Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“Is everyone drinking the ‘Jake Tapper’ and ‘Mark Leibovich’ tonight?” asked CNN’s Tapper at a joint gab fest on How to Make it in This Town at HOGO Restaurant. (see video below) The event raised funds for 826DC, a non-profit spearheaded by Joe Callahan and dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write, according to their mission statement.
Jake Tapper
The New York Times best selling authors (Mark Leibovich, This Town and Jake Tapper, The Outpost) came dressed directly from work, noted Leibovich who facetiously pointed that while he arrived in shirt and jeans, the buttoned down Tapper arrived in suit and tie. The two have been both competitors and friends for many years…………..let the fun begin!
“Just to give you a little background on Mark Leibovich,” said Tapper, “I wanted desperately to work for The Washington Post Style Section as one of their feature writers when I was at the Washington City Paper, so I applied for the job, interviewed with the boss – the editor of the Style Section – and they gave it instead to this guy Mark Leibovich who was a writer with the Business Section.”
“I had never read anything he ever wrote and so my inclination of course was to hate him, hate everyhing he ever wrote,” he emphasized. “And then one day he wrote a piece in 2002 – a profile of then Senator John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry – in which Mark describes sensitively, but also rather shockingly, that they had a rather unusual relationship in that Teresa Heinz Kerry was still very much haunted by the death of her first husband John Heinz – the Senator from Pennsylvania who died in a helicopter crash in 1991, and still referred to John Heinz who died a decade before as my husband.
It was one of these bits of writing and non fiction that was like a punch in your stomach. It was so raw and totally uncomfortable and not the kind of thing a writer with any proper training would ever reveal to the world which was so amazing about it.”
Mark Leibovich
Leibovich, rightly so, wanted to know what Tapper meant by ‘proper training’ to which Tapper responded: “You know what I mean. Like the people that went to the Salons of Georgetown and would never do anything to alienate the Heinz-Kerrys and that was obviously what you were not about. You were about telling the truth and from there I just became a fan and a friend.”
“Now I’m going to tell you about how I started out disliking Jake,” said Mark who beefed up the frat boys take on their respective careers. “For very shallow reasons. He seemed to have a really close or kind of a mutual flirtative (if that’s a word) friendship with my sister. So I had this kind of big brother thing going on there. Jake was a little too good looking for my taste and I knew he had TV proclivities you know, in print guise. You sort of wonder about guys that look like this. Jake also had one of those names. I hate to say it – Jake Tapper – I always thought it sounded like a Hollywood name. It’s a really slick name. So, for the most incredibly shallow reasons, I had some questions about Jake.”
“What put Jake on the map, at least in my eyes, was he wrote a very memorable piece on his one date with Monica Lewinsky that ran in the Washington City Paper a few weeks before she became a household name. What I remember about that piece is that it was sweet about a young woman who was caught in this bizarre maelstrom of public life, madness and scandal which is somewhat of a metaphor of the life we live in DC in the media everyday. There was a sweetness to it and I was predisposed to liking him from that moment on.”
Moral of the story for both was that the choices you make can really ‘weigh on your soul’ but it is important to keep an outsiders perspective in journalism in general.
“I’m a serious grappler and second-guesser and angst-ridden writer,” said Leibovich of his writing habits. “I love writing. It’s the hardest, most painful angst ridden existence you can really ever want, but I love it. It’s been an incredible blessing to be able to find something that you love and you know it’s just something that you should never let go of. Find something that you love whether it’s your full time job or not,” he advised. “Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it less right. Sometimes you just get it flat wrong. I mean it’s hit or miss. I do think that after a while you’ve been doing this, you learn how to ask questions, how to conduct yourself, how to listen. I mean listening is a really really difficult skill to learn and also how to look.”
Neither Mark nor Jake followed a traditional root to journalism. “Youth really is wasted on the young, I mean I think Jake and I both if you look at where we’ve been, we both sort of postponed adulthood. Neither of us went to journalism school. I always revered journalists and I’ve always sort of have since I watched All the President’s Men and wanted to work in journalism, but there was no path that we followed and I think that’s okay. I mean again, time is your friend and you need to support yourself obviously, which is not to be taken lightly.” “It’s amazing to me when young people think that they have to have it all at age 22.” added Tapper.
“They want to know a trick,” Tapper told Hollywood on the Potomac. “The truth is – there is no trick”:
Mark Leibovich and Joe Callahan on the power of words: (correction on video – title of Mark’s book is “This Town”)
