The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Henry Adams and the education of David Rothman

Some­what related: Don’t scan­dal­ize away kids’ ide­al­ism: Clue­ful ques­tions for me from his­tory class at George Wash­ing­ton. — D.R.

My pushy reporter in The Solomon Scan­dals novel, Jonathan Stone, wanted me to delete an ear­lier Roth­man bio (“too short, too press releasy”).

To help busy read­ers, I’ll stub­bornly stick with the abbre­vi­ated ver­sion. But here’s a par­tial pre­quel to the Stone-Rothman Q&A, where Stone grilled me about my inves­ti­ga­tion of the gov­ern­ment office leas­ing pro­gram. I’ll also include some dur­ing and after.

STONE: The Solomon Scan­dals is a news­pa­per and polit­i­cal novel that depicts D.C. as a white-collar fac­tory town in the late 20th cen­tury. Exactly where did your fam­ily stand in the social hier­ar­chy? We’ll do the Edu­ca­tion of Henry Adams routine—personal his­tory mixed in with national and local history—and add some jour­nal­is­tic odds and ends for good mea­sure. Don’t let this get to your head, Roth­man. I’d never be mess­ing with a sec­ond Q & A if a sadis­tic his­tory pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity hadn’t assigned Scan­dals as required reading.

ROTHMAN: Well, I remem­ber what good friends my sis­ter and I were with Car­o­line and JFK Jr. Mere par­venus, though. The Roth­mans’ own D.C. ties go back to the dawn of the Repub­lic, or at least back to when peo­ple got seri­ous about drain­ing the swamps.

More accu­rately, my great-grandfather was a Jew­ish tax col­lec­tor under the Czar, my grand­fa­ther was a painter in the Brook­lyn Navy Yard, and my father reverted back to being a bureau­crat. I grew up in Fair­fax County, Vir­ginia, on the very outer fringes of the Wash­ing­ton élite, the same social stra­tum where I’d place you.

Our neigh­bors didn’t set pol­icy at a cos­mic level, but some worked for and befriended those who did. A mile or so from us, I can recall run­ning into Robert McNa­mara, sec­re­tary of defense dur­ing the Viet­nam War, while he presided over a party from an arm­chair. It might as well have been a throne. My friends and I were sim­ply pass­ing through to another part of the house, so this was only a glimpse, but you could see the D.C. hier­ar­chy in people’s body language.

Wait. Did I actu­ally stop and tell McNa­mara what I thought of the Viet­nam War? Oh, to think so, but after four decades mem­o­ries can fuzz up, and I doubt I did. I just wish McNa­mara had been still more for­mi­da­ble. Maybe he could have more suc­cess­fully passed on his pri­vate ambiva­lence about Viet­nam to Lyn­don Johnson.

STONE: Yep, “outer fringes of the élite,” all right—that’s hardly a soul-to-soul talk with McNa­mara. But you did know a Wash­ing­ton Post edi­tor, a fix­ture on L Street.

ROTHMAN: E.J., your boss in Scan­dals, is inspired in part by a kindly and neigh­borly man with a salt-and-pepper flat­top. B. F. Henry wor­shipped J. Rus­sell Wig­gins, the pre­de­ces­sor of Ben Bradlee, the Water­gate edi­tor. You can read the start of B.F.’s obit here.

STONE: What about the Water­gater men­tioned briefly in Chap­ter 11 of Scan­dals? Did he exist?

ROTHMAN: Harry Dent, Sr., a future Water­gate defen­dant, lived on the block behind us. While work­ing for Sen. Strom Thur­mond, he devised the South­ern Strat­egy which helped put Richard Nixon in the White House in the first place. As reported by the New York Time, he pleaded guilty to a mis­de­meanor because he didn’t think he could get a fair trial. My par­ents sim­ply knew the Dents as ter­rific neigh­bors. I’ve highly fic­tion­al­ized the quick men­tion in Chap­ter 11. Mostly, our neigh­bor­hood south of Alexan­dria was mix of upcom­ing exec­u­tives, white-collar-factory fore­men, and below—far bet­ter for a future reporter and nov­el­ist than a purely élite com­mu­nity. “Fac­tory town” applies since nearly every­one worked for the fed­eral gov­ern­ment or served peo­ple who did. Back in those days, as I recall, the Wash­ing­ton Post ran its civil ser­vice col­umn on the front of the local sec­tion. Or was it the comic page? Either place, The Fed­eral Diary would have fit.

My par­ents were hardly in the thick of the McNa­mara crowd. As a small-time bureau­crat, my father spent decades exam­in­ing Indian land claims, so maybe my inter­est in past scan­dals is a lit­tle hered­i­tary. Sey­mour Solomon is pathetic at real estate-related crimes com­pared to the feds of yore, given all the bro­ken treaties. You might say my father was clean­ing up after the mis­do­ings of cer­tain national politi­cians and their provin­cial friends and other hangers-on, or “oper­a­tors” in father­s­peak. But I can’t say much about his work, because, like many fac­tory hands, he rarely dis­cussed it at home. I vis­ited his office just once, when I was very young; and even then he may not have intro­duced me to his col­leagues. Remem­ber the drunken Lucky O’Brien, your source in Scan­dals? Let’s just say that some of my father’s co-workers were at that level, com­plete with gam­bling debts and anti-Semitism.

On my mother’s side, my fam­ily had ties with the élite in Natchi­toches, Louisiana, the Steel Mag­no­lias town, going back to the 1860s. I can remem­ber the mayor giv­ing us a per­sonal tour of Natchi­toches from an open con­vert­ible; might polit­i­cal dona­tions from my grand-uncle have prompted this hos­pi­tal­ity, as a col­lat­eral ben­e­fit? I don’t know. The whole expe­ri­ence was good train­ing for writ­ing about Power Peo­ple, satir­i­cally or oth­er­wise. Never mind the D.C. mys­tique; with a lit­tle more hubris thrown in, weren’t JFK and LBJ just cousins of the mayor of Natchi­toches? That’s my late grand-uncle’s store you see above to the left, “the old­est gen­eral store” in Louisiana if you go by Wikipedia. Uncle Sid­ney knew some mem­bers of the Long fam­ily, and if noth­ing else, I’m grate­ful to Huey for inspir­ing All the King’s Men, even if it hap­pened a lit­tle unwit­tingly. ATKM’s men­tion in Scan­dals is not an accident.

In gen­eral zeit­geist, our small-townish neigh­bor­hood in North­ern Vir­ginia was a long way from a Deep South­ern city like Natchi­toches; we’re talk­ing about few stray dog­woods, not a place fra­grant with mag­no­lias. The most salient trait when I was grow­ing up, beyond the friend­li­ness of the Dutch Sup­per vari­ety, was our own local brand of Eisen­hower– and Kennedy-era opti­mism, just the reverse of the dark­ness in The Edu­ca­tion of Henry Adams. We were a minia­ture East Coast Cal­i­for­nia, full of mod­ern peo­ple who had rein­vented them­selves, except that once they set­tled on their new iden­ti­ties, they were more likely to stick to them. The gov­ern­ment, civil­ian or mil­i­tary, was all. McLean, where you grew up, was in many respects the same, although more mem­bers of the true élite lived there, Kennedys included. The gen­uine D.C.-area élite in many cases sum­mered in New Eng­land and sent their chil­dren to pri­vate schools, as opposed to endur­ing week­ends at Rehoboth Beach and trust­ing the pub­lic schools. Of course, by old Adams stan­dards, even some promi­nent George­town names were mere gatecrashers.

Beaten down in New York by the Great Depres­sion, my father him­self had arrived in the D.C. area before World War II after los­ing his accounting-related job to a rel­a­tive of the boss; and dur­ing most of my child­hood he was inca­pable of imag­in­ing me not work­ing for gov­ern­ment. We might as well have been in some ways a neigh­bor­hood of assembly-line labor­ers and fore­men in Detroit think­ing that the UAW-level wages would for­ever last, except that in D.C. the good luck did not die off, and even now the Great Reces­sion is less evi­dent than else­where. Racially, too, the Wellington-Tauxemont neigh­bor­hood south of Alexan­dria was homoge­nous: no African-Americans lived there dur­ing my child­hood as far as I recall, and per­haps no Asians or Lati­nos did, either. And of course the Post and Star were the only papers that most peo­ple in the neigh­bor­hood read, with the pos­si­ble excep­tions of the Alexan­dria Gazette and the North­ern Vir­ginia Sun and New York Times. No Inter­net, alas, no National Pub­lic Radio, and just three tele­vi­sion net­works to tell us the way it was.

STONE: Your fam­ily and maybe two oth­ers may have been the only prac­tic­ing Jews within sev­eral blocks and per­haps the only Jews period. Any anti-Semitism there? Or brushes with it elsewhere?

ROTHMAN: Absolutely none was appar­ent from our neighbors—totally in keep­ing with the rein­ven­tion meme. Won­der­ful peo­ple. A few miles away at my high school, I encoun­tered a touch of anti-Semitism, but hardly at an Adams level (“We are in the hands of the Jews”). The Belle Haven Coun­try Club, just out­side Alexan­dria, admits Jews today but was Christian-pure for many years. In Mary­land, as late as 1948, some real estate peo­ple were not sell­ing to Jews; and I’ve even heard that in the ‘30s or so,  the Wash­ing­ton Star was not hir­ing Jew­ish reporters. That changed, of course, well before Carl Bern­stein worked there and went on to help expose Water­gate for the Post. You can read more on Jewish-related top­ics in Scan­dals as a North­ern Vir­ginia Jew­ish novel.

STONE: Early on, you were a bit dis­trust­ful toward the press. Oh, come on—don’t news­pa­pers always print the truth?

ROTHMAN: Topic A at the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina, or close to it, was a ban against com­mu­nists speak­ing on cam­pus. I ended up talk­ing by ham radio to Barry Gold­wa­ter, aka K7UGA. I asked him about the ban and learned he was against it—a posi­tion he con­firmed in writ­ing for my scoop in the Daily Tar Heel. That fit in well with the lib­er­tar­ian side of him. Well, along came a wire ser­vice report that Gold­wa­ter favored the ban. I was hardly a Gold­wa­terite, but with a signed let­ter in front of me in plain Gold­wa­ter Eng­lish, who was I to believe the main­stream media? I’m just sorry I didn’t trans­fer my skep­ti­cism quickly enough to another mat­ter, news cov­er­age of the Viet­nam War. Most of the news­pa­pers in those days were cheer­lead­ers for it, exactly as so many are today about our mis­ad­ven­tures in Afghanistan, his­tory be damned. Look­ing back, despite my fond mem­o­ries of my friend the Post edi­tor with the flat­top, I take it very per­son­ally that LBJ rewarded Russ Wig­gins with a UN ambassadorship.

One way to reform the press, of course, was to be the press, and I not only majored in jour­nal­ism in Chapel Hill but also went on to some grad­u­ate work else­where at A Famous Jour­nal­ism School. Oh, those lec­tures on urban affairs! I was an instant Jane Jacobs par­ti­san, pro-neighborhood, while the pro­fes­sor came across to me as more of a Le Cor­busier sym­pa­thizer in favor of high rises, the Pruitt-Igoe mess notwith­stand­ing. More impor­tantly, AFJS cared less about writ­ing as writ­ing and more about other mat­ters, such as whether a story had a typo. Just one could be lethal. I retreated from AFJS, fin­ished a first novel I’d already begun, the should-have-stayed-in-the-drawer vari­ety; and then I worked for the Jour­nal in Lorain, Ohio, a steel-and-automobile city on Lake Erie near Cleve­land, a fac­tory town with maybe 100,000 peo­ple at the time, tens of thou­sand more than today.

Tri­fles such as lively prose, curios­ity and empa­thy counted more at the Jour­nal than an abil­ity to deprive copy edi­tors of gain­ful work. And talk about an edu­ca­tion! Lorain was exactly what I needed, a com­plete con­trast in many ways to D.C. Red dust from the smoke stacks of U.S. Steel fell upon the south­ern part of town. The Journal’s offices were far more fac­to­ry­like than the cur­rent vari­ety at many papers, and in fact, you could step from the city room into the shop and smell the hot lead. Black wire ser­vice tick­ers clacked out the news. Just one look at your sur­round­ings, and you knew you were work­ing in a gen­uine news fac­tory, with not that much dis­tance between white and blue col­lars. Bill Grei­der, now The Nation’s national affairs cor­re­spon­dent, noted the same about another Ohio paper when he was writ­ing about jour­nal­ism and class dif­fer­ences, and he was so, so right.

Among other sto­ries, I cov­ered the funeral of Bill Scroeder, the ex-Eagle Scout and ROTC cadet whom the Ohio National Guard killed at Kent State on May 4, 1970, inspir­ing praise from some local Nixo­ni­ans. That’s his­tory, alas, not just a few words in Scan­dals. In a bloody way, Richard Nixon’s crowd had bought the war home. I can also recall ask­ing the wrong ques­tions about Viet­nam at a Billy Gra­ham news con­fer­ence and end­ing up in a locked room at the Ober­lin police sta­tion. I haven’t any doubt that cer­tain Ohioans would have wanted reporters shot dead at Kent. Why stop with stu­dents?  Ohio wasn’t all like Mis­sis­sippi, of course—far from it; dozens of nation­al­i­ties lived in Lorain and still do, includ­ing many Lati­nos. The African-American nov­el­ist Toni Mor­ri­son came from Lorain, the set­ting for at least one of her works; and the town had a good library sys­tem, as a Pulitzer Prize-winning lit­er­ary critic raised there can attest. Was it coin­ci­dence, both Ms. Mor­ri­son and Michael Dirda grow­ing up in Lorain? Prob­a­bly not. Lorain wasn’t Bethesda, but the schools and libraries may well have helped.

While I never met Toni Mor­ri­son, I can recall meet­ing such fly-in celebri­ties as Jane Fonda (tar­get of sex­pot jokes from the copy desk), George McGov­ern (a mediocre story—mea culpa) and George Wal­lace (a hur­ried but friendly inter­view on the tar­mac at the Toledo air­port) and Nor­man Mailer (not at all his famous feisty self—in fact, a lit­tle self-deprecating, as in his obser­va­tion that writ­ers aren’t smart enough to be doc­tors or good-looking enough to be actors).

STONE: I’ve heard that in your Lorain days, you were the ulti­mate city-room terrorist.

ROTHMAN: Absolutely—wilder than you in many respects, even if you protest early-morning meet­ings by show­ing up in your paja­mas. A Lorain buddy named Greg Stricharchuk recalls the Roth­man anec­dote. Irv­ing “Leibo” Lei­bowitz, the edi­tor of the Lorain Jour­nal, wanted me to wrap up a poverty-beat story. But the source at the other end was spilling too much. Why should a mere edi­tor, even the much-beloved top man at our 40,000-circulation daily, inter­rupt my research? Ignored, Leibo sum­moned Bill Scrivo, the man­ag­ing edi­tor, who yelled at me to hang up. “Don’t mind that crazy per­son,” I told my source in my best Hildy John­son style. “Keep talk­ing.” He did. Leibo had always appre­ci­ated my tele­phone skills, but now they were com­ing back to bite him. A few min­utes later Scrivo yanked the phone cord out of the wall.

The city edi­tor, Frank Dobisky, still alive and a friend of mine after all these decades, was the next to demand my six or seven feet of copy paper—successfully, as Greg and I recall. Six feet? Yes. Remem­ber this was the era of Smith Corona type­writ­ers and paste pots (detail: the above pic­ture does not show the exact Smith Corona model that I used, but it’s close enough—perhaps a portable ver­sion of my Jour­nal machine).

Frank ordered me out of the city room while my piece under­went edit­ing. “Of course,” Greg wrote on Face­book, “Roth­man goes to the first floor and calls the per­son again. It was a Front Page day at the Journal.”

Exactly. The wild ones didn’t all van­ish along with whiskey flasks from America’s news­rooms; some just went to work for small-town news­pa­pers and, in time, Web sites—assuming they weren’t entre­pre­neur­ial or des­per­ate enough to start their own. Let me add that I’ve been around my share of drink­ing peo­ple but am myself a tee­to­taler even on Passover. Imag­ine what I’d have been like with a full flask.

Repor­to­r­ial stub­born­ness, despite the mis­ery inflicted on poor Leibo, can also come in handy. Years later I was free­lanc­ing off-camera for ABC News in Wash­ing­ton, and I was 90 per­cent cer­tain I had the goods on a mid­west­ern busi­ness­man, a gov­ern­ment land­lord among other things—none other than Sam Zell, as I recall: the same man who would go on to buy the Chicago Tri­bune, the very paper where Greg works today. Ah, the glory ahead! I’m try­ing to remem­ber who was anchor that day. Frank Reynolds? Still, temp­ta­tions notwith­stand­ing, I wanted one last call. So ignor­ing the ABC pro­duc­ers just as deter­minedly as I did Leibo and the oth­ers back at the Jour­nal, I phoned the man’s office and found out that I was in what I’ll hereby dub “a ten per­cent sit­u­a­tion.” My obsti­nacy was pru­dence in dis­guise. The ABC peo­ple weren’t reck­less; but how much eas­ier it could have seemed at the time to gam­ble on the odds!

STONE: What about your other adven­tures report­ing on the Gen­eral Ser­vices Administration?

ROTHMAN: Yawn. Wasn’t that the main topic of your ear­lier inter­ro­ga­tion of me? But now here’s a lit­tle per­sonal twist. GSA was my father’s old agency, the same one for which he had toiled in a con­verted ware­house with­out air con­di­tion­ing. He’d started out at the Gen­eral Account­ing Office or else­where, and GSA came late in his career, well after its tra­jec­tory was set. I’ll delib­er­ately use the pas­sive, the “was.” At my father’s level in Wash­ing­ton, things just hap­pened or maybe didn’t, per­haps stymied in his case by anti-Semitism in the lower ranks of the fed­eral bureau­cracy eons ago, as well as by his heart condition.

STONE: So con­sid­er­ing the tim­ing, GSA had lit­tle to do with his not being a top-dog ‘crat?

ROTHMAN: Noth­ing, in fact. Post heart attack—my father almost died of one in his 40s—my mother cared more about his health than his place in the D.C. hier­ar­chy. She aggres­sively dis­cour­aged him from being a careerist.

Beyond that, the real vil­lain here was a mix of socioe­co­nomic chal­lenges and the Great Depres­sion. My father was the third child of immi­grant par­ents with bro­ken Eng­lish, the very kind of East­ern Euro­pean Jews against whom Henry Adams ranted in Edu­ca­tion. Dad’s fam­ily most likely owned few books other than reli­gious works, per­haps most in Yid­dish. Sim­ply put, in many respects, though not all, he might as well have been grow­ing up in a ghetto-y part of Ana­cos­tia.

Dad bus-boyed his way through New York Uni­ver­sity, only to enter the job mar­ket as the Depres­sion was start­ing up, so he was thwarted not just by the cir­cum­stances of his birth but also by its tim­ing. Of course, the right luck and tal­ent would let “Jews with­out money” pre­vail any­way. Uncle Mar­tin, the old­est in my father’s fam­ily, won a foot­ball schol­ar­ship and ended up a den­tist liv­ing in West­port, lec­tur­ing or guest lec­tur­ing at Yale, and edit­ing the Jour­nal of the Con­necti­cut State Den­tal Asso­ci­a­tion. Marty and I were close; in fact, he is how I learned about my great-grandfather the Jew­ish tax collector.

Now here’s the real kicker in my father’s case. While he lacked Marty’s sta­tus, he actu­ally had some artis­tic abil­i­ties; and later in life he made a very minor name for him­self with acrylics, col­lages and paint­ings on rice paper and was even a guest on Maury Povich’s talk show while Povich was still local. Today he just might have scored in a field like Web design. If noth­ing else, he might have fared well in any era as a painter-decorator,  an old-fashioned crafts­man, which is what my pater­nal grand­fa­ther was after his Navy Yard days. How unfortunate—society’s fix­a­tion on white-collar accom­plish­ments. Cor­rectly or not, I recall that at least one of B.F.’s sons went into some line of blue-collar work, and if he did so by choice, that strikes me as a form of sanity.

STONE: Speak­ing of tal­ents and skill sets, what was a D.C. nov­el­ist doing free­lanc­ing for the National Enquirer, the ulti­mate blue-collar rag?

ROTHMAN: The Enquirer came to me as a result of my GSA report­ing. As a writer, how could I turn down an Amer­i­can cul­tural phe­nom­e­non? No Kennedy– or fly­ing saucer chas­ing for me, though. And I ungrate­fully rejected  an assign­ment to inter­view the dwarf on Fan­tasy Island about his thoughts of sui­cide. In fact, Herve Vil­lechaize did go on to kill him­self. Gory auto acci­dents I could han­dle in my Lorain days, but I lacked the stom­ach for the Vil­lechaize kind of story. Instead I wrote gov­ern­ment waste pieces and how-tos and pop-psych arti­cles. Scan­dals men­tions a National Enquirer stringer ordered to use the phrase “dol­lops of caviar.” In real­ity, it showed up in a story I wrote on high-living diplo­mats from impov­er­ished coun­tries, although I don’t remem­ber if “dol­lops” came from me, the edi­tor or an interviewee.

If noth­ing else, the Enquirer free­lance gig taught me how to write Web-catchy head­lines. The whole expe­ri­ence was prefer­able to the K Street life for me, or to being a mouth­piece on the Capi­tol Hill. Even in the hey­day of print news­pa­pers, the respecta­bles in the Fourth Estate were not gen­er­ally throw­ing large sums of cash at free­lancers off the ten­nis and dinner-party cir­cuits. And I already knew enough about myself and the Wash­ing­ton dailies to real­ize I prob­a­bly wouldn’t be com­fort­able as a staff writer if one of them slipped up and hired me. I admired B.F., but beyond the typo issue, it turned out that his world­view just wasn’t mine. Can you imag­ine me wor­ship­ping Russ Wiggins?

Still, I also see the pos­i­tives of Big Jour­nal­ism, which helps us mon­i­tor Big Gov­ern­ment even if reporters and edi­tors can be as timid as bureau­crats. Blog­gers can score scoops, but most lack the skills and resources for close day-to-day cov­er­age of Con­gress and the bureau­cracy. We need all kinds of media. Even tabloids serve a pur­pose in the jour­nal­is­tic eco-system. Did the New York Times break the John Edwards story about sex and cre­ative uses of cam­paign funds?

STONE: How could an unre­pen­tant Roosevelt-lover like you end up writ­ing a piece for William F. Buck­ley, Jr., and National Review?

ROTHMAN: Bill and I sim­ply hap­pened to agree on the need for an Elec­tronic Peace Corps—people in the U.S. using com­put­ers to share tech­ni­cal exper­tise to devel­op­ing coun­tries and oth­er­wise improve life there. No polit­i­cal con­ver­sions here. He knew I was incur­ably lib­eral. I’d writ­ten him out of the blue, per­haps after the Post pub­lished my EPC idea or I pushed it on National Pub­lic Radio. My logic was that if I could win WFB over, my idea would face less oppo­si­tion from con­ser­v­a­tives. The irony is that Bill was far ahead of most lib­er­als on the issue. Turned out that Jerry Glenn, a for­eign aid expert, was already doing some of the things I wanted in 1980s.  Hello, Obama? Still isn’t too late for an EPC on a grand scale. And if the Repub­li­cans make trou­ble, just quote WFB.

STONE: You also free­lanced a few pieces for The Nation, under Carey McWilliams, on phony pub­lic inter­est groups and other topics.

ROTHMAN: Among my other sub­jects was Roldo Bar­ti­mole, the I. F. Stone of Cleve­land, Ohio, whom I inter­viewed while at the Lorain Jour­nal. Roldo put out a lit­tle newslet­ter called Point of View, and was a role model for the young and uppity at the Lorain Jour­nal. He’s still at it on the Web. And in cer­tain ways, not much has changed. In Cleve­land and so many other cities, the local gov­ern­ments at times care too much about cer­tain busi­ness peo­ple and their mega projects and not enough about such bor­ing mat­ters as pot­hole fills, vital neigh­bor­hoods and good schools. Maybe in some aspects of civic life, Henry Adams could have found a kin­dred spirit in Roldo. “To the New Eng­land mind,” Adams writes in Edu­ca­tion, “roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were con­nected as part of the law of order or divine sys­tem. Bad roads meant bad morals.”

I also met the I. F. Stone of Washington—I’d toyed with the idea of writ­ing a biog­ra­phy of him. If noth­ing else, I got a cafe­te­ria  lunch with Stone out of it: he may even have paid. Izzy coun­seled me to read Emi­nent Vic­to­ri­ans. Hmm. Izzy as a Car­di­nal Man­ning or Flo­rence Nightin­gale? I doubt he meant a com­par­i­son. But if noth­ing else, that was a gen­tle way of talk­ing me out of the bio project while edu­cat­ing me, and he remains a hero of mine, flaws or not. Your last name is a trib­ute of sorts. I lacked Izzy’s focus on for­eign affairs but admired his abil­ity to defy the rest of the world.

STONE: You edited an inter­na­tional tech mag­a­zine, too, and a finan­cial site and newslet­ter for an invest­ment company.

ROTHMAN: I was man­ag­ing edi­tor, then edi­tor of High Tech­nol­ogy Export & Import, no longer pub­lished. May I add that some of my best writ­ers were the worst proof­read­ers? Given my AFJS expe­ri­ences, it was fun see­ing my spelling the­o­ries con­firmed in real life. I’m anti-typo and the rest, of course. But that is why proofers and copy edi­tors exist; shame on news­pa­pers for lay­ing off so many. The main­stream media should leave typos to experts such as bloggers.

As for the finan­cial Web site and newslet­ter, I helped grow the company’s man­aged assets from $30 mil­lion, when I started, to more than $150M at the height of the Nas­daq. I even con­cocted a way for clients and prospects to receive color videos of the owner’s spiels through their e-mails; and I recruited a WGMS clas­si­cal announcer to pitch the com­pany on finan­cial sta­tions in her dul­cet voice. I was not a Reg­is­tered Invest­ment Advi­sor. The site and paper newslet­ter sim­ply reflected the stock rec­om­men­da­tions of the com­pany, and I con­sci­en­tiously quoted from the likes of Busi­ness­Week to flesh out the RIAs’ endorse­ments of such trusted names as World­Com, Enron and Tyco Inter­na­tional. Exec­u­tives from all three ended up behind bars, of course; don’t you love the per­spi­cac­ity of Wall Street and the press?

STONE: Yeah, the integrity, too. Now what about your e-book site and related activities?

ROTHMAN: TeleRead.org in its ear­lier forms goes back to 1992 when it wasn’t even an Inter­net domain yet—I was call­ing for a well-stocked national dig­i­tal library sys­tem blended in with local schools and libraries, another idea that Bill Buck­ley liked. For hard­ware, I sug­gested multi­use color tablets with detach­able key­boards, iPads more or less. Later I cofounded an orga­ni­za­tion called OpenReader.org, which had the nerve to sug­gest consumer-level stan­dards for e-books. The main e-book trade group pre-empted us with its own stan­dard, ePub, and that was fine with me despite my wor­ries that the usual sus­pects would com­pro­mise the stan­dard to fit their cor­po­rate objec­tives. My goal for Open­Reader was to get a stan­dard in place, as opposed to our run­ning the e-book indus­try. Today the iPad and almost all other brands of e-book-capable machines can read ePub directly or through added soft­ware, and sooner or later Ama­zon may come around.

I envi­sioned Tel­eRead as a non­profit, but the big foun­da­tions cared less about mere books—even the elec­tronic variety—than about more fash­ion­able tech­nolo­gies like virtue real­ity. So to keep Tel­eRead alive and open up addi­tional time for other activ­i­ties and health-related mat­ters, I made the site more com­mer­cial and sold it to some old-media peo­ple who had founded a mag­a­zine that became TV Guide or at least part of it. The com­ple­tion of a cir­cle, almost. Remem­ber, my ori­gins are hardly the new media variety.

STONE: So what are the  lessons you’ve learned at the per­sonal level?

ROTHMAN: A few of them are sim­i­lar to Adams’, with my own vari­a­tions. I like the old bigot’s bet­ter side—his gen­er­ally prin­ci­pled approach and his respect for the past. Regard­less of the pub­li­ca­tion I’ve free­lanced for, be it the National Enquirer or the Nation, I’ve done so for the most part on my terms. No Kennedy– or UFO-chasing, remem­ber. I believed in my work at the invest­ment com­pany, too; I myself bought some World­Com. Adams seems to have been the same way for the most part, no small hand­i­cap in many busi­ness sit­u­a­tions. A les­son  in the edu­ca­tion of both of us.

When I’ve suc­ceeded, it’s often and per­haps mostly been while at odds with the usual “wis­dom,” and that might apply to Adams as well. Do you real­ize how crazy it was to be talk­ing up e-books for pub­lic libraries in the early 1990s?  Would that I have lis­tened to my mav­er­ick side early enough about Viet­nam or World­Com! As for Adams, some “con­ven­tional” edu­ca­tors must have con­sid­ered him ready for the loony bin, given his the­o­ries of learn­ing and dis­trust of for­mal edu­ca­tion. He actu­ally had the nerve to sug­gest that teach­ers could learn with their stu­dents rather than just pour facts into their heads. A bit Internet-like, wouldn’t you say? Imag­ine Adams pre­sid­ing over a forum, blog or wiki on Amer­i­can his­tory. I can!

Like Adams, too, I’ve been pre­oc­cu­pied with obso­les­cence, just as you are in Scan­dals—whether about peo­ple or the old Lino­type machine in the lobby of the Telegram. Adams felt that the times were mak­ing him obso­lete, that his edu­ca­tion in the clas­sics and his old aris­to­cratic val­ues were actu­ally a bar­rier to suc­cess in the era of the dynamo. I myself am a proud plebe despite my family’s mag­no­lia side, but I can still iden­tify with Adams in many ways. Imag­ine all the changes that I myself have lived through—for exam­ple, the decline of the print media and even of old-fashioned Amer­i­can Eng­lish, not to men­tion mod­ern changes in val­ues at the expense of tra­di­tional liberalism.

On the Web these days, many peo­ple use “their” to refer to indi­vid­ual com­pa­nies and even favor “who” as a rel­a­tive pro­noun when writ­ing about cor­po­ra­tions. I don’t care if this is accepted in the U.K. and in devel­op­ing coun­tries. As gram­mar and as an acci­den­tally implied world­view, what does it all say? From a tra­di­tional Amer­i­can lin­guis­tic per­spec­tive as well as a lib­eral polit­i­cal one, I’m grouchy. Cor­po­ra­tions are not just col­lec­tions of human beings; they are also piles of paper and swarms of elec­trons and vast aggre­ga­tions of inan­i­mate objects, and all too often the real estate, com­put­ers and num­bers come before the peo­ple. I blame tech­nol­ogy and glob­al­iza­tion and old-fashioned greed and obtuse­ness for the ten­dency to con­fuse humans and cor­po­rate enti­ties, espe­cially when it comes to laws gov­ern­ing polit­i­cal dona­tions. Adam him­self might feel the same way in my place. Bad roads do sug­gest bad morals, in that mem­bers of the busi­ness élite are cor­rupt­ing the sys­tem and keep­ing too much of the wealth to them­selves at the expense of the commonweal.

In a related vein, I won­der how Adams would feel about our appar­ently being so close to the era of cyborgs, when dis­tinc­tions between humans and machines will blur. How will cor­po­ra­tions and oth­ers react? Imag­ine the moral and eth­i­cal issues raised, not to men­tion the pesky lit­tle mat­ter of obso­les­cence. Adams talks about his edu­ca­tion being obso­lete, but what if the very mate­r­ial we’re made of can no longer cut it? Will the 30-percent humans—whatever the stan­dard for quan­ti­fy­ing this—prevail over the old-fashioned 100 per­centers and even the 90 per­centers? “We have the right stuff to build human brains,” accord­ing to Leon O. Chua, an expert in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing. Tech­nol­ogy and biol­ogy are con­verg­ing, and I feel rather reac­tionary com­pared to the young peo­ple today who are look­ing for­ward to cyborgdom.

Still, on many and per­haps most social mat­ters, I’m not Adams, espe­cially on eth­nic issues and the need for a cos­mopoli­tan out­look. Close to half of TeleRead’s vis­i­tors, when I was editor-publisher, came from out­side the U.S., and I would not have wanted it any other way—considering all the bril­liant arti­cles and com­ments that we attracted from the “com­pany who” peo­ple” in dis­tant places. Eth­nic tol­er­ance and eco­nomic growth actu­ally can go together, given the greater tal­ent pool if you keep big­ots like Adams from inter­fer­ing, just so you don’t let cre­den­tial­ism and the related val­ues edge out com­mon­sense.  No need to recall all the Asian entre­pre­neurs of Sil­i­con Val­ley or all the dam­age that America’s 9–11 xeno­pho­bia has wreaked. When I had my heart attack, a Korean sur­geon saved me, and maybe some Jew­ish doc­tors could have helped Adams live past his 80 years. Today writ­ers haven’t any choice but to look ahead to more of a mul­ti­eth­nic future. In a few decades, non­His­panic whites will be a minor­ity among read­ers here in the United States. When I wrote the first draft of Scan­dals in the 1970s, it lacked the fore­word by your great-grandniece, Rebecca Kitiona-Fenton, direc­tor of the Insti­tute for the Study of Pre­vir­tual Media, who hap­pens to be “Jewish-Samoan-Wasp-African-Hispanic.” Despite the satire, or maybe because of it, the Rebecca men­tions just might serve as a bridge to the mul­ti­eth­nic read­ers of the late 21st century.

STONE: How much does The Solomon Scan­dals resem­ble Democ­racy, Adams’ novel?

ROTHMAN: Dif­fer­ences exist between the inner D.C. élite and the outer fringes, and Scan­dals reflects the lat­ter world­view. Despite Adams’ protests at times that he was not insid­ery enough, he never for­got that his grand­fa­ther and great-grandfather had been Pres­i­dent. I don’t know of even one Pres­i­dent Roth­man. Adams’ fam­ily his­tory cer­tainly influ­enced his per­spec­tive in writ­ing Democ­racy and added to the appeal of his works among a cer­tain class. I’m reminded of an old quote from George Giss­ing, the Vic­to­rian nov­el­ist, in New Grub Street: “Men won’t suc­ceed in lit­er­a­ture that they may get into soci­ety, but will get into soci­ety that they may suc­ceed in lit­er­a­ture.” Adams was already there, born with a brand name.

Now, the sim­i­lar­i­ties between Democ­racy and Scan­dals—despite the latter’s more infor­mal style and use of the first-person voice. Both are Wash­ing­ton polit­i­cal nov­els set dur­ing fic­ti­tious admin­is­tra­tions. While Scan­dals is a sus­pense novel and a news­pa­per and polit­i­cal novel, it is also a novel of man­ners, and that is what some crit­ics might con­sider Democ­racy to be most of all. The plots of both nov­els include secret cash trans­ac­tions and other white-collar crimes in the best Wash­ing­ton tra­di­tion. Both raise the ques­tion of, “How much can we reform the polit­i­cal sys­tem, and if change isn’t pos­si­ble, will you com­pro­mise your­self by being part of it or even asso­ci­at­ing with those who run it?” Adams’ pro­tag­o­nist, Made­line Lee, will be going off to Egypt, while your des­ti­na­tion is Hol­ly­wood. Nei­ther town, L.A. or D.C., is angelic. You just want a change.

STONE: But you’ve given away your end­ing! You’ll be drummed out of the sus­pense nov­el­ists’ union.

ROTHMAN: Not at all, Stone. I still haven’t spilled all the twists in the After­word. His anti­semitism and other big­otry aside, Adams might have liked how Scan­dals winds down.

Note to read­ers: For now, con­sider the above a draft. I may make changes later on—beyond typo-catching!—and the final results might end up in a future elec­tronic edi­tion of The Solomon Scan­dals and per­haps a pulped-wood one. Scan­dals is cur­rently avail­able in both media.

Update, 10:47 p.m.: The good news of the moment is that, when I showed the above to my sis­ter, Dorothy, she could find only one pos­si­ble error (on the num­ber of Jew­ish fam­i­lies liv­ing near us). I’ve tweaked the copy in case she is right.

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