This was another Dollar Store find … with the standard “didn't go looking for it” aspects involved in seeing something that looked plausible staring out from the shelf for a buck. I don't think that I'd have acquired this if it hadn't been in that channel, as I really didn't care that much about the authors (and their legendary mis-matched relationship), but it was “interesting enough” to get into my cart a few months back.I'm glad that these various factors conspired to get me into Mary Matalin and James Carville's Love & War: Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home, as it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I'd been hesitant, because I'd hated the Clintons so much, and Carville was their personal media pitbull … and I wasn't sure that I wanted to put myself through some glorification of that sorry period in our nation's history. Similarly, I wasn't sure that I really wanted to follow behind Matalin's track through two Bush administrations … with the emotional scars still left from those years.
However, while the political stuff is certainly in here, it's much more a dual memoir of two completely different political players (if you're not familiar, Matalin is a conservative Republican, who is remarkably fond of her former boss Dick Cheney, and Carville is a co-conspirator with the Clinton Crime Family – and otherwise a supporter of the worst of leftist politics), and how their lives have played out. The dichotomy here is perfectly clear, as the book is set in two typefaces – one for the “Mary” parts, and one for the “James” parts – so you always know who's talking.
If there was one pivotal element here, it would be when the couple (well, family at that point) up and left D.C. for New Orleans. Carville, of course, was from down there, and still had a huge extended family around, but Matalin was from Chicago, and as hot and humid as our summers can be, it was certainly a change for her (although, oddly, she favors open windows, while he wants heavy-duty AC). Of course, their having their daughters (and the various stories of the kids growing up) is another thread here, but the “good stuff” is really the fly-on-the-wall look into the world of Washington, politically, socially, and its accompanying media.
Flipping through this, I'm seeing that most of my little bookmarks are highlighting places with “gotcha” reminiscences (needless to say, mainly from Matalin), which throw a particular light on stuff that usually goes unseen. The book sort of (it jumps around quite a bit) starts with the biggest conflict between the two, the re-election loss of Bush Sr., for whom Matalin was deputy campaign manager, to Clinton, whose campaign was being run by Carville. Following the election, Matalin couldn't find any work in her field, and ended up being hired by CNBC to co-host a “girl-gab show” with Jane Wallace, called Equal Time, that had been described as “Wayne's World on estrogen” (something with which it initially shared a lot of production values). This started out as pretty much just a time-filler, but ended up building up a devoted cult following, which eventually got noticed. She says:
The “last straw” for her was that she did not want to do anything about the O.J. Simpson trial:It turns out, when your ratings are lousy and nobody's watching, you are left alone to die a quiet TV death. It's when you have a hit that the problems start. Once we were “discovered” by the TV critics, the CNBC suits appeared like Death Eaters and tried to suck the blood and soul from Equal Time ...
This then moves into the couple's work on Crossfire and their long friendship with the late Tim Russert, with various stories from each of them regarding how that show impacted both sides of the political spectrum.The rest of television was doing the O.J. Trial nonstop. What intelligent or edifying thing could I possibly add to that? What intelligent or edifying thing could anyone say about that? The O.J. Trail clearly marked the early stages of cable crapdom: the dumber the story, the greater the coverage.
Again, this is very much a personal memoir for the two authors, and it here shifts into discussing Mary's multitudinous pets, and James' dislike of them all … followed by a chapter on raising their kids … followed by a very brief chapter on, well, “bedroom stuff” (largely summarized by its last line: “none of your damn business”) … followed by a look at how they had grown up, and how James is a classic case of ADHD (and how different they are in their personality types – she's big on spontaneity, and he's a stickler for a locked-in schedule).
This takes us to a chapter called “The Dark Ages” which is about the “hanging chads” end to the 2000 Presidential election. Just about the only thing (well, aside from the kids) that seemed to save their marriage is that Carville thought Gore was an ass, so didn't have quite as much blind devotion to him as he did to Clinton … but it wasn't something that he was prepared for when Matalin got tapped to work for V.P. Dick Cheney. She had insisted that it was only going to be for six months, although this wasn't going to be the case. One part here that drew my attention was in her discussion of how hectic these transitions can be …
Because of the destruction of the White House facilities by the outgoing regime, the VP transition was happening from Cheney's home, with a single phone line for communications. Matalin ended up with a pretty impressive dual title, Counselor to the Vice President, and Assistant to the President, giving her remarkable access across the Bush Jr. administration. By August 2001, she had the office of the VP, “a (mostly) well-oiled machine” , and she and James took a cruise together without the kids, and things began to look like she was ready to start her own transition out of the White House.Meanwhile, it turns out that there is something worse than a transition hell that's smooshed into a few short weeks. And that is transitioning from an administration with a civility and maturity level lower than Animal House's, a comparison that is actually a compliment to the outgoing Clinton administration.
You think I'm being a partisan exaggerator? Well, would you call this mature and civil? Once into the White House, we found all the W's had been stripped from our computer keyboards and our desks were full of molding garbage, uneaten fast food and/or porno – and those were only the cute stunts. The vice president's office were the worst because, as it turns out, Al Gore is not what you'd call graceful in defeat. Instead he lived up to his reputation as a real loser.
And then it was September 11, 2001. That morning Carville was speaking at a conference and said, regarding Bush “I hope he doesn't succeed, but I am a partisan Democrat.” … minutes later cell phones started buzzing around the room, with the news of planes flying into buildings. Matalin had arrived at work “spiffed up” in designer duds (and spike heels) to make an impression at a labor meeting scheduled for later that day … a bad choice as things turned out.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Love & War is the play-by-play from within the White House (and subsequently those “undisclosed locations” that the V.P. was being shuttled off to) on 9/11 and the time following. As you may recall, Bush was out of town (reading to school kids in Florida) when the attack came, and the Secret Service whisked (here described as being physically picked up and carried) Cheney off to a safe room in the sub-levels of the White House, while most everybody else was told to get away from the building, as it was expected that a plane (perhaps the one that was taken down by its passengers) was headed for there. Matalin was a few blocks away (in her stiletto heels) when she got a call from the Secret Service – Cheney wanted her there, and they managed to find her and get her back and down to the WW2-era PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) … evidently the first time this space was used for its intended purpose, and what had been “state-of-the-art in FDR's day” was poorly equipped for current tech. Plus, with as many people who ended up being in that space, they found the ventilation was less than needed. One poignant bit here was in her discussing trying to get in contact with key administration members … “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was literally incommunicado … We discovered later that he was pulling his injured and dead colleagues out from the smoke and debris of the Pentagon carnage.”
I don't believe I've read any specifically “post-9/11” books (although I've seen quite a bit online), so I don't have other examples to compare this to … but being able to look over Matalin's shoulder, as it were, as she discusses what was happening in the upper reaches of government over those days, weeks, and months of doubt, rage, and chaos is remarkable here. The details are revealing, and they confirm my counter-to-the-MSM-story gut reaction about the nobility of the Bush administration, especially when compared with its venal predecessor. Needless to say, being part of Cheney's team, her family life was deeply disrupted, as Matalin was off at whatever “undisclosed location” that they were keeping the V.P. (one story she tells was of a Christmas trip out to Wyoming when they were able to have their families join them … she had shipped out – on Air Force Two – all of their holiday ornaments, and requested the advance team find a tree for their living quarters, which she describes: “{it} wasn't a tree so much as a spindly shrub with a few errant branches, a very small version of a freaking Charlie Brown tree”, which caused a major break-down … James came through, however, and notes: “the tree was kind of puny, in a comical way”). Needless to say, as time rolled on, the Iraq war became an issue in their household, and in 2003 she finally disengaged from the White House job. In the course of this both authors do a lot of musing on the reality of the D.C. scene … I found this bit by Carville worth noting:
Of course, this is a guy who worked hand-in-hand with the Clintons, so you'd expect him to try to sweep as much “evil people trying to undermine America” under the rug as possible. But, I digress.Most times people do something because they actually think it's going to work out. Most times, they are not evil people trying to undermine America. Most times, there's not some underlying conspiracy or motive. … There's a great tendency to overestimate conspiracies and underestimate stupidity.
As one would expect in a memoir, there's a lot of “personal” stuff in here, a lot of family issues with the Carvilles (including its matriarch, his mother, dying during this time), the lingering death of their much-depended-on housekeeper/nanny, and even their getting re-married. It turns out that their original nuptials were not up to snuff in the view of the Catholic church (Mary had been previously married), and, as she was starting to get into that brand of imaginary friend stuff, this both became an issue and an excuse to throw a big party down in Louisiana. Lots of stuff about new friends, new experiences, and other revelations of their shift to New Orleans, including their girls growing up and heading off to college.
Amid this there's also a section when they “get partisan” again, with reflections on some of the campaigns and opposing sides of issues they'd been on. Matalin has a great “rant” in here about dealing with the MSM (in parts worthy of Limbaugh or Gutfeld), which of course spoke to me. Here's some of the key bits:
To his credit, Carville takes a less aggressive tone in this part (despite his clear loathing of many of the players in both Bush administrations), and has a lengthy entry taking a look, on various levels, at “what's wrong with Washington”, and this bit certainly rung a bell:Eighty-nine percent of journalists self-identified as liberal. … Who were the 11 percent who confessed to not being liberal? … As annoying as it is to the public, I much prefer today's open partisanship of the media. Nothing produced more hair pulling, breast thumping and chain-smoking in GOP camps than reporters professing no bias while reporting like Democratic operatives. … Do you ever see even a scintilla of fair and balanced reporting from MSNBC …?
The book, which came out in 2013, sort of peters out (being something of a “snapshot” from their lives, things don't get all tied up with a ribbon), taking a look back at the Katrina disaster, and how it is still effecting things down there, and has a final “punctuating” event of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion (and subsequent major oil spill), which happened in 2010 (a scant few months past the Saints winning the Super Bowl – an event that the authors had been heavily involved in – which was a huge thing for the New Orleans community). This part isn't long, but it sort of puts a pin in the timeline as a place to leave off the chronological narrative, and allowing them to finish with some “looking to the future” stuff.I sincerely believe that part of the problem is that so many of the people in positions of power in Washington truly, utterly, do not understand the struggles of average people. They literally can't wrap their minds around the battles ordinary people have to fight every single day ...
I really enjoyed reading Love & War … the back-and-forth between Matalin and Carville (although not in response to the other's writing – they appeared to have written this separately, but in tandem, taking up a topic and letting the editors piece the bits together) is an appealing format. It does, though, go without saying that this would be far more engaging for “political junkies” than it would be for those whose obsessions lie in other realms. That being said, however, the “behind the scenes” looks at those challenging times following 9/11 are well worth the price (and I'm talking retail, not Dollar Store here).
It appears that the hardcover is now out of print, but there's a more recent paperback version out there, so is a pretty good bet to be available at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor As I noted up top, the hardcover has gotten out to the aftermarket and the on-line new/used guys have "like new" copies of it for 1¢ (plus shipping), so if you can't find a Dollar Store copy, that would be your best bet. Again, it's an engaging read, with some really fascinating material in amid the "Mary & James' life together" stuff.
