For Super Bowl Sunday, Bob Greene of CNN writes about Theodore Roosevelt and football:

As my guide through the thicket that football entered and from which it eventually emerged and thrived, I sought the assistance of author John J. Miller, whose meticulously researched book, “The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football,” is the gold standard.

Here’s a picture of TR right after throwing a football. Well, not really. But it kinda looks that way.

My talk about The Big Scrum, at the Ann Arbor District Library in November, is now available online.

We’re overflowing with podcasts this week at NRO: Charles Murray on the state of white America and Jeanne Safer on sibling strife. Murray is a repeat podcast victim, having been on previously to discuss his book on education. Jeanne is a first timer, but as the wife of Rick Brookhiser, she’s a longstanding member of National Review‘s extended family. I’m sharing this for two reasons: 1) It’s interesting. 2) I don’t want my brothers to think I have a special interest in the subject of siblings who hate each other.

Next week: Vince Flynn on his new novel.

One line in my Ambrose Bierce article for National Review isn’t quite right:

Bierce ranks with Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft as one of America’s three finest writers of horror, with tales of ghostly hauntings, invisible monsters, and resurrection men.

This is a defensible claim, but what I meant to say is that Bierce was the finest American writer of horror between Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). The line was messed up late in the edit, no doubt because of my own carelessness.

I have two articles in the current issue of National Review. The first is on my visit with Dan Quayle, based on a trip earlier this month to Quayle headquarters in Arizona. The other, written before Christmas but held until now, is on the 19th-century writer Ambrose Bierce. Technically, it’s a book review of the Library of America’s new edition of Bierce’s greatest hits, but it’s really more of an appreciation of a great author. The opening sentence is an attempt to imitate the kind of opening sentence Bierce might have written for one of his short stories, followed by a few crowd-pleasing quips from his masterpiece of cynicism.

Everything changed for Ambrose Bierce the day he was shot in the head. At least that’s one theory about how a bright young man from Horse Cave Creek in Ohio went on to become his generation’s leading cynic. This was the guy, after all, who gave us The Devil’s Dictionary, which defined “PEACE” as “a period of cheating between two periods of fighting” and “WAR” as “a by-product of the arts of peace.” People still snicker over “MARRIAGE, n.: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.”

Remember Dan Quayle? In the new issue of National Review, I check in on the former veep:

Dan Quayle lost his Secret Service protection within weeks of leaving the vice presidency, almost two decades ago. People still stop him in airports — he has to stand in line and remove his belt and shoes at security checkpoints, just like the rest of us — but for the most part they leave him be. “They’re considerate,” he says. “They give me space.” Every now and then, when he doesn’t want to be recognized, he’ll put on a low-tech disguise: a baseball cap and sunglasses. He did it a year and a half ago, when he attended a tea-party rally. “I just wanted to stand in back and hear the speakers,” he says.

We also talk politics. Who should be the Republican veep nominee? Will Ron Paul be this year’s Ross Perot? Also:

“This far out, the incumbent is usually favored,” says Quayle. “But I think we can beat Obama.” He’ll be looking hard at a single number: the economy’s growth in the second quarter of this year. “That’s when perceptions set in,” he says. He points to his own experience in 1992, when the Bush-Quayle ticket crashed at the ballot box. “In the first two quarters of that year, we were technically — barely — in a recession. In the third quarter, the economy grew by 4 percent. In the fourth quarter, it grew by 6 percent. But none of that mattered, because Clinton got everyone to think that we were still in a recession even though it wasn’t true.”

In about a week, I’ll make my first visit to DC since moving to Michigan — and will speak on The Big Scrum at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center on Tuesday, January 31, at 6 pm. It’s open to the public. There’s no better way to spend the Tuesday before the Super Bowl.

UPDATE: Here’s a link with details.

NATIONAL REVIEW
February 6, 2012

DAN QUAYLE’S SECOND ACT
He’s out of politics, but full of political wisdom

JOHN J. MILLER

Dan Quayle lost his Secret Service protection within weeks of leaving the vice presidency, almost two decades ago. People still stop him in airports — he has to stand in line and remove his belt and shoes at security checkpoints, just like the rest of us — but for the most part they leave him be. “They’re considerate,” he says. “They give me space.” Every now and then, when he doesn’t want to be recognized, he’ll put on a low-tech disguise: a baseball cap and sunglasses. He did it a year and a half ago, when he attended a tea-party rally. “I just wanted to stand in back and hear the speakers,” he says.

Quayle lives in Arizona now. So do his closest relatives: his mother and his three children, including Ben, the son who is now a first-term congressman in the Phoenix area. The former vice president represented Indiana in the House and Senate for a dozen years before George H. W. Bush picked him as a running mate in 1988. Yet he grew up mainly in Scottsdale. “For me, this is more home than Indiana,” says Quayle, who moved back permanently in 1996. “I love the climate here. If we could import the people of Indiana, it would be perfect.”

He drives himself to work, which is in an office building that looks like so many of the other office buildings in Scottsdale, with two stories of sandstone-colored walls, tinted windows, and a red-tiled roof. There’s no guard in the lobby, and the directory doesn’t list Quayle’s name. Visitors need to know in advance that he can be found upstairs, at the end of a long and featureless hallway, where he leases a few rooms. The view from his window is of a parking lot. Quayle isn’t exactly a modern-day Cincinnatus, returned from Rome to run his farm — he is “chairman of global investments” of a private-equity firm, and he travels quite a bit — but there’s a surprising ordinariness to the second act of his life.

Yet he can still make news, as he did on December 6, when he endorsed Mitt Romney for president. “He’s a solid conservative, and he’s our best chance to beat President Obama,” says Quayle. For Romney, the endorsement hardly could have come at a better moment. His smooth-sailing campaign suddenly had foundered. A week earlier, an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News had gone poorly, forcing many Republicans to wonder if Romney was in fact as polished as his debate performances suggested. Newt Gingrich was surging. “At our event, one of Romney’s aides had a poll from the New York Times,” says Quayle. “It showed Gingrich leading in Iowa by 14 points.”

A lot of Americans remember Quayle for one thing: the time he misspelled “potato” in a classroom, becoming the butt of jokes everywhere. Conservatives also remember a level of press hostility that was almost unmatched before the coming of Sarah Palin. They’re likely to recall that Quayle was an ally in a White House that had a strong streak of moderation — and that he occasionally started useful fights, such as when he criticized the television-sitcom character Murphy Brown for bearing a child out of wedlock. It led to one of the most talked-about articles ever to appear on the cover of the liberal-leaning Atlantic Monthly, the one headlined: “Dan Quayle Was Right.”

So as Romney scrambled to shore up his support at the height of the Gingrich boomlet, the Quayle endorsement was more than the perfunctory nod of an establishment Republican. It was a welcome boost from a well-known conservative. The timing was pure happenstance, the announcement having been planned a few weeks earlier to coincide with a trip to Arizona already on Romney’s schedule. And it had been in the works for even longer, with Romney phoning Quayle on a regular basis to talk politics. None of the other candidates had even bothered to contact the former veep. “Romney was the only one to ask for my support,” says Quayle. It’s a small example of the discipline and focus that have turned Romney into the strong frontrunner for the GOP nomination.

Quayle was 41 years old when he became vice president — a relatively young man for the job, with boyish looks to boot. “I learned that if you’re a young conservative, you’ll be a big target for the press,” he says. “It’s bad enough that you’re a conservative. It’s even worse if you’re young because they’ll think you’ll have a future — and they’ll want to destroy it.”

Today, he’s about to turn 65. The hair is grayer. The skin is starting to wrinkle. Quayle says he hasn’t thought about running for office since he finished eighth in the 1999 Iowa straw poll. He quit his pursuit of the presidency and, before the year was over, took the job he still holds with Cerberus Capital Management. “I’d been in politics since I was 29,” he says. “I decided it was finally time to try something else.”

When you’re a former vice president, however, politics are never far away. Quayle still feels an obligation to attend presidential inaugurations, even for Democrats. He went to Ted Kennedy’s funeral. He advised his son’s successful campaign for Congress in 2010. And he puts his mind to the election of 2012.

“This far out, the incumbent is usually favored,” says Quayle. “But I think we can beat Obama.” He’ll be looking hard at a single number: the economy’s growth in the second quarter of this year. “That’s when perceptions set in,” he says. He points to his own experience in 1992, when the Bush-Quayle ticket crashed at the ballot box. “In the first two quarters of that year, we were technically — barely — in a recession. In the third quarter, the economy grew by 4 percent. In the fourth quarter, it grew by 6 percent. But none of that mattered, because Clinton got everyone to think that we were still in a recession even though it wasn’t true.”

In other words, Obama doesn’t have until Election Day to convince Americans that a recovery is under way. He has until the end of the spring. “That’s not good for him, because it doesn’t look like we’re going to have strong growth in the first half of the year,” says Quayle. “The jobs numbers are improving, but a lot of that is temp help, and it doesn’t factor in the people who have dropped out of the labor market because they’re no longer searching for employment.”

For the Bush-Quayle reelection campaign, perceptions about the economy were enough of a challenge — but it also had to contend with Ross Perot’s third-party ticket, which didn’t carry a single state but drew about 19 percent of the popular vote. “There’s no doubt that without Perot in the race, we would have won,” says Quayle. “We would have won handily.” Do Republicans have to worry about a third party in 2012 — perhaps one led by Ron Paul as a Libertarian candidate? “I don’t think he’ll do it,” says Quayle. “But if he did, it would be a big problem. He’d probably get 10 or 12 percent of the vote or more, and 80 percent of it would be Republican.” The GOP should take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen. “Paul should have a prominent position at the convention,” says Quayle. “He deserves it. He’s a credible candidate, and he should be treated with respect.” The expectation, of course, would be for Paul to encourage his voters to get behind the Republican nominee.

At some point this year, Quayle expects to hear rumors of a “Dump Biden” movement among Democrats — a drive to convince Obama that he should recruit a new running mate, replacing the gaffe-prone Joe Biden. “There will be a push to drop him, but it won’t happen,” says Quayle, who was the subject of similar efforts in 1992. “Why switch? Putting someone else on the ticket won’t help. The president must get reelected on his own. Changing the vice-presidential candidate would create too much discord and chaos.”

The main vice-presidential event between now and the conventions, of course, will take place among Republicans. If Romney wins the nomination, whom should he pick? “He needs to think a little out of the box because he’s a traditional, conventional political figure,” says Quayle. He immediately suggests a pair of potential running mates whom many conservatives had hoped would run for president this year: Florida senator Marco Rubio and New Jersey governor Chris Christie. “Rubio is a comer. He has an impressive resume, a wonderful story.” Yet Rubio has also signaled that he doesn’t want to be on anyone’s short list for veep. Quayle chuckles at this. “Let me tell you: If the offer is made, he will not reject it.” Quayle also approves of Christie: “He’s a bare-knuckles straight shooter who loves the give and take of politics. He’s a breath of fresh air, totally unconventional for a Republican governor of New Jersey.”

His next two suggestions are a little less daring. “When you look at the recent history of successful vice-presidential candidates, you notice that a lot of them come from the Senate: Mondale, Gore, Biden, me,” says Quayle. “So that’s a natural place to find one.” He mentions Rob Portman of Ohio. “He’s a solid individual with a great background in trade and the budget. He’s steeped in national politics. And he comes from a swing state.” His other idea is John Thune of South Dakota. “He’s a solid conservative who would complement Romney well. In the Senate, he’s seen as a potential majority leader, and I think he’d be successful on the national stage.”

Quayle has advice for anyone who takes the role. “Vice presidents need to understand two things,” he says. “First, you have to be prepared to be president, and that means you must have access to all of the intelligence, go to all of the briefings, and know exactly what’s going on. Second — and this is the tough one — you have to be loyal to the president’s agenda rather than your own agenda. That can be hard when you come from the Senate, where it’s pretty freewheeling and you can get up and talk about anything or introduce any kind of bill. As vice president, you must always defer to the president. If you want to give a piece of your mind, you do it in private.”

When he talks politics these days, it’s often with his son, the 35-year-old congressman who was born in 1976, just three days after his father’s first election to Congress. “It’s his turn now, his generation’s turn,” says the elder Quayle. “Besides, there’s not enough room for two Quayles in politics.”

NATIONAL REVIEW
February 6, 2012

ACID TEST

JOHN J. MILLER

Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs, edited by S.T. Joshi (Library of America, 880 pp., $35)

Everything changed for Ambrose Bierce the day he was shot in the head. At least that’s one theory about how a bright young man from Horse Cave Creek in Ohio went on to become his generation’s leading cynic. This was the guy, after all, who gave us The Devil’s Dictionary, which defined “PEACE” as “a period of cheating between two periods of fighting” and “WAR” as “a by-product of the arts of peace.” People still snicker over “MARRIAGE, n.: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.”

The head wound came a day before his 22nd birthday, at Georgia’s Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, when Bierce was a soldier in the Union Army. He had volunteered to fight immediately after Fort Sumter’s fall and lived through the awfulness of Shiloh and Chickamauga. His skull, he said, had “broken like a walnut.” He went home to recuperate, split with his fiancee, and returned to active duty within three months. For most of the rest of his life, which ended mysteriously, he was a professional writer.

The Civil War era is known for its remarkable literature, from the speeches and letters of Abraham Lincoln to the poems of Walt Whitman. Yet the war’s veterans, for all of their accomplishments, wrote little fiction about battles or leaders. Mark Twain served in a Confederate militia for a couple of weeks and lit out for the territories, headed for greatness but never to write anything of significance about his country’s epic struggle. Lew Wallace, a Union general, put out Ben-Hur, but it didn’t recount the war either. (It also belongs to that rare category of achievement: the novel that was made into a better movie.) It took Stephen Crane, born six years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, to write The Red Badge of Courage, the most acclaimed fictional rendering of the conflict.

Yet there was Bierce, standing by himself, producing a string of short stories on the Civil War that anticipate the artistic disillusionment of 20th-century modernism. They are all included in the Library of America’s new compilation of Bierce’s work, edited by S. T. Joshi, along with the complete Devil’s Dictionary and other pieces. Several of these entries rise to the level of masterpiece, such as “Chickamauga,” the tale of a young boy who wanders onto a grisly battlefield, failing to understand what the reader knows that he sees. A soldier with a bloody face reminds him of a “painted clown.” A crawling casualty looks like one of his father’s slaves, offering a game of horsey: He collapses as the child tries to hop on, throws the boy from his back, and turns to reveal that he’s missing his lower jaw. At the end of the story, the child makes for a “guiding light — a pillar of fire,” where he encounters a terrible surprise about war’s devastation.

By all accounts, Bierce was a capable soldier. His early enlistment suggests manly idealism — but the reality of combat would alter any illusions he ever held about glory and honor. Twice in battle, he dodged Confederate bullets to help injured comrades. One man died, a fate that possibly confirmed in Bierce’s mind “the intrinsic absurdity of valorous deeds,” as Roy Morris Jr. puts it in his excellent 1995 biography, Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. (The amusing subtitle comes from another of Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary quips: “ALONE, adj. In bad company.”) At other moments, Bierce witnessed scenes evoking profound disgust — such as one of hogs feasting on the faces of the dead, which he worked into his story “The Coup de Grace.” He also may have watched a cannonball decapitate a mounted colonel, whose headless body continued to ride on horseback, like a Sleepy Hollow nightmare, before eventually tipping off.

After the war, Bierce moved to San Francisco and became a journalist, soon earning a reputation for slashing sarcasm. Gloom may have been a natural part of his temperament, but his personal life aggravated the condition. His marriage was unhappy even before a teenage son committed suicide. Another son died of pneumonia. Bierce himself suffered from chronic asthma. Small wonder that this line appears in The Devil’s Dictionary: “MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.”

In the 1880s, Civil War veterans began to write of their experiences, producing a flood of memoirs and magazine articles. Bierce contributed to this effusion of autobiography — see his essay “What I Saw of Shiloh” — but made his lasting mark around the same time with his weird fiction. Bierce ranks with Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft as one of America’s three finest writers of horror, with tales of ghostly hauntings, invisible monsters, and resurrection men. This genre holds wide but not universal appeal, and Bierce always found ways to generate discomfort. In a collection called The Parenticide Club, one story starts this way: “Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity . . .” Here’s another: “Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father — an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.” It takes a certain kind of reader to keep going. Clifton Fadiman once said that death was Bierce’s favorite character. Edmund Wilson refined the claim, saying that death was his only character.

Bierce’s signal achievement was “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” one of the world’s best-known short stories. A condemned man stands on a bridge, ready to be hanged by his captors — but unready for the cosmic joke that’s about to be played on him. (It became a celebrated episode of The Twilight Zone.) It’s the sort of story that demands a second reading immediately following the first because only then can the full richness of Bierce’s narrative, which brims with double meanings, become perceptible. Stephen Crane admired the tale: “Nothing better exists,” he once said. Bierce refused to return the compliment, heaping scorn on the young whippersnapper — a case in which jealousy may have warped judgment.

Bierce befriended Percival Pollard, a critic who rated Crane’s career-making novel as merely “an imitation of Bierce.” When Pollard died in 1911, Bierce was one of just five people to attend the funeral. (Memo to critics: Don’t expect large crowds at your burial.) There, he met H. L. Mencken, in what was apparently their sole encounter. Although Mencken didn’t write horror fiction, he would become Bierce’s journalistic successor. Both men displayed savage wit and shared a loathing for religion, corruption, and the political class.

Contemporaries thought of Bierce primarily as a journalist. Today, he’s remembered as a writer of fiction — and that’s how the Library of America volume has chosen to treat him, excluding the newspaper columns that made him famous in his day. It’s hardly the first such omission: Bierce himself kept this content from the Collected Works that came out near the end of his life. Journalism is of course ephemeral, but Bierce did some of his best work in San Francisco papers. To a crook who tried to rob a safe in a city office, Bierce offered memorable advice: “This is rushing matters; the impatient scoundrel ought to try his hand at being a Supervisor first. From Supervisor to Thief the transition is natural and easy.” A modern anthology of this material would make for good entertainment.

Late in his career, Bierce even took a turn at muckraking. In 1896, his employer of many years, William Randolph Hearst, dispatched Bierce to Washington, D.C., to cover Collis P. Huntington, a railroad tycoon who had given his name to a city in West Virginia. Huntington was lobbying Congress for a law to delay or cancel the repayment of a $75 million federal loan. Bierce’s hard-hitting reports compelled Huntington to approach his nemesis on the steps of the Capitol. “Every man has his price,” said Huntington, suggestively. “My price is $75 million,” replied Bierce. “If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.”

The date of Bierce’s birth is known but not the date of his death. Shortly after Christmas in 1913, he famously vanished, possibly in Mexico. Death has been a pretty good career move for a lot of 27-year-old rock stars, and it worked out well for this 71-year-old writer: Ever since, the question of what happened to him has been a literary parlor game. Was Bierce shot by Pancho Villa? Was he killed at the Battle of Ojinga? Did he sneak into a cave near the Grand Canyon, put a gun to his head, and deliver the fatal blow that had eluded a Confederate gunman so many years earlier? Nobody ever discovered a body. The only certainty is the uncertainty — and the sense that Bierce had managed to write a fitting conclusion to his own life’s story.

Happy 203rd Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe! (Technically, it was yesterday.) Here’s my Wall Street Journal article, from when he turned 200.