Volume 21, Number 17 · October 31, 1974
Up Against the News
By Harold Rosenberg
The Seventeenth Degree
by Mary McCarthy
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 451 pp., $3.95 (paper)
The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits
by Mary McCarthy
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 165 pp., $6.95
'I think,' said George Meany, 'Gerald Ford is what he appears to be.' This metaphysical appraisal could have been offered as an epilogue to Mary McCarthy's The Mask of State. It must have been evoked from Meany by the consciousness that Nixon and his White House had constituted a gallery of false faces, a masquerade. Lawyers, ad executives, experts were actually cadres, armed with 'executive privilege,' of The Man on Horseback. The Man himself wore the Halloween phiz of a Sunday-school moralist, with his adoring family around him, his dog, his self-communing strolls by the sea, his 'fellow Muricans,' his 'goals,' his 'work for peace,' behind which, as the tapes revealed, was a tough, mentally dissolute King Ubu, with a vocabulary of the gutter and the attitude toward his job of a bum in a burlesque show playing statesman. Haldeman: 'Burns is concerned about speculation about the lira.' President: 'Well, I don't give a (expletive deleted) about the lira. (Unintelligible.)'
Review, 4006 words
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