THE CONFESSIONS OF DAVID REMNICK From The New Republic W When I met David Remnick at his Upper West Side apartment last month, he had just returned from Sochi. It was very much a work trip. In addition to appearing on NBC as an Olympic commentator, Remnick wrote a lengthy piece on Vladimir Putin for The New Yorker, while also fulfilling his duties as editor of that magazine. An elevator man took me up to Remnick’s multistoried unit, which he shares with his wife, Esther Fein, and their 14-year-old daughter. (They have two other children: one is in college and the other is a photographer.) Before the interview started, Remnick was his usual engaged self—eager to kibitz about The New Republic, the publishing world, Israeli politics. “I would have loved to have lived in Jerusalem,” he told me in his living room, which is stocked with books and includes a ladder to reach the top shelf (which must be 25 feet high). Since he took over the magazine in 1998, Remnick has also continued to write articles—on Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Al Gore, and Bruce Springsteen, among others—as well as a book, The Bridge, on Barack Obama and race. And yet when I asked him a question about reporting more from abroad, he deadpanned, “Oh no, I hardly get out of the house these days.” It is this reputation for humor and self-deprecation with his staff 1 and the press that has, at least partially, ensured the laudatory coverage that greets him everywhere he goes. And is it ever laudatory. Check Twitter after a story of his goes online, and it’s like the Internet has emptied the thesaurus of all words relating to “genius.” In an unintentionally hilarious Port magazine profile in 2011, Nicholson Baker gushed, “He’s smart and quick to laugh, and if you sit in one of the square soft chairs in his office, he remembers things about your life that you barely remember.” “Making it Look Easy at The New Yorker” was the title of a New York Times piece tied to the release of his Obama book. To his credit, Remnick is aware of how he’s treated, and during the course of our conversation, as well as a follow-up chat over the phone, he spoke at length about his image. We also discussed his most controversial writers, his frustrations with Obama, and why Philip Roth really chose to retire. Isaac Chotiner: Your latest piece is about Putin and the Olympics— David Remnick: It’s less about bobsledding than you would imagine. IC: That’s disappointing. By the way, this is my only question not about Bruce Springsteen. DR: Much appreciated. IC: Do you see Putin as a world-historical figure, or something of a blip in Russia’s drift toward less relevance in the world? DR: I tend to think he will be an important historical figure, yes. 2 He certainly sees himself as one, as the figure who will reassert Russian power and primacy in the modern world. He considered the collapse of the Soviet Union to be the greatest geostrategic catastrophe of our times. Not an ideological catastrophe; he didn’t care one bit about Marxist-Leninist ideology. It was about power. IC: You mention his lack of Marxist-Leninism. Do you think he has any ideology? DR: Yes, I do. I think initially there was not an ideology. He is a state builder. It was all about reasserting the Russian state. But what you see since his return to power is a distinctly conservative Russian ideology, which you might call “Putinism.” What is it? It is a dog’s breakfast ideologically. He is capable of quoting Stolypin, Solzhenitsyn, and any number of people from the Russian or Russian Orthodox past, where useful. The anti-gay law is an aspect of this. In Stalinist times, as Masha Gessen points out, the convenient other was the Jew, or people from the Caucasus, but mainly Jews. For one reason or another, Putin is not hostile to Jews as such. IC: He is a forward-thinking guy. DR: He is very flexible there and we all thank him for that. In Russia, the level of homophobia is extremely high, and so there it is. IC: You wrote your latest piece while in Russia and doing television. One of your writers once said to me that you don’t have sympathy for writer’s block because you write so much. 3 DR: I have nothing but empathy for writers. Everybody who has got a job like mine, sooner or later there is a cartoon of that person. IC: A New Yorker cartoon? DR: More of a caricature. And I am sure there is a cartoon of Jill Abramson. I know what the cartoon of me is. 4 5 Illustration by Matt Taylor IC: What is it? DR: That I write at a preposterous speed and I will let you fill it in. I guess I should I fill it. I get how hard it is to write. Ninety-five percent of what I am doing is reading and editing and dealing with a very, very complicated piece of business. That is more than full time. But I probably write way too fast. The first nonfiction writer who I ever knew was John McPhee. Some small percentage of his class was about how agonizingly hard good writing is. IC: You took his class? DR: I did. And, look, some of it in certain people is dramatized and they need that difficulty as a way of getting from A to B. Whatever floats your boat. With writers I try to get them to get the best of themselves. IC: About your image, your cartoon— DR: Not that anyone should give a damn about it, but I am aware of it. IC: We all care what people think of us. You must feel you get good press, largely because you are the editor of The New Yorker. People want to write for you, and they kiss up to you. Do you think about that? DR: Yes. Look, I went from being a writer to the editor of a magazine in the course of a weekend. It was a strange experience. But the strangeness was not that everyone was laughing at my jokes. 6 IC: There is a “Sopranos” episode where all the cronies laugh at Tony’s terrible jokes because he is the boss. DR: Yes, the idiotic joke! But that wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was what you could do. The freedom involved. I remember distinctly that, very early on, we had a short story slated to run in the magazine, and I read it and didn’t like it. And I was reading I Married a Communist by Philip Roth in galleys, and I remember thinking, Why not do this instead? And we did. I remember a couple months later, there was a hot investigative piece that Seymour Hersh and I had started together. It wasn’t from before, from “B.D.,” Before David. And I was wondering: How does one relay a big story with possible repercussions to the owner? At The Washington Post apparently there had been a covenant between Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham called the No Surprises Rule. Graham would not wake up and see that they had run the Pentagon Papers. So I called Si Newhouse,1 who I then had a very slight relationship with, and said that we have this story that I think accused the prime minister of Russia of taking bribes from Saddam Hussein. I called him up and said it had been thoroughly checked and the lawyer had read it and I knew who all the sources were. And there was a long pause. Then he said, “That sounds very interesting. I look forward to reading it.” And that was it. And I have never called anyone since. That is not a common thing anywhere. To take that onboard, that freedom, as well as that responsibility—that was a complicated thing to process. IC: Speaking of Hersh, he claims that the U.S. government’s story of the Osama bin Laden raid is bullshit. What do you say to that given that your magazine ran a piece that relied heavily on government sources? 7 DR: I thoroughly stand by the story we published. IC: And his comments? DR: Look, there is a difference between what people say loosely or in speeches and what we publish. All I can be in charge of is what we publish. I have enormous respect for him. IC: Hersh wrote a piece a few months back hinting that the rebels were the ones who used chemical weapons in Syria. Why did that run in the London Review of Books and not The New Yorker? DR: Or The Washington Post. I have worked with Sy on many dozens of pieces and am proud of that work. And a lot of those pieces had the potential to break a lot of crockery. I was willing, and am still willing, to go to the wall with investigative journalism. But if he and I disagree, it is not an easy thing. I hope we will work again together. I hope you will print this: I wish him all the best, and I think he is one of the great journalists of our age. IC: As an editor, where do you insert yourself most heavily? DR: The New Yorker is a strange animal. If you went to a random billionaire and said, Here are ideas for a magazine: a non- photograph cover, a long piece on, say, Syria, and yet gag cartoons throughout, I think just the mention of the length would scare potential owners.