The redemption of Nixon

The old saying, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” has received strong reinforcement during the recent unprecedented cold spell in the Palm Beaches. The rest of the world almost certainly thinks we lead a sybaritic life down here with the perennial sunshine taking the edge off the normal hardships that everyone else has to contend with. But one unusual side effect of the recent cold spell (and though it wasn’t cold by, say, Canadian standards, it was the coldest spell we’ve had here in 27 years) was the carnage it wrought on the iguana population. We have a love/hate relationship with iguanas here. When they first arrived in the early 1980s they were regarded as cute, but a decade later the mood changed.

It’s strange interviewing a friend who is dying, but Karl Zinsmeister is at peace. I met Karl in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1981, when we two Upstate New York hicks were new to the staff of Senator Pat Moynihan. The first thing I learned about him was that he and his girlfriend (and later wife) Ann, while on some do-gooder mission in Africa, had wandered into Tanzania and been held on suspicion of being spies. (They weren’t.) Karl threw himself into both intellectual and manual labor with fierce enthusiasm, doggedness, even hard-headedness. Over the past 45 years he has edited magazines, renovated ruined tenements, been embedded in Iraq, raised three kids, lived with Ann on a houseboat, served as White House chief of domestic policy and produced more than 20 books.