The Columnist by Jeffrey Frank

Author:Jeffrey Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gretchen, as I have hinted, was rarely in sympathy with my views. For instance, she had supported the chimerical candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, while I saw Hubert, who had attended our wedding three years before, as a family friend. She was undoubtedly egged on by Lionel Heftihed, whose angry words popped up in what seemed like dozens of small, smudgy magazines.

At the time that Lionel reentered our lives, he was close to forty; his towering hair had begun to gray, and he’d put on weight. But he had not lost his self-importance or his dilettantism; one moment he was holding forth on the Mexican economy, and then he dined out on his overly praised book, Henry Adams’s Education and Mine. I did not mind his quick-change talents, but I did object to his proselytizing in behalf of retreat from Vietnam, especially when it affected my family’s tranquillity.

In the summer of 1968, Lionel encouraged Gretchen to become even more involved in his “antiwar” activities, and almost persuaded her to accompany him on a self-indulgent excursion to Chicago (I put my foot down) for the Democratic Convention. Quoting Lincoln, I wrote that, like bad relief pitchers, some people find that “it is impossible to foresee all the incidents which may attend and all the ruin which may follow.” Gretchen pretended not to see the point when I thrust that column before her during breakfast. She even brushed it away. Her outlook baffled me; seldom has our nation been so divided, and yet she stubbornly took refuge in cheap slogans. As that agitated summer wore on (by the end of it, Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew were facing Hubert and Edmund Muskie), Gretchen seemed increasingly distracted, and her outbursts became less controllable.

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