ONE OF THE TOUGHER DAYS in the life of a book section editor must come when he or she receives a review of a book by one of the paper’s own writers that the reviewer finds not up to par. Thus, it was especially brave of the Washington Post last Sunday to run a review of “The Perfect Wife,” a book about Laura Bush by Post Style writer Ann Gerhart, that gives the book and its author its due. Judith Warner, author of a book about Hillary Clinton, explains that Gerhart comes with a brisk and lively prose style, and a sharp eye for nuance and character. Unfortunately, she also comes equipped with a giant-sized attitude, that turns an ostensible rendition of someone’s life story into a political tract.
Let Warner tell it:
Does the phrase “dripping with condescension” strike you as excessive? It’s not. It describes accurately the slant Gerhart brings to her evocations both of the South and of Texas, and of the 1950s and ’60s, in which Laura grew up. Her take on the time resembles that of the movie “Pleasantville,” which starts out in black and white, and then changes to color, as the repressed and benighted ’50s suburbanites discover the pleasures of rock’n’roll, drugs, and adultery. Her take on the place is that Texas is a strange asylum populated by childlike folk whom she describes in a sort of white-darky dialect that is every bit as offensive as the original version. Here she is describing Laura’s mother, Jenna Welch: “She is much loved, and she gets around quite ably, Jenna does, for a woman born in l9l9.” Does she? Lawsy me!
Laura grows up, and one day leaves Texas, but to Gerhart, things only get worse. She marries–the horror–a Republican politician, whose loathsome ideas she is forced to support, if just indirectly, by backing him. Gerhart’s view of Bush seems expressed best by someone she describes as a “civic leader” in Austin: “George is a very likeable man if you divorce him from his politics,” it being a given that these are uncivilized.
As Gerhart comes to believe that Laura is in fact an intelligent, cultured, sensitive woman, she reads into Laura the beliefs Gerhart thinks are the only ones possible for cultured and sensitive women, which is to say, her own:
We never know, and neither, it seems, do other people: “Her progressive friends vigorously discuss, often with disapproval, the foreign and domestic policies of the forty-third president, but they never discuss them with her.” Gerhart, of course, sympathized wholly with these “progressive friends.” And also with the raucous and exceedingly minor poets the First Lady innocently asked to a reading during the war in Afghanistan, who threatened to tear up the White House. Silly girl, not to have realized that these sensitive souls would quite rightly object to the unwarranted war cruelly proposed by her bellicose husband.
“Her need to win the culture war that separates her from the likes of Laura Bush does her book a disservice,” Warner writes about Gerhart. “Gerhart’s feminist, therapeutically informed, professional woman’s perspective dooms her . . . to endless frustration as she tried to fit Laura Bush into the framework of understandings that structure her own life, and to squeeze anger, indignation, frustration–anything–from a woman who, she believes, has ‘sacrificed’ so very much.”
THE REAL PROBLEM is not that many intelligent, cultured, and sensitive people are not pro-choice, or pacifist, or in favor of increases in government spending (which are the views Gerhart projects on her subject). It is that the very notion that a great many intelligent, cultured, and sensitive people do not hold these opinions, and that they might do so for very sound reasons, is a possibility that has not crossed Gerhart’s mind. Thus, her book means much less as a story about the First Lady than as the unwitting extension of Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias.” Gerhart explains, even better than Goldberg does, the insular feelings that too many newsmen bleed into their copy, and that drives so many readers away.
Gerhartism in different forms is the reason the press has lost power and readers. It is the reason the network newscasts have hemorrhaged viewers. And it is responsible for the rise of the alternative outlets on which the Gerharts look down with disdain. Having run this review, the Post has taken a huge step in the right direction; and could take a bigger one by making Warner its ombudsman. In the meantime, let this step stand for progress.
Good for the Washington Post.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
