On June 6, 2022, the news website Axios published a scoop revealing that the House of Representatives’ January 6 Committee was employing a veteran Hollywood producer as an “unannounced adviser.” Former ABC News president James Goldston, whose credits include such shows as 20/20 and Nightline, had been hired to bring a little showbiz magic to the congressional hearings. To some, this was a scandal. To others, it was unremarkable. There are tricks of the trade to holding viewer interest, pacing big reveals, and cutting video footage for maximum impact. Naturally the committee would consult an expert. Who knows better how to reach audiences than Hollywood?
This is the moral dilemma at the heart of We Tell Ourselves Stories by New York Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson. “First, Joan Didion lived among Hollywood stars,” reads the opening line. “Then she watched show business seep into America’s public square, which evolved into a celebrity worshipping star machine of its own. This category confusion, this overlap of spheres, intrigued and dismayed her.”
The introduction of showbiz methods to politics is a fascinating development, but the book never lives up to the promise of its thesis, for one simple reason: Joan Didion herself did not understand politics very well. Her famously clinical gaze could detect that politics is mostly fake, but she could not grasp that underneath the glitz are real issues, and the superficial aspects of politics, as absurd as they sometimes are, are part of how those issues get settled.
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Didion came to political journalism late in her career. The books that made her name, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), are about culture. The Haight-Ashbury waifs and College of San Mateo revolutionaries whom she writes about in those essays are regular people. The famous people who do appear are not elected officials: Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, Linda Kasabian of the Manson Family, Bishop James Pike of the Episcopal Church.
It was her editor at The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers, who had the idea to send Didion to report on the 1988 presidential campaign. He later commissioned essays from her on the 1992 presidential race, Newt Gingrich, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bob Woodward, and George W. Bush. These essays were collected and published as a book in 2001, Political Fictions, a title that indicates Didion’s cynical view of Washington.
She considered the political class insular and disconnected from reality. “They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us,” she writes. “They talk about ‘programs,’ and ‘policy,’ and how to ‘implement’ them or it, about ‘tradeoffs’ and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the ‘story,’ and how it will ‘play.’”
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Didion had a “mounting sense throughout the 1990s that American electoral politics were now simply a ‘story’ controlled by insiders, managed like a film set, and produced in order to please the slice of the electorate whose opinions were deemed worthy of mattering,” writes Wilkinson. The Clinton impeachment is Didion’s prime example. The president’s affair with an intern was discovered by insiders, publicized by insiders, and manipulated by insiders into an offense worthy of impeachment. The rest of America, whatever prurient fascination they might have felt, simply did not think a sex scandal was important enough to justify ending a presidency.
Didion contrasts this with Watergate. Bob Woodward was a rookie reporter and Carl Bernstein was described by his boss, Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee, as “the Peck’s Bad Boy of the Metro staff” (a reference to a mischievous scamp of the silent film era). “In other words,” Didion writes, they “were at that time Washington outsiders, and it was to their status as Washington outsiders that their ability to get ‘the real story’ was commonly attributed.”
“Outsider” is a term of praise throughout Political Fictions, just as “insider” is a term of condemnation. But Didion has Watergate upside down. Woodward was getting his information from an insider, “Deep Throat,” later revealed to be Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI. Revisionist historians such as Len Colodny and Geoff Shepard have uncovered how the Watergate story was manipulated by insiders, including intelligence agencies, to rid themselves of an enormously popular president who had, after all, just won one of the biggest landslides in American history. The real outsider in the story is Nixon himself, whom the Eastern establishment always hated.
One lesser-known Didion essay that Wilkinson excavates for her book is “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” published in The New York Review of Books in January 1991, about the notorious assault case involving the Central Park Five. Here, too, Didion tells the reader that the narrative being promoted by the media is a therapeutic fiction. Out of 3,254 rapes in the city that year, why fixate on this one? It is “the imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city.”
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Wilkinson approves of this skeptical posture because she believes, falsely, that the five young men incarcerated for the crime have been exonerated. (Another perpetrator, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime in 2002 and his DNA was found on the jogger, Trisha Meili, but this does not mean the original five were necessarily innocent, only that they had an accomplice or that a second rape occurred after they fled.) Her eagerness to cast the trial as a racist hoax that Didion shrewdly saw through leads her into absurdities. Paraphrasing Didion, Wilkinson writes, “Mayor David Dinkins and Governor Mario Cuomo could make a show of being tough on crime by calling for an increased police presence on the streets. Would that have prevented the crime itself? Did it matter?”
Rhetorical questions, but the answers are yes and yes. Better policing would have prevented Meili’s rape, and when Mayor Rudy Giuliani implemented better policing in 1994, the dramatic drop in violent crime mattered to every New York City resident and visitor. The city’s turnaround is a vivid refutation of the idea that elections don’t matter and campaign promises are just rhetorical posturing. Didion’s aloof pose fit her image as a cool observer, but it was flat wrong.
The most egregious instance of Didion attempting to debunk something that was not bunk came after 9/11. Her book Fixed Ideas (2003) depicts the surge of patriotism that followed the attacks as false, irrational, and opportunistic. Wilkinson mentions this embarrassing book only once, probably wisely.
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Was Joan Didion a conservative? She came from a Republican family. Her mother was an admirer of the John Birch Society. When she was starting out, Didion wrote for National Review, which almost soured her career before it began. In 1963, someone recommended her to Jason Epstein of The New York Review of Books as a writer he ought to be publishing. He replied, “What do I want with some little nobody who writes for Buckley?”
Anyone who bothers to excavate Didion’s pieces for N.R., published between 1959 and 1965, will find little that would scandalize her liberal fans. Her job was to review books and movies in order to improve the magazine’s cultural cachet, to prove that conservatives were not all knuckle-dragging philistines. This she did, applying her gaze to such authors as John Cheever, John Updike, and Graham Greene. Certain tics appear in these early efforts that would resurface in her later work, such as her habit of using an incongruously serene and self-possessed tone to describe moments when she emotionally fell to pieces. Her review of the 1960 John Wayne film The Alamo concludes:
I wept as Wayne told his Mexican inamorata How A Man’s Gotta Live. I wept as he explained why Republic Is A Beautiful Word…. I was inconsolable by the time the battle was done, and Wayne lay on the cold cold ground, bleeding as no one has bled since Janet Leigh in Psycho. The last white woman walked out of the Alamo then. She had soot on her face, and she was carrying her child, and she held her head high as she walked past Santa Anna into the sunset. So conspicuous was my sniffling by then that you could scarcely hear the snickers from my neighbors, a couple of young men from Esquire, both of whom resembled Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. They don’t make ’em like Duke on the New Frontiers.
She loved Barry Goldwater. On the other hand, she hated Ronald Reagan and absolutely despised Nancy. Her profile of the latter, “Pretty Nancy,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968, was “probably the meanest thing Didion ever wrote,” according to Wilkinson. The piece criticizes Mrs. Reagan’s smile as “the smile of someone who grew up in comfort…the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.” Nancy herself addressed the hatchet job in her memoir, My Turn (1989). “I smile, I’m afraid, the way I smile,” she writes. “Would she have liked it better if I had snarled? She had obviously written the story in her mind before she ever met me.”
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Still, there is something conservative about Didion’s instincts, even if her politics evolved in the direction necessary to make the likes of Jason Epstein willing to look at her submissions. She believed in self-discipline and personal responsibility. Most people in the late 1960s were charmed by the counterculture. National leaders, even Richard Nixon, expressed the view that student activists were calling the nation to live up to its highest ideals. Didion perceived that the counterculture was in fact squalid and self-destructive. Seeing through the fashions of the day, as she did in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is not something an ordinary liberal could have done.
Wilkinson attributes Didion’s conservatism to her family background. Didion’s great-great-great-grandmother came west with the Donner Party in the 1840s. This ancestry gave Didion “a sense of what it meant to be a Californian, a Westerner, a child of those who crossed the country with only what they could carry in a covered wagon.” Hence her fondness for John Wayne, which Wilkinson finds so mysterious that she devotes the first hundred pages of her book to explaining it. Didion’s views on masculinity, violence, history, Communism, and race are explored to make sense of her love of the Duke, which is surely overthinking it. Most people like movie stars. That’s why they’re movie stars.
One possibility Wilkinson doesn’t consider is that Didion’s conservatism was a reaction against her family. Her father was a weak man who had to be sent to a mental hospital after a breakdown when Didion went off to college. Her mother Eduene was a poor housekeeper. She never dusted or made the beds. “What difference does it make?” was her refrain. “They just get slept in again.” When Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne visited his in-laws’ home in Sacramento, he wrote “D-U-S-T” with his finger on every flat surface in the house to see if Eduene would notice; she did not.
This disorder was agonizing to their highly sensitive daughter. Didion’s famous essay “On Self-Respect” is a tribute to “small disciplines, unimportant in themselves,” that nevertheless instill “what was once called character.”
[T]hose small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are.
She might as well have addressed it to her mother with the marginal note: This is why you must make beds even if they will just get slept in again.
Joan Didion failed as a political journalist because she could not extrapolate this lesson to the national level. In the 1960s, she sensed that the disorder she observed in people’s personal lives was connected to a broader loosening of the bonds of civilization that threatened to send the country into chaos. Thirty years later, she was disparaging the only people on the political scene trying to turn the chaos back, Republicans and especially the Christian Right. These people were terribly gauche in her eyes, the kind of rubes who put up flags after 9/11. Alyssa Wilkinson says Didion was offended by the reduction of politics to image-making. But it was she, not her political targets, who was unable to see past superficialities to the truth underneath.
