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July/August 2000

It's My Party: A Republican's Messy Love Affair with the GOP' By Peter Robinson Warner Books Click on the title to buy the book

Until now, Peter Robinson has been one of the lesser-known of George Bush's and Ronald Reagan's speech writers, but with this sprightly and amusing book, that may change. He has an honest, uncomplicated, almost naive prose style and appears not to have a mean bone in his body, which really ought to disqualify him from writing about politics. But don't let this Jimmy Stewart quality fool you: Robinson is a shrewd inside player, who has been not only wordsmith to the above, but also a cherub-faced consigliere to the Dark Lord himself, Rupert Murdoch, as well as assistant to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Currently, he perches at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. This book comes with enthusiastic imprimaturs and nihil obstats by Tom Wolfe, William F. Buckley Jr., Peggy Noonan, P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Ferguson and Morley Safer. All that is missing is an official endorsement by The Skulls. Since we are obviously dealing with the vast right-wing conspiracy here, I might as well disclose that I hired young Peter Robinson of The (notorious) Dartmouth Review to replace me as speech writer to Vice President George Bush in 1982.

Robinson's book is what its subtitle says it is: one man's attempt to come to terms with a question that has baffled philosophers since the days of Aristotle, namely, what does it mean to be a Republican today? Why are some people cradle-to-grave Republicans? Why are others, conspicuously the majority of Jews, blacks, and Hollywood stud muffins, not?

He calls his inquiry a "travel book," in which he criss-crosses the country from New York City, Jersey City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Fresno to elsewhere, talking to such grandees and worthies as Gov. George Bush, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Reps. Henry Hyde and Christopher Cox, former California Gov. Pete Wilson, Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein, New York Mayor Rudy Giuiliani, and many others. His style of asking almost simple yet profound questions makes him sometimes sound like the eager young pachyderm in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Story, "How The Elephant Got Its Trunk."

He finds out a great deal about the GOP's trunk, returning from his peregrinations with penetrating answers that should occasion some hard thinking among (us) elephants, about who we are, where we are going, and whether we have to change planes in Chicago. Chapters deal unflinchingly with such GOP hot zones as the media, Hollywood, the South, women, abortion, gun control, and Hispanics. This book reads like an instruction manual in how to make a bigger tent. It is therefore an important book, and all Republicans should, as they say, check it. Dems, too, if they want to know what the enemy is up to.

Robinson also has some piquant anecdotes to relate about his time at the White House, one in particular that reveals the toughness beneath the small town Mr. Smith who came to Washington. Reading it made my ideological blood, since cooled, begin boiling all over again.

In 1987 he traveled to Berlin with the White House advance party, having been assigned the speech that President Reagan would give in front of the Berlin Wall. He interviewed the ranking U.S. diplomat in Berlin to get his ideas about what Reagan should say. The diplomat, who could barely be bothered to see him, tried to brush him off with some State Department tapioca about how there should be more air routes into Berlin and what a jolly good idea it was that Berlin should host the Olympics. Above all, the dip cautioned, the President must not mention the Wall, since "[t]he people of Berlin had long ago gotten used to it."

Robinson then did something unusual, namely seek out some actual Berliners. He asked them if they'd gotten used to the wall. They nearly choked on their sausages and told him, in no uncertain terms, about the anguish of their divided families. It seemed that they had not "gotten used" to the Berlin Wall.

Robinson wrote into the speech the line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." This is, you will recognize, one of Ronald Reagan's most quoted lines. When he dies, it might make paragraph two of his obituary.

But back to 1987. You'll already have anticipated what happened: the Berlin diplomat, the State Department, the National Security Council, the White House staff all went bananas. Was Peter Robinson crazy? Take it out! Out, out! But he would not take it out. Among other reasons, the Leader of the Free World kind of liked the line.

The incident escalated, with 30-year-old Robinson going toe-to-toe with, among others, National Security Council Director Colin Powell. (It was disappointing to read this.) Finally, Reagan had to say to his chief of staff, Kenneth Duberstein, with a trace of Reaganesque irony, Look here, old shoe, who's President here? Even skilled White House-hand Duberstein had to back down. Reagan went on to deliver the line. The rest is history.

Morals? (1) Tell it like it is. (2) What (the hell) is it with these pin-striped Nellies, anyway? (3) When Colin Powell comes up before the Senate for his confirmation hearings as George W. Bush's Secretary of State, someone ought to ask him about the incident and see what other delicate sensibilities he wouldn't want to upset as SecState.

Why do most people feel so strongly about their party affiliation? The answer is that man is a tribal creature. He craves a communal identity, whether it derives from the GOP or Democrats, Yankees or Red Sox, Bloods or the Crips. All of us have relatives who would be physically, never mind psychologically, incapable of pulling a Republican or Democrat lever inside the poll booth. I have a friend who actually waited until his mother had died before he allowed himself to vote Republican--it would have killed her. You probably know someone like this yourself. "At any given time," Robinson notes, "political scientists estimate, only about 20 percent of voters belong to a party other than the one in which they grew up."

By the end of Robinson's travels, he finds that "nearly every person with whom I spoke was able to articulate reasons for being a Republican. A belief in individual responsibility. The conviction that any government that absorbs a full one-fifth of the goods and services its citizens produce is too big and too intrusive. The desire to see American military might remain unassailable, even in the post-Cold War world. An eagerness to bring market forces to bear on social problems, introducing voucher programs, for example, to improve our schools, or replacing welfare with workfare."

Finally, he says, "It stands for principles that I myself share. I figure that somehow or other I owe it a little emotional involvement." It's refreshing to hear a sentiment as transparent as this, especially from someone who's gone toe-to-toe with Colin Powell in the West Wing over whether the President of the United States ought to come out in public against the Berlin Wall.