OPINION:
I SHOULD BE DEAD: MY LIFE SURVIVING POLITICS, TV, AND ADDICTION
By Bob Beckel
Hachette Books, $27, 304 pages
If I want to suffer through a political rant by a portly old white guy who dresses eccentrically and who can’t get used to the fact that he no longer is somebody in this town, I don’t need Bob Beckel. I can look in the mirror.
Indeed, the Washington metropolitan area is swamped with folks like Bob, or to a lesser extent like me. We came here young, had our moments close to the great and near-great, and now nobody cares who we knew or what we did. We were news reporters, congressional or administration aides and sometimes we morphed over into being a lobbyist or political operative for this cause or that. Some of us were very good, some turned out to be real thugs.
So why bother to read this book about someone else’s trials and tribulations? Because Bob Beckel was the King Kong of political thuggery in this town for more than 35 years. And if you lament the cesspool Washington has become after we spent our lives trying to make things better and advance our careers at the same time, this apologia for Mr. Beckel’s crazy life and unbelievably hard times is the kind of eye-opener that Dante Alighieri got when Virgil took him on a tour of the Inferno.
If you think I am being unduly harsh on him, know I am merely taking the man at his own words. I don’t know Mr. Beckel, but I reported on many of the events where he was a player — helping Jimmy Carter push through the SALT II and other treaties, managing Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign — and he’s got his history right.
In recent years Mr. Beckel has assumed the role of “political pundit,” whatever that is. I try to avoid cable television chat shows, but while channel surfing I have glimpsed him on “The Five” on Fox News and more recently on CNN. The political insights of most panelists on these shows are an inverse ratio to the volume of their ranting but Mr. Beckel stands out. Wearing loud suspenders and a loosened necktie, he is the Uncle Charlie who makes family holiday dinners a trial with his liquor-infused insults and outrageous assertions that are wont to set the table on a roar.
But the story line in this memoir is not really about the gabble-gaggle. It offers important insights into what’s gone wrong in our public policy mechanism and why so many Washingtonians of a certain age now lament we did not go into some more worthwhile career choice. Mr. Beckel’s story is a tawdry one, some parts of it might have been legally actionable if it were not for the statute of limitations. But one comes away having to face that Washington itself has been an addictive force in the lives of so many of us. We wanted so much, we came close and now we have to go and sit down while the town sinks into the ooze. Mr. Beckel’s life is just an exaggeration of something we all have faced.
Washington was certainly an addiction for Mr. Beckel although his visible drugs of choice were booze and cocaine, political outlawry and lately the methadone substitute known as television. The subtitle of the book refers to his survival, but it is the survival of an addicted personality who must daily struggle to use substitutes that prevent him — as has happened — from collapsing and coming near to death.
First came the alcohol and drug abuse, at an astonishingly young age and in quantities that would have shut down a lesser metabolism. Booze has been part of the culture of this city since its founding, but Mr. Beckel managed to spend considerable portions of his life functioning while stoned out of his gourd. He revels in this, just as he swanks about the dirty tricks, bribes and skullduggery that marked his service for political patrons, including Mr. Carter, Mr. Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Descriptions like “shameless” and “completely unscrupulous” are badges of honor for him.
To the point, while Mr. Beckel’s public persona is that of an old-school lefty Democrat, he really shows no real commitment to the social agenda that dominates that party. He just adopts a growling disdain for conservative politics that is his brand identity. To the point, two of his closest friends — men who probably saved his life as well as his career — are Roger Ailes of Fox and the conservative columnist Cal Thomas.
Mr. Beckel’s third addiction, the bogus rush of personal validation that comes from appearing on national television, still grips him and gives him meaning. Perhaps it is the least dangerous of the three because it assuages an empty ego and has little impact on the world outside. Still, this unhappy man has held up a mirror to those of us whose lives are as inextricably tied to this unhappy city; read this book and ponder.
• Author-journalist James Srodes was the Washington bureau chief for both Forbes and Financial World magazines.
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