Buchwald's Washington

Washington's newest apolitical columnist pondered the presidential election year of 1964. As usual, he found an angle that every one else, even David Lawrence, seemed to have missed.

"There has been a great deal of speculation as to who will be the Republican candidate for President," wrote Art Buchwald for the New York Herald Tribune and 180 other papers. "But no one has given any thought as to who will be the Democratic candidate. The way we see it, the race is wide open. As convention time grows near, worried Democratic leaders are trying to come up with a candidate who is young, has experience, is known to the American public, and can appeal to the independent voter. The big question is, can the Democrats develop anybody in time?"

In such imaginative analyses, Art Buchwald has more than justified the Tribune's decision to bring him back from Paris, where he played journalistic jester for 14 years (TIME, June 22, 1962). At the time, there were those who doubted that Buchwald would feel comfortable in the presence of such sobersides as Joe Alsop and Walter Lippmann or find anything funny about Washington. But the fears proved groundless. Buchwald simply invented his own Washington.

We Were Chicken. When the book Fail-Safe excited fears about accidental war, Buchwald worried about accidental peace. He imagined a scene that would have spelled the end of the cold war: "Five Russian divisions are demobilized, an atomic testing station in the Urals is destroyed, and 40 new Soviet Submarines are flooded and sunk. The Americans pick up this information, and they immediately sink 14 of their own missile cruisers, slash the tires on every SAC bomber. . . The President closes down the Pentagon, furloughs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and fires the U.S. Marine Corps Band. Both sides are eyeball to eyeball, headed hellbent towards a peaceful showdown, and nobody blinks."

After all the uproar over the Cuban crisis, Buchwald added his own classification to Washington's newly manufactured categories of Hawks and Doves: "A dove was someone who was for a blockade of Cuba. A hawk was someone who favored bombing the Russian missile bases. We might as well confess right now, we weren't a Dove or a Hawk--we were Chicken."

"Who Else?" Buchwald bemoaned the growing shortage of Communists in the U.S., and he sympathized with party members whose ranks have been heavily infiltrated by FBI agents: "It isn't too farfetched to assume that in a couple of years the entire Communist Party will be made up of FBI informants"--who pay their dues, in contrast to regular party members, who do not. "In no time at all," concluded Buchwald, "the Communists could become the leading political party in the country." He suggested its candidate for President: "J. Edgar Hoover, of course. Who else?"

The joke was lost on the FBI director. But Buchwald has never been known to worry about the sensitivity of his subjects. One day he dreamed up an interview with a Presidential Special Representative and asked this functionary how he got his job. "It's not easy," replied the P.S.R. "First you make a few speeches criticizing Administration foreign policy. Then you write a few articles for magazines telling how it is to work for President Kennedy, and then you release a story to the press that you're going to be fired. The President is then obligated to find a job for you." To Chester Bowles, the only Special Presidential Representative around, and a man whose recent career nicely fits Buchwald's fanciful version, this was hitting too close to home. Bowles barked back, but Buchwald defended his column on the ground of ignorance: he didn't know that Bowles was the only one of his kind. Bowles had since been appointed ambassador to India.

"I'm a Pushover." In his new role as political humorist, Art Buchwald takes pains to stay aloof from official Washington. "I feel a pundit like me shouldn't see people," says Buchwald, who has yet to meet the President--or want to. "It only confuses me. When you talk to Senators and Congressmen, you get the impression they are working, and you know it isn't true. And people have a tendency to win you over with flattery. I'm a pushover. I figure a guy who likes my column can't be all bad."

Plenty of guys are not all bad. Three U.S. Congressmen have read samples of his work into the Congressional Record; President Kennedy, who threw the Herald Tribune out of the White House,* went right on reading Buchwald in the Washington Post. In his one year in Washington, Buchwald has added 75 newspapers to his syndication and doubled his income, to $80,000 a year. By a considerable margin, that makes Art Buchwald the most successful humorous columnist in the U.S.

* The paper has been smuggled back in--goes to several White House aides and is available to Kennedy if he wants it.

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