Will Editors Ever Love Flaubert?
Fallows, James
Will Editors Ever Low Flaubert? by James Fallows Last summer it became more and more clear that while investigative reporters were telling us what had happened inside the Nixon White House,...
...The meals were served with painstaking etiquette by white-coated attendants...
...The facts, an ability to analyze the facts, and a human understanding are the three ingredients for telling the truth about government...
...remembered the silence of the lobby, and the wan light from hidden lamps...
...Sorenson’s version, by contrast, is not only starchy and dull, but also far less accurate in registering the full truth of the encounter...
...Then, safely inside the sanctum, he’d relax and stroll down the hallway to his office and the morning’s business...
...Decisions come from the Congress, the White House, and all far-flung agencies, decisions which neither ideology nor devil theories can explain...
...And this, in the end, may be the most important reason that more writers haven’t tried harder to communicate the full truth about what they see: it doesn’t seem to matter...
...Even while reporting the fine detail and the human) texture, Crouse does not seriously enough question what he is seeing...
...In 1964, McNaughton was very unsure of his relationship with McNamara, he was newer in his position than McNamara was in his...
...In the dozens of personal encounters that make up the book-with West Point cadets, generals in the Pentagon, rebels in a coffeehouse-Just gives the reader the, benefit of all his insights...
...One reason more of these stories haven’t been written is that...
...it has as much to do with understanding the way decisions are made in government as anything the political reporters and theoretical analysts can say...
...Specific questions seem unanswerablewhy is Congress so slow to impeach...
...As we look back into our very recent history, we can see at least two distinct developments that clearly affected events: the rise of the imperial court in the Kennedy-Johnson White Houses (whose importance has been realized only in the Nixon era) and the sexual element in the Kennedy-JohnsonNixon foreign policy...
...Hey, *Random House, 1973...
...Admiral Ferris could witness this spectacle from picture windows in his quarters, or he could tune it all out...
...he had, it was clear, seen past the press releases and public statements to the world of advisers promoting their own fortunes like courtiers and protecting the President from the reality of unpleasant news...
...No one else can really say what George Marshall meant to Dwight Eisenhower...
...It is cause for wonder that, in a time when writing of all sorts about politics grows more voluminous, the sense of public incomprehension is also rising...
...Indeed, the real subject of his book is the military culture, whose emphasis on yes-men and unsoiled records means that most officers are rated by their supervisors, “the best officer I have ever seen,” and anyone who is rated merely “excellent” or “superior” has lost his chances for advancement...
...You know,” said the politico, as Ted left Apple, “Johnny thinks he’s better than the pols he writes about...
...he had never seen anything like him and admired the Secretary without reservation, being almost slavish in his subservience...
...Death-from-the-Skies himself in the documentary record of the Pentagon papers, but who was privately dissenting to McNamara...
...The irony is that Ellsberg, in his Papers on the War, lacked what Halberstam had in abundance: the understanding of how human beings could make these decisions...
...But the single greatest unmet need in journalism is writing which grounds opinion in fact and illumines it with understanding-that is, which attempts to convey the whole truth about public affairs...
...Halberstam carried out the study in a remarkable way, showing for his dozens of characters how the forces that led them to a certain point in their careers and the rules they played under once they reached that point virtually dictated their decisions...
...They know that the articles present part of the truth about an event, a part which the news and analysis stories seem incapable of including...
...He has the obligation to include the inconvenient fact, the detail which would not fit the novelist’s scheme...
...Random House, 1973...
...by James Fallows Last summer it became more and more clear that while investigative reporters were telling us what had happened inside the Nixon White House, political journalism in general had failed to convey how and why the style of presidential government had evolved to its current point...
...They lived one atop the other, three bunks high, with no privacy and little storage space, with the constant noise of the ship’s operations jarring them...
...Rolling Stone has been excellent in getting its writers to go for the detail and color...
...Stuart Loory’s new book, Defeated: Inside the American Military Machine,” is another...
...Marshall to the demagoguery of Senator William Jenner by taking the stand to support Jenner...
...One of the best examples is his portrait of John McNaughton, the McNamara advisor who came across as Mr...
...They took their meals in windowless, low-ceilinged mess spaces that doubled as warehouses for the bombs and rockets the airplanes would use...
...He reached for Bill Jenner’s shoulder, then he saw who it was, and he let his hand drop...
...Thus in 1972 he could sit with Richard Nixon and agree with him about the structure of peace and the importance of the Presidency, and not ask what any of the words meant...
...If the writer’s responsibility is to help us understand the truth about his subject, the truth in its fullest dimensions, then he should pull all these de tails together...
...Since then another newspaper writer has carved out a similar role for herself...
...The non-fiction writer also needs a set of concerns that will impel him to do more than present the facts...
...the editors have not asked for them, apart from vague requests for the “color” piece...
...In his story, a White House aide, facing a change of administrations, is preparing to leave but trying desperately to stay...
...In one of the two really first-rate stories in the book, “A Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D. C.” (the other is the title story), Just gives us what Reedy attempted to give and what all the journalists like Frankel never put in their stories: a demonstration that he understands the complexity and motivation of human beings in political situations...
...He seems to forget it’s The New York Times they need, not him...
...The most impressive of the contemporary histories is undoubtedly David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest...
...But they can be produced with some reasonable regularity-perhaps once every four weeks, as a rough estimate-and need not be reserved for the books written after years of reflections, if the reporters are constantly looking for all the parts of the story, not just the “facts...
...To make this effort, the reporter must have a sense that it matters whether or not he truly explains a set of events to the reader...
...The combination brought him much closer to a true vision of what was happening politically than either the straight reporters or the rest of the editorial page analysts...
...They were not fools, Ellsberg said (this was Halberstam’s final judgment on McNamara...
...This was an astonishing thing to find, for in all his years as Washington bureau chief and all-around star reporter for the Times, Frankel had never given a sign that he was other than an extremely capable give-me-all-the:facts-ma’am reporter...
...not just what the man said but what he looked like, what he seemed to be thinking...
...This is what Kempton saw: The luncheon was ended, and Eisenhower walked off the platform, stopping a minute to catch his breath and raising his ring hand to lean on a friendly shoulder...
...In his 1960 book White gave all the easy glamor of the Kennedy victory, but he was also nearly heart-breaking in describing the equally real side of the campaign, the collapse of the Humphrey forces in West Virginia...
...When he speculates into character and culture, he needs to separate the facts from the guesses, to say at a certain point, “I can’t prove this in court, but everything I have seen convinces me that this is what’s going on...
...it was, after all, their very brilliance that provoked questions about their failure...
...Constant contact with Kissinger favorably alters their own visions of themselves as well...
...Loory approaches the same topic from a much more theoretical angle than Just, but he has not given up a feel for the nuances of the world he is describing...
...It was as if they felt newspapers were an unnecessary frivolity, a sacrilege in his presence, something profane...
...If “A Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D. C.” were to be told through the newspapers, the front page would carry a story on the aide’s resignation, the editorial page would discuss the change of administration, the society page would report that he was putting his house on the market and taking a new job, and the color reporter might have noticed the reading light in the back of the limousine...
...In 1952, Kempton was traveling with Eisenhower at the time of the Jenner rally in Indiana...
...Before he did anything he checked the appointment book to see what was scheduled...
...James Fallows is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Kempton has since stopped writing these columns...
...This does not mean that there should not be a place for straight factual reporting...
...Belowdecks, the crew was jammed together, 150 men to each open, windowless, poorly lighted, ill-ventilated bay...
...This is not just nice detail...
...His last book before Flaubert was Military Men, published in 1970, a masterful examination of the armed forces preparing to think about its world after Vietnam...
...Anyone who has ever stepped inside the White House, even as a reporter, has had a dim glimmer of how it must feel to be one of the bosses there...
...as influential journalists they deserve a seat at the Metropolitan Club, the company of statesmen, the friendship of other influential people...
...writing should not include much more of the kind of awareness Just’s fiction displays, which for convenience I will call cultural understanding of government, a sense of the way its cultural rules affect its members’ behavior...
...Ted,” shouted Apple, and waved him over, They chatted for about a minute...
...If Johnny worked for the Denver Post and he said, ‘Hey, Ted,’ Teddy would have kept on walking...
...Different journalists have different ideas of themselves...
...The silverware was heavy and glistening...
...While he clearly loathes Apple, he makes Broder look almost saintly...
...That was when Eisenhower, in effect, abandoned George C...
...To see if there was anything special that day...
...Without the third, the truth is obscured because it is hard to understand how real people could make the mistakes government often makes...
...In one of his previous books, Ward Just himself has shown how cultural understanding can be combined with hard factual reporting in a non-fiction format...
...What they too often lack is any hardminded analysis, since under the division of newspaper responsibilities that is left to Joseph Kraft and the rest of the editorial-page thinkers...
...Anything at all...
...he himself said it three weeks ago in choked and angry terms...
...And more general trends are left unexamined...
...What the McGrory-type stories contain is a feeling for the human beings and their culture...
...Broder is earning a different kind of respect, but like Apple his view of what he is making himselfinto affects the version of truth he is telling . Crouse first wrote these articles for Rolling Stone, and it may be fair to see some of the difficulty there...
...But what other writers, and in what...
...sometimes this has greatly enhanced the human understanding of the topic (as with Crouse’s stories) and sometimes it has run the risk of character assassination (as with Hunter Thompson’s reports on the politicians...
...The Novelist’s Eye Is Not Enough The importance of personalities in understanding political campaigns is obvious, and White’s approach has transformed election reporting, even in the newspapers...
...He seemed not to grasp Daniel Ellsberg’s brilliant insight about the men in the several administrations which continued the war...
...He was almost mesmerized by McNamara...
...There is no reason why political...
...Ward Just’s book on the Army, which concentrated on the individuals involved, is one example...
...He t h i n k s they need him...
...Political writing which combined the strongest parts of both-Ellsberg plus the humanity, Halberstam plus the hard analysis-would come far closer to telling us the truth about public affairs than most of what we now read...
...Now the threads are left separate...
...The non-fiction writer should bring the novelist’s eye to his material, but he cannot afford to depart from the facts as he has actually seen them...
...Anything that needed doing...
...Two other ongoing stories-the culture of the Congress and the culture of bureaucracyare too rarely communicated in their full dimensions...
...From the first, Halberstam was shoved in the direction of looking inside the characters of his story...
...When David Broder strikes a pompous note, it may be because he’s writing with the Richard Neustadts and McGeorge Bundy’s in mind, sounding the way he thinks a “respected political analyst” should...
...The admiral’s dining room-it was to a mess what the private dining room in the White House is to a government workers’ cafeteria-could seat 10 comfortably around an oval table covered with starched white linen...
...Murray Kemp ton’s columns in The New York Post during the 1950s are certainly a place to start, for Kempton was one of the first to combine strong factual reporting with a human understanding of his subjects...
...That, with its blind loyalty and totality of self-abnegation, meant bureaucratic power, and John McNaughton wanted power...
...That type of contemporary history which attempts to explain how a certain institution functions has, like election writing, been fortified by cultural understanding...
...As we looked back for sources of explanation, one book stood out as particularly prescient...
...But he did...
...It would have been nice to have had the truth about the imperial presidency explained before the war and Watergate...
...Among contemporary historians, the progenitor of this approach has been Theodore White, who in his Making of the President books has above all else demonstrated an ability to put himself in his subjects’ shoes...
...There is real pathos in the portrait of Humphrey, out-spent by Kennedy, snapping at his aides, and then hating himself because he realizes they can’t do anything more about the situation than he can, writing out a personal check to a television station which has threatened to cancel his telethon unless he pays immediately, Muriel Humphrey watching this with great sad eyes and giving you the feeling, White says, that it was her grocery money being signed away, and at the end of it all, in the shambles of his campaign and the disappearance of his dreams for the presidency, Humphrey stopping to console a sobbing guitar-player who had accompanied him through the campaign, patting him on the shoulder and saying, “Aw, Jimmy...
...Pulling the Strings Together From the conjuction of these two books, an exciting prospect emerges...
...As one example of what Frankel might have been writing, we have Ward Just’s new book, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert and Other Washington Stories...
...The kind of name and identity they hope to give themselves affects the kind of standards they will apply to their own work...
...Crouse is excellent in these vignettes, but his book shows the danger of including color without the analysis...
...He remembered the black Mercury sedans, with the telephones and the reading light in the rear seat...
...This is a familiar political situation: Frankel must have written about ones like it, and the political theorists have, too...
...This type of story has created among editors the undefined awareness that there is another category of article besides straight news and editorial page analysis...
...Although he was a Harvard law professor, there was no more skilled player of the bureaucratic game than John McNaughton, for he understood the bureaucracy very quickly and how to play it, and he learned this, that his power existed only as long as he had Robert McNamara’s complete confidence and as long as everyone in government believed that when he spoke, he spoke not for John McNaughton but for Bob McNamara...
...what sense can we make of our energy policies...
...In this passage, for example, he is talking with an officer about the dumb soldiers, “those with IQs of 80, the ones called Shitkick and Fuckhead, the clumsy ones”: “Well what the hell, you have got to have those guys who will go out there when no one else will,” a major at Leavenworth told me and when I didn’t say anything but just sat looking at him he colored and half apologized and said that he didn’t mean it quite the way it sounded...
...Joseph Kraft and James Reston don’t keep Henry Kissinger’s confidences solely because they are afraid of losing a source...
...The problem with this book is that at the end Halberstam, too, failed to apply the toughest analytical standards...
...Tune out” means he could retire to his study, a windowless room obviously appointed by an interior decorator...
...Newspapers are the most extreme example, in which everything has its place: facts on the front page, analysis-too often without facts-on the editorial page, gossip on the society page, and “color” floating somewhere in between...
...In the one first-class section of his book, on the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger shows an acute awareness of the cultural rules under which each of the people involved was operating...
...The reason for these omissions is that there is really no genre of writing that pulls all the strings together, which sits back and says here are the characters, and this is what they did, and this is what they thought they were doing, and this is what they overlooked...
...Thucydides placed fictitious speeches in the mouths of his characters to more fully explain their actions...
...This is no modest hope, a type of writing which would start with “A Guide to the Architecture” and go on to explain what this means for the decisions made in the White House, a type which gives fact and analysis and human understanding...
...This is perfectly understandable as a human reaction-Broder being a much more modest and likable man-but it overlooks the fact that they’re in essentially the same position...
...When her editors at The Washington Star-News sense that the juices of an event will not come through in the “President Nixon announced yesterday” main story, they send Mary McGrory to write what she sees and feels...
...Making a Name An invaluable aid to understanding is Timothy Crouse’s book on the campaign press corps, The Boys on the Bus,* Crouse knows that joumalism, like politics and the stage, has always attracted people who want to become something through it...
...It is an extraordinary effort to make, since editorial requirements are usually satisfied (and editorial restrictions may begin) once the reporter has done his job of providing either facts or color...
...The man who said that must know better than anyone what it means to pass the gates to glory by kicking your father in the stomach...
...Apart from newspaper color stones, another field of political writing which has occasionally admitted the novelist’s touch is current history...
...When White gets into trouble it is because he does not temper his good-heartedness with any firm analytical standards...
...In one of the more memorable passages in the book, Loory describes an admiral’s life aboard an aircraft carrier fighting in Vietnam: From the flight deck below, dozens of aircraft took off each morning, their bellies and wings laden, as the expression goes, with death and destruction...
...I’m Number One!’ ” . . . All of a sudden Ted Kennedy, who had just finished his speech nominating George McCovern, came around a comer a few feet away from Apple...
...What has too often been missing is some stress on the meaning of it all-why we should care about Apple’s pretensions except for the fun of seeing a high-rider put down, whether there’s anything besides color to Thompson’s description of Muskie as a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow on next year’s crop...
...Just, a former Washington Post reporter who turned to fiction several years ago, has written a series of nine stories, some good and some not so good, about life in the different parts of the federal government...
...Then he checked the Oval Office to see if the old man was in...
...I don’t mean to suggest that Rolling Stone is unique in this conceptual drift, only to say that it has been a striking illustration of the ambivalence many journalists feel about the importance of their work...
...Just, of course, cannot be the only person to possess this ability...
...What was it that kept him from writing the story until Reedy’s book gave him a peg...
...Crouse spends a good deal of time in his book on the dissection of R. W. “Johnny” Apple of The New York Times, whom Crouse portrays as the most egregious of those eager to get ahead: “Take a look at Johnny Apple over there,” said a celebrity-watching politico on the closing night of the Democratic convention...
...He must have the passion of a novelist like Solzhenitsyn to tell the truth about a situation-not just the facts, not just his opinions, but the whole truth...
...The difference that a novelist’s eye can make in the current histories of the White House is suggested by the two in-house books on the Kennedy Administration, A Thousand Days, by Arthur Schlesinger, and Kennedy, by Theodore Sorenson...
...It’s never all there at once, which it must be if the real meaning is ever to come across...
...Let it be said for Dwight Eisenhower that he did what he did not utterly without shame...
...He was up every morning at seven sharp, swinging into the big circular lobby at quarter to eight...
...He *Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1973...
...Most good fiction is based on personal experience and observation, but the novelist has the freedom to build from that base with imagination and without fidelity to fact...
...What was public, what private, and what personal...
...circumstances, have added to their work a sensitivity to culture...
...their decisions may have been wrong, but they were not deluded, for all along the way they were conscious of the choices involved and never felt they could afford the short-term risks of quitting the war...
...While the non-fiction writer needs the novelist’s passion, he cannot simply emulate the techniques of fiction...
...No reporter could do this very often...
...So he became at once the man in the government where two powerful currents crossed: great and forceful doubts about the wisdom of American policy in Vietnam, and an equally powerful desire to stay in government, to be a player, to influence policies for the good of the country, for the right ideas, and for the good of John McNaughton...
...stories like this cannot be produced on a daily or weekly basis because the writer will not have that much to say that frequently...
...He practically goes around with a T-shirt saying, ‘I work for the Times...
...But this makes us take a step further up to ask why the editors haven’t wanted them and why the writers haven’t been clamoring to do them...
...Understandably, neither of these is a work of hardbiting analysis, but there are significant differences...
...That, and being extremely ambitious, and wanting, now that he was operating in Washington, to remain there...
...At publication time the general reaction to Reedy’s book had been tepid, but-we discovered on looking back-one of the most thoughtful and foresighted of the reviews had come from Max Frankel of The New York Times The review showed that Frankel had thought hard and deeply about the changes in the Presidency...
...Academic historians have long acknowledged that a keen cultural sensitivity can help build the truest historical portrait...
...Any doubts he had were reserved for McNamara, virtually alone, or one or two other people that he knew and trusted, who would not betray him with gossip, so that the word would not go around Washington that John McNaughton was a secret dove...
...But Just adds a dimension missing in the other accounts, and in so doing comes much closer to telling the truth about this part of government...
...if a reporter covers one of the bureaucracies for any length of time he develops a sense of what its officials expect from life and their jobs...
...In the early morning there were always one or two visitors seated on couches, nervous men waiting for appointments, who put down their newspapers when they saw him...
...It was George Reedy’s The Twilight of the Presidency, written about the Johnson Administration and published in 1970, but full of the story of the imperial presidency, which is now becoming conventional wisdom...
...it is even conceivable, although on most mornings it is hard to imagine why, that there is still a place for analysis from the columnists...
Vol. 6 • March 1974 • No. 1
