Bob Beckel (1948–2022)

A whole generation of Americans today mostly knows Bob Beckel as a TV personality, with relatively few of them much aware of just how powerful a political operative the man was in his day. Beckel won some and he lost some, but there is little doubt that he was once a real player in the game of national politics. One of his wins was helping Jimmy Carter get support for the Salt II Treaty; one of his losses (and it was a record-setting one) was managing the presidential campaign in which Walter Mondale won only his home state – and that by a slim margin.

But if there is one thing that defines Bob Beckel’s life, it is not politics - it is that he has been an alcoholic for most of his adult life, and is a drug addict who admits to having been a frequent user of cocaine even during the years his office was inside the White House. Through it all, however, Beckel was one of the hottest campaign consultants and political advisers in Washington. In I Should Be Dead: My Life Surviving Politics, TV, and Addiction, his 2015 memoir, Beckel explains how he managed to do it.

Considering that both of Beckel’s parents were alcoholics who found it difficult to control their addictions, it was perhaps inevitable that he would grow up to have the same problem. Beckel uses a substantial portion of I Should Be Dead to explore the rocky relationships he had with both parents and reveals that he only reconciled with his father shortly before the man died, something that he never fully achieved with his mother. As so often happens, Beckel was so confident that he would be able to control his own alcohol consumption that he was already an alcoholic years before he could admit it to himself.

Bob Beckel is a survivor, a man who grew up learning to do whatever it took to protect himself from a an abusive father. In an attempt to keep his father off his back, he learned to lie, cheat, fake, and tell his father whatever he wanted to hear at any given moment. Sadly enough, these were the very skills that would serve him so well when as a young man he moved to Washington D.C. to begin his political consulting career (and it is obvious that he is not the only one there who has mastered those particular skills).

I Should Be Dead is the story of Beckel’s life, a life filled with near-misses, barroom brawls, booze, drugs, and women as wild as he was. In one of the more interesting twists in his life, Beckel, who is a lifelong, left-leaning Democrat, reveals that his closest friends are the ones he made while working at Fox News. He, in fact, credits the very conservative columnist Cal Thomas with not only being his best friend in the world, but also being the man who saved his life in more ways than one. Not only was Thomas instrumental in getting Beckel hired by Fox when no other television network in the country would touch him, he was instrumental in ensuring that Beckel get the medical help that has kept him alive.

Agree with his politics or disagree with them, Bob Beckel is always interesting and, perhaps because of his previously mentioned survivor skills, he proves to be a difficult man to dislike even when his rougher side peeks through for a moment or two. That’s why he was for so long one of the most popular commentators on Fox News, a network with very few viewers that share his political beliefs.

Bob Beckel is a survivor.… (altro)