Word: darman
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...Darman's negotiations with Congress present serpentine challenges worthy of a Kafka plot, his personality has the dense texturing of a protagonist in a Nabokov novel. Contradictions little and large adorn his life. He owns two racehorses but never bets on them because he doesn't gamble. Last year when his aged Audi expired, he agonized for weeks before acquiring a new Mercedes- Benz. The symbolism of so expensive a car bothers this man of independent means who cuts his own hair (badly) because "it's cheaper and faster." With a reporter he knows well, he can be drawn into...
...Bring up the "Darman book," and its author wants to change the subject. A talented writer who enjoys the craft, Darman writes occasional essays, sometimes leavening abstruse material with sports metaphors. He began a major analytical book on the process of governance 14 years ago, during one of his brief recesses from public service. He treated the work as a secret, showing pieces of it only reluctantly to a few friends. Elliot Richardson, his first Washington mentor, recalls it as "marvelously prescient and penetrating," in part because of Darman's gift for dispassionate analysis. Says Richardson: "Dick never allowed...
Public service became an addiction for him long ago. It isn't for want of a warm personal life. He remains gooey over his wife of 21 years, Kathleen Emmet Darman, a writer who has a Ph.D. in literature. They met, by his account, as teenagers at a "Beacon sociable," where Brahmin calves learned to dance under proper supervision. He sought for years to get her attention, even using ploys that could later be called Darmanesque. She gently scoffs at this romantic notion, conceding only that they met as graduate students at a dinner he arranged for that purpose. They...
When he is underoccupied, his bent for introspection becomes acute. His wife describes it as ongoing "self-examination, making his peace with what he does, making his peace with himself." Darman believes specific victories or defeats give him little elation or despair because he plays out either outcome in advance. "I've thought about the hundred things that can go wrong with the deficit thing," he says of today's mission. "If something starts going wrong, I'd be disappointed in myself if I hadn't already thought of that possibility...
Fear of disappointing himself or others remains a durable chain to his childhood. His conservative, demanding father Morton followed his own sire into the New England textile industry. Morton expected the oldest of his four children to do the same. Jeff Forbes, Darman's Harvard roommate, recalls the genetic imprint: "Dick's father was extremely disciplined, with a view that life was very real and very earnest. Dick took that from...