How Do We Get Out of Here?: Half a Century of Laughter and Mayhem at The American Spectator―From Bobby Kennedy to Donald J. Trump
“Tyrrell’s memoir is both a fascinating insider’s account of the modern American conservative literary and political movement, and an insightful assessment of the evolution of American politics and culture during the last half century.”
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr’s memoir How Do We Get Out of Here? is a lively, informative, and often hilarious look back at his more than 50 years of editing The American Spectator, the irreverent, pugnacious, and courageous conservative journal of opinion that he founded while a college student at the University of Indiana in 1967.
Tyrrell’s memoir is both a fascinating insider’s account of the modern American conservative literary and political movement, and an insightful assessment of the evolution of American politics and culture during the last half century.
During this literary journey, Tyrrell advised presidents, met European royalty, intellectually jousted with liberals and progressives, and had a lot of fun along the way. The list of writers and thinkers he published in The American Spectator is a “who’s who” of modern conservatism (full disclosure: this reviewer has contributed articles to Tyrrell’s magazine for the past three years).
In the pages of this memoir you will meet the likes of Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Tom Wolfe, George Will, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, William Casey, Richard Nixon, Robert Bork, George Gilder, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Robert Novak, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William F. Buckley, Jr, Norman Podhoretz, Charlton Heston, Donald Trump, and many others. Tyrrell has interesting (and often funny) things to say about all of them.
Tyrrell used The American Spectator to help wage the literary Cold War. He sensed rightly that in the late 1960s to early 1970s, the Democratic Party shifted from being led by “cold warriors” like John F. Kennedy and Henry “Scoop” Jackson to Soviet appeasers like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. The 1960s radicals, he writes, took over the Democratic Party then and still dominate it today. More importantly, the 1960s radicals and their successors infiltrated and gained control of the nation’s cultural institutions—schools, universities, the media, government bureaucracies, Hollywood, publishing.
What Tyrrell calls the “coat-and-tie radicals” achieved power with the presidency of Bill Clinton, who was much less of a radical than his wife Hillary. Tyrrell details his magazine’s investigative reporting of the Clintons, which included Whitewater and Clinton’s extramarital affairs (and misuse of state troopers to facilitate those affairs). That reporting caused division among the magazine’s staffers, criticism from some of Tyrrell’s erstwhile conservative colleagues, and retaliation from the Clinton administration that nearly bankrupted the magazine.
Tyrrell has a refreshing and often unconventional take on some of the major issues and events of the last 50 years. He admires Richard Nixon and argues that Nixon was innocent of any coverup. He writes about the smallness of Jimmy Carter. He unabashedly praises Ronald Reagan for winning the Cold War and skewers liberals for refusing to acknowledge Reagan’s greatness. He describes Barack Obama as “just another American politician devoid of substance.” And he describes Donald Trump as “gracious,” “tremendously amusing,” “competent, friendly, and a man as good as his word.”
Along the way, Tyrrell wrote interesting and humorous books such as The Liberal Crack-Up, The Conservative Crack-Up, The Death of Liberalism, and Boy Clinton. And for pure fun, Tyrrell’s collection titled The Continuing Crisis is a must read. It is laugh-out-loud funny. As, at times, is this memoir.
Tyrrell also expresses gratitude to the people who provided the money to keep The American Spectator in business all of these years, as well as the staff of the magazine, especially Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, the journal’s longtime managing editor and currently its executive editor. He calls Pleszczynski “the easiest man to work with I have ever known” who understands that “culture is more important to politics than politics is to politics, and humor is more important to understanding the world than sober facts.”
Today, The American Spectator wages the “culture war” against “progressives,” criticizes the domestic and foreign policies of the Biden administration, wages a new literary Cold War against the Chinese Communist Party, and pokes fun at what Tyrrell calls the liberal “Kultursmog” and the “Infantilization of America.”
At the end of this entertaining memoir, Tyrrell thanks God for being “at the center” of his life. God, he writes, “is always with us whether we invite Him or not. He was with me through the raucous times and the more painful moments. Sometimes I owe Him an apology. Other times, I thank Him for his consolation.” That is a great way to end a great book.