A first lady by any other name

Joseph Epstein told me he's misunderstood, and the target of hate mail. Maybe he's not as misunderstood as he imagines.

Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt photo)

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I know Joseph Epstein not as the essayist at the center of a surprisingly vigorous controversy surrounding his recent tome about Jill Biden, but as a writer of short stories about aging Jews, set in familiar Chicago North Side and north suburban neighborhoods. 

One story, written decades ago, revolved around a book of poems squirreled away in a drawer for years. The poems were said to be the beautifully-written last works of a well-known writer and teacher who had died leaving a surprisingly small portfolio of published work.

His widow had found them and recognized their quality, and also that their theme was a transparent condemnation of her as the destroyer of the author’s career.

She gave the poems to the executor of her husband’s estate, and charged him with deciding what to do.

He admired the poems, but was wary of the damage publication would certainly cause.

“Holding out Paul Bertram’s single surviving manuscript, and taking a deep breath, I released it, all of it, into the wind. Through the rear-view mirror, I could see nothing but perfectly made poems scattering over the New Jersey Turnpike.”

I thought of this story, called “The Executor,” recently when Epstein was thrust into the center of a whirlwind after writing a critical Wall Street Journal opinion piece about a more admired, and true-to-life, wife. 

Epstein had been chastised -- and later congratulated -- for writing that Biden should put aside her “Doctor” title and just go with “Mrs.” during her husband’s presidency. Epstein maintained that only medical doctors should insist on the honorific, not doctors of education.

He ended the essay this way: “As for your Ed.D., Madame First Lady, hard-earned though it may have been, please consider stowing it, at least in public, at least for now. Forget the small thrill of being Dr. Jill, and settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Jill Biden.”

Monday, I asked Epstein, via email, “Have you become accustomed to literary controversy? Or are you sorry you ever published this? Should you have let it fly out the car window like Paul Bertram’s poems about his wife?”

But by then, he understood I was planning on writing about the furor, and he demurred. 

“Forgive me if I pass on your information for further discussion and interview on the topic of my recent flap, for I am planning to write something about it myself,” he wrote back. 

Earlier, on the telephone, he said he was curious about my theory about how he got in so much trouble. “You intended this piece to be funny, and it was, but you never quite got there,” I told him. I was being charitable: maintaining he was kidding, not serious, in employing an apparent misogynist attitude. His only fault was that the joke fell a little flat. 

“There certainly were a lot of people who didn’t seem to have a sense of humor about it,” said Epstein, 83.

“I received over 300 pieces of hate mail.

“Somebody called me ‘you kike cunt.’ That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“Another one said, ‘I wish you were dead.’ I don’t know why so many people were so angry.”

They were angry, I offered, because he, at times, appears angry, in print and person. I added that I had once attended a Highland Park, Ill., multiple-writer book promotion event at which he was the only speaker who gave an aggravated, and aggravating, talk.

“No,” he said. “I don’t get angry.” 

But the Biden essay sounded, to me, more angry than humorous. More aggravating than illuminating.

If the essay was really knee-slapping, I think it would have received a more positive, but much less widespread, reception.

My late mother had a theory about just how entertaining one had to be to get away with objectionable content, whether it was in prose, film or a dirty joke told at the end of a holiday dinner.

“You’ve got to have enough fire to make the soot go up the chimney,” she’d say. I think she poached the line from someone else’s comment about R-rated movies.

Truth be told, despite moments of levity, Epstein’s piece didn’t have the necessary flame content to which my mother referred. It wasn’t very funny, or even good-humored. That’s because throughout, he kept making a big deal out of, well, a small deal.

“In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league,” he wrote. 

I don’t know much about college politics. But I’ve had the questionable privilege of covering many elementary and secondary school districts over a long newspaper-reporting career in the area where Epstein lives. I can vouch that school administrators with doctorates typically intensely dislike being called “Mr.” or “Mrs.” 

When talking to college professors with doctorates, a few of them told me modestly that I was over the top when I referred to them by their honorific. But most of them thought it was just fine.

At the same time, I wasn't allowed to refer to them in print as “Dr.” The Associated Press Stylebook frowns on doing that for anybody but MDs.

In 2014, however, I covered a political event at a Northbrook, Ill., delicatessen headlined by Jill Biden, and some of the other reporters’ stories featured the honorific, nevertheless. 

And nobody seemed to care. I know I didn’t. She delivered an enthusiastic unscripted talk about Democratic politics, and her academic credentials seemed much less important than her stump-speech chops.

Epstein, many people now know, cares significantly  more about what conservatives think than what liberals like the Bidens think. In 1997, he reportedly was canned as editor at The American Scholar partly because he welcomed arch-conservative contributors at significantly greater numbers than liberals or moderates, and partly because of perceived lesbian-baiting.

He wrote a long, meandering essay on homosexuality for Harper’s Magazine in 1970 that seemed no more ill-informed than was typical for the period. But it became unnecessarily mean-spirited, even for that time, as it went along.

“One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else's pain, but accepting it, really accepting it, is another thing altogether,” Epstein wrote. “I find I can accept it least of all when I look at my children. There is much my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make me ashamed of them and of myself as their father. But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.” 

These sentences, one might think today, seem needlessly insulting to the members of what was already being called the gay community. I submit that it wasn’t too cool then, either.

And now, amazingly, a small and relatively unsuccessful essay about the academic conceit of using a credential has intensely angered liberals, and become a cause celebre among conservative pundits.

Tucker Carlson’s three-night Fox News defense of Epstein included the claim that Jill Biden suffers from “status anxiety,” is “borderline illiterate” and that her credential was similar to that of Dr. Pepper. He referred to her as “our national shame.” 

Kyle Smith, writing in National Review, excoriated Biden’s dissertation itself as being flimsy, adding that it was likely accepted only because of her husband’s clout. He maintained that Epstein’s real purpose in his essay was to strike a blow against diminished standards for doctorates. 

That may certainly be true, but Epstein never makes the case. Fully half his essay is about honorary doctorates, and those have nothing important to do with the real ones. But the way Epstein’s piece is weighted makes it look like he thinks so.

Smith borrowed a quote from a 2009 L.A. Times story to back his own case that Jill Biden  “sought the degree purely for status reasons. 

“She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,” Joe Biden had said.

But Smith conveniently left out the following quote from the same L.A. Times story, from Time magazine’s Amy Sullivan. 

“Ordinarily when someone goes by doctor and they are a PhD, not an MD, I find it a little bit obnoxious,” Sullivan said. “But it makes me smile because it’s a reminder that she’s her own person. She wasn’t there as an appendage; she was there as a professional in her own right.”

That quote is at the core of a woman’s attempt to avoid being regarded by most people as somebody’s wife and little else. What Epstein doesn’t seem to understand is that a first lady is not just a first lady during her husband’s term. Most likely, unless she acts proactively, she will be a first lady until she goes in the ground.

That is what Jill Biden’s “Dr.” is all about. An identity of her own. Shame on anyone who tries to cheat her out of it.

Teacher Jill Biden was said to be the first vice presidential wife to hold an outside job while her husband served in the White House. The first ever.

No matter what you call her, that’s a credential worth remembering.

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