I finished Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life last night, and it’s a terrific book, and you don’t know how hard it was for me to write those words: “a terrific book.” Surely you’ve caught Toobin on one or another show this past month, talking about his account of the O. J. Simpson murder case; he’s been on a wildly successful media blitz that has resulted in the book’s debut at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list. You’ve seen him, cool- voiced, eloquent, glasses ringing his eyes, the very picture of a sober legal journalist in his mid-30s. I’ve seen him, too, and what I want to know is: Glasses? Since when does Jeff Toobin wear glasses? I never saw him wear glasses back in the pre-soft-lens days when we all wore glasses.! Maybe he doesn’t really need glasses. Maybe he’s only wearing them for effect. How big do you think his advance was from Random House? Why am I thinking in italics?
Because Jeff Toobin is my life-long rival. Well, not exactly life-long; we only met when entering seventh grade at a tiny New York City private school. But we started getting in each other’s way back then. In high school, we were up for the same parts in school plays and were fellow staffers on the newspaper; in fact, I have it on good authority (I cannot reveal my sources, even now, more than 20 years after the fact) that in eighth grade he sought to prevent my recruitment to the newspaper staff, perhaps on grounds of my juvenile conservatism. This was the same year that a McGovern organizer came to a school-wide assembly in our gym and asked if anybody in the place was for Nixon. I raised my hand. It was the only hand raised. There were 300 kids in that gym.
I got on the paper in ninth grade anyway, but Jeff’s Machiavellian maneuver proved diabolically successful. His longer tenure on the staff ended in our senior year with him editor and me a sub-editor, though these sorts of hierarchical distinctions were pretty much meaningless on a mimeographed sheet that came out every couple of weeks, generating no interest in the school and only slightly greater interest among those of us on staff.
We liked talking about politics and read a lot of the same books, and hung around a lot in our senior year — a year which culminated in his writing a really nice and sentimental tribute next to his picture in what he took to be my yearbook. Only it wasn’t my yearbook; it was his own yearbook. When his children look at his senior photo, they’ll have to read something about me.
I bumped into Jeff a few times on the streets of New York during college and afterward but heard little of him until it turned out he was trying to send my brother-in-law to jail. This is no joke. My brother-in-law, Elliott Abrams, spent five years of his life under the siege of the Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, and it turned out that Jeff was one of the lawyers specifically assigned to get Elliott. Later, he wrote a book called Opening Arguments about his time with Walsh’s office in which he acknowledged that the pursuit of Elliott was unjust. Yet he still wrote about Elliott in a mingy, ad hominem way that I found, and still find, itself a form of prosecutorial indiscretion.
One night, just as that book was coming out, I arrived early for dinner at a Georgetown restaurant and went down the street to a local bookstore. Walking to the back in search of the fiction section, I literally ran into Jeff, who was having a book signing for Opening Arguments. Face to face, I felt I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I just smiled and exchanged pleasantries. “You know, you caused my family a world of grief and trouble,” I said. He mumbled something about the First Amendment, Elliott getting a say and Jeff getting a say. It was an excruciating moment, for him and for me. (He got some measure of revenge a few years later after I published a book; ” glad to see you finally between hardcovers,” he said in yet another accidental bookstore encounter, this time in front of the big Barnes and Noble ten blocks from our old high school in Manhattan.)
So it was with some wariness that I began reading his coverage of the O. J. trial in the New Yorker, only to find it well-written, wellreported, and compelling — all qualities his book shares, and more still. The Run of His Life is almost flawless, an account of the Simpson case that manages to be comprehensive and fair while still being damning of this signal event in exactly the right way (just as he was unfairly damning of Elliott).
He’s getting rich from it too. I don’t begrudge it for so impressive a book. But come on, Jeff — what’s with the glasses?
JOHN PODHORETZ
