David Weir

Someone’s desk, its fake wood paneling peeling off, peeks out the side of a torn home that is crumpled into an accordion-like sculpture. The sides of another house are ripped away, improbably leaving a clothes closet unscathed, its garments arranged on hangers as neatly as the day their owner disappeared.

Bits of dried cloth, their colors faded and coated with dried muck, hang rigidly over the trees, acting as sentinels guarding the ruins below. Birds don’t land here anymore.

At first glance, East Biloxi looks like a ghost town. But poke around a bit and people start emerging from inside their crushed houses, from tents pitched out back, or from some of the new FEMA trailers that have recently arrived. Most of the survivors still seem to be trying to just grasp the scope of what has happened to them. They are confused as to why so little help has yet arrived. And they’re angry.

Despite the rhetoric of government leaders, and large relief organizations, not to mention the massive media coverage in the weeks following the disaster, these people sense now that they are the leftovers, the ones who, if they are going to rebuild their lives, apparently will have to do it on their own.

Lee Smith is one of the locals who’s been waiting for months for help to arrive. “Till last week, every time you call them, they got a different lie to tell you,” says Smith, 55, recounting his efforts to get answers from his insurance company and from officials at FEMA. “I’ve just been waiting on them for something to happen.”

As others have noted, Katrina laid bare a dirty secret in America — a secret with many names. We know it’s about race and class but it’s about other things as well, things less easily labeled. The storm provided a visible reminder that progress in this country for some always comes at a cost to others. One thing about living in a society that regularly scrubs itself of its collective memory is we keep having to relearn the lessons of the past.

East Biloxi, and the other small towns of the Gulf Coast, as well as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, are places where the poor are poor in so many ways. They can’t read or write well, and don’t have the skills or clout to get what they need out of government bureaucracies or private insurance companies. They can’t see a way out of their traps. Lacking much effective political leadership or advocates, they are dependent on the good people still showing up, willing to help.

Smith, a homeowner, a single dad and a former construction worker, stands next to his small three-bedroom house, where — until the storm — he lived with his two teenage daughters. Now the house sits cracked and twisted on its foundation, filled with jumbled and ruined piles of his possessions. The sour odor of mold drifts out of his screened windows, causing him to edge further downstream.

Smith is a diabetic with high blood pressure and suffers from cancer that he has been told is terminal. He needs pain medications and oxygen canisters for breathing. Because of the mold, he can’t enter his house to take inventory of what is missing and what remains, for insurance claim purposes.

Looters stole one of Smith’s cars and ransacked his house after the storm. Knowing how ill he was, he’d recently poured his life savings into refurbishing the house (“so my girls would have something to fall back on”) and on rebuilding several vintage cars and trucks that are one true passion in his life.

But Smith says his insurance adjuster has told him his policy won’t cover most losses because the damage was caused by flooding, not the storm itself.

Smith’s case is hardly unique. Mississippi state officials estimate that there are 35,000 homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed but who did not have flood insurance. Meanwhile, the post-storm grace period for not paying their mortgages has ended, and efforts to extend them federal relief are stalled in Congress.

“The insurance companies, including mine, are telling us it was a flood,” says Councilman Lawrence. “But how can you have a hurricane without the wind? This isn’t a flood zone. It was wind-driven surge that did this damage.”

Into the vacuum, volunteers from the grass-roots nonprofit group Hands On USA are helping survivors put their lives back together. Cutting through the red tape of government and large relief organizations, Hands On USA volunteers are helping East Biloxi residents manage such day-to-day chores as clearing debris from their houses, finding temporary shelter and seeking counseling.

The group, which formed in Thailand last year after the devastating tsunami hit there, set up shop in a Biloxi church soon after Katrina blew ashore. “We immediately put out the word and the volunteers started pouring in,” Hands On USA co-director Dave Campbell explains. So far, more than 700 people from all over the U.S. and Canada have come down to work in Biloxi, some staying for just a weekend or a week, others hanging out for the duration.

“Our initial strategy was to stay just three months — to hit the beach like the Marines and then hand it off to the Army,” explains Campbell. “Only problem is, it doesn’t look like the Army is going to show up.”

Campbell adds that “soon after we got here it was clear there was a great mental health need. Leaving after three months would have had us pulling out between Thanksgiving and Christmas — not a good time to disappear on these people. So now we plan to stay until the end of January.”

In Lee Smith’s case, Hands On USA volunteers have succeeding in getting FEMA to deliver him a disabled-access trailer — after his own repeated attempts had failed.

Relief workers say that FEMA’s process for registering storm victims for trailers is confusing and has led to many cases where people like Smith have fallen through the cracks. Victims were asked such ambiguous question as: “Are you willing to relocate?” “Is your house livable?” “Has FEMA assessed your property?” Depending on their answers, many were denied trailers. Victims like Smith just grew more frustrated.

Every survivor presents a new story. William Michael Vanderberg, known to everyone as “Mike,” still seems traumatized by what happened when he tried to ride out the storm. He has a broken hand and cracked sunglasses, and his lips tremble when he talks. He keeps glancing over his shoulder at the Gulf of Mexico, less than a block away, as if he fears it may suddenly rear up once again.

“Susan, I ain’t seen her. She lived right over there,” he mumbles, pointing to a lot littered with debris, all that’s left of Susan’s house. “She’s out there, I reckon,” gesturing toward the Gulf.

He turns around. “I had four friends staying in a hotel, over about there. The hotel’s gone. I ain’t seen any of them, reckon they’re gone, too.”

Hands On USA volunteers discovered Mike recently living in his car. They bought him a tent, sleeping pad and sleeping bag, and helped him stake out a spot under a live oak tree. They also are helping him with FEMA, where he has a non-homeowner’s application on file for aid. In addition, they drove him to a doctor, who bandaged up his broken hand, and to a psychiatrist.

Mental health experts have indicated that antidepressant medications are needed for survivors showing signs of post-traumatic stress in the storm-ravaged areas. Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that some 500,000 people — both hurricane survivors and the emergency workers who helped them — may need mental health services.

In the midst of the devastation, larger relief organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army have been scaling down their efforts. They still have warehouses of supplies but no efficient way to distribute them to people in the poor communities of the Gulf Coast. Both still send out trucks with warm meals, and they are distributing boxes of clothes and other goods from certain centralized locations. But this will all end soon, according to local representatives of the two agencies. The Red Cross has already closed all of its shelters and the Salvation Army plans to stop its meal service before Christmas.

By contrast, Hands On USA is sending out teams every day to strip mold out of houses, remove debris, and demolish structures. (Several religious organizations also are on the scene, doing similar work.) Volunteer teams have cut up and removed hundreds of trees — live oaks, pines, magnolias, white birch, even a few pecans, though one volunteer estimates there is still “20 years of work left here.”

The biggest question hanging over East Biloxi is what will become of this place, once all the debris has been carted away, and the land is finally open for redevelopment. One answer is already evident.

Until Katrina, a series of large barges anchored offshore served as casinos, and were by far the largest employers in the area. When the storm pushed the barges ashore, they cut wide swaths over the land, taking out everything in their path. Today, they sit far inland, with more than a few flattened houses and possibly bodies still underneath.

Soon after the storm, local and state officials announced that from now on they will locate the casinos on land, within the first 800 feet of Biloxi’s shore. Some of this new development will cut directly into East Biloxi’s worst-hit sections.

Not surprisingly, rumors fly around these neighborhoods: “The remaining houses will all be flattened for new casinos. There won’t be a place for any of us to live around here anymore.”

The threat seems credible. Amid a total pre-storm population of about 50,000 in Biloxi, the casinos accounted for some 30,000 jobs. The first casino reopenings are scheduled for later this month.

“Nobody — the local, county or state government — wants to put anyone out of their home,” says Councilman Lawrence. “But it’s going to be hard for our people on minimum incomes to rebuild here now. Houses will cost $60,000 to $100,000. It’s hard to secure a loan.

“Our old way of life in Biloxi is gone,” he concludes. “What we got now is gaming. Where we lived will probably be a prime onshore gambling site now. We will lose a lot of the outer perimeter of East Biloxi.”

Now that it’s winter, cold fronts are sweeping down from the north, so volunteers from Hands On USA deliver blankets and coats, items the poor of East Biloxi used to own but now do not.

An elderly lady named Cora Reddix, in her 80s, answers a knock on her trailer door from some volunteers. Reddix lost her house and her car in Katrina. She also lost two toes to a gangrene infection that went too long untreated, so now she is virtually housebound, or trailer bound, with no way to get out and help herself.

Like almost everyone in these parts, Reddix is surprised that someone has come to help her. And grateful. Today’s delivery includes a new pillow, very nice, donated by somebody somewhere up north, and packaged up by Hands On USA volunteers earlier that morning.

“Oh my, thank you, ” says Reddix, tears in her eyes. “I’m livin’ uptown now!”

Hands On USA co-director Campbell, contemplating the limits of his group’s ability to help the residents of East Biloxi, and conscious that they will all be gone by the end of next month, says he is looking for ways to interest various political figures in their plight.

“After all,” he says, “one way or another these folks going to be on the social safety net of the system, however tattered.”

As I drive around the shattered Gulf Coast, an old Bob Dylan song keeps playing in my head:

Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds.
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken.

Katrina may have done all the physical damage down here, but there’s something much bigger that’s been broken too. That is the wrecking of a social services system that no longer takes care of the most vulnerable among us.

This hoary memory surfaced recently when I read that Bill Bradley has the same heart condition that I have, atrial fibrillation. Bradley said that on four occasions he has felt bad enough to cancel or delay his rigorous campaign schedule.

I can certainly relate: On that first occasion, my lunch mates drove me to a nearby emergency room, where a noticeably nonchalant M.D. listened through his stethoscope. “Your heart is beating out of rhythm a bit. Just try to relax. It should pass in a while.”

I let myself take a deep breath (until then I think I had been afraid to breathe deeply, lest my heart explode — though by breathing shallowly, I essentially caused myself to hyperventilate). Suddenly I realized that I probably could slow my own heart rate down, which is more or less what I then proceeded to do.

After a few more deep breaths, the episode had passed, and I felt normal again. The doctor explained I had just experienced cardiac arrhythmia, an irregular heart beat.

Press reports have raised questions about whether this will affect the public’s perception of Bradley’s ability to perform the duties of president, should he be elected this coming November. “It can’t help but hurt him,” said one commentator on a talk show I was half-listening to the other morning. “People will wonder if he can take the stress of the office.”

Tying the irregular heartbeat issue to stress was, in my experience at least, a perfectly accurate connection to make, although the idea that anyone would vote against Bradley for this little problem seems silly. Since that first episode at lunch long ago, I’ve experienced many such fluttery moments. In recent years, the incidents grew in frequency and severity until my physician recommended that I start taking a pill to regulate the heartbeats.

Since then, the problem has essentially disappeared.

Press reports about Bradley, who is just four years older than I am, suggest he experiences a rapid “speedup” in beats — the same as I did. When the rhythm gets out of whack, the beats seem to overtake each other, almost like racers on a track — and this is actually a pattern you can see on a printout of a electrocardiogram.

Bradley also takes medication to control this condition, and the most serious recent incident he’s reported came on a day when he says that he forgot to take his pill. When my own prescription ran out last week and I thought I was too busy to get it refilled immediately, sure enough, that damn fluttering feeling returned for me, too. Again, I could empathize.

According to the doctors, drinking coffee or alcohol can sometimes provoke arrhythmia, but maintaining a very heavy pace at work or dealing with personally stressful situations of any kind also seemed to bring the problem on for me — or they did until I started taking the medication. I don’t know if the former senator from New Jersey experiences it this way, but the worst part of these episodes was often the aftermath, when I’d feel very tired, which is not exactly convenient in the middle of, say, a long staff meeting — or when delivering a campaign speech.

So for me, at least, having this little problem led me to develop a type of self-discipline where I would try to will myself to stay as calm as possible in difficult circumstances. If this failed, and my heartbeat started racing out of control, I reverted to the slow, deep breathing I first learned years ago, and simply waited it out. In a bad case, I’d lie down and rest until it passed, although this has the unfortunate effect of seemingly making it easier to feel what is happening inside there, not to mention that lying down is not always possible, especially for a president.

Bradley, ex-athlete that he is, maintains what sounds to be a much more active exercise routine than I do these days, but I still play recreational sports and coach kids’ soccer, and this problem has never affected any of that. Running, hiking, skiing, swimming, sports of all kinds don’t seem to be any harder to do than they ever were.

Frankly, except for a few discrete episodes, this problem has never been much more than an irritation for me, like a stomach ache, a head cold, a minor burn; the normal discomforts of every day life. Compared to allergies, say, or even the hiccups, it’s nothing much to complain about.

Sometimes over the years, no doubt hoping to elicit a little reaction, I’ve mentioned the problem to friends. “Isn’t that what they used to call ‘palpitations,’” one of the first people I told asked.

“Ah yeah,” I would admit. “That’s right.” You see, it can be hard to get much respect for a malady so closely associated to romance novels. It’s like succumbing to a case of the vapors.

But, unlike that clueless commentator I overheard discussing Bradley’s palpitations as a political liability, the ex-senator and I know there are two million of us out there in America with this particular disability — and we therefore qualify as a little-noticed but certifiable constituency!

Move over, Sen. John McCain and your war veterans. Our guy Bradley has the cohort of a whole interest group of people with troubled hearts. And the one thing we sure know how to do is to swoon over our man.

Those are the folks who are just that close to this or that senator or inhabitant of the White House or well-known media personality. The shared assumption inside the Beltway is that the exercise of power through these established channels still matters — a lot.

Maybe so. But this faith in traditional, derived power adds an almost quaint air to the nation’s capital at the millennial moment. Such beliefs evaporate the further away from Washington one travels, of course, and are downright rare by the time you reach Silicon Valley, where increasing numbers of congressmen seem to be showing up these days, hands outstretched. The irony in this is that the belief that government’s day is coming to a close, that a rapid transformation of society is occurring via digital networks, has been an article of faith among the digerati for years.

Even the justice department’s aggressive counter-attack via the anti-trust suit against Microsoft has failed to change many minds in the wired world about government’s waning power. The only difference is that now tech money flows into the lobbyist firms clustered along K Street like champagne at an election party. As a line item, you might call it “insurance.”

As a direct result, however, Congress has suddenly reversed its traditional antagonism to high-tech and Internet issues (remember the Communications Decency Act?) to grant tax breaks for ecommerce and for R&D, to limit liability for stock volitility and Y2K computer failures, and to grant more job visas for immigrant workers. The war on encryption is virtually over, with the defeated National Security Agency in disarray, as Seymour Hersh documented recently in the New Yorker.

The fact that the new tech-friendly policies are furthering the development of a networked economy that undermines the traditional centralized authority of the nation-state itself is rarely mentioned. But if this era does indeed herald “the end of big government,” as Bill Clinton famously noted a few years back, where will that leave Washingtonians, the custodians of the old company store?

Perhaps the biggest public policy question facing our society as the millennium turns is barely being discussed inside the United States, though it hangs over everything here just like those winter storm clouds that hover but never seem to burst, and that is: “What’s the new role for government?”

In order to find a substantive discussion of this issue in the past year, you would have had to travel quite a ways beyond the Beltway — over to the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, where near the end of November there was what was called the Third Way Conference. President Clinton was there, along with other nascent globalists like Tony Blair (Britain), who’s just learned how to send e-mail; Gerhard Schroeder (Germany); Lionel Jospin (France); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil).

Clinton and Blair, bouyed at home by their robust economies, argued for a new role for government — empowering citizens through universal education and access to technology so all can participate fully in the new economy. They consider their philosophy “progressive governance,” i.e., not strictly a public sector nor a private sector option, which is to say, a Third Way.

France’s Jospin worried out loud: “I see that we have a new economy but it’s not going to sweep away history, it’s not going to sweep away the various social groupings and it must not sweep away the nation-state. I’ll accept a networked economy but I don’t want a world dominated by networks, because that will be run by the private sector.”

Clinton later agreed with Jospin’s position: “We’ll say yes to the market economy, but no to the market society.” He went on to say that “what we’re striving for is to replace a divided way of looking at politics and talking about our common lives with a unifying theory.”

Here in the capital, it is rare to hear such debates. Behind most of the Neoclassical facades on archaic government buildings, entire floors of bureaucrats continue to occupy themselves with matters of amazingly minimal relevance to most people’s lives.

The cumbersome insititutions of government have undergone remarkably little change this decade, even as the world around them has melted away to reveal a new one in formation — an economy where people switch jobs constantly, building private portfolios and networks they carry with them, joining informal teams to invent new opportunities, generating wealth through equity culture — all based on digitized information as the common currency of a post-industrial, post-ideological society in the making.

A world where, as Walter Wriston has noted, information can be literally more valuable than money; one where ideas based on scarcity are being replaced by new ideas based on abundance.

In its own odd way, Washington sits poised on the bleeding edge of all this change. No other town on the continent is so information-obsessed, which explains its “most wired” distinction. Washington is, and long has been, the candy store for information junkies, so much so that the emergence of searchable databases linked to each other represents a perfect virtual replica of the space that Washington, Inc., has long occupied in the physical world. (According to a year-end survey, the Washington area actually has more tech firms — 12,183 — than any other in the country, even Silicon Valley, which has 11,930.)

The biggest difference is that physical Washington with its hallowed corridors of power is built only for the insiders. The main business in this place is making sure that you’ve got equal access to Republicans and Democrats — everyone wants to be bi- and to have it both ways.

Until recently, therefore, anybody who told you they could detect the fine cuts of positioning separating, an Al Gore, say, from a George W. Bush, had been paying way too much attention, or was making a buck on the detail work. (That changed a bit when both candidates had to start articulating their positions due to unexpectedly strong challenges within their own parties.)

Still, there’s no ideology left here, nothing that can stand alone without a modifier, like “compassionate” conservatives who say they support faith-based organziations, or “pragmatic” liberals who say they support faith-based organizations.

As they slice and dice their way to the bank, the old hands in Washington don’t yet fully comprehend that their world is dying. Their old system, based on the hoarding of access to power and classified information, is crumbling; it’s being replaced by the new chaos of a frenzied trade in information by everybody.

Even that most hallowed insider transaction — campaign fundraising — is being subverted by the Internet. Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura used the Web to develop grassroots support for his unlikely campaign, helping him to raise hundreds of thousands in matching funds for much-needed television and radio ads. His eventual election was a shock to many journalists, though not necessarily on the Web.)

This year, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain has used the Internet to raise more than $1 million from his supporters at his Web site — which is one reason he has been able to challenge Bush for his party’s nomination.

In a move that perhaps was more than just another photo op, McCain and former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley joined hands across party lines earlier this month to pledge that if they win their parties’ nominations, they will enforce a ban on accepting “soft money” donations. Like McCain, Bradley has been successful raising money online, more so than the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Vice-President Gore.

Of all these candidates, Gore may be the one most aware of the need for a Third Way, though he seems too cautious a politician to do much about it. During Clinton’s final year in office, look for him to do a lot of talking of the sort he did in Florence; starting in 2001, as a civilian from his base in Little Rock, he certainly will be a leading international advocate for constructing a new civic culture.

Back here at the center of the empire, if you look closely, the marble atop the swamp in this fine old town shows evidence of hairline fractures, as it gradually is coming undone from the inside by the pink ethernet vines, T-1′s, and DSL that are creeping in under the red, white and blue carpeting from all sides.

Most of the inmates of the marble asylum remain, for now, blissfully unaware of the threat.

That too, however, will be changing.

In the film, Bergman is cast favorably as a man of his word, the moral force who eventually persuades Wallace to come around to the side of good — a detail Wallace has
vociferously
challenged. But those of us who have worked closely with Bergman over the years know him as one of the premier
reporters of his time. (I’ve collaborated
with him on and off since 1972, at Rolling Stone magazine and the Center for Investigative Reporting,
as well as on televised reports for “20/20,” “60 Minutes” and PBS, and also as co-lecturers
at the University of California).

A dogged, rough character who will go almost
anywhere in pursuit of his story, Bergman also is a committed intellectual
who has made a mission of spreading awareness of what he calls the “grammar
of television” to as large an audience as possible. In this way, he’s also an
activist, one who believes in using the media to reveal
how power is exercised, in the pursuit (though he is far too gruff and macho to
ever admit this, even to a friend) of truth and justice. I interviewed him Thursday, a few hours
before the Washington premier of “The Insider.”

How are you?

I’m pretty good, now that Mike [Wallace] has surrendered.

Surrendered?

Yeah, in the New York Times yesterday. He said that he’s been hearing from people that the
movie is pretty good and he doesn’t look so bad after all. And he’s decided that he’s now at
peace.

Zeroing in on Mike for a minute …

Mike has given up.

Yeah, I want to get to that. But, just matching movie with reality for a
little bit here — did his “I’m with you, Don” quote in the movie [implying Wallace's complicity with his boss, Don Hewitt, in withholding the tobacco story] really happen?

No.

OK, so that would be one of the events that captures what you call
“the emotional and philosophical honesty” of the film?

Look, there’s many things in the film that did not happen, and in fact,
much of the film is the reconstruction of a time line. So that if you watch
it closely as to certain developments, it’s not logical.

I said to Michael Mann, “What is this?” And he said it’s
not a documentary. It’s a dramatization of the events.
And its a very effective — in my opinion — vehicle for expressing both
the emotional — particularly the emotional — and psychological aspects of
doing this kind of work and being in this kind of situation.

If it had been done in the chronological order as a documentary, I
doubt anybody would watch it. It would be like what the CBS lawyers said to
me when they signed off and released me to work on this movie. They said
– to paraphrase them — “Have fun working on the movie. We know it’s a very
complicated story where there’s no death or violence, so it’s unlikely ever
to be made.”

Looks like they were wrong.

I guess.

I would assume one of those philosophically honest aspects was
the fear that seems to have been the galvanizing emotion behind Mike and Don’s decision to
initially side with the corporate guys. I’d
like to hear you talk about that, that corporate big-foot possibility.

Well, I mean the bottom line in all of this is that the company came
over to news division and said, “Whether you believe them or not, what you
guys are doing is going to result in a tobacco company owning CBS.”

Did you believe that?

No.

And so they were … blackmailing?

The presentation that was made by the general counsel was very, very
persuasive, and it did not truck any dissent.

I see.

You couldn’t … if you said something, various questions were raised and
[the corporate counsel] just kept saying, “No, that won’t make any difference
and that won’t make any difference” and so forth.

And so in terms of what went on with Mike and Don, they were sort
of, if you will … they say they were sort of overwhelmed.

The general counsel presented it
with the veneer that there would be a three-week period where this was all
going to be considered by outside counsel. It wasn’t permanent. Yet
certain things happened in the following week that convinced me that that
was just bullshit — including them ordering me out of [whistle-blower Jeffrey] Wigand’s house when I went back to him
to sort of fact-check things.

The second thing that was going on here that
was different from whatever Mike or Don or anyone else was considering was
that I’m the one who had the intensive personal contact with Wigand and his
family over a long period of time. So I’m the one who has to bear, if you
will, the personal, emotional price of what this might mean for him.
As well as the ethical question of having done a lot to try to get him
to tell his story and help him tell his story.

So you’d invested yourself.

Invested? I was in a situation where — if I had, for instance, gone
public and denounced what was going on, I endangered revealing
my source. So I was caught in a situation where even if I did go
public, I realized — being, as Morley Safer liked to point out to me, “just
a producer” — I could easily be damaged from behind by my colleagues saying,
“Well, he’s off the reservation, and there are all kinds of other factors
here that he doesn’t even know about.”

And what would that have done? It wouldn’t have helped Wigand’s
credibility. That’s for sure. So, it was a difficult balancing act at
that point. But there’s no question that Mike and Don, from the period of
these first meetings until the middle of October, which would be two weeks
after quote “the final decision,” had no intention of ever making any of
this public, had no intention of lifting a finger to help Wigand. Just the
opposite. The company had said, “Don’t go near him, don’t help him.”

It’s only when they realized that if they cut Wigand loose — which is
what they had done — that the story itself, that is, the substance of what
he had to say about Brown & Williamson, was going to come out anyway.

So they were going to lose the story — part of which appeared on
the front page of the Wall Street Journal — and eventually the story would come out
that they killed the story. So that’s when they began maneuvering. Don began maneuvering to figure out a way to
do “a censored version.” Which is not accurately portrayed in the movie. But it’s a complication
that’s very difficult to explicate.

It sounds like when it became clear that others were going to get the
story and he was going to lose the story, Don’s journalistic chops kicked in.

To a certain extent. But there was the problem of how to spin it. At that
point, assuming that more of the story came out, and my reporting back to
them that Wigand was now talking to the Wall Street Journal, it would come
out eventually that they had killed the story.

And why did Wigand start talking to the Wall Street Journal?

Well, because he was no longer obligated just to talk to us. And because,
in the middle of August, he had put his name on the witness list for ABC
and their libel suit. And then ABC folded. So he was hanging out there to
dry anyway by ABC already, and their lawyers. And so reporters were calling
him. Byron Levin of the L.A. Times was calling him, Alex Friedman was
calling him. And he would say to me, “Should I talk to these people?” And
I said, “No, no. We’re going to do the story. Don’t talk to them.” And
then when we’re not doing the story, he calls me and says, “Should I talk
to this woman?” And I said, “I guess you should, because we’re not doing
the story.”

It seems you had to go through this difficult personal transformation from the
journalist who has managed whistle-blowers all your career to being one yourself.

In a manner of speaking, my final act as a whistle-blower in this is the
movie. Because, in the movie, it’s clear I leaked the story to the New York Times
that made it all public. You know, so that is true. The other thing
that’s happened is that — and this is a matter of luck and the fact that a
lot of people stood up and did the right thing — is that the movie
undermines any attempt to simply spin this as an anomaly.

The reality is, inside the business — especially the network television
news business — it’s self-censored, mostly. And when push comes to
shove, it’s censored. And that’s when it has to deal particularly with
stories that involved institutions that are the same size or larger –
private institutions, public institutions, governments, spy agencies —
they’re all fair game. But in the world where multinational megacorporations
are the new and growing power center, don’t expect to see much critical coverage
on network television.

The fictional treatment reveals that structural reality. Is that really what you’re
proudest of in this film?

I’m proudest for Michael Mann and Eric Roth, and the people involved
in making the film, that they were actually able to get this film not only
made, but distributed.

In Hollywood film history, it’s hard to think of another
political-economic critique of a major industry like the media.

Yeah. I don’t think that this is what I would call an in-depth political
critique. It’s not a documentary or a polemic. But through the structure
that Michael Mann has chosen to tell the story — which is really about two
people — those concepts are the overarching theme.

Michael wasn’t trying to make a pseudo-documentary. So he’s not looking
for complex pieces of information that he’s going to throw
into one fact. There was some criticism in the New Yorker, for instance, and
arguments that I had with him, you know — “What about the criminal
investigation? What about the Tisch family? That’s not explained in the
movie.”

But it’s a story, it’s a movie. I think everyone will agree who sees it,
no matter whether you like the movie or not, the movie makes you
uncomfortable. It makes you psychologically, emotionally uncomfortable
because of the level of tension that’s maintained for so long.

More like a play.

And the acting of Russell Crowe is just phenomenal. You get the sense of
Wigand, of an average American with various neuroses, trying to
make it and being confronted with these objective realities.

Did you ever think your life would be a movie?

[Laughs.] Only when I took the wrong drug.

What happened was, normally in these situations, in the network television
world, when they happen, the usual progression — and there were a lot of
unusual things here from the beginning, such as they were trying to kill it
even before it got broadcast — is that the producer walks the plank. And
given the structure of the organization, that’s how you know that, in fact,
the on-camera person is not the real reporter.

So in this situation, what’s first of all unusual is that I survived it. I mean, if you look
at it from one perspective, by the time the story got on the air and shortly thereafter,
I could’ve had anything I wanted at CBS News.

The reason you survived is that you had a long and valuable career
there, and they weren’t going to cash it in just yet.

Well, they were ready to cash it in. I don’t know. I mean, if Mike
Wallace is to be believed, he told me one day not to come to the office
because Don Hewitt was going to fire me. That happened a number of times.

So the reality is that a lot of other people did things which are not
explained in the movie. They just sort of happened in the movie. And
because they did things, it changed the lay of the land. And because I was
in a sense lucky enough to survive — and by survive I mean survive with
my job, survive with my reputation — I then felt obligated, now that Wigand
is taken care of, to make it clear what the issues were here.

Now, it’s unfortunate that, in the movie-making process, a lot of these people who
did things are not included in the story. Some are in the acknowledgements
that run at the end in the credits, which is something that I asked for and
Michael Mann did.

And because of what other people did while I was in the middle of this,
it worked out. And so, in some ways, I felt this obligation to make sure
that people understood what was really going on here, not just from an
emotional point of view, from a human point of view, but also from the overriding issue which confronts the media and journalism, which is that
network television news is censored. Mostly self-censored, and it won’t do
that story. So, in a sense you have to go to Hollywood to do that story.
I mean, you could do it in a journalism review, you could do it in a
variety of magazines as an article, but the general audience who watches
television, the mass audience, would not hear about it.

Do you feel this film is going to change that reality?

I think that this film will make it more difficult for anybody to use
the concept of tortious interference ever again, to interfere with a story
being fully reported.

And I think this story will make it very difficult for anybody to believe
ever again that a network television news organization does not take
commercial consequences into consideration before they will do a story, or
how it influences what reporting they will do. So at least those issues
are on the table.

This is consistent with your personal agenda over
the years, to deconstruct the grammar of television.

Network television news is never going to do a story showing the audience what
goes into doing a magazine segment on “60 Minutes.”

So in many ways, this film is surfacing in almost an educational
way what you’ve been a student of in your own career for 20 years, and
you’ve been frustrated finding a way to get this out.

What is out is — Mike Wallace didn’t go out and do the ground-level reporting to do the Hezbollah. He points out in retort that there is another guy, Jim Hogan, who will
actually be at the screening tonight, an old friend of mine, who we hired
as the leg man to go first. I went second. And Mike went third. That’s
the way the business works. The audience doesn’t know that.

Let’s talk about you and Mike. Has there been any reconciliation
personally?

I have to put it this way. The first story, the first shoot, in 1983,
something goes wrong. Mike takes me out in the parking lot and reams me
out in front of everybody. That’s how our relationship began. And it appears that’s how it’s ending. Except this time, he can’t order me into the parking lot.

So how does that make you feel?

I was sad that … Well, I felt a number of different ways. He started
screaming a year and a half ago. He refused to take my advice a year and
a half ago to stop screaming and to try to have a rational discussion with
the people involved. He ignored it. He became vindictive and abusive and
would not listen. So I decided I wasn’t going to talk to him.

I waited six months, I set up a meeting with him to help open up communication. I
felt we accomplished something at that meeting. It took place in early
February of this year. Four months later, he’s back at it, talking about
the meeting that we had, this private meeting, and spinning it so it looks
like I’m coming on my hands and knees …

… asking for a job? That’s what they had in Brill’s Content.

They never asked me about it.

That piece basically says, Lowell is trying to make himself the star
of this.

Here’s the irony in all of it. Twenty-one years a network television
news producer, someone is trying to tell me that I’m trying to get too much
credit? Anybody who reports on this and asks Mike Wallace, “Haven’t you been
getting the credit for the work of other people for however many years?” he’ll respond,
“Well, I wrote a book, and in the book, there’s four paragraphs about my producers.”

So, in a very blunt way, this is simply a matter of projection,
psychologically?

He just said it the other day, he said, “The problem with Lowell isn’t
that he has penis envy, it’s microphone envy.” I mean, he’s nuts.

Where were Morley, Harry, Andy and Ed? Ed just barely appeared and then
disappeared. Why were they cut out?

I don’t know why they were cut out of the movie. It’s not a
documentary. Morley’s role in this is public record. He denounced me and
Mike publicly. And then later I asked him, “How can you say these things
and not have called me even or talked to me?” He said he didn’t need to
talk to me because I was Mike’s producer and you talk to Mike. That gives
you an idea of the class relationship.

And Ed was briefed on this before it all became public, and his reaction to me was he wanted it all to go away. Leslie Stahl didn’t know until it became public. She’s been the
most stand-up. And [Steve] Croft didn’t know anything until it became public, and
he said nothing until the piece actually, eventually, got on the air. And
then he said, “What’s the big controversy? We put the piece on, didn’t
we?” So, I think I said at the time that during the roughest period,
no correspondent called to wish me luck.

Does Don come through accurately as the Don Hewitt you know, and as the man who
built “60 Minutes,” in this film?

No.

So what is lacking for people to really understand
and appreciate him? Is there another movie to be made?

No. The movie is not about Don Hewitt and Mike Wallace and “60 Minutes.”
That’s not the central focus of the movie. It has become the central focus
of the publicity, because Mike Wallace has chosen to go ballistic without
seeing the movie. It’s not a good idea to review movies that you haven’t
seen. You wind up doing what Mike did yesterday in the New York Times. You should say,
“Yeah, well maybe I’ll wait until I see it.”

So now that everybody will see it, what will be your future with
the “60 Minutes” people?

I don’t know. I don’t have any future.

You don’t have any intention of getting back together with them in any way?

There’s a movie coming out tonight. There’s been this
huge public thing, there’s an article in today’s Newsday, you know, with
Vern Gay, where he quotes [my wife] Sharon as saying its hard to think of how we would
get back together. As far as I’m concerned, there are certain issues here,
and they’re issues that the rank-and-file people at “60 Minutes” know are
true.

I have made no effort, and I will make no effort, to go to work for
“60 Minutes.” I was asked to get involved in “60 Minutes II.” I agreed to try
and do that. Mike and Don put the kibosh on that. And that was over a year
ago, and now I’m off on another incarnation. I’ve got a New York Times job, and
I’ve got a four-hour documentary coming for PBS. And I may do a book just simply to
lay a lot of this out so that it’s not subject to the kind of disinformation and smear
which is starting to happen. But other than that, I’m overwhelmed. I’ve got a lot going on.

At the end of the day, do you think it’s possible for a person working in the media
to actually make things better in the world, or do you feel that …

Give me a break. I can’t answer a question like that.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist, Lowell?

I’m an asshole. You know that.

Beyond the door to his office suite stretches the bustling Wenner Media
headquarters (“almost the size of a football field,” he says with characteristic immodesty), where the young,
the slender and the hip march about in platform shoes performing the
mundane tasks of running Jann’s empire.

This is where the music went. It’s strange, but if the entire cultural
explosion from the 1960s could be drawn down to just one guy, it would be this compact energy ball right here — the quintessential baby boomer, our own Peter Pan, a chubby
adolescent who would never grow up.

Wenner was an entrepreneur long before it was cool. And if, as the venture
capitalists like to say, entrepreneurs usually have only one good idea, at least his was a doozy. Wenner was, to put it plainly, the star-fucker who always traded up — the
ultimate name-dropper who finally became a bigger name in the tabs
than many of the stars he worshiped.

These days he oversees three successful magazines (Rolling Stone, Us and Men’s
Journal), and if that doesn’t provide enough fodder for Wenner-watchers, there are plenty of other angles for the wags to whisper about — his
much younger boyfriend, designer Matt Nye; his many Hollywood buddies, including David Geffen, Barry Diller and Richard Gere; his
longtime business partner and now ex-wife, Jane, and their three
sons; and the accouterments of his success — the Hamptons mansion, the driver and car, the jet and the private Idaho retreat, for summers.

Jann’s long, strange trip here, to the center of his own conspicuous universe, began
a continent away and three decades ago, in a rundown warehouse in the old
printer’s district in San Francisco’s South of Market area, a few short gestational months after the
Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love in 1967. There, Rolling Stone magazine, which would
become the voice of a generation, was born. Until the moment issue No. 1 launched, Jann had been just a frustrated wannabe, one of the guys jumping
around the margins of the action, crashing the performances, handing out
fliers, hanging on outside the doors of the stars.

From a separate group of would-be entrepreneurs across town, according
to Robert Draper’s detailed history, “Rolling Stone Magazine: The
Uncensored History,” Wenner stole a mailing list and a corporate name
(Straight Arrow Publishing) to get off the ground. But nobody doubts that
the editorial concept came directly out of Jann’s own music-crazed soul.
The idea was unique for its time: Instead of the puff pieces expected from
a trade magazine, Rolling Stone would cover rock ‘n’ roll for what it was,
the most powerful cultural and political force in a time of widespread
social tumult. The magazine would take risks, and run stories no one else
was willing to cover. Jann recognized that a new social order was forming,
with music as its binding energy.

Wenner’s mentor in this new world of publishing was an older music critic
named Ralph Gleason; most of the money for the risky venture came from the
family of his wife, Jane Schindelheim Wenner, a dark-haired, fine-boned
beauty who was rarely seen at the magazine, but whose presence was always
felt in its formative years.

What made Jann — and Rolling Stone — successful was the power of rock
‘n’ roll combined with his personal ruthlessness and the opportunism,
including kindness, that wealth allows. He was unparalleled in his
generation of magazine editors as a spotter of talent, and for creative types of a certain age and temperament, Jann will always be considered
the magic-maker. He embraced the ideas and generated the excitement; he
untapped his writers’ best work. He untapped everybody, loosened the words,
made the sap flow. That was part of his pure genius as an editor.

In the early years, when 20,000-word pieces were not uncommon in the
magazine and it was his job to edit them, Jann often seemed to lose
interest and stop reading a few paragraphs into a piece. Nonetheless,
his mark was always there. The headlines, the ledes, the art, the display
type — much of that was Jann. His skill at positioning a story, the way he
drilled to the sweet spot — those were his gifts. He didn’t really write
or line-edit with distinction himself. He was the man who hired the writers and
the editors, the designers and the photographers. He spotted you and he
spotted your story. Before long, he was the keeper of the story.

One of the critical elements in Wenner’s success was that he knew not only how to develop and exploit talent, but also when and how to dump it. Every
Rolling Stone writer and editor, photographer and designer has a
bucketful of Jann tales, how the outbursts, the abuse, the breakups, the
firings came down. When Jann turned heartless on you, he played that part
better than anyone else.

The brand names of Jann’s once and former stars is impressive: Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Chet
Flippo, Joe Klein, Tim Cahill, Tom Hayden, David Harris, Cameron Crowe, Joe
Eszterhas, David Felton, Tim Ferris, Ben Fong-Torres, Howard Kohn, Jon
Landau, Dave Marsh, Annie Leibovitz, Greil Marcus, Grover Lewis, Abe Peck,
John Morthland, Paul Scanlon, Marianne Partridge, John Burks, Timothy
White, Sarah Lazin, Charley Perry, Michael Rogers, Roger Black, Ed Ward,
Charles Young, Christine Doudna, Harriet Fier — and that list could go on
and on to embrace dozens more. (I, too, was one of Jann’s stars for a while — between 1974 and 1977, I
wrote a dozen or so long investigative stories for the magazine, half the
time as a freelancer and the other half on staff as an associate editor.) Not all of these people were fired, of course; increasingly, as the years went by, the talent got fed up with Jann’s antics and just quit.

Either
way, as Rolling Stone went forward with the business of seducing each
new group of 16-year-olds, the genius of
Jann’s ruthless content strategy gradually became apparent. No matter how
spectacular one group of staffers might be, they all shared one problem from which there is no escape — they grew older. Everybody, that
is, except Jann himself. His petulant fits and rages actually seemed frozen
at an age considerably south of 16 — think “terrible 2″ and you’ll
get the idea.

By 1977, Jann decided he’d outgrown his hometown, and he took his whole San
Francisco hippie show to New York, the main media stage. Ten years after
the Summer of Love, the magazine had survived countless financial and
personnel crises that might have sunk it, much as they sank all the other
start-up rags from the ’60s. But the tyrannical boy king had stayed atop his throne, always
seducing another wave of talent, closing bigger ad accounts, just barely
holding it all together. Now he would become rich.

In New York, Jann hit gold. Soon he was a regular in the celebrity
pages, grinning ear to ear, escorting Jackie and Caroline Kennedy to a
party. There he was, throwing the party for the Democratic
convention in New York. There he was in a movie, playing himself
(“Perfect,” with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis), and he wasn’t
half-bad, though the movie’s story line made a travesty of Rolling Stone’s
editorial standards. (“It must be difficult making the transition from
editor to actor,” I gently suggested during a visit just before the film
launched. “Not really,” Jann answered. “Not when you have so much natural
talent.”)

Jann’s bluster was all part of the package. It is hard to imagine a more
shielded — what psychiatrists might call “defended” — personality from a generation that has embraced
therapy and the human potential movement. Clearly, his childhood in a
family where neither parent had time for him had left its mark. Not long
after he was sent away at the age of 12 to the Chadwick School, which
Robert Draper characterizes as an orphanage for rich kids south of Los Angeles, Wenner’s
parents divorced. Neither parent called to take him back, and Jann’s
version later of the custody battle between his parents was that
neither of them wanted him. At Chadwick, he added another “n” to his
birth name, Jan, and went his own way away from the family that didn’t want
him.

Though he always exhibited the wounds of an abandoned child, with
insecurities that were painfully obvious (he would cover part of his face
with his hand when talking to you, and he almost always kept a table
between himself and anyone else who was around), he also early on
demonstrated a powerful ability to empathize with an entire generation that
felt betrayed by its parents. This was, after all, a generation that
simultaneously rebelled against the Vietnam War and a host of constrictive
social arrangements and gravitated to the one force that bridged racial and class lines — music. Jann really could trust his own wounded instincts as he proceeded to capture the Zeitgeist of the age.

His short, muscular body zoomed around the magazine’s
office; if you didn’t look quickly, you’d easily miss him as he passed. Though he
surrounded himself with taller people, he
didn’t like to look up at anyone, so most meetings were held at something
approximating room-length, or at least everyone else had to be sitting.
And despite his insecurity, he never had much
trouble making eye contact, and there always seemed to be a
conspiratorily mischievous glint in his large, lovely blue eyes. His voice
rapped out orders in a rapid-fire delivery, made even more so in those
early years by his heavy cocaine habit.

Staffers often worried that Jann was overdoing powder (and later
alcohol), especially when he’d tend to be missing at important moments.
Sometimes, though, it wasn’t the mind-altering substance that was to
blame, but Wenner’s pure fear of being onstage. During a hastily arranged
news conference following the Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army
exposi that Howard Kohn and I co-authored in 1975, for example, Jann was
nowhere to be found. Reporters from virtually every national and local
media outfit in San Francisco clamored for an explanation of how the
magazine had gotten this scoop, but Jann was too nervous to appear before
them himself. We were told later that he had hidden under a table, vomiting,
while avoiding the media.

One-on-one, however, Jann was a master at exerting personal power. He
knew how to charm anybody who came into his orbit. He stalked the objects
of his greatest affection, and used the magazine to gain access. Thus did he
get cozy with John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jackie Kennedy, the
royalty of the age. But once Jann got to know
these stars, he cared about them, not as a fan but as family, just as
with his staff. And then, just as with the staff, he’d fight with them and drive them away.

The stars often
accused Jann of going back on his word, of betraying them, of lying. But usually he would cajole his way back to their sides, where he’d
extract another interview from them, another deal, yielding yet another
wave of accusatory charges and countercharges. Have Jann, have drama.

His blow-ups with Lennon were especially legendary, yet when Lennon was
murdered, according to Draper’s book, Jann was inconsolable; he raced
across town to the Dakota and stood across the street with a sorrowful band
of other fans, crying in the rain. Later, without telling anyone, he
stopped the memorial issue of the magazine as it was headed to the
printer and hand-scribbled in tiny letters a final message in the fold:
“John, I love you I miss you you’re with God I’ll do what I said ‘Yoko hold
on’ — I’ll make sure, I promise XXX Jann.”

By the mid-’70s, the stars of other, somewhat imitative media hits
started gravitating to Jann’s side. As “Saturday Night Live” came into
being, Jann and Rolling Stone developed a synergistic relationship with
actors like John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. One time, in advance of a visit
to the magazine’s offices, a large package arrived for the Blues
Brothers. When a curious staffer poked at it, sure enough, white powder began to leak from inside.

At Jann’s Victorian mansion in Pacific Heights in San Francisco,
Saturday nights were sometimes the excuse for him to show off new toys, like
an early large-screen TV set on which he displayed the
first episodes of “Saturday Night Live” to staffers juiced on Remy Martin,
coke, scotch, bourbon, marijuana, cigars and other substances hard to
recall now, let alone the following morning. Outside, in Jann’s driveway, the
painfully insecure and brilliant photographer Annie Leibovitz would leave her
cameras in her car. Hours later, after stumbling outside only to discover her car had been broken into and her
cameras were gone, Annie would come back in, crying. Jann always laid out the cash for new ones.

When certain staffers’ birthdays came around, the staff passed a hat,
and when enough cash had been collected, the lucky one’s present was
procured — a nice big bag of cocaine. It was normal practice for an editor
stopping by the staff darkroom to sniff a line or two while
checking over photos for upcoming feature story layouts.

One thing this account of partying obscures is how
hard the people who built Rolling Stone worked. The magazine was
published biweekly, but throughout the early years, few of its editors
and designers had any substantial publishing experience. Just like today’s
Web pioneers, this was a new generation creating new media — if we’d
fit in to what already existed, we wouldn’t have been there. As a
result, some pretty funky production standards and long hours were the norm. It wasn’t uncommon to work around the clock the
last few nights before we shipped an issue. Those of us who wrote the main
articles often stayed at the magazine night and day until we got our long,
tortured manuscripts into their final form.

Jann’s own work rhythms helped set the pace. He was, to put it lightly,
a “night person.” He rarely even showed up at the office until afternoon, and
then normally it was with a dark growth of beard and some kind of hangover. As the night wore on, however, Jann kicked into high gear, sometimes
with assistance. As other people began to fade, his energy seemed to pick
up, allowing him to break down any creative resistance to his ideas the
rest of us might have had.

When the magazine moved to New York, where politicians were the celebrities, Jann was instantly at
their sides. In one of his few long-term moves, he hired William Greider,
whose analytical columns have kept at least one strong political voice as a
continuous part of the magazine’s mix to this day. (“Hell, I even agree
with him 80 percent of the time,” Jann said recently. “And that’s pretty good.”)
In 1993, Wenner and Greider landed an exclusive interview with newly
installed President Clinton, another ’60s kid refusing to age, whom
Jann instantly adored — even today he considers Clinton “an amazing man,
he’s so smart.”

Jann’s personal life was always on the edge, of course, just like
Clinton’s, though the orientations were different. Nobody seemed to be able to figure out his marriage with Jane. It was,
euphemistically, an “open” marriage; rumors of Jann’s bisexuality often
circulated, as did stories of Jane’s affairs, but somewhat like that
much-later celebrity couple — Bill and Hillary — Jann and Jane seemed
genuinely emotionally intertwined with each other, in ways too
mysterious for their friends and co-workers to unravel.

Finally, in 1995,
came Jann’s own Monica-like outing. Through a tortuous process some said
Jann himself had instigated (only to then try to suppress), Jann’s
homosexuality went public. He and his 20-something love, Matt Nye, a
clothing designer, were outed, and the press revealed that his long marriage
with co-founder Jane Schindleheim Wenner was over.

The Wall Street Journal chose this occasion to present a highly unusual
Page 1 report, complete with salacious details not normally presumed to
be of major interest to the business and financial communities, in order to
speculate that Jane and Jann’s breakup would throw the future of the
magazine empire into doubt.

Wrong. The empire survived the marriage, ’60s-style.

As an empire builder, Jann actually has a mixed record. To his credit, once he got Rolling Stone’s formula right, he was smart enough to not
try to alter it too much. Instead, he experimented with his rapidly expanding cash reserves
by starting or taking over other magazines — more than a dozen over the years. Most of those soon
failed, as is the nature of the business, or were sold off. Today just two
others remain — Us, which he says he plans to take weekly sometime over the next year to compete
head-on with People; and Men’s Journal, the
adventure magazine that duplicates Rolling Stone’s aesthetic in content aimed at the athletic baby boom male who has the time (and
money) to pursue outdoor adventures.

Wenner’s restless energy over the years has yielded more failed
experiments than almost anybody else in the business, yet he’s never
gambled anywhere near large enough a portion of the capital available to
him to put his essential project at risk. At the same time, one striking thing about Jann’s career is that, apart from
Rolling Stone, his success at recognizing other great innovative business concepts has
been negligible. When Bob Pittman showed up to tell Jann about his bright
new idea for a cable TV show called MTV, Jann dismissed his vision as
something that would “never” work. MTV, of course, became far bigger than
Rolling Stone could ever hope to be, and in the process breathed life back
into the moribund music business in many ways that benefited Jann and his
magazine enormously. But Jann himself had missed an opportunity.

Later, when Marc Andreessen came by to describe his brand new
World Wide Web idea — a browser and a company called Netscape — and to ask Wenner
to invest, Jann once again was dismissive. “I didn’t want to be the one to
lose a bundle on that,” he remembers, perhaps slightly chagrined now
that Andreessen’s net worth far exceeds his own.

Many others came to pay homage as well over the years. Wenner
particularly liked Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired, but he figured Rossetto
would never succeed as a magazine publisher because he favored design
elements that obscured the text and refused to include “service-type
stories that would help people figure out how to use all this tech stuff.”
Rossetto, of course, went on to create one of the most important magazines
of the ’90s, Wired, before being dismissed by investors in favor of an
editorial team that has made the magazine more accessible and user-friendly.

There’s more than a little irony in the fact that most of today’s media pioneers,
all of whom would probably identify Rolling Stone as a model for building
their companies, operate out of the same brick-walled warehouses South of
Market where Jann birthed Rolling Stone, in the city Jann dismissed from
his rearview mirror as a “backwater” more than 20 years ago. Today, by
contrast, the “new media” entrepreneurs are creating wealth Jann could only
dream of.

Of course, at 53, Jann is not young or hungry anymore. These days, off
to one side in his office, on a small display table, sits a shrine to his
three sons, ages 13, 12 and 8. In a drawer are more shots — pictures of
their vacations together, photos of them climbing all over him, one big
Jann and three little Janns.

Now here is something radically different from the old Jann,
something fragile. Lines creep into his expression when he talks about his
children, of his concerns about how they may think of his sexual
orientation as they approach their own adolescence. All of a sudden he’s a
little vulnerable, not so sure of himself, maybe even a little scared.

But to get something, you have to give something up. To fall in love with someone much
younger, to leave the security of his long marriage, no matter how
unconventional it may have been, this had to take a toll on Jann. He’s suffered a loss, and
this has made him, finally, just maybe, start to do what everybody else in
his generation did — grow up.

He allows that this love of these children, this “unconditional love,”
is the very best thing in his life. This is his tender spot.

Things with Jane, he says, are “well” now, and that’s all he’ll say
about that subject. Jane has always owned about half of the company, but it
is perfectly obvious that the three smiling boys in these pictures are the
glue that now holds this particular family media empire together.

Talent comes, talent goes. The choreographer remains. The director. The
man who calls the shots. Jann has so completely and successfully lived out
his own story, complete with dramas of every kind, that he’s almost
graduated to the stuff of legend. Abandoned by his own parents, he became a
pseudo-parent to his staffers. He’d take us to the best clothing stores to
dress us for media tours, frown over our haircuts and stuff extra money
into our pockets. If something bad happened, Jann was reliably
compassionate. News of someone’s sick relative, or an accident, would send
him into tears, even while his hand reached for his checkbook. When Howard
Kohn suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm several years ago, and his
health insurance policy had lapsed, Wenner wrote out a very large check, no
questions asked, to help pay for the surgery that saved Kohn’s life.

But just as savagely, Jann could always turn on any of us, and
eventually he usually did. Once he’d driven everyone out of the company
except himself, and had achieved complete domination, he somehow seemed
to stay suspended in time. Lost in the ’60s. All of the rest of us
trailed away, little pieces of narrative, scenes really, from the earlier
parts of his movie, on to our own life stories.

Back here in Midtown, he’s the man. Producer, director, actor, writer,
editor, cameraman, casting, set, distribution house, financier, publicist,
everything. Owner of the franchise.

Jann’s world. Dig it.