Imperial Caddy: The Rise of Dan Quayle in America and the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else

Quayle-bashers will find this literary pummeling of their man an unalloyed joy. Syndicated Washington Post columnist Queenan has done his homework and not lost his sense of humor while doing it. He begins by citing media descriptions of the vice president as a dimwit, a pinhead, a dolt, a chowderhead--and those appellations are just for starters. Then he goes to work on Quayle's home state of Indiana and the oddballs it has produced, from Ku Klux Klansman D. C. Stephenson through the Rev. Jim Jones to Axl Rose. Queenan determines that the state's native sons are a strange mixture of gullibility, mediocrity and weirdness. Next he turns to Marilyn Quayle, whom he depicts as the offspring of a wacky family devoted to a dispensational premillenialist conservative preacher, Robert B. Thieme Jr. Queenan even critiques Embrace the Serpent, the goofball thriller written by the second lady and her sister Nancy T. Northcott. Will Dan Quayle someday be elected to the Oval Office? Maybe so, concludes Queenan, who believes that since Andrew Jackson, we have had very few chief executives who were not bumblers, drunks, crooks or morons. (Oct.)