Word: helprin
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...pros and cons of such a move with campaign chief Scott Reed. Then on April 23, the day of a desultory telephone conference call to the G.O.P.'s "Team 100" fund raisers, Dole sat in the sun outside his office with novelist and Wall Street Journal contributor Mark Helprin, whose writings on Dole had made an impression on the Senator. Helprin broached the idea of Dole's quitting everything--and realized that Dole was a step ahead of him. "When I raised it," Helprin recalls, "he was looking out over the Mall. His eye seemed to be fixed...
That same day Helprin was meeting with John Buckley, the new communications adviser, at Union Station, when Buckley got a message for Helprin to phone Dole. Helprin called from a pay phone, and Dole asked him to take a shot at writing a resignation statement. For the next few weeks the two talked every couple of days, with Helprin faxing Dole versions of the speech. Helprin came up with the allusion to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology whose strength was replenished when he touched ground. Dole liked that. But there was much he didn't like. They went over...
...Dole took Barbour aside and told him he was going to resign both jobs. Barbour was as relieved as he was astounded. Reed pushed Dole to make the announcement on May 7, but Senate business intervened. Instead, May 15 was chosen. Dole, Reed and Helprin all agreed that the speech should be short and poignant. Dole discussed with them whether to include a section contrasting himself with Clinton, but then demurred. Although he was resigning, he had come to praise, not to bury...
...lounges to garrets to the watering holes of writers across the nation, the unsettling news spread that the script for Bob Dole's best speech ever, his not-a-dry-eye, "White House or home" abdication address, was the work of a Wall Street Journal columnist listed as Mark Helprin. Come again? The Helprin known by starving artists and threadbare assistant professors of English is, after all, an aesthete hatched at the New Yorker and renowned as the writer of eloquent, rarefied novels. And as a tormentor of reporters, who in his early years invented an ever changing, operatic past...
...Helprin's novels are not clearly political and at their most florid are, though much admired, in fact not clear in any direction. Winter's Tale, for instance, is an obscure and very long fantasy about an annoying magical horse. His most recent, Memoir from Antproof Case, is marvelous, brilliantly written bosh about an elderly maniac who fulminates obsessively against coffee. Coffee? Sure...