January 28, 2018 // January 12, 2018
New Revelations about the End of Days, AKA another day in the Oval Office
New Revelations about the End of Days, AKA another day in the Oval Office
Relax. Relax, everyone. What we’re about to reveal here may shock you but we promise you: It’s true.
Author Michael Wolff wrote a book titled Fire and Fury focused on the first year of the Trump presidency, a book that was released just about two weeks ago. The publishing schedule - from start to finish - is a testament to his outlining, researching, writing, editing and rewriting ability, and to publisher Henry Holt’s editing, fact-checking, design, manufacturing, sales and shipping capability! According to reviews and those who have read the book, it’s full of negative and disturbing portraits of the President and his team, along with horrifying stories of their philosophies and activities.
Given that the book wasn’t titled Calm Waters and Serenity, was anyone surprised? People who despise the President and his policies have been delighted with the book, and every aspect of their year-long outrage about the outcome of the 2016 election has been validated by the revelations it contains.
Fact: We haven’t read it. But we have read some of the book’s excerpts that have appeared online, and we've read the author’s introductory comments. We were mostly curious about this: How was the book constructed? When Wolff talks about subjects going “on the record” with him, he writes:
“Many of the accounts of what happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances, I have, through consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.
Some of my sources spoke to me on so-called deep background, a convention of contemporary political books that allows for a disembodied description of events provided by an unnamed witness to them. I have also relied on off-the-record interviews, allowing sources to provide a direct quote with the understanding that it was not for attribution. Other sources spoke to me with the understanding that the material in the interviews would not become public until the book came out. Finally, some sources spoke forthrightly on the record….And everywhere in this story is the president’s own constant, tireless, and uncontrolled voice, public and private, shared by others on a daily basis sometimes virtually as he utters it.”
We decided to compare this to some other political books and see if we could learn anything from the authors and their approaches to their work. Thirty years ago, another insider offered a look at life in the West Wing, one Donald Regan, former Chief of Staff for President Ronald Reagan. Regan was forced from office in February, 1987 and his book appeared in May, 1988, another example of speedy journalism to say the least. In the forward of For the Record, From Wall Street to Washington, Regan recounts his journalistic process as follows:
“Except where the press reports are quoted, this book is free of hearsay. In all but a very few cases I have reported only what I observed with my own eyes or heard with my own ears. Where it is necessary to describe an offstage event in order to make sense of the author’s direct experience, I have always quoted or paraphrased an account of an eyewitness as the eyewitness himself narrated it to me personally. Director quotations of individuals are based on my notes or my clear recollection of words spoken. Out of deference to the office and the man, I have not enclosed language attributed to the President in quotation marks except in cases where his words have appeared I print elsewhere.”
In 1994, journalist Bob Woodward published The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House. His subject matter was specific: The first year of Clinton’s presidency, specifically regarding his approach to economic policies. He explains his research as follows:
“Overall, more than 250 people were interviewed. Dozens of these people were interviewed many times, frequently in evening-long dinner sessions or at some length in their offices. A great many of them permitted me to tape-record the interview, otherwise I took detailed notes. Many also provided me with memoranda, meeting notes, diaries, transcripts, schedules or other documentation.
Nearly all the interviews were conducted on ‘deep background,’ which means that I agreed not to identify those sources. … I took care to compare and verify various sources’ accounts of the same events. The extensive documentation, and the willingness of key sources to allow me to review with them the important meetings, discussions, and decisions many times, has resulted in an unusually detailed record of the first year of the Clinton presidency on economic issues.
A copy of all the documents, notes, transcripts, and tape recordings of the interviews will be deposited with the Yale University Library. The files will be opened to the public and researchers in 40 years to provide the exact source or sources for each portion of the book.”
As a visual aid, here's a shot of some of the history/political/commentary books on our bookshelf, including those we’ve read or those that have newly arrived and been added to the reading list. Admittedly limited, but a broad spectrum, no?
The subject matter and/or authors includes Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Rosalind Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Andrea Mitchell, Linda Ellerbee, Theodore Roosevelt/William Howard Taft, Lewis and Clark and the Navy Seals.
The end of this story offers you a bonus image: Some of the humor books we own, sitting quietly on the shelf right above these more fact-based books. But for now - keep reading. If nothing else, we hope the images show an eclectic mix of ideology and being open to hearing different points of view.
At this point, it makes sense to stipulate to the following:
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's explore some insights found in some of the books we’ve referenced so far: Fire and Fury, For the Record and The Agenda. Note: language is intact from the source material. Here we go - identify the author of the following:
1. “..as in its apparently incurable compulsion to talk about itself through the media, [this administration] has been one of the wonders of our history and a most illuminating case study of populism in action.
2. “Later that morning, [the President] was on Air Force One heading for Chicago, thumbing through his briefing book and schedule for the one-day trip…the mayor had wanted to meet with him but the president’s busy schedule would not permit it. ‘Who the hell could make such a dumb fucking mistake?’ the President bellowed out. … In the confined space of the plane, [he] stormed on and on. It was truly awful, on the edge of controlled violence. The counselor to the President, watching the outburst, was stunned. He had never quite seen an adult, let alone a president, in such a rage.”
3. “The White House understood from the beginning that the press was not its natural ally. The President’s aides were essentially the same people who had gone through his campaign for the Presidency, and they were aware that very few journalists sympathized with the President’s policies or were attracted to his personality.”
4. “Once the President came into the Oval Office with a newspaper folded into quarters showing some story based on a leak from the White House. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he had shouted. Presidential flare-ups were common enough, but he often would not let an incident go, roaring on for too long before calming down.”
5. “Mr. President, you want to make every decision. You can’t. You’ve got to delegate more. It’s not the quantity of your decision. It’s the quality. I’ve sat beside you when somebody else is talking at one of these meetings, and I watch your eyes just fog over. You’re gone. It’s because you’re tired. You think you can go without sleep. You can’t.”
6. [About the President’s Chief of Staff]: “The article continued, ‘He’s got to go,’ one source said, ‘because absolutely nobody’s for him. Even some of his own staff would like to tell him but they don’t dare.’ ”
Okay, you're right. None of these are from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Just so you know, the answers are:
There’s not much more to say here. Journalists and Washington D.C. insiders have been writing books about presidents and other leaders for many years. The question isn’t whether or not Fire and Fury is truthful. The question is: does this kind of “tell-all” matter any more than any other similarly researched and written book?
We’re going to go ‘on the record’ with our reply: Nope.
----
Notes:
In Robert Caro’s unparalleled 4-volume biography (with a fifth volume underway), The Years of Lyndon Johnson, we meet a man and future president whom Caro describes as follows:
From the author’s website:
Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for biography, has three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and Best Biography, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
From the author’s website:
Bob Woodward made crucial contributions to two Pulitzer Prizes won by The Washington Post. First, he and Carl Bernstein were the lead reporters on Watergate and the Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973. Woodward also was the main reporter for the Post’s coverage of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Ten stories won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting — “six carrying the familiar byline of Bob Woodward,” noted the New York Times article announcing the awards.
He has been a recipient of nearly every other major American journalism award, including the Heywood Broun award (1972), Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting (1972 and 1986), Sigma Delta Chi Award (1973), George Polk Award (1972), William Allen White Medal (2000), and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Reporting on the Presidency (2002).
From Wikipedia:
Donald Thomas "Don" Regan (December 21, 1918 – June 10, 2003) was the 66th United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1981 to 1985 and the White House Chief of Staff from 1985 to 1987 in the Ronald Reagan Administration. He advocated "Reaganomics" and tax cuts to create jobs and stimulate production. Before serving in the Reagan administration, Regan served as chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch from 1971 to 1980. He had worked at Merrill Lynch since 1946, and before this he had studied at Harvard University and served in the United States Marine Corps, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel.
From Wikipedia:
Michael Wolff (born August 27, 1953) is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.
Author Michael Wolff wrote a book titled Fire and Fury focused on the first year of the Trump presidency, a book that was released just about two weeks ago. The publishing schedule - from start to finish - is a testament to his outlining, researching, writing, editing and rewriting ability, and to publisher Henry Holt’s editing, fact-checking, design, manufacturing, sales and shipping capability! According to reviews and those who have read the book, it’s full of negative and disturbing portraits of the President and his team, along with horrifying stories of their philosophies and activities.
Given that the book wasn’t titled Calm Waters and Serenity, was anyone surprised? People who despise the President and his policies have been delighted with the book, and every aspect of their year-long outrage about the outcome of the 2016 election has been validated by the revelations it contains.
Fact: We haven’t read it. But we have read some of the book’s excerpts that have appeared online, and we've read the author’s introductory comments. We were mostly curious about this: How was the book constructed? When Wolff talks about subjects going “on the record” with him, he writes:
“Many of the accounts of what happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances, I have, through consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.
Some of my sources spoke to me on so-called deep background, a convention of contemporary political books that allows for a disembodied description of events provided by an unnamed witness to them. I have also relied on off-the-record interviews, allowing sources to provide a direct quote with the understanding that it was not for attribution. Other sources spoke to me with the understanding that the material in the interviews would not become public until the book came out. Finally, some sources spoke forthrightly on the record….And everywhere in this story is the president’s own constant, tireless, and uncontrolled voice, public and private, shared by others on a daily basis sometimes virtually as he utters it.”
We decided to compare this to some other political books and see if we could learn anything from the authors and their approaches to their work. Thirty years ago, another insider offered a look at life in the West Wing, one Donald Regan, former Chief of Staff for President Ronald Reagan. Regan was forced from office in February, 1987 and his book appeared in May, 1988, another example of speedy journalism to say the least. In the forward of For the Record, From Wall Street to Washington, Regan recounts his journalistic process as follows:
“Except where the press reports are quoted, this book is free of hearsay. In all but a very few cases I have reported only what I observed with my own eyes or heard with my own ears. Where it is necessary to describe an offstage event in order to make sense of the author’s direct experience, I have always quoted or paraphrased an account of an eyewitness as the eyewitness himself narrated it to me personally. Director quotations of individuals are based on my notes or my clear recollection of words spoken. Out of deference to the office and the man, I have not enclosed language attributed to the President in quotation marks except in cases where his words have appeared I print elsewhere.”
In 1994, journalist Bob Woodward published The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House. His subject matter was specific: The first year of Clinton’s presidency, specifically regarding his approach to economic policies. He explains his research as follows:
“Overall, more than 250 people were interviewed. Dozens of these people were interviewed many times, frequently in evening-long dinner sessions or at some length in their offices. A great many of them permitted me to tape-record the interview, otherwise I took detailed notes. Many also provided me with memoranda, meeting notes, diaries, transcripts, schedules or other documentation.
Nearly all the interviews were conducted on ‘deep background,’ which means that I agreed not to identify those sources. … I took care to compare and verify various sources’ accounts of the same events. The extensive documentation, and the willingness of key sources to allow me to review with them the important meetings, discussions, and decisions many times, has resulted in an unusually detailed record of the first year of the Clinton presidency on economic issues.
A copy of all the documents, notes, transcripts, and tape recordings of the interviews will be deposited with the Yale University Library. The files will be opened to the public and researchers in 40 years to provide the exact source or sources for each portion of the book.”
As a visual aid, here's a shot of some of the history/political/commentary books on our bookshelf, including those we’ve read or those that have newly arrived and been added to the reading list. Admittedly limited, but a broad spectrum, no?
The subject matter and/or authors includes Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Rosalind Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Andrea Mitchell, Linda Ellerbee, Theodore Roosevelt/William Howard Taft, Lewis and Clark and the Navy Seals.
The end of this story offers you a bonus image: Some of the humor books we own, sitting quietly on the shelf right above these more fact-based books. But for now - keep reading. If nothing else, we hope the images show an eclectic mix of ideology and being open to hearing different points of view.
At this point, it makes sense to stipulate to the following:
- The current occupant of the Oval Office may, in fact, be spectacularly unsuited for his job. (Or is he? See the “Notes” at the end of this piece.)
- The media outlets that cover the activities of the Oval Office regularly (read: daily) publish or broadcast stories that are less than positive about the President or his staff, offering examples of how he is spectacularly unsuited for his job.
- People who participate in social media seem to accept and share without reservation the stories, clips, headlines or memes that support his or her political point of view, without doing any research or even reading the story itself.
- Anyone who questions the prevailing narrative about the President is an uninformed, misogynistic idiot.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's explore some insights found in some of the books we’ve referenced so far: Fire and Fury, For the Record and The Agenda. Note: language is intact from the source material. Here we go - identify the author of the following:
1. “..as in its apparently incurable compulsion to talk about itself through the media, [this administration] has been one of the wonders of our history and a most illuminating case study of populism in action.
- a. Michael Wolff, about the Trump White House
- b. Donald Regan, about the Reagan White House
- c. Bob Woodward, about the Clinton White House
2. “Later that morning, [the President] was on Air Force One heading for Chicago, thumbing through his briefing book and schedule for the one-day trip…the mayor had wanted to meet with him but the president’s busy schedule would not permit it. ‘Who the hell could make such a dumb fucking mistake?’ the President bellowed out. … In the confined space of the plane, [he] stormed on and on. It was truly awful, on the edge of controlled violence. The counselor to the President, watching the outburst, was stunned. He had never quite seen an adult, let alone a president, in such a rage.”
- a. Michael Wolff, about President Trump
- b. Donald Regan, about President Reagan
- c. Bob Woodward, about President Clinton
3. “The White House understood from the beginning that the press was not its natural ally. The President’s aides were essentially the same people who had gone through his campaign for the Presidency, and they were aware that very few journalists sympathized with the President’s policies or were attracted to his personality.”
- a. Michael Wolff, about the Trump White House
- b. Donald Regan, about the Reagan White House
- c. Bob Woodward, about the Clinton White House
4. “Once the President came into the Oval Office with a newspaper folded into quarters showing some story based on a leak from the White House. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he had shouted. Presidential flare-ups were common enough, but he often would not let an incident go, roaring on for too long before calming down.”
- a. Michael Wolff, about President Trump
- b. Donald Regan, about President Reagan
- c. Bob Woodward, about President Clinton
5. “Mr. President, you want to make every decision. You can’t. You’ve got to delegate more. It’s not the quantity of your decision. It’s the quality. I’ve sat beside you when somebody else is talking at one of these meetings, and I watch your eyes just fog over. You’re gone. It’s because you’re tired. You think you can go without sleep. You can’t.”
- a. Michael Wolff, describing interaction of a senior staff member with President Trump
- b. Donald Regan, describing interaction of a senior staff member with President Reagan
- c. Bob Woodward, describing interaction of a senior staff member with President Clinton
6. [About the President’s Chief of Staff]: “The article continued, ‘He’s got to go,’ one source said, ‘because absolutely nobody’s for him. Even some of his own staff would like to tell him but they don’t dare.’ ”
- a. Michael Wolff, about the White House Chief of Staff
- b. Donald Regan, about the White House Chief of Staff
- c. Bob Woodward, about the White House Chief of Staff
Okay, you're right. None of these are from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Just so you know, the answers are:
- b. about the Reagan White House
- c. about President Clinton
- b. about the Reagan White House
- c. about President Clinton
- c. about President Clinton
- b. about the Reagan White House Chief of Staff (Donald Regan)
There’s not much more to say here. Journalists and Washington D.C. insiders have been writing books about presidents and other leaders for many years. The question isn’t whether or not Fire and Fury is truthful. The question is: does this kind of “tell-all” matter any more than any other similarly researched and written book?
We’re going to go ‘on the record’ with our reply: Nope.
----
Notes:
In Robert Caro’s unparalleled 4-volume biography (with a fifth volume underway), The Years of Lyndon Johnson, we meet a man and future president whom Caro describes as follows:
- A man of awesome complexity, energy ambition and power-obsessed with secrecy, obscuring (often “rewriting”) the facts of his personal and political life.
- From earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate-coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition.
- Driving his people to the point of exhausted tears…Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty.
From the author’s website:
Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for biography, has three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and Best Biography, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
From the author’s website:
Bob Woodward made crucial contributions to two Pulitzer Prizes won by The Washington Post. First, he and Carl Bernstein were the lead reporters on Watergate and the Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973. Woodward also was the main reporter for the Post’s coverage of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Ten stories won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting — “six carrying the familiar byline of Bob Woodward,” noted the New York Times article announcing the awards.
He has been a recipient of nearly every other major American journalism award, including the Heywood Broun award (1972), Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting (1972 and 1986), Sigma Delta Chi Award (1973), George Polk Award (1972), William Allen White Medal (2000), and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Reporting on the Presidency (2002).
From Wikipedia:
Donald Thomas "Don" Regan (December 21, 1918 – June 10, 2003) was the 66th United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1981 to 1985 and the White House Chief of Staff from 1985 to 1987 in the Ronald Reagan Administration. He advocated "Reaganomics" and tax cuts to create jobs and stimulate production. Before serving in the Reagan administration, Regan served as chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch from 1971 to 1980. He had worked at Merrill Lynch since 1946, and before this he had studied at Harvard University and served in the United States Marine Corps, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel.
From Wikipedia:
Michael Wolff (born August 27, 1953) is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.
The Humor bookshelf...a sampling represented here. Authors include: P.J. O'Rourke, Bill Maher, Adam Carolla, Al Franken, Greg Gutfeld, Fran Leibowitz, Dennis Miller, Ellen Degeneres, David Sedaris, Joe Queenan, Nora Ephron, Cynthia Kaplan, Steve Martin and Michael Rosen (editor)