1.
Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde's self-destruction stemmed from an ill-advised libel case he filed. In 1895 Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, the Marquess having accused Wilde of being a sodomite. As the defendant's part of the case was getting started, his counsel was prepared to present a parade of young men with whom Wilde had had carnal relations. Wilde's counsel accordingly dismissed the case.
But this was not the end of it. The information the counsel for the Marquess had put together was forwarded to the authorities, and Wilde was arrested for sodomy! His first trial ended in a hung jury, but on retrial he was convicted and served two years in prison.
2. Alger Hiss. The Hiss self-destruction was quite similar to Wilde's. The case arose in the anti-Communist hysteria of the post-WWII period. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was holding hearings trying to identify Communists and Communist sympathizers in the U.S. One Whittaker Chambers testifed that Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s. Hiss denied this, and challenged Chambers to repeat his allegations away from the protected confines of the HUAC committee room. Chambers did so, on "Meet the Press", and in August of 1948 Hiss sued him for libel.
The Justice Dept. initially determined that no criminal charegs were warranted. But in November, after some pre-trial discovery in the libel case, and some investigative work by Congressman Richard Nixon, a grand jury was convened and Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury, alleging that he lied when he said he didn't see Chambers after January 1, 1937, and when he said he never turned over any documents to Chambers. Hiss was convicted after his second trial, the first having hung 8-4 for conviction, and he served 44 months in prison.
3. Douglas MacArthur. The MacArthur self-destruction also came about in the environment of the post-WWII red scare, though it didn't involve any court case. MacArthur's administraton of post-war Japan was known for its wisdom and humaneness, and of course his exploits in the Asian theater during WWII had made him a household name. His downfall was due to his acts of insubordination during the Korean War, when he repeatedly ignored orders from the Joint Chiefs of staff and tried to involve Red China in the war. His basic idea was that World War III was necessary to combat the Communist menace.
President Truman finally fired MacArthur in April of 1951, and MacArthur returned to the U.S. Upon his return, MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress, and was interrupted by applause 30 times in his 34-minute address. One representative shouted out, "We heard God speak here today. God in the flesh, the voice of God!" "Life" magazine reported that the audience was "magnetized by the vibrant voice, the dramatic rhetoric and the Olympian personality of the most controversial military hero of our times". His biographer, William Manchester, says that MacArthur was "lucid, forceful, dignified, and eloquent; though he clearly thought his message urgent, his delivery was unhurried and rhythmic. All his life had been a preparation for this moment."
This speech represented the high point of MacArthur's popularity, and it was all downhill for him after that. Letters and telegrams to the White House were running twenty to one for MacArthur and against Truman, whose approval rating plunged to 23%, still an all-time low for a sitting president. After the speech, a joint Senate committee immediately began an inquiry into MacArthur's actions. MacArthur tetified, followed by seven weeks during which the administration methodically rebutted MacArthur's position. Manchester says that "One by one, officers who admired MacArthur seated themselves before the Senators and sadly rejected his program for victory." Manchester goes on to state that "Against this array of fact and expertise, the general's Republican defenders had little to offer but a welter of party loyalty and conservative intuition."
After the hearings, MacArthur spent a full year traveling around the country giving rabble-rousing speeches. But the result was that MacArthur's star gradually dimmed, as people got tired of his constant bad-mouthing of Truman and the Truman administration. People were interested in the future, while all MacArthur was doing was re-litigating past personal grievances. Manchester says that "each time he took a swipe at Truman he descended a little". The crowds gradually dwindled, civic leaders started walking out of his speeches, and local leaders started calling him a "demagogue". In particular, MacArthur's keynote address at the 1952 Republican conventon was a complete dud.
MacArthur lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity in a New York hotel. He finally died in 1964 at the age of 84.
4. Avery Brundage. Avery Brundage was president of he International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1952 to 1972, and prior to that had been president of the United States Olympic Committee since 1928. Growing up in the 1950s, I used to often see his name in the sports pages, usually in the context of his relentless advocacy for amateurism in Olympic sports.
Besides his fetish for amateurism in sports, Brundage had a hstory of anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sympathies, and misogyny. Despite this history, he was selected as IOC president in 1952, the only non-European to ever hold the post. Part of his appeakl was that he was independently wealthy and served for free, even paying his own expenses.
Brundage's problem was that he was unable to adjust to the changing times. He condemned the Black power demonstration of the two U.S. sprinters in Mexico City in 1968, and then refused to cancel the 1972 games after the massacre of Israeli athleetes in Munich. Historan Alfred Senen sums up Brundage's legacy: "After Munich, Brundage departed the Games, which had grown beyond his comprehension and his capacity to adjust. The NOCs and the [ISFs] were revolting against his arbitrary administration; violence had invaded his holy mountain and was giving every indication of returning; despite all his efforts to reach out to the world through athletics, he stood accused of bigotry and both race and class prejudice, not to mention the denunciations proclaiming him politically naive ... Few mourned his departure from the Olympic scene."
In 1973 Brundage, who had long expressed his wish to marry a German princess, did in fact marry a German princess who wass 48 years his junior, his longtime wife having died two years earlier. Brundage died in 1975 at the age of 87, leaving a decidedly mixed legacy.
5. Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael dropped out of college in 1940, and spent the '40s living a Bohemian lifestyle while struggling to support herself as a free-lance writer. She got into movie criticism in the 1950s, and became nationally famous in 1965 when her first book of movie criticism, I Lost it at the Movies, became a surprise bestseller. This first book of movie reviews was followed by five more: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang(1968), Going Steady(1969), Deeper into Movies(1973), Reeling(1976), and When the Lights Go Down(1980). I enthusiastically bought and read these books, and still have them in my own personal library.
Her downfall can be traced to a scathing review of When the Lights Go Down by Renata Adler, a writer who, like many of us, had always admired Kael's reviews; but when Adler took a closer look after being commissioned to write a review, she found that it was "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Adler's 26-page tour de force is included in her 2017 collection of non-fiction, After the Tall Timber". Adler states that "It is overwhelmingly clear...that one thing Ms. Kael has ceased to care about is films. She hardly praises a movie any more, so much as she derides and inveighs against those who might disagree with her about it." Adler documents in great detail how "Ms. Kael's quirks, mannerisms, tics, and exscesses have...taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains."
I am unable to dispute a single word in Adler's epic takedown. In retrospect, it is obvious that over the years Kael grew to love being in the limelight and basked too much in her fame, causing her writing to become more and more over-the-top, at times bordering on the hysterical. By the time she died in 2001, at the age of 82, her star, which once had burned so brightly, had completely faded.
6. Howard Cosell. Howard Cosell was a successful New York lawyer when he decided to switch careers and go into sports broadcasting in the 1950s. He started with radio and expanded ito television, becoming a mainstay on ABC's Mondday Night Football when it debuted in 1970. You either loved or hated Cosell's brash, bombastic, pompous style, but you couldn't ignore him.
By 1985 Cosell's star had faded, and he was taken off ABC's announcing team for that year's World Series, and was fired from ABC. What happened to Cosell is similar to Pauline Kael's fate, in that he fell in love with his public persona, and exaggerated it until he became a caricature of himself. I personally trace his downfall to an appearance on Barbara Walter's interview show in early 1984. When Barbara asked him how he wanted to be remembered, he said, "That's easy. That he was a good husband, a good father, and a good grandfather." Walters asked, "Nothing about carer?", and Cosell responded, "No, it's not important." To me this established his whole broadcasting career as a big fraud, as he had spent his entire career bragging about how he had single-handedly transformed sports reporting from unabashed adulation for the home team to critical, objective analysis; he always claimed that he had introduced journalism to sports reporting. And now he is saying it's "not important"? I cry foul.
Cosell's fall from grace actually took place gradually throughout the first half of the 1980s. Boxing had been his first love and had made him famous during the 1960s, but after announcing a one-sided fight on November 26, 1982, he decided that he was done with boxing forever. Similarly, football was the other sport which had made him famous, but he quit his Monday Night Football gig in August of 1984. In his book I Never Played the Game, Cosell claimed that he never watched an entire MNF game during the 1984 season. He added that "I watched enough to know, however, that the telecasts were dreadful. There was never a story line, only discussions of play upon play upon play. No perspective. No reportage beyond the game. No humanization of the players. Only feeble attempts at humor, trying to prove they could prosper without me. There wasn't a skilled performer among them." Cosell proceeded in his book to criticize all three of the new team--Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and O.J. Simpson. Not content with that, he also criticized his replacement on the half-time highlights of the prior day's games, saying that they "were a joke. I had turned them into one of the most popular moments on television. My replacement, Jim Lampley, couldn't match my delivery."
The unrelenting criticism of other sportscasters in I Never Played the Game really sealed Cosell's fate. It left him estranged from his former broadcasting colleagues, and, like MacArthur, he retreated to his New York apartment, rarely leaving home and rarely having any visitors, until he died in 1995 at the age of 77.
7. Sarah Palin. When Sarah Palin was picked to be John McCain's running mate in 2008, she seemed poised to become the next right-wing superstar. She had incredible good looks, loads of charisma, and strong conservative credentials.
However, she started self-destructing almost immediately. When Katie Couric interviewed her, Palin was unable to answer even the simplest of questions. When asked "What magazines do you read", the best she could do was "Whatever comes across my desk." After her defeat in the 2008 election, she resigned her governorship the next year, citing a slew of ethical complaints against her. She tried her hand as a FOX analyst, but got cut loose at the end of her contract period, as the network came to realize that she had nothing worthwhile to say.
In 2017 Palin filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times for accusing her of "political incitement" in the run-up to the 2011 shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The case finally came to trial earlier this year, and the jury unanimously found against her.
In 2022 Palin ran for Congress from Alaska and lost to a Democrat, even though Alaska is solidly Republican. During the campaign the man hired to prep Palin for her VP debate with Joe Biden in 2008 was interviewed on one of the news networks, and said that when he had asked Palin what her position on NATO was, she responded, "What's NATO?"! Her self-destruction had become complete.
8. Alan Dershowitz. In a famous article in the late 70s, Esquire magazine called Dershowitz the "best lawyer in America". His many successes during the next three decades supported this honor.
But after the turn of the century Dershowitz started to self-destruct. His fanatical, over-the-top advocacy for the state of Israel cost him much of his credibility. What little honor he still had left was destroyed in January of 2020 when he joined the Trump defense team for the second impeachment case. Dershowitz argued that proof of a crime was needed to impeach a president, a totally lame position, and the opposite of his position in the Clinton impeachment, when he had said just the opposite. To cement his dishonor, he lobbied President Trump for clemency for his past clients still in federal custody, and his efforts played a role in at least twelve clemency grants.
9. Rudy Guiliani. Rudy Guiliani's star burned brightly during his career as a U.S. Attorney and then as mayor of New York City. But when he undertook to help President Trump steal the 2020 election, he completely self-destructed. Today he is a pathetic figure, respected by nobody. He currently faces contempt of court charges for his failure to turn over assets to the Georgia election workers whom he has defamed.
10. Joe Biden. Joe Biden self-destructed twice. The first time was when he ran for president in 1988, and he had to leave the race in disgrace after he was discovered to have engaged in plagiarism of a British labor leader, and to have lied about his law school record.
Biden managed to rehabilitate himself after this debacle, only to self-destruct again when he decided to run for re-election in 2024, after promising to be a "transition president". The pathetic debate performance which sealed his fate was a fitting end to a career by a guy who finished third-from-the-bottom in his class at a third-rate law school.
