I was searching for something or other, and I happened across an article on a different subject that caught my eye—this 1996 article by Jonathan Chait (he of BDS pride) about his fallen buddy Stephen Glass, the serial liar whose career at TNR ended in ignominy.
Chait is very angry at Glass, and rightly so. Chait’s trying to excuse/explain how he, and so many of our Best and Brightest, could have been so fooled by a sociopathic con man.
An interesting subject, to say the least.
I know a certain amount about Stephen Glass and his deceptive career. I saw the movie “Shattered Glass,” and I’ve read the Vanity Fair article on which it was based. But I couldn’t remember encountering the following facts that Chait relates [emphasis mine]:
After [Glass] was caught, I often heard it said that he should write novels. Perhaps he heard this himself and took it to heart. But it was clear all along that this notion was terribly misguided. He never had much talent for prose. When his stories read well, it usually resulted from heavy rewriting, most notably by Kelly. (Very often he would hand his stories to me minutes before they were due, and, to save him from embarrassment, I would perform a kind of emergency triage on his text, rearranging it into something resembling a coherent structure.) Moreover, his stories were interesting only because they were purportedly true. The characters in his stories, as in his novel, lack any depth or believability.
So, in addition to being a long-undetected serial liar as a journalist, Stephen Glass was a writer who could not write. And yet he was considered a wunderkind at TNR for three full years, hired at the ripe old age of 23, and also wrote for Policy Review, George, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s, and had publishers interested in a book. Say what you will about the viewpoints and thought processes presented in those publications (and I’m not familiar with all of them), most of the articles in them seem to be decently—and even well—written, at least in the technical sense of use of language and the flow of prose.
It seems that Glass’s articles were so poorly executed that they needed an almost complete rewrite, leaving just the bare bones of the idea. It’s not that such a thing is never done in the publishing world, but it’s my impression that it’s usually done for someone more illustrious, someone with a reputation and at least a modicum of fame, someone whom the periodical wishes to pamper and court. But a 23-year old kid, at what is probably one of his first real jobs as an adult? Preposterous.
So, why? Why such a heavy assist? Reading the rest of Chait’s piece, and remembering some of what I already knew about Glass, I’d say it appears that everyone’s almost overwhelming desire to coddle Glass (sort of like a kitten) and keep him around had to do with his uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with people, to entertain them, and to seem personally vulnerable at the same time. A kind of fun mascot, he was the kid brother you want to protect.
I’m not sure what this has to do with politics; perhaps nothing. But it doesn’t escape my attention that most of those enabling Glass were liberals (although the late Michael Kelly, an editor who was a moderate, was a prominent one of Glass’s champions). Make of that what you will.
Here’s Charles Lane, the editor who finally caught Glass, on how it felt to be taken in:
We extended normal human trust to someone who basically lacked a conscience…We thought Glass was interested in our personal lives, or our struggles with work, and we thought it was because he cared. Actually, it was all about sizing us up and searching for vulnerabilities. What we saw as concern was actually contempt
I like to think my radar’s good enough that I wouldn’t be taken in by a con artist. And maybe I wouldn’t—and fortunately, so far I haven’t, at least to the best of my knowledge. But I realize that everyone is somewhat vulnerable, including me, to a really good con. That’s the hallmark of the best ones; they charm and disarm their victims.
I suppose I’m writing this because I continue to think of Obama as a con artist, one much of America has fallen for—and may fall for again, unfortunately. Once the mark has been conned, it’s very difficult to break the spell. The truth has to hit that person in the face with unequivocal certainty.
