Following the death of Paul Greenberg last month, several of us who write columns and editorials at this newspaper took a stab at writing about him.
It was, at least in my case, an intimidating assignment. No one was better at summing up lives in 1,000 words or less than the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Pine Bluff Commercial. Upon hearing of his death, I pulled down his little book from 1991 titled "Resonant Lives: 50 Figures of Consequence."
The book, published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center of Washington, D.C., while Greenberg was still at the Commercial, consists of 50 short essays on figures ranging from historian C. Vann Woodward (an Arkansas native) to evangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Some of those essays originally ran in the Commercial as obituary editorials.
"The obituary editorial has become an unrelished chore on many newspapers," Greenberg wrote. "You can tell by the dull ring of duty in the prose. But such an assignment should really be seen as an opportunity. Endings lend perspective. They teach in a way that beginnings cannot. It is better to visit a house of mourning, a Talmudic sage once advised, than a house of joy.
"That a skull on the desk as a memento mori has given way to the modern office wall lined with plaques and citations is not an improvement. Not all these highly opinionated pieces are obituaries, but each offers Gentle Reader a kind of summing up."
Riding back to Little Rock following a speaking engagement in Arkadelphia one day, Walter E. Hussman Jr., the Democrat-Gazette publisher, told me the most pleasant part of his job for years was reading Greenberg's copy in advance of publication. It was Hussman who hired Greenberg away from the Commercial in early 1992 so readers statewide could enjoy his prose.
I thought of Hussman's line as I read "Resonant Lives" again, and determined that my first column had not done him justice. The best way to honor Paul Greenberg in print, it seems, is to quote him.
"The idea of history as biography enlarged has faded in recent times under the onslaught of the social 'sciences,'" Greenberg wrote. "As numbers replace names in the history books, and general trends take the place of specific events, something has been lost, mainly the person and the story. 'Anecdotal' has become a pejorative term. The moral of a story, now known as the conclusion, has to be expressed in numbers or vague generalities to be respectable. This is not an improvement, either. Something not just of beauty but of great use is being lost."
Irving Kristol, dubbed the Godfather of Neoconservatism, had great respect for Greenberg and wrote the introduction to the book. Following his death in September 2009, Kristol was described by The Daily Telegraph as having been "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th century." I would put Greenberg on that list.
"We no longer really believe in the process of character formation, and therefore do not think that either the home or the school or books have any role to play in the process," Kristol wrote in his foreword to Greenberg's book. "We believe, rather, that the character of young people unfolds ('flowers') in a purely natural way, one that spontaneously seeks an appropriate form. To act on any other premise is to engage in 'repression,' to exercise an adult tyranny over the young, and also a social tyranny over the individual.
"Not only do we no longer credit any idea of original sin. (Plutarch didn't, either). We are convinced, rather, that every infant at birth has a quasi-divine individuality that is positively sinful to interfere with. (The 'interference' of abortion is quite another matter, of course). The short essay on a life, of a kind that Paul Greenberg does so beautifully and magisterially, has fallen victim to such prepossessions. True, he writes mainly about contemporary figures, rather than historical ones, and he writes for adults rather than for children. But adults, too, have to work continuously at 'character formation,' either to improve the character they have or to retain and repossess it.
"For this enterprise, Mr. Greenberg presents us with encapsulated knowledge about and insight into important contemporaries. Above all, because he himself is a wise man, he guides us to incremental wisdom about people and ideas--and ourselves."
I read all the essays and especially enjoyed those on Arkansans. I've long been fascinated by colorful characters. I got to know Orval Faubus in his later years and shared a number of meals with him. I found him to be a complex man, defying the stereotype most of us had developed. I also liked to say I was the only person to have worked for both John Robert Starr and Tommy Robinson.
Here's a Greenberg sampler:
Greenberg on J. William Fulbright: "In 1957, the year of the Little Rock Crisis, when his state was being stampeded by an ambitious demagogue in Little Rock, Senator Fulbright took advantage of the opportunity to take an extended trip abroad. Tracked down in England, he had no comment on the greatest crisis of law and conscience to confront his state in this century. He lay low for a whole month while matters swayed in the balance. When he finally did speak up, it was to give aid and comfort to the mob and, yes, to criticize Dwight Eisenhower for sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock.
"A year later, Fulbright would file his own personal brief with the Supreme Court of the United States challenging the Eisenhower administration's policy in desegregating the schools of Little Rock. It's no secret why J. William Fulbright skedaddled when he was most needed: He was afraid of losing his political office. Instead, he lost his political soul."
Greenberg on Faubus following the November 1980 screening of a documentary on the former governor: "The sneak preview is over now, but Orval Faubus is still going strong, surrounded by reporters, rehashing old campaigns, reaching back for the names of old friends and foes. He still enjoys the game. He will yet justify the unjustifiable, if only history will listen. He'll look better, he said, 'in the perspective of history when animosities and prejudices have faded with time.'
"It is another great quote from a politician who used animosities and prejudices so adroitly, and won six terms as governor. Twelve years in office. That seemed a long time then. Now it is the shortest, like yesterday when it is past. Stepping outside into the fresh air, I am struck again at this season by how suddenly it gets dark."
Greenberg on Tommy in late 1989 (Robinson has always been known to Arkansans simply by his first name, much like Elvis): "Folks like Tommy Robinson are the natural enthusiasts of life, and when they become politicians, they turn republics into democracies and democracies into demagogueries. Some demagogues only ape belief; they truly believe only in their own ambition. But the naturals among them tend to believe what they're saying, at least while they're saying it. Tommy Robinson is among the latter. He not only voices his instincts; he acts on them.
"Why else would he make a risky run for governor when he had a safe congressional seat? Why not serve another term or two in the House, qualify for a nice pension, and then challenge Arkansas' only challengeable senator, Dale Bumpers, in 1992? That would be the logical course for an ambitious pol to take. But logic is to Tommy Robinson as water is to a duck's back. The reason he is so good at exploiting the instincts of others is that he follows his own."
What writing. Greenberg, who described himself as an ideologically unreliable conservative, gets the final word: "Biography isn't just history; it can be philosophy."
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.