The Vice Presidency: Second Look at a Second Lady

An affable, unimpressive public man improbably rises to great power, and it transpires that the master of his ascent is a strong-willed watchdog of a wife with an ambition as long as her enemies list. That political scenario is as classic as Lady Macbeth and as modern as Nancy Reagan, and it was just those predecessors that Marilyn Quayle was being compared to last week. After six months of investigation by Bob Woodward and David Broder, the Washington Post unfurled a seven-part series on Vice President Dan Quayle in which most of the critical scrutiny appeared to be directed not at the Vice President, but at his wife.

Much of the damage seemed self-inflicted. After more than three years of near silence on her husband’s inelegant entry into national politics in 1988, the Second Lady made an inelegant entry of her own: in interviews with the Post, she brandished daggers at the press and at her husband’s campaign handlers, denouncing such ignominies as their alleged refusal to serve food on charter flights, which caused her to lose “14 pounds in one week.” She became “so thin,” she said, that “my skirt would move around and my kick pleat would end up in the front, because there was nothing to hold it . . . It was just awful.”

But Marilyn’s most undiplomatic words were aimed at Secretary of State James Baker, who may compete with her husband for Bush’s job four years from now and is a formidable Washingtonian in the meantime. Baker is not only Bush’s closest friend and former campaign manager, but also has accumulated friends around the capital since he arrived 17 years ago. It was Baker, Marilyn complained to the Post, who was responsible for Quayle’s fumbling first appearance at the riverfront rally in New Orleans in August 1988, because the campaign sent no one to greet him. He was also to blame, she charged, for the critical press coverage of Quayle’s nomination, even though Baker, like everyone else, was kept in the dark about Bush’s choice until minutes before the President’s plane landed at the convention. “They should have been ready to go with papers on exactly who Dan was,” said Marilyn. “There was nothing tangible to hand to a member of the press. So people were scrounging where they shouldn’t have been.” And it was Baker, she said, who arranged to waken Quayle two nights later to grill him on his National Guard record. “Getting Dan . . . up at 3 in the morning to discuss things,” she said, was “just stupid, stupid, stupid! I think there was a frenzy in the press and that kind of produced a frenzy among people who would normally be a little bit more level thinking.”

Her thrusts in the Post series could be dismissed as little more than palace intrigue if the Post had not pronounced her potentially the “most influential First Lady in American history” should Quayle become President. “Their relationship represents what will be the typical political relationship of the future,” says Sheila Tate, the former spokeswoman for Nancy Reagan and one of Marilyn’s friends. “Most women in their 30s and 40s are career people; from here on out, when their spouse is elected to a public office, these women are going to have the role of senior adviser.” That prospect would not be so alarming if, after scarcely laying a kid glove on Dan, the newspaper did not go on to suggest that Marilyn would make Americans long for Nancy Reagan — taffetas, tyrannies and all. “Nancy would soon be considered a woman of the people,” a Quayle associate told the Post.

The series does give the Vice President’s wife high marks for the care and energy with which she has pursued the causes of disaster relief and cancer detection. But the impression of Marilyn that emerges overall is of a woman so controlling of her husband’s image that she once removed from the wall a picture she believed gave him a paunch, scribbled over it and then kicked it out of its frame; a strategist who helped plot not only her husband’s early political career but also his mini-campaign for the vice-presidential spot on the G.O.P. ticket; a political partner who has installed herself in a large office across from the Vice President’s and receives a nightly packet with his schedule and the big decisions he is considering; a wife who intimidates — and has even fired — members of her husband’s staff; and a grudge-bearing campaigner who tends to blame others for her husband’s mishaps.

If Quayle, as the series says, “expresses approval and glee” at some of his wife’s “mischievous” potshots, then he is likely to be delighted by the political barbs she has included in her soon-to-be-published thriller, Embrace the Serpent. Written with her sister Nancy Northcott, the book features imperialist Russians and drug-running Arabs conspiring to replace a dead Castro with another evil Cuban dictator. Readers who can get past the book’s clutter of cliches (“Even his fertile imagination hadn’t truly conceived of the ecstasy of ultimate power”), arthritic prose (“Acknowledgment of those limitations in no way comforted him”) and breathless dialogue (“There’s got to be a way!”) will not find it hard to decipher Marilyn’s ideological prejudices. The hero is a black Republican Senator from Georgia and a defender of the Star Wars program who is up against a fatuous Democratic President with “little understanding” of his country’s security, an intelligence community “crippled by the micromanagement of Congress” and the elitist editor of Washington’s biggest daily, who is conducting his own private foreign policy when he is not in bed with a Senator’s wife. That she has reduced her characters to caricatures will not set Marilyn apart from many first-time novelists. But after her outbursts of last week, she may risk becoming a caricature herself.