The Cat in the Hat for President Read online

  T H E C A T I N T H E H A T

  F O R P R E S I D E N T

  A Political Fable

  Published by Foxrock Books/Evergreen Review in association with OR Books/Counterpoint Press. Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

  Copyright © 1968, 1980 by Diana Nin Coover and Sara Chapin Coover. Introduction copyright © Diana Nin Coover and Sara Chapin Coover.

  Visit our website at evergreenreview.com.

  First printing 2017.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset by Pauline Neuwirth. Cover design by Bathcat, Ltd and Pauline Neuwirth. Printed by Bookmobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.

  paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-130-9

  ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-131-6

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  “The Cat in the Hat for President” is a 1968 election-year tale, written in a mouse-infested Mexico City hotel with brass spittoons in the lobby, a temporary hideout from the University of Iowa, where I was then employed. Iowa, like so many universities, was on the boil that spring. The nation still had a citizen army then, and the young were being drafted away to die in a stupid war virtually no one believed in, so there was a desperate urgency about the mounting nationwide resistance, and we found ourselves in the middle of it. Vigilante police teams had been created and thrown into battle, heads had been bloodied, students hospitalized and arrested and charged with conspiracy (some of this can be seen online in my thirty-minute documentary, “On a Confrontation in Iowa City”; a choice of websites available, but my own preference is the one posted and introduced by John Foley at Flashpointmag.com).

  We needed a break. My wife Pilar’s Argentinian guitar maestro was in Mexico that spring, so we decided it was time for a few quiet lessons. While she practiced and lessoned, I entertained our three small children. And it was while reading a Dr. Seuss book to them that my eye fell on the little Cat in the Hat symbol on the front cover: “I can read it all by myself.” It looked remarkably like a campaign button, and, by changing one letter, it was one. The Cat’s goofy anarchism resonated, I realized, with that of the current generation of students, all of whom had been brought up on the Ted Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) stories, and I could count on them going to bat for the Cat who knows where it’s at. Like Mr. Brown, I had my candidate.

  I rented the maids’ laundry room on the roof of the hotel and set to work, and by the end of our trip I had a rough draft of the story. As soon as we got back to Iowa City, I gave it a quick slap of the polish rag and sent it off to Hal Scharlatt, my editor at Random House, in the hopes that we could get it out before the election. Random House was also the publisher of the Dr. Seuss books, so maybe Geisel could even provide some illustrations. But the publishers would have none of it. They buried the original typescript in a locked drawer and told my editor to forget it, it didn’t exist. Dr. Seuss was a multimillion dollar business for Random House, and they were taking no chances. Moreover, Hal was warned that if the story appeared anywhere, I was no longer a Random House author and his own job was in jeopardy.

  There were no photocopiers in those days. Two typed carbon copies were about max for readability. I had sent the original and one carbon copy to Hal, kept the other one for myself. Hal didn’t hesitate. He slipped his carbon to his friend Ted Solotaroff, editor of the new New American Review, who had already printed one of my stories in his second issue. “The Cat” appeared there that autumn in the fourth issue, just ahead of the elections.

  While we were still in Mexico, President Johnson, realizing he’d been duped by a disreputable gang of glory-seeking generals and himself no longer believing in the war for which he’d long served as cheerleader, had announced he would not run for reelection. The well-planned North Vietnamese Tet Offensive had begun and, though stopped at first, would eventually lead to American defeat. In April of that year, Martin Luther King was assassinated, in May Paris was rocked with massive general strikes and the occupation of university and government buildings, and in June presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, brother of the assassinated president, was gunned down. That was the cheerful atmosphere in which the Cat’s campaign was launched.

  The Republicans nominated Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew as their candidates, and at the raucous Democratic convention in Chicago, presided over by Mayor Richard Daley, the vice president Hubert Humphrey at his side smiling benignly while outside in the streets Daley’s police were moving violently against the massed protesters, Humphrey was chosen as standard bearer with Ed Muskie as veep. Not long after the story’s publication, Richard Nixon was elected President—easily, until the current one, the worst in American history.

  Nixon’s election meant that the war, with sinister Henry Kissinger calling the shots, was only going to worsen on the way to its all too predictable end. Bombs and napalm would soon rain down on Cambodia and Laos as well as North Vietnam. Peaceful protesters in the U.S. were going to get shot. A lot of draftees as well. And, eventually, in spite of all the sacrifices, the Americans would have to flee, their tails between their legs.

  The two Cat stories (The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back) provide mock-interpretive background for this story and all the characters are Dr. Seuss characters. The narrator is a cynical party hack named Mr. Brown (you all know Mr. Brown, he’s out of town—though later he came back with Mr. Black), his principal interlocutor and the genius behind the Cat being the monstrous Clark from One Fish Two Fish. The story would appear briefly during the 1980 election campaign as a little book, titled with the original story’s subtitle, A Political Fable. Republican conventioneers would be welcomed at the entrance to their hotel by young women dressed in cat costumes, holding up signs that read “Let’s Make the White House a Cat House.”

  —Robert Coover

  August, 2017

  Look what we found

  in the park

  in the dark.

  We will take him home.

  We will call him Clark.

  He will live at our house

  He will grow and grow.

  Will our mother like this?

  We don’t know.

  —Dr. Seuss

  One Fish, Two Fish

  Red Fish, Blue Fish

  “Why do you sit there like that?” asked the Cat in the Hat.

  We stared back at him. The sonuvabitch was unconscious.

  “Lift your chin

  Out of your shoes!

  We will win

  And they will lose!”

  Ned held the phone receiver like a club, glared at the Cat, his temples throbbing. What in August and September had looked like the political upset of the century, had by mid-October become a total disaster, not only for our party, but for the nation as well.

  “Some news is glad,

  Some news is sad,

  I do not think—”

  “Shove it,” snapped Joe. Ned dropped the phone receiver to its cradle with a bang. Our party’s moderates and liberals, so-called, my men Riley and Boone among them, had ju
st pulled out, leaving us stranded, to form a rump group in support of the Opponent. It was a move almost unprecedented in the history of American politics. So was the more serious threat that lay behind it.

  Sam, pacing, paused to clap one hand to the Cat’s shoulder and suggest quietly that he go for a walk or take a nap or something. But the Cat remained, grinning foolishly. Sam shrugged, resumed his pacing.

  I watched Clark. Clark watched us. Benignly, hugely, over thin hands folded just under his eyes. He more than anyone had brought us to this strange crisis. Yet he betrayed no surprise, no solutions, no remorse.

  Joe took a hard drag on his cigarette, ground it out savagely in an ashtray. “Well, we’ve gotta think of something and damn quick,” he snapped.

  The Cat doffed his Hat and out popped a Something that commenced to dash preposterously around the room. Infuriated, Ned leaped up and stomped on it. “Get your silly ass outa here!” he screamed at the Cat, and kicked him out the door. Ned was an affable guy, circumspect and deferential. His reckless boot in the butt of our party’s nominee for the next President of the United States of America only showed how bad things really were.

  I could have said, I told you so, but it was no time for that either. Nor for that matter was it necessary. It was clear they all remembered my early opposition—an opposition that had nearly cost me my job—remembered it and now counted it wisdom, for much of the decision-making was falling on my shoulders again. “Your ball, Sooth,” Joe said. Given the nature of the decisions that lay ahead, I can’t say I was all that happy about it.

  In truth, my original objections to the Cat in the Hat had been of a merely practical sort. I’d been convinced from the outset of the impossibility of unseating the incumbent party this year: a war was on and the nation was prosperous. As I saw it, our job was to build for the elections four years hence, and I accepted the National Chairmanship of the party in that spirit. I was convinced we had to strengthen and enlarge the center to win, and therefore sought the nomination of a solid middle-of-the-roader with an uncontroversial record, a man whose carefully controlled candidacy this year would lay the groundwork for his election four years later.

  Moreover, even had we, not they, been the party in power, the Opponent would have been a tough man to beat. Born in a small Midwestern town of middleclass parents, reared and educated in the Southwest, known to have considerable holdings and influence in the Eastern Establishment, a poker buddy of several Southern Senators, progressive and city-oriented yet bluntly individualistic and rural in manner, rugged, shrewd, folksy, taciturn yet gregarious, a member of everything from SANE and the NAACP to the American Legion, Southern Baptists, and the National Association of Manufacturers, a chameleon personality who could project the faces of Chairman of the Board, Sheriff, Sunday Duffer, Private Eye, Young Man on the Go, Crackerbarrel Philosopher, Liontamer, Dad, Quarterback, Country Gentleman, City Lawyer, Good Sport, Field General, Swinger, and the Guy Next Door, all in one three-minute TV sequence, the Opponent was, in short, a natural. Of course, as Clark was to point out and the Cat to demonstrate, he was not without serious failings, what man is? But when I took over in early spring as the minority party’s National Chairman, it was generally conceded he was a shoo-in. Later, at their Convention, a young, soft-spoken, Harvard-educated New York Congressman was chosen as his running mate. Beautiful. Christ, how I envied them!

  There are risk-takers in politics, bold men who wait their chance then go for broke, latent Hotspurs suddenly gunning for immortality with the intensity and single-mindedness of an assassin or a saint. I’m proud to say I’m not one of them. My life in business and politics has been long, successful, and colorless. I have been, among other things, a state senator and treasurer, a U.S. Congressman, an undersecretary in the Department of Commerce, and Ambassador to Costa Rica, but most of my political life has been spent—in and around business—working quietly for the party. I could no longer count the number of ad hoc committees I’ve chaired, closed sessions swayed, anonymous tasks performed. Without headlines, without glory—though not without honor. It was a tribute to my effectiveness that the press, upon receiving news of my appointment, merely took it for granted. MR. BROWN NAMED PARTY HEAD.

  Theoretically, politics is all issues: the word used to describe the conflicts arising in men’s efforts to suffer one another. But practically, of course, there are no issues in politics at all. Not even ideological species. “Liberal,” “conservative,” “left,” “right,” these are mere fictions of the press, metaphoric conventions to which politicians sooner or later and in varying ways adapt. Politics in a republic is a complex pattern of vectors, some fixed and explicable, some random, some bullish, some inchoate and permutable, some hidden and dynamic, others celebrated though flagging, usually collective, sometimes even cosmic—and a politician’s job is to know them and ride them. So instinctive has my perception of the kinetics of politics been, so accurate my forecasts of election outcomes, I have come to be known jocularly as Soothsayer Brown among my colleagues, or, more spitefully, Gypsy.

  I even foresaw, many campaigns ago, what most men cannot: my own electoral defeat—foresaw it, accepted it, and then willingly took on the scapegoat’s role by espousing a number of unpopular minority views to help broaden the party’s base. I’ve been called a “liberal” in the media ever since: I! who own twenty suits, all in obscure shades of brown, and who in over forty years of eating in restaurants of every category and cuisine have yet to order anything except hamburger steak, charred to a crisp. You see, I am blessed—or damned, as you will—with puffy pink lips. They helped me to win my seat in the House of Representatives, just as later they helped me to lose it. My short stature, round belly, smooth pink scalp, anonymous name, and occasionally irascible temper no doubt contributed, but mainly it was the fat lips. By thrusting the lower one forward, I was able to project a marvelous complexion of selfrighteous anger, a kind of holy Bible-belting zeal for judgment, which complemented nicely the central issue, so-called, of my winning campaign: an attack on my incumbent opponent’s corruption. That wonderful pout did me little service, however, in defending myself against the same attacks two years later. Anybody with lips like that, you knew, just had to blow it. Of course, there were many factors, many vectors, but the fat lips were decisive. “Greatness” in American politics has always been associated with thin lips—some obscure racial or iconic bias, no doubt—and there was nothing I could do about it. I predicted my young tight-lipped challenger would take 56 percent of the vote; he won 56.4 percent.

  And so, many years, many engagements, many auguries later, now chairing my party and confronting an apparently invincible Opponent, publicly proclaiming an upset victory in November, whoever our candidate might be, but privately seeking a candidate to fit the probable vectors of the campaign four years hence, I could only react with bitterness and frustration to the Convention-floor move by a clutch of zany young turks to nominate the Cat in the Hat. Every man has his weakness and I have mine: my own failing, as perhaps you’ve already noticed, is a limited sense of humor. It has flawed my campaigns, curtailed my diplomatic career, been the blind spot in my perception of political dynamics. Rationally, I accept the idea that life is at best a game, yet my nature is serious and fiercely competitive: I fight to win and couldn’t help it if I would. The Cat in the Hat campaign buttons appeared the second day of the National Convention, provoking a general merriment. As the laughter mounted, I grew uneasy, then irritable, finally incensed. Not until the Convention was nearly over—and then only thanks to Clark—did I discover the significance of that laughter. Soothsayer or no, I was the last to embrace the Cat and wear the badge.

  Not only, you see, had I succeeded in finding the ideal candidate for my longrange, plans, I had found two: a spirited Irish Protestant from Boston named Riley, and a tall lantern-jawed Westerner named Boone, direct descendant of the romantic frontiersman. I delight in the illusion of
democracy in action, not only because it wins votes but also for its own sake. An open contest between two well-chosen candidates is a great entertainment, an exciting relaxation from the real work of politics. There are risks, of course, especially in intraparty matches such as the one I was arranging. A deadlock could occur, for example, bringing about the nomination of a dark horse—or a dark cat, to speak to our case. But, given the virtual inevitability of losing the elections this year, even that possibility did not seem entirely undesirable: Riley and Boone would get all the pre-Convention publicity, one of them would probably be the Vice Presidential candidate, the dark-horse Presidential contestant would bear the onus of defeat, and my two men would again be going for the top spot four years later, then as seasoned and respected veterans. So I organized support teams for them in all fifty states, secured sizable campaign funds for each, through friendly media outlets elevated them from anonymity to world fame almost overnight, encouraged and directed their participation in selected state primaries, brought them onto the Convention floor in a final rush of electoral fever, drama, and glory—and all for nothing. Once the Cat took over, they somehow looked like fools.

  “I Can Lead It All by Myself” was the legend on the Cat’s campaign buttons. His button portrait was the familiar one: tall floppy red-and-white striped hat, red bow tie, white-gloved hands clasped decorously over his chest, thumbs pressed together, grinning that idiot grin (though thin-lipped, I had to admit). The Cat in the Hat himself did not at first appear. His madcap explosion on the scene was engineered—apparently, at least—by Joe and Ned, a couple of maverick Midwesterners whose techniques were as fresh as they were amateurish. Only several hysterical hours later was I to meet the real spirit behind the coup: a luminous, ingenious, pear-shaped mass named Clark.

  The first day went as I’d planned, with plenty of fanfare, good food and drink, back-slapping and vote-trading, stirring speeches, the usual Convention hoopla—though admittedly it was all a little hollow, beclouded with the factuality of being the party out of power and little or no hope of getting in. The only hint of something out of order was the slogan that appeared on toilet walls and crept oddly into conversations: “Let’s make the White House a Cat House.” But the next morning, into the hotel breakfast rooms throughout the city, Joe and Ned, dressed like the Cat in striped hat, bow tie, and gloves, came shuffling, doing a soft-shoe to their “Cat in the Hat Campaign Song”: