Casual
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Casual Just Toobin Marvelous for Words Ifinished Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life last night, and it’s a terrific book, and you don’t know how hard it was for me to write those words: “a...
...Later, he wrote a book called Opening Arguments about his time with Walsh’s office in which he acknowledged that the pursuit of Elliott was unjust...
...Why am I thinking in italics...
...Walking to the back in search of the fiction section, I literally ran into Jeff, who was having a book signing for Opening Arguments...
...we only met when entering seventh grade at a tiny New York City private school...
...Surely you’ve caught Toobin on one or another show this past month, talking about his account of the O.J...
...I never saw him wear glasses back in the pre-soft-lens days when we all wore glasses...
...He got some measure of revenge a few years later after I published a book...
...We liked talking about politics and read a lot of the same books, and hung around a lot in our senior year—a year which culminated in his writing a really nice and sentimental tribute next to his picture in what he took to be my yearbook...
...It was an excruciating moment, for him and for me...
...I got on the paper in ninth grade anyway, but Jeff ’s Machiavellian maneuver proved diabolically successful...
...When his children look at his senior photo, they’ll have to read something about me...
...Simpson murder case...
...There were 300 kids in that gym...
...It was the only hand raised...
...He’s getting rich from it too...
...2 on the New York Times bestseller list...
...John Podhoretz...
...it was his own yearbook...
...Well, not exactly lifelong...
...Since when does Jeff Toobin wear glasses...
...Maybe he doesn’t really need glasses...
...Because Jeff Toobin is my lifelong rival...
...The Run of His Life is almost flawless, an account of the Simpson case that manages to be comprehensive and fair while still being damning of this signal event in exactly the right way (just as he was unfairly damning of Elliott...
...You’ve seen him, cool-voiced, eloquent, glasses ringing his eyes, the very picture of a sober legal journalist in his mid-30s...
...I raised my hand...
...glad to see you finally between hardcovers,” he said in yet another accidental bookstore encounter, this time in front of the big Barnes and Noble ten blocks from our old high school in Manhattan...
...But we started getting in each other’s way back then...
...I don’t begrudge it for so impressive a book...
...His longer tenure on the staff ended in our senior year with him editor and me a sub-editor, though these sorts of hierarchical distinctions were pretty much meaningless on a mimeographed sheet that came out every couple of weeks, generating no interest in the school and only slightly greater interest among those of us on staff...
...But come on, Jeff—what’s with the glasses...
...This is no joke...
...You know, you caused my family a world of grief and trouble,” I said...
...Only it wasn’t my yearbook...
...Face to face, I felt I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I just smiled and exchanged pleasantries...
...In high school, we were up for the same parts in school plays and were fellow staffers on the newspaper...
...How big do you think his advance was from Random House...
...One night, just as that book was coming out, I arrived early for dinner at a Georgetown restaurant and went down the street to a local bookstore...
...he’s been on a wildly successful media blitz that has resulted in the book’s debut at No...
...My brother-in-law, Elliott Abrams, spent five years of his life under the siege of the Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, and it turned out that Jeff was one of the lawyers specifically assigned to get Elliott...
...So it was with some wariness that I began reading his coverage of the O.J...
...I’ve seen him, too, and what I want to know is: Glasses...
...in fact, I have it on good authority (I cannot reveal my sources, even now, more than 20 years after the fact) that in eighth grade he sought to prevent my recruitment to the newspaper staff, perhaps on grounds of my juvenile conservatism...
...This was the same year that a McGovern organizer came to a school-wide assembly in our gym and asked if anybody in the place was for Nixon...
...Ibumped into Jeff a few times on the streets of New York during college and afterward but heard little of him until it turned out he was trying to send my brother-inlaw to jail...
...Maybe he’s only wearing them for effect...
...Yet he still wrote about Elliott in a mingy, ad hominem way that I found, and still find, itself a form of prosecutorial indiscretion...
...He mumbled something about the First Amendment, Elliott getting a say and Jeff getting a say...
...trial in the New Yorker, only to find it well-written, wellreported, and compelling—all qualities his book shares, and more still...
...Casual Just Toobin Marvelous for Words Ifinished Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life last night, and it’s a terrific book, and you don’t know how hard it was for me to write those words: “a terrific book...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 5
