TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012092/0120102.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 6.1 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 17

THE VICE PRESIDENCY

Second Look at a Second Lady


Washington is wondering: If Marilyn Quayle became First Lady,
would she make Nancy Reagan look good?

By PRISCILLA PAINTON -- With reporting by Michael Duffy and Nancy
Traver/Washington


    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.