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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Williams

Leader and the Swan

Posted Monday, July 6, 1998, at 5:50 PM ET

Dear Tim,

Of course you're a pig in this case, since Nina Burleigh's cuteness quotient is of no relevance to our judgment about whether the president might have "ogled" her over a game of Hearts. Of course he did. Her miss-ish astonishment on this score is just one of many icky things about her piece. (The ickiest, if you're wondering, is her repeated insistence that Clinton's appreciation "rendered [her] willing and pliant." The second-ickiest is her casual mention of what she was wearing at the time of the fateful encounter--"a very short, green Betsey Johnson seersucker suit." I may swoon, the status-signifier says, but I'm not Gennifer Flowers. A close third is her appropriation of Yeats's great "Leda and the Swan."

I suppose there's honesty in Burleigh's admission that she found his power sexually compelling, but honesty is overrated when it comes to confessions as embarrassing as hers. I'm dumbstruck by her admission that while she was covering the president she sat in her hotel room after the card game wishing that the Big Guy would send an aide over to ask her for a drink. And then she sat down and wrote about this wish in a national magazine. It's one thing to use your sex, as female journalists are wise to do in covering the heavily male culture of politics. It's another to try to have sex with your subjects. (And using your sex is, of course, a risky business. Early in my career, covering Washington parties at night for the Washington Post's Style section, I was briefed by my professional sisters on how to dodge the greetings of a certain orange-haired senior senator, who had a way of throwing his arm around your shoulders to say hello and then insinuating his hand under your armpit, on the far side, to make a friendly tour of your soft tissue.)

A milestone of sorts: Michael Lewis's famous New Republic piece about his wife's derrière is no longer the most compromising piece of first-person journalism on record.

Did you see Roy Rogers died? The obit on the Los Angeles Times website notes that Rogers called himself "an introvert at heart." Only in America.

That's all for now. I just came away from a longish wait in the check-out line at the Safeway, so my mind's full of nothing but Bruce and Demi.

Chastely,

Marjorie


the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758596061626364656667686970717273747576
from: Marjorie Williams

Leader and the Swan

Posted Monday, July 6, 1998, at 5:50 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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