Was Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger the inspiration for John Goodman's Walter Sobchak?

I wanted to write something about how it wouldn’t be shameful for Joe Biden to announce his retirement due to his health issues. After all, in ten days, Biden will have served 7/8ths of a full term, a longer duration than JFK served, so he’d hardly go into the history books as another William Henry Harrison, but be closer to James K. Polk, a President who made a sizable impact but who chose not to run for a second term.

At that point, I vaguely recalled that there was a Secretary of State who resigned after about 7/8ths of a four year term and was replaced by his deputy, a career Foreign Service officer.

That turned out to be James Baker, Secretary of State of George H. W. Bush, who resigned on August 23, 1992 to manage his best friend’s ill-fated re-election campaign. His deputy Lawrence Eagleburger, who had risen up from the ranks of career Foreign Service officers, served as acting Secretary until the lame duck GHW Bush gave him a recess appointment in December 1992 so Eagleburger could enjoy being known as a former Secretary of State even though he only was officially one for a few weeks.

This seemed all very genteel and dignified — Isn’t it nice that the humble, faceless civil servant Eagleburger got to be Secretary of State for a couple of months! — until I read up on Eagleburger, who turns out to have been some kind of a maniac, a Walter Sobchak look-alike.

Here’s Eagleburger in old age:

Upon Eagleburger’s death in 2011, the Associated Press recounted:

He did not fit the image of the office [of Secretary of State].

He was hugely overweight. He chain-smoked cigarettes, sometimes with an aspirator to ease chronic asthma. He was afflicted with a muscle disease.

Born Aug. 1, 1930, in Milwaukee. Eagleburger graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He grew up in a Republican family, once telling a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal that “my father was somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan.”

I don’t believe anybody has drawn the Eagleburger-Sobchak connection before, but it’s plausible. The Big Lebowski, released in 1998, is set in 1991.

Many have wondered why the Coens went to the trouble of setting their movie so specifically in one particular year of the recent past, but my impression is that the Coens almost always have good reasons for whatever they do.

For example, they edited their movies bicamerally under the pseudonym of “Roderick Jaynes,” which appears to have been a tribute to Julian Jaynes, who was a lecturer in philosophy at Princeton U. who published the cult classic The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind while Ethan Coen was a philosophy major at Princeton.

In general, the Coens are extremely clever.

My guess is that the Coens watched a lot of CNN in 1991.

Anatoly Sobchak became mayor of St. Petersburg that year and was a favorite of the U.S. government before dying under suspicious circumstances in 2000. (More speculatively, Walter Ulbricht was the supremo of East Germany from 1950 into the early 1970s.)

Lawrence Eagleburger was U.S. deputy secretary of state during the key year of 1991. When Saddam Hussein shot Scud missiles at Israel in the hopes of widening the Gulf War and bringing the Arab Street over to his side by encouraging a Gaza-like Israeli retribution, Eagleburger was dispatched to Israel, where he successfully dissuaded the Israelis from responding.

My guess would be that the Coen Brothers followed the 1991 Gulf War closely on TV and that it fed into their creative process.

Like heavyweight boxing champ George Foreman, who named all of his five sons George Foreman (Jr. through VI), Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger named each of his three sons “Lawrence Eagleburger.” The Washington Post reported in 1991:

Along the way, he married twice and produced three sons, all of whom are named Lawrence. "First of all, it was ego," he explains about his sons, who go by their middle names. "And secondly, I wanted to screw up the Social Security system."

Hmmmhhhhh … I can’t figure out a way to tie Republican Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger’s Foremanesque son-naming back into the Democrats’ current conundrum, but, well, that’s the way these posts sometimes go.