Behind Enemy Lines

-- Newsweek Magazine:

 

The veteran political reporter R. W. Apple had the blues. He was sitting in the makeshift New York Times bureau off the convention floor, hunched over his laptop computer, looking the way Tom Wolfe once described Jimmy Breslin—like a bowling ball radiating steam. “These Democrats,” Apple groused. “Aren’t they acting like . . . Republicans?”

It was a serious allegation, but true. It seemed to me, a former Republican speechwriter asked by NEWSWEEK to observe the Democrats, that they were acting just like us—now brawls, no epithets. Even Jesse Jackson was showing up time.

The delegates, like their nominees, were proper boomers, businesslike and tailored. There was much talk of unity, but what I saw was the pretty homogenized gathering of one of the great parties of an increasingly homogenized country—a country that has been ironed out, no lumps and wrinkles and grass stains, a country in which we are becoming all alike, sophisticated, Gapped, linened and Lancomed.

This is one of the things that leave reporters depressed, this is why Johnny Apple had the blues: they want life to be authentic, they want people to be vivid, they want conventions that are a punch in the nose, they want to play a role. But it’s hard to play the part of city-slicker reporter now, because no one will play the part of rube.

You look to the podium, and you want to hear thoughts as big as the room, words bright as balloons. You yearn for something spontaneous and real, for a moment when reality breaks through the screen—a chant begun in the back of the hall that spreads and rings the rafters, a demonstration nobody planned, a speech full of things that are true.

You get lonely for the big heart of politics. You root for the rhetoric.

But—life is life and not bad but sometimes thin—and what you get is this:

Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo. Both hit it out of the park in ‘84, both this time hit a double.

Note to those who would be great speakers: Jesse Jackson doesn’t use a TelePrompTer. He memorizes set pieces that he has debuted elsewhere and weaves them together into a new whole. And he knows how to use fear. When he first comes out he stands back and sucks in the tension and high stakes in a great nostril-flaring inhalation; somewhere in his chest they turn into energy and the actor’s art. This is a trick particular to born politicians and schizophrenics.

Mario Cuomo also is a great actor. You have to act a speech. It’s a paradox of modern politics: to “act” is to be phony, but because of the demands and limitations of bigroom oratory, if you don’t act the text you’ll look wooden and—phony. Natural politicians understand and master this intuitively, without thinking.

When Cuomo puts out his hand to maintain his command—that movement that says, “Don’t clap yet, the applause line is coming”—it is the short, blunt hand of a masseur. He’s not only controlling the crowd, he’s massaging them. He’s touching the audience’s shoulder and saying, “Lie that? Wait’ll I get to your back.”

Cuomo talks about justice, Jackson talks about love, and something else. The constant subtext of his speeches is how hard it is to be alive, how tiring it is to go every day to a job that hurts your soul, your back. “She works haaaaaard for the money!”

Delegates and reporters want to be moved; Jackson moves them. Which is why they forgive him anything.

Al Gore. Earnest, modern, blandly debonair, he was the surprise of the convention, with the best speech. He had context: the war is over, the world has changed, our next great battle is not on the land but for it. Great Elvis joke—focus groups must be showing the Elvis stuff is a plus—“It is time for them to go” a good chant. Gore seems half suburban high-school principal and half preacher man; he’ll be good on the stump and tough in debate. Kids, Tipper and mom are great, dad made me think of the John Huston character in “Winter Kills.” I believe he may be running the secret government Perot found out about before he quit.

Ann Richards. The only person in America of whom one can say: she reminds me of Lana Turner and Stu Spencer. Actually she’s like the matriarch of a big family of deeply attractive sons and daughters on a Ponderosa-like spread in a TV show with a name like “El Paso!” Cursed like Mario and Jesse with high expectations, her speech wasn’t the dazzler of yesteryear, but it was solid and did the job. In a quiet moment outside the convention hall, Richards ruminated on human nature and said, “People are what they appear to be. That’s been true in my experience. People aren’t good at hiding what they are.” This struck me as the smartest thing I heard anybody say in four days.

Bill Clinton. Oh Bill. For days I’d been picking up great speech ions, I could feel it coming. I was wrong. The big speech was good, not great, and not quite the equal of Dukakis’s—“The Reagan erruh is ovuh”—in ’88.

It may have been a focus-group speech—“We gotta say something about Bush’s lack of vision,. that gets a very strong response in groups”—or a committee speech—“That pretty part from Ted, that can be one of the endings!” Whatever, the result was a weak cup of coffee, somewhat stimulating but essentially insubstantial.

“We can do better” was JFK.” Now that we have changed the world it’s time to change America” is almost word for word George Bush. This is known in the speechwriting dodge (William Safire) as being fiercely derivative (Oscar Wilde).

You think Republicans won the past 12 years with lines, not ideas, so the Clinton speech was a series of applause lines largely unconnected to thought, ideas, philosophy. And a chicken in every pot– or, as you put it,” “An America where health care is a right, not a privilege” is a promise—not, as you said, a vision.

“I don’t have all the answers . . .” was refreshing. “ More empowerment, less entitlement” has potential and should be developed. Ditto “A government that is leaner, not meaner.”

Big tonal mistake: Bush is down, but Americans are fair; they’re mad at the president, but you don’t convince them you’re better by treating him with scorn. Put-downs are most effective when you’ve established a spirit of generosity. (And if you’re going to be a pugilist you better be a poet.)

Second total mistake: references to “my fighting spirit” and “the passionate commitment that I have.” Never talk this way about yourself in a speech. Or in a conversation, either. (You don’t have to put a hat on your virtues and make faces. Your hero JFK’s references to himself were self-mocking.)

The new covenant sounds both Biblical and, well, new. If it catches on it will be because people understand it, which so far they don’t. Repetition alone won’t do it; context and clarity are all. (Note to speechwriter: context, as you know, is often lengthy and rarely snappy. Your communications director will resist what he calls “long globs of no sound bite.” Write it the way you know it should be and smuggle it to Bill on the plane. If the communications chief threatens to fire your, offer to return home to write a snappy campaign memoir. After he takes you to dinner and asks you to stay, keep smuggling.)

The Film. The most compelling rhetoric of the last convention night was in the Bill Clinton bio. It was wonderful—stirring, soft focused and emotional—and alarming. Clinton’s focus groups show people think he was born rich; in the film, Hillary just happens to mention that when she talks to people they tell her the most amazing thing, they think Bill was born rich!

And can we get this one straight? Reporters and the Clinton organization keep saying he was “born in poverty,” but from all the pictures and the facts that have been revealed, Clinton appears to have been born middle or lower-middle class—the meaning of these phrases keeps changing—like just about everybody else in those days. Grandma and grandpa, with whom he lived as a child, had a cook/housekeeper. Grandpa had a store. Billy had a cowboy hat. This is poverty only by the standards of—forgive me—Northern boomer media snots who see Southerners as . . . naturally impoverished. (It was probably the outhouse that began the hagiography.)

I bet half the parents in America suspect that the real nature of Clinton’s deprivation wasn’t financial but emotional. Grandma and grandpa worked, mom was at school, his father was dead. But politicians can’t say, “I was born in loneliness . . .” to show they know something about pain.

Speaking of which: it is good that those who seek to lead us tell us of their lives, and the events that shaped them. But—there was a lot of my dad died, my son almost died, dad was a drinker, my sister died.

Why do modern Democrats have to declare to each other that they have suffered, that they are victims? In group therapy this is known as saying hello, but—this is government. The real pain in a person’s life is interior; the anguish unveiled in these speeches seems a surrogate for genuine pain, and the device seems not revelatory but deceptive.

But then, this is a party half in love with death. It is almost three decades since his passing, but JFK was the most popular man at the convention, RFK the most beloved; the first great moment of applause came when their pictures came up on the squares of a screen. All conventions are obsessed with something, but Democratic obsession with the Kennedys speaks of their continuing confusion about the facts of their predicament. They didn’t lose the presidency because when the Kennedys died they lost their charisma; they lost the presidency because they lost their voting base.

The Suit. This is a departure. Most people running for president wear your basic Brooks Brothers suit, but the one Clinton wore through most of the convention has bigger, sloped shoulders, and a sharper break. Kind of a Montclair, N.J., real-estate salesman’s suit. I wonder how many days or weeks his staff debated it. “Look, I don’t wanna get in your way but we’ve already got a Slick Willie problem, OK? You look at it and see chic breakout outfit, but other people are gonna think of the guy who screwed ’em at the closing.”

By the way, Clinton goes home to Little Rock to get his hair cut at a local place. This is so he’ll have an average-guy haircut so the voters will think he’s a regular guy. And the voters do notice it. They think to themselves: he goes to the local Clip ’n’ Snip so he’ll have an average-guy haircut so the voters will think he’s an average guy.

Clinton’s charm and warmth and intelligence are obviously real. His friends whisper the famous flaw: he wants too much to be liked. So do most politicians, of course. They love the roar of approval, the hands outstretched to touch their faces. Clinton’s flaw, I think, starts with a fleshy calculation, an instinct to blunt disagreement and split the diff, to shade and swallow. All presidents manipulate. FDR did, and so did Ronald Reagan. But with them, people perceived that beneath the overlay was a core of hardness and toughness. Clinton has survived a great deal this year. But one wonders: at the core, where it counts, what is there?

What’s Wrong With the Right?

-- New York Times:

 

One day in 1980, New York’s history-minded Democratic Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, sat in his wood-paneled study reading the Op-Ed page of a major newspaper. Suddenly he smacked the floor with his cane like Lionel Barrymore, shook his head and growled, “Of a sudden, the Republican Party is the party of ideas.”

At least that’s how I imagine it. Anyway, it was 1980, he did say the Republican Party had become the party of ideas. and he was right. He was also surprised, understandably. A party that had spent decades hanging on through low budget liberalism was finally changing. prompted by forces its establishment had not ignited and could not control.

From the West came the broad, grass-roots antitax movement signaled by passage of California’s Proposition 13. From the East came new writers with new assumptions, who argued for change in the journals of New York and Washington. The two forces converged to produce something fresh: a modern conservatism that could govern.

At the center was Ronald Reagan, who kept in one piece a naturally divided movement—social conservatives who would ban abortion, libertarians who would legalize cocaine—first by giving its members a winner when they hadn’t expected to have a winner in their lifetimes. Mr. Reagan’s interests were widely and openly conservative. He had come to his beliefs at a time when the right’s tenets were clear: budgets should be balanced; put a Federal agency in charge or the Sahara and it would run out of sand. But he was receptive to new thinking and generous toward all strains of conservatism because in a way he believed In them all. His respect for other conservatives spread as if by contagion. For a decade the people he brought to Washington functioned pretty well as one big fractious family.

And then … the crash. Not of the economy but Dr Communism, which brought down more than the Berlin wall. For if Mr. Reagan held modem conservatism together, two pillars kept it aloft. The first was unambiguous and effective opposition to the evil of Communism. The second was a promise that Republicans would make government smaller, less expensive, less intrusive. The first pillar fell last summer, on roughly the day The New York Times ran the headline “Gorbachev Quits as Party Head; Ends Communism’s 744Year Reign.” The second pillar began to wobble when the Bush Administration, in 1990, rescinded “Read my lips.”

The end of imperial Communism made the movement start to float apart; the end of “Read my lips” made it mean. And thus the current impasse, in which conservatives hut”1 thunderbolts at one another. William F. Buckley Jr., an architect of the movement and one of its authentic heroes, is castigated as a narrow-minded excluder; he, in turn, eases into a pair of tuxedo slippers to tap out editorials damaging the Presidential campaign or the most rightward of the serious candidates in the 1992 race. Pat Buchanan.

It is not an easy time to be a conservative.

A decade ago, while Pat Moynihan was turning into Lionel Barrymore, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., a columnist and the editor of the conservative journal The American Spectator, was writing a book called “The Liberal Crack-Up,” which traced with originality and verve the decline of liberal thinking through liberal behavior. Now he has written a book abut the right. “The Conservative Crack-Up” is part memoir, part essay, and it has some useful; things to say about Conservatives and their current predicament.

“The politics of the left and right are bereft,” Mr. Tyrrell says. “The liberals have not had new ideas since the last ice age . . . Conservatives have coherent ideas, but they have very few gifted pols. The conservatives relish for politics is only sporadic and almost wholly dependent on their perception that some zany reformer has become a threat to their home sweet home.”

Mr. Tyrrell notes that one of the reasons conservatives didn’t make some of the gains that they could have was that by the time they won power in 1980 many of their leaders, from their new President to the editor of their most important journal (Mr. Buckley of National Review) to the godfather of the freshest troops (Irving Krystal of the neoconservatives) were near or at retirement age. For them the victory of 1980 was less a hungry beginning than a satisfying end.

But this book is best when Mr. Tyrrell speaks of the distance, the utter disconnection, between the nation’s establishment—the press, academia, the arts—and its people. He accurately observes that “conservatives have become accustomed to being underdogs in the cultural wars,” that in the 1970’s the conservative movement was the least celebrated of movements, receiving “nothing comparable to the publicity attending the antiwar movement, the youth movement or the gruesome feminist movement. And yet only the conservative movement was to attract enough support from the country to capture the White House.”

The elites did more than ignore a movement. The “smokestack industries of American culture”—universities, policy institutes and the news media—have polluted the intellectual environment with their “incessant politicizing.” The result, in Mr. Tyrrell’s view, is a national blandness, a new conformity: “America’s Kultursmog has eliminated most forms of intellectual individualism with alarming thoroughness. There was a time when American culture was teeming with diversity and even with heresy. But over the last few decades the atmosphere of American culture has grown stale as the arts, ethics and every product of intellect has been tainted with the political vaporings of the New Age.”

*   *   *

Mr. Tyrrell is amusing and pointed when he rails about what is wrong with the left. When he writes about the right, however, things get uncomfortable. Much of the history he tells is old and has been told, often better, elsewhere. Some of Mr. Tyrrell’s complains seem tired. When he laments his and other conservatives’ exclusion from the tables of the news media titans, one simple wonders why he resents the absence of a dying establishment. Young writers in their 20’s and 30’s, hazed, shaved and barked at in the politically correct boot camps of the Ivy League, continue to rise, rebel and turn right. And they are the future.

There is less Menckenish irreverence in this book than mere rudeness towards safe targets. The score-settling ratio is high. Mr. Tyrrell calls Gary Mills a backstabber and Hilton Kramer bilious; he suggests that George Will is an explosive figure motivated by malice. Often the book seems less an examination of a crack-up than an example of it.

Sometimes it is hard to read, hampered by an odd tone, a kind of dispirited puckishness. And sometimes it’s just heavy going. Some conservative writers like Mr. Tyrrell affect a kind of big word style (predisposed to rodomontades, Mr. Tyrrell tends to compose feuilietons about the day’s perturbations). In part I think because they all grew up in a time when liberals had intellectual hegemony, one of the first things you had to prove as a conservative was that you weren’t stupid. But I’m not sure conservatives have to prove that any more.

Ultimately, this book is frustrating because it does not maintain a level of seriousness about what is behind the name-calling on the right—an inability so far to reach agreement on what conservatives should stand for and fight for in the new world. Should the right try, heroically, to return to the fight for smaller, less expensive government, or should it aim at increasing revenues that would allow us to get the books aright and fund what Pat Buchanan has called Jack Kemp’s big rock candy mountain? Mr. Tyreell does not address this and other questions with depth.

There are, in 1992, many kinds of conservatives. Concorde conservatives crisscrossing the Atlantic to check on this election and that caucus, cultural conservatives, bristling supply-siders, spiky libertarians and others, all rent by 12 years of intramural fighting, conflicting ambitions and snubs. A dozen years of leadership will leave you tired; a dozen years away from the grass roots, when you used to be the grass roots, might leave you disoriented. It would be amazing if they weren’t fighting, and weren’t mean.

One wishes Mr. Tyrrell’s magazine and other journals of the right would be not an army but a battlefield, not a combatant but a site on which combat occurs, each of the many sides contending, gaining and losing terrain, until the best side wins. We might all sit down, breathe deep, take heart and busy ourselves with pillar building. As for those fractious, angry Washington conservatives who would rather, this year, hurl thunderbolts, perhaps they need a rest. If they don’t come together soon, they will get it.

Those Moist Amphibian Lips

-- New York Times:

 

Once upon a time in the land of children’s books there resided certain conventions: fairy tales would be relatively simple stories, and the lessons they provided would be both practical (cry wolf too often and no one will listen when the real wolf comes) and moral (virtue is, in the end, rewarded). There were some unfortunate stereotypes (the kind tend to be beautiful, women with sharp noses tend to be witches). and some heroes were dolts, which you know if you’ve ever had a 3-year-old look up and ask you, “Why does she think the wolf is her grandma?”

Now, possibly because children are more sophisticated—if that is the word to describe the condition produced when a toddler up late with an earache can pick up the channel switcher and wind up on Channel 35, where an adult male is masturbating to disco music there is something new: the ant-fairy tale, a mordant treatment of the form’s conventions in a manner that might be called not Grimm but somewhat grim.

“The Frog Prince, Continued” by Jon Scieszka begins where “The Frog Prince” left off. He’s already been kissed by the Princess and is now a nice yuppie-looking man in a suit and tie, but, alas, he is not happy. His wife, the Princess, who looks like Sydney Biddle Barrows, is always nagging him to stop sticking out his tongue as if he’s catching flies. He wants to know how come she never wants to go down to the pond anymore; she says she’d probably be in a better mood if he’d stop hopping around on the furniture.

You know what happens next: she finds a lily pad in his pant:> pocket and declares she wishes she’d never kissed his slimy frog lips, and the Frog Prince packs his bag and leaves. Then he goes on a great adventure where he tries to get a witch in the forest to turn him back into a frog so he can be happy again. But the witches he meets are apparently heavily influenced by Stephen Sondheim. The first one threatens to cast a wicked spell on him because she thinks he’s there to wake up Sleeping Beauty before the 100 years are up. (This witch zaps people into spells with a television channel switcher.) The next one, whom he finds at a beauty parlor having her hair done and reading Hague magazine, fears he’s come to rescue Snow White and offers him a poison apple.

The Prince is terrorized by more witches who don’t understand what story they’re in, and at the end, tired and bedraggled and ready to recount his old blessings, he returns home to a by now anxious and rueful Princess, who is eager to kiss his moist amphibian mouth. The moral being, in a harsh and confusing world it’s sometimes best to trust what you have and to fight boredom not by changing your outer world but your inner one.

Steve Johnson’s illustrations are artistically interesting—witty and spooky at the same time. But at bedtime most parents prefer benign and sunny, because children have nightmares and the day-to-day world yields more than enough fodder for an imaginative child’s bad dreams. So I’m not sure spooky is a good thing. But it is good if you wrote and illustrated the book in part to make your grown-up friends laugh. Mr. Scieszka’s first book, “The True Story of The Three Little Pigs,” for example, has been a huge hit with adults. My friends laughed at this book too, but they have three decades on the nursery school set.

To fully appreciate “The Frog Prince, Continued,” you have to have a highly developed sense of Irony and a sharp sense of the absurd, which most children don’t develop before they can read, despite exposure to random television programming. The jacket says “The Frog Prince, Continued” is for ages 5 and up, and it’s definitely up because those under 6 or maybe 7 will inevitably be confused by it. And that’s all right. There’s time ahead for ironic humor. People who sell things for children are always claiming too broad an age group. probably so they’ll have a bigger pool of potential buyers. This is not only unhelpful to the consumer, it’s counterproductive to the seller: hit a 3-year-old with, say, the “Peanuts” characters too soon and they’ll be bored, refuse to listen and turn against Charlie Brown and Lucy forever. Although appearances are sometimes deceiving, little children are not sophisticated and they don’t know it all. So it’s worth waiting a few years before introducing them to Jon Scieszka’s sense of humor. My guess is that the rest of the family will still be laughing at “The Frog Prince, Continued.”

The Eye of the Beholder

-- The Washington Post:

 

The novelist and journalist John Gregory Dunne once described himself as “one of life’s neutrals, a human Switzerland,” but he sure got over it. This collection of his essays, magazine pieces and book reviews is full of sharp, tough prose-he is a wonderful writer, wry and educated-that is funny, mordant, acerbic and depressed. He’s on the side of the good guys, only he doesn’t find a lot of them, and he’s on the side of the truth, which is also pretty hard to find. Resisting intellectual currents to get at what at least seems to be true (a tough piece on Chappaquiddick becomes a tough piece on John Kennedy; he says of the work of a Camelot apologist, “This is not history; I would call it perjury”), he journeys to Israel before the Intifada, to Hollywood during the McCarthy era, to all the gin joints in Chinatown.

Does he have something to say? Yes, that life is hard, and full of shadows and deceit. He writes of a friend as having “the eyes of someone who has seen too much, too many violations of the human contract,” but those are also his eyes, and the fun in this collection is seeing them at work. He is drawn to morgues, courthouses and the scene of the crime “the way some people are drawn to church” (lots of Catholic imagery here; a friend has the look of “a Graham Greene priest; he had heard too much in confession”) and finds there the usual assortment of transgressors. “Whenever I meet a cop, I am struck by a certain element of performance in his persona.” He is a reporter who knows whom to listen to. A defense attorney tells Dunne about his favorite kind of defendant: “I like the guy who says, `Sure, I was in the store . . . but there was no way that bastard could’ve recognized me with my mask on. It was a Batman mask. Who’d she think I was, Bruce Wayne? And I didn’t have no shotgun. It was a twenty-two. If she says she can recognize me, she’s blowing smoke up your {obscenity}.’“ The attorney smiles. “That is an easy client to defend.” Another lawyer says of the case backlog in Santa Monica, “The only cases that go to trial are the unimportant crimes of important people and the important crimes of unimportant people.” That’s the most succinct definition of modern urban criminal justice I’ve ever heard.

There is an intellectual wildness to some of Dunne’s observations. “My Lai was the last major American victory, body-count-wise,” he says in an essay on the Mideast. Newt Gingrich is “of course, the moral equivalent of a bowel movement.” The columnist Robert Novak is “that fat and flatulant little bully” (I myself prefer Mark Shields’ explanation that Novak is simply living proof that Calvin Coolidge and Ma Barker were more than just good friends).

Dunne has a soulful edge-his Catholicism has not left him, or he has not left it-but he’s no romantic, he’s not sentimental, his heart doesn’t soar. One senses he faced a tough decision when leaving college: Join the priesthood, or run the Westies? He became, as some gifted ambivalents do, a writer, armed with Eyes of a Killer Nun. In a review of William F. Buckley Jr.’s memoir, Overdrive, he is admiring and impatient: “And yet at stage center, he is really not very giving of himself, except for that sly self-deprecation that comes so easily to the self-infatuated.” The writer Alexander Cockburn is “the salon Stalinist fancy man.” Does Tommy Lasorda swear a lot? “To say Lasorda has a mouth like a sewer is to pin a bad rap on the department of sanitation.”

But writers who search for what is true, and who try not to be guided by politics in what they see, deserve admiration. It occurs to Dunne, a former screenwriter himself, and author of a sympathetic piece on a writer who had been a figure in the “witch hunts,” that “had there not been a blacklist, all the Hollywood Communist screenwriters, penitent and unpenitent, would have languished in the well-paid obscurity they essentially deserved.” The most memorable and moving part of the book is his trip to Israel in the days before the Intifada. He is drawn to spies, hoping to get a clear read on things from those who have no investment in illusion. No one satisfactorily answers his questions, not even “V,” a young American Jew, an editor distrusted by all and reliably used as a conduit by all sides. Dunne asks him “if it was not corrupting for the whole state of Israel to have this raj in an area where the Jews were outnumbered nearly fourteen to one by the Palestinians.” V shrugs: That’s the Peace Now line. His question neither answered nor addressed, Dunne spends a sleepless night reading the Jewish quarterly Tikkun and thinking that being in Jerusalem, with its constant assault of ideas, is like “being an eyewitness to a bad marriage and the poisonous bickering therein.”

When he writes about writing, world weary becomes, perhaps by accident, invigorating. He is still excited by his trade, about which he is not in the least romantic, and has good simple advice: blocked? gone dry? confused by our own plot, confused by why we wanted to be a novelist in the first place? Tough it out. “What civilians do not understand-and to a writer anyone not a writer is a civilian-is that writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.” Go to the office every day, break the block by showing up. “The professional guts a book through this period, in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve, and a failure of nerve is the best definition I know for writer’s block.”

It has been asked of collections such as this: Why should anyone want to buy old opinions on old topics, and isn’t this taking literary recycling too far? And these are valid questions, but it seems to me that it is always interesting to see a review that shows you how a writer like Tom Wolfe was viewed by his contemporaries in the pre-Bonfire days; it’s interesting to see a meditation on Renata Adler’s impressive work flicking the lid off the New Grub Street revealed in the Ariel Sharon-Time case and the Westmoreland CBS case. Years later such pieces can tell you things about the age, the way reading a William Manchester essay on his short war with the Kennedys over Death of a President tells you about the hothouse angst of the mid-’60s. It’s old news but its still news. The real question is what do you want to spend for old news, and the answer is maybe you want to buy the paperback version and keep it in a small pine bookcase from college, picking it up every few years and getting reminded.