Black halloween! I walked with the crooked nun;
Heard the cruel father sob in the empty room;
and households dining together in daily hatred;
the posed hysteria, and the idiot calm; and those
whose love was poisoned with delay, I saw still smile,
—and felt in myself forever the anguish of understanding.
After six years on the blacklist and working “in the shadows,” as it was called, Maddow caved in and named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. McGilligan reports this reluctantly and sadly. As he had observed when interviewing Ben—and as I had inferred from the Weston biography—Ben was an exceptionally interesting and civilized man. Leafing through my copy of the biography, I am struck anew by its quality of mildly exasperated tenderness toward its subject.
Why am I telling you this? When I told Rachel of my fascination with Ben Maddow and of my feeling that by inserting him into a piece that was supposed to be about her I was imitating her forays into left field, she nodded in agreement. “It’s our form of exhibitionism,” she said. “Here’s what I’m interested in. Here’s what grabs me. I’ll pull you along on the same thread I followed. I think it works. As long as people are connected to you as the author, it works.” The thread I am pulling is attached to a “family secret” that Rachel casually revealed to me one morning. She said that “Maddow”—with its mild subliminal association of meadows in summer—is a fake name. Not faked by her or her parents but by a nineteenth-century Ellis Island official who bestowed it on a family of Russian Jewish immigrants named Medvyedov, derived from medvyed, the Russian word for “bear.” One of the few things Rachel has been told about her kinsman Ben is that he chose David Wolff as his pen name because he thought medvyed meant “wolf.”
Rachel’s paternal grandfather, Bernard, came, like Ben, from this renamed family. He grew up in New Jersey, and became a jeweler. Shortly before the Second World War, he married a woman from a Dutch Protestant family named Gertrude Smits. Rachel speculates that Gertrude’s parents were “not psyched about Trudy marrying a Jew, so this became a subject that was not discussed in the family. It wasn’t exactly a family scandal, but it was close to a family secret that Grandfather was Jewish.” Rachel’s father, Robert, was brought up as a Protestant. When he and the “very Catholic” Elaine were engaged, he agreed that their children would be brought up in her faith. He converted to Catholicism when Rachel was eight years old.
Maddow recalled that around ten years ago, when she and her brother were home for a holiday, her mother made a formal announcement: “‘You know, your grandfather was Jewish.’ And David and I were, like, ‘Yeah?’ My parents thought they were breaking news to us, but my brother and I had known Grandfather was Jewish for a very long time, though we didn’t know how we knew.” In 1938, when Bernard and Trudy married, anti-Semitism was still a fact of life in America, like soda fountains in drugstores. Words like “mishegaas” and “shpilkes,” which trip from Rachel’s tongue in her broadcasts, were never heard in Edward R. Murrow’s. The revelation that someone you didn’t know was Jewish was Jewish was breaking news of a sort. Today, it is something that is apt to receive a “Yeah?” response. My parenthetical tale of the blacklisted distant relative and the covertly Jewish grandfather—set in motion by Rachel’s unguarded question “Does the name Ben Maddow mean anything to you?” and told under the spell of her own meandering narratives—remains incomplete and unsatisfying. My respect for Rachel’s powers of storytelling is only redoubled by my sense of the absurdity of attempting to imitate her. She is inimitable.
* * *
Maddow’s excitement about 2017 has died down. She is as disarming and funny as ever, but sometimes the gaiety seems a little forced. Here and there she is magnificent. In a show on June 30, which could be called “An Essay on Disgust,” she lashed out at Donald Trump as she had never done before. The occasion was Trump’s distasteful attack on two MSNBC commentators, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Maddow set up her argument by talking about the political tool of distraction. Typically, a politician who wants to divert attention from a subject he prefers the public not be overly interested in will introduce another subject that will act the way a glittering toy acts on a susceptible baby. But Trump, she said, “doesn’t just merely distract people, he disgusts people. He breaks the bounds of decency. Breaks the bounds of what people generally agree are the moral rules for engagement in public discourse.” The extremity of Trump’s offensiveness forces us to take the bait, to “weigh in as being opposed to this vile thing.… With a normal politician’s normal political distraction, almost all of us will just observe it, right? We’re either distracted by it or we’re not. This guy’s strategy, though, it is really different. It’s to sort of tap on the glass of your moral compass—‘Is this thing on?’ To try to make you feel implicated by your silence.” She went on to speak of the damage Trump does with his “nuclear version of a conventional political tactic.” She said, “The thing he damages is something he neither owns nor particularly values, in the abstract, at least. The thing he hurts is the presidency and by extension the standing of the United States of America.”
Reading the text of the essay is a lesser experience than watching Maddow deliver it on the air. Its logic is a bit insecure, and it is repetitive. But during the broadcast you felt only the force of Maddow’s moral conviction. She is no longer a practicing Catholic, but she has a religious temperament. “I grew up in a believing Catholic home and that has stuck with me,” she told me. “I believe in God, and I probably consider myself Catholic. And I think that in the most basic sense we have to account for our lives once they are done. I don’t have a cartoonist’s picture of Heaven that governs my actions, but I do think you have to make a case for yourself.” This was part of her answer to a question I asked about a commencement speech that she gave at Smith College, in 2010, in which she characterized the saloon-smashing prohibitionist Carrie Nation as “an American huckster, just promoting herself,” who had done the country irreparable harm. She counseled the students to seek glory—the glory of making selfless ethical choices—not fame. That her own quest for glory has brought fame in its wake may be a paradox that occasionally strikes her, but does not put her into a state of high shpilkes.
The New Yorker, 2017
PART II
THE ART OF TESTIFYING
On the second day of David Souter’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in September 1990, Gordon Humphrey, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, with something of the manner of a boarding-school headmaster in a satiric novel, asked the nominee, “Do you remember the old television program Queen for a Day?”
“Well, it wasn’t something that I spent much of my youth watching,” Souter said, “but I’ve heard the term.”
Humphrey fussed with papers and went on, “Yes, well, going back to the days of black-and-white TV, let’s play ‘Senator for a Day.’”
“I still have a black-and-white TV,” Souter put in.
“I don’t doubt it,” Humphrey said, and continued:
I hope you don’t watch it much. My theory is that nothing would do more good for this country than for everyone to smash his television set … because people would begin—especially parents and children—would begin talking and children would begin doing their homework instead of watching—having their minds filled with rubbish every evening from our wonderful networks.
Humphrey collected himself and went on to propose that Souter put himself in the shoes of a senator interrogating a Supreme Court nominee and asked him what he would be most concerned about. He added that he was asking not so much for his own benefit as for that of “the young people who are tuned in—”
“On television,” the voice of a quick-witted Joseph Biden, the chairman of the committee, rang out.
“On television, yes,” Humphrey concluded, as Souter smiled puckishly and the audience burst into laughter.
1
During the confirmation hearings for John Roberts last September, old black-and-white movies came to mind unbidden. Watching Roberts on television was like watching one of the radiantly wholesome heroes that Jimmy Stewart, Joel McCrea, and Henry Fonda rendered so incisively in the films of Capra, Lubitsch, and Sturges. They don’t make men like that anymore. But Roberts had all their anachronistic attributes: the grace, charm, and humor of a special American sort in which decency and kindness are heavily implicated, and from which sexuality is entirely absent. It was out of the question that such a man be denied a place on the Supreme Court. The plot of the hearing hinged not on whether Roberts would be confirmed but on how the eight Democrats on the committee—Patrick Leahy, of Vermont; Edward Kennedy, of Massachusetts; Joseph Biden, of Delaware; Dianne Feinstein, of California; Russell Feingold, of Wisconsin; Charles Schumer, of New York; Herbert Kohl, of Wisconsin; and Richard Durbin, of Illinois—would perform.
In his opening statement, Roberts offered a baseball analogy to illustrate his notion of judicial seemliness. He likened judges to umpires, who “don’t make the rules; they apply them.… They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role.” He added, “Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.” At the game of Senate confirmation, however, Roberts was precisely the person everybody had come to see: he was the batter to whom eighteen pitchers would pitch. Eight of them would try to strike him out while ten (Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania; Orrin Hatch, of Utah; Charles Grassley, of Iowa; Jon Kyl, of Arizona; Mike DeWine, of Ohio; Jeff Sessions, of Alabama; Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; John Cornyn, of Texas; Sam Brownback, of Kansas; and Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma) would ensure that he got on base.
The fastballs that the Democrats hurled were fueled largely by memorandums that Roberts had written as a young attorney in the Reagan administration advising his superiors on how best to undermine civil rights, voting rights, affirmative action, and antidiscrimination legislation. The written record of what Kennedy called “a narrow and cramped, and, perhaps, even a mean-spirited view of the law” was the focus of the Democrats’ pointed questioning. The Democrats invited Roberts to disavow the misguided views of his youth—Surely you don’t believe such stuff now? they asked him in not so many words. And in not so many words Roberts indicated that he still did. But words were not decisive in this hearing. Roberts’s dazzlingly sympathetic persona soared over the proceedings and enveloped them in its aura. In the third round of questions, Charles Schumer looked over his glasses at Roberts and said, “You did speak at length on many issues and sounded like you were conveying your views to us, but when one went back and read the transcript each evening, there was less than met the ear that afternoon.” But in fact it was the eye that created the illusion.
Roberts had a wonderful way of listening to questions. His face was exquisitely responsive. The constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of nineteenth-century primers of acting in which emotions—pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear—are illustrated on the face of a model. When it was his turn to speak, he did so with equal mesmerizing expressiveness. Whenever he said “With all due respect, Senator”—the stock phrase signaling disagreement—he looked so genuinely respectful, almost regretful, that one could easily conclude that he was agreeing with his interlocutor rather than demurring. During the first round of questions, Biden flashed his famous insincere smile and said, “This shouldn’t be a game of gotcha.” In point of fact, the Democrats—notably Biden himself—“got” Roberts a number of times, but no matter what disagreeable things were said to him he maintained his invincible pleasantness. Biden scored heavily, for example, when he said:
In 1999 you said in response to a question … “You know, we’ve gotten to a point these days where we think the only way we can show we’re serious about a problem is if we pass a federal law, whether it’s the Violence Against Women Act or anything else. The fact of the matter is conditions are different in different states, and state laws are more relevant … more attuned to different situations in New York as opposed to Minnesota. And that’s what the federal system is based upon.”
Judge, tell me how a guy beating up his wife in Minnesota is any different condition in New York.
What could Roberts say? He could only flounder, but he floundered so prettily that Biden had to laugh and say “Okay.” Schumer, too, repeatedly won debating points but never penetrated Roberts’s armor of charm. In the second round of questioning, Schumer offered this inspired set piece:
You agree we should be finding out your philosophy and method of legal reasoning, modesty, stability, but when we try to find out what modesty and stability mean, what your philosophy means, we don’t get any answers.
It’s as if I asked you: What kind of movies do you like? Tell me two or three good movies. And you say, “I like movies with good acting. I like movies with good directing. I like movies with good cinematography.” And I ask you, “No, give me an example of a good movie.” You don’t name one. I say, “Give me an example of a bad movie.” You won’t name one. Then I ask you if you like Casablanca, and you respond by saying, “Lots of people like Casablanca.” You tell me it’s widely settled that Casablanca is one of the great movies.
Arlen Specter, the chairman of the committee, intervened to say that Schumer’s time was up, and that there would be a fifteen-minute break. Roberts meekly asked if he could respond before the break, and, when given permission to do so, he said, “First, Dr. Zhivago and North by Northwest”—bringing down the house. Roberts went on to give an unconvincing defense of his evasiveness, but it was too late—there was too much good feeling wafting through the room like lavender air freshener—for the weakness of his argument to matter. Roberts’s performance gave the word “disarming” new meaning. In the end, three Democrats—who had been no less pointed in their questioning than their fellow Democrats—voted to confirm Roberts. “I will vote my hopes and not my fears,” Herbert Kohl said, confessing, “I was troubled by parts of Judge Roberts’s record, but I was impressed by the man himself.” The two other Democrats who voted for Roberts—Patrick Leahy and Russell Feingold—similarly allowed Roberts’s persona to lull them into unguarded optimism. Even Democrats who voted against Roberts acknowledged his spectacular winningness.
But no performance can be entirely without flaw, and there was one extraordinary moment when Roberts was taken by surprise and propelled into uncharacteristic, unattractive at-a-lossness. Dianne Feinstein—a thirties-movie character in her own right, with her Mary Astor loveliness, and air of just having arrived with a lot of suitcases—was questioning him. As she later recalled, “When I couldn’t get a sense of his judicial philosophy, I attempted to get a sense of his temperament and values, and I asked him about the end-of-life decisions, clearly decisions that are gut-wrenching, difficult, and extremely personal.” Feinstein looked at Roberts and said:
I have been through two end-of-life situations, one with my husband, one with my father, both suffering terrible cancers, a lot of pain, enormous debilitation. Let me ask you this question this way: If you were in that situation with someone you deeply love and saw the suffering, who would you want to listen to, your doctor or the government telling you what to do?
Roberts, his brow furrowed with concern and empathy, replied:
Well, Senator, in that situation, obviously, you want to talk and take into account the views and heartfelt concerns of the loved one that you’re trying to help in that situation, because you know how they are viewing this. You know what they mean when they’re saying things like what their wishes are and their concerns are, and, of course, consulting with their physicians.
Huh? For once, the ear trumped the eye. What was Roberts saying? What had happened to his syntax? Why all those “you”s and “they”s when the answer clearly called for an “I”? As Roberts went on speaking in this unsettling language of avoidance, Feinstein coldly interrupted, “That wasn’t my question.” “I’m sorry,” Robert
s said demurely. “I’m trying to see your feelings as a man,” Feinstein said. But she wasn’t able to sustain the moment. She fell into the trap of rephrasing her question in a way that allowed Roberts to say, “Well, that’s getting into a legal question.” Feinstein quickly backed off. “Okay. I won’t go there,” she said, as the split screen showed Roberts smiling with relief and perhaps a bit of triumph.
The Republican bridesmaids performed their ceremonial function with varying degrees of perfunctoriness. Specter, who had the role of chairman to play as well, played it as a courtly old man. A recent battle with cancer had left him thin and almost without hair. It was hard to see in this diminished figure the dark-haired man who fifteen years earlier had interrogated Anita Hill with such arrogant ruthlessness. No one who watched the Clarence Thomas hearings will forget the look of hatred that Hill directed toward Specter as she parried his assault on her credibility with her weapon of steely truthfulness. Specter no longer inspires hatred, of course, but he remains an obscurely sour figure. Some fundamental unlovableness adheres. It doesn’t help that he speaks with excruciating slowness, as if he were a southerner.
Lindsey Graham, who is a southerner, speaks at northern speed, and to highly entertaining effects. When it was his turn to question Roberts, he didn’t just stroke him. He cut to the chase:
You were picked by a conservative president because you have associated yourself with the conservative administrations in the past, advising conservative presidents about conservative policies. And there’s another selection to be made, and you’re going to get the same type of person. And you can—I’m not even talking to you now—to expect anything else is just not fair. I don’t expect—I didn’t expect President Clinton to pick you.
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