P.J. O’Rourke, who has died at the age of 74, once hosted a small New Year’s party at his apartment in Washington. The year was 1990. He’d just returned from Germany, where he had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I expressed my sorrow that I hadn’t been there to see it. He went into his bedroom and returned with a small tin of mints. He’d emptied it — and he’d put a shard of the wall he’d pickaxed himself with his own hands inside it.
“Happy New Year,” he said.
That was P.J. Though he and I liked each other, we weren’t intimates. And yet he gave me something of inestimable value just because he could.
P.J. O’Rourke was maybe the nicest person I’ve ever known, which is an interesting thing to say about a man who made his name and his reputation as a take-no-prisoners cynical wit and observer of political foibles.
His passing after a short illness is devastating, not only because it robs us of his gimlet eye but because it reduces the store of kindness in the world, which is more precious than rubies.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that P.J. was, for a long time, the only cool conservative writer in America. His pieces for Rolling Stone and Harper’s and other mainstream outlets gamely featured his horrified takes on elite cluelessness and liberal-Puritan malfeasance against ordinary American playful fun.
Young right-wingers had never seen his like. Neither had young left-wingers — or anybody else, for that matter.
He skewered clueless old leftists taking a cruise on the Volga River to celebrate the glories of Soviet Russia in a Harper’s essay that served as the centerpiece of an essay collection called “Holidays in Hell.” The book made him a star.
Before that, he had been a key staff member of National Lampoon in its 1970s heyday, when it was the greatest comedy magazine this country had ever seen. Matty Simmons, the Lampoon’s publisher, called him the magazine’s “cohesive force” and described him as “tough and dedicated and talented.”
Other staffers hated him. Given how impossible he was to hate, I’d guess these pseudo-counterculturalists sussed out his politics early on — and were scornful of his BA from Miami University of Ohio.
P.J. emailed me this about Matty Simmons, whom I knew, upon Matty’s passing in 2020: “He gave me a shot at the Lampoon when everybody else was being Harvarder-than-thou.”
Harvarder-than-thou — a perfect P.J.ism.
Born and bred in Toledo, Ohio, P.J. was a champion of the great American middle. Indeed, his final book, from 2020, was titled “A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land.” He loved this country and reveled in it — even in its fatuous mediocrity.
His ability to satirize affectionately was at its most triumphant in the two wildly successful projects he conceived and edited in the 1970s. “National Lampoon’s High School Yearbook” and “National Lampoon’s Sunday Newspaper” — the two greatest long-form works of parody ever produced in this country — would revolutionize American publishing, as humorous books that followed their model would dominate the high-end paperback world for the next decade.
P.J. had bigger game to hunt. In 1991, just a year after his gift to me, he would become the most successful political satirist in America upon the publication of his book “Parliament of Whores.”
The book was and remains an utterly devastating portrait of the US Congress’ mediocrity, mendacity, self-dealing and uselessness — and revealed uncomfortable truths about the way Washington worked that the DC press corps refused to acknowledge or portray. There have been hundreds, thousands of imitations in the decades since. None has come close.
P.J. soldiered on, giving speeches and writing cold-eyed and tough-minded pieces and books about the follies of elites. Case in point: an article he wrote for Commentary magazine we published on the eve of the 60th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration.
It began thus: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what the Kennedys ever did for your country.”
Oft imitated. Never duplicated. P.J. O’Rourke was a joy to read, a joy to edit and a joy to know.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com