The Honey and the Source: Reporters and Their Status Taboo
Bethell, Tom
The Honey and the Source: Reporters and Their Status Taboo by Tom Bethell The response to Barney Collier’s book, Hope and Fear In Washington (The Early Seventies): The Story of the Washington...
...Collier used famous journalists to do this, not (I believe) to put down journalists, or because he was “envious” of them, but because this happened to be the only group of famous people he had easy access to...
...Secondly, Collier tells us much too much about himself, and he frequently does so in a sentimental, mawkish way, talking about his wife and child and rabbit, too, as though he wanted us to be sure we knew (as one reviewer put it) that he “has his feet firmly planted in the loam of Mother Earth and his mind nestled in the bosom of Mother Nature...
...When that happens, as we know, the journalist will get up onto a pedestal and proclaim: First Amendment...
...Tom Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...He babbled knowingly about politics...
...And because he thinks he’s opened a few bathroom doors on people and caught them at something or other...
...The press loved it, of course, and, as it now seems, sought a further taste of blood and fame by clawing and scratching at other American institutionsmost recently the intelligence community...
...It is a passage that, for some reason, I can’t get out of my mind: Rolly led me to the back of the house where a small breakfast table was set in a room with a glass ceiling and glass walls like a greenhouse but as tall as a two-story bitdhouse, with the birds flown away...
...By the next issue [Morel had a firestorm on its hands...
...Alexander Cockburn sneered at Collier for being unable to write the novel that he perceived in this material, and in fact Collier did consider changing all the names in the book to fictitious names...
...Where are the poets...
...Had he done so, the book would have been ignored, or possibly given some faint praise...
...well, gossip...
...By the time I came across Nora Ephron’s review in Esquire, this Buming Issue had cropped up in my mind: a book less than entirely flattering to journalists is disliked by journalists...
...The gnats flew on the presidential press plane, with the best care and feeding...
...No doubt he got hate mail, no doubt someone called it “toilet bowl journalism...
...But more than that, it tells us so much about the person or people concerned...
...And, of course, the best thing of all was to try to show, by quotation or use of status detail, precisely how certain people were “climbing” and thereby attaining power...
...well, I won’t go on...
...Scotty refused to believe that Americans would elect a man to the White House who didn’t see the wisdom of simple, old-fashioned beliefs...
...Scotty said, “The last great man...
...It’s hard to see how she could feel that way today...
...clout, clout, like somebody with a big “Who’s got clout...
...When a journalist does it to other journalists they get up onto a different pedestal and bawl: The Creep...
...This in itself is rather odd, because her book could be construed as being far more damaging to certain CBS figures than anything Collier wrote about his subjects...
...At any rate, when one actually reads the book after all this fuss and bother, one immediately encounters something that no reviewer, apparently, had dared mention...
...Just as Timothy Crouse did in his basically deferential (and widely praised) book The Boys On The Bus...
...She talks about Washington embassy parties, and how “everybody hates them because they are truly boring...
...Barney Collier interviews all these important people from the press, the “stars people know,” as CBS Washington bureau chief Bill Small had suggested to him (although he needn’t have bothered), and Collier isn’t in the tiniest degree interested in what they write about or orate about...
...He hesitated...
...I had learned that most people weren’t interested in reading puff pieces,” she says...
...Yes, gossip-to turn the tables on those who have accused Collier (and others) of dispensing gossip...
...And on like this for 20 pages...
...Dan Rather’s watched...
...Really, it’s hardly surprising the press as a whole isn’t thrilled about this book...
...Researchers looking through old newspapers have already found this to be the case on a number of occasions...
...The Burning Issue here: Are Journalists Becoming Too Famous...
...I don’t want to suggest that Barney Collier has written another Life of Johnson, but there is quite a strong sense of deja vu about the criticism...
...who is clothed in status, but has little else to wear...
...One hears a good deal of discussion these days among journalists about The Problem-the problem of journalists writing too much about one another, and so on, and a number of journalists really would like the celebrity problem to go away so they could get back to the serious business of covering news without all this distraction...
...As long as that lasts, and that will be presumably as long as television lasts, then the people who bring us the news are not only themselves news, but they urgently need scrutiny and criticism...
...Sally Quinn appears to have been neutralized, to a large extent, and there seem to be no effective replacements, despite a huge reportorial staff...
...Sample sentence: “Everything which another man would have hidden, every thing the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind...
...Then there is a narrow runway from the archway across the stage platform and down two steps into the pit...
...Did you hear about Johnny Apple’s source in Ohio...
...All right, weird it is...
...That I would like to know...
...He only pretended to be writing a book about journalism, when in fact he was writing one much more nearly about “manners...
...In a way, the most interesting thing about status is that it is a subject that nearly everyone prefers to avoid entirely...
...And he wants to punish people who have succeeded in the profession in which he failed...
...Tom Wolfe gave Leonard Bernstein the same treatment, as is well known, and a related case cropped up not long ago in Washington, when Sally Quinn reported that the wife of an assistant secretary of state, who was in charge of a local Vietnamese refugee program, was “placing” the refugees with her friends as maids...
...puff...
...There are also a goodly number of outright favorable accounts: Stewart Alsop, Me1 Elfin, Bob Novak, Helen Thomas, Soma Golden, Betty Beale, the Kalb brothers, Mike Waters, Jack Anderson, Maxine Cheshire...
...I asked him how he managed to pay for such a project, and he said, “Oh, I’ve got plenty of money...
...whereas, I submit, the fact that his hands were shaking when he said it is still interesting (unless, perhaps, it was a permanent condition with Nixon...
...One example from their book perfectly illustrates the hard-news-has-as hort-life thesis: Carl Bernstein’s “Quivering Hands” story...
...Here we begin to get into the Interesting Question...
...Freedom of the Press...
...The press was a plague of gnats, biting and biting and flying into his face and eyes, and if he tried to get away from them, in some hidden office, he would look at the fruit bowl, and there, flying above a peach, would be a gnat...
...And that is one thing that bothers me about the intemperate hostility to Collier’s book...
...We talked about Washington, while I watched him...
...Most news stories have a “half life” of anywhere from one day to six months or so...
...A player makes his entrance through a proscenium archway, with a curtain...
...Most of them seem to be quite happy to do this, however, because they think of themselves (with some justice) primarily as policy makers and only secondarily as writers...
...There you have another Burning Issue, as I realized when I looked at two other reviews in which Collier was accused of attacking the superstars of journalism...
...An interesting case of reporters who turned from the narrow front page to the broader spectrum of life is that of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men...
...And probably The Dial Press paid him something for this nothing...
...Sander looked around for faces in the dimly lighted room...
...But like Collier, Sally Quinn does not neglect the...
...He was truly interested in Apple’s Source...
...But let me ask, a hundred years from now, which will seem more interesting Georgetown manners in the early 1b70s, or what the state chairman secretly said last week...
...He already knew most of the people he was going to write about, and so he called them up, chatted on the phone, had lunch, dropped by their offices...
...Isn’t he your friend...
...A Grant of Immunity But it’s not going to happen, because celebrated people are legitimately a part of the news, “news” being defined primarily by the curiosity of the public...
...Here is Art Buchwald in the Sans Souci (a fashionable restaurant in Washington) : Anyone who enters must play...
...This, I think, has truly offended the press...
...The interest in the book lies precisely in this compulsion, the fact that Collier’s intent seems to be to display himself in a gossip’s neurotic dance of death...
...gone too far this time...
...DO you have clout?’’ “Nah...
...The story so far: In 1973 Barnard Law Collier, a journalist formerly with the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times, but by then a free-lance writer (he left the Times under circumstances he does not precisely elucidate, but which seem to have had something to do with an over-stuffed expense account: the book includes an amusing description of Foreign Editor Seymour Topping’s arrival in Buenos Aires to talk to Collier about “expense accounts that make people laugh”), decided to write about the Washington press corps...
...No, far worse is the fact-that Collier doesn’t seem to be taking the press seriously at all in this book, except insofar as they illuminate status life in Washington...
...Barney Collier rather conspicuously has not joined in the applause after the Watergate act...
...In fact, Collier does at times seem to relish showing himself in a rather unpleasant light: an unusual form of exhibitionism...
...Art nodded his head, yes...
...Helen Thomas’s eyes were dark and very strange, they saw everything...
...Apple has worked Gilligan as a source for a long time and he got Gilligan to say things that...
...Are You Ready for This?’ The press loved Crouse’s book when it came out because he was such a good kid out there on the sidelines, occasionally calling “foulyy here, putting thumbs down there, but his heart was in the right place because he took the game so seriously...
...In the first place, as a result of the press’s role-or perhaps one should say alleged role-in the demise of Richard Nixon, agood deal of public attention has been focused on the press, in particular the Washington Press Corps...
...The Bernstein-Woodward stories were of this type, but when they wrote the book they had the sense to give us something other than all the tiny little bits added together...
...It is just such social newcomers, of course, who are inclined most rigidly to enforce the status taboo, and who are most upset, therefore, by the rude scrutiny of a Barney Collier...
...In America generally there is so much social mobility that it is not surprising to find a fairly strong status taboo, but among journalists in particular there is good reason for the taboo to be particularly strong...
...It is a sympathetic portrait...
...Rolly and I ate fried bacon, tea, white bread toast, and honey...
...The upsetting point seems to be not so much that the “revelations” are so shocking, because they are not, as that they are so “trivial...
...who dare not burn his source, nor give us honey...
...Overall, the book is very uneven, with dreadful, cute chapter headings, quite a number of sections that don’t work at all, and other sections that are, if anything, rather too cloyingly praiseworthy about their subjects...
...Many journalists wrote in to complain...
...I did my toast the same way he did...
...Boswell was thought to have harmed Dr...
...was Mike Pearson...
...Superstars...
...Burned Source The use of status detail and direct quotation (“gossip”) to illuminate a discrepancy between radical philosophy and elitist life style is particularly telling, of course, and in a way one admires Wicker for so candidly laying his cards on the table...
...David Halberstam, in his recent Atlantic article on CBS, illuminates the character of chairman of the board William Paley with material that, had it come from a lesser pen, might have been dubbed gossip...
...Scotty was an oracle again...
...One critic referred to Boswell’s “gross gossipation,” and added that Boswell, who for a while was shunned by polite society after the book came out, “deserves what he daily meets withthat of people shutting their doors against him as they would against any other wild Beast...
...I tried to imagine the cries of “Foul...
...The horrible truth, as many journalists must surely realize, is that the kind of immediacy and up-to-dateness required to get a story on the front page of a newspaper tends also to ensure its total oblivion a few months later...
...Scotty Reston’s got clout...
...I’m going to do him,” I said...
...Furthermore, as Samuel Huntington recently commented in The Public Interest, “there has come into existence a national press with the economic independence and communications reach to play a role with respect to the President that a local newspaper plays with respect to a mayor...
...And he was possessive of the honeypot...
...He hesitated...
...Outside the windows of the structure, in a space that used up the entire small backyard, was a swimming pool in the style of a Grecian bath...
...Ten-foot-high columns supported the low sky on each side...
...It tells me that the author is writing about “the way we live now,” not merely about what a source on Capitol Hill said this morning about the leak of the week from the subcommittee of the month...
...The news story of Watergate was developed, as most such stories are, with each tiny little bit of new information being added to the store of what was already known...
...Gnats swarmed like reporters, and after a while it was hard to tell gnats and reporters apart...
...Collier asks his subjects plenty of ridiculous questions, and, to his credit, embarrassing ones, too...
...Behind me I heard the footsteps, in a prancing trot...
...Next Alexander Cockburn weighed in with a lengthy essay on gossip in The New York Review, this being the theme of his review of four books, including Collier’s, and We’re Going To Make You A Star by Sally Quinn...
...He watched the entrance and act of each star player...
...Once, at a dinner at the German ambassador’s in Bonn, I was seated next to the New York Times correspondent and felt terribly insulted...
...As in: Did you hear the latest...
...At one point Bernstein went to a presidential press conference and noted that Nixon’s hands “did not stop shaking...
...We know the answer, of course, although some of us apparently hate to admit it to ourselves...
...And he’s socially envious...
...She tells us, for instance, just where she was taken to lunch, and by whom...
...But the novel fad could not last, the Review reassured itself...
...This simple notion has, unfortunately, eluded those journalistreviewers who have leaped to the defense of their colleagues with an ad hominem attack on Collier...
...The New York Review duly fired off gigantic salvos at him which seemed to have been lifted directly out of the QuarterZy Review’s attacks on the new novels that were being eagerly read in the early 1800s...
...Poor turkey, he’s only caught himself...
...The furor over the Collier book brings to mind, once again, The Quarterly Review, which in 1832 railed against the then eagerly read “Novels of Fashionable Life,” and concluded by pointing the finger of blame at those “members of the aristocracy [who] have themselves come forward to inform against their fraternity, showing themselves ambitious of a kind of distinction...
...how to put it delicately...
...Nor did Truman Capote...
...Scotty was suddenly angry and indignant that a furtive pretender like President Nixon had frozen Scotty Reston out of the White House, a house he had visited as an honored guest for 20 years...
...But only stick close to this person until “someone more powerful comes in...
...it was what he seemed most proud of about his house...
...Collier had written about such things as what Vanocur ordered from the menu, how he talked loud enough to be heard and recognized at the next table, and how he “blocked my arm with his shoulder to prevent me from reaching over to examine the check...
...The damnable books were “widely circulated,” but “this whole branch of bookselling cannot last long...
...Here he is in Rowland Evans’s Georgetown house...
...If there are more than two people together, if there are three, one of them is climbing...
...ignoring the Burning Issue, namely, Was Vanocur Too Close To The Kennedys...
...After that they’re dead, excepting only for perusal by media critics, professors of sociology, and, with any luck, a patient researcher or historian winding his way through the microfilm in the decades and centuries ahead . Consider the vast coverage right now of Campaign ’76, and imagine going back to the newspaper morgues and trying to read through the same material for Campaign ’72...
...Is he really that awful...
...Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea-and it would be nice to return to a simpler world in other ways, too...
...And it was predictable mainly because it had been heard so many times in the past...
...The subject is rank, “clout,” manners, class, who ranks, who’s who...
...It is precisely her insouciant disregard for the status taboo that makes Sally Quinn an interesting writer, and for just that reason so many people tend to sigh and roll their eyes and tsk their tongues when her name is mentioned...
...As Tom Wolfe has truly said, status is “just the fundamental taboo, more so than sexuality and everything of that sort...
...Parts of the book are well written, observant, funny, and it is not nearly so hostile to most of its subjects as the reviews suggest...
...They swarmed around Watergate in clouds, and the worse Watergate smelled, the more gnats came, it seemed from everywhere...
...It is a vignette, certainly, a sketch, but Collier succeeds in bringing Reston to life as I have not seen in other descriptions of the man...
...Towards the end of her column, Ephron made another revealing observation: “I realized, as I read Collier’s book, that I would not have been nearly as offended by it if it had been about movie stars...
...They did not die with the first frost...
...And it wasn’t a bad choice, either...
...If you want to take someone’s temperature in the television world, you measure where they take you to lunch...
...Another critic of the book wrote: “A great character, in worthy situations, is an object of virtuous contemplation, but that minuteness of anecdote, that ostentatious display of trifles, which we sometimes meet with, is a vicious indulgence of inquisitive impertinence...
...When Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, F. W. Dupee grew very alarmed, worrying whether it was “parajournalism” (which would have been bad), and he worried, too, that the “documentation is, for the most part, suppressed...
...He went on, almost without blinking...
...Quinn, alas, did become a star, which has not helped her reporting...
...he asked...
...Quinn, for example, raises questions about the professional competence of some of the people she dealt with, which Collier never does...
...Consider, for a minute, the case of Evans and Novak...
...What is so disconcerting about the apparently sensible, let’scomeback-down-to-earth suggestion that the press stop writing about itself is that lurking behind it there seems also to be a desire for a grant of immunity from criticism for our gallant gentry of the Fourth Estate...
...Collier’s book, by contrast, has been hissed at venomously for months...
...And like any good journalist, he developed sources, who told him more about Apple, such as “that interview with John Gilligan where Gilligan talked about all the things that were going wrong with Muskie’s campaign...
...Rolly said: “It’s a terrific pain in the ass, Barney, but I like it...
...After only a very short period, all that topical stuff about reporters begins to seem just about as boring as out-of-date...
...Gossip” is a pejorative term commonly applied to books disapproved of by reviewers these days, and with its chic chatter about psychopathology, Cockburn’s article was suitably h la mode in other ways, jf not entirely intelligible...
...Others have chosen to spit at Collier for daring to bring up what is, in effect, a taboo subject...
...Why did Collier write it...
...Journalists would have professed to admire Collier’s “courage,” but they wouldn’t have bothered to read the book...
...Just as journalists love to do with politicians, of course...
...Collier uses the word “babble” several times when his subjects talk about politics...
...The gnats were more fierce than ever that summer because they were well fed by the mess of Watergate...
...They are, after all, an emerging elite...
...It was impressive and strange...
...it is certainly one of the more readable columns, and infinitely preferable to the rumination that most columnists give us...
...To reverse the usual judgment on Bernstein and Woodward, I should imagine that it is in their book that their names will survive, not in their original newspaper stories...
...William Qoinn had been depicted by CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr as a political ally of Goldwater] , and I was not only suspicious of them but felt that they were socially inferior...
...In this sense, then, the “Style” section of The Washington Post has filled a big gap in recent years, and for that reason it is more likely to be of interest to historians than the Post’s front page, because it tells us something about manners in the nation’s capital...
...All the Post wanted to know was what the President said...
...who was once prime Minister of Canada...
...From the moment it came out, literary types had worried about how Boswell got the conversation down, too, since he took no notes in public...
...Golly...
...He called me, “My boy,” as if I were a son...
...this, however, reflected poorly on Collier, not on Vanocur...
...Timothy Crouse, to give him his due, doesn’t entirely fall into the Apple Source trap and gives us some perhaps more illuminating anecdotes, including one about Johnny Apple himself...
...How very surprising...
...It’s hard enough even now to read about Campaign ’76, unless one happens to have a vested interest in the outcome, in which case the whole thing takes on a horse-race quality, which of course is close to the spirit in which it is written up in the dailies...
...How are you today...
...I will simply say that when I read that someone has been dismissed as a writer of gossip, my inclination is to go out and buy the book...
...Collier, Cockburn felt, “has produced a work of such evidently cruel triviality that the reader constantly asks himself why on earth a grown man should have felt compelled to write it...
...In working for The Washington Post’s “Style” section, Sally @inn made quite an interesting discovery about social coverage, as Tom Wolfe had, too: it doesn’t have to be favorable...
...She says that “those in power in Washington understand perfectly how much good or damage a write-up in the social section can do...
...that would be heard across the land if, say, a book by a White House staffer critical of the President were assigned for review to other members of the administration and found to be a bad book...
...The Honey or the Source...
...Where one is taken to lunch says a lot,” she says...
...Of late, unfortunately, the “Style” section has been behaving itself...
...Collier proceeded on the assumption that if someone is well enough known, almost everything about him is, in a way, interesting, and his most insignificant actions can be used to illuminate the forbidden topics of class and status...
...Puff...
...Although Bernstein and Woodward may not have intended it, we ended up with something approximating a picture of life in Washington in the early 1970s...
...Illuminating the Target The same has been true of our other contemporary “gossip” writers, of course...
...Sally Quinn says that she loved every minute of it once she “got over the shock of being publicly denounced and snubbed and of receiving hate mail...
...It was a lesson in manners...
...The gnats were driving President Nixon to distraction...
...Some people believe that the advertisements will tell the most about our society, however, and they may be right...
...Apple tells Halberstam in the Times newsroom, “Say, I was over at Peter and Ellen Straus’s-you know, Punch’s favorite co usin-last night, and Harding Bancroft [vice presidcnt of the Times] was there, and your name came up and I thought you’d be pleased-it was very favorably commented upon...
...social Climbing Another writer who is quite well known for violating the status taboo is Sally Quinn of The Waskington Post...
...a flagrant breach of private confidence, and an infringement of the rules of good breeding...
...He hesitated...
...His attention was over my right shoulder, on the archway...
...From inside the book a bad novel about journalism is probably struggling to get out, but Collier cannot manage this...
...He took his knife and showed me how he buttered his bread a little first, and then put honey on it, never touching his knife to the bread so as not to transfer crumbs to the honeypot...
...Are you ready for this...
...And in just the same way, The New York Review’s fireworks exploded harmlessly overhead, serving merely to illuminate the target...
...And here he is on Richard Nixon and the press: The gnats were getting to him...
...The water was mirrory still and dark and the terrace was of a blackish stone...
...It is not just that there is a danger, as in the Wicker case, of pointing out a discrepancy between egalitarian philosophy and elitist life style, although this would not be difficult with many eminent journalists today, including, very possibly, one or two of those who have publicly denounced Collier’s book...
...You’ll get the best quotes, and you won’t miss any from the star...
...Wolff fulminated...
...When Tom Wolfe began writing about status life in the midsixties, including as an important part of his technique such details as dress, manners, the patois, the ambience, he was dismissed as a gossip writer...
...A Lesson in Manners Anyway, I think that Barney Collier must have been aware of some of these points about short-term interest and long-term interest when he wrote his book, and thus made the wise decision to exclude all political “gossip...
...Did you hear that the so-and-so’s are splitting up...
...He adds that Collier “presents himself visibly to the reader as a shit...
...Collier apparently hadn’t heard about this prohibition (as I say, he seems to be half crazy), and he walked straight past the guards, got inside the statusphere and had a lovely time holding up a number of forbidden objects for our inspection...
...He said, “I name lots of guys’ books...
...En route we will encounter a number of Burning Issues...
...In fact one imagines that they are hoping no very serious scrutiny of their original stories will be undertaken, lest anyone point out what is surely the truththat their contribution to the demise of Nixon has been wildly exaggerated...
...The very same objections were raised...
...Rolly was very careful about the honey...
...Did you hear about the latest CIA outrage...
...In a puff, Scotty was transformed from a voice of prophesy and doom into a feisty little son of a knotty-kneed, left-handed shipyard worker on the filthy banks of the Clyde River in Glasgow...
...Here’s one I like: “Reporters had been anathema to me, after my father’s experience in Germany [ Lt...
...He seems to be part crazy, part intelligent...
...It is worse than that, because when status itself is examined, there is an obvious threat to the journalist who is a writer in name, but whose writings are usually doomed to instant oblivion...
...It’s just so fundamental to everything people do,” Tom Wolfe has remarked...
...Only reporters were worse...
...The first inkling anyone had of what was to come was a piece in /Morel, the journalism review, about Sander Vanocur, formerly a correspondent for NBC-TV, but by then down on his luck and looking for a job...
...For some reason, this form of journalistic rulebreaking is seen as a threat...
...who is a policy maker at heart, but is not in charge of policy...
...Eric Sevareid sent a furioso letter to The Washingtonian, which had run further extracts from the book...
...A Sisyphean task...
...Among the journa“Oh...
...Gen...
...A creep, a shit...
...There were eyes everywhere...
...But the problem here is that these people didn’t become celebrities because Collier wrote about them-he wrote about them precisely because they were celebrities...
...Now, like the good, tame media critic he was supposed to be, perhaps he should have taken note of it all and worried about the Burning Issues, such as: Are Evans and Novak Too Close To Their Sources...
...Most of the portraits in the book are, in fact, ambiguous: if you liked the person, you could see what you liked, if you disliked him or her, you could see what you disliked...
...In between scenes, Art turned his attention to me...
...When I reached for it, he said, “Careful of that...
...It must also be said, however, that some of the criticism this book has received is well deserved...
...His eyes were sharp...
...The Shit...
...AS Vogue has recently reminded us (in an article about gossip), “Washington, D. C., has become the new-age Holly wood...
...For one thing, as Sally Quinn has so unkindly reminded us, it illuminates social climbing, and thus also illuminates the routes to power, in many cases...
...He gave me some ideas for the book, and he suggested a title...
...Art was seated at his preferred table, down in the pit with his back to the wall...
...Status is the true subject of Collier’s book...
...There are several pages of this, and it is well done, I think...
...When this happened, apparently, Collier either changed the subject or walked out of the room...
...It is true, as Cockburn remarks, that his plan often appears to be “to trap them into foolish remarks, to reveal some ‘secret...
...except for Mao Tse-tung...
...I think it’s true to say that the whole subject of status is particularly threatening-and therefore particularly taboo-among those who are actively engaged in climbing the social rungs, or among those who find themselves in a relatively elevated, but nevertheless precarious social position...
...Did you hear what happened to Miss Jones down the road...
...Gnats...
...Almost every weekday lunchtime when Art is in town, he takes in the show at Sans Souci...
...One’s immediate suspicion is that there must be some Hidden Meaning here...
...To understand a society it is essential to understand how people climb...
...You’ll pay for that, Barney...
...Here Wicker “always studied Franc Shor’s wine choices with care, and was perennially surprised to find himself able to hold up his end of the conversation, and even on occasion to bring the table to his point of view . . . . it was not only in the executive dining room of the Geographic that he sometimes had a vivid sense of having come a long, long way...
...Like Barney Collier, she has been accused of writing gossip, although the reviews of her book that I have seen have been merely snide, not overtly hostile...
...As in: Did you hear about the latest Gallup Poll...
...Weird...
...But two years later it is already beginning to read like something you come across on the 69-cent shelf of remaindered items...
...The “trivial” details often have a way of making a much more basic point...
...Who knows...
...Geoffrey Wolff, writing in New Times, was beside himself with rage...
...Collier wrote about something else entirely...
...But then she says: “But I loved them because everybody in Washington goes to these horrible events at one time or another, and so I used them as a sort of training ground to meet and talk to and observe the famous and powerful people who make the town move...
...I asked...
...I have now read the book and read the reviews, turned back rather puzzled to the book, glanced over the reviews again, and concluded that, yes, there is indeed an Interesting Question worth examining...
...It can’t just be a bad book that everyone is so upset about...
...This may not be a bad idea if you happen to be having a problem with the autograph hunters at Elaine’s, but it doesn’t go very far towards solving the larger problem...
...This is what they write about, of course, but he just doesn’t want to hear about it...
...In fact, this disparity is so great that it seems journalists in some quarters have indeed become like film stars in that they tend to react violently to anything less than total praise...
...There is an important exception, however, and that is when the journalist turns his back entirely on contemporary realism, retires to the woods and writes a novel...
...And Crouse’s book really did seem interesting when it came out...
...She wrote: “The thing the Washington journalists in the book said to me when I called them up to say I was writing a column about it was, Don’t, don’t write anything about it, you’ll just give the book publicity and end up selling copies of it...
...Every day it’s like a new drop of poison,” Scotty spit...
...They flitted day and night, every day, everywhere...
...First of all, two of the portraits included, those of John Chancellor of NBC and Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post, are outright malicious, and if they had been excluded, as they should have been, it would be much easier to praise the book...
...are mostly faddist...
...Not “superstars,” mind you, no irony was intended...
...He watches with screwy eyes...
...Puff...
...puff...
...She put a kiss on the part of Art that he offered her-the upper rim of his left ear...
...Every“Does Ben Bradlee have clout...
...Theodore White called it “toilet bowl journalism...
...I don’t think Collier regards Washington journalists as enviable people at all...
...But the fact remains that today, such a short time later, whatever it was that Nixon said at that press conference is of no conceivable interest...
...Then, as a lady in a pink pantsuit, with her neck skin hanging, leaned her belted belly over my shoulder, I smelled the aroma of Joy...
...He talks of the Post as having “torpedo tubes...
...When Johnny Apple talked politics to Crouse, Crouse listened...
...All right, fair enough, no need to be unnecessarily hard on Nixon, no need to run the risk of being accused of bias, et cetera...
...Gross Gossipation’ It is, for example, “weird” to read of the contemporary reception accorded to Boswell’s Life of Johnson...
...Journalists are our superstars, let’s not forget...
...Even Stewart Alsop, whom Collier treats respectfully, is described at one point as “doing what so many Washington journalists habitually do in the company of others, and sometimes alone with their typewriters...
...But with many simple persons a mystery has been revealed, and a charm has been broken, and they will never again have the same respect for the Great which they once had...
...Status detail and what is currently called gossip is of interest to historians, but it is also of interest right now...
...Nor did...
...He said, “ ‘Clout in Washington.’ ” I said, “Who’s ‘Clout...
...But still, it is difficult to imagine reading an Evans and Novak column that is more than about a week old for precisely that reason (unless you happen to be one of those people who not only likes to read the political gossip but also goes to bed at night worrying about such matters as: Are They Too Close To Their Sources...
...Vanocur and Collier had lunch at Jean-Pierre’s, one of Washington’s better restaurants: Sander entered Jean-Pierre’s in an obvious hustle, waving a newspaper in one hand, while the other patted the mitre d’s shoulder...
...Thomas Babington Macaulay later came out with an assessment of Boswell’s character that makes anything written about Barney Collier pale by comparison...
...It seems to me that the most important attribute of gossip, the sine qua non, is that it be absolutely up-to-date...
...At times she even seems to take a perverse pleasure in it: “Social climbing and power climbing-the two are“ often synonymousare what make Washington run...
...The world‘s poets are now second rate and the living philosophers...
...They have come a long way, surely, in the ten years or so since Sally Quinn felt “terribly hsulted” sitting next to a Timesman...
...He said it had required thousands of dollars of architecture and engineering to build...
...This will surely be of greater interest than the day-to-day unfolding of those public events which to us, today, seem “newsworthy...
...Nevertheless, their book was widely criticized when it came out, and it was criticized precisely because it included the day-today stuff and not the weighty analysis and interpretation and moralizing that the reviewers seemed to want...
...Rolly was extremely proud of it...
...Johnson by reporting some unflattering observations about him...
...Tom Wicker, an associate editor of The New Yorlc Times, tells us something about himself in his book on the Attica prison riot when he says that he “envies” William Kunstler, the radical lawyer, for being more to the left than he, but he tells us more when he describes the scene in the National Geographic dining room, with prominent guests whose names fill a paragraph...
...I said, “Okay, what’s your name...
...Just such an issue might have interested media critic Ephron, but she chose to ignore it, revealing instead that there was a minor conspiracy of silence afoot to try to stop people from hearing about Collier’s book...
...The Buchwald portrait itself is in that category, as are many others-Dan Rather, Rowland Evans, Eric Sevareid, Ben Bradlee, and (as far as I am concerned) the muchmaligned Sander Vanocur chapter (with the caveat that the brief discussion of Vanocur’s reported affair with Shirley Machine, the film actress, was in very poor taste considering that Vanocur’s wife was dying of cancer at the time...
...Fall leaves and apples floated in the water...
...After all, you can laugh off the comment about gnats, although there is surely some justice to Collier’s observation...
...puff...
...But curiously enough, anyone from the fraternity who breaks ranks, breaks the rules, and decides to write about the broader spectrum of life-asitisbeing-lived is apparently in danger of being denounced by his colleagues...
...Ephron’s suggestion amounts to a recommendation that journalists make themselves even more like movie stars-in effect by getting themselves press agents...
...Journalists and Superstars The book was published in the fall of 1975 and received hostile reviews everywhere...
...Day-to-Day Trivia The fact is, most journalists-certainly almost all journalists in Washingtonwrite “stories” that it would be almost inconceivable to imagine wanting to read a year later (24 hours later often is more like it), and to make matters worse, most of them write about incredibly narrow little wavelengths out of the total spectrum of human events...
...The Honey and the Source: Reporters and Their Status Taboo by Tom Bethell The response to Barney Collier’s book, Hope and Fear In Washington (The Early Seventies): The Story of the Washington Press Corps, has been so immoderately hostile all round that you know he must have put his finger on an exposed nerve...
...Both Collier and Quinn, then, have violated the status taboo (although Quinn much more conspicuously in her Washington Post “Style” pieces than in her book), and as a result a predictable outcry arose from the press...
...To do this, it is true that he used his journalist friends, or perhaps ex-friends would be more accurate...
...but surely it is very presumptuous to assume that he is “envious” of the people he is writing about...
...nah...
...When covering a party she advises that the best thing is to “find the most important powerful person in the room and stick close...
...He said the glass was tinted and extra strong to withstand hail...
...kicking a man when he’s down...
...She notes at one point that she “began to be seen as a personality rather than just another reporter” without seeming to appreciate the danger therein...
...This has happened recently to Ward Just, a former Washington Post reporter, whose novels have very probably been praised more than they have been read...
...gossip...
...and I suppose this is what has outraged them as much as anything...
...New journalism” is almost as unpopular among the “working press” as it is among the “men of letters” who write modish essays praising whatever is currently fashionable...
...Sevareid compared Collier rather extravagantly to “the sick loners in the crowd who use real guns to assassinate the prominent...
...He wanted to put this in the Post story, but was reprimanded by his hard-news-approach editor...
...But from the press’s point of view, there is something more threatening, I believe, about Collier’s book...
...They gave us the story of what it was like to work on The Washington Post on such a story, all the day-to-day trivia, in other words, all the behind-the-scenes stuff...
...Weird,” was Art Buchwald’s oneword description of the book, and that’s not a bad description...
...to die...
...Hollywood arrived in the Washington Post newsroom...
...tiny details...
...He’s a creep, that much is clear from his book...
...Actually, it was from the money Bob and I made on one of our books...
...You’re not going to do him, are ya...
...In that sense, then, Nora Ephron is quite right in pointing out the connection between journalism andstardom...
...Nora Ephron deals with this worrisome matter very inadequately, however, because she suggests that the best way for the Journalist-as-Superstar to cope with the celebrity problem is to stop granting interviews to people like Barney Collier...
...Where are the philosophers...
...bad books are published every day of the year, and if they are as bad as this one is supposed to be, they are ignored...
...She does this here and there in her book We’re Going To Make You A Star, an account of her unsuccessful tryout for the CBS Morning News in 1973...
...Then what is all the fuss about...
...Their column is, surely, pure political gossipwhat was said at yesterday’s secret meeting-although none the worse for that...
...He was businesslike...
...Television did it, not ‘The Dial Press...
...I don’t have clout...
...Even if they were outraged by the truth, they continued to read...
...Me1 Elfin sat in his Newsweek bureau, a block away from the White House, and he watched...
...Are you ready for this...
...Who’s Got Clout?’ The best sections deal with journalists whom Collier evidently does not feel strongly about one way or the other, but is content to observe with a degree of detachment, for instance, James Reston of The New York Times: He puffed smoke from a curved pipe...
...And it worked...
...Then Art saw something coming that caused him to hunch up his shoulders, suck in the left side of his mouth, close his left eye, cock his head to the right and up, and shake...
...That much also is clear...
...Phew...
...He can then be praised for his courage and safely ignored...
...A lesson in manners...
...Where are all the great men...
...and Quinn also brings to light the amorous inclinations of one producer, again quite damagingly...
...But surely the point is that Collier’s book can be discussed quite independently of his character, whatever that may be...
...In a voice loud enough for anyone who cared to hear, the mitre d’ announced: “Oh, hello, Mister Vmocur...
...The subject of status is like a house with thickly curtained windows, boarded up entrances, No Entry signs, and guards patrolling the perimeter...
...Scotty’s voice was mellow and brooding...
...But why did The Dial Press print this piece of shit...
...It was interesting, even though it was, by the lights of what is normally allowed onto the front page, trivia...
...Collier tells us, for example, that Johnny Apple of the Times “plopped into a chair upstairs in the living room and almost immediately began to babble about politics...
...They were flying in his eyes and buzzing in his ears, and nowhere could he go without being bothered by them...
Vol. 7 • February 1976 • No. 12
