There is a scene in the movie The Verdict in which Paul Newman, playing a down-and-out lawyer working a case against the rich and powerful, faces the jury and, in a plea from his very soul, says, "So much of the time we're just lost. We say, please God tell us what is right, tell us what is true."
That is the way that many Americans felt in the aftermath of America's national catastrophe on September 11. Some turned to religion, some to the words of political leaders. Still others looked for answers in the eerie words written by the archpoet Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."
When these prophetic words, written over 80 years ago in "The Second Coming," are repeated to Haynes Johnson, his reaction is swift. "It speaks to me," he says and without missing a beat adds, "Do you remember the famous speech that William Faulkner made when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950?" Johnson, in his rapid-fire way of speaking, turns our attention to another literary figure, for further consolation. "This was at a moment when the country was terrorized in a different way," he says. "It was at the peak of the Cold War. Faulkner gave one of the incredible, ringing endorsements of faith in human beings. He addressed the pessimism and the fear and concerns of the world and then said, 'I decline to accept the end of man,'" says Johnson, his voice rising in excitement as he recites from memory Faulkner's speech. " 'I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.'"
PW caught up with Johnson at the office of his publisher, Harcourt, to discuss The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years. Tanned and relaxed and impeccably dressed in dark suit and tie, the youthful looking 70-year-old threw his glasses on the conference table, ready to take on questions about his new book that looks at America and its values in the 1990s—which may not exist anymore in the aftermath of September 11.
There are myriad themes running through The Best of Times—amazing medical discoveries, brilliant technology, the intrepid Internet, the infallible stock market, the frenzied media, all with Bill Clinton and the politics of search and destroy at the center of the maelstrom. Johnson takes on each of them and dissects them with such surgical precision that, in the end, the hubris of the era is exposed in all its shallowness. There is a feeling that Johnson is on a mission.
"I started this book four and a half years ago," Johnson tells PW, "because I was convinced we were passing through a period unlike anything Americans have been through before. The end of the Cold War, peace, unprecedented prosperity—everywhere you looked the United States was ascendant. And yet at the same time there was a growing culture of scandal and celebrity and tawdriness—and this was long before I might say anyone named Monica became known."
Bill Clinton is the central character in The Best of Times and is more than just a familiar face on TV to Johnson. It turns out that Johnson has known the former president since Clinton was a 19-year-old working in the office of Johnson's friend, the late Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. "I will never forget the time I was working out of Fulbright's office [while writing Fulbright: The Dissenter, 1968], and Lee Williams, his closest associate, says, 'Haynes, there's someone I'd like you to meet who's just joined the staff and we think has promise.' Nineteen-year-old kid named Bill Clinton. Chubby face, much chubbier than he is now, but exactly the guy you see now—charming, smart, pleasant, schmoozing. He was always over your shoulder. And he is in so many ways the same talented, compellingly interesting guy as we see, and he embodies everything in our times—all the best and worst of us. And I think what I've written is a tragedy because it was a tragedy of lost opportunities."
Johnson hasn't squandered many opportunities in his own life. Born and raised in New York City, he virtually has printer's ink in his blood, for he is the son of the Pulitzer Prize—winning reporter and editor Malcolm Johnson. "My father," Johnson says proudly, "was on the old New York Sun. I was a copyboy there." When told the old Sun building with its beautiful, patinaed clock is still there on the corner of Broadway and Chambers, just opposite City Hall, Johnson quickly rattles off the dead paper's slogan, delivering it with delight: "It Chimes For All!" Malcolm Johnson was awarded the 1948 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for his Crime on the Waterfront series, which was later turned into one of the greatest films of the 20th century, On the Waterfront. When Haynes won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for the Washington Star in 1966, for coverage of the civil rights demonstrations in Selma, Ala., the Johnsons became the only father-and-son team to receive Pulitzers in the history of American journalism. When asked if any of his children may be following in the path blazed for them and going for a Pulitzer trifecta, Johnson laughs and says no, adding happily, "They're all independent—not a yuppie in the bunch!"
Turning serious again, he recalls the terror—and hope—of the civil rights years. "Reporting on civil rights—which transformed my life—in the South, Selma, Mississippi and Bogalusa and all those places where blacks were clubbed to death for simply trying to register to vote. That was such a shock. And it wasn't so much being frightened. I guess there was danger—there was—but it was different. I felt I was a part of history at that time. I was very proud of that. I am immensely proud of witnessing, going into those black churches when [Martin Luther] King was speaking, and the mobs were outside shouting and screaming, 'We Shall Overcome'—I still get goose pimples when I hear it now."
Johnson blames much of the country's troubles on the media, going back to the O.J. Simpson trial. The "O.J. Format" started something with not only the regular networks, but, specifically, the cable networks. "You can go nonstop. And they invented what we're seeing now This nonstop, this 'All O.J., All the Time.' 'All Monica, All the Time.' Before September 11 it was 'All Chandra, All the Time.' And the same people are turning up. What's it telling us? The common denominator is, it's hot, it's scandal, it's diverting and it's cheap. Don't forget, it doesn't cost anything. Do you think those people talking about Chandra on the television were trying to find out where she was? They didn't know anything!" he says, his voice rising as he relishes his indignation
When asked if the events at the WTC will make tabloid television featuring O.J., Monica and Chandra and their ilk irrelevant, Johnson takes a more serious tone "I hope they're not irrelevant," he says, "because we ought to take them all as examples of what we can't allow ourselves to do again—to wallow in the insignificant, the trivial, the diverting, the deluding, sheer scandal for scandal's titillation itself. If we allow ourselves to step back into that kind of cycle, we're just asking for more trouble down the road."
But for all his criticism of the media, Johnson thinks it came up big after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. "As critical, harsh and contemptuous as I've been of my business," he says, "I have to say the coverage has been the best since the Kennedy assassination in terms of being serious, sober, careful, thoughtful under great pressure and duress. In crisis we do respond."
One of the problems of tabloid television is that it has turned the talented away from serving in government. "We've demonized public officials," Johnson says strenuously. "We've demonized politics in government and it's been a long process and it got even more pernicious and more vicious. It's taken a terrible toll, and we're now quite aware that there is a real need for the most talented people, the most far-sighted people, the best trained people." Johnson points out how the attacks on September 11 reminded us of the importance of government. "Now we understand; we now need, crave, public servants, and what is the government? They're firemen, they're policemen, they're nurses, they're emergency workers, they're the public school teachers. We need to get back into what's important. Until the WTC happened, what was the story in the country? It was 'All Gary Condit, All the Time.' We weren't paying attention to the world's problems."
The media and Republican politicians blasted Clinton over his extramarital affair, and Johnson points out that New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who's had his own marital problems, is now being hailed as "America's Mayor." "People with vision and character and strength," Johnson reminds us, "are not alabaster saints. We should celebrate their strengths and be a little more forgiving of their private failures, so long as it isn't carried out in a way that really hurts the public."
But politicians and the media are not the only ones to endure Johnson's tough scrutiny. The folks at Silicon Valley also come under his microscope in The Best of Times, no matter how young, rich or hip they perceive themselves to be. "Someone told me in the Silicon Valley," says Johnson, "that it's a very sad thing when your closest pal is your interconnectivity. And we all get lost in cyberspace," he continues. "I don't mean to knock the wonders of technology in a sort of a Luddite way, because it is wonderful. But the idea that this is the nirvana or that it is even the greatest advance in human history I think is nonsense. It's just one of many."
Noting that the attack on the WTC was one of the great "low-tech" terrorist acts in history, he says, "Part of our delusion was that our technology was going to save us. That we had all these wonderful gadgets and missiles. And suppose we had built the missile shield and could stop all the missiles coming in—but it still wouldn't have anything to do with the real source of problem, as we saw, because you can turn a plane into a missile."
Johnson is of the old school of writing—it's torture. "As Red Smith said, you sit down and you hit the keys and you put one little word after another and you watch the blood come out on the screen. The fact is, you simply have to sit down and do it. Because if you don't do it, it'll never get done." Johnson's an early riser in his D.C. home—he lives just two blocks from the Washington Cathedral—and he's up at 6 a.m. every day, at which time he reads the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. "Then I'll have my coffee," he continues, "and I'll go in the room and I'll write as long as I can. It's just hard work—it's like making shoes."
When he's not writing, Johnson teaches at the University of Maryland, where he has the Knight Chair for journalism, and at Princeton University. He is also a regular on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. "I'm very proud of that show," he says, "because you're reaching the people who care about ideas, and they want to be informed, and they take the time to tune in. It's a wonderful feeling that you have a responsive audience."
The only real shining heroes in The Best of Times—as was once again proven when the World Trade Center collapsed—are the American people. "Because they handled themselves with enormous maturity," Johnson insists, "under an onslaught of gross scandal and betrayal. They didn't lose faith in their country or their system. They showed very good sense in judging Clinton rightly. Poor on character, very condemnatory toward him. But understanding of his weaknesses and appreciative of his strengths. They showed they were able to handle it. They didn't break. They didn't give up. They didn't go into despair. They didn't call for the heads. They weren't for impeachment. And they understood exactly why."
After profiling the 1980s with Sleepwalking Through History (1991) and the '90s with The Best of Times, what's next for Haynes Johnson? "I don't know," he says thoughtfully. "I actually have a lot of different ideas for books, but I want to wait until I get through this fall." His immediate commitment is to the promotion of The Best of Times, which Harcourt has scheduled for a first printing of 150,000 copies. After the greed of the '80s and the hubris of the '90, the first decade of the millennium will most certainly plot a new direction following the events of September 11. "All changed, changed utterly," as Yeats wrote about another historical moment. And there is comfort in knowing that Haynes Johnson will be there to write that history, however it plays out.
