Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  THE ’90S

  The New Century had been the leading magazine of ideas and opinion in American life since its inception in 1890. This was, admittedly, a bit before the actual new century. But the magazine’s founder, a somewhat overly well-read industrialist named Horace Gladstone, considered himself a forward-thinking person. In the founding editorial, he wrote, “It is my intention to encourage America to adopt new technology, to keep the tax base moderate, to be mighty with the sword but diligent with the olive branch, and to promote freedom and opportunity for all people no matter the circumstances of their birth.” Gladstone split the middle of the road of opinion exactly down the middle, a winning formula that ensured the New Century’s editors would always be a hot date in the capital’s salons.

  One morning in April 1990, Brad Cohen walked into the New Century’s offices, on Twenty-First Street in Washington, DC, with the intention of joining their number. He carried with him all the confidence that one-and-a-half lifetimes could allow. For young men of a certain ethnic background, with a certain amount of ambition, and a taste for spending their working hours reading dreary old Congressional Record summaries, looking for a juicy policy tidbit, the New Century was the absolute best possible place to land. Brad shared the ethnicity and ambition but not the proclivity toward research. He didn’t need documents, because he already knew everything that was going to happen—at least everything that mattered. That gave him quite an edge.

  He leaned up against the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist was thin and small and ten years shy of elderly. She wore a sleeveless blouse and glasses so thick they could have doubled as car headlights. Her desk was about as tidy as the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange at closing bell. She was on the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Rosenstein is in a conference right now.”

  She was talking about Gary Rosenstein, the legendary biker professor of Harvard Yard and also the longtime arts and letters correspondent of the New Century. Gary Rosenstein had slept with two of Norman Mailer’s wives and possibly with Norman Mailer himself, and had somehow pulled off the trick of hanging out at both Andy Warhol’s Factory and Nixon’s White House. He was the only man in American who had Lou Reed and Henry Kissinger in his Rolodex. One time he’d broken Leonard Michaels’s nose at a party on a bet.

  Gary Rosenstein had spoken not one word to Brad in Brad’s previous tenure at the magazine, which had, technically, taken place a year in the future, but it was also twenty years in the past. Brad wasn’t going to get ignored again. Or maybe he was. Rosenstein ignored everyone. Either way, he was determined to make a better show of things this time.

  “May I take a message?” the receptionist asked.

  A pause.

  “OK,” she said. “How do you spell that?” And then, as she wrote, she said, “U-p-d-i-k-e.”

  Another pause.

  “OK then, Mr. Updick,” she said. “I’ll have Gary call you as soon as he can.”

  Brad suppressed a laugh. Actually, it was more like a scream.

  A door burst open. There stood Gary Rosenstein, his delicious mane of hair terribly disheveled, first three buttons of his collar open.

  “Was that call for me?” he said. “I was expecting one.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was a Mr. Updick from Massachusetts.”

  Gary Rosenstein sighed. “That’s Updike, Susan,” he said. “John Updike. The famous writer.”

  “Well, he called you.”

  Rosenstein rolled his eyes and went back into his office. Ten seconds later, the door opened again. CNN’s chief congressional correspondent walked out, patting down her hair, and left the room without looking at Brad or anyone else. That was a typical Rosenstein lunch hour.

  Finally, Susan, who Brad knew from past or future experience was everyone’s receptionist, acknowledged Brad’s presence.

  She looked up at him. “How can I help you, young man?” she said.

  “I’m here for my interview,” Brad said.

  He gave her his name, and she looked down at her desk.

  “Yes, you’re on the schedule,” she said. “Just wait here and they’ll come get you.”

  “Thanks,” Brad said, and then, winking, added, “I call him Mr. Updick too.”

  “Who’s Mr. Updick?” she said.

  The New Century’s current owner was Jacob Jaffe, a Yale professor of economics and also the second son of one of New England’s largest shipping families. He’d bought the magazine for pennies on the dollar in 1968 after the Washington Post had taken a brief but disastrous milquetoast stab at it, and immediately brought it back to political relevance by tacking its politics hard right, publishing witty screeds against the counterculture and women’s liberation, and even, in one dark hour, a cover essay titled “Is School Busing Really Necessary?” Of course it was, but Jacob Jaffe wasn’t necessarily in the game to be right.

  In 1972, just to stay in the conversation, Jaffe ordered the magazine to bank left. He rode Nixon hard. Admittedly, so did everyone else, but the New Century dug its spurs in as deep as anyone until that horse rode out of town. They published attacks on the CIA after the Allende assassination, had a correspondent in the Killing Fields of Cambodia before it was fashionable, and published an early piece on Harvey Milk and the new politics of gay liberation. Ralph Nader wrote a cover story about corporate propaganda, and Noam Chomsky submitted a dense tract called “The Banality of American Fascism.”

  As you can imagine, that got boring pretty fast. That era’s writers had since gone on to bemoan the decline of organized labor elsewhere. Recent years had seen Jaffe broach the middle. Starting in 1981, he employed a raft of senior editors, all of them hosts or panelists on at least one national TV show, whose opinions split exactly down the middle between “Reagan is an idiot” and “Reagan is a god.” This made for editorial meetings where everyone screamed at one another across the table all the time like undergrads in the cafeteria. It worked on TV, but it made managing the staff a pain in the ass. By 1990, the Reagan enchantment had begun to dissipate. Jaffe once again sensed a shift in the political winds. He was looking for a way to enter another phase. His way found him.

  Brad Cohen entered Jacob Jaffe’s office. It was a large office, wood paneled and professorial. Volumes of philosophy and history and journalism lined the walls, from Herodotus to Susan Faludi, with not much fiction or poetry mixed in. The arts were Rosenstein’s department. Jaffe liked the serious stuff that moved the world forward.

  He was reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal simultaneously, skipping back and forth between articles on the same topic, trying to read between the lines to figure out the real story. This was a hobby of his, an intellectual exercise like doing the crossword. Brad cleared his throat. Jaffe didn’t look up.

  “Mr. Jaffe,” he said.

  “Yes?” Jaffe said without looking up.

  “I’m Brad Cohen. I’m here to interview for the junior editor position.”

  Jaffe looked up. “I’m sure you are,” he said.

  They all looked the same to Jaffe, these eager young Jews with their big ideas and their starched collars. He knew them because he had once been one of them. Every year he handed out three junior editorships to the country’s most promising young future pundits, thereby filling the ranks of Washington journalism with his disciples and greatly reducing his risk of being attacked in a rival publication. It had worked for a long time.

  “I’ve been reading your clips,” Jaffe said to Brad’s surprise. “I liked that piece you wrote in the campus magazine comparing the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Donald Trump. Very clever.”

  “Thanks,” said Brad. “I like that one too.”

  “My one question is: Why waste any column inches at all on a nothing like Donald Trump? Spy chewed him up years ago.”

  “He’s not a nothing,”
Brad said. “An idiot maybe, but a consequential one. In fact, I think the Donald will be a player in American business and entertainment for the rest of his life. He could easily host a TV show. Even run for president.”

  “Donald Trump will never be president.”

  “Of course not. But he could be a candidate.”

  Jaffe pointed at Brad. “You,” he said, “are crazy.”

  He picked Brad’s résumé off the desk.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “Two-time high school journalist of the year. National Merit Scholar. Graduated from the University of Chicago, Phi Beta Kappa, with a double degree in political science and economics. Finished in two and a half years.”

  Jaffe paused and lowered his glasses halfway down his nose, unimpressed. He saw kids with credentials like that all the time. The junior editor gigs were tough to get.

  “What?” he said. “No Rhodes Scholarship?”

  “I’m not really a jock,” Brad said.

  “Hah,” Jaffe said. “Me either. A little racquetball and running maybe.”

  “Besides, I’m too selfish to be a Rhodes Scholar.”

  “Some of the most selfish people I’ve ever known have been Rhodes Scholars,” Jaffe said.

  This was Brad’s in.

  “You mean like our future president?” Brad said.

  “And who might that be?” said Jaffe. “Donald Trump is no Rhodes Scholar.”

  “No,” Brad said. “But Bill Clinton is.”

  “Bill Clinton?” said Jaffe.

  “Yes.”

  “The governor of Arkansas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hang on a second.”

  Jaffe pressed a button on his phone. “Susan,” he said. “Could you tell Gary I want to see him.”

  A minute later, Gary Rosenstein came through the door.

  “You rang, mein Führer,” he said.

  “Yeah. This is Brad. He’s applying to be a junior editor.”

  “A Jewnior editor,” said Gary Rosenstein with a studied sneer.

  “Brad, tell Gary what you just told me.”

  “Bill Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States,” Brad said.

  Jaffe and Rosenstein had a good laugh with that one. Brad sat stoically.

  “May I make my point?” he said after the yuks had subsided.

  “By all means,” Jaffe said, daubing his eyes.

  “He’s young, he’s handsome, and he’s about as aw-shucks as they come. And even though he has the most elite education imaginable, no politician fakes the common touch better. He’s the smartest man in any room, and he’s politically ruthless. When it comes to free trade and economics, he’s basically a Republican, but he also doesn’t play these bullshit trickle-down games, and he’s tough where he has to be on foreign policy. And let’s not forget his wife, who has a legitimate chance to someday be our first female president.”

  Again, Jaffe and Rosenstein laughed. Again, Brad regarded them stonily.

  “You can mock if you want,” he said, “but the Clintons are the ultimate modern power couple. They are going to seize control of this country and remake it in their boomer-yuppie image.”

  “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Jaffe said.

  “I may or may not be serious,” Brad said, “but I’m definitely right. Give me this job. Assign me a cover story on Bill Clinton. I’ll prove it to you.”

  “Junior editors don’t usually get cover stories. Mostly, they make copies and do research for the senior editors.”

  “I’ll do all of that,” Brad said. “But also give me the Clinton story. I’ll stay on that beat for two years until he’s elected.”

  “The junior editor position only pays two hundred dollars a week,” Jaffe said. “Which is why the positions are usually summer internships.”

  “Money’s not a problem,” Brad said. “I invested all my bar mitzvah gifts in Apple stock.”

  Jaffe and Rosenstein gave each other a look. They wanted to pivot the magazine again. This kid clearly had a vision. If he was wrong, they could always dump him. Jaffe said, “How about we make you a senior editor instead?”

  The appointment of an unknown twenty-year-old—and one without an Ivy League degree, no less—to their ranks had the rest of the New Century’s editors in a frenzy. They’d never been on this side of an editorial sea change. The churning waters were making them a little sick.

  They sat in the New Century’s conference room, awaiting the arrival of their new colleague.

  “What were they thinking?” said Arnie Kaufman, a staunch libertarian with modest predilections toward technology and corporate largesse.

  “You’ve got to serve time in the bullpen,” said Mark Dubinsky.

  The bullpen was where the junior editors sat, alongside the fax machine and the LexisNexis console. There were four of them, hip to hip, back to back, constantly on the phone checking facts, awash in a sea of research printouts and tear sheets while also desperately trying to find the angle that would secure them a slot in a private office. Each senior editor had one of those rooms with a door, ringing the bullpen like luxury boxes. Once your name went on the door, it rarely came off unless life took you elsewhere. Becoming a New Century senior editor was no one’s life ambition, but it was concrete in which that ambition could rest.

  “Everyone pays their dues,” said Mark Dubinsky’s twin sister, Tessa. He was a Republican and she was a Democrat. Both of them were nerdy-cute, in their early thirties. They were in discussion to set up a he-said, she-said debate show on CNN to follow Crossfire.

  Also in the room were George Brook, a terrifyingly hawkish refugee from a pro-Reagan think tank, and Eddie McCord, the youngest and most recently hired of the group. Brook was always wrong about every major issue of the day. He stated his opinions in muscular and witty prose that almost made it acceptable that he had a side gig taking corporate speaking fees. Jaffe kept him around because he brought in a certain wealthy audience.

  McCord was the cultured one, under consideration in the highly unlikely event that Gary Rosenstein would abdicate his valuable throne at the top of Mount Critic. He made his first splash with the publication of a cover essay, “The Bisexual American,” the first such piece to appear in any magazine with even a pretense of mainstreamness. Since 1987, he’d kept the magazine on the people’s side when it came to the AIDS crisis and the banning of gangsta rap, and on the establishment’s side when it came to the encroachment of political correctness into college curriculums. He was Jaffe’s version of the youth movement, a bulwark against the magazine seeming too square and wonky. The fact that he was a bit of a dull pedant, and also in his midthirties, didn’t seem to hurt his rising reputation as a voice of the new generation.

  There they sat with four other men: a science guy, a defense specialist, an economist, and a thinly disguised political operative, all of whom were forty-three, all bespectacled, and all Harvard graduates. All told, they represented the New Century’s hive mind. The prospect of a new arrival threatened everything.

  Brad Cohen entered the room with Jaffe and Rosenstein. He had the body of a twenty-year-old but the experience of a sixty-year-old. This made him far more dangerous than any of the senior editors could imagine. They may have been smart, but he’d actually lived through the ’90s before. Being able to predict the future with nearly 100 percent accuracy was a great gift in this line of work.

  Jaffe took his place at the head of the table, and Rosenstein sat at the other end, like parents at seder. Brad sat next to Jaffe.

  “OK, everyone,” Jaffe said. “Item one, the only item that really matters. This is your new senior editor, Brad Cohen.”

  “His name was created by a random-Jewish-name generator,” Rosenstein said.

  Everyone laughed, including Brad, because it was basically true.

 
; “Hold on a second, Jacob,” said Mark Dubinsky, because they all called Jaffe by his first name; the New Century was a family until it wasn’t. “Why does he get promoted like this? Tessa and I served our time in the pits, and the rest of us started on the bottom somewhere.”

  There was a murmur of agreement. Brad was clearly an interloper, an undeserving. He wasn’t even old enough to drink! But Brad had thought through this situation very carefully. He knew who these people were and more or less where they were going; a couple of them, he couldn’t quite remember, but it was nowhere important. He’d been studying them for two lifetimes, and he was ready to take them down, mostly by waiting them out.

  Other than McCord, who would prove remarkably resilient, and Gary Rosenstein, who was probably a vampire, the rest of them had a career shelf life of five to twelve years. The Dubinskys would retreat to university life after disastrously backing Al Gore in the recount fight. Jacob Jaffe himself would suffer a fatal heart attack while skiing in Vermont in 2004. If Brad just gave them what they wanted now, he’d outlast them all.

  “Brad, maybe you want to address that,” Jaffe said.

  “Of course,” Brad said. “Look, I’m not here to be a threat to you all. I wasn’t even looking for a senior editor job. Jacob just offered me one, whether I deserve it or not, and it would be foolish of me to turn it down. But I’m not going to take one of the private offices. I’m going to sit in the bullpen with the other juniors. You all can use me as you see fit—research, phone calls, whatever. I won’t get your lunch or your coffee—that’s below my pay grade—but in any other way, I’m yours.”

  “So why is he a senior editor then?” asked Kaufman, addressing Jaffe directly, as though Brad were incapable of answering for himself.

  “Brad’s got a story he’s going to be working on,” Jaffe said. “His beat exclusively.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It has to do with the next president.”

  “Does he know something we don’t?” asked George Brook with a huge guffaw.

  “He thinks he does,” Jaffe said.