I just sort of ran across this by accident the other day, and enjoyed discovering it.
I was thinking about Daniel Patrick Mohnihan, someone I admired greatly. And for whatever reason, I was thinking about stories I used to hear about his drinking. So I Googled it.
And I ran across this profile from 1986. It mentions rumors of drinking, but only in passing. That’s not why I’m sharing it. I’m sharing it because I thought, wow, here was a journalist who was even more impressed with Tom Wolfe than I was. The piece begins:
Has teevee land ever seen a man so tickled as Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
As he describes the plight of the American family to Phil Donahue, the senator’s knees lock and his shoe tips wag. His bushy brows hump up like two millipedes on a twig, then ascend to his thatchy forelock. When the audience applauds him, Moynihan applauds back. And as the clapping flattens into a roar, his mouth goes pursy, forming a fleshy Irish rose.
His daughter Maura — late of Harvard and the rock group the Same — has seen the look before. “Dad’s mouth gets like that when he’s happy,” she says.
After the show, Moynihan lumbers toward the elevator. He is a towering sight — 6 feet 4 inches — and surprisingly trim. He is one of those men whose waggy midlife jowls make them seem far heavier than they are.
“Saddle up, children!” he yells tinnily, and the entourage shuffles over to meet him. There is something antique, something mythological about Moynihan. The theater he has become — the herky-jerky Anglo-speech, the bow tie slightly askew, the tweedy caps and professorial rambles — they all make him seem vaguely not there, a figure not of the present but of an unreal history, an American Edmund Burke taking dominion on the Hill….
So who was this writer who so ably impersonated the Cool-Write King himself?
Well, it was David Remnick, who has been editor of The New Yorker for the past 20 years, back during his Washington Post days.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading it and thought I would share…
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Yeah, I know this post seemed to lack a point, and was self-indulgent. It’s sort of like finding a shell on the beach that I like, but that I know will impress no one else…
If I only wrote to please myself, most of my posts would be like this one. So count yourselves lucky that I care somewhat about bringing up topics that interest others…
Note that I went back in and italicized the “somewhat”…