by Harris, Dan
The unmasking of Ted Haggard became a massive national story. There are few things the media loves more than a self-appointed paragon of virtue falling from grace. Local reporters captured Haggard leaving his house in an SUV, with his wife by his side and several of his children in the car. To me, he looked like a child caught dead to rights but still hoping against hope that he could talk his way out of it. He leaned over the wheel and told the assembled reporters, “I’ve never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I’m steady with my wife.”
“So you don’t know Mike Jones?” one reporter asked.
“No, I don’t know Mike Jones,” he said.
Moments later, in a flagrant bit of bad acting, Ted asked, “What did you say his name was?”
Days later, the charade crumbled. He stepped down from his positions at the National Association of Evangelicals and at New Life Church. In a statement read aloud to his followers, he said, “There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life.”
The affair gave birth to a thousand snarky blog posts, and it confirmed Americans’ lowest opinions about evangelicals. This was, after all, a man who described homosexuality as a sin, as a “life that is against God.” My gay friends were eating it up—Wonbo being one notable exception. He never once crowed. Like me, he seemed surprised and a little saddened. We both agreed that, while Ted was clearly guilty of towering hypocrisy, there was also some poignancy to the fact that the moral teachings associated with his faith had forced him to suppress a fundamental part of who he was. We covered the story aggressively, but we also took pains to point out that Haggard was much less strident than many of his co-religionists on the issue of homosexuality. In fact, he had once assured Barbara Walters in a prime-time interview that gays, too, can go to heaven.
Throughout the crisis, I had been calling and emailing Ted repeatedly. No reply. The guy who used to get back to me within seconds had gone completely dark.
After a few days, the story died down, as it always does. America, as then senator Barack Obama had noted after Hurricane Katrina, “goes from shock to trance” faster than any other nation on earth.
As Ted’s world fell apart, mine was getting much better. Just weeks later, Bob Woodruff told me he wanted to set me up on a date. Not two years after surviving a bomb blast to the head in Iraq, Woody—as he was known to his friends—was playing matchmaker.
At first I was skeptical. I wasn’t enthusiastic about being set up—to me it seemed slightly pathetic—but it was hard to say no to an American hero, a guy whose story was turned into a bestselling book, and who was greeted by Jon Stewart during an appearance on The Daily Show with the question, “Why are you still more handsome than me?”
Bob’s wife, Lee, an effervescent and hilarious blonde, was hard to refuse as well. Here’s how she laid out the whole setup situation: “Her name is Bianca. She’s beautiful, she’s a doctor, and you’re an idiot if you don’t do this.” This Bianca was, per Bob and Lee, an internal medicine resident at Columbia University. The Woodruffs were friends with her parents, and what could I do? I said yes.
On the night prearranged for the date, I was walking out of the gym on my way to the restaurant when my phone rang. It was Bob, calling to make sure I wasn’t flaking out. “Dude,” he assured me, “she’s hot.”
We were meeting at an Italian spot on the Upper West Side. Pathologically punctual, I showed up early and staked out a spot at the bar, near a pair of bankers from New Jersey doing shots. It was mid-December and the place had festive decorations and a holiday feel. My plan was to lean against the bar, staring at my BlackBerry, so that when Bianca walked in, she could come over and tap me on the shoulder and I could look up all cool and nonchalant. Of course, I was too nervous to pull that off and ended up staring anxiously at the door.
Minutes later, when she appeared, my internal reaction was similar to the one my cousin Andy described the first time he met his future wife: “I’ll take this one.” Bob had not exaggerated; she was beautiful, with golden hair and piercing, light blue eyes—like a husky’s, but much softer. As I did whenever I was confronted with anyone I found intriguing, I peppered her with biographical questions. She was raised in Manhattan. Her dad was a doctor, her mom an artist. She was six months out of medical school and in the hellishly stressful first year of residency. She was also, as I learned over the course of the evening, smart, passionate about medicine, humble, optimistic, quick to laugh, and a lover of animals and dessert. Pretty soon, we were doing tequila shots with the bankers.
Drinks turned into dinner. The first date turned into a second. Three months later, Bianca moved into my apartment. (On the day we brought her stuff over, I marveled at the affable yet unyielding diplomatic skills she employed to convince me to give up 60 percent of my closet space.) Two months after that, we adopted cats. When we called my parents to ask them to provide a character reference for the assiduous pet-vetters at the ASPCA, my father—who aside from being a worrier is also a wiseass—asked whether we were also going to have a commitment ceremony. The cats immediately became the butt of jokes among my male friends at work, who automatically associated felinity with femininity (ignoring historical cat-loving avatars of machismo such as Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, and Dr. Evil). When Chris Cuomo heard about our pet adoptions, he sent me an email that read, “Do u sit when u pee?”
As a man who was a mild hypochondriac, it was handy to have a doctor around. More significantly, after living alone in my apartment for nearly a decade, I found it wonderfully strange to get back into bed after a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom and see three cats and a human form lying there, all of whom now had equal claim to the territory.
Bianca truly brought out the fool in me. I had never been this comfortable around anyone before. I would march around the apartment, a displeased feline under each arm, singing songs. I would make up ridiculous nicknames for them. When she was in the living room trying to work, I’d use the Remote app on my iPad to blast Steppenwolf and then lie there with a stupid, twisted-up grin as she burst into the room, tut-tutting about the interruption.
I was beguiled by the contrasts. This was a woman who subscribed to The New England Journal of Medicine, and also Us Weekly. She looked great in both scrubs and cocktail dresses. She could work a thirty-hour shift—during which she would perform chest compressions, manage ornery colleagues, and comfort grieving families—then come home, take a nap, and cook her grandmother’s sauce and meatballs. When I went away on work trips, I often arrived at my destination to find that she had packed snacks and a mash note in my suitcase.
I’d never been in love before. I’d long had a nagging fear that maybe I was too self-centered to ever get there. Everyone always said you’d “know,” but I never “knew.” Now, all of a sudden, I did. It was a giant relief to sincerely want what was best for Bianca—to worry about her life and her career, rather than just fixate inwardly. Selfishly, I felt she was both a smarter and kinder person than I was, and that being by her side might make me better.
Sorting out my romantic life after decades of often aimless bachelorhood was like scratching a huge existential itch. On the downside, though, it left me free to concentrate all of my neurotic powers on work. Bianca pointed out that I would sometimes come through the door at night scowling. “What’s wrong?” she’d ask. “Nothing,” I’d mutter, then make a beeline for the couch, turn on the television, and launch into a harsh postgame analysis of my latest story. It was hard for her not to take my occasional gruffness a little personally. More than that, she hated seeing me gloomy; she had a doctor’s urge to cure and a sense of sadness and frustration that she couldn’t.
It was not as if she didn’t understand and sympathize with the “price of security” stance. This was a woman who had graduated at the top of her med school class, was in an elite residency program, and who still felt she had more to prove than anyone else. She, too, would come home frayed, but�
��fairly or unfairly—the very nature of Bianca’s anxiety would make me feel superficial by comparison. She would cry over her patients’ pain or loss, whereas my complaints often involved a colleague getting a story I wanted, or questions about whether I’d handled myself well during a contentious on-air interview.
From Bianca’s point of view, though, perhaps the most annoying part of my work fixation was my unnatural attachment to my BlackBerry, which I kept within reach during dinner, on the couch as we watched TV, and on my bedside table all during the night. She’d catch me glancing at it in the middle of conversations and shoot me a j’accuse look. She did eventually convince me to at least move the offending instrument, and its charger, to the other side of the bedroom while we slept.
One of the things I was often doing with that BlackBerry was sending emails to Ted Haggard. I’d hit him up every month or so, desperately seeking that exclusive interview whenever he emerged from seclusion. Journalism aside, I also was massively curious about where he was and what he was doing.
Nearly a year went by before he wrote me back. When at last I got him on the phone, he had an incredible story to tell: Time’s 11th most influential American evangelical was now living with his family in a dingy apartment in Arizona, barely scraping by, selling insurance. Remarkably, his wife, Gayle, had decided to stand by him.
Several months later, on a frigid January morning in New York City, Ted and I sat down for his first network news interview since the scandal.
I was nervous—and it showed. I have a very obvious tell when I’m anxious: my face looks tired. And on this day I looked exhausted. I tried jumping up and down, slapping my cheeks, and standing out in the cold, but I couldn’t fix it. I was simply uncomfortable doing what was sure to be a tough interview with someone I knew and liked.
For the shoot, Wonbo had rented a studio downtown, and I was sitting in a cushioned chair opposite Ted, who was on a couch. Unlike me, he seemed entirely at ease with the inquisition that was to ensue. He was leaning back, legs crossed, wearing a blazer but no tie.
I dove right in. “Is it fair to describe you as a hypocrite and a liar?” I asked.
“Yes. Yes, it is,” he said, almost enthusiastically, as if he couldn’t wait to get this off his chest.
“Do you think you owe gay people an apology?” I asked.
“Absolutely. And I do apologize,” he said. “I’m deeply sorry for the attitude I had. But I think I was partially so vehement because—because of my own war.”
Amazingly to me, he insisted he wasn’t gay. Months of psychotherapy, he said, had cleared everything up. “Now I’m settled in the fact that I am a heterosexual, but with issues,” he said. “So I don’t fit into a neat little box.”
He said it was no problem to stay faithful to his wife. “It’s not a struggle at all now.”
“Why not just live as a gay man?” I asked.
“ ’Cause I love my wife. I love my intimate relationship with my wife. I’m not gay.”
“Can you hear people watching this, though, and thinking to themselves, ‘This guy is just not being honest with himself?’ ”
“Sure, but everybody has their own journey. And people can judge me. I think it’s fair if they judge me and that they think I’m not being real with myself.”
The toughest moment in the interview came when I surprised him by playing him a damning piece of videotape we’d obtained. It was an interview with a former parishioner, a young man who said he’d been sexually harassed by Ted. On the tape he described, in graphic terms, how one night Ted had hopped into bed with him in a hotel room and began to masturbate.
When the video ended, Ted said, “It is true. We never had any sexual contact, but I violated that relationship and it was an inappropriate relationship.”
“What’s it like to watch that?” I asked.
“It’s embarrassing. That was very embarrassing. I mean, I am . . . I am a failure.”
When it was all over, Ted didn’t seem at all resentful that I’d blindsided him. I had coffee with him and his wife and we chatted as if none of it had ever happened. We talked a lot about what Ted’s next move might be. The one thing he swore he’d never do again was pastor a church. (A couple of months later, he asked me to meet him and Gayle for lunch at a midtown hotel because they wanted advice on how to pitch a reality show they were dreaming up. When that didn’t take off, they started a church.)
What struck me most from the interview was not Ted’s slipperiness or his eyebrow-raising claims about the nature of sexuality or even his wife’s decision not to file for divorce; it was something else. For all of Ted’s hypocrisy and deception, there was one issue on which he did not waver: his faith. “I never fell away from God,” he told me. When I pointed out that it was his religious beliefs that forced him to live a lie for so many years, he countered that it was the “culture of hatefulness” in the modern church that did that, not the core teachings of Jesus himself. In his darkest moments, when he was living in that apartment in Arizona, crying every day for a year and a half and actively contemplating suicide, his faith was his main source of comfort. It gave him the sense that his travails were part of a larger plan, that even if everyone on earth hated him, his creator did not. “I knew with assurance,” he said, “that God cared for me.”
In the weeks and months after the interview, I kept coming back to this. I, too, had endured my own self-created crisis, albeit of a less public and less intense variety. Ted’s involved doing drugs and cheating on his wife; mine involved doing drugs and having a nationally televised freak-out. On this score, I envied Ted—and not in a patronizing, I-wish-I-were-stupid-enough-to-believe-this-stuff way. It would have been enormously helpful to have had a sense that my troubles had a larger purpose or fit into some overarching plan. I had read the research showing that regular churchgoers tended to be happier, in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning and that suffering happens for a reason helped them deal more successfully with life’s inevitable humiliations.
Up until my interview with Ted, I had derived a smug sense of self-satisfaction that, unlike the believers I was covering, I did not have a deep need for answers to the Big Questions; I was comfortable with the mystery of how we got here and what would happen after we died. But I now realized that a sort of incuriosity had set in; my sense of awe had atrophied. I might have disagreed with the conclusions reached by people of faith, but at least that part of their brain was functioning. Every week, they had a set time to consider their place in the universe, to step out of the matrix and achieve some perspective. If you’re never looking up, I now realized, you’re always just looking around.
Ted Haggard, who had taught me to see people of faith in a different light, had also taught me something else: the value of a viewpoint that transcended the mundane. Of course, I wasn’t forsaking ambition—and I wasn’t planning to magically force myself to believe in something for which there was, in my opinion, insufficient evidence. However, I was about to cover a story that, for the first time since Peter Jennings ordered me to start reporting on spirituality, would actually penetrate my defenses. The message came in a deeply weird and extremely confusing package.
Chapter 3
Genius or Lunatic?
The man sitting across from me and completely blowing my mind favored a style, both verbal and sartorial, so monochrome that it was as if he wanted to vanish like a chameleon into the barf-colored wallpaper of this hotel room in Toronto. He was elfin, rheumy-eyed, and, as the cameras rolled, droning on in a gentle Teutonic lilt. Superficially, at least, he was the type of person who, if you met him at a cocktail party, you would either ignore or avoid.
And yet he was saying extraordinary things. Life-altering things. He was making points that were forcing me to rethink my whole “price of security” modus operandi. Not just rethink it, but think above it, beyond it—and possibly go beyond thought altogether.
The real mindfuck, though, was this: almost as soon
as he said something brilliant, he would say something else that was totally ridiculous. The man was toggling seamlessly between compelling and confusing, incisive and insane.
He would go like this:
Zig: a spot-on diagnosis of the human condition.
Zag: a bizarre, pseudoscientific assertion.
Zig: a profound insight into how we make ourselves miserable.
Zag: a claim that he once lived on park benches for two years in a state of bliss.
He said he had a way for me to be happier, too, and despite the fog of folderol, I half suspected he actually might be right.
Weeks before I first heard the name Eckhart Tolle, I was staring, unhappily, in the mirror of an airplane bathroom. I was on my way home from shooting a Nightline story in Brazil, where we’d spent a week living with an isolated Amazon tribe. It had been amazing. These people still lived exactly as their ancestors had in the Stone Age. They’d barely met any outsiders. They let my producer and me sleep in hammocks in their huts. I returned the favor by entertaining them with my video iPod. Leaning over the metallic counter in this lavatory, I was neither savoring the incredible experience I had just had nor strategizing about how to write my story, which was set to air a few weeks hence. Instead, I had my forelock pushed back and was scrutinizing a hairline that seemed to me about as stable as the Maginot Line.
Bianca had busted me doing this on more than one occasion in our bathroom at home. She pointed out that, other than some thinning in the back and a receding divot near my part, I basically had a full head of hair. But every now and again, a stray glance in a reflective surface would send me down the rabbit hole. Here in this cramped airplane bathroom, I was flashing on a future that looked like this: