The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  This bleakness is Simon’s stamp on the show, and it suggests that his political passions ultimately trump his commitment to accuracy or evenhandedness. The imagination, values, and convictions of a writer play a big part in even the most accurate nonfiction, of course. Telling a true story well demands that the reporter achieve his own understanding of the events and people described, and arriving at that point can mean shading reality, even if only unconsciously. We view the world from where we sit. Truman Capote, in his nonfiction classic, In Cold Blood, finds a clue to the motives of the murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, in unrequited or unconscious homosexual desire. Norman Mailer’s preoccupation with mystical themes gives the senseless killer Gary Gilmore a romantic aura in The Executioner’s Song. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s fascination with masculinity and social status allows him to cast the early space program as a prolonged reprise of ancient single-combat rituals. In each case, the author’s unique perspective gives a “true” story a starkly original shape.

  But the more passionate your convictions, the harder it is to resist tampering with the contradictions and stubborn messiness of real life. Every reporter knows the sensation of having a story “ruined” by some new and surprising piece of information. Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it’s also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success—and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction.

  Which is precisely what he’s done. Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of that vision by doing what reporters do—heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes—he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out. He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

  The essential difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is that the artist owns his vision, while the journalist can never really claim one, or at least cannot claim a complete one—because the real world is infinitely complex and ever changing. Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes make it feel more real than reality. As a film producer once told me, “It’s important not to let the facts get in the way of the truth.”

  Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.

  In a session before a live audience in Baltimore last April, for a local storytelling series called The Stoop, Simon was asked to speak on the topic “My Nemesis.” He began by reciting, by name, some of the people he holds grudges against, going all the way back to grade school. He was being humorous, and the audience was laughing, but anyone who knows him knows that his monologue was, like his fiction, slightly overstated for effect, but basically the truth.

  “I keep these names, I treasure them,” he said. “I will confess to you now that anything I have ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, as anything I have ever done in life down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe, and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be…. That’s what’s going on in my head.”

  This vindictive streak, this desire to show people how wrong they are, is tempered somewhat by Simon’s sense of humor and his appreciation for complexity, and by the vision of his many skillful collaborators. But in the show’s final season, which debuts in January, Simon will revisit the part of Baltimore that’s closest to his heart, the Sun. The season, more than any other before it, will reflect his personal experience. Given his long memory and his inclination to settle old scores, the difference between fiction and fact will be of particular interest to his former colleagues.

  The newspaper’s management rightly viewed Simon’s intentions with trepidation, but given that city hall and the governor’s mansion embraced his jaundiced vision, how could the fourth estate refuse to open its doors? So the Sun has allowed the show to use its name and even to build an exact replica of its newsroom so that Simon and his company can flesh out their story line with greater authenticity. It isn’t going to be a comfortable ride, because Simon is apparently set to exorcise some personal demons. His vision of Baltimore was shaped largely by his work as a crime reporter, and it seems likely that his anger about capitalism and the devaluation of human life is rooted in his unhappy experience at the Sun.

  A famous quote from the great Sun Papers columnist H. L. Mencken is reprinted in large type on the wall of the spacious lobby in the newspaper’s building on Calvert Street: “As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.”

  It was this promise, this “life of kings,” that animated Simon and many other reporters who started in the business twenty years ago.

  “I love this place,” Simon told the audience at The Stoop last April, speaking of his frame of mind at age twenty-two, when he was starting his career as a Sun reporter:

  This is the place of H. L. Mencken, of Frank Kent, of William Manchester. It’s like you can touch things that you can be proud of. I just have to do good work for its own sake…. I’m basically happy, and it’s like the least ambitious I am in my life. Until … it gets sold out of town. And these guys come in from Philly. The white guys from Philly. And I say that with all the contempt you can muster for the phrase white guys. Soulless motherfuckers. Everything that Malcolm X said in that book before he got converted back to humanity—no, no, he was right in the first place. These guys were so without humanity. And it was the kind of journalism—how do I describe bad journalism? It’s not that it’s lazy, it’s that whenever they hear the word Pulitzer, they become tumescent. They become engorged…. All they wanted to do was win prizes…. I watched them single-handedly destroy the Sun.

  The “white guys” Simon so viciously abused in this talk (and not for the first time) were William Marimow and John Carroll, notable newspapermen who are my friends; Marimow was a longtime colleague of mine at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He eventually left the Sun in conflict over newsroom cutbacks with its corporate owners (originally the Times-Mirror Corporation, which was absorbed by the Tribune Company in 2000) and went on to head the news division of National Public Radio. Last year, Marimow returned to helm the Inquirer, a newspaper where he had earlier won two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting. Carroll became editor in chief of the Los Angeles Times, resigned defending the newsroom there, and is now at Harvard University. Both have impeccable reputations in their field, and I hold them both in high esteem. Simon hates them.

  He hates them in part because they were agents of change at the Sun, the institution he loved, initiating a process familiar in newsrooms all over the country. Just as the efforts of great detectives like McNulty and Freamon are neither valued nor supported by their bosses, many superb reporters and editors at the Sun, and with them the paper’s higher mission, were betrayed by the corporate pursuit of profit margins. Marimow and Carroll were for a time agents of that process, an unpleasant role that many fine newspaper editors have found themselves in during the past decade. Yet to Simon they are all the more culpable because they didn’t public
ly object to a talent drain that he felt devastated the newsroom. There’s nothing unique about the situation. The sad story is familiar to newspaper people all over the country. (I watched it happen at the Inquirer, where Knight-Ridder threw just about everyone and everything of value overboard before bailing out of journalism altogether.)

  Some of us chalk up this trend to market forces, to the evolution of information technology, to television, radio, and the Internet. At the long-since-departed Baltimore News-American, where I worked before being hired at the Inquirer, we used to joke that people didn’t read our newspaper; they played it. The paper was full of number and word games, along with sports scores, racetrack results, TV listings, comics, want ads, and advertisements with clippable coupons. One by one, these multifarious reasons why people used to buy newspapers have been cherry-picked by newer media; that includes the paper’s most basic offering—breaking news, whose headlines are now available on most cell phones. Declining circulation means declining advertising, which means declining revenues, so corporate managers face a tougher and tougher challenge maintaining the high profit margins that attracted investors thirty years ago. These are just facts, and different people and organizations have handled them with different measures of grace and understanding.

  But to Simon, this complex process became personal, boiling down to corporate greed and the “soullessness” of Marimow and Carroll. It’s an honest opinion, but arguably unfair, flavored by personal bitterness and animosity. (Simon told a writer from American Journalism Review that he was angered by the paper’s unwillingness to grant him a raise after he returned from a leave of absence in 1995—he was writing The Corner—and he took a buyout six months later.) Given his vindictive strain, his talent for character and drama, and the national TV show at his disposal, such an opinion is also a combustible one.

  I should note here that it isn’t hard to join Simon’s enemies list; I did it myself while writing this essay. I first contacted Simon several years ago, as a fan of his show and as a screenwriter and aspiring producer interested in learning more about him and how he’d created it. He was friendly and helpful, and I remain grateful. Then in 2006, after the fourth season of The Wire, I decided to write a tribute to Simon and his show. I contacted him by e-mail to see about renewing our conversation on different terms, and he consented. He asked me to avoid writing about his personal life, and I agreed. I was determined, as well, to avoid discussing his dispute with Marimow and Carroll, since I liked and admired both parties, and was disinclined to choose sides.

  When I discovered, after my last conversation with Simon, that the final season of the show would be based on his experiences at the Sun, I felt compelled to describe the dispute, but I resolved to characterize it without entering it. To avoid exploiting anything that had passed informally between us on the subject, I relied on Simon’s ample public commentary to explain his feelings, and then, realizing that the essay had strayed in an unanticipated direction, showed him an early draft to solicit corrections and criticism. I got it. The draft provoked a series of angry, long-winded accusations, which would have remained private had he not taken his complaints to the Atlantic’s editor, in an angry letter impugning my motives in contacting him originally, and characterizing all our interactions as my attempt to win his confidence in order to skewer him on behalf of my friends. I could see myself morphing into a character in his show.

  Simon has already given Marimow’s name to a character in The Wire, a repellent police department toady who, in the hilarious words of the show’s Sergeant Jay Landsman, “doesn’t cast off talent lightly, he heaves it away with great force.” But this was just a minor swipe; the final season of The Wire will offer Simon the chance to take on his old enemies from the Sun directly. An article that appeared in the October 2000 issue of Brill’s Content hinted at the tack he may take and went to the core of what he says are his objections to the pair. It featured Simon, then five years removed from the paper and well into his enormously successful second career, making the case that a widely respected Sun reporter, protected by Carroll and Marimow, was making up stories and distorting the truth in a hell-bent effort to turn a series on lead-paint poisoning into a competitive Pulitzer submission. Simon felt the editors, in an effort to bolster their new star, purposefully ignored the misgivings of some of the newspaper’s veteran reporters. To the editors, it was a case of an aggressive reporter who had made a few mistakes in pursuit of an important story. To Simon, it was an example of all that was wrong with the remade newspaper, and a reminder of the clash over journalistic values that had led him to quit in the first place. In his mind, the Sun had also abandoned its mission to really cover Baltimore, and was now fiddling while the city burned. Instead of exploring the root causes of the city’s intractable problems—drug abuse and the government’s unenforceable “war” against it; racism; poverty; rampant Big Capitalism—the newspaper was engaged in a largely self-congratulatory crusade to right a minor wrong.

  Sure enough, in the upcoming season one story line deals with a newspaper’s muckraking campaign on homelessness. It’s probably been crafted to represent Simon’s take on a typical Carroll-Marimow project: motivated less by a sincere desire for social reform than by a zeal for Pulitzer Prizes. (The paper did, incidentally, win three Pulitzers under the editors’ guidance. Normally, in the newspaper world, this is considered a triumph, but for Simon it just adds bitter spice to an already bad dish.) And whereas the Brill’s reporter who wrote the story was painstakingly evenhanded, Simon’s fictional version of events will carry no such journalistic burden.

  Apart from the distress it causes the real people behind his sometimes thinly veiled depictions, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this. It’s how an artist shapes a fictional drama out of his own experience. Simon is entitled to his take on things, entitled to exploit his memory and experience, his anger and sense of betrayal, just as he exploited his cynicism and political outrage about official Baltimore in the show’s first four seasons. Indeed, given the richness and power of his vision in The Wire, we ought to be grateful for his unforgiving nature. The kind of reporting he felt could no longer be done at the Sun he has brought to the screen. But his fiction shouldn’t be mistaken for fact. It reflects, as much as anything, Simon’s own prejudices.

  In my decades in newsrooms, I encountered my share of hard-core skeptics like Simon, but those resembling the stereotypical Hack were the exceptions. The more true stories you tell, the more acquainted you are with suffering, stupidity, venality, and vice. But you’re also more acquainted with selflessness, courage, and decency. Old reporters and editors are softened by knowledge and experience. If anything, they become less inclined to suspect or condemn. They encounter incompetence more often than evil, and they see that very few people who screw up do so in ways that are indefensible. After years of drumming up the other side of the story, old reporters are likely to grow less angry and opinionated, not more.

  In that sense only, David Simon may be truer to the stereotype than the stereotype is true.

  The Measured Man

  Atlantic, July/August 2012

  Like many people who are careful about their weight, Larry Smarr once spent two weeks measuring everything he put in his mouth. He charted each serving of food in grams or teaspoons, and broke it down into these categories: protein, carbohydrates, fat, sodium, sugar, and fiber.

  Larry used the data to fine-tune his diet. With input nailed down, he turned to output. He started charting the calories he burns, in workouts on an elliptical trainer and in the steps he takes each day. If the number on his pedometer falls short of his prescribed daily seven thousand, he will find an excuse to go for a walk. Picture a tall, slender man with the supple, slightly deflated look of someone who has lost a lot of weight, plodding purposefully in soft shoes along the sunny sidewalks of La Jolla, California.

  Of course, where outputs are concerned, calories are only part of the story, and it is here that Larry begins to diffe
r from your typical health nut. Because human beings also produce waste products, foremost among them … well, poop. Larry collects his and has it analyzed. He is deep into the biochemistry of his feces, keeping detailed charts of their microbial contents. Larry has even been known to haul carefully boxed samples out of his kitchen refrigerator to show incautious visitors. He is eloquent on the subject. He could sell the stuff.

  “Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?” Larry asks me with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. “There are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length is typically one to ten megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information stored per gram. That’s many orders of magnitude more information density than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your stool is far more interesting than a computer.”