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In Huntington, Quayle admitted, "I ((did)) what any normal person would do at that age. You call home. You call home to Mother and Father and say, 'I'd like to get into the National Guard.' " The only difference was that Quayle's parents were not quite Ma and Pa Kettle. His mother Corinne is the daughter of Eugene Pulliam, a conservative Hoosier press lord who dominated the state as the publisher of the Indianapolis News and the Indianapolis Star. The managing editor of the News was then Wendell Phillippi, a retired major general who had commanded the Indiana Guard. According to Phillippi, Quayle called him to ask for help in getting into the Guard and to inquire about the chances of being called to active duty. Phillippi said he contacted an acquaintance in the Guard and highly recommended Quayle.
There is no more difficult political role than that of a conservative from the baby-boom generation. Attitudes and behavior that were commonplace in the late 1960s -- about drugs, sex, military service -- are now viewed with post- factum moralism through the prism of two decades of cultural revisionism. By 1969 millions of American men of draft age would have gone to great lengths to avoid combat in the most unpopular war in the nation's history. Is an entire generation of draft avoiders, who stayed within the law, barred from high political office? Or is there a special standard for hawkish conservatives, who are automatically maligned as hypocrites if they did not then put their rifles where their rhetoric is now?
There is something disturbing about Quayle's reluctant admission that he used pull to get into the Guard. In this, Quayle, scion of a wealthy family, reflects a different tradition than does the well-born Bush. The Vice President, who eagerly enlisted as a Navy aviator during World War II, was reared by a code of strict moralism that reviled special privileges and taking more than one's share. Quayle appears to reflect the more permissive and probably more common outlook that wealth and connections provide certain protections against the vicissitudes of life and that these dispensations are to be enjoyed without guilt. But in this attitude, Quayle reflects the era in which he came of age.
An iron law of scandal is that no matter how grave or trivial the initial offense, the press will inevitably reduce the issue to a simple question of honesty. By traditional, George Washington cherry-tree standards, Quayle appears to be guilty only of shading the truth. But there has also been a troubling pattern of lapses of memory surrounding Quayle's public statements since he was tapped by Bush. Initially, Quayle claimed he could not remember if anyone helped him get into the Guard. In an NBC interview Wednesday night, he conceded that "if phone calls were made . . . I don't know the specifics of that." That same evening, Quayle told the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour that his father James also "certainly could have called people." But perhaps Quayle's most questionable assertion is one that he has clung to from the outset: that a desire to avoid combat played no role in his eagerness to enter the Indiana Guard.