THE GHOST AND HIS RHINOCEROS

By John Skow

From faculty lounges to garrets to the watering holes of writers across the nation, the unsettling news spread that the script for Bob Dole's best speech ever, his not-a-dry-eye, "White House or home" abdication address, was the work of a Wall Street Journal columnist listed as Mark Helprin. Come again? The Helprin known by starving artists and threadbare assistant professors of English is, after all, an aesthete hatched at the New Yorker and renowned as the writer of eloquent, rarefied novels. And as a tormentor of reporters, who in his early years invented an ever changing, operatic past in which to luxuriate. One tall tale had his father refusing to let Helprin eat supper until, standing at attention, he had told a satisfactory original story.

Helprin's novels are not clearly political and at their most florid are, though much admired, in fact not clear in any direction. Winter's Tale, for instance, is an obscure and very long fantasy about an annoying magical horse. His most recent, Memoir from Antproof Case, is marvelous, brilliantly written bosh about an elderly maniac who fulminates obsessively against coffee. Coffee? Sure. You see...

But Helprin, it turns out, is also a conservative political columnist. He has expostulated for the Wall Street Journal off and on since 1985, in style and tone closer to Rush Limbaugh than George Will. As a contributing editor to the Journal in 1992, he evaluated the man now running as the party's candidate: "Senator Bob Dole, the grand old rhinoceros of the G.O.P., is in his fury and in his wisdom a natural for the presidency, but by the time he assumed it, he would be 73 years of age." Depending on how you feel about rhinoceroses, that could have been an endorsement.

In any case, Helprin scolded the Clintons with harrumphing indignation. Hillary irked him even more than the President did, and he sniffed about "the White House 'Hillarys'--Highly Inexperienced Left-Liberal Academic Righteous Yuppies." Helprin's paragraphs for the Journal didn't track as well as those he saved for his novels. "Now that the bloom is off the rose, the White House oracles are thumping their naked tails in unison to protest that Whitewater is political," he wrote.

Ouch. Block that bloomless rose. But among subsequent columns was one in February titled "Let Dole Lead." Helprin recommended there that Dole, the wily legislative fox, drive Clinton bonkers with bills he would look bad vetoing. By this time the G.O.P.'s future was in danger and whether it was lost was pretty much up to the old rhinoceros. Dole read the column and liked it. In April he met with Helprin, an aloof, inscrutable character who lives on a 200-acre farm in New York's Hudson Valley, and Helprin became the first person in years to give voice to another aloof, inscrutable character. Getting the resignation speech right for the brusque rhythms of the majority leader took a dozen sessions of phone editing. Dole would read a passage, then grump, "Can't say that"; "Don't want to say that." Out went Helprin's flower arrangements, but what was left rang true.

Will the classy literary ghost and the newly homeless ex-Senator stay together? Will Helprin, who avoided the draft in the Vietnam War (he apologized in a Journal column), hurl shame, through his boss, the wounded old soldier, at Clinton's draft dodging? (Helprin apparently did serve a year in the Israeli armed forces, but explaining this to a Chamber of Commerce audience in Keokuk, Iowa, could be complicated.) Dole's people seem to like the idea of more Helprin speeches. Which could leave the Democrats, searching nervously for something to worry about in this ominously optimistic season, a little troubled.

--By John Skow. Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington