by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

When Gary Met E. J. — and the Era of “Character” Began

Reading Matt Bai’s All the Truth Is Out for the PEN/Galbraith Award, I come upon this sketch of E.J. Dionne, and realize the things I didn’t know about the early career of this Georgetown colleague.   Such as that E.J. was the writer to whom Gary Hart’s advisers granted the first full access to the candidate in 1987:

That they chose E.J. Dionne made perfect sense.   It wasn’t just that Dionne, who was about to turn thirty-five, was perhaps the most obvious star of the new generation, having already reported from Paris, Beirut, and Rome, while somehow making time to cover two presidential campaigns.   Nor was the main factor in the decision that Dionne would write his profile for the cover of The New York Times Magazine, which combined a more literary gravitas than the newsweeklies with the influence of a large national circulation.
What made Dionne special among the younger crowd , more than any of this, is that Hart actually respected him.   Nerdy and sputtering with energy (“harried like a border collie with a bad herd,” in Cramer’s inimical description), Dionne wasn’t just another privileged dilettante in search of some wry observation he could peddle on Nightline.  A Catholic school kid from Fall River, Massachusetts, which was no one’s idea of a patrician paradise, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he had earned a doctorate in sociology.   He was a serious, first-rate intellect, and to Hart that meant that Dionne could be, if not quite co-opted, then at least made to see the relevance and urgency of Hart’s agenda.   At least Dionne didn’t go dead in the eyes when you talked about economic transformation or the decline of the nation-state, which is more than Hart could say for most of the boomers on the bus.
However much Dionne may have been a man of ideas, he counted himself among a generation of reporters who had been heavily influenced – whether they were scholarly enough to know it or not – by the work of Erik Erikson … [who is] most famous for having pioneered the concept of “identity” – and what he called the “identity crisis” – in the 1950s and 1960s.   “If Teddy White can be credited with opening the back room of American politics to the public view,” Dionne said, “a writer like Erik Erikson could be credited for opening the back room of the psyche.”  

And such as this: that E.J. is the writer whom Hart, dogged by rumors of marital infidelity, told: “Follow me around.”

Does Bai connect the dots and make the point that E.J.’s anti-patrician Fall River Catholicism may have shaped his depiction of Hart – and of the rumors about Hart’s philandering – as much as Harvard or Oxford or Erikson or The New York Times did?  Still reading – and eager to find out …

  1. etr-gu posted this