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[Don't Quote Me]

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Not himself

How I unmasked Anonymous. (No, not that Anonymous.)

by Dan Kennedy

Anonymous confessed. To me. This Monday. "I will not deny that," he told me when I confronted him with the evidence. "I'd better not lie. It would get me into trouble. I would be disgraced in the profession."

No, no, no. Not that Anonymous. That guy wrote about ancient history -- the 1992 presidential campaign. I'm talking about the other Anonymous -- the one who produced two pieces for the Nation on this year's campaign in a prose style eerily similar to the one Joe "Anonymous" Klein used in Primary Colors.

The Klein imitator, it turns out, is Nation senior editor Richard Lingeman, who had Anonymity thrust upon him by publisher and editorial director Victor Navasky as a stunt playing off the sensation caused by Primary Colors.

What a relief. Klein, a neoliberal whose views on affirmative action and welfare deviate considerably from liberal orthodoxy, is anathema in the pages of the left-liberal Nation.

"That wasn't Joe Klein. We would never have Joe Klein write for us," said Nation associate editor and columnist Katha Pollitt. Several minutes later, though, she confessed, "I wasn't paying too much attention. If we published Joe Klein, I'll eat my hat."

Pollitt needn't change her diet.

"It seemed to me that Richard could be Anonymous and should be Anonymous and was Anonymous," says Navasky, whose relationship with Lingeman goes back to the 1960s, when they were pulling pranks for the now-defunct humor magazine Monocle. "During the campaign, whenever people would ask, `Is this the real Anonymous?', I'd say, `Hey, he's anonymous.' You don't lie. You mislead strategically."

Indeed, the Nation presented Anonymous as someone who could be the genuine article, but left some wiggle room for plausible deniability. Among those playing along with Navasky's game was the Boston Phoenix, which published the first piece in its February 16 issue ("Primaries Colored," News).

"They were very circumspect," recalls Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis of his negotiations with the Nation over reprint rights. "When I asked if there were going to be more articles, they were very careful not to overextend themselves. At worst, I thought we would be engaged in the great game of guessing what was going on at the time, and that was okay with me. I don't consider us misused in any way."

Not that the Nation gag generated anywhere near as loud a public buzz as Klein's did, but the Newsweek columnist would have been a lot better served if he'd emulated Lingeman's and Navasky's puckish responses, when he vehemently denied last winter that he was the author of Primary Colors.

Though the journalism-ethics cops are preparing to run Klein out of town on a rail, it seems to me that the real issue isn't Klein's anonymously penning a juicy roman à clef about the Clintons, but rather the over-the-edge quality to his lying. That was compounded by Newsweek editor Maynard Parker's bad judgment in going well beyond the call of duty to protect one of his stars.

After all, the anonymity of Primary Colors' author is hardly unprecedented. Perhaps the most famous example is Henry Adams's Democracy: An American Novel, the Primary Colors of 1880. Variously attributed to Adams, future Secretary of State John Hay, and a lesser-known government official named Clarence King, Adams's authorship remained in question for 40 years, until his publisher confirmed it once and for all.

Former Atlantic Monthly editor Robert Manning, for one, doesn't accept the argument that Klein has lost his credibility as a journalist. "I think I would judge his work as I had before," Manning says. "One can be as bothered by unsourced works, like a lot of Bob Woodward's stuff, as by the Anonymous bit by Joe Klein."

Indeed, the way Klein handled himself last winter no doubt played a big part in the near-universal condemnation that greeted his confession last week. Klein's a guy who's able to poke fun at himself in print, as he did in several passages of Primary Colors. He also showed considerable grace and humility in a coming-out piece in this week's Newsweek and in a pre-unmasking essay for the New York Times Book Review a couple of months ago.

But Klein in person is apparently another matter entirely.

Take, for instance, the account of yet another Nation hand, Washington-bureau chief David Corn, writing on July 19 in Salon (http://www.salon1999.com) about a surreally ugly February confrontation between Klein and Jacob Weisberg, who'd helped put together a New York magazine piece that pointed the finger at Klein.

"I had rarely seen such a display of unrelenting anger," Corn reported. "Weisberg turned white. . . . Maybe [Klein] had adopted a schizophrenia that allowed him to live his lie -- that is, until he went to deposit his royalty checks in the bank. Or perhaps he would do anything -- including mistreating a colleague -- to protect his cover."

And what of Richard "Anonymous II" Lingeman?

"Is he returning the money? That's my question," Corn says, laughing. "I think he ought to take the money he did for that piece and give it to Joe Klein. Or better yet, use it to buy Klein a copy of The Book of Virtues."


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