VOICES FROM THE PAST — The editors of this page occasionally invite the great wits and observers of ages past — reconstructed through the miracle of artificial intelligence — to cast their eyes upon the present day. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
On the Late Mr. Wolff, and the Trade of Whispering to Kings
In the voice and manner of H.L. Mencken, Sage of Baltimore, upon a decade of correspondence between a journalist and a financier, and what it reveals about the trade of both.
I have spent the better part of a long and cheerfully misanthropic career watching the American press strike attitudes of heroism while performing the duties of a valet, and I confess that even I, hardened as I am to the spectacle of virtue rented by the hour, was mildly diverted by the recent excavation of some twenty-three thousand pages from the private correspondence of the late and unlamented Jeffrey Epstein. Buried in that midden heap, like a truffle in a hog wallow, sat a decade of letters between the deceased financier and one Michael Wolff, a journalist of the modern American type — which is to say, a man who has converted the ancient trade of flattery into a species of literature, and been garlanded for it by his professional guild not once but twice.
The facts, as they have come slithering out, are simple enough to be stated in a single indecent sentence: in the year 1911 — no, forgive me, 2011, though the difference in moral technology is negligible — Mr. Wolff sat down and composed for his patron a plan of campaign, in the style of a general disposing his regiments, for the rehabilitation of a reputation that had, by any honest accounting, no earthly business being rehabilitated. He proposed to scrub the search engines, cultivate a stable of business reporters as one cultivates hogs for market, and in due course produce the “new narrative” that would smother the old one in its crib. He called this, with a frankness that does him a certain backhanded credit, “a kind of reverse journalistic effort.” I have heard many euphemisms in my time for the manufacture of falsehood, but I confess this one has the crude poetry of a man too busy counting his fee to bother lying to himself.
Now, the great mass of the American public — that vast, gaping, credulous ganglion which I have elsewhere had the honor of naming the booboisie — will no doubt receive this news with the appropriate three minutes of outrage before returning to its cud. It will wonder how a man who dined out for twenty years on his proximity to the mighty, who wrote a best-selling chronicle of the White House and was paid the compliment of having his facts disputed by everyone in it, could also have offered to “neutralize” an inconvenient reporter for a client accused of trafficking children for sexual abuse. But the wonder is misplaced. There is nothing here that violates the natural history of the American press; there is only, for once, a specimen pinned to the board where the layman can see its wings.
For the plain truth, which no journalism school has ever printed on its diploma, is that access is not the enemy of corruption but its favorite delivery mechanism. The reporter who dines with the Duke does not dine with him in order to expose him; he dines with him in order to keep being invited to dinner, and the Duke, who is nobody’s fool, understands the transaction perfectly. Mr. Wolff merely had the poor taste to put the arrangement in writing, to describe his own employer’s press corps as a “gullible press” — a diagnosis he was uniquely positioned to make, being one of its most successful gulls-in-chief — and to offer, for a fee somewhere in the neighborhood of what I used to make in a decade, to “immunize” his client against what the rest of us call the truth.
Nor should we neglect the finest passage in the whole grimy correspondence, the one in which our hero, during the presidential silly season of 2015, proposed to his patron that they hold a sitting candidate’s reputation for ransom — save him, ruin him, whichever the market favored — and rendered the calculation in four words of admirable commercial clarity: “You are the bullet.” I have known blackmailers with more shame and considerably less prose style. That the candidate in question went on to occupy the Executive Mansion, and that of the entire menagerie of the ashamed and the resigned — the Mandelsons cashiered, the Summerses repenting in sackcloth before the cameras, the Ruemmlers expressing regret through spokesmen — he alone should have emerged from the wreckage entirely unsigned, unindicted, and unbothered, strikes me as being about as surprising as the sun rising in the east. The bullet, it turns out, was never fired. It was simply kept in a drawer against future need, the way a prudent man keeps a fire extinguisher, or a prostitute keeps a photograph.
I am asked, by the more tender-minded of my readers, whether this is not cause for reform — whether some oath, some license, some bar association of the press might not be devised to keep such men from the trade. I answer that the press does not need policing; it needs only honesty about its own function, which is not now and has never been to speak truth to power, but to act as power’s most eloquent domestic staff, dressing it, feeding it its lines, and occasionally, when the tips are good enough, threatening the neighbors on its behalf. The Roman nomenclator, that whispering slave who fed his senator the names of the crowd, at least had the excuse of his chains. Mr. Wolff had a Pulitzer committee’s cousin twice over and a literary agent, and volunteered.
I set down these observations not in anger, which is a wasted emotion when spent on inevitabilities, but in the spirit of the entomologist who has found, at long last, a specimen so perfectly representative of its genus that it deserves a place under glass. Let it be labeled honestly: Homo scriptor aulicus, the courtier who writes, native to Manhattan, feeds on proximity, and calls its droppings scoops.
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