Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson, on John McLaughlin, ‘A Legend’ Among Rotten DC Bosses)

“In a city famous for tyrannical bosses, from congressmen crazed with drink to bureau chiefs aflame with illicit desire, [John] McLaughlin had become a legend. You heard stories of volcanic rages, unimaginable flights of egomania. Least among his eccentricities was his requirement that all staffers refer to him as ‘Dr. McLaughlin,’ because he had once earned a Ph.D. in communications or some other of the lesser academic disciplines….

“The McLaughlin legend, I quickly discovered, had shortchanged the McLaughlin reality. When I opened the door to his production company’s suite, the first words I heard came roaring up in the famous Rhode Island drawl: ‘This is s–! Unadulterated s–!’ From the shadows of a darkened office, behind a desk as vast as the deck of an aircraft carrier, McLaughlin would bellow at his staff through an intercom. His voice ricocheted down hallways, and the epithets burst like ack-ack above the dim cubicles where his assistants cowered and trembled. The abuse was astonishing, unpredictable, and, in several instances, cruel. A single tirade could last for an hour.”—Conservative commentator Andrew Ferguson, “The Man Who Started It All,” The Weekly Standard, Dec. 24, 2007, reprinted in The Washington Examiner, Dec. 24, 2007

Since death took him eight years ago, fewer and fewer people will remember what all the commotion was about each week on The McLaughlin Group.

But nobody who heard the stentorian voice of the founder and host of that current affairs show, John McLaughlin, could ever forget it—least of all, judging from Andrew Ferguson’s profile, the staffers unlucky enough to work for him.

A high decibel level was only one aspect of his impact on employees, however. As writer and TV personality John Leonard noted in a June 2000 article for The Nation, McLaughlin “settl[ed] one sexual-harassment suit out of court, facing the prospect of at least two more–and nevertheless permitting himself to savage Anita Hill on his McLaughlin Group.”

In addition, on a scale of 1 to 10—a popular measure that the host used to rate and dismiss issues or legislation—McLaughlin, a former Jesuit who appeared to display precious little humility or piety in any part of his life, rated a “10” for his impact on the level or content of political discourse over the last 40 years. He has a fair claim to being the godfather of the cable shout-fests that have raised the nation’s emotional temperature during that time.

Did McLaughlin improve the environment around him by what he said or did—the choice that ultimately all of us face and are graded by? To quote the Beltway blowhard’s frequent response on other matters during his show’s long run: “WRONG!!!”

(The image of John McLaughlin accompanying this post was taken by Karl H. Schumacher on May 3, 1974, when the future pundit still worked at the White House as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon—whom he hailed, extremely prematurely and utterly preposterously, as “the greatest moral leader in the last third of this century.”

Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson, on Notes Made by Famous Readers in Their Favorite Books)

“The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people's libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of ‘textual activity,’ to use the scholar's clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.”— American journalist and author Andrew Ferguson, “Nixon Between the Lines,” The Atlantic, October 2023

I came upon this article several weeks ago and set it aside for future reference. Early last night, I became intrigued by Ferguson’s opening paragraphs: his discovery of Richard Nixon’s books in the late President’s library and museum in Yorba Linda, CA.

An inveterate reader, Nixon engaged heavily in these materials, becoming a counterpart to the famous authors that Ferguson mentioned as scribbling in margins. One book the disgraced ex-President digested in his unwanted retirement deeply annoyed him with its revelation that in 1969, his then-National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, had ridiculed him “in private conversation with liberal friends.”

Irony of ironies: even as Ferguson was researching his biography of Nixon among these previously unsampled books, Kissinger himself was appearing at the Nixon Library to promote his own latest book, Leadership, in which he had praised his old boss.

A further irony of ironies: only a few hours after reading about this conjunction of events, I found on the Internet that the man Ferguson called “the 20^th century’s only celebrity diplomat” had passed away, at age 100.

Somewhere in the afterlife, I suspect, Nixon and Henry the K are going to have a very long conversation.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson, on Xmas Songs From ‘Melisma Mamas’)

“When it comes to Christmas, then, Mariah Carey and the other melisma mamas might be right to leave Jesus out of it altogether and settle instead into Santa's lap for three minutes of forelock tugging. Most singers and songwriters do the same, avoiding piety in favor of a frolic. This is the common course contemporary Christmas music has traveled over the last several decades. The most prominent trend has been toward what the music industry calls the ‘novelty song’—a ditty so insubstantial that it wobbles from funny to infuriating in 32 bars. Excellent examples of novelties in the secular songbook are ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?’ and ‘Disco Duck’ from ye olden times on up to the more recent Rock Me Amadeus’ and ‘Crazy Frog.’ And so my all-Christmas station sputters with ‘The Chipmunk Song,’ ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,’ ‘Here Comes Santa Claus,’ and ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.’ If Weird Al Yankovic suddenly converted and took responsibility for writing all our new Christmas songs, he could do no worse than ‘Be Claus I Got High,’ ‘I Want a Boob Job for Christmas,’ or ‘Daddy Please (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas).’”— Andrew Ferguson, “Jingle Hell: The Debasement of Christmas Songs,” The Weekly Standard, Dec. 21, 2015

Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson on Newt Gingrich, “Panicky Before Panicky Was Cool”)

“Reading the [Newt] Gingrich catalog, you get used to intimations — or are they threats? — of Armageddon. Windows are slamming shut, or are just about to, all over the place, all the time. ‘Time is running out,’ he wrote toward the end of ‘Window of Opportunity,’ 27 years ago. It’s no wonder that Washington thinks he’s so smart: Gingrich was panicky before panicky was cool. The political class runs on his kind of excitement, as one crisis of the century succeeds another, week by week. Politics on its own terms is so boring — decades of the same issues, the same interests, the same charges of heartlessness against Republicans and of profligacy against Democrats — that attention has to be stoked by artificial means.”--Andrew Ferguson, “What Does Newt Gingrich Know?”, The New York Times Magazine, July 3, 2011