IN THE MAGAZINE

Photos by Chris Shonting

A CONVERSATION WITH LEWIS LAPHAM - PART 1

INTERVIEW BY BLAKE BAILEY

Lewis Lapham is one of our most distinguished editors and essayists. Called “a connoisseur of the perfect word,” he was editor of Harper’s magazine for almost 30 years, assuming emeritus status in 2006 to start his own journal, Lapham’s Quarterly. Contributors to the current (spring 2008) issue include Ben Franklin, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and the Notorious B.I.G. Lapham’s many books include Money and Class in America (1988), Waiting for the Barbarians (1997), Gag Rule (2004), and Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2006), in which he makes a cogent case for impeaching our present blockhead in chief.

Something of an aristocrat himself, Lapham would seem an unlikely liberal. His great-grandfather founded Texaco, his grandfather was mayor of San Francisco, and his father was a shipping tycoon; while the United Nations charter was being drafted at the San Francisco Opera House in 1945, the ten-year-old Lapham “was passing canapés to Jack Kennedy and Molotov and Alger Hiss,” as he recalls. Motivated, perhaps, by a sense of noblesse oblige, Lapham has devoted much of his career to exposing the more unsavory aspects of his own heady social class. “I know the ethos of the American oligarchy of which young Bush is a servant,” he remarks. “He’s an agent of the selfish greed that usually overtakes a fat and stupid oligarchy.”

Vice: What led to your decision to leave Harper’s and start Lapham’s Quarterly?

Lewis Lapham: It’s something I wanted to do for years. I did a prototype of the quarterly in 1997 for the History Book Club, which they published as a book. It did quite well. They published it first as their own book and then it was bought by St. Martin’s and I think that, between the two editions, it sold at least 15,000 copies. That was very encouraging. But I also had a great deal of fun doing it. It’s called The End of the World and you can find it at St. Martin’s or Amazon.

In your essay “The Gulf of Time,” you mention the surfeit of “prioritized” and “context-sensitive” information and deplore the lack of a broader historical context. Could you discuss how Lapham’s Quarterly addresses the problem?

My hopes for the journal are to bring the notion of the historical perspective into people’s minds. When I was at Harper’s, I would get articles and essays, and one of the things that I always encouraged the writers to do is to put in some kind of historical background. In other words, set it in context. I mean, things don’t just appear out of nowhere. Our journal is clearly not comprehensive or academic. It’s simply meant to open the door to the historical consciousness. To bring to bear the perspective of history is not only fun but also very comforting. If you can imagine that people have been here before and will be again, you become part of a bigger self.

Somewhere you mentioned Aristotle’s point about there being a cycle whereby an oligarchy becomes rancid and gives way to tyranny, which in turn devolves into anarchy, and then turns into some form of democracy, and then oligarchy again, and so on. Do you think such cycles are inevitable? If so, why go to the trouble of trying to alter them via the marketplace of ideas?

[laughs] I’m not sure I can alter them. But perhaps people can take that idea and say, “Well, if that’s true, maybe we should do something to at least forestall the coming of the next cycle, or at least know what we’re in for and learn to live with that.” The only thing we can really change, of course, is the past. And to re-perceive the past in a way that is useful to us in the present helps to give us maybe a different or better idea of how to proceed further.

Do you think George Bush is the worst president in history?

I wouldn’t know that. I don’t know enough history. I would certainly say that he’s the worst president in my experience. I’m old enough to go back to having voted for Eisenhower, so that’s a fairly large number of presidents. I was alive when FDR was president, but I was ten when he died, so I didn’t really get a sense of him. But I would say that, to my knowledge, or in my lifetime, Bush is the worst.

You’ve mentioned the favorable response to your essay “The Case for Impeachment.” What was the tenor of the negative responses, if any?

There really wasn’t much negative. The negative was that it was a pipe dream, and it was foolish, and that impeachment never was going to happen and I was not wise to the ways of the world in Washington. And from the National Review side, another example of “dreaming-idiot liberal nonsense.”

How would you characterize the true motives of the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq? Was there any idealism involved, or was it purely cynical?

I think there was probably an element of idealism in it. I think the notion of bringing democracy to bloom like flowers in the deserts of Mesopotamia was probably part of the idea. I think also part of the idea was that we live in such a dangerous world filled with nuclear weapons that somebody has to step up to the standard of the old Roman Empire and impose something along the lines of a Pax Romana or Pax Americana on the world. Otherwise anarchists can appear with nuclear bombs in their suitcases and so on. The world is in need of a firm hand, and a hand that is also kindly and just, and who better than the Americans to be that hand? I think that in the minds of people like Charles Krauthammer or William Kristol and possibly in the mind of Bush there was something of that. I think there was also a good deal of cynicism in the motive. I think the notion of access to the oil reserves in Iraq was certainly part of the equation. I also think they thought they could do it easily. One of my relatives—my great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle—was a man named Henry Dearborn—

He led the American invasion of Canada during the War of 1812.

That’s right. They expected him to take Canada in a matter of months. And they thought that the Canadians would welcome him with flowers. It’s the same story! The Canadians, there are very few of them, they love us, they really want to be Americans, and we can take the place—it’s a cakewalk. Same speeches coming out of Washington, and they were in the orders that Madison sent Dearborn. Dearborn was in retirement. He’d been the secretary of war in both the Jefferson administrations. He was doing very well—he was a collector of customs in Boston, a magnificent plum of federal patronage. And suddenly—he’s in his 60s—and he’s appointed commander in chief of the American Army. There was no American Army in 1812—there are state militias, many of whom deemed the Canadians their good friends. He had a very hard time of it, but also that same notion that it was going to be an easy thing to do. So I think they [Bush et al.] thought the invasion of Iraq was going to be more like a Pentagon trade show.

What, ideally, should our response to 9/11 have been? Would any military aggression have been justified? In Afghanistan, for instance?

The mistake was to call it a war, I think. The War on Terror is war on an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. It’s like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty. I think had we looked at it as a criminal matter, and not gotten so excited about war, it would have helped. A lot. It would have particularly helped if we had confined our police raid to Afghanistan.

You’re awfully hard on the Clintons. Of Hillary, you’ve said, “I don’t have any respect or regard or hope for her.” Of Bill, you’ve said, “Another man of all seasons content to promote the ritual fictions of a sham democracy.” You also call them “bandits.” Would you elaborate a little?

Well, I wrote a lot of columns about the Clintons when he was in office, and I guess my favorite description of him was as a piñata: You could hit him and anything would come out—scandal, gossip, friendship, a speech. I think of them as terminal narcissists. I can remember when Gore was running for office in 2000, he made a speech here in New York, and Clinton came to make a speech as well. It’s the middle of the summer, 2000, Clinton is talking to the entire New York media somewhere down at NYU. The entire speech was about himself. He didn’t mention Gore’s name once. And here we were supposed to be in the middle of an election that was important to win. I think of the Clintons as being out for only themselves. I still remember the photograph of the 16-wheeler truck that was pulled up in front of the White House when they departed, carrying with them everything that could be moved.

Surely you like something about Bill—I mean, he does have some pretty lovable qualities.

I think Bill was a tremendous talk-show host—I think of him the same way I think of Oprah. He’s a very clever politician. I’ve met him a couple times, and he’s the kind of person who can remember everybody’s name having only seen them once before. He’s formidable. But I don’t know what he’s about except the greater glory of Bill Clinton.

Was he aware of the disparaging things you’d written? Did he respond to that in any way when you met?

He didn’t respond to that at all. I’m not sure whether he was aware of it or not, but it was a White House dinner. You go through the receiving line and then there’s a dinner. I’d never met him before this point. It was right in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky story. It was like only two weeks old at the time, and the entire Hay Adams Hotel was taken over by the British press. Fleet Street descended like a flock of crows. People were searching through Washington for Monica’s underwear, and the only place in America that Monica was not discussed was at dinner at the White House. Never came up. It was raining and I had to get the last plane back to New York. So I stood in the receiving line to shake hands with both the president and Hillary, but the line was moving slowly, and time was running out, so I left. And just as I was going through the door out of the state dining room, Clinton broke away from the receiving line and came over to me, shook my hand and said, “Lewis, if you hadn’t come to this dinner, it wouldn’t have meant anything at all.” [laughs] It was spectacular!

You must have been charmed.

Of course! The fact that he even knew my name, much less what I looked like... Had he said to me, “Look. If you’ll just step into the Oval Office for a moment and consider writing me a check for $200,000,” I probably would have written it. That he is the greatest money-raiser of all time is… I could well understand it. He has that kind of charm and I’m sure he could talk almost anybody into anything.


TO BE CONTINUED
A CONVERSATION WITH LEWIS LAPHAM | 1 | 2 |

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Comments

Anonymous, on Jul 15, 2008 wrote: Hopelessly tiresome. Bailey needs to learn to ask non-leading questions. Light-weight rookie, interviewing a limp-dick.