The notice from Uncle Sam arrived the other day: “Welcome to the
Federal Employees Retirement System. The U.S. Office of Personnel
Management thanks you for your years of public service and the
contributions you have made to America.…We are here to serve you
and wish you a long and fulfilling retirement.”
“Retirement”—that’s for old people, isn’t it? How strange that
it should now apply to me, a man in the prime of life, hardly into
middle age—with just a hint of gray here and there, a barely
noticeable bald spot, and an appealingly cherubic-looking double
chin! Still, I suppose retirement is one of those milestones on
life’s rocky road that call for a bit of reflection, so here
goes:
For most of my government career, I was a political
speechwriter. This meant that the most important people in my
professional life were librarians— men and women (mainly the
latter) who could help me acquire the information I needed in the
briefest possible time. The finest librarians I ever worked with
plied their trade in the Old Executive Office Building (now the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building) of the White House, when I
served as Vice President Quayle’s principal speechwriter. How I
loved going to that library on the third floor of OEOB! The room
itself, with its tiled floors, wooden panels, winding staircases,
large airy spaces, and rows upon rows of books, delighted both the
eye and the spirit. And the librarians themselves were so
graciously cheerful, so unfailingly helpful, and so incredibly
busy! Today, when I think back on those years with Vice President
Quayle, one of my warmest recollections is of librarians.
But my second tour of duty in the White House— as a speechwriter
for President Bush and Vice President Cheney—was a different
experience entirely. There now was hardly any need for me to visit
the library—a team of extremely bright young college computer
whizzes was always at my beck and call, and they would invariably
supply me with more information than I could possibly absorb about
the most abstruse and varied subjects. Still, for old time’s sake,
I’d sometimes visit the White House library. For the most part, the
same librarians were still there, and to my considerable
satisfaction, they actually remembered me—I guess I was one of
their best customers in the old days. But now the library, though
still breathtakingly beautiful, appeared to have fallen on hard
times. Gone was the hustle and bustle, the air of excitement, that
I recalled so well. Even the librarians themselves, though friendly
and helpful as always, seemed curiously listless. It was as though
some of the air had gone out of the balloon. Who needs librarians,
after all, when you’ve got the boundless riches of the Internet at
your disposal?
Have America’s librarians become a vanishing species? My wife
received her master’s degree from the Columbia University School of
Library Science, yet today that school no longer exists—it expired
around the same time that the Soviet Union did. Apparently, the
demand for librarians has declined drastically in recent years. And
even in my own home, the library that my wife and I lovingly
assembled over the years is subject to scorn and ridicule. “If your
library had existed in the days before computers,” my younger son
recently informed me, “it might have been worth something. Now,
it’s worthless.” Nice child.
Well, I intend to prove the little wise guy wrong. All these
past years, when equipping my personal library with such weighty
tomes as Disraeli by Robert Blake, The Experience of
Literature by Lionel Trilling, and Sabbatai Sevi: The
Mystical Messiah by Gershom S. Scholem, I’d say, “This is my
retirement reading.” Now, all of a sudden, my retirement is upon
me. It’s time I got to work.
