4/23/2014    CNN    by Dan Merica

Storrs, Connecticut (CNN) – Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lamented the state of journalism on Wednesday, telling an audience at the University of Connecticut that journalism is now driven more by entertainment than fact based reporting.

Clinton, who has been the focus of national media attention since the early 1990s, told the 2,300-person audience that “journalism has changed quite a bit in a way that is not good for the country and not good for journalism.”

“A lot of serious news reporting has become more entertainment driven and more opinion-driven as opposed to factual,” she said. “People book onto the shows, political figures, commentators who will be controversial who will be provocative because it’s a good show. You might not learn anything but you might be entertained and I think that’s just become an unfortunate pattern that I wish could be broken.”

Clinton’s comments came as part of the question and answer portion to Wednesday’s event. University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst asked Clinton about how journalism has changed and whether journalists could help break gridlock that has halted work in Washington.

The former secretary of state went on to say that she feels there is a space for “explanatory journalism because there’s a lot going on in the world that needs explanation.”

The former first lady also had a tip for journalists: Do your homework.

“It’s important for journalists to realize that they have to do their homework too and they really should be well-prepared when they interview people, when they talk about issues,” she said. “I think that it’s with professional tweaking and creativity we could address some of the issues we know are plaguing journalism today​.”

Clinton has long been the focus of journalists’ attention, which at times has caused an acrimonious view of media.

According to the diary of Diane Blair, a longtime Clinton confidant whose personal documents gained media attention earlier this year, Clinton regularly expressed frustration and a deep distrust of the media.

In January 1995, Blair wrote that Clinton expressed “her total exasperation with all this obsession and attention, and how hard she’s finding to conceal her contempt for it all.” On Thanksgiving Day 1996, Blair wrote that Clinton thought the press was “complete hypocrites.”

“Say they want the truth, want power to be transparent, but in fact they prefer the backstage manipulation of B. Bush, N. Reagan, B. Truman, R. Carter,” Blair wrote, listing several former first ladies. “On her death bed, wants to be able to say she was true to herself and is not going to do phoney makeovers to please others.”

When her husband, Bill Clinton, was president, many in the White House worried of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that aimed to take down the Clinton White House. Some of that concern stemmed from the rise of right wing media and blogs.

Clinton’s 2008 campaign also suffered from a sometimes tense relationship with the media. In 2008, former President Clinton railed against what he called “the most biased coverage in history,” and both Clintons complained of what they believed to be pervasive sexism dominating the campaign narrative.

In response to her remarks, Tim Miller, executive director of American Rising PAC, a conservative research and media super PAC, said Clinton’s problem with the media stemmed from “a lack of interest in transparency, not the media. She’s never going to like anyone that tries to hold her accountable.”

While in Storrs, Clinton also talked about National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, the future of the Ukraine-Russia relationship and the importance of youth participation.

Because the remarks came at University of Connecticut, a school whose basketball program won both Division I national championship in 2014, the former secretary of state also brandished some of her basketball bona fides, telling the audience that she was “a big fan” of Shabazz Napier, the men’s senior guard.

“You just busted every bracket,” Clinton said.

Clinton, who has used the last few months to travel the country and deliver paid speeches, has acknowledged that she is thinking about a presidential run in 2016. All polls have her as the Democratic frontrunner and it is likely that she would win the nomination if she won.

Former Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who attended Wednesday’s event, said the former first lady should think about running, while Connecticut’s Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he would support Clinton “when and if she does.”

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/23/hillary-clinton-todays-media-is-more-entertainment-less-facts/

Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition [New York, N.Y]    17 Nov 1994

On Wednesday, Nov. 9, the day after the election, the New York Times surveyed a team of experts to explain the Republican tide. These commentators included liberal historians David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Alan Brinkley; civil-rights leader Julian Bond; George McGovern; and a token Republican, Howard Baker. Now, it may be possible to draw up a list of people who would be likely to know less about the anti-government message that was delivered Nov. 8, but it would take a lot of effort.

One of the revelations of the past two weeks has been the incompetence on the part of so many liberals in understanding and describing the GOP takeover. Conservatives basically know about liberalism; anyone who goes to the movies, listens to popular music or reads the major newspapers finds himself traveling on liberal terrain. But many liberals, it transpires, have only the haziest phantasms about conservatism, having only read each other’s descriptions of it.

The New York Times Magazine (whose slogan is “What Sunday Was Created For”) recently did a story on evangelical Christians using a tone one might adopt in the contemplation of Martians. Mr. Halberstam wrote a massive book about the 1950s that placed no emphasis on two of the most influential events of the decade, the pioneering work of Milton Friedman, which contributed mightily to the ideas behind the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and William F. Buckley’s formation of National Review, which helped to form a conservative movement that led to the Reagan revolution and ultimately the Gingrichian ascent.

While liberals such as John Judis and E.J. Dionne have actually read the conservative sources, many other liberals, especially in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, have reacted to the election like gaping victims of a 1950s horror movie: They don’t know what this monster is; they don’t know where it came from, or how it got so powerful; they only wish it would go away.

All of this goes to show how distant the two political cultures have become. On the one side there is the Doonesbury cohort: the smart liberal Boomers who have had their lives traced by the lives of Garry Trudeau characters — Mark on public radio, Joanie the lawyer and Hill staffer, Rick the Washington reporter. On the other side are a quite different set of cultural references associated with former professors Gingrich, Armey and Gramm — Sunbelt suburbs, John Wayne movies, grace before dinner and high-tech entrepreneurs.

The 1990s culture war isn’t a conflict between country rubes and urban sophisticates. It is increasingly fought between elites, often with similar academic credentials but radically different world views. It’s no longer outsider conservative bomb-throwers railing against the East Coast establishment. The new paradigm is the assault on Robert Bork, with well-educated activists and journalists going up against well-educated theoreticians.

Last Tuesday’s election was not simply a political shake-up; it was another step in a long cultural revolution, the rise and maturity of what Sidney Blumenthal has called the Conservative Counterestablishment. We now have two rival establishments in this country.

The full story of this election starts in places such as a motel in Tennessee a quarter-century ago, where a law student, Fred Thompson, worked the night shift sitting at the front desk reading Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind.” Now Mr. Thompson has been elected to the Senate and many of the other people who also once sat alone reading Kirk or Hayek or Oakeshott or Burke join him in important positions. Many of them manage the institutions that conservatives have created over the past 25 years, and which have spread anti-statist thinking. As GOP chronicler John Podhoretz has pointed out, unlike the Reagan victories, this was a leaderless election sweep; it was anti-government ideas themselves that permeated into all those gubernatorial, congressional and state legislature campaigns.

This conservative establishment is of course radically different in shape, size and tone from the liberal one, but also from previous Republican leaderships. The Republicans who were formed before the Reagan administration practiced a limited form of politics. With their interest in getting policies right, the George Bushes and James Bakers were either satisfied with, or uninterested in, the cultural landscape.

The new generation of Republicans practice social politics. In his first postelection interviews, Mr. Gingrich spoke about the counterculture and  the McGovernites. Mr. Gingrich set himself up for some snickering ripostes by bringing back McGovern — liberals have come a way since then and in fact liberalism is now too ethereal a thing to make an effective bogeyman. But in bringing up the 1960s, he was referring to the moment when liberals and conservatives first split into separate cultures.

Mr. Gingrich’s best moment came during the final weeks of the campaign when he stood against a withering assault by an entire world of people who declared the “Contract With America” a disastrous mistake. He insisted that no, it was actually a key to victory. That correct stand echoed another key moment, last year, when GOP strategist William Kristol stood against a similar public barrage and said that no, there is no health care crisis and the Republicans should oppose the Clinton plan, rather than merely compromise with it.

These brasher conservatives were displaying an intellectual self-confidence and Washington-savvy that has not always characterized Republican political players. Feeling beleaguered, many older conservatives ended up obsessing about and exaggerating the power of institutions that were unfriendly to them. That temper is obsolete.

The emergence of rival establishments means that the institutions of the old single establishment have lost importance. For example, the New  York Times was once the paper of record, the voice of the governing New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans. But that group is gone, and there is no longer a role for a single paramount institution. The Times reasonably enough oriented itself toward the upper-middle-class core of Manhattan, the Upper West Side/Greenwich Village liberals. It is still one of the great papers of the world, but it is now one player among others. The more it serves its core audience in Manhattan, the less authority it will have over the rest of the nation.

Public debate between these two establishments is bound to be fierce over the next few years; the journalistic hit jobs are already getting nastier. We might be all better off to recall that establishments don’t triumph by building on the rubble of the old. They triumph by building new structures on greenfield sites and forcing everyone to move over to them.

Conservatives will have trouble acting like an establishment in part because so many conservatives love feeling persecuted and resentful, but also because conservatives are acutely aware of the dangers of establishmentarianism: insularity and snobbery.

But there’s no getting around it; if you want to run a country for a long period of time, you have to form an establishment. And establishments have one advantage: They are happier than renegade movements that feel history is going away from them. The best advice on how to win conservative allies still comes from a happy establishmentarian of the 19th century, Walter Bagehot. It is this:

“The essense of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading wholesome Conservatism through the country: give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts. . . but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned — try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to enjoy the state of things. Over the `Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the `regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.”

Let liberals wail and whine for the next decades; maybe it’s the conservatives’ turn to be happy warriors.

12/05/2014    Talking Points Memo    By Laura Kipnis

……

Speaking of male hysteria brings us to the case of Tyrrell’s protégé at the American Spectator, David Brock, and his biography, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. After receiving a million dollar book advance to write a smear job on Hillary similar to the one he’d previously performed on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill (Brock was famously the author of the “a bit nutty and a bit slutty” line about Hill), a strange thing happened when he tried to plunge the dagger again. Somehow he couldn’t. Sure there was the stuff about the 60s radicalism that Hillary never really abandoned, including a catty analysis of her college wardrobe. And like the rest, he spends pages enumerating her bodily crimes and misdemeanors: given her thick legs she adopted the sort of “loose-fitting, flowing pants favored by the Viet Cong” (just call her Ho Chi Rodham); along with these, she sported white socks and sandals (here, even I must protest), wore no makeup, piled her hair on top of her head, and “came from the ‘look-like-shit school of feminism.’” Even once ensconced in the professional world she cut a “comic figure” with her hair fried into an Orphan Annie perm and a “huge eyebrow across her forehead that looked like a giant caterpillar.”

But more of the time it’s an intermittently compassionate portrait of a gawky, brainy, well-intentioned Midwestern girl swept off her feet by a charismatic Southern charmer, who migrated to the backwaters of Arkansas—or Dogpatch, as Brock likes to call it—to advance Bill’s political fortunes, sacrificing herself and her principles for love. Bill repaid her by having sex with everyone in sight. But Hillary wasn’t a phony, and shouldn’t have had to play the part to advance Bill’s career, Brock insists—he even says that her physical appearance should never have become a political issue, notwithstanding the amount of time he devotes to cataloguing it.

One of fascinating aspects of Brock’s employment situation was that he happens to be gay and the Spectator happens to regularly fulminate against gay rights, as did his yappy boss Tyrrell whenever given the chance. When Brock speculates that Hillary might have been “perversely drawn to the rejection implied by Bill’s philandering,” willing to accept compromises and humiliation in the sexual arena because of the greater good she and Bill could together accomplish, Brock—who’d once thrown a gala party to celebrate the hundredth day of Newt Gingrich’s anti-gay Contract With America—could have been describing his own career arc too. The big problem for him was that he ended up identifying with Hillary when he was supposed to be vilifying her. Some mysterious alchemy took place in the course of his writing this book: instead of exposing Hillary to the world, she exposed Brock to himself. The result was a stormy break-up with his pals on the Right: he became persona non grata in his former circles.

But he and Hillary had some sort of imaginary bond, at least in Brock’s imagination. He describes waiting in line for several hours at a bookstore for Hillary to sign his copy of It Takes a Village, and where he hoped to stage their first face-to-face meeting. The question on his mind, he confesses, is what she thinks of him. But when he reaches the head of the line, faces up to the real Hillary rather than the imaginary one, identifies himself and asks when he could have an interview, Hillary’s wry reply is, “Probably never.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ts/men-who-hate-hillary-clinton

From Whitewater to Troopergate, here’s everything you don’t remember about the Clintons.

Politico    1/1/2015

By BEN SCHRECKINGER

Hey! Remember the ’90s? If you’re like me (a millennial), you were probably too hopped up on Capri Sun and Go-Gurt to retain more than bits and pieces. Well, Important Things were happening. And judging by how much ink was spilled (this was when the news still came printed on dead trees), most of those Important Things were scandals involving Bill and Hillary Clinton. But because you can’t get a semen-stained dress past Nickelodeon’s standards department, even millennials who had their wits about them back then know only the basic outlines of these national traumas.

This is important because—as you may know if you’ve followed coverage of those midterm elections that so few of us voted in—millennial voters are totally in play: Likely voters under 30 are split nearly 50-50 between preferring a Republican- or a Democratic-led Congress, with a slight advantage toward the GOP. That makes us a challenge for Hillary—but also an opportunity, since most of us can’t tell our Paula Joneses from our Star Joneses from our Ken Starrs. In a survey Slate conducted this past spring, only 46 percent of people under 30 and 28 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds remembered the Monica Lewinsky scandal “very” or “fairly” well, compared 76 percent of older Americans. And consider this: The very youngest voters at the polls in 2016 will have been born after the Lewinsky scandal broke; as far as they know, the most controversial thing the fairer Clinton’s ever done is wear sunglasses on a plane while texting.

But the political consultants who are planning to rake in tens of millions of dollars pretending they know how to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 smell an opportunity, too: Part of their strategy for sinking the HRC juggernaut (assuming she does, indeed, run) is to reintroduce young voters to the Clinton administration scandals of the ’90s that we might have missed. Now, a whole new generation of Americans will get to feel that special mix of disgust and apathy that only comes from reading for the first time a detailed description of the president’s penis from a woman who is not the president’s wife. As the old political saw goes: You can either beat a dead horse or you can cut it into a two-minute web video and hope it goes viral (and people who spend time around dead horses know viral).

To save the consultants the trouble, and to help enlighten my fellow twenty-somethings, Politico Magazine herewith presents a tweetable, shareable millennial’s guide to the Clinton scandals of the ’90s.

Gennifer Flowers

Imagine, if you can, the year 1991. It was a happier time. The Berlin Wall had recently fallen, Saturday Night Live was still funny and newspapers were raking in money hand-over-fist. We’re talking pre-Myspace era. Pre-Friendster even, if you believe a time that old exists.

Most Americans were satisfied with their president, George H.W. Bush, even though they thought he was kind of a dweeb. (At that point in his life, he didn’t even wear crazy socks.) His reelection in 1992 was considered a safe bet until a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton entered the scene. You mean that skinny, white-haired grandpa who seemed so angry at Barack Obama a while back? Yep, same guy. Except back then, he was scarfing down Big Macs and wailing on the sax with Arsenio Hall (the Jimmy Fallon of the 1990s), and he was about to become the first black president. The Democrat had energy, he had charisma, he even had an upbeat song by Fleetwood Mac (still together at the time, despite the cheating and the cocaine).

The other thing Clinton had was a libido, an open secret among the press corps and political insiders. “Everyone knew he had this baggage,” says Jill Lawrence, who covered Clinton and his administration for the Associated Press and then USA Today. “I’m not saying we expected Gennifer Flowers to have a press conference and produce recordings.”

But that’s exactly what Flowers, a D-list actress-cum-D-cup nude model, did. Well, first, she came out ahead of the 1992 New Hampshire primary and told the Star (a supermarket tabloid sort of like a less shameless Gawker of the pre-snark era) that she had had a 12-year affair with Clinton. Then, Bill went on 60 Minutes to deny the affair but acknowledge “causing pain in my marriage.” And that’s how the nation also met Hillary Clinton, who told correspondent Steve Kroft, “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.” It was a seminal moment in the history of cheating politicians and their spouses, as the soon-to-be First Lady of the United States pitted herself against First Lady of Country, years before the “Stand by Your Man” moments of Huma Abedin, Gloria Cain and Silda Spitzer.

That’s when Flowers held the press conference and played ambiguous tapes of phone calls with Clinton that she claimed validated her story. But because Twitter hadn’t been invented yet, and Clinton had managed to avoid mass-faxing pictures of his manhood to the public (note to Anthony Weiner: stick to fax), how could Americans be sure what was true? The tapes left enough wiggle room for Slick Willie to slide through the scandal unscathed (though years later, he would admit to having a sexual encounter with Flowers, but claimed it only happened once, in 1977).

The Arkansas governor came in second in the New Hampshire primary and dubbed himself the “comeback kid” (a phrase that, when I googled it, led to a 1980 made-for-TV movie about minor league baseball featuring Patrick Swayze. Ask your parents?). From there, Clinton won the nomination and rode high into the general election. Voters might have been pretty sure he was a serial philanderer, but they were also beginning to suspect that his opponent, Bush père, hadn’t actually meant them to “read his lips” and the prospect of four more years of boring scandals like that proved nearly unbearable. Clinton won the presidency, and a smug nation was confident it would never again elect a Bush to high office.

Travelgate

After Bill’s inauguration, the scandals came early and often. The first of these was Travelgate, a warm-up act for bigger blow-ups to come. In May 1993, Clinton aides fired the staff of the White House travel office, which—get this—was officially called the White House Travel and Telegraph Office. Instead of just replacing the office with a part-time intern and a Kayak.com account, the White House installed an Arkansas travel company with several ties to the First Family. Critics accused the administration of cronyism, and the administration accused the old travel office staff of improper recordkeeping.

This was the first scandal in which Hillary really took the lead. It appears she was the driving force behind the administration’s efforts to oust the travel staff, which included prodding the FBI to investigate the office (maybe to find out whether they were still using telegraphs?), and covering up those efforts. The late William Safire, a conservative political columnist who had nonetheless endorsed Bill Clinton for president (and also a stodgy language columnist who turns in his grave every time one of us uses emojis or shouts “YOLO”), called Hillary a “congenital liar,” and the White House press secretary announced the president wanted to punch Safire in the face. (It’s worth keeping this episode in mind every time someone over 40 tells you that civility in Washington has reached a new low.)

In the aftermath, an independent counsel would find that Hillary made “factually false” statements to investigators but that there wasn’t enough evidence to indict her. The most important thing about Travelgate, though, was that it helped to pave the way for Whitewater, the thinking man’s Clinton scandal.

Whitewater

You could be forgiven, fellow millennials, for not knowing much about Whitewater—because much of the Washington press corps never quite wrapped their heads around it either. “I could never remember what it was supposed to be about,” says Todd Purdum, a Politico senior writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor who was then with the New York Times Washington bureau. “It was so byzantine.”

Let’s go back to the beginning. Whitewater was the name of a tract of land on the White River in Arkansas that the Clintons invested in with fellow Arkansas couple Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1970s. The plan was to wait for the land to appreciate, build vacation homes on it and sell it, but the plan didn’t work and the Clintons lost money. Then, in the mid-1980s, Jim McDougal embarked on another real estate scheme, Castle Grande. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer for the development plan, which collapsed amid federal regulators’ accusations of financial fraud.

It’s likely that no one would have ever heard of Whitewater, or Monica Lewinsky for that matter, if Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, an old Arkansas friend of the Clintons, hadn’t been found dead in July 1993 in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park with a gun in his hand and a bullet wound in his head; a distraught letter about Washington witch-hunts was also found in his briefcase. Foster had been battling depression at the same time he got wrapped up in Travelgate (as an intermediary between Hillary and the staffer who did the firing). Many on the right rejected the logical conclusion that the political climate in Washington had become toxic enough to drive a person to kill himself, and they instead clung to the theory that the Clintons had offed Foster or pressured him to commit suicide.

In the aftermath of Foster’s death, White House staff removed documents related to Whitewater from his office at Hillary’s behest, then, in the face of questioning about it, changed their story more times than Diddy’s changed his name. In 1994, the Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, to investigate the Clintons’ role in Whitewater and related dealings in Arkansas, including the allegation that, as governor, Bill had improperly pressured a businessman to give Susan McDougal a loan.

While the investigation was ongoing, Hillary got the chance to shine again. Seeking to tamp down Whitewater and a controversy over her miraculous run earning a 10,000 percent return in 10 months in the late 1970s trading cattle futures with no prior experience, she held the fact-filled Pink Press Conference to defend herself, so named for the color of her sweater.  She used the occasion to turn a salacious scandal into a mind-numbing logic puzzle with statements like, “I gathered all my documents together to give to my accountant. I had a year-end statement from Stephens, which did not report anything about commodities. I had a year-end statement from the Peavey Brokerage Company, which … reported a loss, and I had no year-end statement from either Clayton or the company called ACLI.”

“It was impermeable,” Purdum recalls. “But it was also an entirely accurate press conference about Whitewater.” Mostly, people were impressed with her “relaxed” body language, and in a way it was telling: The Clintons escaped unscathed, while both MacDougals and 13 other people, including a former Bill Clinton aide and his successor in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, were convicted of Whitewater-related crimes.

Troopergate and Paula Jones

Nostalgic for a good old-fashioned sex scandal, a confused public now turned its attention from Whitewater to Troopergate, a story that then-conservative journalist David Brock first reported for the American Spectator in 1993. (Yes, this was when David Brock was a conservative muckracker. More on that in a minute.) Two Arkansas state troopers claimed that they had arranged sexual liaisons with women, including one named Paula, for Bill Clinton when he was governor.

In May 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones filed a lawsuit against the president for sexual harassment that allegedly took place in 1991. This was all happening at the same time that Rwanda’s ethnic majority Hutus were committing a genocide that killed between 500,000 and a million of their countrymen. Guess which story got more coverage in the American media.

To bolster her claim that Clinton had exposed himself to her in a hotel room, Jones gave a graphic description of his penis. Her lawyers also dug up a raft of other government employees who they said had been the object of Clinton’s sexual advances. Working without the aid of Tinder, Clinton had somehow still managed to make a pass at half the women who had come within a five-mile radius of him, and when you’re the governor or president, a lot of those women work for you. It was in response to questions from Jones’s lawyers that Clinton would deny, under oath, having “sexual relations” with a certain White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Clinton ended up paying Jones $850,000 in a settlement. But you could say it was really a wash for Bill and Hill: Brock, the guy who broke the story, repented of the right and now runs a group of left-wing nonprofits that are working overtime to protect the couple’s reputation in the 2016 race.

Monica

None of these scandals prevented Bill Clinton from cruising to an easy reelection in 1996. So, finally, the Republican Party decided to give up on the sideshows and focus on the real scandal going down in the Clinton administration: a massive deregulation of the financial services sector, backed by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, that would lead, a decade later, to a global economic meltdown, force all of us to move back in with our parents, and destroy our parents’ retirement funds. Just joking. The Republicans were pretty much fine with all of that, as long as no one was getting blown.

Instead, the world exploded when a Department of Defense bureaucrat named Linda Tripp produced evidence that Clinton had lied under oath about Lewinsky when Paula Jones’ lawyer asked him if he’d had sexual relations with the intern. While Tripp’s motivations for nearly bringing the republic to its knees remain shrouded in mystery, she was probably interested in a book deal (#ThisTown). She had befriended Lewinsky when both were working at the Pentagon and, on the advice of a literary agent, recorded phone conversations with Lewinsky about the affair. When Tripp found out that Clinton had denied having sexual relations with Lewsinky, she offered her tapes to Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who had taken over the Whitewater investigation.

On January 17, 1998, a reclusive blogger named Matt Drudge broke the news that Newsweek—this was before the storied news brand merged with the Daily Beast, then died, then was revived to promptly accuse an elderly Japanese-American man in California of inventing Bitcoin—had killed a story by Michael Isikoff about Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky. (In homage to the Internet’s first giant scoop, Drudge has refused to update the design of his website to this day.)

This is when things really got crazy. On January 26, Bill went on national television to say, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The next day, Hillary went on the Today Show and told Matt Lauer (then still with hair) that the steady succession of scandals had been drummed up by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Lewinsky turned over a semen-stained blue dress that provided DNA proof of the affair, Starr pursued the perjury allegation and the fate of the government rested on whether oral sex, which Clinton eventually admitted to receiving from Lewinsky, fell under the definition of “sexual relations.” When, in August 1998, Clinton ordered airstrikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan (involving a group called Al Qaeda and a guy named Osama bin Laden), people who had just seen the movie Wag the Dog speculated the strikes were cooked up as a distraction from Lewinsky.

For Purdum, the most surreal moment came in August 1998, when federal prosecutors asked Clinton about the neckwear he had sported during a Rose Garden appearance on the day that Lewinsky appeared before a grand jury. Lewinsky claimed to have given him a tie. Was this the one—a message from the president for her to remain loyal? “They were thinking Clinton may have been trying to send a signal by tie,” Purdum recalls. (Hey, maybe it was more efficient than the White House telegraphs?)

The saga dragged on for months and even started taking a toll on American families. “I would get calls from my mother,” says Lawrence, who covered the seamy details day in and day out. “‘Did you have to use that phrase?’” A version of the story even seeped into millennials’ impressionable young minds. “People who had small children had to explain to them, in many cases prematurely, what a lot of phrases they heard on the radio meant,” recounts Purdum. Lawrence recalls her 9-year-old son drawing a picture, titled “Lewinsky/Clinton,” of the president staring morosely out a window with the caption, “I used to like her.” Some of you may remember this as the confusing period of adolescence when your parents let you start watching MTV as long as you promised not to turn on C-SPAN.

In December 1998, the Republican-held House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The following February, the Senate voted to acquit. It would turn out that many of Clinton’s most zealous persecutors in the Republican Party were adulterers themselves. Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House during the impeachment vote, had run off on his first wife while she was recovering from surgery for cancer. Bob Livingston, who had been elected to succeed Gingrich as speaker, resigned the post when Hustler revealed he had had an extramarital affair of his own.

And that was the end of the Lewinsky saga… or was it? Last April, Stephen Colbert got Bill Clinton to join Twitter. As of October, @MonicaLewinsky is there too. Could the stars be aligning for a 21st-century Anthony Weiner-style Lewinsky scandal encore? Hillary’s enemies can hope against hope, but as millennials learned from the bitter disappointment of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit Obama’s reelection campaign, the sequel’s never as good as the original anyways.

Pardongate

With the end of the ’90s came the end of the golden age of superficial Clinton scandals. On his last day in office, Clinton rode off into the sunset with a substantive scandal, issuing several questionable presidential pardons on January 20, 2001. Most notably, he pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive from justice who was wanted on tax evasion charges and hounded by allegations of what George Bluth might call “light treason.” But Rich could be forgiven, apparently because his ex-wife had given generously to the Clinton Library and to Hillary’s fledgling Senate campaign. And this might explain why Wall Street titans are so eager to put a Clinton back in the Oval Office.

Legacy

Just as historians have come to view the World Wars as a single, massive conflict, in hindsight Travelgate, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky begin to look just as inseparable. Their legacy might be just as consequential as well: Disturbed by the power of lone women to sway the course of our democracy by recording phone calls, the good folks at the NSA resolved to just do that all themselves. Realizing that it would be better if future generations of leaders preempted scandal by incriminating themselves with semi-public photos of their escapades from the get-go, Al Gore invented the Internet and gave Mark Zuckerberg the idea for Facebook. Determined to spare the country another eight years of asinine scandal-mongering, Hillary Clinton politely ceded the 2008 Democratic primary to Barack Obama, and Washington swore off stupid distractions once and for all.

OK, that’s not how it happened. In fact, the scandals never did much lasting damage to Bill or Hillary. Bill’s approval rating shot up to 73 percent at the exact time the House was voting to impeach him (which is about 30 points higher than Barack Obama’s “strong” rating now). Hillary’s favorability rating hit an all-time high in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, and during her recent tenure as secretary of state, more than 60 percent of Americans held favorable views of her.

“It was a secret weapon that [Bill Clinton] had,” says Joe Klein of Time magazine, who anonymously authored Primary Colors, a thinly veiled roman à clef about Clinton’s 1992 campaign that turned into a movie starring John Travolta. “Blue-collar white guys saw him messing around with lounge singers, eating at McDonalds … they just admired him. He was living large.” In other words, dredging up old scandals might not claw many millennials away from the Clintons. “I think it’s an awfully stale beer,” Purdum says.

In fact, some argue that the most lasting legacy of the scandals might be the trivialization of American media, which started long before Upworthy and BuzzFeed began clogging our Facebook news feeds. “The real scandal was the press scandal,” Klein says. “The amount of time and space we spent on things that were non-important or nonexistent.”

So, now that you know, feel free to forget quickly and clear up that mental hard drive space for more important things, like T-Swift lyrics. I’ll leave you with Klein’s compressed summary of the whole thing for the tl;dr crowd: “There was a shady real estate deal, that was just a stupid real estate deal. And then there was a blowjob, and that’s it.”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/clinton-scandals-the-nineties-113905.html

http://videos.hollywoodreporter.com/services/player/bcpid1257205077001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAAC3bNtw~,c0hgCOyLwy4Lde_FJ6Ombu5W_uQUkX83&bctid=3932766106001

He nearly destroyed this magazine. Sixteen years later, his former best friend finally confronts him.

11/10/2014    New Republic   by Hanna Rosin

The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of The New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone—each one a home run.

I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. I didn’t even know he had a dark side. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. right away. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. He can’t fire you. He can’t possibly think you would do that.”

I was wrong, and Chuck, ever-resistant to Steve’s charms, was as right as he’d been in his life. The story was front-page news all over the world. The staff (me included) spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny stuff—a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia—and also some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians. In fact, we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic’s fact-checking department.)

After the scandal broke, the magazine fact-checked and annotated every Stephen Glass story to determine the extent of his fabrications. The key at the top of this page indicates that phrases underlined in blue have been confirmed as true; phrases underlined in red have been confirmed to be untrue; phrases underlined in pencil cannot be confirmed either way. Subsequent pages are very, very red.

Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune,” Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him.

Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christensen in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. It was the book that finally provoked my anger. The plot follows a thinly fictionalized Steve in the aftermath of the affair. It portrays him as humble, contrite, and “a few shades hipper than the original,” I wrote in a review for Slate. The rest of us came off as shallow jerks barely worth apologizing to. Steve sent about 100 handwritten letters of apology that year to people he’d injured, all several pages long and very abject: “I’m genuinely sorry that I lied to you and betrayed you.” But he was also hawking his book, so we saw the letters as an effort to neutralize us. Reading the novel pretty much killed off my curiosity. For years afterward, if I thought about Steve at all—usually when I got an e-mail from a journalism student who had seen the movie in an ethics class—he was the notorious Stephen Glass, still living in the Clinton era.

Then, in 2010, I got a call from a lawyer in California. Steve had filed an application for something called “moral character determination” with the California state bar. He wanted to be a lawyer and the guild apparently did not think he had reformed enough to practice law. Did I want to provide an account of Steve’s wrongdoing? the lawyer asked. Chuck Lane was going to, and Steve had lined up several witnesses to speak in his favor. I said I would think about it and I did. For a few days, I tried to call up the anger again. But after all those years I could only find faint traces of it.

In fact, the prospect of appearing in court revived some of the old protective instincts. I hadn’t seen Steve in twelve years. I couldn’t say he deserved to be a lawyer, but I couldn’t say he definitively didn’t, either. (Since when did lawyers become the measure of purity anyway?) At stake for the lawyers was the sanctity of their guild. But for me, a larger question loomed: Agreeing that Steve could never practice law felt a little too close to agreeing that no one who had done something wrong—even monstrously wrong—in their youth could ever move beyond it. “I don’t wish him ill,” I’d written in my review of The Fabulist. “But I’m not convinced he’s changed all that much.” When the lawyer reminded me that the real Stephen Glass lived on the other coast, that he had professional aspirations, that he had friends who would stick up for him in court, that, in short, he was still making his way through time, it suddenly occurred to me: How could I possibly know if he’d changed or if he hadn’t?

“The movie makes it seem like there was some joy in all of this for me,” says Glass now. “But it never felt fun. I was anxious and scared and depressed.”

Steve Glass now lives in Venice Beach with his longtime girlfriend, Julie Hilden, a dog, two cats, and a rotating cast of foster pets. (The couple are also vegans.) He works as director of special projects at Carpenter, Zuckerman, Rowley, a personal-injury law firm in Beverly Hills. For anyone who knew him back in the day, this is a comical juxtaposition. Steve is a Jewish boy from the posh Chicago suburb of Highland Park with pushy Jewish parents who insisted on the usual (doctor, lawyer). When they urged him to go to law school, they probably had Supreme Court appearances in mind, not, as the firm boasts, a $2.1 million settlement for a homeless man hit by a garbage truck. But Paul Zuckerman, the partner who hired Steve and has become his mentor, considers this development to be a sign of grace. “You were on track to be an asshole,” he told Steve when I was there. “The best thing that ever happened to you in your life is that you fell flat on your face.”

I’d e-mailed Steve this summer to see if he would talk to me. The New Republic was approaching its one-hundredth anniversary and the magazine wanted to revisit this dark chapter in its history. Other than publicizing his book, Steve hadn’t done any interviews since then, and certainly not with people from that era. But he readily agreed to talk to me, for reasons that became clear to me during the course of our conversations.

We decided to meet at a café near his office, and I ran into him on the street when we were both heading over. We said hello, reflexively hugged. I flashed back to the many times I’d run into him on the corner outside CF Folks, a lunch place near the old New Republic office in D.C. It was like encountering a cousin I hadn’t seen in some time. He had the same sandy curls and glasses, the same bouncy walk, and the pallor of someone who spends all day in an office. He still had the air of a nice boy who was about to theatrically help his grandma cross the street. Only something was a little different. He was more grounded? Or maybe masculine? For some reason it popped into my head that Steve had once wanted to write a story about how everyone thought he was gay but he wasn’t. He was floaty back then, undetermined, as if he could levitate in those white socks. But now he had lost that quality.

The first question he asked was whether I had any kids, which gave me a good idea of how far he’d strayed from his old world of journalist friends. (I have three, according to Wikipedia, and the many articles I’ve written mentioning them). I asked if he’d kept in touch with anyone from back then, and he said he hadn’t been able to. In the early days after the scandal, Steve told me, when he would see one of us on the street in D.C., he would become terrified, to the point of feeling “physically ill, like my stomach was falling out of me,” and turn and run in the other direction. He didn’t read any news about himself for a long time—it took him a year to read the Vanity Fair story about the scandal—because it was “extremely painful,” he said. Eventually that meant he fell out of the habit of reading much news at all, outside The New York Times and legal papers for work. I realized that for Steve, we too were frozen in the Clinton era. “It’s not realistic,” he explained, “but after a period of time, I was still convinced my old world of friends were having conversations amongst themselves, … that you and Jon were still hanging out every day and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t get over the idea that it was one big club and I was no longer a part of it.”

On the plane to California, I’d imagined myself in the same role as the lawyer who’d asked me to appear at the bar hearing. I was going into intellectual combat, and I had to be well prepared. I dressed in an overly formal way, and I read Crime and Punishment on the plane to acquaint myself with the tricks of a guilty mind. I was wary of getting played again, and so I decided I would not spare Steve any question, no matter how uncomfortable. That phone call when he asked me to defend him to Chuck, for example. What was he thinking? “I was clearly putting you at risk to back up my lies,” he said, adding that he had asked multiple people to defend him. “What I did was horrible and then asking people to defend me was horrible.” His words were heavy but his tone stayed friendly. He was relaxed—in fact, much more so than I was. And his directness surprised me. He’d clearly thought through these answers, but they didn’t feel canned or rehearsed.

A torn-out page from one of Glass’s legal pads bears the URL for the fabricated website of “Jukt Micronics,” the fake software company Glass created for his story “Hack Heaven.”

Steve volunteered that he thought his most extreme sin of this kind was going to Michael Kelly’s house to beg for his support. Kelly, who’d been the editor before Lane and later died reporting in Iraq, was bulldog-loyal to his young staff. He had once written a vicious letter to one of Steve’s sources who’d challenged Steve on the facts of a story, accusing the source of lying and demanding an apology. This letter got dredged up in the aftermath of the scandal and did not make Kelly look good. Did Steve not foresee that would happen? “I felt my entire life was falling apart around me, and I felt scared and desperate,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about the ramifications of asking you to defend me.”

And so it went for several hours. I would ask Steve about something he’d done. He’d pause, conjure the moment, parse every iteration of the crime, add whatever I’d forgotten to mention, and then apologize. If the first step of reforming yourself is acknowledging your sins, then Steve was determined to get an A-plus, along with extra credit. For example, I asked whether he had consciously made us his co-conspirators in the creation of fiction. I recalled him once asking me to help with his story about the nonexistent Monica Lewinsky memorabilia convention. The story was dull but had a funny line at the end about a Monica Lewinsky sex doll. Were there any more details like that? I had asked, and he came to life, recounting various trinkets, including a condom named after her. I cheered him on, and thus together, we birthed a fabulous falsehood. Steve said he remembered doing that all the time, that “the normal editing process wound up directing the fabrications.” His most egregious creation, he said, was when he co-wrote a story with Chait about Alan Greenspan and invented an actual shrine to the then–Fed chairman. “I wanted you guys to feel something in my presence, to be excited to be around me,” he explained. “And as I crossed more lines, the lies became more and more extreme, and I just became more and more anxious and crazy and out of control.”

In his book, Steve’s fictional alter ego explained that he lied because he wanted to be “loved” by the people around him. At the time, that explanation struck me as generic, something a person relatively new to therapy might glibly repeat. But middle-aged Steve was now describing a very specific dynamic between himself and his audience, one that was humiliating to admit and felt more fully digested.

I asked him if he’d seen Shattered Glass. The movie came out around the same time as his book, and his editor had arranged for him to go to a screening set up by David Carr of The New York Times. Steve recalled that at first he couldn’t find the building. He was terrified that he would tell people he had the wrong address and they’d think he was lying. He said he couldn’t pay much attention to the film, and so he looked at his feet and cried. He thought it captured some of the drama really well, but that it got one essential thing wrong: “The movie makes it seem like there was some joy in all of this for me. But it never felt fun. I was anxious and scared and depressed. Outwardly I was communicating fun, but inside all I felt was anxiety.”

After a while, I stopped playing prosecutor and got a little more human. I told him, for example, that his book had made me furious, and he said he understood why.

“I was still self-justifying,” he said. “It was mean, in the sense that I didn’t imagine someone like you or Jon reading this and thinking, Hold on. I was the victim then.” He said he thought at the time that he had the emotional development to write a book, but it’s obvious to him now that he didn’t.

All of this might make you think that Steve was just telling me everything I wanted to hear. I did at some point ask if he ever allowed himself to fight back against accusations, even to get angry, and he admitted that he did not want to do that in public. But what put my suspicion on hold was the monumental shift in his tone.

In the old days, Steve used to walk around the office asking all of us, “Are you mad at me?” for no reason at all. Chait got so tired of it he vowed to whack Steve with a magazine every time he said it. Now, Steve would ask, every half hour or so. “Are you happy you’re doing this?” Or: “Is this how you expected it to go?” He hadn’t lost the need to solicit approval, only now the questions seemed less rankly needy, less narcissistic, and more the kind of friendly check-in any normal and nice adult might do.

Although we now know that Glass created fake business cards to support his stories, this one is authentic.

In January, a few months before I interviewed Steve, the California Supreme Court declined to admit him to the bar. This decision ended his twelve-year quest to become a lawyer. In 2002, Steve had applied for admission to the New York bar, but withdrew his application two years later when he found out that it was going to reject him. He started the process over again in California in 2007, and both the state bar court and the hearing department ruled in his favor. But the committee of bar examiners kept appealing, and ultimately he lost by a unanimous decision at the state Supreme Court level. His case was highly unusual—even felons can become lawyers, after all. But the court ultimately decided that Steve had failed to prove that he “is no longer the same person who behaved so poorly in the past.”

A deciding factor for the judges was the discovery that Steve had misled the New York bar about how much he’d worked with various magazines to help detect his fabrications so they could inform their readers. He was still adding new articles to the list as late as the 2010 trial of the State Bar court. In his testimony, Chuck said he was astonished Steve hadn’t disclosed these articles twelve years ago. “If I wanted to get across anything new at the hearing,” he later told me, “it’s what a shock that was.”

The court also heard from 22 witnesses on Steve’s side—his girlfriend, a judge he’d clerked for, law professors he’d worked with, two psychiatrists he had seen, colleagues, friends, and Martin Peretz, who owned The New Republic while Steve was there and had reconciled with him. An emotional high point came when his girlfriend, Julie Hilden, was on the stand. She explained that she had gotten together with Steve shortly after the scandal, and he’d helped nurse her through a serious illness early in their relationship. The opposing lawyers asked why she hadn’t married him if she trusted him so much, and she started to cry. She told them that she and Steve had decided not to marry until same-sex marriage was legal in California. (I believe that she was sincere about this. I was friends with Julie many years ago, and she is a person who carries principles to an extreme—she wrote a book called The Bad Daughter about her decision to abandon her ailing mother so she could live her own life. Also, the veganism.)

The opposing decisions from the lower and state Supreme courts evince very different views of what rehabilitation looks like. To the Supreme Court, a reformed person is something like an oncologist; his eyes are trained on the offending cancer, his mission to root out every last trace. To the lower courts, a person reformed is no longer even engaged very much with the original crime. He has moved on, in a way that thwarts our hunger for retribution. If it isn’t already obvious, my sympathies lie with the lower courts. Whenever I read in the transcripts someone saying that Steve was “devastated” by his crime, as his former law professor said, always confessing, cataloguing, apologizing, I bristled. It sounded like the old Steve, always wondering if you were mad at him, consumed with some pre-existing shame. As a college friend once (brutally) said about him: “He could always absorb whatever abuse you threw at him. No matter what mean thing you said about his pants or his personality or whatever, he’d suck it up, like a beaten dog happy to get an open-fisted punch in the ear.”

To me, the most relatable testimony in Steve’s hearing came from Melanie Thernstrom, a journalist and an old friend of Julie’s and, ultimately, of the couple’s. Thernstrom found the court’s fixation on whether he’d listed all of his fabrications—“like was it 27 or 42?”—to be “sophistic.”

When Julie first told me she was dating Stephen, I was completely horrified, and as a journalist, you know, I had very strong negative feelings about what he did, as, you know, the members of my community all did, and certainly tried to talk her out of it.

Then getting to know him, you know, I went from horrified to skeptical, and then grudging, like, “Well he seems nice, but he probably isn’t, you know, deep down. I’m sure, you know, maybe it’s all an act, and then in getting to know him all these years, the dawning realization that this is really an extraordinary person, that he is really a wonderful person, an incredibly good partner, just very kind, generous, loyal, responsible, empathetic, someone who really cares about other people. … This journey I took from horror to affirmation is one I saw every one of Julie’s friends go through over the years, and there is not one single friend of hers who doesn’t feel about him the way I do.

It is said that we are a nation of second acts, that at this cultural moment especially, we fetishize failure, that we love nothing more than a sinner reformed. But perhaps what we love is a story about second acts. A Christian testimonial or an Alcoholics Anonymous confessional is designed to be thrilling, but not too closely scrutinized. There is a long night of darkness and then, suddenly, a morning of light. But if we peer too much at the details, we get wary, or maybe bored. We might get some satisfaction hearing Eliot Spitzer say, “You go through that pain, you change,” but we don’t believe it enough to trust him to represent us. Perhaps what we lack is patience, because reform is not all that theatrical, or even a great story. It is slow, tedious work. You see a priest, or a psychiatrist. You acknowledge the sins. You go through a long period—years, decades even—of living with that acknowledgment, stewing in it, denying it, owning it again. If you work hard enough and are sincere in your efforts, then maybe each day you are a little more reformed than you were the day before. And maybe one day, the change can be detected on the outside.

The top line on this page from one of Stephen Glass’s notebooks reads “DON’T DO STUPID THINGS.”

One of the luckiest things that happened to Steve after the scandal was landing in the company of Paul Zuckerman, one of the partners at his firm. Steve applied to the job in 2003 in response to an ad. “What a genius,” Zuckerman thought when he looked at his résumé. “He clearly has applied to the wrong firm.” Georgetown grads who have clerked for judges normally don’t apply to personal-injury firms. But then Zuckerman read the cover letter, in which Steve wrote about his history. Zuckerman laughed, he told me, and promptly deleted the e-mail.

And here, the story gets a little apocryphal. Zuckerman thought about that letter for a while. When he was 35, he had a serious problem with drinking and drugs. He was married at the time and had a kid: “I was sick and I was in denial and I kept it all a secret. And finally it got so bad I had to accept that I could not control it on my own.” Most people will recognize this as the language of a twelve-step program, which is what it is. Zuckerman found himself in a “dingy room I thought I was too good for,” but eventually he settled in. He did his personal inventory, and “learned a lot about myself and my shortcomings.” Now he felt he might be in a position to help someone else do the same. He retrieved the e-mail and gave Steve a call. Of the 100 or so employers that Steve wrote to, Zuckerman was the only one to offer him a formal interview.

Zuckerman is precisely the kind of person you would expect to work in a personal-injury firm: He would look perfect in his Armani suit if he could only get ahead of his five o’clock shadow. When Steve came in for the interview, “he wanted to tell me the entire story in mortifying detail. I say ‘mortifying’ because at the time it hung so heavily on him. He was so sad, and it was so painful for him. I said, ‘You don’t need to tell me every detail,’ and he said, ‘I do. I need to know for myself that you know it all.’ ” Zuckerman then took Steve to meet one of the other partners and begged Steve not to go through the thing again: “It takes too long. We’re busy.” But Steve insisted.

Zuckerman hired Steve as a paralegal. At first he kept a close eye on him: “No way I was giving him my Social Security number and my mother’s maiden name.” Eventually, they found the perfect role for Steve—and here is where the tedious work of reform begins. When clients come in, Steve helps the firm get them ready for trial. The first thing he does is tell them who he is. He says he worked at a magazine and he lied and made up stories and covered them up. He says he got caught, that Hollywood made a movie about it and that there are many people “who dislike me and rightly so.” He has done this about a dozen times a month, for the last decade, meaning that the conference room in the firm’s modern, exposed-brick office has become his equivalent of Zuckerman’s dingy room, where Steve confesses, over and over again.

Zuckerman has Steve do this so the clients won’t find out about his history themselves and because he has to explain why Steve can never appear in court. But there is a deeper reason. In the firm’s lore, personal-injury work is like evangelism. “We are dealing with people who have not only been injured; they’ve been broken and need to be made whole,” says Zuckerman. In order to do that, the lawyers need to know the whole truth about a person, even secrets they’ve never confessed to anyone. But the clients are often afraid to disclose the truth because they fear it will hurt their case. So the lawyers have to work on them. “You can lie to your priest and lie to your wife,” Zuckerman says, “but you can’t lie to us.”

For example, Zuckerman explained, there was a client who got in a terrible motorcycle accident while driving home. The only witness who could verify his account of what happened was his mistress, who was on the motorcycle with him. There was another client who needed a doctor to testify about his health before an accident, but the physician who had seen him most recently had done an operation on his genitalia, which the client found embarrassing. When Steve opens with his confession, “it gives the client freedom to tell me what’s wrong with their life,” says Zuckerman. “They open up and tell you everything, even their secrets and things they are afraid to share. No one can do that better than Steve. He shares his background, and they know it’s safe for them.” Steve and the clients develop relationships. Sometimes he goes to their houses, makes them a meal. In the state bar court hearing, Zuckerman testified about Steve’s work with a “homeless crack-addicted mentally handicapped guy who lived in the streets under a tarp, HIV-positive” and who showed up at the office “filthy, fingernails 6-inches long, covered in fleas and lice and his own waste and his own filth.” Steve helped him to get into a homeless shelter, hook up with community services, and eventually, win the $2.1 million settlement in the garbage-truck case.

I heard this and alarm bells went off. The work sounded humane but also possibly manipulative. It sounded like crafting masterful stories in order to get the results you want. “Filthy fingernails,” “fleas and lice”—those all sounded like details out of an old Steve Glass piece. When I put this to Steve, he was a little touchy, although he’d already considered the ethics of his work. “It’s not manipulation; it’s caring. I don’t coach the clients; I help them discover their story.” He added: “It makes me anxious to do this. But I work from facts that are indisputably true. Maybe the anxiety comes from being afraid to be accused of lying again.” His answer didn’t satisfy me, but I figured he would work through this one in time. Winning a personal-injury suit requires facts but also a sympathetic narrative. Perhaps in a few years he’d be able to just admit that.

Change, after all, comes slowly. Zuckerman recalls that once, in the early days, he saw Steve crossing the street, and he was “the saddest guy in the world. He was just walking down Beverly Boulevard like that cartoon character with the stinky blanket and the cloud. He just looked like the world had taken a shit on him.” Then, in the last two years, the cloud started to clear. “He just began to like himself. I know this. I can sense it.” The final threshold, oddly, was the Supreme Court decision. Steve no longer had to defend what he had done or wait for someone else’s judgment. That’s why, when I sent him the e-mail, he so readily agreed to talk. “I felt so liberated, from that wanting to be loved all the time. It’s oppressive.” When the decision came down, he said, “I didn’t feel rejected, or desperate, or angry, overwhelmed. I felt sad and disappointed. I felt like my reaction was totally appropriate.” He took a day off work, hung out with Julie, and stopped waiting. It made me wonder if part of the reason the Supreme Court rejected him is because he was seeking their approval: the request itself was evidence that he didn’t yet deserve it.

During the bar trials, Steve’s childhood was depicted as a series of psychological traumas. Since the scandal, Steve has been in steady therapy, sometimes four days a week. One psychologist suggested that he may have “arrested development” and was unable to draw proper boundaries with his parents. The psychologist also said he suffered from a need for approval, a need to impress others, and a need for attention, and pointed to Steve’s fear of inadequacy and rejection. His father, who was a doctor, and his mother, who was a nurse, put “enormous pressure” on him to succeed at school, the court documents read. His parents would grill him and his brother on academic subjects, and the one who got the most wrong answers would be “frozen out” by his mother, while the other would be showered with love. When he was working at The New Republic, he came home for Passover one year and got his parents a subscription. They said the magazine was a “sandbox,” and it was time he grew up. He decided to create articles with “electricity,” and that’s when he began making things up. There’s no doubt that parental pressure played some part in what Steve did. But, as Jack Shafer wrote, the stories create a “cringeworthy picture of him. How many people would make the sort of confessions and excuses that Glass does in this case, just to gain admittance to the bar?”

In our interview, his views about his parents sounded more nuanced. Yes, they were pressure-cooker Jews, he admitted, “but I internalized the pressure much more than they put it on me.” He reads his descriptions of them in the legal papers and they sound “harsh” to him now. “I feel much more sympathetic, because I brought their world crashing down on them, too.” He said his parents had changed over time and so had he. Now, he thinks of them as “more like good friends who have a long shared history with me, but there’s no real feeling of dependence.” I pressed him on this, and he said that he was “wary to talk about them.” I had the strong impression that Steve had faced all these former versions of himself—not just the fabulist but the pleaser and the manipulator and the grasping Georgetown grad desperate to be a lawyer—and shaken hands with them and emerged from those encounters improbably content.

The first thing Stephen Glass tells new clients of his law firm is that he worked for a magazine where he lied, made up stories, and got caught.

When Chuck Lane got the call asking whether he wanted to participate in Steve’s bar trial, he was somewhere between reluctant and game. He told the bar he would show up if they subpoenaed him. “I was trying to avoid seeming like I had a vendetta against Steve, which I don’t,” he told me. “I don’t want people to get the idea that, after all these years, I am out to get Steve. I don’t care if he’s in the bar or not.” Still, he told me, it was a free trip to L.A.

Chuck was not all that eager to meet to discuss Steve Glass, yet again, so I interviewed him over the phone. He is now a columnist at The Washington Post, and we talked while he was waiting to be edited. When Chuck arrived at The New Republic, we young people experienced him as a parent constantly telling us to clean our rooms. We were used to the delightful, conspiratorial antics of Michael Kelly, and Chuck was an actual grown-up. He had been a foreign correspondent for many years writing serious stories about Eastern Europe. He was not impressed with Steve or any of us bright young things. But we later realized that the character traits we least appreciated about Chuck—his sobersidedness, his suspicion of froth—were what ultimately made him the hero of the story. Steve was finally caught after a dramatic showdown, in which Chuck drove him to Bethesda to find the site of a supposed hackers’ convention that Steve had written about. Chuck pressed Steve for details—which building? what room? Steve kept lying and Chuck kept behaving like the reporter he was. We had to grudgingly admit it: he could not have handled it better.

Over the years, the scandal has made Chuck a “D-list celebrity,” he jokes. He was the hero of Shattered Glass, played by Peter Sarsgaard. He got admiring letters and e-mails from all over the world, and still does. “While the world would be a better place if it had never happened, it would be hypocritical to say it was some kind of heavy burden for me,” Chuck says. “It was a great feather in my cap.” At the same time, he added, “it tends to distract from everything else I’ve done in my career.”

What Chuck has always wanted from Steve, he told me, is a “full, voluntary, unrestrained, uninhibited, generous, forthcoming confession. And he never did that. How can you believe in a person’s change unless you know what the hell he did?” I told him about my trip to see Steve, and how he had seemed truly honest about everything he had done wrong. “If what you’re saying is true, if he’s really being truthful with you, then that’s the first evidence I’ve ever heard that maybe he’s finally got it,” Chuck said.

But he couldn’t sit with that impression for more than a few seconds. What Steve was telling me was a “classic one-source story,” because it all came from Steve, he pointed out. Then the train started up again: “It just goes back to the fundamental problem with all this. You can’t get your virginity back! You just can’t! Steve did something so spectacular and so dishonest on such a world scale that it’s going to stay with him forever, and not unfairly. People are entitled to doubt him now.”

Chuck does not generally seem like a hard-hearted or unforgiving person. But he went through something very different than the rest of us. We never confronted a panicking Steve and had him lie to our faces. When it comes to Steve, Chuck can’t get his virginity back, either. Chuck agreed with that theory. “This is a problem, and not a problem I can get over. I cannot believe what Steve Glass says. He went through the looking glass, and now I feel like Steve could say anything and I would be a fool to believe it,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I hate Steve, and it doesn’t mean I want Steve to fail in life or anything. I just don’t believe him. … With me, he’s just forfeited the presumption that he’s telling the truth.”

The aftermath was different for Chuck, too. The Steve Glass affair became a central part of his public identity, perhaps even the moment when he was his most fully realized self. Whether he likes it or not, he will forever be defined by it, and whether he wants to or not, that’s hard to let go of.

After many hours of talking, Steve and I met Julie at a bar in Venice Beach. The place was packed; it was late, and I was jetlagged and a little cold. Our conversation had been so intense for so long that it slipped into a kind of normal. We talked about pets, Julie’s job, and a minor procedure she’d had. Julie told me they’d recently gotten engaged. They asked the waiter whether the food on the menu was actually vegan and admitted, in that cute couple way: “I know. We’re annoying.” Julie and I caught up a little on friends we had in common, and I had the thought that, if we lived in the same city, I might bump into Julie and Steve naturally, that I wouldn’t have to widen my social circle all that much for us all to land inside it.

I told Steve I was grateful he’d been willing to risk talking to me after all these years, and he said, “I missed you.” He told me that after college, Jon and I had been like his family, and that’s why he wanted so much for us to like him. My guard went up again. I was touched and simultaneously worried about getting taken in by him. Did he really miss me? Or was he saying he missed me as a way to win me over?

It was then that I realized that I was not the inspector come to peer inside him and discover whether the inner workings were free of rust. Forgiveness happens in a relationship. The transgressor has to make a palpable shift but so does the person who has been transgressed against. The day before I came to L.A., I had reread The Fabulist. This time, it didn’t move me one way or another. The parts that had enraged me before seemed minor, and I also noticed some moving moments of self-reflection I’d missed. That was my first clue that I, too, was no longer the same person I was in 1998, or 2003. Some people he has wronged will never forgive him. This doesn’t mean that the truth about Steve is elusive, or subjective. It means that forgiveness is a choice, and I decided to make it.

Hanna Rosin is a writer for The Atlantic and Slate, and author of The End of Men.

Correction: I previous version of this story misspelled Hayden Christensen’s last name.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120145/stephen-glass-new-republic-scandal-still-haunts-his-law-career

12/14/2014    Politico   By Todd S. Purdum

It’s practically a truism that the only way for a president without big majorities in Congress to get anything big passed is to anger his own party’s base. And history suggests that the short-term partisan pain usually produces more lasting political gain.

At least that’s what the Obama White House is hoping will be the result of its messy compromise with House Republicans on a year-end omnibus spending bill that left the president’s liberal supporters seething. For anyone who lived through Bill Clinton’s strategic compromises with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, the complaints from the left had a familiar ring.

In June 1995, when Clinton countered GOP demands for fiscal probity by offering his own plan to balance the federal budget (over 10 years instead of seven), House Democrats cried foul. “I think most of us learned some time ago that if you don’t like the president’s position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks,” declared Rep. Dave Obey, a liberal stalwart from Wisconsin. “If you can follow this White House on the budget, you are a whole lot smarter than I am.”

But Clinton’s aides explained that he had come to the conclusion that the American people would not see him as leading if he simply said “no” to the Republicans, and that he was determined to be seen as being on the “solution side” of problems, from the budget deficit to welfare.

(Also on POLITICO: The man behind the political cash grab)

In the six years of his presidency, Obama hasn’t had to do much of that kind of compromising, nor has he been willing to. But in the wake of the GOP’s midterm rout, the president and his aides have now apparently come to the conclusion that that’s what the American public wants — and even expects.

The stakes facing the two presidents are not really comparable. Clinton — in the midst of his first term — was trying to reorient his party by upending three decades of Democratic orthodoxies concerning the social compact, while Obama — nearing the end of his second — was simply trying to avoid the threat of another round of brinkmanship over a government shutdown by passing what — in a less rancorous era — would have been a routine spending bill.

This president bent on Democratic priorities — allowing the weakening of a key provision of the financial reform bill he himself fought so hard to pass, and a big increase in individual contribution limits to political parties and their congressional campaign committees — to stave off even more unpalatable elements: cuts to Obamacare, or retribution for his recent executive actions on immigration. From the administration’s perspective, accepting this bill — warts and all — was better than risking an immediate shutdown or a 90-day continuing budget resolution that would have to be relitigated in the far more unstable circumstances of a larger House GOP majority and a Republican Senate.

Obama’s presumed intention is to live to fight another day. And if he has any hope of avoiding complete marginalization in his last two years in office, that’s just what he’ll have to do — if only by using his veto pen — in the new year.

(Also on POLITICO: How the deal got done)

It’s worth remembering that President George W. Bush passed his Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008 with crucial Democratic support, over the vociferous objection of conservative Republicans — and even then only after the House initially rejected the bill and sent the stock market plunging in shock. In negotiations over the bill, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson knelt down in supplication to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for her support.

So it’s probably not the worst thing for Obama, politically speaking, that Pelosi has declared herself “enormously disappointed” with the White House’s support for the spending bill, which passed with just 57 Democratic “yes” votes and 139 “nos.” Indeed, the public tends to like presidents who stand up to their own parties, and couldn’t care less about the internal rivalries and disagreements within the House Democratic caucus.

Early in Clinton’s tenure, House Speaker Tom Foley and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, both Democrats, urged him to abandon any push for the kind of campaign finance overhaul that Ross Perot’s outside-the-box campaign had put on the national agenda. Clinton acceded and later counted the decision as one of his biggest mistakes, in terms of setting the tone for his new administration.

(Also on POLITICO: How Wall St. got its way)

Perhaps no other single act of Obama’s presidency has received sharper criticism from both parties than his early acceptance of his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s advice to let Pelosi take the lead in drafting the economic stimulus bill that was roundly denounced by liberals as too small and by conservatives as too laden with pet Democratic pork barrel projects.

“He was far too deferential to the congressional wing of his party, and it cost him,” one senior Republican House aide said Friday. “It cost them more, but it cost him.” And, the aide continued, in contrast to Clinton — who made a determined strategic decision that the only way to win reelection in the aftermath of the GOP’s 1994 takeover of Congress was to seek artful compromise, “this president is not really driving events anymore.”

In fact, Republicans said, the White House weighed in with its last-minute lobbying push only after the basic terms of the deal had been hammered out by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and his colleagues Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), thus giving Pelosi a good 24 hours to solidify liberal opposition.

From the White House perspective, internal Democratic divisions on Capitol Hill were just as pronounced — and perhaps more significant — as Pelosi’s irritation with Obama.

The paradox is that despite the liberals’ discontent, the White House’s all-out campaign for the compromise bill involved the kind of personalized outreach — from the president’s top aides to senior Cabinet officers — that congressional Democrats have been craving in vain for six years. It’s tempting to ponder what sort of results Obama might have achieved if he had employed such basic care-and-feeding techniques earlier, in less drastic circumstances.

Were he inclined to be a careful student of Clinton’s successes — which the record suggests he is not, particularly — Obama might take comfort from the reality that 20 years ago, Clinton was widely mocked by many in his own party (and among the opposition) as weak and waffling (or at least cynical) for his compromises with the Republicans. By the end of his tenure, no less a critic than Gingrich adjudged him “the best tactical politician, certainly of my lifetime,” and today he is remembered, for better and worse, as the kind of president who could close the deal.

Even before tackling a biography of Fox News founder Roger Ailes,New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman broke several scoops about the most secretive organization in cable news. But a book gives Sherman space to blow up the legends and unearth the real story of how a sickly kid from Ohio who once produced The Mike Douglas Show became a political adviser to three presidents and created an outlet whose bare-knuckle approach and conservative politics reflect his own pugnacious style — turning Fox News into the most popular cable TV news channel in the process. So much of how America talks about politics now flows from Fox News’ partisan, crowd-pleasing approach, and Sherman provides a detailed, illuminating history of how Ailes made it all happen.

— recommended by Eric Deggans, critic, Arts Desk

http://apps.npr.org/best-books-2014/#/book/the-loudest-voice-in-the-room-how-the-brilliant-bombastic-roger-ailes-built-fox-news-and-divided-a-country