While the effect on coalition military might and progress was minimal, the psychological effect was maximized by a weapon that the coalition itself had unwittingly brought along, as if to allow Saddam some sort of handicap: the “embedded” television press corps.
With the decision to integrate both print and television journalists into military units, President George W. Bush and certain of his advisers demonstrated once again their belief that history has begun anew with them. In fact, the history behind this journalistic innovation is long, torturous and important.
From the beginning of organized violence, soldiers have viewed civilians as prey and spoils, while civilians have viewed soldiers as little more than rapacious criminals. So great did this mutual contempt grow that by the Middle Ages, philosophers, legalists and military men had begun to search for ways to limit the impact of the first group on the second.
In the West, this movement led to the professionalization of armies and accompanying codes of discipline for soldiers. Though these codes were often violated, outrages no longer occurred with anything approaching the regularity that they had in earlier centuries. More and more, civilians learned of war from the work of writers who witnessed it rather than by hard experience.
* * *
Demonstrating that their embrace of progressive military methods in Afghanistan hasn’t been a passing fancy, the coalition launched its ground attack into Iraq at the same time that its bombs were falling on the country’s urban areas, in line with the fundamental principles of modern mobile, mechanized warfare established by the great armor campaigns of the Second World War.
* * *
Writers thus accrued a predictably large measure of influence over military affairs, based on how much they did or did not reveal about a given army’s plans and actions. Indeed, so significant did this influence become that, by the time of the American Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman declared that if he could, he would shoot all war correspondents as spies.
Generals of a different nervous temperament, however, learned not to despise but to manipulate the press: T.E. Lawrence, for example, could never have become the great legend of Arabia without the studious efforts of correspondent Lowell Thomas. Myths were not difficult to manufacture or fine-tune: The public’s appetite for tales of martial valor only grew with its greater remove from the dangers of the battlefield.
Television altered this equation. On the one hand, stories of battlefield excitement could be illustrated as never before; on the other, televised images more often than not revealed that war was a terrifying, dangerous and often psychologically shattering experience. But for their new war in Iraq, Mr. Bush and his advisers jettisoned all the old qualms about allowing cameras to show too much. Convinced of the absolute moral rectitude of his struggle against Saddam, Mr. Bush apparently believed that embedded correspondents would only add to the campaign’s glory by allowing the public to see the two undertakings—military and journalistic—as one great and just national mission. Instead, before the first week was out, the administration’s new media policy became the factor most likely to complicate, frustrate and perhaps endanger the success of a military campaign whose brilliance cannot disguise the fact that it is, after all, a military campaign, and as such loaded with death, bloodshed, blunders and acts of betrayal as well as bravery.
The embedded journalist equipped with a video feed is a feature of war more suited to degenerate ancient Rome and its circuses of blood than to a modern, progressive army. Watching actual violence in real time may teach valuable lessons about war, but it spreads fear and eventually inures us to killing. “Embedding,” as the name ironically suggests, is more than mere voyeurism: It is the pornography of the battlefield, and in the hands of amoral criminals such as America’s current enemies, it will prove enormously and enduringly useful. The images born today will take a long time dying.
By allowing the embedding of journalists, then, our modern army is again embracing medievalism. Our enemy, meanwhile, has used the methods of the Information Age to turn the power of televised images against us. This will not be the last reversal of psychological roles that we experience in this war. When we discover weapons of mass destruction, and when we learn just how willing Saddam’s legions are to kill their own merely to gain a temporary advantage, the moral momentum will shift back our way. But embedding has been an unnecessary and foolish experiment; and the sooner we pull the plug on it, the quicker we can go about the final, grueling business of subduing Saddam’s minions.
MARCH 30, 2003 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS
THE UNDERLING’S REVENGE, BY CONDÉ NAST’S WHISTLEBLOWER
The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger.
Doubleday, 327 pages, $21.95.
THE COVER OF THIS BOOK BY A former assistant to Anna Wintour, the British editor in chief of the American Vogue, proclaims that it is “A Novel,” no doubt in part as a legal precaution. It’s been dangled before us for months as a roman à clef that will unlock the chilly glass doors of Condé Nast Publications to give us an inside look at one of the magazine industry’s most famous and fearsome figures. You’re not being sold the writing talent of the author, Lauren Weisberger, a young, beaming, blond Cornell graduate. No, the selling point of The Devil Wears Prada is Ms. Weisberger’s presumably intimate knowledge of her mysterious ex-boss.
APRIL 13, 2003 BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, MARGARET TALBOT, MICHAEL CRAWLEY
MICHAEL KELLY
FOR THOSE OF US hanging about the Kuwait Hilton and the military briefings in the past weeks, and paying the occasional easy-does-it visit to the frontier zone or to the safer bits of southern Iraq, the name of Michael Kelly was a frequent and somewhat guilt-inducing reference. In the first place, we had all read or were engaged in re-reading Martyrs’ Day, his enviable account of the last Gulf War. In the second place, we knew that he was miles up the road ahead of us, at the sharp end with the Third Infantry Division. I don’t approve of “embedded” journalism myself, but nor was I pretending that I’d have had the discipline or fortitude to go that way. So, as we fiddled with gas masks during mostly false-alarm air-raid warnings in Kuwait City, one would say facetiously to another: “Mike must be within commuting distance of Baghdad by now.”
The longest time I ever spent with him was very different. He heard that I was going to a Farrakhan rally at the Howard University campus a few years back, and asked if he could keep me company. We ended up as the only white guys present during an especially lurid harangue from the late Khalid Muhammad. The atmosphere wasn’t all that menacing despite some efforts in that direction, and afterward we spent a good deal of time talking to the organizers and the members of the audience. The rest of the night, we sat up forever while he told me of growing up in D.C., of being by family origin a member of the opposite Irish-Catholic faction to Pat Buchanan, and of going with his mother to early civil-rights rallies. His curiosity and his humor, and his quick impatience with bullshit, were all of a piece. I often thought he was wrong, but I never knew him to be wrong for an ignoble or cowardly reason.
–Christopher Hitchens
I MET MIKE WHEN I WAS on maternity leave with my first baby, and he had just been chosen as the editor of The New Republic, where I then worked. The prospect of squeezing myself into acceptable business attire, heading downtown for the first time since the baby, and making intelligent conversation with the famous journalist who was my new boss seemed hopelessly intimidating. Maybe Mike noticed my moment of hesitation; maybe he just intuited how I felt because he and his wife, Max, had a new baby, too. But the next thing I knew, he was proposing bringing lunch to my house in Bethesda, and the next day he was there, bearing pâté and a baguette and the ingredients for a lovely simple pasta, which he cooked for me while keeping up a riveting patter about all the things he wanted to do at the magazine. He never made a big deal about instituting a “family-friendly” policy at The New Republic, where the staff was young and childless; he just said that, if I preferred, I could work at
home a couple of days a week when I came back.
There are so many ways in which the public Mike will be remembered and deeply missed-as an extraordinary war correspondent, a charismatic editor, a passionate columnist and a beautiful writer. I will remember him as my beau ideal of a working father.
–Margaret Talbot
I MET MICHAEL KELLY when I was an intern at The New Republic in 1996 and he was the magazine’s incoming editor. I wrote to him asking for a staff job. He responded by taking me to a nice lunch in downtown Washington. Our lunch confirmed everything you’ll hear about his kindness toward aspiring young writers whom other editors might impatiently brush off. I was still just a punk, but he treated me like a serious person.
But that lunch was less interesting than the second conversation we had. Michael had offered me a job as a TNR fact-checker, with a chance to write on the side. I had another offer, to write about politics for an alternative weekly in Boston, and decided I couldn’t turn down a full-time writing job. Not only did Michael understand my decision, he seemed to turn a bit wistful.
He was most passionate in urging me to devote myself completely to my work. Go to every last campaign event and city council meeting you can, he told me. If you have a girlfriend, drag her along. Work hard, he said. “You don’t have as much time as you think you do.”
–Michael Crowley
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
APRIL 20, 2003 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
Back to the Couture
SOCIAL NAVIGATION REQUIRES a geisha’s wiles, so it was startling to hear Nan Kempner speak her mind about the $3,500 dinner ticket that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is charging for its April 28 CostumeInstitute Benefit—the opening night of its Goddess exhibit, which will examine the way that “classical dress has profoundly inspired and influenced art and fashion through the millennia.”
“What the hell, I might as well be honest,” Ms. Kempner said by phone. “I just think it’s terribly expensive, and I’ve been doing this party for God knows how many years.” Ms. Kempner said that she’d been at it since the 70’s and her name appears on the current list of benefit committee members. “It’s always been fun and attractive, but it seems to me it’s gotten a little out of hand,” she said.
When asked if she meant that the ticket price seemed ostentatious against the backdrop of the war in Iraq and our foundering economy, she brushed that aside. “I think it was all planned before the war and the economy, and I don’t think it has anything to do with taste or judgment. I just think it has to do with interest, and it has to do with desire to go,” she said. “Who knows? Maybe it’s Seventh Avenue blackmail. It’s the old story: People love to see and be seen, and I guess if you have to pay that much to do so…“
I told Ms. Kempner there didn’t seem to be too many on the committee list who couldn’t afford the price tag.
“Well, exactly,” she said, “but maybe it’s the same group of people that get asked to everything and feel they want to support everything, and sometimes maybe it gets a little out of hand.”
MAY 25, 2003 BY SRIDHAR PAPPU
SO JAYSON BLAIR COULD LIVE, THE JOURNALIST HAD TO DIE
“THAT WAS MY FAVORITE,” JAYSON Blair said. It was the morning of Monday, May 19, and the disgraced former New York Times reporter was curled in a butterfly chair in his sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment. He was eating a bagel and talking about one of his many fabricated stories—his March 27 account, datelined Palestine, W.Va., of Pvt. Jessica Lynch’s family’s reaction to their daughter’s liberation in Iraq.
Mr. Blair hadn’t gone to Palestine, W.Va. He’d filed from Brooklyn, N.Y. As he’d done before, he cobbled facts and details from other places and made some parts up. He wrote how Private Lynch’s father had “choked up as he stood on the porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures.”
That was a lie. In The Times’ lengthy May 11 account of Mr. Blair’s long trail of deception, it reported that “the porch overlooks no such thing.”
Mr. Blair found this funny.
It was now two weeks since Mr. Blair had been exposed and resigned from The Times. In that period, he’d become a journalistic pariah, entered and exited a rehabilitation clinic, and wound up on the cover of Newsweek, smoking a cigarette. His actions stained The New York Times, turned his former newsroom upside down and called into question the future of his ex-boss, executive editor Howell Raines. The Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., had called his deception “a low point” in the paper’s 152-year history.
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
But other than a couple of brief statements here and there, Mr. Blair hadn’t talked publicly about what happened. Everyone still wanted to know: Why had he done it? Why had a promising 27-year-old reporter with a career in high gear at the most respected news organization in the world thrown it all away in a pathological binge of dishonesty?
Theories, of course, abounded. He was too young. He’d been pushed too far. He was a drunk; he was a drug addict; he was depressed.
These theories were all partially true, he said.
“I was young at The New York Times,” said Mr. Blair. “I was under a lot of pressure. I was black at The New York Times, which is something that hurts you as much as it helps you. I certainly have health problems, which probably led to me having to kill Jayson Blair the journalist. I was either going to kill myself or I was going to kill the journalist persona.”
He stayed with that concept. “So Jayson Blair the human being could live,” he said, “Jayson Blair the journalist had to die.”
AUGUST 17, 2003 BY TOM MCGEVERAN
SHMOMO ERECTUS
“IT’S A GAY WORLD AFTER ALL!” SCREAMS VH1 IN A press release pumping up their Aug. 18 documentary, Totally Gay. The show, VH1 says, will capture a phenomenon that has built to a fabulous crescendo this summer. “In the early 90’s, the entertainment landscape was a virtual gay wasteland,” the promoters scold. “Fast forward to 2003, where ‘gay is the new black.’”
Gay is the new black.
In one sentence, they’re telling us that the gay-rights movement has met its moment, and now stands to rank with the greatest culture war of our time, the civil-rights movement; and they’re also telling us the movement is well-dressed. Is this liberation, or is it stereotype? Is the current increase in gay visibility progress, or is it a retrograde throwback to the homosexual caricatures of the 1950’s, of a Nelly Nation of queens, hairdressers and interior decorators? Should we all just sit back and enjoy the show, as the caricature of the aesthetically obsessed, sweet-smelling gay man joins the American ranks of the non-threatening interloper: the funny little Jew, the tap-dancing Negro, and last year’s model, the fumblingly illiterate Italian mobster—the lovable social misfits for a new age?
Not if we have anything to say about it. Call us the shmomosexuals: gay men who use the same moisturizer for their hands and face, if they use it to “moisturize” at all. Gay men who thrill to the prospect that Oscar, not Felix, might have been the latently gay character in The Odd Couple. Gay men whose daydreams of a wardrobe splurge are set against the efficient, Muzaked quietude of the Men’s Wear-house on Sixth Avenue in Chelsea. Joe Shmo, that is, but gay.
Much of the excitement over alpha gays and their “metrosexual” acolytes has been generated by America’s most recent gay fetish object, the Bravo reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, where five gay style experts make over a hapless straight guy in their own image.
The Fab Five and their helpful, helpful attentions to the grooming and manners of straight men: a safe and fun way to accept gays without having to admit they might be something like you—or that they might be people for whom civil rights are not an abstract matter of national policy or history, but a very real and personal question of self-determination or economic freedom.
And what is at stake for the wider culture? An opportunity, really, to do this one right, to admit gays into the full panoply of legal protections
without forcing them to go through the minstrelsy phase: a little soft-shoe with your blowout, sir?
Shmomosexuals—untelegenic, too smart by half for the pop-mania version of homosexuality—have to steal a part of this limelight if the culture wars are not to devolve into wan affirmations from marketeers and product-pushers at the cost of rights granted by the government and supported by voters.
Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank is a shmomosexual of the first order. He said he was looking at his 1976 campaign poster as he was speaking to The Observer from his Capitol Hill offices.
“It’s like the equivalent would be Two Guys for the Poor Goys, with Jewish people showing people how to cut corners and save money,” he said of Queer Eye. “It doesn’t have to do with effeminacy, it has to do with superficiality. The notion that gay men have a superior fashion sense is not true, and it’s damaging. It’s a way to marginalize people—you can treat them as pets.”
In other words, it encourages the sentiment: What could they want with gay marriage or adoption or immigration rights for their partners, or the right to teach in our schools or serve in our military, when they’re getting such fabulous publicity for their looks?
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 48