New DC Tell-All Won't Say Much

Elite Washington is starting to brace itself for This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral -- Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! -- in America's Gilded Capital, the new so-called tell-all book by New York Times writer Mark Leibovich. Politico and others are reporting that the book promises to reveal the childishness and narcissism of D.C.'s media and political insiders.

Except This Town will do nothing of the sort. You can tell that by the 2011 profile that This Town author Leibovich did  about Politico reporter Mike Allen. In it, Leibovich flinched and then ducked when he was hitting on some interesting facts about Allen's life. Then Leibovich, a D.C. insider himself, refused to interview Allen's brothers and sisters because it "felt too invasive."

This is the ballsy journalist who is going to embarrass official Washington in July when the book is released?

In his research for the profile, Leibovich found out that Mike Allen's father, Gary Allen, was an Orange County right-winger who was an iconic voice for the John Birch Society. This information comes at the tail end of an endless, where-the-hell-is-this-going profile -- and then it is promptly dropped.

When Leibovich mentions Mr. Allen to son Mike, Mike's face freezes into a panicked smile. Then Allen the son says that he appreciates his parents but that "life is not binary," and waits for the reporter to change the subject. Lesson learned, Leibovich drops the subject. He then says something about asking Allen if he can call his siblings, but never follows up. Then the piece ends.

You may have heard of burying the lead, a journalistic term meaning to put the most important part of the story deep down in the copy. Leibovich put crucial information about Mike Allen so deep in the Times profile you'd need a hydraulic fracking device to find it.

I'm not saying that Gary Allen had to be the entire piece. Leibovich didn't have to go full Freud on Allen. But he could have gone deeper than just describing the younger Allen's quirks -- he's a pack rat and very private -- and thus made his profile, and I venture to guess what will be the the contents of This Town, more penetrating.

I'm afraid that This Town will not answer the question about Washington, D.C.'s insiders any more than any other "takedown" of the last few decades. Namely, what motivates these people? Leibovich reports that Mike Allen is a Christian who goes to Bible study in Washington. Why? How? For how long? Is he a convert? What does is faith mean to him? We never find out.

I've been a journalist my entire life, and I have never come across people who are as secretive as other journalists. This is the great secret of Washington's media elite. In every job you eventually achieve a certain level of intimacy with colleagues and let your guard down a little. Not with journalists. They never talk about their families, where they grew up or went to school, what cultural figures inspired them, and how they learned their craft.

Mark Leibovich accepts from Mike Allen than life is not binary, but he never counters with the argument that, while not binary, life can have patterns and that people are influenced by things -- books, movies, other people, religion. Not to mention the fact that Leibovich never speculates that Allen the son may have learned something about the craft of writing from Allen the father.

But nobody is allowed to go there, because these are the folks who appear on our computer screens and televisions every night and tell us what is what, and to sift through their lives might shatter the conceit that they belong to a holy and noble priesthood of truth tellers and immaculate speakers-of-truth-to-power.

Certainly it's not hard to guess how some of them got here. If you're an attractive liberal female like Norah O'Donnell, you can land in front of the camera no matter how much of a dingbat you are. But what about the others? Who are the staff writers for the Washington Post, what are their politics, and why did they become journalists?

Years ago I heard a joke that the Washington Post is an unofficial member of the Ivy League because that's where they recruit from. Is that true? If so, why? Say what you will about Bill O'Reilly, he puts his entire life out there -- where he grew up and went to school, his influences, what his dad was like at the dinner table.

What was Mike Allen's dad like at the dinner table?

This Town will not answer that question. Instead, it will reveal some embarrassing social-climbing behavior by a few people that few outside D.C. know or care about. The offended will be scandalized for a week, then go back to their parties and lobbying.

To report anything truly serious about who these people are and what motivates them would be uncouth, not to mention reveal that most of them are liberal activists who got their start in college if not earlier. And that gives up the game.

Reading Leibovich's weird profile of Allen, and anticipating the sorry high school defensiveness that will result from the rich and insulted in This Town, I thought of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a great book that helped me become a writer.

In the beginning, the writer Alex Haley is trying and failing to get Malcolm to open up. He tries everything, and can see the entire project failing, when in desperation he reaches for an ace. "Tell me about your mother," Haley asks. The shield cracks, and Malcolm X smiles and starts talking.

Washington needs a storyteller who will ask about your mother.