This week Alec talks with Lewis Lapham, who's been refining his prose for over 50 years. Lapham says he still has to write “three or four or five, sometimes eight drafts of something,” but takes pleasure in “getting it right.” Today, he’s at the helm of Lapham’s Quarterly. He was at Harper’s for many years – and he started out at The San Francisco Examiner before stints at The Saturday Evening Post and Life.
To talk with Lewis Lapham, you’re struck with the sensation that you’ve stumbled onto the set of a 1940’s film noir movie. He wears pressed suits and pocket squares -- and his stories evoke another era. He tells Alec about being a rookie reporter at The Examiner and what it was like to go on a meditation retreat with the Beatles in India.
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Louis Lapham and Harper's Magazine are forever linked. As its editor for nearly thirty years, Lapham began each issue with notebook and essay written in his beautifully precise prose on the political and cultural climate of our times. He's been compared to Twain and to Montaigne. His expensive looking suits, complete with pocket square evoke another comparison. To sit with Lapham, you're struck with the sensation that you've stumbled onto some film noir set, and some of the stories he recounts belonged to that genre, like when he got his first job as a rookie reporter at the San Francisco Examiner. Seven reporters would lie around on couches with hats over their faces, waiting for news of a murder, and then I, as the cub, would go out to the scene of the murder with the photographer. The photographer had a speed Graflex camera, wore a shark skin suit and a loud hand painted tie, and his name was Seymour Snare Seymour and I would prowl the lower depths in order to find sensational headlines for the first edition. In those days, paper had six or seven editions, and we would do the late afternoon edition with the murder headline. And they told you I was twenty two, So you're a kid, entirely a kid. And you this was not the background. You came from a tough, working class background. No, no, And that's one of the describe where you came from when I came out of the you know, the affluent, privileged San Francisco society, San Francisco society. My my grandfather was the mayor of the city between nineteen two and nineteen forty six and wing World War Two, and he would go out on the launch to meet carriers when they would come in from the Pacific War. And I would be piped aboard with the mayor to meet Admiral Nimitz or Admiral Halsey on the bridge of the enterprise. Also, he as the mayor, presided over the Charter of the United Nations in San Francisco, and he made sure that I was excused from school to attend the plenary sessions and then he would give diplomatic cocktail parties. And I can remember at the age of ten passing Canapays to Molotov and to Stutenius and to Alger Hiss and John Foster Dallas. And then I went to boarding school in New England, and from there to Yale University and after that to Cambridge, England. At Cambridge, Lapham considered becoming a history professor, but decided he wasn't cut out for the footnotes. Then he briefly toyed with acting, but realized he was only good at playing characters to whom he was sympathetic. In the end, journalism called Louis slap him says he was a precious youth. When he got back from England and took the job at the San Francisco Examiner, he had a lot to learn. I can't remember, like the first piece I ever wrote for the for the paper was in Oakland. They sent me to cover a flower show that I went to the flowers show and I wrote four thousand words and with all kinds of wonderful adjectives straight out. And the senior guy on the beat in Oakland was a man named Crowley, and he looked at me and he said, Louis, these are the most beautiful four thousand words I have ever already said, they tears in my eyes. But he said, I tell you what, why don't you see even cut it in half? Great pain? I was, you know, destroying immortal. I brought it back to Crowley, and Crowley looked at He said, Louis, I thought the first four thousand words are truly beautiful, but these are even more beautiful. But see I didn't cut in half again. And we went through this over a period. It finally came out as one paragraph. And what I learned in the newspaper business was to write on deadline, but also to trim and concision, concision and then when you and the other reason, of course to be in the newspaper business was to learn about the you know, the American democracy. I mean I didn't know how a city worked, or what politics were, or you know, I lived privileged. Why in a bubble? What were some of the first insights you had into the American political system? Form? That was? It was really about who you knew, I mean a way. It wasn't the right or wrong. It was what was the deal? What was the trade? Could we both get something out of this? It mattered that you could speak well, that you were adroit, also that you liked people. My sense of most of the politicians I've known have been that they have genuine liking for their their fellow human beings. And I mean there there exceptions such as Cheney would be a beautiful example. I mean Cheney, I think. And and the trouble with so many of the conservative politicians that have been in power of over the last thirty years is there they don't have that quality, or at least they don't seem to me to have that quality. You see, this is the difference between a democratic society is one and it is held together by mutual feeling and respect for one's fellow citizen. I hold my fellow citizen in thoughtful regard, not because he is beautiful or rich or famous, but because he is my fellow citizen. The kind of a society that gathers around a court, the kind of society that you would see in the court of either Elizabeth the First or Louis the fourteen. A court society is one where it is all about interest, It is all about hanging in the trapeze of one's connections and what it's very very cold. I mean, that's the whole move towards the resort uh communicated community. I mean the the rich the in the United States today, I mean living in a completely different world. But do you think it's always been that way? Meaning are the wealthy today different from the wealthy two generations? Three generations? I think they probably are. I mean there's always a distinction between there's always a class distinction. I mean you can there's no society in the history of mankind that hasn't been organized along some form of class distinction. I mean, we organize it in terms of money. We were doing that pretty much from the beginning. I mean, the the settlement of Plymouth in in six is a venture capital deal. It is, I mean it's backed by by merchant bankers in in London. Well, first of all, if you when you talk about people aligning themselves from the beginning on the basis of class, and I'm wondering how you've experienced that in your family, what was your father's politics to the extent you want to say, and did you differ from your family were your politics because your politics are pretty I wouldn't use the word liberal or progressive, but they're but they're candor is the watchword here. I think, yeah, no, when they disappointed in the way you know, you know, was your father a pretty open minded guy. Yes, my father had been very strongly in favor of Roosevelt two and his father, my grandfather, I want to became the mayor, was strongly conservative Republican who thought that FDR was the end of the world. Wouldn't carry a dime in his pocket right on the hand. By the time grandfather got to be mayor of San Francisco in two he ran as an independent and he was very open I mean he would pick hitchhikers up. He never had a you know, a bodyguard, He never had tinted windows. He used to like to go into the you know, saloons in San Francisco late at night. And the he wanted to get a bond issue passed to replace the street cars on Market Street with buses, and there was some resistance about that. So he put it to a bet. He said, Okay, there'll be a race. I will race from the Ferry Building to city Hall. I will write an elephant against a trolley car, and if the elephant beats the trolley car, we have the bond shoe. If not not. But he was a gambling man. So he insisted on a handicap, and the handicap was that the elephant would be allowed to go through red lights. The elephant one the bundle as you passed. Now, when you leave, uh, San Francisco three years the newspaper, Where do you go from there? I go to New York. I go from the San Francisco Examina and come to New York the Herald Tribune. How long were you there? I was there, uh two years? Write about them? First of all, I was general assignment, covered the city, the mayor crime who was the mayor? Wagner? I think? And then I was sent to the u N. I became the third correspondent over there was the u N when Kristoff was there pounding a shoe on the table, and when Castro was there carrying the chickens to Harlem. I was then sent down to write about the the Cape Canaveral first subspace shot. So you know, I did a lot of different things. So after the Herald Tribute, what did you do? There was a new magazine called USA one, and I became staff writer for the new magazine. It folded after six months. I then became a staff writer for the Saturday Evening Post, which was a big deal. In nineteen sixty three. They were still going strong. They were still going strong. I mean in nineteen sixty Life and the Saturday Evening Post where the equivalent of what the networks became by the end of the sixties. If the president wanted to talk to the American people, he would either sit down with Joseph Stewart Alsop for the back page interview in the Post, or with Teddy White in the back page interview Life. That was mass media back in the time. People also, I remember my grandfather in the early sixties and either in Brooklyn, he would read five newspapers a day. There was a morning paper, there was an evening paper. New York was swimming in newspapers. There were eleven newspapers in New York in nineteen sixty when I can, including the Brooklyn Eagle, which was the best newspaper by in some people's opinion, in the all the five boroughs. So I travel all over the world for the Saturday Post. I mean, I went to did stories in California, went and spent two weeks with the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and in Rishikesh. What was what was that experience like? And you encapsulate that. Where was it like hanging out with them in India? Well, did you get any time with them? No? Not really, I got I got a little time with them. The the there was something called transcendental meditation, which was all of rage in nineteen sixty seven and the Mary she was giving people mantras in you know, handing whispering them in the your ears and and the Beatles have gone there for a retreat. They needed to chill out. They needed to chill out. Being a Beatle was stressful. Stressful, I mean the oppression and all those love letters, seeing those songs. McCartney told me once that they would record four songs a day. They want to keep the studio time down to a minimum. It was expensive. They record two songs in the morning and they could have some fish and chips, smoke a cigarette, come back and do two songs in the afternoon. It was a real grind, he said, being a Beatle in the early days. But by seven or the biggest thing in the world now they're taking a little more time. I was sent to become a potent, to somehow get into the ash Ram. No press, of course, was allowed. So how how would you do that when when someone you're working for says, go get into the ash ram? How do you do that? Politics? Dealmaking? First of all, I studied. I went to California to talk to devotees of the Maharishie's a little brief so that when I got to Rishi Cash and I got in the cabin, I said, as the driver to the astra, I said to Rishi Cash, and he says, you go beatles. I said, I go beetles. And it was twelve dollars a hundred and twelve miles the days. And then I found out that one of the Maharishi's main men, Rag Vendor, a major domo, would come down once or twice a day to the town the shop, and I struck with an acquaintance with Rag Panda. Impressed Rag Vendor as to my knowledge of He dropped a few clever phrases under the understood mo of the of the transcendental world. Exactly worded my way into the confidence of Rag Panda, and then explained to him that I was from the Saturday Post, biggest media in America, and the Maharishi was a publicity hound. But believe me, it was in no way critical. I I was here to gaze into into the into the mysteries of the East and too and at the same time make the Maharishi exactly and eventually rag Venda admitted me to the ash Ram. I was allowed for the gate. There must have been oh seventy meditators present, as well as the Beatles. I mean, because he ran this Ashom, and the Beatles didn't have a private they had a group. They had a bungalow to themselves, and they also had provisions that were sent in from London. Because the and the food that was being served at the common table, I was wanting, yes, very very bland someone someone seasoned doll. Yes, But you know I attended that some of the open sessions I had, and I would have an occasional um aside with one of the Beatles, I mean McCartney, I thought was had a wonderful sense of humor, and so did Ringo. I never really got far enough into abstraction to understand Lennon, but there were a lot of other people right about. I mean, you know, I had a conversation with Mia Pharaoh. He showed she showed up The most beautiful model in the world at that time was a girl named Marissa Barrenson. And she showed up with her French boyfriend who had a mint coat. And then the Beach Boys showed up, and Donovan showed up. There was the wife of an Air Force colonel from California, had been living in Beverly Hills, and but her husband had left her one night because a UFO had landed on the lawn of their house in Beverly Hills, and and he had gone with them. There were there were a lot of characters. And up until then it's you and Mr Snare taking pictures in Oakland, and then you come and do the general General Assignment and you're covering Wagner at all in New York for the trib But would you say there was a time in your writing? Was there a moment and can you track it? Was there something happening in the country. Because I'll give you in a prefatory way, like a story about my dad. My dad turned forty in nineteen sixty seven, and when he turned forty, he was a school teacher making no money. I had six children, back in the day when people had six children. On faith, you know there was this believes in problems, these Irish Catholics. And in the ensuing twelve months from the fall of nineteen sixty seven, my father, who was a staunch Democrat, he was a Democratic Committeement and a very progressive Democrat when I was young. In the ensuing twelve months, King is shot, Kennedy is shot, my father's political nemesis is resurrected from the dead. The Democratic Convention is a is a debacle in Chicago, Nick's and becomes president, and his mother dies that October. So in that twelve months, like everything my father held dear just seemed to come crashing down. And I will say that my father was never the same again. Was there some series of events? Was a period you went through whenever they started to getting a lot more real to you politically? A period in our history perhaps, well, there were several. I mean, I said earlier when I was talking about about Maharishi, was sixty seven. It wasn't It was sixty eight, And that is the It's the same month that's as Ted, and that's the same years as Kennedy and King King and Chicago, Nixon and Nixon. On the other hand, I was kind of prepared for that because when I was in Cambridge, England, and here I'm still twenty two years old, young and at at Yale, I have not been a I wasn't a white shoe type guy. I I didn't. I went to one football game my freshman year, and then I spent the rest of the weekends in New York because that was wonderful in New York and in the fifties. I mean, I had access to an apartment that Orton would sometimes hold fourth and down in the village, and my idea of an evening would be to go to listen to Auton hold Fourth, and then go up to Birdland and listen to Parker uh Play and the or Mingus, and or go over to the White Horse Tavern and watch Dylan Thomas drink himself to death. I mean extreme mean I was love with perfect poetry. I knew we wanted to be a writer. I didn't know what kind of a writer. But then I go to England. The Fall of nineteen is the Uprising and Hungry and the uh was crisis, and a couple of the young Englishmen that I had become friends with went to Hungary to take part in the protests against the Soviets, and one of them was killed. If you remember the history, we had promised the CIA had promised to back the Hungarian Revolution, which of course we did not. Then I suddenly was asked to explain the Suez policy of John Forster Dallas, which I couldn't do because I hadn't been reading as an undergraduate newspaper as I've been reading auton Or brect Or literature. And I decided. When I first came back to America in the summer of nineteen seven, I went to Washington to apply for jobs. I went applied to the Washington Post, the White House to see if I could get some sort of clerk's job in the basement. And I went to apply for uh, the C. I A, what did you imagine you were going to have to offer the CIA? What were you gonna do? I was going to right. It was totally no, it was totally romantic, and it was drench coat last train of Berlin Communism, Finding Communism. I passed the mental tests, and I passed the physical and psychological tests, and then I had the interview with someone what I said, some of the younger guys, I'm twenty two these these guys must have been somewhere between thirty. I mean like that, Oh Yale looked like sounded like George W. Bush w W. So this year you're saying, is it what kind of a demeanor to them? Frat boy demeanor? Yeah, these are the kind of guys that I had avoided during my entire four years where you were at the ball game, you're reading, I I'm in New York, right, But I've studied for this, so I haven't quite written things on my cuff, but I I'm prepared. I mean, I know the four roads into the Orgon Forest. I am prepared to talk about the roman Off dynasty. I know about Stalin's crime. Since you know I'm first question, Alec, I'm not making this up. If you were standing on the thirteenth tea of the National Golf Links in Southampton, what club do you had? I got that one right, I've done that. I knew the answer to that question. The second question, six pm last week in August, you were coming in on the final approach to the Odd Club at Hey, Harvard, Fisher's Island. What tack are you want? I knew that too, because I've done that too. So you're doing well. Two for three. Third does make See I can't remember Mixi's last name were a slip. MIXI was the great numpomaniac of the Iva circuit in the fifties. And not to have known Mixi was not to have lived to have known her wardrobe. Yes, And I said them, gentlemen, my information is second hand. I've had rumors French silk, Belgian lace. But I I sources are untrustworthy and we're usually drunk. And then I said, and besides that, I apologized for wasting your time. And I got up walked out. I thought, my god, I mean, if this is the fence, I've got a jump. I've never been surprised since about the blenders, See I mean, I mean the arrogance that the idea that they, well, we'll figure out your coledge of Yugoslavian history later on or in of that region, one of us. Are you fit for the fraternity? Thus Louis lap Him tossed aside another career possibility. This is Alec Baldwin. You're listening to here's the thing. More in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin. You're listening to here's the thing. My guest. Louis lap Him's job at the Saturday Evening Post abruptly ended when the magazine folded in nineteen sixty nine. He was quickly hired at Life Magazine, which also went bust. In nineteen seventy, lap Him joined Harper's Magazine, where, except for some intervening years, he stayed until two thousand six. Lapham started at Harper's as a contract writer and soon became an editor. He has mentioned that he quote edited the magazine with a sympathy for the writer rather than the editor end quote. And as you know, I like, I mean, you know, good writing good, essay writing good. Any kind of writing isn't is an adventure. I mean you really don't know where you're going to end up. It's not a program attic. It's not like writing an annual report or writing a uh, you know, a baseball score. So over the course of time, I taught myself to write essays. And when did you take over the show over there? I took over the show nineteen and you created the Harper's Index. Correct, Yeah, but I do that later I do. I'm now the editor, and then I get fired in nineteen one because by this time it's changed hands. It's now in the hands of the MacArthur Foundation from Chicago. And the first time I was introduced to the board, I knew that it was over. It's not a question of whether there I was going to be fired next week or next month, but it was six months later because they didn't like what I wrote. I mean I was writing essays that were sometimes critical of American policy, politics, culture, so so seven So you said, he and then what happens? Then I spent two years in exile, and then uh, young John MacArthur, heir to the MacArthur Foundation fortune, became a member of the board and I was reinstated. I said, Rick, I'll be happy to go back, but only if a I can fire all the members of the board that fired me, and two that I can completely redesign the magazine. And when do you invent the index when I come back? I mean I redesigned that. When you say we designed it was in order to do what you're just a layout? Well, yeah, I brought the readings to me. Now, now, when you started your own magazine, when you started the last quarter, whose idea was that mine? I mean, it was something I wanted to do. For a long time. I mean again, it goes back to my um interest in history. The quarterly is a lot of history in the quarter. What it is is the great books made topical. I mean I take a subject in the news, war, money, politics, nature, medicine, and then assemble texts. My contributors are people like Escalus, Cicero, Gibbon, Machiavelli, Shakespeare. It's based on my notion. That is actually the notion of German poet gert Is talking about history, and he says history is it's our inheritance. The story on the old walls were printed in the old books is also our own story. And Gurta says, he who cannot draw on his three thousand years is living hand amount. And that's true. You find history exhilarating. I do. I find it essential essential, I find it a great source of energy and hope. I mean you have a quote here in which you say the reading of history damps down the impulse to slander, the trend and tenor of the times instills a sense of humor, lessons our fear about what might happen tomorrow. That's true when you understand the obstacles that people have had to overcome. Nothing that improves man's condition and circumstance is accomplished without going up against very heavy odds. This is what history teaches you, so that you don't despair of your your own time. You don't say, God, America's in decline. If you look at history, that America has always been in Yeah. If you look at history, a golden Age was really just the time when they got away with it. That's right. History is not what happened two hundred or two thousand years ago. It's a story about what happened, what happened to them. Yeah, that's right. Now you have how many children? Three? And are any of them involved in publishing at all? No? No, do they have? Are they deeply political people? Are they have strong political opinions? Do they share yours? For that matter? My older son does to some degree, My older my oldest what does He's in the financial business, in private equity in Toronto and Canada. How do you end up Prepare He ended up up there because he married a Canadian girl. And also in Toronto is a pretty good place to live. I mean, he has four children. He could provide for them better life there than he could say in New York City, And what about your other two children. My daughter is married to an Italian prince and lives outside Rome, and my younger son is also in a financial business and he is working in a small venture capital firm in Monaco. Do you ever think you'd have kids and you'd be able to say that you have three kids and all three of them live overseas in Canada, one in Rome, one in Monica, and my six grandchildren are overseas two four for them. You travel there all the time. I travel not all the time, but I travel enough to keep it warm, and they come here. Now. You've obviously are very keen on history, and that's that's uh embedded in much of, not all of your writing. And for people who don't know you, you're a very handsome, very elegant. The pockets square, the crisp suit, the tie, you're very handsome devil. You know what. I'm sure that every door has been open to you for you over the years. You're great. You're the person every wants one wants to sit next to at a dinner. And my question becomes, I'm gonna name five figures from history, and I'll keep naming some until we get it right, because maybe maybe the answer is you never met them and you had no opinion of them. But I'll name some over the course of American history, and you tell me what your assessment of them was, to the extent you're willing to um either John or Robert Kennedy? Did you meet other one of them? I met them both. With the circumstances of meeting John. It was a party. It's actually I met him both at the same time. It was a party given for Teddy Kennedy and it was a birthday party for Teddy and I. It's either sixty two or sixty three, Southampton, No, New York, Fifth Avenue, had big apartment on Fifth Avenue. I was at the time going out with a young lady who was also going out with Bobby. I was Beard at the familiar with that term at the dinner at Beard. Yeah, this is two. I think this is sixty years old. Yeah, aside or sixty two or sixties three? Would you make of either one of them? What do you make of them? In retrospecting history through the prism of history? What do you think about either one of them? I'm learning to like them more now than I did then. Let's go back on the U. N. Correspondent for the Harald Tribune when Kennedy is inaugurated. The speech asked, not what America can do for you when you do for American I'm watching it with the correspondence from foreign correspondence and the guy from Lamonde listen to that speech and says, that's the worst naive treacle treacle right, almost gotten with him, Right. I was very gung hog Kennedy the I think seeing him in the setup at the you had Smith's, no Smiths apartment, it was a real disappointment. He seemed like he was a guy who was hounded by demons on the You know, I also know something about his relations with women at the time, so we didn't think he had his house in order enough to be I didn't think so. Yeah, and what about his brother? Did you get the same brother? I thought it was a bully because many many people have a very negative assessment of him up until his brother's killed. Yeah. Did you meet Nixon? Yes? I met next time once And I'm trying to remember I had a I never liked or trusted Nixon, and I can't remember where I met him. I met him some place in California, but at a distance. I mean that was never you know, I was part of a crowd or something. But isn't it interesting how people that I know who are not as a stute as you are about history, but there're students of history there. There's certainly students of American history. They certainly know the political history of this country. And many of my friends who are politically active, and I mean beyond writing checks and that kind of uh, you know, that kind of political class where it's all about giving money and in that world, I've I've heard people say, God, I I take Nixon back tomorrow compared to these guys that are here. And there was a lot of good with Nixon. Do you agree with that? I don't know enough to agree or disagree with it. I know that he backed the Environmental Protection Agency. I know that he backed the what's the Unemployment Act? That that if you get hurt workman's compensation. But there was a lot of good under Nixon. Yeah, what do you think of rom What did you think of Romney? And more importantly, inside the question of what you think of Romney, what do you think about, shall we say, the casting Department of the Republican Party. They seem to because Obama was there for the taking. Don't you think I think Obama could have been defeated. Yeah, I think he was lucky to win, just the way I think he was lucky to win. Uh. You know in two thousand and eight when the Republicans put up Sarah Palin. But yes, the I thought it was a pretty clownish group of primary candidates that were fielded by the Republicans. They my sense of Romney again, I saw him in a small room once, but you know, trying to draw him up money from some Wall Street guys in New York. He didn't come off any differently than than what you've seen him on television. Was almost impossible for him to overcome what Gingwich said about him during the primary. Um, what do you think about Obama? I think Obama means well, Um, I think that's enough these days? Probably not again, how much can a president really accomplish it is another problem? And you I don't think he's the he likes politics in the same way to say Johnson did. Johnson really wanted to use the office of the presidency to do something and knew how to make it work. I knew that it was political. I'm never sure that Obama is about anything other than a striking opposes Nor am I sure that that is not what the office of the presidency has become. Why anybody would want to become president of the United States is it's something that I have Um, I can't imagine wanting to do that, because when you think about what is that life like, I mean you're surrounded by people that are probably lying to you. I mean it's like a life at court in in um Queen Elizabeth England or only the fourteenths France. It's cold hearted self interest. It's not require a degree of vanity that that you know, I can I can imagine it, but it but it's it's uh, well, we've heard that comment before. What people have said the type of man or woman that would want to be president now is someone we certainly don't want to be president. Probably not Lincoln wanted to be president. He wouldn't have wanted to run for I mean he's running for a second term. I mean he was reluctant. I mean, you know, there are people that are happy to leave the office, to leave the stage, to leave the stage. As my one friend said, about one political figure that leave the stage. It's a thankless task, really is It's Yeah, it's service. It's get service to your come. Yeah. Louis Lapham continues to serve his country. At seventy seven, he still goes to work every day at Lapham's Quarterly. After our conversation, I wondered why Lapham hadn't cultivated more personal relationships with the political leaders of his day. So Hello, it's Alec Baldwin calling for Mr Lapham. Mr Lapham is speaking. You know, Lewis. When you were here and we talked about, you know something, a number of things, but one thing that kind of stuck in my mind was that you had this access to all of these political figures, government leaders of their time and so forth, and you were around them and reporting about them, and yet it sounds to me like you didn't make them intimates of yours. No, I did not, And I was wondering why was that the case. Well, because I thought of myself as a journalist and I wanted to be free to say what I thought or report what I thought I had seen, and I didn't want to become obligated. I wanted to keep a safe distance. You know, I appreciate that because I mean, that's a very common thing that people, uh, you know, you know when when the political leaders started to you know, hang out and party with the press, when they invited them in the door to stay, everything began to change. Yeah, everything does begin to change. And that's what begins to happen, of course, in the sixties, when politics becomes glamorous and Kennedy and cameloged and the heady association with power. It's you would ascribe that phenomenon kind of beginning with Kennedy. Well, that was when I first became aware of it. I mean, I'm sure it was true at the Court of Louis the Four Teeth and Elizabeth the First. It's true of any court society. I once wrote a essay about the American media. The title was Rosencrantz and Jill's Stern, And that's the way I tend to think of the Washington press corps. The struggle for me is that if you and I don't mean to sound lofty here, but you have kind of a Clinton war room Carvel esque approach toward dealing with the media, which is that you put out every fire and you address every issue where your name is dragged in, or you try to remain above the fray and ignored, knowing that will all I mean, unless there's real criminal charges at stake, you know that it will dissipate. And I'm wondering if you have any advice for me, and it was, do you think I'm better off where there's nothing serious involved? Do you think I'm better off not engaging and letting it go and it just wafts away like smoke? Or do you think that journalism today and the media establishment today is a bull I need to be fighting from time to time. I don't think you need to fight it Alec, because you always lose. Can I tell you my introduction to that. My first lesson in this was in the Oakland City Hall press room. I mentioned Seymour Snare with the The press room is in the same building as the police department and the courts in the Mayor's office. The head of the by squad was anxious to become a particular friend of the media, of the press, and so that the press would play him as as an heroic figure, which the press obligingly did. The vice squad guy also had a girlfriend who was a serious nymphomaniac. He used to make her available to the members of the press room on the third Friday of every month. She was very good looking, but she had only one leg. She was a beautiful, one legged nymphomaniac who was the paramour of the head of the Vice squad exactly, and I, being the cub I was not invited to the Friday afternoon celebrations, nor did I want to be. But that they then comes when she was married and the ladies husband files divorce suit and names the vice squad captain as the correspondence. I was in the press room the day that that announcement was made, and suddenly these four guys rise reluctantly to their typewriters and begin to write morally outraged editorials. How can such things be? How can our fair city of Oakland tolerate the behavior of a corrupt police captain. I mean, you see what I mean. I mean they turned on a dime. What I'm telling you is the media is is not trustworthy. It's Claude Rains closing down the casino. Yeah, I'm outraged. I'm outraged. And the guy your winning, sir, I'm shocked, shocked at this gambling. Here your winnings, sir. Yeah, it's not good to get into involved. I don't think in an argument with the media because they always have the last word. You wanted us to think. You've just done me a big favor. Your pen is mighty, your mind and your your words are mighty. And with a single phone call who you have crushed my entire public relations apparatus in to powder. But I'm grateful to you for thanks. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, m