cause a rush to publication without verification. One of the major themes of my story is the difficulty of dealing with complex issues in a media environment that rewards simplicity, one in which the desire for good copy overwhelms the dictates of good sense.
Like all other liberals, I believe that a free press is the bulwark of liberty and democracy. Like anyone who has ever been covered by the press, I am painfully aware that journalists are fallible. Too frequently, reporters don’t get the context right, and commentators don’t get the facts right. Journalists, I fear, are just as subject as other humans to incompetence, venality and self-deception. It is frequently difficult to know which of those failings is the culprit when a story goes awry.
Those intimations of mortality, however, do not worry me very much; they do not threaten the republic. I am more concerned about a different and more subtle phenomenon in the media world. Here is a simple illustration. In the winter of 1994, after I had been at the National Endowment for the Humanities for about six months, the NEH announced that the Jefferson Lecturer for that spring would be Gwendolyn Brooks, the Chicago poet who, in 1950, became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. The Jefferson Lectureship carries a $10,000 stipend and is the most significant award that an American humanist can win. The roster of Jefferson Lecturers is a Who’s Who of humane letters. The New Republic, edited then by the right-leaning controversialist, Andrew Sullivan, had opposed my nomination. It greeted the news that Brooks would be the Jefferson Lecturer with a full column of sarcasm and ridicule. Charging that Gwendolyn Brooks was not good enough for the honor and that she had been selected only because she is black, TNR screamed that this is just what could be expected from a chairman of the NEH who is as hopelessly politically correct as Hackney!
Aside from TNR’s judgment about a significant American poet and a wonderfully gracious woman, there were two things wrong with this editorial opinion. The Jefferson Lectureship is awarded after careful screening by a committee of the National Council on the Humanities, followed by a discussion and a vote by the full Council. Choosing the Jefferson Lecturer is a privilege that the Council guards jealously. The chairman may participate but cannot control. Second, and more damning, the selection of Ms. Brooks was made several months before I was confirmed, and was made by the thoroughly conservative National Council that had been assembled by Lynne Cheney, my pugnaciously conservative predecessor at the NEH. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.
It is easy to see how TNR could make the mistake it made. That Ms. Brooks was my choice fit so well into the story they had been telling about me that they did not bother to check the facts. Truth was the victim of the needs of their narrative. This is the heart of the matter. Something is wrong when the story generates its own facts, rather than the reverse.
Journalists do more than gather and report facts. They tell stories. They select and arrange facts to tell what they hope will be a story interesting enough to grab the attention of the public. As Robert Darnton points out in his convincing portrait of the ethos of the news room, “newspaper stories must fit cultural preconceptions of news.”[4] The first thing a reporter does on being given an assignment is to search the newspaper’s “morgue,” and nowadays probably Nexis as well, to get the background and to see how the story has been handled before.
“Big stories develop in special patterns and have an archaic flavor, as if they were metamorphoses of Ur-stories that have been lost in the depths of time,” writes Darnton.[5] This is true in two senses. Not only is the reporter’s anticipation of the slant of a particular story influenced by how it was previously cast, but reporters in general are heavily influenced by stereotypes and preconceptions about what constitutes a good story. A good reporter is adept at recognizing and manipulating standard images, clichés, angles, and scenarios in order to call forth a conventional emotional response from the editor and the reader.
My own modest gloss on this insight into journalism is that there is a large but finite number of basic stories or plots floating around in our culture, archetypal narratives that carry wisdom and values, and that are recognized as familiar and meaningful by the reader. Americans love Cinderella stories and rags-to-riches stories and triumph-of-the-common-man stories, transfiguration narratives like “Beauty and the Beast,” and stories about the lonely individual standing bravely against great odds, among many others. We never tire of the standard love story, or of retellings of King Lear or Faust, even in modern settings and even with twists. Good stories also must have believable characters, heroes and villains, conflict and resolution, and they might even carry a message: moral flaws bring down powerful and talented heroes; virtue is rewarded; hard work pays off; the world isn’t fair; or pride goes before a fall. The possibilities are many but not endless. The reporter, or indeed the historian, who can fit his story into the plot lines of a familiar narrative, especially one that reinforces important cultural values, has a better chance of captivating his reader.
My visit to Hades in the spring of 1993 left me somewhat singed but also wiser in the ways of the world. As many commentators have noted, had I not been a presidential nominee, the story about me and Penn would not have generated much attention. Bringing me down was a way of embarrassing and thus weakening President Clinton. My fate was to be a voodoo doll in the hands of the President’s enemies.
More important than that, however, I believe my tormentors recognized quickly that the events at Penn could be shaped to fit the critique of the university and of liberalism that already existed in the public mind, having been developed by conservative intellectuals over the previous generation. I was to be emblematic of the cultural elite that was running the country and was out of touch with the people, the elite that since the 1960s had been leading the nation away from the traditional values that made America great, that had sold out to left-wing authoritarianism, that unleashed on college campuses the NKVD of political correctness, that was the sponsor of the rise of minority groups to a privileged status within society, that was anti-Western in orientation, that was in thrall to statism, that was subversive of capitalism, and that needed to be crushed and replaced by the New Republicans. This was a role that I would have declined had I been asked, but I was imprisoned in a story someone else was telling.
As I have thought back on my experience during the spring of 1993 I have come to realize that I survived because I was able to escape from the story that had been created by the conservative masters of mass media. I could do that only when the setting shifted to the United States Senate, an arena in which face-to-face relationships are still important. There, in my old-fashioned way, I could present myself directly to the audience that was to decide my fate. I could tell my own story. Here, similarly, using the old-fashioned technology of a book, I hope to liberate myself for a final time from the grasp of netherworld narrators, and to bring back to the living earth the lessons of my painful journey.
1
It all started innocently enough in the summer of 1992. I was then halfway through my twelfth year as president of the University of Pennsylvania, and I don’t think I am deluding myself by remembering that things were going extremely well. It is true that the University was facing a dense collection of prickly problems. Our state appropriation was being held up and threatened in Harrisburg, producing an uncomfortable budget squeeze. We were being sued by an advocacy group for allegedly not fulfilling our century-old obligation to provide “Mayor’s Scholarships” to Philadelphia students.[1] We were negotiating with the city to acquire the civic center, which borders the campus and was critical to the expansion plans of our Medical Center. It was no longer needed by the city because of the construction of a modern convention center on Market Street East. We were also planning an ambitious cogeneration plant that the local electric company, PECO, was opposing by bringing political pressure to bear
