Andrew Sullivan and "Honesty"

Earlier this week, I questioned Sullivan's publishing of the Elizabeth McCaughey article when he was editor of The New Republic. Classily, he sought to make my age, rather than the honesty of the piece he published and championed, the issue. I guess that didn't do the trick. Because now he's accusing me of seeking the "subjugation of free inquiry and free ideas" and calling my writing "chilling." I'll let the argument of the post in question stand on its own merit. But I will answer the basic smear, which is that I lack integrity as a writer, and sacrifice the truth in order to elevate an agenda.

So let's talk honesty, and commitment to speech, as that's the issue here. It was Sullivan, remember, who accused the anti-war left of mounting a "fifth column." Who went on a rip evaluating the patriotism of the war's critics. Who doesn't even allow comments on his site. Tell me again who's trying to marginalize speech. And it is Sullivan who brags, in his bio, of winning a National Magazine Award for the article written by Elizabeth McCaughey. Here's the letter from a National Magazine Award judge that The New Republic, under Sullivan, didn't publish:

April 27, 1995

To the editors:

I was on the panel of judges for the National Magazine Awards and cast my personal vote in the public interest category for the entry from the New Republic, “No Exit” by Elizabeth McCaughey. I did so because I thought it was the magazine article that had the greatest effect on public policy in 1994. I first read “No Exit” and McCaughey’s subsequent reply to administration critics of her article (the reply was also part of the entry) when they appeared in the New Republic. They were convincing to me during the judging of the awards. Perhaps I was right to be convinced, perhaps not. But I now know something for certain: I was wrong to believe the New Republic.

Your magazine endorsed Bill Clinton. The health care plan was a central, if not the central, piece of legislation of Clinton’s presidency. You put a devastating story about the health plan on the cover and then, a few issues later, heralded McCaughey’s reply to her critics with the cover line “Elizabeth McCaughey: White House Lies.” Lies! How could a magazine endorse a story and its author more strongly? As a reader I assume that such endorsement means, at the very least, that the basic facts in the article will be correct. Now I read Mickey Kaus saying in the New Republic that, among other important errors, McCaughey was wrong when she said that the Clinton plan would not allow a patient to pay his doctor directly for medical care but must allow the doctor to be paid by the government plan. Her errors, Kaus writes, “completely distorted the debate on the biggest public policy issue of 1994.” But where was Kaus when the story came in? Didn’t anyone there bother to check McCaughey’s citations to see if she was accurately reading and quoting the plan? It couldn’t have been that hard. If it turned out that you slipped up and McCaughey’s story was wrong, you should have said so yourselves back then rather than waiting for Kaus to shoulder the load at this late date. Then again, how does a reader know that Kaus is right? Did anyone there bother to check his story when it came in?

I am not talking about the difference of opinion between McCaughey and Kaus. A magazine is a chorus of many voices. There is lots of room for disagreement. But that’s not the problem here. Clinton’s plan says what it says. Any article on that plan must be based on accurate statements about what the plan says. Making sure that an article is accurate is one of the things an editor does. If you are not going to do that for a cover story on a central piece of legislation by a president that you endorsed, if you are not going to do that for a follow-up in which you call the administration liars, when are you going to do it? If Kaus was wrong and McCaughey is right after all, then how could you have published Kaus’s column? I can imagine a good magazine publishing neither McCaughey’s story nor Kaus’s story. But I cannot imagine a magazine with respect for its readers publishing both.

Yours,

Gregory Curtis

Tell me again abut honesty, Andrew, and the pursuit of truth over ideology.

Here are some excerpts from a contemporary article by Mickey Kaus, one of Andrew's then-employees, and surely someone who explained McCaughey's failings to him:

Guess who just won the National Magazine Award for "Excellence in Public Interest"? We did! We won it for Elizabeth ("Betsy") McCaughey's articles on the Clinton health plan. McCaughey "waded through all 1,364 pages of the health care reform package," the judges said, then she "tore it apart." Her " carefully researched" pieces "transcended the coverage in most of the press. More than any other single event in the debate, what she wrote stopped the bill in its intellectual tracks."

So why don't I feel more like celebrating? Is it because, as a New Yorker editor publicly complained, the McCaughey articles seemed to have been " nominated for buzz"? Perhaps. But does The New Yorker not care about buzz? (Tell it to the Easter Bunny.) Is it because my colleague Michael Kinsley, in this space, denounced the initial McCaughey piece as a "screed," and James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic, said its claims were "simply false" and Theodore Marmor, professor of public policy at Yale, told me his fellow health experts of left, right and center consider McCaughey's articles " risible"?

[paragraph after paragraph dismantling the McCaughey article]

I don't mean to leave the impression that McCaughey's efforts were worthless. She did unearth some juicy provisions, like one steering medical training slots to "racial or ethnic minority groups" (though, like a good GOP apparatchik, she called this inchoate preference a "quota"). She got some things right. But she got a lot wrong. In the process, she completely distorted the debate on the biggest public policy issue of 1994. Give her a medal.

Andrew sought, earlier this week, to explain why he published this article. He explained that it was "provocative." Full of lies, to be sure. Lies, in fact,that were exposed at the time, and not only by Andrew's employees, but publicly, by James Fallows and the White House, and many other. But no matter. The article was "provocative." And that's what mattered. Not honesty. Not impact. But provocation.

It's a peculiar quirk of Washington that repeatedly being wrong doesn't harm your reputation for accuracy or prescience. Indeed, if you leverage your poor predictive abilities correctly, and always stay in a safe mainstream, they can even do something more important: Make you seem courageously honest.

Sullivan hangs his hat on a reputation for honesty that comes because he constantly shifts his opinions as each, one after the other, is proven flagrantly incorrect, and the mainstream moves to reflect that. Then Sullivan spends a lot of time writing about his anguished evolution, and eventually settles in the new center. This was true of Bush, true of Iraq, true of some of the largest issues of our time. It's telling, though, that when wrong opinions serve his career, as happened in the case of No Exit or The Bell Curve, then honesty is subsumed beneath a higher value: "Provocation." Sometimes the truth is dull, or politically marginal. At those times, being honest and being provocative conflict. And we've seen which Sullivan chooses when pressed. It makes him, to be sure, a fun and interesting writer. One I rather like to read. But it doesn't leave him in a position to throw stones at the integrity of others.