I have been thinking lately that I would like to cancel my New Yorker subscription. With its sprightly covers and often inscrutable cartoons, the New Yorker arrives in my mailbox every week without fail, unfortunately, adding yet another mostly unread New Yorker to the stack teetering on my dining room table.
But this week, a single article in the October 26 New Yorker has made it worth my $195 a year subscription and all my guilty trips to the recycling bin.
It’s a Bob Woodward essay titled “A Dangerous Friendship.” In it, Woodward tells the excruciating story of one of his great life regrets. He got too close to a source. That source became a dear friend. He betrayed his friend.
Woodward’s essay belongs in every Journalism 101 syllabus. It takes up a central ethical question — what do we journalists owe our sources and our subjects? Anything?
Enter Joan Didion
“Writers are always selling someone out,” Joan Didion famously declared in the preface to her book of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”
Didion confesses that she is so small in stature and so obtrusive in temperament that her interviewees, the subjects of her stories, “tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”
Apparently, by her lights, it was not Joan Didion’s duty to refresh anyone’s memory.
For years I had wondered vaguely why I was neither a fan of Joan Didion’s writing nor of Didion herself — until I came across that quote and later on read her Saturday Evening Post essay “Getting Serenity.”
In that piece, Didion is granted permission to sit in on a twelve-step meeting of Gamblers Anonymous in Southern California. She is made privy to the personal revelations of its participants and their day-in-and-day-out struggles with addiction. She publishes what she hears.
That’s it, I realized. That’s what I have found so off-putting about Joan Didion. Not that she had published the confidences shared in that meeting — apparently, she was given permission to do so.
What really got to me was Didion’s attitude toward these unsuspecting folks and their struggles — her disdain for them.
A Story I’d Rather Not Tell You
Which brings me to that big regret of mine, the one that I’d rather not share. But what the heck, if Bob Woodward can do it, so can I.
I once wrote a story about a family celebration. I was invited to their house, fed, and let in on their family secrets.
Then I wrote about that family and what I considered to be its bourgeois pretentions. I was proud of myself, proud of my story. I had told the truth about these people. I had exposed them for what they were.
What they were, of course, was a perfectly ordinary, hard-working American family.
A sorrowful phone call from the father of that family put me straight. The scales fell from my eyes, and I resolved never again to present myself, Didion-like, as a sympathetic, friendly listener who would look out for the interests of her subjects — when in fact I was a journalist, I was going to write the truth, the facts as I saw them.
If that posture kept me from accessing the grittiest of the grit, so be it.
Journalism Students — Take Note of Bob Woodward’s Sad and Dangerous Friendship
Which brings us back to Bob Woodward and his essay in the New Yorker. It is a piece of work for the ages. It is the story of a journalist who succumbed to a dual temptation: To the desire for friendship with a kindred, politically minded spirit. And to the desire to get the inside story of the goings-on at the White House.
Bob Woodward and his family had become close friends with Richard G. Darman over the years. Darman was a government official during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and Woodward had built many a story around information Darman had quietly shared with him.
They enjoyed long lunches and weekend outings together. They talked for hours. They took their children along on their outings. Their children became friends.
The arrangement worked well until 1992, when Darman confided the power struggles and the failed economic policies inside the George H.W. Bush administration.
Darman trusted Woodward — his friend — to keep the information quiet until after the 1992 presidential election. Woodward did not. He chose journalism over friendship. He wrote the stories before the election. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. The friendship ended.
For Bob Woodward, Life Is Not Off the Record, Not Anymore
Woodward was more careful in his friendships in the years that followed. Unlike Didion, “If I became close to someone I might write about, I tried to make it clear that reporting was my business. Life was not off the record.”
The friends, Woodward and Darman, never reconciled. Darman died in 2008.
This was a deep loss for Woodward. He feels that loss to this day. He ends his New Yorker essay with “I never had another friend like Dick Darman.”
As for me and the New Yorker, all is forgiven. If, say, every other week, I come across an essay as poignant — and clarifying — as this one by Bob Woodward, written from the aerie of his ninth decade, I’ll pay the 195 bucks.
More stories I’d rather not tell you: “Tulips and Sex — Writing as If Everyone I Know Were Dead.” Also, “John Donne — A Love Affair With a Poet Long Dead.”
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