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that reopens a closed mind.” He found the book compulsively readable. “It consumes weeks of my life, drives me up the wall every time it calls Dole ‘the Bobster,’ yet I can’t stop turning the pages.” Others, like New York Times reporter (now columnist) Maureen Dowd, writing in The Washington Monthly, were put off by Cramer’s New Journalism tone. “With a prose style more irritating than entertaining, the author takes Wolfe’s faded New Journalism technique and sends it into fifth gear— VRO-O-O-OM! VRO-O-O-OM!—dousing each page with italics, ellipses, exclamation points, sound effects, dashes, hyphens, capital letters, and cute spellings.” Los Angeles Times political reporter Ronald Brownstein sensed that What It Takes was more about American ambition than electoral politics, and should therefore be judged alongside other overblown attempts to divine the national character. “Cramer has produced a work that should be put under glass: It’s one of a kind, a hopped-up amalgam of Teddy White, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer —day-glo civics. Everything about this book is oversized: its ambition, its scope, its flaws, its energy. Presidential elections are the white whale of American journalism—and in Cramer they have found a manic Melville.” Cramer’s next impossible assignment was a biography of Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio. A famously private, reticent man, DiMaggio had fended off all previous attempts to write about him. The project was suggested by Cramer’s publisher, who had spent years trying to convince DiMaggio to write his autobiography. DiMaggio’s 1999 death provided Cramer with his biggest break. Already four years into the book, he hadn’t been able to convince DiMaggio to help him (“We talked four or five times about why he wouldn’t talk to me—which was quite interesting in itself”). Cramer found many of DiMaggio’s friends were similarly reluctant to help, in deference to DiMaggio. Now information “came sluicing in—new recollections spurred by the event, new sources who felt free to talk and old sources who wanted to talk— to remember the man who had touched their lives,” he says. Published one year later, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, portrayed its subject in an unflattering light. DiMaggio’s cheapness, greed, and coldness came to the fore, while Cramer subjected the “Hero Machine,” the media and public’s uncritical adoration that had produced DiMaggio’s celebrity, to an unsparing critique. Many reviewers seemed hurt at having their hero brought down. Russell Baker, writing in The New York Review of Books, questioned Cramer’s sourcing (“With no attribution whatever, stories scandalous, shocking, and delightful are presented as gospel”). As with What It Takes, some critics, like The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley, objected to Cramer’s writing style (“The prose careens wildly from he-mannish to maudlin to street-wise to coy to pseudo-hip to sarcastic to barstool confidential”). Others, like The New York Times’s Richard Bernstein, judged that the book was written “with utter command,” and assigned a more respectable pedigree to Cramer’s prose (“a cross between Ring Lardner and David Halberstam with dollops of Dreiser and Hemingway thrown in for good measure”).
For his most recent book, How Israel Lost (2004), Cramer revisited many of the places he reported on in the late seventies and early eighties. He is currently working on a book about the American garment industry in the early twentieth century. Do you see yourself as part of any particular journalist tradition? I think of what we do as going back to the kinds of profiles Josep Addison did in the eighteenth century. Addressing the reader an telling him a story. Promising him that if he spends the time wit your story then certain benefits will ensue, certain truths will be el cidated. I write nonfiction with the same goal—though not necessarily th techniques—of a novel. I want my books or articles to have the sam impact a novel has on a reader: something happens to the charact in the story during which an emotional truth is revealed. That is goal nonfiction and fiction can share. Both are capable of creating life-changing experience for the reader. Do you consider yourself a “literary journalist”? No, I’m a smith. I occupy the position in our society that a good wheelwright would have occupied in his. Making wheels is a highly specialized skill. I don’t consider myself to be an artist, I consider myself to be a skilled workman. But I do feel part of a community of writers. I’ve been privileged to meet Halberstam and Talese, and I’ve told them how much their work meant to me, and how it showed me how big you could make this job. It’s very nice to feel like there is a tradition that I am continuing. I don’t know whether I’ll leave it in as good shape as Halberstam and Talese did, but I certainly feel there is something they passed on to me. I hope there is somebody I’m passing it on to. What kinds of subjects are you drawn to? If there is a theme to my work, it is about people—usually men— working obsessively to create something larger than themselves. It may be larger than them, or they may just think it is larger than them. But the obsession is deep either way. I think I understand something about them. Is that because you see yourself in them? Perhaps. Or maybe I feel I ought to be more like them. But when I see one of those guys, I know that there is a world, of his creation, for me to write about. And if I can get the reader to see the world from behind that character’s eyes, he will be taken on a wonderful journey. How do you find stories? I just get on something and can’t let go. Sometimes an editor will call me up and say, “I think you should write about such and such.” And I’ll say, “Oh, no! I don’t know a thing about that.” And then a funny thing will happen. It won’t go away.
- Page 3 and 4: Table of Contents Title Page Dedica
- Page 5 and 6: To Helen
- Page 7 and 8: Acclaim for The New New Journalism
- Page 9 and 10: Preface I had neither studied nor t
- Page 11 and 12: perceived as bizarre tribes one stu
- Page 13 and 14: work is the spirit with which he pr
- Page 15 and 16: for a movement than an advertisemen
- Page 17 and 18: and reporting (the latter developme
- Page 19 and 20: Crane did before them—bridge the
- Page 21 and 22: Journalists have revived the tradit
- Page 23 and 24: Sims, Norman, and Mark Kramer, eds.
- Page 25 and 26: infantrymen in the army of homeless
- Page 27 and 28: a marginal or strange subculture—
- Page 29 and 30: “Disdain” is too strong a word.
- Page 31 and 32: of the academy that I’d be assign
- Page 33 and 34: Well, not really. I was never comfo
- Page 35 and 36: sacred to me. I know that if I were
- Page 37 and 38: expand on brief notes, transcribe q
- Page 39 and 40: experienced Denver as a member of a
- Page 41 and 42: history or policy. Or than when I
- Page 43 and 44: Bruce Chatwin, anything by J. M. Co
- Page 45: Freed from the constraints of newsp
- Page 49 and 50: Now I’ve known a lot of politicia
- Page 51 and 52: gathering information. So the first
- Page 53 and 54: I learned it in Baltimore when I wa
- Page 55 and 56: How did they respond? They were won
- Page 57 and 58: write anything down, but the conver
- Page 59 and 60: What kind of a presence do you like
- Page 61 and 62: earned him the moniker of “staff
- Page 63 and 64: I want to understand the lives of p
- Page 65 and 66: You haven’t done any celebrity jo
- Page 67 and 68: I never know. I do know that I don
- Page 69 and 70: When Children Want Children, I rent
- Page 71 and 72: I like doing interviews over meals
- Page 73 and 74: Do you believe journalism can lead
- Page 75 and 76: Supporting himself through odd jobs
- Page 77 and 78: the editor’s house, but it had a
- Page 79 and 80: their activities, takes precedence,
- Page 81 and 82: public policy, etc., play in your w
- Page 83 and 84: How do you get people to ignore you
- Page 85 and 86: American landscape to someone who h
- Page 87 and 88: tried to kill him, and a drive-by s
- Page 89 and 90: Has taking notes openly ever been a
- Page 91 and 92: anymore. I trust my editors more th
- Page 93 and 94: Do you see yourself as part of an h
- Page 95 and 96: JONATHAN HARR In February 1986, Jon
For his most recent book, How Israel Lost (2004), Cramer revisited many of the places he<br />
reported on in the late seventies and early eighties. He is currently working on a book about the<br />
American garment industry in the early twentieth century.<br />
Do you see yourself as part of any particular journalist tradition?<br />
I think of what we do as going back to the kinds of profiles Josep Addison did in the eighteenth<br />
century. Addressing the reader an telling him a story. Promising him that if he spends the time wit your<br />
story then certain benefits will ensue, certain truths will be el cidated.<br />
I write nonfiction with the same goal—though not necessarily th techniques—of a novel. I want my<br />
books or articles to have the sam impact a novel has on a reader: something happens to the charact in<br />
the story during which an emotional truth is revealed. That is goal nonfiction and fiction can share.<br />
Both are capable of creating life-changing experience for the reader.<br />
Do you consider yourself a “literary journalist”?<br />
No, I’m a smith. I occupy the position in our society that a good wheelwright would have occupied<br />
in his. Making wheels is a highly specialized skill. I don’t consider myself to be an artist, I consider<br />
myself to be a skilled workman.<br />
But I do feel part of a community of writers. I’ve been privileged to meet Halberstam and Talese,<br />
and I’ve told them how much their work meant to me, and how it showed me how big you could make<br />
this job. It’s very nice to feel like there is a tradition that I am continuing. I don’t know whether I’ll<br />
leave it in as good shape as Halberstam and Talese did, but I certainly feel there is something they<br />
passed on to me. I hope there is somebody I’m passing it on to.<br />
What kinds of subjects are you drawn to?<br />
If there is a theme to my work, it is about people—usually men— working obsessively to create<br />
something larger than themselves. It may be larger than them, or they may just think it is larger than<br />
them. But the obsession is deep either way. I think I understand something about them.<br />
Is that because you see yourself in them?<br />
Perhaps. Or maybe I feel I ought to be more like them. But when I see one of those guys, I know<br />
that there is a world, of his creation, for me to write about. And if I can get the reader to see the<br />
world from behind that character’s eyes, he will be taken on a wonderful journey.<br />
How do you find stories?<br />
I just get on something and can’t let go. Sometimes an editor will call me up and say, “I think you<br />
should write about such and such.” And I’ll say, “Oh, no! I don’t know a thing about that.” And then a<br />
funny thing will happen. It won’t go away.
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