On a sunny day in Alexandria’s historic Parker-Gray neighborhood, I knock on the door of a large brick house painted yellow with green trim.
“You’re right on time,” says R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. His home is less than a mile from the banks of the Potomac River and only a few blocks from the offices of The American Spectator, the magazine Tyrrell founded in 1967.
Dressed in khakis and brown tassel loafers, the pocket square a silken plume rising from the breast of his navy-blue blazer, Tyrrell motions past the sitting room to his library, where a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln hangs above the fireplace mantle.
“This was a gift to my great-great-grandfather, a secret service agent in Chicago,” Tyrrell says, his boyish voice recalling Chet Baker. “Lincoln was our greatest president. Well, it’s between Lincoln and Washington, at least.”
We take our seats in the library—along with Marina, a two-year-old chocolate labrador who curls up at the foot of a tall column of books. There is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire nestled among heavy volumes of history, politics, and political biography. I notice a healthy collection of novels by William Faulkner, and works by Tyrrell’s friends Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, whose picture also hangs in the hallway alongside photographs of Tyrrell with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
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