On his nightstand the day I asked to see it: “The White Nile” by Alan Moorehead, a book about educational policies, another on great speeches of history, and an amusing bonne bouche by G.K. Chesterton. He was that kind of reader.
When it came to being a politician in the sense we knew one — a cautiously crafted, assembly-line product of focus groups and consultants — Dick Riordan was not that guy.
Before Donald Trump’s exultingly vicious personality corrupted the cheerier idea of “authenticity” in politics, Dick as a politician remained an amateur, maybe even a bit of a naif, sometimes impatient with the horizontal mechanics of democracy versus the vertical authority of the corporate world. He was, as The Times wrote after he was elected in 1993, a study in contradictions. We in the Riordan book group saw all of this up close.Richard J. Riordan, who died this week, liked to fight with journalists, including this one. But he also signaled his respect.
We soon added others, and in time, the core group filled 10 or a dozen or 14 chairs at his dining room table every month. Some members eventually moved away, like Alan and Arlene Alda — the actor and his writer wife — and scholar James Q. Wilson and his wife, Roberta, as new ones arrived. At that first meeting in January 1995, we four had read “Einstein’s Dreams,” and we were puzzled by bits of it. Other book groups might keep on puzzling, butL.A. had many other multimillionaires but only one mayor. Even as ex-mayor, it tickled Dick that he could wheedle an author into joining us. Several of us thought that was a lousy idea. It inhibited conversation about a bad book.
Writer Donna Foote is another of our members. A few years back, her friend’s father was dying with one wish: Dick had been his best friend in high school, and he wanted to talk again to the man he’d lost touch with. Dick “dropped everything, called the dying man and stayed on the phone reminiscing as if not a day had passed since they had last spoken,” Foote recalled. “His friend died shortly after that, a happy man.
He didn’t suffer fools gladly, Mike remembered last week, but “he was interested in pretty much everyone’s story.”
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