Diffident Owl

By Donald Morrison

FINAL REPORTS by Richard Rovere Doubleday; 244 pages; $16.95

To call Richard Rovere a political reporter would be to call Tocqueville a travel writer or Boswell a gossip columnist. "I'm really not especially interested in politics," Rovere insists in this posthumous collection of previously unpublished reflections and autobiographical snippets. Instead; his quarry is "American life in all its wonder and looniness."

Rovere has a caricaturist's instinct for the grotesqueries of stump and smoke-choked room, of presidential campaigns, congressional hearings ("Nothing that Washington has to offer comes closer to theater") and state visits. He is at Nikita Khrushchev's elbow when the Soviet leader praises the bleak industrial landscape of the New Jersey Turnpike as a symbol of American dynamism; with Bess and Harry Truman as the couple, in bathrobes, bid good night from the back of their campaign train to an impromptu crowd of fellow ordinary Americans. Rovere's political analyses--about the Truman Administration's crippling venality, John Foster Dulles' domination of the Eisenhower Administration, John Kennedy's lack of specific goals--are often sharply unconventional. Unlike other liberal admirers of Adlai Stevenson, for instance, Rovere concludes that the Democrat would have been a "disaster" as President, unable to control the military, the McCarthyites and his party's ward heelers.

If Rovere betrays a weakness, it is modesty. "What I feel is a certain thinness in my work, a certain choppiness, a reluctance to take on and see to completion any work that will take more than a few days or a few weeks," he complains. "I have spent God knows how many unproductive hours asking myself if I was really put on this earth to write about the likes of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy." A bit too harsh a verdict; but then Rovere did not come to writing easily. He flunked the first grade in his Brooklyn elementary school, was diagnosed a slow learner and never thought about making words his life's work until a high school football injury gave him a long stretch of hospital time for reading. After an uncomfortable journalistic debut as a subeditor on that now defunct "independent" Communist journal The New Masses, Rovere was hired as a writer by William Shawn, then The New Yorker's managing editor. A few years later Shawn and Harold Ross, the magazine's founding editor, assigned him to write about politics as if he were a critic-reviewing a book or play. Thereafter, diffident and a bit owlish, the critic plied the provinces with nearly every would-be President from Thomas Dewey to Jimmy Carter. Rovere also found time to write eight nonfiction books and countless shorter works, most notably a straight-faced 1961 article for American Scholar on the existence of an "American Establishment," a spoof so successful that scholars began debating the subject seriously.

"There have been millions of words--too many by far," he concludes, "many that I know I would regret if I steeled myself to review them all again. And for me, as for most twentieth-century Americans, work has been mainly a series of interludes--son, husband, father, traveler, wage earner, victim, victimizer."

Oddly, it is in those nonworking interludes that Rovere glows. He describes his warmly hospitable household up the Hudson from New York City (he commuted to Washington periodically by train) and the crushing anxiety of waiting for his son to return from a hitch as a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam. That ordeal of fatherhood only sharpened Rovere's angry 1968 assessment of the war, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Finally, from his hospital bed, he sends up a frustrated flare: "If I were applying for employment, I would have to describe myself as having spent the last year staving off death as a fireman puts down flames. Oh, but I hate it, hate it, hate it . . . I seem to myself to become pettier and meaner and more selfish by the hour." Again, he is far too modest. Shortly afterward, in the fall of 1979, he wrote a typically graceful, large-hearted paean to his nurses ("able, generous and a pleasure to be with in difficult times"). He died a few days later. In an introduction to the book, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an old friend, praises Rovere as "preeminently a civilized man--decent, fairminded, responsible, skeptical, honorable." Rovere, ever the skeptic, would have disagreed elegantly. --By Donald Morrison