12.7/The Interpretive Lens/The Intellectual Frame

Live Ideology: The Controversies Editors Actually Fought Over, 1989–1999

The Decency Standard and the Excerpt

In April 1990 the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, under director Dennis Barrie, opened The Perfect Moment anyway. A Hamilton County grand jury indicted Barrie and the museum on opening day for pandering obscenity; the trial ran that September; on October 5, 1990, a Cincinnati jury acquitted both. Roughly 80,000 people had seen the exhibition by then.¹ That same year NEA chairman John Frohnmayer vetoed peer-approved grants to four performance artists — Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes — under the new standard; their suit became NEA v. Finley. The record business ran its own version of the trial in the same years — the parental-advisory sticker, the 1990 obscenity prosecution of 2 Live Crew in Florida — but the magazines’ own referendum stayed in print.

Five years later the same absorption reached print. In the last week of October 1994, nearly the entire editorial staff of a Washington political weekly threatened to resign over fifty pages of a psychology book. The New Republic, under editor Andrew Sullivan and owner Martin Peretz, had decided to run an excerpt of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life — the Free Press volume by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray — on the cover of its October 31 issue, packaged as “Race and I.Q.”³ Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist, had died that September; Murray carried the promotion alone. The book ran past eight hundred pages, and most of them discussed white Americans only: its structural argument concerned a “cognitive elite” sorting itself into a distinct social class, and the shrinking purchase of redistributive policy in a knowledge economy. Chapters 13 and 14 — roughly fifty pages — carried the claim that the measured gap in IQ scores between Black and white Americans might be partly genetic in origin. Those fifty pages were the controversy. The compromise that averted the resignations was arithmetic: the excerpt would run, and nineteen rebuttals would run in the same issue, by writers including Mickey Kaus, John Judis, Leon Wieseltier, Jeffrey Rosen, Hugh Pearson, and Glenn Loury.³

The package as published was a demonstration of a magazine’s working method — print the strongest version of an argument, surround it with the strongest counterarguments, let the reader work — and it was simultaneously a referendum on whether that method had a floor. The staff position was that some claims are normalized by the framing regardless of the rebuttals: that running the excerpt was the act, and the rebuttals were furniture arranged around it. Three positions were held in the rooms where this was argued, each in good faith. Run it with rebuttals, because refusing to engage concedes the argument to a right-wing press that will run it without any. Refuse to run it, because a claim historically saturated with violence is legitimized by a respectable masthead no matter what surrounds it. Or cover it without engaging it — report the book as a phenomenon, who was reading it and what it had activated, without printing the argument itself — the position editors retreated to when they could not agree. The book sold several hundred thousand copies in hardcover; the American Psychological Association’s 1995 task-force report acknowledged the measured group differences and rejected the genetic-causation inference; Stephen Jay Gould’s revised The Mismeasure of Man (1996) became the standard reply. The pattern that emerged in the trade was precise: writing about the book was survivable; deciding to run it was not.

The two fights were the same fight, staged in different venues, and editors experienced them as one continuous question about their own function. The Mapplethorpe controversy asked whether a publicly subsidized institution could hang an image; the Bell Curve controversy asked whether a privately owned magazine should print an argument. In Cincinnati the gatekeeper was a jury and the answer was acquittal; at the weekly the gatekeeper was an editor and the answer was the nineteen-rebuttal hedge. What the pairing exposed was that the magazine class had two different vocabularies for the same act. Where the state was the censor — Helms, the grand jury, the grant veto — the editorial position was unanimous and confident: the funding-restriction question was not hard, whatever one thought of the photographs. Where the editor was the gatekeeper, the confidence dissolved, because the editor could not appeal to the First Amendment against himself. The Cincinnati jury had eight days of testimony and a verdict form. The masthead had a Monday meeting and no form at all.

The Two Feminisms

The decade’s feminist argument arrived at the editorial floor in 1990 wearing seven hundred pages of art history. Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published by Yale University Press that year, argued that sexuality was chthonian, pre-social, and pre-rational; that civilization was an Apollonian construction perpetually threatened by Dionysian force; and that academic feminism’s premise — gender as social construction, patriarchy as cause rather than response — was wrong at the root. Her named antagonists were Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who had drafted a model antipornography civil-rights ordinance for Minneapolis in 1983 — vetoed twice by Mayor Don Fraser, passed in Indianapolis in 1984, struck down on First Amendment grounds by the Seventh Circuit in American Booksellers v. Hudnut in 1985.⁴ Dworkin’s position — in the tradition of Robin Morgan’s 1974 formulation, “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice”⁵ — was that pornography was not speech but action, the documentary record of women’s subordination; MacKinnon’s legal-academic version held that the ordinance and sexual-harassment law — a doctrine she had helped invent — shared one logic. Against them stood a feminist opposition with its own credentials: the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, founded in 1984 by Ann Snitow, Carole Vance, and others; Ellen Willis, whose 1981 essay “Lust Horizons” had coined the term “pro-sex feminism”; Susie Bright, editing On Our Backs in San Francisco. Paglia stood outside both camps and treated Dworkin as the necessary opponent — Puritanical, in her telling, and Victorian on date rape — and Dworkin returned the treatment; the two never debated in person. Paglia’s essay collections, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) and Vamps and Tramps (1994), were the magazine-facing artillery.

Inside the offices, three positions circulated, and their distribution did not match the public record. Paglia as a serious thinker the academy could not absorb: held by senior male editors, by women tired of being instructed in what was permissible to find arousing, by certain queer writers — privately persuasive at higher rates than publicly admitted. Paglia as a provocateur running camp shock-tactics in the costume of erudition: held by those who had read past the first hundred pages. And Dworkin as simply right, the discourse not yet caught up: held mostly by women who had survived something, a position carrying a moral authority in private conversation that the Paglia position could not match there.

The same split returned at the end of the decade with a president’s name attached, and the venues were no longer quarterlies. Kathleen Willey’s allegation — that Clinton had groped her in the Oval Office study on November 29, 1993 — reached Newsweek through Paula Jones’s legal team in 1997, and Michael Isikoff pursued it through the fall.⁶ The magazine held the story for months on a corroboration problem: Willey had asked Julie Hiatt Steele to back her account, and Steele agreed, then recanted. Willey appeared under her own name on 60 Minutes on March 15, 1998, in an Ed Bradley interview. The harder case followed the same shape at a different network. NBC’s Lisa Myers filmed Juanita Broaddrick on January 20, 1999; Broaddrick alleged that Clinton, as Arkansas attorney general, had raped her in a Little Rock hotel room on April 25, 1978, and conceded on camera that she had earlier filed an affidavit in the Jones case denying any assault. NBC held the tape for thirty-five days, citing corroboration; the Senate impeachment vote fell on February 12; the interview aired on Dateline on February 24, 1999, after the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post had reported that the tape existed.⁷ In between lay the eighteen months — from the January 21, 1998 Drudge Report item that pushed the Lewinsky story into the open after Newsweek held it, through the August grand-jury testimony, to the February 1999 acquittal — in which the story consumed the air supply of every magazine in New York, and monthlies that did not cover politics found themselves covering politics.

The masthead split was the sex wars resumed under party pressure. The political position: Clinton was being prosecuted by a Republican apparatus whose substantive program was the rollback of women’s rights; whatever he had done with consenting adults was private; what mattered was who replaced him. Gloria Steinem put the case in the New York Times in March 1998.⁸ The categorical position: a forty-nine-year-old president and a twenty-two-year-old subordinate were not a private matter; the Willey allegation, if true, was assault, and Broaddrick’s, if true, was rape; the political-protection argument betrayed two decades of feminist legal work. Andrea Dworkin — the ordinance author, a decade after her magazine exile — made that case in the Guardian the same month. Inside an office the split mapped onto generation and biography: a senior editor whose career had been made by Roe-era feminism across the table from a features writer half a generation younger for whom the categorical position was obvious, neither performing. The pitches that arrived in October 1998 were the Linda Tripp tapes as a literary genre, the gendered division of pundit reaction, Kenneth Starr’s prose style. The pitch that did not arrive was the profile of Jane Doe #5 before her name was public — the reporting work of finding and corroborating Broaddrick being harder, at every desk in the city, than the meta-piece about coverage.

The Advertisement and the Bomb

Two bodies of material sat outside the editors’ category system in the first half of the decade, and the two failures ran in opposite directions. The first was material the editors understood perfectly and could not decide whether to touch. In the 1991–1992 academic year, Bradley R. Smith, media director of the Institute for Historical Review — the Torrance, California organization that had been the center of American Holocaust denial since 1978 — submitted full-page paid advertisements to college newspapers across the country, framed as a call for “open debate on the Holocaust.” The ads ran or were rejected at more than sixty campuses, including the Daily Northwestern, the Cornell Daily Sun, the Michigan Daily, and the Stanford Daily.⁹ The fight the ads produced was never over whether denial was true. It was over what printing them was: a content-based restriction question (some campus editors ran the ad with rebuttals and denunciations attached); an ideological transfer no rebuttal could offset (the position of the Anti-Defamation League); or an attention subsidy to a movement that would die if ignored (the working assumption at most professional desks). Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press, 1993) treated the campus campaign as a case study and named the British military historian David Irving as a deliberate falsifier of evidence. Irving sued for libel in London in 1996, where the burden fell on the defense; the trial ran from January 11 to April 11, 2000, and Mr. Justice Charles Gray’s judgment found for Lipstadt and Penguin — Irving had wilfully misrepresented the historical record and was, in the judgment’s word, a denier.¹⁰ A suit had forced the adjudication the editors had spent a decade declining to host: not covering the trial was abdication, and covering it meant printing what Irving claimed. The 350-page judgment demonstrated that the record could defeat denial under cross-examination, which settled the case without settling the editorial question.

The second body of material was the reverse: the editors could not decide what it was, because they had never assembled the file. On August 21, 1992, a Marshals Service surveillance operation on a remote ridge in Boundary County, Idaho turned into a firefight that killed Deputy Marshal William Degan and fourteen-year-old Sammy Weaver; the next day an FBI sniper, Lon Horiuchi, firing under rules of engagement a Senate subcommittee chaired by Arlen Specter called “an unconstitutional shoot-on-sight order,” killed Vicki Weaver as she stood in her cabin doorway holding her infant daughter.¹¹ Randy Weaver, a former Green Beret and a follower of Christian Identity theology, surrendered at the end of the month. Six months later, on February 28, 1993, an ATF raid on the Branch Davidian community at Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas killed four agents and six Davidians; the FBI siege that followed ran fifty-one days; on April 19, 1993, after a CS-gas operation, the buildings burned, and seventy-six Branch Davidians died, David Koresh and more than twenty children among them.¹² Two years to the day after the fire, at 9:02 in the morning of April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh — a twenty-six-year-old Army veteran of the Gulf War who had driven to Waco during the siege — detonated a 4,800-pound ammonium-nitrate bomb in a rented Ryder truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, nineteen of them children in the building’s daycare center.¹³ Terry Nichols, who had helped assemble the bomb, was convicted of conspiracy in 1997.

For the first thirty-six hours after the blast, most editorial speculation ran foreign — Middle Eastern, in the pattern of the 1993 World Trade Center attack — and most of it was wrong in the same direction. When McVeigh’s identity emerged, the magazines discovered a category problem: the militia movement — Militia of Montana, founded in 1994 by John Trochmann; the Michigan Militia, the same year, under Norman Olson; behind them the Posse Comitatus tradition dating to 1969 and the Christian Identity theology that had shaped Weaver — was a documented ecology of organizations that no one at the general-interest monthlies had been tracking. The dominant frame for rural America had been nostalgic or scenic; the political reality of post-Reagan rural decline and the radicalization running through a particular reading of the Second Amendment and a particular reading of Revelation had been reportable for years and largely unreported. The reporters who closed the gap, among them Jess Walter, whose account of the Weaver case became the standard book, did the taxonomic work of separating tax protesters from Christian Identity from constitutionalist militias from the neo-Nazi fringe.¹⁴ Set beside each other, the two failures made a diagram of the trade’s blind field. The denial ads were a known evil the editors debated amplifying; the militias were an unknown quantity the editors never debated because incomprehension had filed them under scenery. Attention was the whole question in the first case. Attention had never been paid in the second.

The Speech and the Ballot

On the evening of August 17, 1992, at the Republican National Convention in the Houston Astrodome, Patrick J. Buchanan told the delegates: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” He named abortion, gay rights, and “radical feminism” as fronts, and closed on the federal troops in Los Angeles that spring: “as those boys took back the streets of LA, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”¹⁵ The mainstream reception was hostile; Molly Ivins’s verdict — that the speech “probably sounded better in the original German” — was the magazine class’s line as well as hers.¹⁶ What the verdict skipped was the arithmetic. Buchanan had taken 37 percent against a sitting president in the New Hampshire primary that February, and by the end of the primaries roughly three million votes;¹⁷ the convention slot was not a fringe-courtesy but the price of the floor he had established. His position — paleoconservatism — was coherent on three axes that cut against the Reagan-era consensus: anti-interventionist (he had opposed the Gulf War), anti-free-trade (he opposed NAFTA and GATT before opposition was respectable on the right), and restrictionist on immigration. It carried an intellectual genealogy running through Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and the Old Right of the 1930s, and in 1992 most senior editors at the general-interest magazines could not have named Russell Kirk — though William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review essay “In Search of Anti-Semitism” (December 1991) had already made the case that some of Buchanan’s formulations were not innocently chosen. In February 1996 Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary outright against Bob Dole, and coverage shifted overnight from who is this man to where did these voters come from.

The ballot administered the same correction on a second front. The magazine class’s working assumption in the early 1990s was that race-conscious preference policy was both legally durable and morally settled. The strongest published critique of that assumption was coming from Black writers, which posed the assignment problem in its sharpest form. Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (St. Martin’s Press, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, argued that race-based preferences traded short-term remedy for long-term injury to Black self-conception — not that racism had ended, which Steele explicitly denied, but that the ameliorative apparatus had become its own pathology. Glenn Loury, the first tenured Black professor in Harvard’s economics department, argued from labor economics that targeted preferences depressed the market signal of merit; Stanley Crouch’s cultural criticism, pro-Ellison and anti-Afrocentrist, worked from a position to the left of both and was equally unwelcome to editors who had not done the reading. A white editor in 1991 faced the commission in the form it actually took, in offices and never on memos: I want you to write this; I am not sure I agree with it; here is what it would have to do to run. Then California voted. Proposition 187, barring undocumented residents from non-emergency public services, passed on November 8, 1994 with 58.9 percent — most provisions enjoined within weeks by Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of the federal district court in Los Angeles, and held unconstitutional in 1997 — and Proposition 209, prohibiting preferential treatment by race or sex in public employment, education, and contracting, passed on November 5, 1996 with 54.6 percent, sponsored by Ward Connerly, a Black businessman on the University of California Board of Regents.¹⁸ The country’s most racially diverse state had voted for both. The settled question was not settled.

The speech and the ballots described the same gap from two directions. Buchanan showed the editors a constituency they had filed under theater; the initiatives showed them an electorate that had stopped deferring to a consensus the mastheads believed was general. The campus-speech panic of 1990–1993 ran through the same offices in miniature — the Newsweek “Thought Police” cover, D’Souza’s bestseller, the Michigan and Wisconsin speech codes struck down in federal court in 1989 and 1991 — and produced the same three-way split as every other controversy in this chapter: a genuine departure is occurring and must be reported; a small set of incidents is being amplified by a conservative press infrastructure and the amplification is the story; some of each is true and the magazine should hold the line at craft.¹⁹ The people holding these positions had themselves been on those campuses within the decade. On this one subject the trade was not covering a distant constituency. It was covering its own formation, and it split accordingly.