Remembrance of things passed: how my friend Stephen Glass got away with it

Washington Monthly, July-August, 2003 by Jonathan Chait

THE FABULIST: A Novel by Stephen Glass Simon & Schuster, $24.00

ONE DAY IN JANUARY 1996, I SAT IN Steve Glass's apartment following the returns to the New Hampshire primary with him and one or two other colleagues of ours at The New Republic. We were watching a C-SPAN call-in show, and Glass began speculating about how callers can get on the air. Glass picked up the phone and called the number, and said he lived in Manchester. His status as an apparent bonafide New Hampshirite thrust him to the front of the line--within seconds he was talking to the host. His immediate success flustered him. Asked whom he had voted for, Glass stammered, "Uh, Lamar Alexander." Why? "I was, uh, concerned about Pat Buchanan's anti-Semitism," he explained. The host asked him what he did for a living. Glass replied, "I'm a worker."

His interview ended, and as he hung up the phone I doubled up in laughter. Real workers, I told Glass, would describe their job specifically--say, foreman at a tire plant. They don't refer to themselves as "workers." Only Marxists do that. Nor are they usually obsessed with anti-Semitism at the expense of all other issues. When I told all this to Glass, he could only blush and confess that he hadn't been able to think of anything else to say.

I remember very clearly what I concluded about this at the time: "Steve Glass is a terrible liar. If he ever tries to lie to me, I'll know it right away." In retrospect, this was not the correct lesson to draw.

In 1998, Glass made national headlines when he was exposed as a serial fabricator, and fired for concocting much of what he'd written. People who didn't work with him have often expressed amazement that he managed to convince a group of educated, highly skeptical colleagues to publish stories that, in hindsight, are wildly implausible. (The First Church of George Herbert Walker Bush?) If they suspected Glass from a distance, surely those of us who worked with him every day should have sniffed him out. This seems intuitively sound, but in fact has it backward: It was our very proximity to Glass that made us susceptible to his fraud. Everybody knew him as almost inhumanely industrious in his reporting--anytime you came into the office late at night, he'd be there--and equally diligent in his fact-checking of our stories. He was also unusually sensitive and considerate. Repeated exposure to him made possible the suspension of disbelief. My wife spoke extensively with Glass just once, when we went out for dinner with him and his girlfriend. Afterward she told me that she thought all his charming stories sounded made-up. I reacted with indignation. Steve Glass, I told her, was the last person who would make something up. Sure, he had lots of funny stories, but you just had to know him.

Many of my fellow journalists now say Glass never had any real talent, and relied entirely upon cheating to make it, but I don't share this view. He had extraordinary social intelligence and a rare ability to get people to open up to him--as we all saw at the office, where he soaked up everybody's secrets. On the morning Michael Kelly was fired as editor, before any of the staff knew what was happening, Glass walked into my office and told me something big was afoot--closed doors, tension in the air. On one occasion, the two of us worked together on a profile of Alan Greenspan. We attended the Fed chairman's hearing in the Senate, and afterward he noticed a young woman walk up to Greenspan's table and snatch his name placard. In a crowded room full of senators I hadn't noticed it, but I followed him as he sought the woman out and asked her why she had done it. She confessed to being a sort of Greenspan junkie, who followed his public testimonials out of sheer enchantment. This was just the sort of colorful detail we were looking for. Sensing ! was about to crack up, I had to walk away and watch the interview from behind. But Glass kept talking sympathetically, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to follow Alan Greenspan around like he was the Grateful Dead.

Unfortunately for Glass, he is now permanently disqualified from using those reportorial skills, and so he has turned to fiction. After he was caught, I often heard it said that he should write novels. Perhaps he heard this himself and took it to heart. But it was clear all along that this notion was terribly misguided. He never had much talent for prose. When his stories read well, it usually resulted from heavy rewriting, most notably by Kelly. (Very often he would hand his stories to me minutes before they were due, and, to save him from embarrassment, I would perform a kind of emergency triage on his text, rearranging it into something resembling a coherent structure.) Moreover, his stories were interesting only because they were purportedly true. The characters in his stories, as in his novel, lack any depth or believability. What dooms him most of all as a novelist is the very thing that doomed his journalistic career: He lacks any capacity for grappling with moral questions.