Word: thoughtful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There wasn't much Caleb could do, in fact, except register his objections, and then, when the article came out, call me on the phone to tell me that he thought I had done exactly what he thought would be most unfair: portray him in the pages of Fifteen Minutes as some toolish junior with delusions of presidential grandeur...
...Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm describes the real case of journalist Joe McGinniss, who spent years interviewing and buttering up a convicted murderer—only to publish a biography of the man arguing that he was a psychopathic killer. The convict sued him for fraud; he had thought the journalist was his friend. The case ended in a hung jury, but the jurors had tended to favor the murderer...
...read The Journalist and the Murderer the month before I started working on the students who plan to be president story. I didn’t want to agree with Malcolm. I thought it would be possible to write an arch saga of Harvard ambition without selling anyone out. I imagined my conversations with Caleb as a level playing field—a wannabe journalist and a wannabe politician playing the interview game across the streets of Georgetown. Caleb had experience dealing with the press. He had been hand-picked by Karl Rove to serve as his assistant. I wasn...
...went inside his apartment to take notes on the magnets on his refrigerator and the peanut-butter-covered spoons in his sink. And then, after all that, I wrote an article about him based on a premise I had come up with before I met him and which he thought was fundamentally unfair...
...told Caleb I was working on a short reflective follow-up—not a correction, but something of a personal apology. This wasn’t something Caleb or any of my other sources had requested; but I felt ambiguous enough about the reporting process that I thought a follow-up might be appropriate. I told my editors about it, but then I stalled. I tried to write, but couldn't get down anything that satisfied me. I wasn't sure what it was that I was trying to apologize...