I recently got to interview Frank Rich for the
Review. Aaaah! For those who don't know who he is, I'll attempt to describe him using analogies.
Frank Rich: political op-ed writing
Tupac: hip-hop
Salvador Dali: trippy ass art
Dave Chappelle: making you laugh
The Rolling Stones: rock n roll
Kurt Cobain: grunge
Latarian Milton: badass 7 year old with a future in either going to jail very soon or being the subject of the greatest reality show of all time
This is really long:
Every Sunday, politics junkies around the country pick up the New York Times and promptly toss aside the front page section, flipping immediately to Frank Rich’s weekly op-ed column. His writing is fluid and lucid, both unabashedly frank and rich with meticulous observation and research. His experience as an influential drama critic throughout the 1980’s and early 90’s conspicuously contributes to his writings’ unique cultural and theatrical flair. The man who took the Bush administration to task in his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold and presciently urged pre-DNC Obama to switch from his theme of “Change we can believe in” to “Change before it’s too late” called the Review from his stakeout at the Republican National Convention:
FR:Where are you from in Washington?
SJ: I’m from the Chevy Chase area; I went to Wilson.
I went to Wilson too.
You did?
Yeah, I went to Deal and Wilson.
Wow I didn’t know that, that’s really cool.
Yes, in another era, yes I did. So where exactly did you grow up, what neighborhood?
I live on Worthington St, at Pinehurst Circle by Western Avenue.
I grew up near the Cathedral. My mother, who’s no longer alive, went to Murch, Deal, and Wilson, and I went to Deal and Wilson, and there you have it. And my best friend, we co-edited the Beacon – does the Beacon still exist?
Yeah you’d be ashamed of it; it’s pretty bad now.
It was pretty bad when we were there, but what happened when we were seniors in 1967, we tried to run an editorial of the home rules of the District (?), were stopped by the journalism advisor and the principal, and then went public with it to the Washington Post. It caused a big scandal and we almost got our college recommendations revoked. But then we graduated, and my friend who’s a guy I still know named Jeremy Pikser, went on to Oberlin, that’s why I mentioned it, and then became a screen writer and wrote for instance the movie Bulworth with Warren Beatty. It’s a rare academy award nominee to come out of Wilson. But he was kicked out of Oberlin midway for SDS activities. Anyway what year are you in there?
I’m a junior now.
Do you like it?
Yeah I love it here, it’s really great.
Yeah it’s a great place. Lisa (?) was there and graduated a year ago. So what can I tell you?
When’s the last time the US faced such a pivotal election?
I don’t think there’s been one in my lifetime. In 1960 when I was eleven years old in Washington, I sort of had the sense from my parents that it was a pivotal election, but I don’t think that the stakes were this high. I think another pivotal election was 1968, but its fate was sealed when Humphrey got the election. If McCarthey or Bobby Kennedy had challenged Nixon, that would have been an election like this. But in the end when you had Humphrey running against Nixon it kind of lowered the stakes because they weren’t so wildly different. It was hard to figure out what Humphrey was. So I would say in my adult life, there’s been nothing remotely like this.
Why are the stakes so high right now?
The stakes are high because of the eight years we’ve had of the Bush administration, which has obviously weakened America’s alliances and reputation abroad at a time when, not just the war in Iraq, but Iran, Russia, the Middle East in general, Pakistan, Afghanistan – there’s tremendous tension and conflict, all of which could be on the verge of boiling over. The question of who’s going to lead America after what in my view is the debacle of what’s happened under Bush and Cheney is very important. At the same time we’re in an economic crisis. We’ve been through this before. It’s not the Great Depression, but there are tremendous issues starting with the worst income inequality in America indeed since before the Depression and obviously with the sub-prime crisis and everything else. So we’ve had a government that in my view has not been managed in the last eight years. It’s lurched from one crisis to another, been run by ideology and often in secrecy by an arrogant crew. The country’s sort of been sitting still while the country moved on. So whoever takes over really has a very difficult job ahead of them, and I think there’s a clear choice between the two guys who are running for that job.
So what might the outcome of the election say about the American people, their morals, and their intelligence?
I think we have to wait and see. You know elections are decided in recent years by such close votes – and this may be another one – that it’s hard to generalize. And this one is close at the moment; we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and I think a lot of Americans are genuinely undecided, and just beginning to concentrate on it. So I think we should give them a chance to make their decision before we make political judgments about what it means.
But doesn’t it say something that it’s so close? Shouldn’t it not be so close with such a stark difference between the two candidates?
You know it’s just Labor Day, and I see that point but I think it’s hard to know from national polls. I think it’s too premature to make a decision about that. I really think we’ll know a lot more on election day and maybe a little bit before, but right now it’s all sort of in limbo and people are just coming back from vacation and beginning to focus, and we don’t know what it means. We don’t even know entirely what the polls mean because on one hand they may underestimate the resistance to an African-American being president, we don’t know, but there’s that whole theory that there’s a whole group of voters who don’t want to vote for a black person but will tell pollsters otherwise because they’re embarrassed to admit it. At the same time the polls may underestimate young people and their turnout, African-Americans and their turnout if they have a big boost this year. They don’t really necessarily compensate for the huge changes in registration that are going on in some states, and they also definitely undercount people who only use cell phones and don’t use landlines. So the whole thing is murky anyway, and given how close technically it is, I think it’s going out on a limb to make a sweeping judgment. I do think if you want to stand back for a second and say that the polls are fairly accurate as a theory, Obama is a guy who is not only black, but is new to most people. He’s considered by some as inexperienced. McCain is supposedly a known quality, and I’ve been arguing in my column and would argue that he’s not so wildly known by the public and his reputation isn’t necessarily in tune with the reality of his record. But all of this is going to play out; we have debates to come, and we’ll see.
Who did you support in the primaries originally?
Times columnists are not allowed to endorse anyone.
But personally?
I went into the primary season feeling in the Democrats that there were several plausible candidates, including Obama and Clinton. I was disillusioned along the way by some of Clinton’s behavior but there were other good candidates too. There were good things to say about Dodd and Biden. I have to say I never was a John Edwards fan. It has nothing to do with his recent scandal, but I always found him unconvincing. I found him insincere; that to me he had kind of a used car salesman quality about his populism. So I almost never wrote about him because I didn’t take him that seriously. But the others I took seriously.
Coming from a theater background, would you say theater is more political than politics is theatrical, or the other way around?
I’d say the other around. While there is some political theater in this country and there always has been, particularly during times of strife such as during the Depression, during the civil rights movement, and during Vietnam, and to some extent during the Iraq war, the theater of politics is ubiquitous at this point. One thing I discovered growing up in Washington was – and you probably did too – there was this official Washington that all the schoolkids came from all the country to see, and sort of this official presentation of what democracy and government and politics are like – the theater of it if you will. And then there was something else going on backstage and now what’s happened in terms of politics in an election year is it’s so theatricalized, whether it be in the staging of a convention, or every candidate appearing on every late night talk show, every daytime talk show. All of which is a fairly recent development. It was only beginning with the Clinton run in 1992 that candidates started to become quite so interested in appearing on the kind of shows they do now – whether it be Leno or Letterman or Oprah or Dr. Phil. It’s all a recent development and now it’s all sort of become a branch of show business.
Would you say that the most engaging and best acting politician is usually the one that wins?
That’s a good question. I’m trying to think of examples. Arguably, yes. Certainly that was true of George W. Bush, who came across as much more easygoing, and sort of came across as a good guy on television, whereas Gore and Kerry were relatively stiff and uncomfortable. Clinton was a much more charismatic figure on television than obviously either George Bush the first or Bob Dole, and I guess you could argue that about Obama and Clinton too, but that isn’t the only factor in their case, particularly since it was so close. And if it were to be decided on that basis alone with Obama and McCain, I think Obama would win. But I stress that I would not make that prediction; I think there are too many factors at work, but it will be an interesting test of your question.
Speaking of Bush, do you think he’s really a nincompoop or is he just a smart guy playing stupid to get more popularity?
Well my book The Greatest Story Ever Sold deals with this issue. I do not think he is a nincompoop. I think he’s a perfectly smart guy who is intellectually lazy. I think history will show that when he went off on misadventures like the Iraq war, he didn’t do the homework. We now know he didn’t really know the difference between Sunni and Shiite. He didn’t know the history of the region before he blundered in there. That’s intellectual laziness; that’s not stupidity. I think he was a marvelous actor. This is a guy who after all was born in Connecticut, went to three of the most elite schools in America – Andover, Yale, and Harvard. From a blueblood American family, who managed successfully to portray himself as a shitkicker to the American public, as a good old boy, and of course that wasn’t his background at all. And one point I made in my book is that so-called ranch in Crawford was something that he purchased as he knew he was running for president for the first time. It’s not a working ranch; there may have at one time been a couple of animals on it. It’s a rich man’s country house, the kind of house a northeasterner like his father would have in Kennebunkport in Maine, only he had it in Texas. And again by wearing jeans and clearing brush night and day, something surely he didn’t have to do, he played the role of a good old Texan guy.
In terms of how his administration has acted, with their draconian and secretive nature, do you think that’s a precedent that other presidents will follow because they find it gives them more power, or do you think it’s a warning to future presidents that if they do that it will probably make them less popular?
We don’t know the answer. I hope the latter possibility that you suggested is right, but I don’t know. It depends on who gets elected. I’m not good at predicting the future. I’d hope as you said that this is an example that will not be repeated. But there’s a bipartisan history of presidents who like to have executive power, so we don’t really really know until someone’s in office. And it’s not as if, while the Bush example is extreme in my view, and has done damage to the Constitution, it’s not as if other presidents from both parties – including someone like LBJ – didn’t guard their power zealously. So we just don’t know. Take someone like Bobby Kennedy who’s a hero of mine and many people of my generation, and yet earlier in his career when he was in the Kennedy administration, he was pretty much a take-no-prisoners attonery general zealously wanting to guard the executive branch’s prerogatives and power and he was a liberal democrat. And he had some of that history back in the senatorial days earlier in his career, so we just don’t know. We can’t predict how people are going to behave. Certainly a lot of democrats are hoping that if Obama gets in, that he will reverse a lot of what Bush has done. And he has claimed that he wants to do so, and we should take him at his word if he gets in. McCain’s views on this are, shall we say more ambiguous, to put it mildly.
You reference so many different news sources week to week, and you always seem to find the diamonds in the rough. How do you pay attention to so many of them?
It’s labor intensive. I talk to a lot of people; I read a lot.
What sources do you trust the most?
Well I would say that, first of all I trust my own reporting and I trust reporters I actually know, wherever they work. There are certainly news organizations that have incredibly talented reporting staffs that usually can be relied on, and in that category I would include for starters both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal’s news coverage – we’ll see what happens with Murdoch [there] – and there are good reporters at the L.A. Times and elsewhere. There are some bloggers who do fantastic reporting, like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. That said, I’m a big believer in looking at raw material, looking at transcripts of hearings, looking at documents, talking to people directly. I like to see for myself, read a government investigation for myself and not rely on anyone’s summary of it, however accurate. Because I sometimes feel I can find things by close reading or close examination that inevitably are not going to be in a news story, even in the best publications.
When you were developing as a writer, who were some of your role models?
I had a bunch of them. Growing up in Washington, and being a theater nut but also being a news junkie I always had role models in both areas. For instance among theater critics, I was an enormous fan of – these people are no longer alive – Kenneth Tynan, a great British critic, who at one point when I was very young was writing for the New Yorker, and was just a great writer. Walter Kerr was, when I was growing up, was the drama critic of the Herald Tribune, which was the great newspaper that was the main rival of the Times. It died during the newspaper strikes in the mid-1960’s and ultimately I would meet him later in life because he ended up as a theater critic at the Times, and I succeeded him actually in 1980 when he retired. Then, in terms of journalism in general, I’m very very influenced by the so-called new journalists of the 60’s, so that whole group of writers that congregated around Esquire, at that time Harper’s, at that time Rolling Stone once it got started. People like Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, and many more – these are just off the top of my head – that really had a huge influence on me. Not that my writing is like theirs. I’m sure I’m forgetting five other people, I’d run home and look at my bookshelves and I could tell you more. But one example as a journalist was Norman Mailer, who wrote for Harper’s in the 60’s, and in fact when I was a freshman in college – the summer after my freshman year was the summer of ’68, and Mailer wrote amazing coverage for Harper’s magazine of both the Republican Convention in Miami and the Democratic debacle in Chicago. They were ultimately published as a book called Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and I just wrote the introduction for a republished version of it that came out last month, and reading it for the first time since those pieces originally ran forty years ago, I was struck again by how great they were and what a model of a certain kind of journalism that was. And by the way, really worth picking up – the New York Review of Books just brought it out in paperback – Miami and the Siege of Chicago. He also wrote, a year earlier, a terrific account – again for Harper’s that came out as a book – about the first big anti-Vietnam march in Washington, which I went to as a teenager in Washington. And that’s another book that holds up, it’s called Armies of the Night, and I think it’s been continuously in print. So there were lots of wonderful writers, most of them working in magazine journalism at the time.
I’ll definitely check them out.
Yeah if you’re interested in this stuff, then you will not be disappointed. Both are great. The convention book is just – I couldn’t believe that it was incredibly prescient about the future and hilariously funny on top of everything, which is always a plus as far as I’m concerned.
How are your relations with the other op-ed writers? Do you ever call up Bill Kristol for example and start arguing with him?
No it doesn’t work that way, first of all we’re spread out over several places. I’m friends with some of them, but it’s really like we’re independent operatives. It’s not like we get together and meet under any circumstances. Many of them are in Washington and I’m mainly in New York. Paul Krugman is in Princeton. So people are sort of spread out. So no we don’t have those kinds of things. We find each other at the conventions. Maureen Dowd’s been a good friend of mine for years. As you may know she’s also a native of Washington. And I know them all to varying degrees, and they’re all cordial relationships. One who I had the nicest relationship with – who’s now retired – was Bill Safire, who was a conservative columnist at the Times but was just a wonderful encouraging guide and colleague.
How did you segue into politics from theater? When did you decide to do it and what did your editor say when you first proposed it?
Well I didn’t first propose it. What happened is this: very early in my career I had written about politics and covered politics. The first piece I ever sold – just as I was graduating at Harvard – well the first two pieces I ever sold were a short piece for the Times, an op-ed piece the year it started, like in 1970 or so. The first piece I ever sold to a magazine was for Esquire, it was a long profile of Dan Ellsberg at the time he broke the Pentagon Papers. And then I also did some political reporting on a weekly newspaper that I helped start with some friends in Richmond, Virginia – a paper that no longer exists that was called Virgin Mercury. I ended up coming to New York to work for a political magazine that also no longer exists. They asked me to write film reviews to save money rather than hire a film critic, and that led to this whole career. Anyway cut to the early 1990’s. I started as a drama critic in 1980. I was beginning to get bored, and there were several reasons for this. One was that the theater was in tremendous decline in New York and I was interviewing the same six people over and over. I started writing about the intersection between politics and theater in 1991. And in 1995 my mother’s death had a big influence on me. So I went to the Times and said, “I really have had enough of this.” I was grief stricken, but the manager of the paper said I should do another season. Maureen Dowd, then a reporter at the Washington bureau, suggested that we cover the convention together and collaborate on writing about it. So it never really occurred to me, not consciously anyway. But they kind of saw where my writing was going. It was a gutsy move; people thought it was weird. It was not something that had been an ambition of mine, but it turned out to be very fulfilling. Like other success stories it’s a happenstance of luck and coincidence.
What do you think of the VP picks?
I think the Biden pick is impressive. I think that Biden is one of the good guys in Washington. He’s not wildly ideological, and he’s not perfect but he’s very smart about foreign policy. And he’s… an adult. The McCain choice – my first impression is it’s a cynical political move based on the ludicrous premise that women will vote for any ticket with a women, which is sexist and insulting to women. Now it doesn’t mean it couldn’t’ work, but it’s truly a cynical move. On the other hand I don’t believe either vice president is determinative of what’ll happen in the election. It’ll really be the top of the ticket. Maybe if Palin turns out to be a distraction, but it’s too early to know. The real is issue is what it says about the judgment of the candidate who picked her. What does this say about McCain?
Is there a chance the Palin scandals will derail the Republican ticket’s campaign?
Not necessarily, it is only the VP. It sounds like a kind of small scandal as these things go. It’s not like it’s a federal investigation. It will probably be dismissed by Republican partisans as simply Alaskan politics. I wouldn’t get your hopes up on that one.
