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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I was one of the magazine editors deceived by journalist Stephen Glass during his reign of error and lies. His fictionalized memoir, "The Fabulist," is supposed to be an apology. I don't buy it.
May 17, 2003 | About a week ago, someone close to Stephen Glass, someone I like and respect, e-mailed me with a request: Glass wanted my address. He wanted to write me a letter of apology.
I was slightly stunned. Five years have passed since Glass had concocted facts, quotes and sources in articles he'd written for me at George magazine. But even a late apology is better than none, and I have always wanted to forgive Glass his transgressions. It's no fun to live with a wound that never heals. It's just that without an apology, forgiveness was hard; I'm no saint, able to transcend the misdeeds done to me without at least some effort on the part of the miscreant. Now, at last, Glass had apparently decided that it was time to make amends, and I welcomed it.
Then I read that Stephen Glass was about to publish a novel called "The Fabulist" -- and would appear on "60 Minutes" to promote his book, promising to explain what had led him to deceive me and so many others he worked for and wrote about. And the rush of emotions that I'd felt five years before roared right back: frustration, regret, anger, suspicion. Could I trust that Glass really wanted to apologize? Or was he merely trying to silence a potential critic before his novel's publication?
To really understand why the story of Steve Glass still causes such pain, you have to know that making up facts was only part of what Glass did to his colleagues. We opened ourselves to him, and in turn he probed our minds, pinpointing our vulnerabilities, our vanities, our prejudices. He exploited the worst in us and betrayed the best. And then he just vanished -- until now. Now he's back, promoting a tale of fall and redemption.
I first met Glass sometime in 1997. Based in New York, I was in charge of assigning Washington stories for George, and part of my job was to scout D.C. for new writers. It's actually a tough job; the city contains many fine reporters and polemicists, but few gifted feature writers. Washington generates little color in its culture or its prose. Steve Glass, however, was a splash of exuberance against a backdrop of gray monuments and gray newsprint. His pieces in the New Republic were characterized by the wonderfully oddball anecdote -- young Republicans behaving obscenely in a hotel room, financiers who'd created a shrine to Alan Greenspan, cult worshippers of Paul Tsongas. Somehow, Glass discovered people who acted like inside-the-Beltway residents imagined normal Americans behaved. Wacky, loony, real people.
But his articles weren't always lighthearted. The article that first attracted Steve attention was about a young black man holding up a D.C. cabbie, a crime that happened to take place while Steve was in the taxi. For Harper's, he wrote an essay about a summer job as a phone psychic, suggesting that the psychic hot line had particular appeal to blacks. In Steve's portrayal, they came across as more pathetically needy for psychic advice than whites were, and more gullible too. The piece had a seductive appeal to neo-liberal sympathies; these hot lines duped poor, uneducated minorities just as much as, say, lotteries did.
I assigned Steve three stories, two of which George published. One was about the power of celebrity lobbyists. I wanted Steve to show that celebrities were effective -- the story wasn't a story if they weren't -- and he came through, digging up a Virginia political consultant who'd studied this very question. According to this source, legislation supported by celebrities was 10 times more likely to be voted into law than that which wasn't. Steve had found the money shot statistic; it made the story not just entertaining, but important.
Next, Glass profiled Bill Clinton's friend, power lawyer Vernon Jordan. The timing was right after the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal, and I was anxious to dig up some dirt on Jordan, who was mired in Clinton's shenanigans but doing a masterly job of foiling the press. Once more, Steve scored. He described Jordan pacing anxiously at his law firm, wearing out the carpet underneath an oil painting of himself. A great image; Steve said he got it from colleagues of Jordan's who wished to remain anonymous. Glass also discovered several women who claimed -- anonymously as well -- that Jordan was a boorish lech. "I always wear a bra around Jordan," one woman admitted. "Otherwise he stares at my tits."
