SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL: A Writer in Full

...The novel, Back to Blood, is set in Miami and deals with immigration...

...5 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 Robert stacy Mccain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current...

...A key passage of the article, based on the eyewitness account of Trooper Danny Ferguson, told how the trooper had arranged for Paula to visit the governor’s hotel suite, where it was assumed, based on the governor’s past history, that a sexual encounter had occurred...

...The 1994 article “led straight to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.… It took four years, but nevertheless, that’s exactly what caused it,“ says Wolfe, 77, his native Virginia drawl only slightly diminished by decades of living in New York City...

...s P e c T a T o R ’ s j o u R n a l A Writer in Full Tom Wolfe on the Spectator, the zeitgeist, and “the reporter in me...

...Politics does not interest me at all,” he says...

...s article that Wolfe briefly recounted for the China and successfully disengaging the United Stat t i w a m l p i d c i r t s i h s i h i d l c n i ” , s r e v u e n a m uCh was the role of the 1994 “Troopergate” “Nixon is still rem u em ng bered for c o ertain sh o rewd cy polic e h y phone interview a month after his speech, Wolfe Even before negotiating U.S...

...In a tele- military from Vietnam...

...In his speech at the Spectator gala, Wolfe’s characterization of the Lewinsky affair was stated more bluntly—“a porn movie starring a fat girl...

...Was a leading practitioner of what becam o g a s e c e d m l c i r r u c h t n i l i h ol m fe s ’s e a f ppraisal e matters u , s u ince he e ad n sconced e known as the New Journalism...

...To media elites, such a comparison is blasphemy...

...Yet while the names Woodward and Bernstein “are universally known” as having brought down the Nixon presidency, Wolfe says, “David Brock and Bob Tyrrell did virtually the same thing in the case of Bill Clinton, but most people outside the world of journalism would have no idea who you were talking about if you mention their two names...

...My interest in writing… is in the discovery of things that I assume that most people don’t know about...

...Compared to the Nixon legacy, Wolfe then asks, what achievement will mark Bill Clinton’s place in history, other than the Lewinsky scandal...

...However, as Wolfe pointed out to the assembled dignitaries at the Mandarin Oriental, the cover story of the January 1994 Spectator, “Living With the Clintons,” is quite literally Exhibit A in the scandal that made Clinton only the second president in U.S...

...If the size of the advance was newsworthy, so is the subject matter...

...The question is strictly rhetorical, and it was the Spectator’s exposé of Clinton’s womanizing ways that ultimately made it so...

...Nixon “called off the draft, and that was the end of the anti-war movement,” Wolfe says, adding that this illustrates that the hippie protesters of the sixties were actually more concerned with avoiding military service than with anything so noble as “peace...

...That’s just the reporter in me...

...by Robert stacy Mccain Tom Wolfe in anything else?—but for the occasion of The American Spectator’s 40th anniversary gala, his trademark attire was augmented by a black tie...

...While The Bonfire of the Vanities fascinated critics with its acidic insights on the status-consciousness of New York’s finance moguls during the booming eighties, the racial subtext of the novel—with a Sharptonesque demagogue, Reverend Bacon, exploiting an auto accident as an emblematic injustice—prefigured the explosive power of identity politics in the nineties...

...astronauts, The Right Stuff, an immediate best-seller that became a box-office smash as a 1983 movie...

...Now it’s become much hotter...

...Woodward and Bernstein were acclaimed for demolishing the presidency of Richard Nixon, and demolishing public figures is considered a very high point in journalism,” Wolfe says...

...If you don’t have that attitude, then you should become a public relations person...

...If you look at my books, there is no political plan...

...withdrawal from elaborated on the meaning of his comparison of the Spectator’s reporting to the oft-lauded Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein...

...Clinton barely did survive the impeachment, but his final two years were not at all a good time for him,” Wolfe says, and because the Spectator article led to the exposure of the presidential affair with Monica Lewinsky, “People all over the world remember Clinton mainly for one scene from a hotel-room adult TV movie, starring a very unlikely pair: a fat girl nobody knew and the cotton-top president of the United States...

...Amid a glittering crowd that included Beltway He wore his white suit—has anyone ever seen power players like Mary Matalin, Grover Norquist, and Paul Wolfowitz, to say nothing of legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, Wolfe was clearly the star of the evening at Washington’s posh Mandarin Oriental Hotel...

...Whether or not that should put Brock and Tyrrell in the Hall of Fame or the curriculum of every journalism school,” he says, “is another question...

...Since she was an Arkansas state employee and he was the state’s chief executive, this amounted to the basis for a federal civil rights lawsuit, Jones v. Clinton, filed May 6, 1994—with the Spectator article included in the filing as Exhibit A. It was during his January 1998 sworn deposition in the Jones v. Clinton case that the Leader of the Free World denied having “sexual relations” with a certain Monica Lewinsky...

...My attitude is that a writer should feel that what he is writing is more important than any cause, any problem, certainly any political party...

...Despite the seemingly prophetic qualities of his fiction, Wolfe insists that he doesn’t write novels with the aim of finding the pulse of each succeeding era...

...Along with a handful of other writers—including Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson—Wolfe brought to non- fiction writing a literary flair that had previously been the exclusive domain of novelists...

...Brock’s article told of a fateful May 1991 rendezvous at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel between the governor and a woman named Paula...

...While the debate over various immigration “reform” proposals has helped make immigration a hot-button issue, Wolfe says, “A couple years ago, when I first got the idea, I’d start telling people about it, and people would fall asleep...

...It’s very counterproductive to put your finger in the wind and see, ‘Gee, let me see what the zeitgeist is,’” he says...

...And I’ve also written a novel [A Man in Full] about a woman who lies her head off in front of a grand jury in order to seek revenge against a man who’d slighted her...

...was further enhanced when Wolfe identified two key emerging traits of the Baby Boom generation, narcissism and self- indulgent spirituality, and dubbed the seventies the “Me Decade...

...When the magazine reached newsstands—the cover featured British artist John Springs’s caricature of Clinton tiptoeing home in the pre-dawn hours with the headline “His Cheatin’ Heart”— Paula Corbin Jones sought to vindicate her good name, a vindication that would lead directly to Clinton’s impeachment...

...And his keynote speech at the November event made him quite literally the headliner...

...A decade later, while the media buzzed about the Silicon Valley “dot-com” boom, Wolfe’s A Man in Full focused on an Atlanta mogul riding the coming tidal wave in real estate...

...history to be impeached...

...What next...

...I always say, ‘Oh, in a few months,’ but I don’t make predictions anymore...

...In successive best-sellers, Wolfe captured the spirit of the times with novels whose characters and plots were not merely “ripped from the headlines,” but actually seemed to predict the future...

...Needless to say, his fans and friends frequently ask how soon his next book will be published...

...Yet this sordid business, he says, is practically the only thing anyone will remember about Clinton’s eight-year presidency, whereas despite the stain of Watergate, Vietnam, however, Nixon “ended the anti-war movement in five minutes,” Wolfe notes...

...SSpectator’s 40th anniversary gala...

...The Durham audience similarly ignored his protestations that the elite “DuPont University” attended by Charlotte Simmons was purely a fiction, Wolfe said...

...Collected in a series of best-sellers—The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), and M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 4 9 s P e c T a T o R ’ s j o u R n a l Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers (1970)—Wolfe’s writings have become a classic chronicle of the fads and follies of the sixties...

...Yes, she’d gone to that hotel suite, Paula Jones said, but there was no sex, just crude advances by Clinton that culminated in the governor displaying his penis and demanding, “Kiss it...

...Immediately famous as the “Troopergate” story, Brock’s account of how Arkansas state troopers on Clinton’s security detail aided and abetted his gubernatorial dalliances set off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his presidency...

...And while the war in Iraq was monopolizing headlines, Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons looked at the “hook up” culture of college life in a way that eerily prefigured the rape hoax that targeted Duke University’s lacrosse team...

...When I was at Duke just a few months after that case broke, long before anyone knew the facts… I was there speaking about literature at the North Carolina Book Festival in Durham,” Wolfe says, describing the “very learned” themes of his April 2006 lecture...

...Then in 1979, he published his space-race saga of the first U.S...

...This presidential perjury and 4 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 R o b e R T s T a c y M c c a I n other Clintonian evasions constituting obstruction of justice were the “high crimes and misdemeanors” named in the historic House impeachment vote on December 19, 1998...

...Naturally all the questions were about Duke lacrosse—there are some very rude, sexually aggressive lacrosse players” in I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe admits...

...Nobody will believe it was not about Duke...

...Wolfe promises that Back to Blood, like all his His reporter’s instinCts continue to lead him novels, will be about people, not politics...

...I submit that The American Spectator did a more thorough job with Bill Clinton than Woodward and Bernstein did with Nixon,” Wolfe told the tuxedoed and bejeweled audience, comparing editor R. Emmett Tyrrell and former Spectator reporter David Brock to the Washington Post duo whose Watergate coverage made journalism history three decades ago...

...He made headlines in January when it was announced that Little, Brown & Company had acquired—for a rumored $7 million advance—the rights to Wolfe’s next novel...

...As a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and a freelancer for Esquire and New York magazines, Wolfe chronicled a vivid era in equally vivid prose...

...But I’ve also written a novel [The Bonfire of the Vanities] about a white district attorney who is desperate for the black vote for re- election...

...His reputation as a keen-eyed observer of social trends In successive best-sellers, Wolfe captured the spirit of the times with novels whose characters and plots were not merely “ripped from the headlines,” but actually seemed to predict the future...

...I’m not saying whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing...

...Having established himself as one of the century’s most successful journalists, Wolfe introduced a mid-career plot twist, achieving equal success as a novelist...

...to timely topics...