Talking Shop With Mr. Family Values Himself

PHOENIX —  It’s the second morning of our summer-long quest to explore the state of the American family, and I’m having doubts.

In an hour we’re set to interview former Vice President Dan Quayle, the man who put the term “family values” into political play with his “Murphy Brown” speech in 1992.

Now it’s 90-something outside, and our family of five is trying to get dressed in our rented 26-foot RV, which is rocking like a boat in a storm because Emily, 10, keeps reenacting a hula number from her school’s musical extravaganza a few days earlier.

Shoes are lost. The bathroom’s airliner-sized. This is not journalism as commonly practiced.

We pulled into this, our first RV park ever, after 1 a.m., concerned that our late arrival would disturb our fellow campers. We needn’t have worried.

As we wheeled into the gravel driveway, our headlights fixed upon an old dog on a picnic table. He glared red-eyed for a moment, then went back to gnawing the wood and whining demonically. Ballpark-wattage lights blazed at other sites. Beneath one trailer’s battered aluminum awning, bare-chested men applied wrenches to an outlaw-style Harley, the vehicle of choice at several of the park’s eclectic array of permanently parked mobile residences.

In the morning, Emily pulled open the curtains and offered her assessment: “This is a crummy-looking place.”

I’d been up early and checked things out. The residents I’d met, I said, all seemed friendly. “Don’t judge people in advance,” I warned her. “Be respectful.”

An hour later, my wife, Pam, issued a similar admonition in an oddly incongruous context.

“Do you have any questions for Mr. Quayle?” she asked the kids.

“I’m going to ask him to spell ‘potato,’ ” Emily answered.

“You will not ask him that,” Pam snapped, staring down from the RV’s cab-over bunk, into which she had clambered in search of Robert’s clip-on tie.

As Pam gives her own little sermon on respect, I think about our peculiar predicament. Our children, having embarked on an educational journey few ever will have the chance to make, are about to meet a man who once held the second-highest office in the land. This should be a moment of awe for 12-, 10- and 7-year-olds.

And, in truth, it largely is. Yet, like all children in America, ours have been bombarded with the message that James Danforth Quayle is a boob. Just as President Clinton almost certainly encounters kids who regard him primarily in light of crass talk radio jokes, Quayle forever will be parrying spelling witticisms.

As a citizen, I’m convinced that reverence for leaders is a far greater danger than political disrespect. But as a father hoping to imbue his children with a sense of civics, I lament that mockery has become the primary form of discourse, even at the elementary school level.

Anyway, just as Clinton always will have loyalists who believe he’s been unjustly maligned, Quayle has his cadre of devotees, many of whom reportedly are urging him to run for president in 2000. (“I’ll be in a strong position after the 1998 election to make that decision,” he tells us.)

Fortunately, we haven’t come to talk politics per se.

We arrive on time and sufficiently well dressed that Quayle--who is wearing a golf shirt and khaki pants held up by a silver-edged belt--grins. “You don’t look like you’ve been traveling,” he says.

We arrange ourselves around a conference table at the offices of Campaign America, the GOP fund-raising organization in Scottsdale that Quayle heads. The kids explain our assignment. Quayle says he is reminded of “those congressional fact-finding trips to the Bahamas.”

Then his blue eyes get a distant look. “The best vacation, actually the only memorable vacation that I had growing up, was around 1961,” he says.

Leaning back and relaxing, he paints a picture of his family loading into a 1959 white Rambler station wagon with a tent-trailer on the back. For two weeks, they toured Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks and wound up at a small lake in Idaho.

“I remember fishing off a little rubber raft and catching these big trout,” he says. The family ate out only twice, and one of those times was when the camp stove leaked on sandwiches his mother had made.

*

This picture doesn’t comport with my image of Quayle’s childhood as the scion of the wealthy, conservative Pulliam publishing dynasty. Quayle first moved to Phoenix in 1955 with his parents when his dad went to work for the family’s Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette. Young Dan grew up here in a house beside a golf course, with two younger brothers and a younger sister.

In 1963 the family returned to Indiana, where Quayle launched his political career 13 years later, serving two terms in the House before moving to the Senate at 33.

Now Quayle is 50, he and his wife, Marilyn, are back in Arizona, and their three children, Tucker, Benjamin and Corinne, have moved on to college and careers. But an empty nest hasn’t kept him from stirring family matters into the national stew.

In his most famous speech, in 1992, Quayle attacked television for creating a plot in which fictional TV anchor Murphy Brown seemed to be “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ” Five years after that speech, cadres of sociologists still squabble over whether Quayle was right in his assessment of the troublesome, sometimes tragic impact of single parenthood.

It seems to me that part of the backlash against Quayle’s family values crusade stemmed from an ingrained American distaste for the privileged lecturing the struggling on how to run a family. Quayle doesn’t buy that assessment.

For one thing, he says, his Richie Rich image is a wild exaggeration; his grandfather “had an aversion to inherited wealth,” so the family nest egg will be passed on only to Quayle’s grandchildren’s generation.

Besides, people weren’t angry at the messenger, he says, but at the message of that talk--a hard-nosed critique of the Los Angeles riots and a lambasting of the baby boom generation’s self-indulgent, undisciplined, disrespectful values, which, Quayle contends, contributed to the unrest.

And now that family values talk has infiltrated political rhetoric across the spectrum, Quayle feels vindicated.

“Both political parties, liberals and conservatives, have joined the debate and said, ‘Look, family is important. Virtues and values are important,’ ” he says. “The debate is much more intelligent, much more focused, much less controversial.”

*

Everyone now agrees, Quayle says, that “if the family isn’t strong, the community isn’t strong, [and] if the community isn’t strong, the country isn’t strong.” The only question, he says, is whether people want government to bolster the family or think that familial strength comes from within.

At the end of the Murphy Brown speech, Quayle said something that I know to be true: When many middle-class, middle-aged boomers had children of their own, they tended to recover the traditional values they’d scorned.

In their book, “The American Family” (HarperCollins, 1996), Quayle and co-author Diane Medved profiled five families, including a Latino clan in East Los Angeles, black Chicagoans, white entrepreneurs and a family headed by a single mother in Indianapolis.

Some were poor and all had problems, but, Quayle notes, they survived because they had strong values, such as discipline and respect.

As Quayle talks, Pam shoots pictures and the children listen attentively. Or they seem to. When we load back into the RV, Ashley says that Robert was pinching her under the table.

*

Hearing that takes me back to the RV park where we’d spent the night--the only place we could find in our directories that accepted children. Across from us had been a weather-beaten gray trailer, about half the size of an RTD bus. Outside, eight bicycles and a couple of tricycles had been strewn amid toys, appliances and strollers. Someone had wedged a menagerie of stuffed animals against a small window, apparently to hold out the heat.

As we dressed, kids of all ages spilled out of that trailer and other trailers. Bored-looking adolescents sat on skateboards, watching the day unfold. A pack of 4- or 5-year-old girls plopped down in the fading shade of the cinder-block camp store and chattered away without a care, or an adult, in sight. I suspect we were looking at their summer.

I have no doubt that some of those children come from families that are every bit as strong as mine or Quayle’s. But I suspect that at least some of their parents don’t have the time or energy or inclination to fine-tune their values--to, say, lecture them on the disrespect of pinching in the presence of a former vice president.

There they are, though--part of the community, part of the country, part of the cycle of virtue and vice, cause and effect that is the heart of the family values debate.

* Monday: A hard life in Yabba Dabba Doo Land.