FOREWORD

            Everybody who knows Marshall Lynam will expect this book to be chock-full of hilarious human stories about a lot of the great, near-great and obscure but fascinating folks he’s come to know in his eventful life.  They won’t be disappointed.  Others who’ve not yet heard of Marshall Lynam are in for a treat--a treasure of fascinating true tales, fun to read and never before told in print.

            Marshall has worked, managed and written for daily newspapers, presidential candidates, the Speaker of the House and the world’s second busiest airport.  First as a nineteen-year-old waist gunner on a B-17 and later as a representative of our government, the author has traveled over much of the world and met dozens of world leaders.  He was my Chief of Staff during the years I served as House Majority Leader and Speaker.

            During his years as a newsman and top congressional aide, Marshall Lynam has been close enough to the levers of power to tell us what’s written inside Ted Kennedy’s shoes and what refreshments Billy Graham orders on a private airplane.  He has seen four-star generals weep, presidents get tangled up in their telephones, congressional leaders trip on their egos and fall flat on their dignities.  With it all, Marshall is never mean.  He spots the humor in every situation, whether being chased down a hallway by a notorious Texas gunman or being dropped by parachute into the depths of Biscayne Bay.  (He writes of the latter experience that it was great fun but he enjoyed most the part where he came back up to the surface.)

            Marshall can find something funny in a royal wedding, a lynch mob carrying a noose with his name on it, or a dose of castor oil.  Always intrigued with the vagaries and charming foibles of human personality, he tells each story with the practiced skill of a born raconteur.  He makes us see the human side of characters we’ve only read about in headlines.

            Not that the scores of episodes told in these pages are all frivolous.  Far from it.  Here Marshall covers the deeply personal side of stories that shook the earth and changed the world--from the historic meeting in Jerusalem between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat that reversed the course of centuries and led to the historic peace between Egypt and Israel, to a fateful visit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow that presaged the end of the Cold War.  He was there--and makes you feel you, too, were there.

            This book is not a partisan polemic nor an appeal for any particular ideology.  It is a collection of warmly human stories told by a warmly human guy gifted with the eye of a marksman, the ear of a father confessor, and the pen of a poet.

            When Hurricane Beulah smote the coastal lands along the Gulf of Mexico in 1967, leaving a path of human wreckage on both sides of our international border, President Johnson declared an “open border policy.”  Rescue crews in helicopters lifted stranded families away from the cruel floodwaters and carried them to safety, not stopping to ask their nationality.  At the height of that disaster, Marshall and I, along with a small group of other congressmen and newsmen, visited a place called Camp Ringold where military barracks had been converted into a refugee camp to house and feed several thousand victims of the flood.  We watched as bedraggled, storm-tossed kids, cleaned up and in dry clothes, got their first meal in two days.

            En route back to Washington by plane, a reporter came up to Marshall asking help.  He said he’d written most of his story but couldn’t seem to compose a simple single sentence that would capture the essence of what he he’d seen.  Marshall slipped a page into his portable typewriter and immediately hammered out the following:  “Happiness is a little Mexican boy with oatmeal on his face.”

            In every situation, he instinctively discovers the human side.

            When I first met Marshall those many years ago, he was a lanky, long-legged young fellow with a disarmingly cherubic face, perceptive as a radar beam but down to earth as pair of resoled cowboy boots.  After a quarter century of working closely with him on presidential visits, legislative schedules, high negotiations with heads of state and down-to-earth sessions with troubled constituents, I appreciate him as a gentleman, a skilled workman, a marvelously gifted writer and a cherished friend.

            Read this book, and you’ll understand why.

                                                                                                 --Jim Wright