The Last Magazine: A Novel (7 page)

B
efore I look at the Brennan Toddly story, I want to find out who Brennan Toddly is. There is a Wikipedia entry for him, a single paragraph:

An author of three books, two nonfiction, one fiction.

1989:
A Peaceful Village
—an account of a Peace Corps building effort in Uganda. (Out of print.)

1996:
The Typewriter Artist
—a novel. The main character is a writer who lives in New York. He is a mild depressive and everyone ignores his work. (Out of print.)

1999:
Awash in Red
—a personal journey of self-discovery, as the author struggles with whether or not to remain a socialist.

I find out that Brennan Toddly, according to his bio, spent two years at
The Magazine
in the mid-nineties, has been the recipient of a number of government grants, and seems to have landed at his new magazine just this year. An impact hire, to be sure.

I power-read the story. It is impressively full of nuance. A representative paragraph:

After the panel discussion, I made my way backstage, where I encountered Kanan Makiya. I introduced myself to Makiya. He invited me to his home for tea. We walked across the campus yard, where a new class of coeds had just arrived, playing Frisbee and hacky sack. Easy, carefree thoughts. The opposite of what Makiya was thinking. “This is what Iraq was like when I was a child, before I had to leave,” he told me. “You Americans are finally paying attention. You must finally take action.” Three hours later, I had left his office, a bladder full of sweet chai, convinced. But the arguments with myself would continue.

I call the university where Makiya is living out his exile and request an interview for a Nishant Patel column.

For Kenneth Pollack, I call his publisher and ask for a copy of his book
The Threatening Storm
to be sent over. It is getting so much attention, thanks to the Brennan Toddly story, that the publisher tells me they are doing a rush second printing of it. But he says they’ll messenger me a copy and get Pollack to phone me later this afternoon.

Now I wait.

A blur of a human being passes by my cubicle, high-pitched voice trailing.

“Sanders, Sanders, Sanders.”

I jump up in my seat to see the human comet. I recognize the man calling Sanders. It is Matt Healy, Chief Investigative Correspondent, based in DC.

Healy broke
The Magazine
’s (and the country’s) biggest story in the nineties, the Pentagon Paper of Blow Jobs, that whole business
with President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Without Healy, the nation might never have known the details of things like cigar vaginal penetration. Then where would we be? Well, the Internet would have solved that problem within a few years anyway.

Yes, there is no doubt in the mind of anyone at the magazine that Healy is the closest thing the magazine has to its own Woodward and Bernstein, rolled into one. A regular Neil Sheehan—revealing the past decade’s version of Watergate, but easier for most to imagine, as it just involved a slightly chubby chick, infidelity, and a hard-on. The evolution of American journalism: three decades coming full circle, a source with the name Deep Throat leaking information about the chief executive’s illegal behavior to investigating the actual mechanics of deep-throating a chief executive. There’s no need to even point out that Healy himself isn’t exactly a model citizen of marital behavior—the “ass gape cocksucker” email about Milius, for instance, a couple of divorces, smoking crack, rumored affairs, the whole deal—but of course, Healy never had the chance to lie about it under oath, in a grand jury, so ethically speaking, the magazine is in the clear from charges of hypocrisy.

Healy is pigeonholing Sanders Berman, right outside the men’s room. A real bulldog type. Three spiral notebooks on his person. Two flopping out of his back pockets, one in his hand.

“We should make it a cover, a cover,” he yells. “Three sources—CIA, DOD, the VP’s shop—are all saying and confirming it. They are saying the links are there, they are saying there are links. Al Qaeda in Baghdad!”

Healy rushes off down the hall, his points made.

Sanders Berman comes wandering away from the men’s room, as if in a daze, like he’s just been hit by a dust storm.

I take the chance.

“Hi, Sanders, how’s everything?”

He stops.

“Oh, hi—Walters, is it? Everything is good.”

“Hastings, yeah, that’s great, that’s great. Yeah, I’m just researching Nishant’s column for the week.”

“What’s he writing on?”

“The case for war, really coming down for it.”

“He is? Darnit, that’s what I was going to write this week.”

I start nodding.

“I just had dinner with Ken Pollack last night. I was going to quote him, too.”

Sanders Berman touches his bow tie. He puts his elbows up on my cubicle, a gesture of familiarity. He sees that I have the Brennan Toddly article on my desk.

“Don’t tell me he’s going to use that Iraqi gentleman’s argument . . .”

“Yep, I have a call in to his office.”

He puts his knuckle under his chin, in thought.

Am I going to appear too precocious? Am I about to overstep my bounds? I mean, who am I to suggest any ideas? I’m a twenty-two-year-old former intern, a researcher and an occasional fact-checker.

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll come up with something to say,” I say. “Like, no one has made any American historical arguments for the war yet.”

He looks at me, eyebrows up, as if he’s considering humoring my suggestion.

“Hmm. And Hastings, if you had a column, that’s what you’d say?”

“Uh, well, I mean, President James Polk has some good thoughts on these kinds of issues.”

Sanders Berman smiles and starts to walk away. I think he’s regretting even talking to me. He has his head down and I hope he’s not regretting it, but that is the sinking suspicion I get. If I were a female
intern, at least his ego could have received some flattery, but “There’s never a reason to talk to a young male intern” is probably what he’s thinking. I should have kept silent, mouth shut.

No time to worry or beat myself up over it.

The phone rings.

It’s Kanan Makiya.

“Hi, uh, thanks for calling. Yeah, so, like you said in Brennan Toddly’s piece—”

“Mr. Toddly took me out of context.”

“No doubt, um, really, hunh.”

“Have you read my book?”

“Um, no, it’s on my list.”

“Hmmm.”

We go back and forth a few more times, until, twenty minutes later, he says more or less what he said in the Brennan Toddly story. I thank him and hang up.

My phone rings again.

Kenneth Pollack is on the line.

“Have you read my book?” he asks before we begin.

“Um, no, sorry. It’s on my list, though.”

“Hmmm.”

“But I did see what Brennan Toddly wrote about it, and it sounds like a really great book.”

“Yes, thanks, but that was taken out of context.”

“Right, sure, no doubt.”

“I mean, how do you summarize a five-hundred-and-three-page book in a single page?”

“Very carefully?”

“You lose the caveats.”

Pollack starts in on his theory and doesn’t let up for a good
twenty-three minutes. Nuclear programs. Weapons of mass destruction. Biological, chemical. UN reports, broken resolutions, aluminum tubes, uranium enrichment, Israel’s reactor strike in 1983. Secret mobile weapons labs. I’m feeling good about it, because it’s the stuff that Nishant Patel wanted him to say, and all I have to do is keep typing what he’s saying.

I spend the next three hours correcting typos and condensing my conversations with Kanan and Ken into a single page, taking the best quotes and putting them up top.

I grab a quick dinner and come back to my desk after eating. Agonizing over each sentence. This is the first time I’ve been asked to do research, and I don’t want to fuck it up.

While I’m proofreading and figuring out the best way to write it up in an email to Nishant, another email appears.

From:
Sanders Berman

Subject:
James Polk

Mike, per our conversation, could you send me the Polk citations you were talking about?

Regards,

SB

This really, really is the big time now.

I think it’s about time for me to apologize to all of my colleagues.

I’m sorry.

There, that’s out of the way.

I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’m a nice guy, at heart, and I have to say it weighs on me whether or not to write about everything that happened at
The Magazine
.

Thomas Jefferson said something once: “Don’t mistake the facts for truth.”

Actually, I said that, not Jefferson, but attributing my thoughts to him gave it more authority for a second.

It’s true that without
The Magazine
, I’d never have gotten a platform.
The Magazine
gave me my start. Biting the hand that feeds and the like.

In my defense, I’d like to point out that we at
The Magazine
are always doing unseemly things, always taking other people’s experiences and actions and desires and totally mangling them for our purposes. An intellectual journalist once wrote a book about it—I think she was working for the same magazine as Brennan Toddly. She said that what we do is morally indefensible. Yeah, probably, but who does
anything that’s really morally defensible these days? Politicians? Lawyers? Janitors maybe? Should we all be janitors? Construction workers? Cops? EMTs? Teachers?

Okay, maybe they are doing morally defensible things. Regardless, other people’s experiences sell ads, make good copy, the usual. We’re always sticking the long knife into someone’s back, and with the right editing, we always manage to give that knife a little twist—we’re professionals, after all.

Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit. Maybe my colleagues will read the excerpts (very little chance they’ll buy the hardcover) and think, yes, that Hastings kid, he got it exactly right. Does anyone ever read something that’s been written about them and think, “Yep, that motherfucker nailed me—all my faults and hopes and insecurities and dreams and all”?

Maybe they’ll think, “What an asshole. Look at this, selling out his employer to make a quick buck.” (Trust me: I make more working for
The Magazine
than writing a memoir about working for a newsmagazine. We’re not Condé Nast, after all.)

Maybe some co-workers will read the book and think it’s okay. And others will think it’s shit. That’s what I guess is called “a mixed critical reaction.” My guess is that I won’t have much future at the magazine once word gets out that I’m trying to publish this—which makes me a little sad. They have feelings, and I have feelings too.

So really, I’m sorry. Mr. Peoria, Mr. Berman, Mr. Patel, Jerry, Sam, Gary, Anna—it’s not personal, or at least it’s only as personal as anything else.

It’s snowing still, December 2005. I’ve switched to drinking bottles of San Pellegrino mineral water because I like the feel of the weight of the bottle in my hand. Almost like I’m actually drinking.

I just got an email from Human Resources saying that the magazine is about to lay off one-third of its staff, thanks to the difficult
economic climate and “the rapidly changing nature of our industry.” So if the general thesis of the book is true, encapsulated in the title—that this could actually be the last magazine of its kind—it’s hard to jeopardize a future if the place you’re working for has none.

Which reminds me of a speech Henry the EIC gives to the new interns. He says he keeps a cartoon in his office that’s from that middle-highbrow magazine, published in 1981. It’s a dinosaur reading our magazine. We’re a dinosaur, get it? Ready for extinction. The point, he told us, twenty years later, is that critics and naysayers have been heralding the decline of
The Magazine
forever and it’s never come to pass.

There’s that other saying, too. I think Harry Truman said it: “If you’ve worked in the kitchen, you won’t eat at the restaurant.” But if it’s a five-star restaurant, with a couple of celebrity chefs, wouldn’t you want to hear about the rats from a rat himself? The chefs might think it’s an unfair attack, because, if you
really
know restaurants, you know rats are a big part of the business. All sorts of unsanitary shit goes on that you wouldn’t ever want the customers to know.

All that being said, I do and always will love
The Magazine
.

Approximately three hours and forty-eight minutes
left.

“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

—V
ICE
P
RESIDENT
D
ICK
C
HENEY
, A
UGUST
2002

“Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq’s nuclear program before Baghdad’s defeat in the gulf war. . . . The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”

—
The New York Times,
S
EPTEMBER
8, 2002

“The debate about whether we’re going to deal with Saddam Hussein is over, and now the question is how do we deal with him.”

—P
RESIDENT
G
EORGE
W. B
USH
, N
OVEMBER
2002

“These liberal hawks could give a voice to [Bush’s] war aims. . . . They could make the case for war to suspicious Europeans and to wavering fellow Americans. They might even be able to explain the connection between Iraq and the war on terrorism.”

—G
EORGE
P
ACKE
R
IN
The New York
Times Magazine,
D
ECEMBER
8, 2002

“Barring a dramatic change of behavior by Saddam Hussein in the coming weeks . . . a military intervention to disarm Iraq would be justified.”

—
Washington Post
EDITORIAL
, F
EBRUARY
5, 2003

“The president will take us to war with support . . . from quite a few members of the East Coast liberal media cabal. . . . We reluctant hawks . . . generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold. . . . Mr. Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the coming war is a far cry from the rash, unilateral adventure some of his advisers would have settled for.”

—
New York Times
COLUMNIST
B
ILL
K
ELLE
R
, F
EBRUARY
8, 2003

“The humanitarian case for war is strong enough on its own.”

—B
RENNAN
T
ODDLY
ON
Charlie Rose
, F
EBRUARY
13, 2003

“We have to save the Iraqi people.”

—N
ISHANT
P
ATEL
ON
THE
SAME
BROADCAST

“What I’m suggesting is that if our goal is to bring democracy to the Middle East, there are better ways to do so then invading and occupying a country.”

—J
AMES
F
AL
LOWS
ON
THE
SAME
BRO
ADCAST

“That’s Munich talking.”

—S
ANDERS
B
ERMA
N
,
The Magazine

“Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. . . . What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network. . . . As with the story of Zarqawi and his network, I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaida.”

—S
ECRETARY
OF
S
TATE
C
OLIN
P
OWELL
AT
THE
U
NITED
N
ATIONS
, F
EBRUARY
2003

“The detainee was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.”

—J
ANUARY
2003 CIA
REPORT
ON
P
OWELL
’
S
SOURCE
,
AL
Q
AEDA
OPERATIVE
I
BN
AL
-S
HAYKH
AL
-L
IBI
,
WHO
PROVIDED
THE
IN
TELLIGENCE
AFTER
HIS
RENDITION
TO
E
GYPT

“Yes, [Iraq] could be an incredibly dangerous war for journalists. But then, you know, we’re in a situation that’s fairly dangerous for those of us who live in places like New York and Washington.”

—J
OE
K
LEIN
ON
ABC’
S
This Week
, M
ARCH
9, 2003

“This is really bold. . . . Mr. Bush’s audacious shake of the dice appeals to me.”

—
New York Times
COLUMNIST
T
H
OMAS
F
RIEDMAN
, M
ARCH
2003

“The question is, is Saddam Hussein a threat to the world or not? I think he is. We should do it with or without the UN.”

—P
ETER
B
EINART
,
EDITOR
OF
The New Republic
, M
ARCH
2003

“Iraq is a part of the war on terror. Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September the 11th should say to the American people that we’re now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.”

—P
RESIDENT
G
EORGE
W. B
USH
, M
ARCH
2003

“One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by
Newsweek
spoke of ‘the green mushroom’ over Baghdad—the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. . . . It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him.”

—
Newsweek
COVER
STORY
, M
ARCH
17, 2003

“I believe that the Bush administration is right: this war will look better when it is over. . . . Weapons of mass destruction will be found. . . . Iraq is surely producing weapons of mass destruction.”

—F
AREED
Z
AKARIA
,
Newsweek
COVER
STORY
, M
ARCH
24, 2003

“Iraq is going to be a cakewalk.”

“We’ll be greeted as liberators.”

“U.S. officials expect there to be less than 20,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq after the initial invasion phase of the war is over, anticipating a drawdown by December 2003.”

“They’ll be home by Christmas, I can tell you that much.”

“We need to demonstrate the good intentions of Americans, but also our power. Shock and Awe, I dare say, did that beautifully.”

“We forget, or pretend to forget, or convince ourselves that this time, this time it’s going to be different, this time it really is evil versus good, good versus evil, this time, we swear it, the war is going to follow the script, even though in the first scene of the movie, you always have a savvy general ready to give a warning, ready to foreshadow what we all know, who says, wars never go as planned, wars never go how you want them to, wars unleash things—those dogs of war—that we have no control over, ripple effects and whatnot. But there is also the other general in the first scene, the fool to be sent up, ready to say, don’t worry, it will all be over by Christmas.”

—V
ERY
I
MPORTANT
T
HINKERS
FROM
V
ERY
I
MPORTANT
AND
W
ELL
-F
UNDED
T
HINK
T
ANKS