Part I: Anonymous Sources in Current Affairs
Ed Klein's Blood Feud: The Clintons Vs. The Obamas is absorbing, loaded with tension, and the pages turn at the clip of a high-stakes soap opera. The characters are larger than life. In fact, they are the most powerful people running the United States of America, guardians of its present and shapers of its future. The actors fall into two camps dominating the Democratic Party who are at war with each other. Our future will be affected by the victor of their blood feud. Does this book sound relevant? Worth our time for summer reading?
Does a bear... you know what?
Books on current events written by journalists should be taken very seriously but there are a few things to keep in mind. For one thing, the authenticity of the work can not be measured by the same standard as a work of history written by an historian. Works of history treat subjects who are dead or who are at the very least out of power and can do no harm to the people being interviewed by the author. Sources do not mind being named. Documents are declassified and are waiting to be mined. A reader of historical non-fiction can expect a book of the genre to be well-sourced and (hopefully) annotated with notes and a bibliography providing the reader with the information needed to check the accuracy of the information and the plausibility of the claims made in the book.
By necessity, books on current affairs are a different sort of product and should be treated as such. The more current the events are, the more likely the author will need to rely on anonymous sources. Ed Klein's latest book Blood Feud depends heavily on anonymous sources. It is his long-awaited sequel to The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House and chronologically picks up where that book left off - in the late summer of 2011, when Obama's approval rating first dipped to the high thirties and his team began to worry about his prospects for re-election.
The Amateur was striking in its credibility. The premise of that book, among other things, was that Obama was incompetent and out of his depth in the White House and was a ruthless, mean-spirited character who cynically used people and threw them under the bus when he was finished with them. What made The Amateur so instantly believable was that most sources were named. For example, the author conducted a dramatic, three-hour, audio-taped interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright which formed the basis of a chapter in the book.
What makes Blood Feud most obviously different from The Amateur is its overwhelming use of anonymous sources. This is nagging for the educated reader who wants to know who said what. At some point the critical reader is inclined to say, "Come on...enough already. Name somebody, please."
And yet, all is not lost with anonymous sources. The publisher has the sources and keeps them protected. In the absence of naming the source for a scene, Ed Klein uses a method called deep background to establish his credibility with the reader. Here's one example:
Early in the book, Ed Klein paints a word-picture of a scene that took place after Hillary Clinton left the Obama administration in 2013. She organizes a luncheon with her old girlfriends from her Wellesley graduation class. They all meet at her favorite French bistro in New York. Klein's source is an unnamed woman in attendance. The upshot of the meeting is that Hillary announces her intention to run for the presidency in 2016. (Now most of us assume Hillary will run, but this scene is important because she, to this day, has carefully avoided making the announcement.) There are some other gossipy tid-bits in the scene. Hillary tells her girlfriends that "Obama has become a joke." She summarizes his incompetence with the quote, "There is no hand on the f****** tiller."
The source for the bistro luncheon is anonymous but Ed Klein gives the reader deep background for the scene. He names the bistro; names the chef who prepared the food; describes what courses were served and which wine was consumed. He describes the outfit Hillary was wearing. Klein repeats this method throughout the book, giving enough detail to establish authenticity but not enough to sap the tension or slow the turning of the pages.
This reader appreciates Ed Klein's sensitivity to the details of each scene in the absence of naming sources. Blood Feud is based on anonymous sources to a much greater degree than The Amateur because its events are more current than the events of the earlier book. Klein's sources for The Amateur were primarily people who had been involved in the various stages of Barack Obama's rise to power. They were people who had been used and discarded by him. In other words, they no longer had a relationship to protect. Perhaps they even relished being named as a source to get a little pay-back.
By contrast, the people interviewed for Blood Feud are still close to the Clintons and the Obamas. They have jobs and relationships to look out for. The drama is still unfolding. The truth is without anonymous sources, stories that should be told wouldn't get published. If the reader is forgiving about the overwhelming use of anonymous sources, Blood Feud is an engrossing read that will leave you haunted by its implications. More on this tomorrow.
Patriot Thought
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