DAN QUAYLE: Late Bloomer

Can one, at this point, disentangle Dan Quayle from Dan Quayle jokes? He seems to induce a short attention span in others, leaving them stunned with a serene vacancy. The New Republic has penalized with mock awards people who are foolhardy enough to speak well of him. Can anyone be taken seriously who takes Quayle seriously?

As the polls show, Quayle has not recovered from the way he was shoved into the public arena under a rain of blows. Gallup reported last month that 54% of the public — including 43% of Republicans — said he is not qualified to be President; 49% thought Bush should pick a new running mate for ’92. “My skills,” Quayle said recently, “have always been in negotiating and conciliating.” That sounds like wishful thinking from a man so long under assault, including the deadly assault of laughter. Like Charlie Chaplin in the ring, what can he do but crouch behind the referee and wave his gloves in vague call-it-off gestures? Yet he practiced conciliation even before he stood so badly in need of it.

When he was elected to the Senate in 1980, Quayle told political scientist Richard Fenno, “I know one committee I don’t want — Judiciary. They are going to be dealing with all those issues like abortion, busing, voting rights, prayer. I’m not interested in those issues, and I want to stay as far away from them as I can.” Yet Quayle was not raised among people who shied from extremes. He is the coeval of the cold war: the year of his birth, 1947, also gave us the CIA, the Attorney General’s list of subversives and the internal-security program. When Quayle was five years old, Dwight Eisenhower carried Indiana with the help of Quayle’s grandfather, publisher Eugene Pulliam, and William Jenner, who were, respectively, the right and the far right of the state Republican Party. When the John Birch Society was set up in 1958 with the thesis that Eisenhower had collaborated with communism, Quayle’s parents became enthusiastic supporters of it. James Quayle compared Birch Society founder Robert Welch to the legendary prophet Nostradamus.

When Dan Quayle was starting high school in Arizona, his neighbor Barry Goldwater was beginning his race for the presidency. When Richard Nixon ran for re-election in 1972, Quayle’s father decided that Nixon, like Eisenhower, had betrayed the conservative movement — so Quayle pere supported the insurgent Republican right-wing candidate John Ashbrook. When Quayle entered the Senate, it was as the beneficiary of a conservative political-action- committee blitz that knocked off five liberal Senators that year (including his opponent, Birch Bayh of Indiana). Quayle’s whole (short) adult life was spent cocooned in the modern conservative movement. He should have spread his butterfly wings as an ideologue, yet he came out talking compromise. That is the most striking thing about his intellectual formation.

If he seemed for much of his life unaffected by the world around him, that may have been an advantage, considering the world he lived in. He avoided the Viet Nam War, but he also ignored much that led to Viet Nam. Inattentiveness is sometimes a survival skill. Quayle’s pugnacious father did not always agree with Quayle’s more famous grandfather, Eugene Pulliam, and among Pulliams it matters from which wife of Eugene one is descended (he had three). When the 17-year-old Quayle thought of siding with his father against his grandfather on behalf of family friend Barry Goldwater, his mother Corinne (a daughter of Pulliam’s second wife) told him, “Don’t start any more trouble in the family. We already have enough problems.” Quayle’s father James — an ex-Marine who named his son for a friend, James A. Danforth, a World War II hero killed in action in Germany — was gung-ho for Viet Nam. J. Danforth Quayle was, famously, not. Considering the other enthusiasms of his father’s, from Robert Welch to Ashbrook, from Nostradamus to Fundamentalist preacher “Colonel” Robert Thieme, there is something to be said for the son’s reluctance to join his father’s battles. Quayle grew up golfing with his imperious grandfather and camping (gun in hand) with his volatile father, an opinionated owner- editor whose Indiana newspaper is known to its local critics as the Huntington Herald “Suppress.” Young Danny kept his head down, his eye on the ball.

One of Quayle’s college professors has an indelible memory of trying to make a point with Quayle, and talking into air. “I looked into those blue eyes, and I might as well have been looking out the window,” says William Cavanaugh. But he was the teacher of Quayle’s freshman composition course; he had differed with his student over the prose of Whittaker Chambers. Witness, Chambers’ portentously anticommunist book, was a kind of bible in the Quayle family. Quayle’s tactical incomprehension with Professor Cavanaugh may have been the response of one who knows where ideological conflict goes when it is pushed. Attending law school in Indianapolis, Quayle lived outside town with his grandmother, the divorced second wife, while a son of the first wife edited the Indianapolis paper, and the third wife was active in the Pulliam chain. Quayle kept peace all around. He may not know much, but he seems to have self-knowledge when he calls himself accommodating.

Is Quayle serene merely because he is vacuous, preferring drift to ideology? That view obliges one to explain how, in politics, he drifted often and early to the top. Even his friends admit that his success was not by any blaze of intellect. Says M. Stanton Evans, the ex-editor of the Indianapolis News, who helped Quayle get his first political appointment: “There is a cycle in all of his offices. When he comes in, he is underestimated — too young, too inexperienced — and then he surpasses people’s expectations.” In other words, Quayle first gets the job and then gets qualified for it. But for a politician, getting the job is the primal qualification. How did he succeed at that? The only answer his critics have been able to come up with is a false one — family influence.

Influence should have counted at DePauw University, an old Methodist school in northern Indiana with loyal alumni and great institutional pride. Quayle was a third-generation Pulliam at the school, a member of the same fraternity (Delta Kappa Epsilon) to which his grandfather, father and uncle had belonged. His grandfather founded the national journalism fraternity Sigma Delta Chi at DePauw, gave the school many bequests and served on its board. There was a Pulliam Chair in History until just before Dan’s arrival on campus. “If I had known he was a Pulliam,” says Ted Katula, the athletic director who was Quayle’s golf coach, “that would have impressed me. Pulliams are big here. I didn’t learn he was one till he was running for Congress.” Yet Katula was the member of the university staff Quayle saw the most. Little was made of Quayle’s being a Pulliam because few people knew it. He did not bring the subject up. In his experience, family ties were as much a source of division as advantage.

Quayle got special treatment at DePauw in one provable case: he graduated with a major in politics without taking the required course in political theory. When he flunked the theoretical parts of the final exam, he was given a special exam without those parts. He was one of two students for whom this was done that year, and the common denominator in their case is not family (the other man was not a Pulliam) but a quarrel between the department head and the teacher of political theory over the size and kind of assignments given in the course. The two students had dropped the class when there were protests that the teacher, newly arrived from Harvard, had too long a reading list, protests the department head energetically backed. If other teachers went easy on Quayle, it was because he is the kind of person for whom people like to do favors. They were just doing what George Bush would later do on a colossal scale.

Quayle, who has refused to release his college and law school transcripts, was certainly no student at DePauw. The teachers who disliked him did so because he was good at getting by on charm. He was serious only about golf, a family passion instilled in him during the long Arizona days of his adolescence. His father, who has a unilaterally disarming candor, admits overstating it when he said of Dan’s major, “If he’s anything like his old man, it was probably booze and broads.” But the minutes of Quayle’s fraternity have this entry: “A petition was submitted to have Bro. Quayle censured for his violation of house security. It was moved he be: 1) fined $25, 2) removed from all house offices, 3) warn him that his pin will be lifted if he does it again. A motion was accepted to table the petition’s motion.” Violating house security means having unauthorized persons in one’s room.

There had not been much war protest on the DePauw campus by the time Quayle graduated in 1969. Quayle’s father was writing editorials backing the war in Viet Nam, but his son was not paying attention. As graduation approached, Quayle had to do some shopping around to find an opening in the National Guard. (In 1988 he said he meant to go to law school, but he had not applied to one.) He asked people he knew about the Guard, whom to call, but it is unlikely they did or could rig things for him. His grandfather was semiretired in Arizona; his father was not a natural ally in this effort. He had the advantage of knowing where to go, but not of fixing what the response would be.

During his service in the Guard through much of the academic year 1969-70, Quayle decided he did indeed want to study the law. Admission would not be easy after his admittedly poor academic performance at DePauw, but here a personal contact was helpful. He knew the admissions director of the Indiana University law school in Indianapolis — through his family, as he knew most older people. This admissions director, Kent Frandsen, was a judge in the little town of Lebanon, outside Indianapolis. Another prominent citizen there was Quayle’s grandmother, Martha Pulliam, who was given the Lebanon paper as her own in the divorce. (She was the one Quayle would live with.) Frandsen gave Quayle a break, something he was doing for many others at the time. The night school was expanding its enrollment — it would move into a new and larger building in 1970 — and Frandsen had a summer program to try out marginal cases. Quayle, out of school for a year, went into that program.

Frandsen did him another favor when he called in Quayle and another student, Frank Pope, and asked them to start a student newspaper for the night school. Before, there had been just a mimeographed sheet. Frandsen wanted to begin life in the new building with a real paper, and he allotted money to the project. Quayle became the editor of the journal he and Pope called the Barrister. It is unlikely Frandsen would have asked Quayle to do this if he doubted he could manage the newspaper along with courses at night and work during the day.

Daytime work was expected of Quayle (he had waited on tables at DePauw), and his father suggested working in the office of Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar. The father called his friend, fellow Pulliam editor Stan Evans. According to Evans, “Jim asked me to lunch with Dan. I did most of the talking and learned for the first time that he wanted to go to law school. I said I thought it would be better to work in the ((state)) attorney general’s office than in the city government, since I knew that many of the people who worked there were in law school.”

Evans knew about the young Republicans in the statehouse, since they were involved with him in conservative causes. As he said of Quayle’s performance, “He was not as ideological as the other people in the A.G.’s office. He was certainly not out at Ashbrook rallies.” (Evans, a friend of Quayle’s father’s, agreed with him on the need for a third-party candidate in 1972.)

( It was normal that those working in the state government should have political connections of some sort. In the Lieutenant Governor’s office were Daniel Manion, son of the John Birch Society’s Clarence Manion, and Frank Pope, whose family was so close to William Jenner that he grew up calling him Uncle Bill. In the budget agency was Judy Palmer, who was the personal assistant to Edgar Whitcomb’s wife during Whitcomb’s 1968 campaign for Governor; in the prosecutor’s office was Vicki Ursalkis. All these people were students at the night school, only a few blocks from the statehouse, but they saw more of each other during their daytime tasks, in the balconies ringing the rotunda, than in the school, even though Quayle, Pope, Ursalkis and Palmer made up a study group for their law classes. According to Pope, the women carried the men in these preparations. “Dan and I wouldn’t have done what we did in law school without Vicki and Judy.” Quayle dated Vicki before he met Marilyn.

Most of these Republicans had past ties to the Jenner organization, which Quayle’s grandfather had opposed for years, but that did not trouble Quayle’s relations with them. Quayle liked to ask Pope’s mother, when he played bridge at her house, about the old Jenner wars she relished as a party organizer. He took this in without much comment, and certainly without reciprocal revelations. “There was one thing Dan Quayle never talked about,” Frank Pope says now, “and that was his family.”

The statehouse was a den of young activists, among whom Quayle seemed almost apolitical. Pope says Manion “dragged” Quayle and him to a meeting or two of the Young Americans for Freedom, but “Dan ((Manion)) was so far right he scared Danny and me.” Certainly there were young activists in Quayle’s circle who shared his father’s zeal for Ashbrook. But Quayle did his work at the attorney general’s office and in class, and went home to his grandmother’s house in Lebanon.

Marilyn Tucker was as bright as the women in Quayle’s study group, and her uncle, the Indiana secretary of state, was a Jenner man. She and Quayle were sure of each other from the start and were married in 1972 by the friend of both their families, Kent Frandsen. It was a fine political marriage by Indiana standards, but after passing the bar exam in 1974 Quayle went back to Huntington, to his father’s small paper, without announced political ambitions.

The myth now firmly established is that some Fort Wayne party men chose | Quayle because of his looks for the thankless task of running against eight- term Democratic Congressman Ed Roush in 1976. Quayle was recently introduced to a board meeting of the Hoover Institution as one who volunteered to “fall on his sword” in that 1976 campaign. But Walter Helmke, the G.O.P. candidate in 1974, says that the idea of Roush’s invincibility is nonsense. “He only beat me by 8,000 votes, and that was in the post-Watergate election when Republicans did badly. When Dan ran against Roush, Gerald Ford swept Indiana for the Republicans. Ford carried Dan.”

The idea of Quayle’s passive role in this beauty-queen audition is also overstated. Helmke remembers that Quayle was out in his journalist’s role observing his own campaign and Richard Lugar’s unsuccessful run against Birch Bayh in the 1974 Senate race. Helmke was surprised when Quayle asked foreign policy questions in those local races. And two years later, when Helmke showed Quayle around Roush’s district, they were not looking for swords to fall on.

Nor did talent scouts have to prod Quayle into his 1980 campaign against Birch Bayh. He aggressively sought a conflict in which the odds were longer against him than they had been four years earlier with Roush. When the golf coach, Katula, asked why he would risk a safe House seat on such a race, Quayle told him, “Coach, we’re just going to have to work harder.”

He campaigned in all 92 counties of the state. He defused the age issue by saying, over and over, “Birch Bayh was almost the same age when he beat Homer Capehart.” (This ploy would backfire when Quayle used a similar line about John Kennedy in 1988.) When Bayh accused him of extremism, Quayle distanced himself from the ads being run against Bayh by the National Conservative Political Action Committee, telling the Washington lobbyists, “Your negative campaign will allow him ((Bayh)) to allege that outsiders are trying to tell the people of Indiana how to vote.” Quayle resigned from the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress because it was trying to purge third-party presidential candidate John Anderson from the Republican party. He ran an ideological campaign but with just enough touches of pragmatism.

Quayle is not interested in lost causes. (Maybe it was fitting that he not go to Viet Nam?) In this he resembles his grandfather, who constantly frustrated his conservative editors. Eugene Pulliam, says Stan Evans, “was a seat-of-the-pants guy, unpredictable.” Jameson Campaigne Jr., whose father edited the Indianapolis Star for Pulliam, says, “He ((Pulliam)) was not a conservative; he was a Methodist — a good government type. That is why he opposed Jenner and the corrupt Republicans in Indiana.”

Pulliam bought 51 newspapers in his career, but most of them were small-town papers, and he had a small-town approach to government. It is not surprising that he settled in Lebanon, a little community that is almost an annex to its golf course. Pulliam believed in paternalistic civic improvement, where business, politics and journalism unite to clean up a town and then run it for its own good. He clashed early in his career with the Klan, lax liquor laws and prostitution.

When he got involved in national politics, it was as a pragmatist. He joined Eisenhower in 1952 against the Taft conservatives. He joined Lyndon Johnson in 1964 against Goldwater, whom he had helped draw into politics in order to “clean up” Phoenix. He went back to the Republicans in 1968 and stuck with Nixon. Quayle’s father rebelled against both Eisenhower and Nixon by supporting Birch and Ashbrook — lost causes. Pulliam had no more use for the Birchers than for Klansmen.

Some mistook Pulliam for an ideologue because his pragmatic political stands mattered as much to him as the papers’ income. He defied advertisers over matters like liquor licensing and a Phoenix beltway, favored by the business establishment, which he helped defeat. He was prickly about his independence and about that of his family and loved institutions. He resigned from the board of DePauw when the school refused to turn down federal money with strings attached. His own children and heirs were expected to work; the money he left them is tied up, dependent on their performance on the newspapers.

Pulliam gave the readiest daily sign of his competitiveness on the golf course. He learned in Lebanon how to talk with the city establishment on the links, and he set a Quayle family pattern of buying homes that overlook the fairways. He liked year-round golfing, so he left Lebanon in the winter, first for Florida, then for Phoenix. He was an advocate of improvement, tourism and more golf courses for Phoenix long before he bought his paper there. The Phoenix course on which Quayle learned to play is nestled among a dozen or so clubs, their bright green carpets dramatic against the pebbly desert.

Quayle was such a natural golfer that his grandfather soon liked having him for a partner. The Pulliams read character on the golf course. The DePauw coach admires the nerve, even the courage, of Quayle’s game. “He likes the heat of battle.” He claims that Quayle rises to challenge, takes chances but keeps his head. Could Quayle beat his old coach, who stays in shape and plays constantly? “By the 16th hole, conversation would be at a minimum.”

Quayle’s competitiveness appealed to Roger Ailes, who handled him in his 1986 re-election race for the Senate. Quayle’s record in debates was good until he met Lloyd Bentsen. He debated Roush five times in 1976 and Bayh once in 1980. The general view was that both men underestimated him and were beaten by him. Dan Evans, Quayle’s 1980 manager, says he was effective against Bayh because he was not being “handled,” as in 1988 — the Nancy Reagan excuse about debate “overpreparation.” But Quayle needed help in 1988, when he was on the defensive from the outset. Indiana reporters say that even now he has not regained the confidence and ease he showed in his earlier campaigns.

Quayle starts from a conservative base but tries to keep the freedom to maneuver away from it. In 1976 he suggested that marijuana be decriminalized, a view too radical to be repeated before his constituents. Dan Coats, who now holds Quayle’s Senate seat, is a born-again Christian who as Quayle’s aide helped him win votes from the religious right; but Richard Fenno, the political scientist who observed his 1980 race, noticed that Quayle kept his commitments to a minimum in this part of his campaign. In the Senate, Quayle avoided the social issues and sought expertise in defense, specializing in SDI. His staff emphasizes the way he could cooperate “even with Teddy Kennedy” to pass the job-training act. This is the kind of paternalistic program, involving business, that his grandfather supported in towns he “looked after.” Quayle’s pragmatism is good politics, but he seems to favor it in any case. In an editorial for the Barrister (the first political writing of his I can find), Quayle attacked the machine-driven convention system in Indiana, calling for open primaries — the kind of reform Eugene Pulliam always favored.

As Vice President, Quayle has established a right-wing base again, choosing a hard-line and activist staff (unlike Vice President Bush’s bland low-profile aides). The number of Ph.D.s is emphasized by his press office (two for Carnes Lord, his national security aide). He recruited from the ranks of believers in the cold war, just before that war’s demise, surrounding himself with those who have an investment in it. His chief of staff, William Kristol, is the son of neoconservative Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb and is a former aide to William Bennett. Quayle is comfortable with intelligence in his vicinity.

Structurally, Quayle’s position with Bush, a man never quite accepted by the right as “one of our own,” is that of Nixon with Eisenhower — bridge to the right, voice of the right, pacifier of the right. In the latter role he has already been criticized by the National Review and conservative columnist Eric Breindel. It is a high-risk position, since reflex anticommunism is not the right-wing glue it was before Mikhail Gorbachev. Quayle has treated changes in the Soviet Union as suspect, while saying he does not differ from the President (the refrain against which all Vice Presidents must play their own tunes). Quayle is loyal to individuals, as he showed in the Senate in 1986 by his frantic efforts to win a judgeship for Daniel Manion (whose written opinions were more embarrassing than Quayle’s spur-of-the-moment inanities); but he does not play to lose. If Bush wants to get rid of Quayle, he may get as little cooperation as Eisenhower got from Nixon. Kristol, who turned down other job offers in the Administration to go with Quayle, is firm for his man. Similar commitments are in the making.

During the 1988 campaign, people wondered about Quayle’s actions (and even his whereabouts) in the Viet Nam War. But the startling thing is that, if he inherited the Oval Office tomorrow, Quayle would be the first President since World War II who did not serve in the military during that war. Even Jimmy Carter, the U.S. President of most recent birth (1924), was a Navy cadet during the war. Not only was Quayle born after the war — the first baby boomer so near the top — he is also the first man to have grown up entirely within the confines of the modern conservative movement. He was surprisingly unscarred by that (or any) experience when Bush chose him. Quayle claimed John Kennedy was just as young in 1960; but Kennedy had known prewar Europe as well as the wartime Pacific.

Stan Evans traces an arc in Quayle’s career of rising (if belatedly) to expectations. The angle of the arc must now go up, dramatically. Quayle was born not only roughly a quarter-century after any preceding President; he spent another quarter-century blissfully AWOL from history. His press secretary, David Beckwith, calls the Vice President a “classic late bloomer” — which means that the first three decades or so of his life do not matter, just the last decade. That is starting late even for a faster learner than Quayle has given evidence of being. How can he “rise to expectations” when the U.S. can expect all the troubles of a world coming out of the cold war, and when the person doing the rising came in with the cold war himself? That is why, for all the jokes, we must take Dan Quayle seriously. We must do so, because Bush did not.