Michael Rogin

There he stands, mounted on a pedestal, booted, spurred and bigger than life, his enormous, holstered six-shooter set just below the eye-level of passers-by, welcoming travellers to Orange County. He used to straddle the entrance to the John Wayne International Airport; now, so as not to suffer the weatherbeaten fate of the original, the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne.

William Jefferson (‘Bill’) Clinton is not the man from Hope for nothing. And the major story in the American media this election year recounts his resurrection from the politically dead. Indeed, Clinton’s rise is matched in American history only by the equally spectacular fall of George (‘Desert Storm’) Bush, the collapse that put the Arkansas Governor in the White House in the first place. Newt Gingrich rode the Contract with America to victory in 1994, giving Republicans their first control of the House of Representatives under a Democratic president since 1946, and their first control of both houses of Congress since 1952. There are two ways to understand what happened next. From one perspective, the Gingrich revolution was a failure. Emboldened by Gingrich’s attack on medicare and the environment, his effort to finance a tax cut for the rich with the resources of middle America, and his forced closing of the federal government, Clinton finally stood up for principle. Having followed in the footsteps of Millard Fillmore (1850-3), arguably the most obscure and feckless president in American history, whose record of failing to veto an Act of Congress for hundreds of days Clinton was on the point of surpassing (and who had been denied renomination by his own party), Clinton transformed himself into Harry Truman, who turned the 1946 Republican triumph into a Democratic victory two years later.

‘AT&T Welcomes the World,’ announced the giant sign above the Global Olympic Village at Olympic Centennial Park. Although international corporations had built the park to call attention to themselves, ‘sponsor footprints’ like the AT&T tower ‘were not just advertisements’, explained Billy Payne, chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games: they showcased ‘state-of-the-art technology’ that ‘people will be seeing for the first time’. The Coca-Cola Corporation built its Olympic City entertainment centre at the northern edge of the park. CNN headquarters – the property value of which increased by 26 percent with the building of the park – lay just to the south-west. On 27 July, film footage carried by CNN displayed first the AT&T Welcome to the World, then beneath it the flash of a bomb.’

Will Rogers died in 1935 the most loved man in America. Ray Robinson, who was 14 years old, remembers the news reaching his summer camp by radio and spreading like wildfire from bungalow to bungalow. No death since Abraham Lincoln’s (the kidnapping and killing of the Lindbergh child aside) had moved the country so much. Motion picture theatres around the country darkened their screens in honour of a top Hollywood star. NBC and CBS went off the air for 30 minutes, paying homage to the most popular voice on radio – a few years earlier Will Rogers had hosted a variety show which had gained the largest audience in history. For the first time in nine years, ‘Will Rogers Says’ – the boxed comments that appeared daily in five hundred newspapers – did not appear. Rogers had been featured on the cover of Time; he had been received at the White House by five Presidents. However, unlike his famous male contemporaries – Charles Lindbergh, Al Jolson, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin – Will Rogers has left no aura. In my tiny recent poll of English intellectuals, no one knew who he was. Nor, having now read Ray Robinson’s reverent but clear sighted biography, do I.’