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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

the breakfast table
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from: Katha Pollitt

We Are All on Good Morning America

Posted Thursday, April 30, 1998, at 1:27 PM ET

Good Morning Andrew --

I can't retrieve my e-mail at the moment. Could it be because I am treasuring 1275 messages in my inbox? Anyway, I will just send off into the blue my thoughts on seeing Peter Kurth, brother of Barbara Kurth, on Good Morning America (I think). You'll remember that Barbara Kurth is the mother whose daughters were kidnapped by her ex-husband, Stephen Fagan, who changed his name and lived in shadowy splendor in Palm Beach Florida, raising "the girls" as they are always called (they're now 21 and 23), having told them their mother died in a car crash. Barbara Kurth got no help from FBI or legal system in tracking him down, by the way, because the kidnapping took place in l979, before parental kidnapping was covered by appropriate laws. She spent all her money on private eyes, to no avail.

So of course, since she is the mother, Barbara Kurth has been attacked in the media, solely on the basis of allegations by Stephen Fagan, who says she was an alcoholic who neglected the children, leaving him no choice. (She denies his charge--which was investigated by the court, after all, which found them untrue and gave her custody.) He doesn't explain why he kept up the deception for two decades, long after his ex-wife had clearly overcome her problems if she ever had any, and had gotten a Ph.D. (she is now a professor of cell biology, married--but no kids). His whole family was in on it, too--his parents also moved to Florida. It's hard to imagine the cruelty involved here.

Anyway, I turn on the TV in my hotel room in Whittier California, which is--as every single person I mentioned this place to reminded me--where Nixon went to college (why do we all have this little fact so firmly implanted in our brains?), and there was Barbara Kurth's brother, Peter, being interviewed by Katie Couric. And what amazed me is that here was this ordinary American man, who had been suddenly plucked from obscurity by the hand of fate, and he knew exactly what to do on television! How to sit (not too slumpy, not too stiff), what to do with his hands (kept them quiet, don't gesticulate or fiddle with your ear or other body part), how to arrange his expressions (relaxed, alert, open, affable), how to speak in sound bites (don't digress! don't get mad! don't talk too long!). It was as though he'd been on TV every day for years.

Talk to you later,
Katha

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990
from: Katha Pollitt

We Are All on Good Morning America

Posted Thursday, April 30, 1998, at 1:27 PM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist at The Nation. Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at the New Republic.
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