White House, Jailhouse, Oyster House: Notes on Some New Mobilities
On its face Jeb Magruder’s An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (Atheneum, $10.00) is a standard modern rise story—up the ladder to hell. The hero is born to a family that’s in shock (a once-rich elder has just gone to jail like a common thief). His dad, who owns a Staten Island print plant, talks little, reads more, looks dour. His college, Williams, amounts to a putdown itself, treating all Preppies as teen kings and High School Harrys (Jeb is one) as creeps. Summer work on a New Jersey assembly line seems fearful:
Fenders came at me along the assembly line and my job was to screw in the four bolts that secured a headlight. The fenders came relentlessly, like an advancing army, and I soon saw that I couldn’t possibly keep up. . . . Some mornings I’d wake up in a cold sweat, after having a nightmare in which the assembly line was revolving around my bed. It was the worst experience I’d ever had, . . . I didn’t see how anyone could live like that for thirty or forty years.
And the army sends him “out in the cold again”—to Korea as an EM, tenting with a man with VD.
Nor do matters pick up instantly when, returned at last, college over, trainee job in hand, young Jeb marries and launches his career. Domesticity bottoms out as a gloomy apartment, appliance trouble, three children under the age of four, and absolutely “no help.” Ascent in the corporate structure is erratic (hard to locate the Heavenly City when you’re dropped back to floor-manager status in a klutzy department store after holding a top market slot in a chain). Even political moonlighting-precinct work, campaign management—is a downer if your candidates can’t finish in the money.
But despite slow weeks and low grosses, the hero is climbing, no question. From Crown Zellerbach at $7000 a year (paper-bag and toiletpaper salesman) to Booz, Allen at $8000 (management consultant); from Jewel Tea at $22,000 to Broadway-Hale at $35,000 (merchandising exec); from obscurity as a party worker to the start of a cosy scrapbook (GOLDWATER BACKER MAGRUDER HAS EVEN TEMPER, HIGH BOILING POINT: Northfield [Illinois] Star); from borrowed elegance in the form of a friend’s Bentley (“. . . a memorable trip: [Gail and I] cruised through the South like royalty, leaving in our path hundreds of awed motorists and service-station attendants”) to boughten elegance of one’s own (“. . . a lovely modernistic house in the Santa Monica valley about a mile from the ocean”). And at length the call comes from the White House and glory aplenty rains down. “I had been struck by the sheer perfection of life there” at San Clemente, the hero murmurs; “. . . my hands were trembling.” Life in the East isn’t bad either—for a stretch: lunch with Christina Ford at Sans Souci one day. on the next a toot around the Monument in “my Mustang with special Inaugural license plate #4 . . . just behind the President, Vice President, and Marriott.”
But in another part of the forest serpents are coiling, meanness hidden by sly smiles. To his dismay the hero discovers he’s being set up. Loyal and good, eager to sacrifice for the cause, positive (for a time) that his friends, his trusted co-workers, are at one with him in dedication, he’s fated to learn they’re not. Desperate, he begs them to reconsider, but they’re busy, unable to talk. They’re busy playing on his ignorance of the law, protecting themselves, fabricating alibis, contriving “deniabilities.” Too late he grasps the Situation, understands he has climbed these peaks for paste. Nothing for it but to give himself up. pay his debts like a man, aspire to start afresh.
Most readers will look to this memoir for new light from within. Why was the break-in approved? How arrogant, really, were the President’s men? What exactly happened when all at once everybody was scrambling? Mr. Magruder’s answers and estimates are usually piquant and sometimes plausible. His overt attempts at portraiture— the President is presented as so badly coordinated and awkward that he can’t hold cup and saucer without clatter—lack subtlety and measure; his extended quotations from conversation and papers yield, when studied, many odd items of interest. (It appears, for instance, that the most overworked word in White House memoranda and chat, through the Magruder years, was “devastating.”) An American Life will undoubtedly come to stand as “a valuable part of the record.”
But its importance lies elsewhere, in a deep and pitiable truth that’s remote from hard news, weightier than the book’s my thy structure can bear, and less closely connected with a discovery of sin or an obstruction of justice than with the defeat of occupation itself. Mr. Magruder’s key subject, in a word, is work.
Heading up a public relations operation in the Executive Mansion means, he says, providing lengthy game plans . . . bureaucratic exercises, ways of producing an illusion of activity when in fact little existed . . . “The typical crisis memo; twenty-four actions listed, and perhaps half of them ever carried out.” It means writing phony letters to newspapers and staging phony victory celebrations on the East Coast to shape voting patterns in the West. It means proposing to the President, with high enthusiasm, a campaign to call him Mr. Peace (“Mr. Peace leaves all other Misters behind”). It means responding with high enthusiasm, game plan at the ready, to the President’s own proposal that the Republican Party be promoted as “the party of the open door.” And it means spending hours on “ideas” that are, alas, downright dumb:
One idea we sometimes kicked around in the White House was changing the name of the Republican Party. . . . One way to attract Middle Americans to our cause might be by offering what seemed to be a new party. . . . Haldeman was interested in this idea. . . .
The confusion induced by the emptiness of this “work” is wretched to witness and morally damaging in its effects. Subtly it insinuates that every deed by a “White House person” must somehow qualify in reality as work, that every action is fraught, momentous, different in kind—because done by a Somebody—from that same action as performed by commoners. And time and again the sequel is arrogance, as when one presidential assistant, told by a Blue Ridge Park officer that he mustn’t drive his car close to a place where bears come out at night to feed, deliberately flouts the rule:
We found about a hundred tourists standing around in the dusk like an audience in an amphitheater . . . most [of them) speaking in whispers. and then we were horrified to see [Fred] Malek arriving in his Mercedes, honking his horn for people to get out of his way. He had decided to drive up, so he could watch the bears without getting out of his car. The people were appalled, then furious . . . needless to say. the bears never came. . . .
The revelation implicit—nothing here for amazement, and probably little for “personal” blame—is that this “American life” or work history composes a seamless whole: the top and the bottom are one. But until sleaziness, cheating, and the relentless I-want-I-want became grounds, almost by accident, for Jeb Magruder’s punishment, they were the grounds of his survival. They shaped the code of the assembly line: “. . . my foreman explained to me that the trick was to screw in only the three outer bolts. The fourth bolt screwed in from the inside and if I didn’t screw it in the inspector would never notice.” They were the principles on which young Magruder as Vicks VapoRub salesman learned how to conduct a “competition”:
. . . you slipped into your routine . . . special discounts . . . buy nowpay later . . . and so on. You’d set up your counter display, managing to knock your competitor’s displays off the counter in the process. Finally as a parting touch, after you’d made the sale, you’d slap a decal on the druggist’s window. That was a remarkable decal. It was made of plastic that couldn’t be scraped off. To get rid of that decal you had to change windows.
They were basic “management techniques” at Jewel Tea—as, for example, hire two men for one job and encourage them (extraproductively) to kill each other off.
I worked too hard, says Mr. Magruder, summing up his career to date. —Too ambitious. Not enough time home with the wife and kids. None but the hardest rock will listen unmoved. But while the refrain and the myth are familiar, sanctified by the past, American to the core, they add up in the end only to another mode of cover-up. The true lesson of this profoundly depressing book is that work on the mountain closely resembles work down below—in its offense to human dignity and honorable pride. And the dirtiest secret revealed is that contrary to public belief, it’s only at the top that there’s much chance of “getting caught.”
Mules and Pinballs
Studs Terkel’s Working (Pantheon, $10.00) is a widely and justly praised inquiry into American life on the job, and as should be acknowledged at once, the book for much of its length is astonishingly undepressing. A gregarious man, Mr. Terkel must have crossed a bore’s path in his time—but he inflicts few upon his reader. Corporation president, piano tuner, prostitute, dentist, adman, cop, and a hundred more possess, as they converse with this interviewer, uncommon pungency and tangibility; the quality of their work experience matters less than their articulated flexibility and realism. A stewardess remembers that once, after her captain told her that a crash landing might lie just an hour ahead (say nothing to the passengers yet), “this guy got mad at me because his omelet was cold and I was gonna say, ‘You just wait, buddy, you’re not gonna worry about that omelet.’ ” A press agent chuckles at lunacy: his three clients are “Cinerama, Indonesia, and the Singer Company.” Springy forces of individuation and resilience appear and disappear. A copyboy’s sudden outburst of independence: “I wasn’t hanging around the paper because that was my destiny. I was just some little pinball that had dropped in a slot. I was there because a bunch of accidents put me there. I also had a will and an energy and I was moving. I was in motion, creative—”
Everywhere in the book voices cry out, with Randall Jarrell’s lady in the park, See me! See me! Don’t confuse me with my job, age, costume, social place: don’t slot me down . . . “I’d like to run a combination bookstore and tavern,” says a steelworker. “I would like to have a place where college kids came and a steelworker could sit down and talk. Where a workingman could not be ashamed of Walt Whitman and where a college professor could not be ashamed that he painted his house over the weekend.”
Despite the vibrancy and desire of the principals, however, a sense of waste and confusion asserts itself well before the end, and too firmly for anyone to shrug off. Who could “take heart” at pungency without community, without shared social reality, without linkage between self-estimates and performance levels in service or craft? The interviewer describes the book he constructs from people’s talk as “above all (or beneath all)” a treatise on daily humiliation:
The scars, psychic as well as physical, brought home to the supper table and the TV set, may have touched, malignantly, the soul of our society. . . . For the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent. . . . “I’m a machine,” says the spot welder. “I’m caged,” says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. “I’m a mule,” says the steelworker. “A monkey can do what I do,” says the receptionist. “I’m less than a farm implement,” says the migrant worker. “I’m an object,” says the high fashion model. Blue collar and white call upon the identical phrase: “I’m a robot.”
And the emphasis seems, finally, just: monotony; violence and exploitation shape these works and days, and personal fantasy and individual will to transcend the given terms of employment can’t by themselves beat them back. Mr. Terkel has counterparts of a sort in the ranks of contemporary social critics, but he is unique in his eschewal of apocalyptic gestures and ghoulishness. He never misses the fine energy of the quarrel in the street, and aims always at honoring the nerve of resistance.
The Only Presidents
Given a corrupted work world, a scene in which the will to escape (with Jeb Magruder) to some imagined Eden is wholly understandable, how should decency proceed? Mr. Terkel’s unrevolutionary answer is that decency can seek, at the minimum, in the name of human solidarity, to know what it’s like elsewhere. A similar answer is returned by John R. Coleman’s Blue-Collar Journal: A College President’s Sabbatical (Lippincott, $6.95). The author, president of Haverford College and chairman of Philadelphia’s Federal Reserve Bank, stole two months’ leave from his trustees not long ago and spent it on the road as a blue-collar worker—ditchdigger, sandwich and salad man at Boston’s Union Oyster House, garbageman near Washington, D.C. The goal was to test himself, to learn whether the challenge of work life many steps down from the top could be met and mastered. There’s a labyrinth of mime in Mr. Coleman’s chapters, and some boyish fiddle. (“Was I really a bank director? Or a college president playing a bank director? Or a ditchdigger playing a college president playing a bank director?”) And the author, as he admits, isn’t an original thinker on social or cultural issues.
He is, on the other hand, first-rate at opening up the insides of work experiences that wound. One Saturday. morning during his service as trash collector, he offers greetings to householders outside doing yard chores:
. . . most often the response was either nothing at all, a look of surprise that I had spoken and used a familiar tongue, or an overly sweet hello.
Both men and women gave me the silent or staring treatment. A woman in housecoat and curlers putting her last tidbit of slops into the pail was startled as I came around the corner of her house. At the sound of my greeting, she gathered her housecoat tightly about her and moved quickly indoors. I heard the lock click. In a way I was flattered by that, even though I had nothing more than picking up her trash on my mind. Another woman had a strange, large animal, more like a vicuña than anything else, in her yard. I asked her what kind of dog it was. She gaped at me. I thought she was hard of hearing and asked my question louder. There was a touch of a shudder before she turned coldly away. A man playing ball with his two young sons looked over in response to my voice, stared without a change of face, and then calmly threw the next ball to one of the boys. And so it went in almost every yard.
In registering his inner resentment at this stoniness, the college president-economist pushes past phrases about “mechanisms of objectification by caste and class” into a substantial world of feeling. It’s the same when, after several days of job-hunting, he finally lands a spot; the rush of relief takes the reader well inside experience that unemployment statistics (“5 percent of the labor force”) close off:
I was hired. “You can start right away.” In the lives of thousands and thousands of people, my three days of “unemployment” would be nothing at all. Yet the relief I felt when I heard those words was real enough to me. My confidence flowed back almost at once. I was determined to do the job well.
As Mr. Coleman everywhere stresses, the curse of semi-genuineness hangs over his “sabbatical”: the work experience in Blue-Collar Journal isn’t “real.” But as he sorts out the sensations, frustrations, and insights of his “holiday,” this college president demonstrates, instinctively, how a kind and sensible man of power might go about connecting, in his own thought, the quality of experience in his personal enclave with that of people “outside.” Shuttling in reflection between campus and kitchen, between the remembered quiet of his own office and the noise of other workplaces, he generates queries both clear and complex: What is the importance of sanctuary? How should undergraduates perceive buildings-andgrounds men or cafeteria workers or maids? What would this or that academic-intellectual truism—about self, political reality, history—mean if situated differently, if proposed as truth by a blue-collar worker off campus?
A Federal Reserve chairman is no man of revolution, and to say it another way, there’s no reason to believe that American society would transform itself tomorrow if, in any enclave—San Clemente, Haverford, Amherst—men and women began setting themselves to the task of becoming aware of the actions and interests of distant others. But human example is never altogether without potency. If there’s to be an advance from the myths that haunted Jeb Magruder in his youth, powerful promptings to moral realism will be required. And no prompter can any longer be trusted whose claim to authority rests on degrees, tassels, sleekness, “success.” Suppose, though, that President Coleman’s example were to prevail . . . Suppose, that is, that power undertook to behave as though persuaded its first obligation were to attain, at a cost in comfort, genuinely comprehensive sympathy . . . Suppose men and women to whom the texture of life “below” was extraordinarily vivid were to be regarded as what they are, indispensable—the only Presidents we have . . . Seldom as pretentious as words like these might suggest, Mr. Coleman’s highly affecting Journal summons memories of the best American dream, namely that our purpose, the national destiny, was nothing other than to achieve a full democratization of mind. Time to beg back that dream.