The Most of Nora Ephron Page 8
But there’s more to the story. Erickson’s draft was sent to Goodwin for approval. Then, in June, Esquire received a letter from James St. Clair, who turned out to be Goodwin’s lawyer after all, demanding sixteen thousand dollars for Goodwin to pay the legal fees entailed in reaching the settlement. This came as a surprise to the management. Blinder was under the impression that the token payment of one thousand dollars was agreed upon; he also believed that this was to have been a transaction among gentlemen, not lawyers. Esquire’s house counsel, Ron Diana, replied to St. Clair on July 7. He said the magazine was completely unwilling to pay such a high fee, particularly because it continued to believe in the accuracy of Burlingham’s article; Diana instead offered five thousand dollars. Arnold Hyatt, the shoe man, then resurfaced. He called Blinder to say that Goodwin was shocked at the belligerent tone of Diana’s letter; Goodwin, all injured innocence, could not understand how things had gotten so unpleasant. Blinder was apparently persuaded by the call, and the $12,500 fee was arrived at. Blinder then sent Hyatt a case of champagne.
Out-of-court settlements are extremely complicated, or so I have found from talking to lawyers in the past couple of weeks. They’re reached as a result of a combination of practical and ethical considerations. Generally speaking, though, if a magazine is willing to settle, the rule is this: if the magazine believes its article was right, it may settle for practical considerations and pay a token amount to avoid court costs. If the magazine is wrong, it may settle not only by paying off but also by printing a retraction, correction, or apology. What is extremely rare—so rare that none of the lawyers I interviewed could recall a similar case—is for a magazine that believes it is right to pay off and print a retraction of sorts.
I can’t quarrel with the financial settlement Goodwin got. I don’t like it, but it’s a business decision, I suppose. But Goodwin got the money and the apology. This is a tribute to him: he is as crafty and manipulative and brilliant as Bo Burlingham said he was. But it’s a bad moment for this magazine. Abe Blinder told me that he had no problem with the settlement because: “There is no principle involved.” I would like to state the principle involved. It’s very simple. A magazine has an obligation to its writers and readers to stand by what it prints.
In any case, the Goodwin business is over. Bo Burlingham got $1,250 for his article and Dick Goodwin got $12,500 and an apology. There are all sorts of lessons to be drawn here, but the only one that seems to me at all worth mentioning is that I will henceforth try, when assigning articles on controversial subjects, to find writers who know the Tisch brothers.
In our conversation, Abe Blinder said that another reason he would probably not allow this column to run in Esquire was that Arnold Gingrich is dead and cannot defend himself. I am deeply sorry that Arnold is dead, for many reasons. For one thing, he was a man who could change his mind, and I like to think that by now he might have come around to Burlingham’s way of seeing Dick Goodwin. For another, I think he meant it when he said what he did at the end of his monologue on Goodwin: “I’ve always said that this is a magazine of infinite surprises where people can say what they damn please, even to the extent of the editors disagreeing among themselves.” If he were alive, I think that on those grounds he would have allowed me to print this column in the magazine: he would also have admitted that I outfoxed him just a little bit on that one small point.
One last thing. I speak only for myself, but I would like to apologize to Bo Burlingham.
—November 1976
I Just Want to Say: The World Is Not Flat
LAST WEEK I went to one of those Internet conferences I get invited to now and then, and of course New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was there. He wasn’t actually there in person. It wasn’t that important a conference. He sent a tape of himself. He took the entire thesis of his best-selling book The World Is Flat and squished it down into twenty minutes. Coincidentally, two nights earlier, I had found myself standing across from Friedman, in person, at a craps table in Las Vegas. As he rolled the dice to make a five, I shouted, “This is it, Tom, this is your chance to make up for being wrong on Iraq.” But he rolled a seven and crapped out.
And then there he was at this conference. There was a big banner over the screen that said THE WORLD IS FLAT, and all the bright, young Internet people watched Friedman talk about globalization and say that technology had flattened the walls of the world. They were enthralled by him and actually managed to stay focused and off their mobile devices for the entire time he was speaking. Afterward, instantly, they all turned their mobile devices back on, and the huge conference room was suddenly illuminated by hundreds of small boxes and orchestrated by the sound of thousands of tiny fingers tapping away.
Friedman, of course, is not just a columnist for the world’s most powerful newspaper—he’s something else. He’s a panelist. There’s an entire population of panelists today, mostly guys, who make a living in some way or other but whose true career consists of appearing at conferences like this. Some of these panelists are players and some are merely journalists, but for a brief moment, the panel equalizes them all. The panelists perform in front of audiences that include ordinary people, but their real performances are for one another at places like the Foursquare Conference in New York and Herbert Allen’s summer CEO-fest in Sun Valley; the panelists’ job is to put into perspective whatever conventional wisdom happens to apply at the moment, and to validate it.
In fact, these conferences tend to be validating in every way, and it’s no surprise that at the last two I attended, there were representatives from Walmart who appeared onstage and were never once asked about their public-relations difficulties over pesky things like the way they treat their employees. (At both conferences, though, the men from Walmart were cheerfully asked about their company’s policy of requiring executives to fly tourist and sleep two-in-a-room on business trips. Both times the men from Walmart cheerfully replied. Both times the audience cheerfully chuckled along.)
Anyway, it interests me that every time I go to one of these conferences, there’s a piece of absolutely unarguable conventional wisdom about the Internet that seems sooner or later to turn out to be wrong. It’s not easy to be wrong about the Internet—the Internet consists of pretty much everything in the universe. So pretty much anything you say about it is going to turn out to be partly true in some way or other. Nonetheless, it turns out not to be.
For example, when I started going to these conferences, it was a given that the Internet was going to set everyone free; this was back in the day, when we understood the Internet to mean e-mail. The world was full of executives and panelists who took the position that it was much simpler to return twenty e-mails than ten telephone calls. But executives now return hundreds of e-mails every day, and life is not remotely simpler. They return e-mails day and night. They never go home from their e-mail. What’s more, they absorb almost nothing that happens, because the minute it does, their BlackBerrys are blinking at them.
Then the dot-com boom began, and a new piece of conventional wisdom emerged: the dot-coms would make us rich. This was true. They did. And then, suddenly, the dot-coms crashed. So not quite true.
Time for a new piece of conventional wisdom: there was no money in the Internet. This was confounding: it seemed that an amazing, unheard-of, completely mystifying episode had occurred in the history of capitalism. A huge business had emerged, but there was no profit in it. Warren Buffett, who is the king of the panelists, the überpanelist, the second-richest man in America, the sage of Omaha who plays online bridge with the first-richest man in America, gave a speech during this period, and reminded all his acolytes that between 1904 and 1908 there were 240 automobile companies in business; by 1924, 10 of them accounted for 90 percent of revenues. This sentence was quoted as if it had come straight from the Mount, although no one was entirely sure what it meant. Was everyone going to go out of business, or just almost everyone? The guys who’d started in garages would make money, o
f course—they’d already made money. The guys who’d invented the technology and the software would be rich. But everyone who’d come afterward would be doomed.
Many panels were held on this point, and many panelists were thoughtful and interesting (and puzzled) about the bleak future ahead. But one thing was clear: there was no money in the Internet. And advertising was not the answer: advertising would never work because the people using the Internet would never ever accept it. The Internet was free. The Internet was democratic. The Internet was pure. Ads would never fly. What’s more, in the TiVo world we now live in, the ads would be blocked by Internet users who would never stand for them.
Which brings me to this conference on the Internet I attended last week, where, it will not surprise you to hear, there was a new piece of conventional wisdom: there were billions of dollars to be made in the Internet. It had suddenly become clear that there was a lot of advertising money out there, and all you had to do was provide content so that the ads had something to run alongside of. It crossed my mind that the actual definition of “content” for an Internet company was “something you can run an ad alongside of.” I found this a depressing insight, even though my conviction that all conventional wisdom about the Internet turns out to be untrue rescued me somewhat from a slough of despond on the subject.
And by the way, the world is not flat. There are walls everywhere. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq, where everybody crapped out, not just Tom Friedman.
—March 2006
The Making of Theodore H. White
HE WAS ALONE, as always.
A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it, and Theodore H. White was alone. It was a hot, muggy day in New York when he finished, or perhaps it was a cold, windy night; there is no way to be certain, although it is certain that Theodore H. White was certain of what the weather was like that day, or that night, because when Theodore H. White writes about things, he notices the weather, and he usually manages to get it into the first paragraph or first few pages of whatever he writes. “Hyannis Port sparkled in the sun that day, as did all New England” (The Making of the President 1960). “It was hot; the sun was blinding; there would be a moment of cool shade ahead under the overpass they were approaching” (The Making of the President 1964). “Thursday had been a cold day of drizzling rain in Manhattan, where Richard Nixon lived” (The Making of the President 1968). “I could see the fan of yellow water below shortly before the plane dipped into the overcast” (The Making of the President 1972). And now Theodore H. White looked at the opening line of his new book, Breach of Faith: “Wednesday dawned with an overcast in Washington—hot, sticky, threatening to rain—July 24th, 1974.” It had worked before and it would work again.
White flicked a cigarette ash from his forty-sixth Marlboro of the day and took the last sheet of one hundred percent rag Strathmore parchment typing paper from his twenty-two-year-old IBM Executive typewriter. It was the 19,246,753rd piece of typing paper he had typed on in his sixty years. He was tired. He was old and tired. He was also short. But mainly he was tired. He was tired of writing the same book over and over again. He was tired of being taken in, taken in by John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, General Westmoreland, Richard Nixon, tired of being taken in by every major politician in the last sixteen years. He was tired of being hornswoggled by winners. He was tired of being made to look like an ass, tired of having to apologize in each successive book for the mistakes he had made in the one before. He was tired of being imitated by other journalists, and he was tired of rewriting their work, which had surpassed his own. He was tired of things going wrong, tired of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; the night of the Saturday Night Massacre, for example, he found himself not in the Oval Office but on vacation in the South of France, where he was reduced to hearing the news from his hotel maid. He was tired of describing the people he was writing about as tired.
We must understand how Theodore H. White got to be that way, how he got to be so old and so tired. We must understand how this man grew to have a respect and awe for the institutions of American government that was so overweening as to blind him to the weaknesses of the men who ran them. We must understand how he came to believe that all men in power—even base men—were essentially noble, and when they failed to be noble, it had merely to do with flaws, flaws that grew out of a massive confluence of forces, forces like PR, the burgeoning bureaucracy, television, manipulation, and California. We must understand his associates, good men, tired men but good men, men he lunched with every week, men who worked at newsmagazines which had long since stopped printing run-on sentences with subordinate clauses attached to the end. And to understand what has happened to Theodore H. White, which is the story of this column, one would have to go back to earlier years, to the place where it all started.
Time magazine.
That was where it all started. At Time magazine. Not everything started at Time magazine—Theodore H. White developed his infuriating style of repeating phrases over and over again later in his life, after he had left Time magazine—but that is where most of it started. It was at Time magazine that White picked up the two overriding devices of newsmagazine writing. The first was a passion for tidbits, for small details, for color. President Kennedy liked to eat tomato soup with sour cream in it for lunch. Adlai Stevenson sunned himself in blue sneakers and blue shorts. Hubert Humphrey ate cheese sandwiches whenever he was in the midst of a crisis.
The second was omniscience, the omniscience that results when a writer has had a week, or a month, or a year to let events sift out, the kind of omniscience, in short, that owes so much to hindsight.
Until 1959, when Theodore H. White began work on the four-hundred-one-page, blue-bound Making of the President 1960, no reporter had written a book on a political campaign using these two devices. White did, and his book changed the way political campaigns were covered. He wrote the 1960 campaign as a national pageant, a novelistic struggle for power between two men. He wrote about what they wore and what they ate and what they said behind the scenes. He went to meetings other reporters did not even ask to attend; the participants at the meetings paid scant attention to him. And then, of course, the book was published, became a best seller, and everything began to change.
Change.
Change begins slowly, as it always does, and when it began, White was slow to notice it. He covered the 1964 campaign as he had covered the one before; he did not see that all the detail and color and tidbits and dialogue made no difference in that election; the political process was not working in the neat way it had worked four years before, with hard-fought primaries and nationally televised debates and a cliff-hanger vote; the 1964 election was over before it even began. Then he came to 1968, and the change, mounting like an invisible landslide, intensified, owing to a massive confluence of factors. The first was the national press, which began to out-report him. The second was White himself. He no longer went to meetings where he was ignored; he was, after all, Theodore H. White, historian to American presidential elections. Had he been a student of physics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, instead of a student of history and all the Cicero he could cram into his books, he might have understood what was happening. But he did not. The change, the invisible landslide of change, eluded him. He wrote a book about a new Nixon, an easier, more relaxed, more affable Nixon. He missed the point. He missed the point about Vietnam; he missed the point about the demonstrations. Larry O’Brien used to be important; now it was these kids; who the hell were these kids to come along and take politics away from Theodore H. White? He missed the point about the Nixon campaign too. And so, in 1969, came the first great humiliation. A young man named Joe McGinniss, a young man who had gone to low- and mid-level meetings of the Nixon campaign, where the participants had paid him scant attention, produced the campaign book of the year, The Selling of the President, and even knocked off Theodore H. White’s title in the process. Then, before he k
new it, it was 1972, another campaign, another election, and White went through it, like so many other reporters, ignoring Watergate; months later, as he was finishing the 1972 book, he was forced to deal with the escalating scandal; he stuck it in, a paragraph here, a paragraph there, a chapter to wrap it all up, all this sticking out like sore thumbs throughout the manuscript. That year, the best book on the campaign was written not by White but by Timothy Crouse, who had stayed at the fringes, reporting on the press. To make matters worse, Crouse’s book, The Boys on the Bus, included a long, not entirely flattering section on Theodore H. White, a section in which White complained, almost bitterly, about the turn things had taken. He spoke of the night McGovern won the nomination in Miami:
“It’s appalling what we’ve done to these guys,” he told Crouse. “McGovern was like a fish in a goldfish bowl. There were three different network crews at different times. The still photographers kept coming in in groups of five. And there were at least six writers sitting in the corner—I don’t even know their names. We’re all sitting there watching him work on his acceptance speech, poor bastard. He tries to go into the bedroom with Fred Dutton to go over the list of vice presidents, which would later turn out to be the fuck-up of the century, of course, and all of us are observing him, taking notes like mad, getting all the little details. Which I think I invented as a method of reporting and which I now sincerely regret. If you write about this, say that I sincerely regret it. Who gives a fuck if the guy had milk and Total for breakfast?”