Poof! the Phenomenon of Public Vanishing

By LANCE MORROW

John Kennedy used to wonder what he would do with himself after he finished his second term in the White House. He would be at "the awkward age" then, he said, "too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs."

After Dallas, Kennedy was translated into a sudden myth, a permanent luminescence. It is a profitless irony that the drama of his death spared him the long, fading afterlife of the ex-powerful.

There is a phenomenon of public vanishing in America that is poignant and spooky. It is a compact enactment of the American themes of success and failure. Remember Walter Mondale? All spring and summer and fall of 1984, Mondale was a presence in American life, his words, his cadences, his voice and visage and body English all injected electronically into the nation's consciousness. Then November. Poof. Mondale vanished, like the minute explosion of light on the screen when one turns off an old television set after the national anthem--the little death of a star. Mondale reappeared not long ago, gave a few interviews, then dematerialized again, disappearing into a Washington law firm. He became, in short, a private man, a resident of the same obscurity (almost) that everyone else calls home.

There are certain words that English ought to have but does not. One is a word for the opposite of memory. Oblivion is not quite it. Forgettery? That swampy region in the southland of the brain where everything we have forgotten now lies, overgrown with kudzu, something like an enormous automobile graveyard.

Americans are usually gentler and more metaphorical than some other peoples in consigning their public figures to forgettery. Joseph Stalin slaughtered a generation or two of Soviet leadership. He dealt out the ultimate obscurity: death. It was part of his theory of management. Sometimes he invited prospective victims to his all-night dinners (about 10 p.m. to dawn) and later had the NKVD take them off to be shot. One ruler in Central Africa is said to have murdered hundreds of his people and sometimes eaten them for supper. And so on.

In America, it is the people who eat the politicians for supper. Public vanishing is a dramatic spectacle usually because it has to do with power and its loss. If a politician gives a speech and there is no one there to hear it, has he made a sound? Ask Harold Stassen. He knows something about the riddle of the tree falling in the empty auditorium.

American Presidents are a special case. At the end of his awful term in the White House, Franklin Pierce vanished into obscurity in New Hampshire. "What can the next President do but drink?" he asked. The U.S. was shuddering into the preliminary convulsions of Civil War, so Pierce may have had a point. In + those days, ex-Presidents did not enjoy the sort of opulent afterlife that they now have. They did not busy themselves building their official libraries, those temples to a President's selective memories of power. They did not enjoy lifetime Secret Service protection and hundreds of thousands of dollars in Government allowances. Ulysses Grant went broke and, dying of throat cancer, spent his last days laboring over his autobiography to make some money for his survivors. By today's rules, King Lear would have spent a happy retirement on the golf course.

Richard Nixon has accomplished one of the most complicated and impressive acts of ex-presidential vanishing. But then Nixon always did possess a kind of genius for finishing himself off and then re-emerging as a "New Nixon." He left the White House in disgrace, strangling on tapes and expletives. He vanished into his seaside house at San Clemente, Calif. He fell into a sepulchral, or defiant, silence. It was as if he were passing through the stages of mourning (denial, anger, depression, acceptance) for his assassinated self. Then, after five years, he moved east to New York City, published four more books and built a kind of public private career as writer and elder statesman. Nixon is the marathon man of public vanishers, always running hard to outdistance the old disgrace.

One of the most spectacular vanishing acts of modern times was that performed by Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew. For a time in the first Nixon Administration, Agnew was a prominent American folk hero or villain, the voice of the Silent Majority standing up to the "nattering nabobs of negativism." Then the Justice Department closed in on him for accepting $147,500 in bribes in the days when he was Governor of Maryland. Agnew resigned and disappeared from the face of the earth. Now and then he is sighted spiriting through an airport in the Middle East. He makes his living as an international trade consultant and keeps a house at Rancho Mirage, Calif., near Palm Springs, not far from Gerald Ford's home. Rancho Mirage is one of the world capitals of vanishing. Plains, Ga., has its more down-home native obscurity.

Sometimes those who are willfully vanished achieve a mysterious, dark entity --a man like Howard Hughes, for example. His biography became a kind of American antimatter.

Television is the principal theater in which the drama of vanishing is enacted. There is a sermon in the cathode-ray tube, a buried subtext about power and fame and celebrity. TV captures life vividly, intimately. But the images are merely electrons in the air. Moment to moment, they vanish. Being, then nothingness. All conscious life is haunted by the prospect of nullity. Public figures and celebrities become intimately familiar, and then they are gone. "Buffalo Bill's defunct," wrote E.E. Cummings. Is public vanishing a psychodrama in which we appease our fears of death? In the phenomenon of public vanishing, one sometimes detects the ghost of a childhood terror of abandonment. Or perhaps the converse impulse: a punitive satisfaction at the mighty brought low, vaporized. It is a theme of Shakespearean size. Power and fame are fugitive. Or, to see it in more banal terms, the world has a short attention span.

But turn the glass a little. What the public perceives as a vanishing may in fact be an escape into a better reality. In October 1984 Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, 53, one of the bright hopes of the Democratic Party, learned that he had a mild form of cancer. At first, he decided to plow ahead with his re-election campaign. Then he thought better of it. As a friend told him, "Nobody on his deathbed ever said, 'I wish I had spent more time on my business.' " Tsongas gave up his political career to spend his time with his family. He vanished to the public in order to materialize for his family. He may have given a deeper reading to a line of W.B. Yeats: "Man is in love, and loves what vanishes./ What more is there to say?"