Harper’s editor still a man of many words

NEW YORK — Lewis Lapham flips up the top of his Zippo lighter, ignites another Parliament and inhales deeply.

At 71, he’s about to step down after 28 years as the editor of Harper’s magazine, but he’s not talking about that right now.

Instead, he’s telling the story of his aborted job interview at the CIA back in 1957, when Lapham, after matriculating at Hotchkiss and Yale and Cambridge, hoped for a career as a Cold Warrior.

“The CIA was in temporary buildings, Quonset huts down by the Lincoln Memorial,” he says. “The interview was at a wooden table with four guys, all from Yale. They were of a type that I had come to ridicule at Yale -- the George W. Bush type.”

Which is?

“Eastern, rich, privileged, arrogant, perennial cheerleader,” he says, the adjectives rolling out in his patrician voice.

He can’t resist taking a shot at Bush, which isn’t surprising: His cover story in the March issue of Harper’s is called “The Case for Impeachment.” Then again, Lapham has skewered every president since Nixon.

He continues his story about the CIA interview, marveling at the questions he was asked.

“The first question was: If you were standing at the 13th tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club would you use?”

He exhales a stream of smoke. “Now, it so happened that I’d played that golf course and knew the hole. It’s a short hole, so if you said ‘driver,’ you’d be wrong.... I said 7-iron, and I got it right.”

He is, as always, dressed elegantly: a starched white shirt with gold cuff links beneath an impeccably tailored blue suit with a natty paisley handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket.

“The second question was: You’re coming in on the final tack at the Hay Harbor on Fishers Island in the late afternoon -- what tack do you take? I don’t remember what the answer was, but I got it right because I had sailed at Fishers Island.”

He pauses theatrically.

“The third question was: They mentioned the name of a girl who was known on the Ivy League circuit for being a ravenous nymphomaniac. And the question was: Does she wear a slip?”

He takes another drag, emits another cloud. “I didn’t know, because I’d never had carnal knowledge of the young lady. I explained that I’d heard rumors of French silk and Belgian lace but I couldn’t vouch for my sources.”

Then he walked out, he says, disgusted with the know-it-all smugness of his CIA interrogators. “I said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time. Goodbye and good luck.’ ”

Then he went home to San Francisco, where his grandfather had once been mayor, and began his journalism career as a reporter for the Examiner.

What a story! It explains so much. Not only does it hint at why the CIA has screwed up so often, from the Bay of Pigs to 9/11, it also suggests why Lapham -- the blueblooded great-grandson of a founder of Texaco -- has been lobbing elegantly crafted literary grenades at America’s ruling elite for decades.

It’s a great story, so great that it sounds ... just a tad too good to be true. Which calls to mind Lapham’s “Tentacles of Rage” fiasco.

That essay, a spirited attack on “the Republican propaganda mill,” ran in the September 2004 issue of Harper’s. Lapham wrote of watching the 2004 Republican convention and “listening to the hollow rattle of rhetorical brass and tin.” Alas, the magazine arrived in subscribers’ homes before the Republicans had actually convened.

But he swears his CIA story is true. And he apologizes for faking his convention coverage. Well, sort of.

“It was a mistake, but to my mind a very minor one,” he says. “I put it in to meet the September deadline, to give it timeliness.... I wasn’t putting words in anybody’s mouth or remarking on something that didn’t happen.”

Besides, he says wryly, “it was fairly accurate.”

“The term most people use to describe Lewis is patrician, and he does have that air,” says Tom Wolfe, the novelist and journalist. “He’s very much part of a social network. He does know a wide range of people in the upper orders. That’s why I think he has a lot of fun with his left-leaning views.”

Lapham has published many of Wolfe’s iconoclastic pieces, and the two share a fondness for shooting spitballs at sacred cows. “He is politically a real maverick,” says Wolfe, who believes that that attitude improves Harper’s. “It’s very idiosyncratic, and I mean that in a good way.”

Lapham was hired in 1971 as a writer for Harper’s by legendary editor Willie Morris. A couple of weeks later, Morris got fired and most of the staff quit in protest.

When the smoke cleared, Lapham was the new managing editor. And in 1976, he became the editor.

In June 1980, the owners of Harper’s announced they were killing the money-losing magazine. At the Chicago Sun-Times, reporter Rick MacArthur, who loved the magazine, read the news on the wire and called his father, J. Roderick MacArthur, a board member of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“I said, ‘Do you think the MacArthur Foundation could bail out Harper’s?’ ” Rick MacArthur recalls. “And my father, who is a very unusual man, said, ‘Why not?’ ”

So the MacArthur Foundation bought Harper’s and set up the Harper’s Magazine Foundation to run it. The magazine kept losing money -- intellectual magazines inevitably do -- and in 1981, the Harper’s Foundation board replaced Lapham with Michael Kinsley, now a syndicated columnist.

Rick MacArthur, irate at Lapham’s firing, joined the board and started a counterrevolution. In 1984, the board fired Kinsley and rehired Lapham.

In his second coming, Lapham radically revamped Harper’s, which was born in 1850 and looked it. He introduced three new features: Harper’s Index, an ironic compendium of statistics; Readings, a quirky collection of odd items such as letters, transcripts, rants, even suicide notes; and Annotation, a two-page spread with a document in the middle, surrounded by an expert’s scathing commentary on it.

It worked. And the Harper’s Index became perhaps the most copied magazine feature of the last quarter-century.

“That was a brilliant innovation,” Wolfe says. “The Index is fabulous. Those things are antidotes to subscription guilt, like the New Yorker’s cartoons: You open the New Yorker and you look at the cartoons and you feel you’ve read it even if you don’t read anything else. The Index and Readings have the same effect in Harper’s.”

But for Lapham, the heart of Harper’s remains the essay -- a writer tackling a subject with passion or wit. “I’m always looking for a voice in writing,” he says. “I want to hear what the writer has seen or felt or thought.... I’m not looking for data, I’m looking for experience, wisdom, meaning.”

Lapham published dozens of memorable pieces, including David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship, Christopher Hitchens accusing Henry A. Kissinger of war crimes, Michael Paterniti on driving cross-country with Einstein’s brain.

He sees his own essays -- which will appear bimonthly after his retirement -- as ironic observations of a flawed species. “Human folly is human folly in whatever century it’s encountered,” he says. “I’m watching fools leap and dance. What am I supposed to do, say they’re not fools?”