Necessary Roughness

On the second leg of my flight home, I asked for Diet Sprite and got a “Sprite Lite”. It wasn’t bad, but the can recommends that the beverage be serviced “Ice Cold,” which caused me to wonder if it breaks down at room temperature. Comforting. I missed my original connection in Dallas, but I got the next one two hours later. This gave me time to go through Mary Matalin’s book, Letters to My Daughters.

Ms. Matalin has served as pundit-adviser-spinmistress for Bush-41 and Dick Cheney. Her husband is the Cajun pundit-adviser-spinmeister of the Democratic party, James Carville. I half expected some ideological jabs about the kids’ father, but this book was less about Mom and Dad and more about watching their children grow up and passing on lessons from the author’s own parents. I also read it to see if there were any bits of advice I could give my own daughters and look really wise.

The book is humorous, self-deprecating, and covers the topics important to the author: boys, hormones (both pubescent and menopausal), losing the need to be childish, what to do when mom’s in a healthy “freak-out”, the importance of having loving your sister, loyalty, loving your country yet traveling to get perspective, treating elders well, taking the high road, marriage, and others. I found some things that were pretty cool, like how well Mary got along with her sister, and how much the younger Matalin sisters seem to love and play off each other. She feels that since her daughters trust people easily and want to make others happy, that boys might take advantage of them, so her advice to be assertive seems well-founded. She finds that fame corrupts more than money, an interesting observation. In her chapter on loyalty, she admits that Carville’s defense of President Clinton during impeachment drove her crazy, but still uses it as an example of loyalty. Her chief observation about loyalty is that loyalty is good, but it becomes harmful when that loyalty is not reciprocated.

This is the third straight book I’ve read where Tim Russert’s name has come up. Of course, I read his autobiography, but between that and this book I also read Arrogance by Bernard Goldberg. All three recount Tim’s story where he was comforting a friend who had lost his child, when he asked the father whether he would give back the experiences of his child in order to spare himself the pain of that child’s loss. I actually had more respect for Tim Russert from reading Goldberg’s account than after reading Big Russ and Me.

The book does not contain many facts about Ms. Matalin’s life; she alludes to events that shaped her thinking but does not provide details. She also does not provide any reasons for her ideology, which disappointed me. In fact, she and James Carville go out of their way not to discuss political matters in the household, which I suppose could be the only way such a marriage between such polar political opposites can exist. I would recommend this book to those with girls growing up in the house, or perhaps to those uncles and aunts whose nieces adore them and look to them for additional perspectives.