Standing Firm.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter

Like anyone with an ounce of self-awareness who writes about politics for a living, I have a lot on my conscience. No other area of mainstream journalism offers such freedom to savage reputations with clever adjectives, adroit put-downs, blind quotes, armchair psychiatry, artfully telling anecdotes, and the mindless (often consciously cruel) pursuit of the trivial.

In January, while covering Bill Clinton's trip to Russia, I stumbled across a sad-eyed Gary Hart in the lobby of Moscow's Metropol Hotel looking like Banquo's ghost. As I heard myself call out, "Excuse me, Senator Hart," I felt a twinge of guilt over all the ridicule I had heaped on him in the wake of Donna Rice. Back in 1987, I was covering presidential politics for Time magazine and I believed that Hart was too weird, too much of a loner, and too impressed with his own intellect to serve as an effective president. The Bimini twist on the good ship Monkey Business provided the frame to turn Hart's bent for self-destructive behavior into a tabloid tragedy. So I joined the media lynch mob, gleefully shouting, "Let's string him up ourselves, his kind ain't worth a fair trial." Looking back on it, I cringe over my complicity in driving this capable, albeit deeply flawed, amn completely out of public life. Why must Hart remain forever stigmatized in an amnesiac political culture that could so easily rehabilitate Richard Nixon?

Reading Dan Quayle's inadvertently revealing autobiography reminds me that there remain savage journalistic moments that I do not recant. Just staring at him on the cover in a frat-boy sweater, radiating bland good looks under the title, Standing Firm, made me want to giggle.

I was in New Orleans for the 1988 Republican National Convention, and afterward I wrote the Time cover story on Quayle's near-miraculous elevation. Six years later my attitude regarding Quayle is straight Edith Piaf: "Non, je ne regrette rien." Then as now, I take pride in having gotten away with snide sentences like, "Quayle radiates the same bumptious enthusiasm, the same uncritical loyalty, the same palpable gratitude, and the same malleable mind-set that George Bush brought to the GOP ticket in 1980." Why do I shed a belated tear over Hart, while the plight of this oft-derided, out-of-power Hoosier second banana leaves me completely dry-eyed?

That question--writ large for the entire national media--is at the core of Quayle's seemingly ghostwritten book. Like Charlie Brown of the 1950s rock song, the former vice president seems to be constantly asking, "Why is everybody always picking on me?" All I can give is my own personal answer.

Quayle, by chance, had come to a breakfast interview with Time on the morning of his 1988 selection; with embarrassingly maladroit news judgment--augmented by the after-effects of a night on the town in New Orleans--I overslept and missed the breakfast. Listening to the interview tape afterward, I discovered Quayle's answers were a nonstop string of banalities, even in light of his awkward position as a vice-presidential wannabe still waiting for the word from Bush. Quayle's new book makes clear what happened next: "On the night of August 16, hundreds of newspeople in New Orleans were asking any acquaintance of mine they could find, 'Tell me about Dan Quayle.'" What Quayle fails to understand is that what destroyed...