Magazines
Words and thoughts from Vanity Fair
By Diego Vasquez
Apr 2, 2007, 07:39

Vanity Fair wasn’t nominated for a single National Magazine Award in 2004, but over the past three years the magazine has been nominated for 14 NMAs, and last year it won in the essays category. This year's four nominations are in photojournalism, columns and commentary, profile writing and public interest. Today, as part of an ongoing series on this year's NMA nominees, Media Life excerpts passages from three of the Vanity Fair pieces that were nominated.

Public Interest
Vanity Fair’s public interest nomination is for William Langewiesche’s piece “Rules of Engagement,” about a disheartening series of events that unfolded in Iraq after a young Marine was killed by an insurgent-planted landmine.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece, which ran in the magazine’s November 2006 issue:

The boom of the land mine exploding was heard throughout Haditha. Immediately afterward the city went quiet, except near the convoy, from which the Marines piled out shouting. Some ran back to the shattered Humvee to render aid as they could; the others quickly settled down, and indeed milled around uncertainly until Wuterich ordered them to spread out into defensive positions. It was still barely 7:15 in the morning, the Humvee boiled with black smoke, and the possibility existed that its destruction marked the start of an ambush that would now expand into overlapping attacks with automatic fire and rocket-propelled grenades. All through Iraq the insurgents were laying such lethal traps. For the moment, the houses on both sides of the street showed no sign of activity, though certainly they contained people lying low, if only out of fear.

Again it is important to face the realities here. According to counter-insurgency doctrine, these people were not necessarily the enemy, but Terrazas was nonetheless spilling his guts into their street. Among these very houses was one where the Marines had discovered a bomb factory just a few days before. Moreover, even if the neighbors were not directly involved, they must have known the location of this land mine, which could not have been planted without the locals taking notice. Surely some residents could have found a way to warn the patrol; if they were not the enemy, surely some could have acknowledged that Kilo Company during its stay in Haditha had been showing goodwill and restraint. But no, it was apparent that to these people Terrazas was just another dead American, like roadkill, and good riddance to him. For Wuterich's squad the silence of the neighborhood was therefore less reassuring than ominous. It was the quiet before the storm, the prelude to an attack. The Marines were angry and tense. They sighted their rifles at the walls and rooftops, thinking every variation of fuck and waiting for the incoming rounds.

Instead, a white Opel sedan came driving up the street. It was an unmarked taxi carrying five young men, four of them college students bound for school in Baghdad, the fifth their driver. They were only about a hundred yards away from the blast site when they happened upon the scene. Through their windshield—dirty, bug-splattered, against the sun—they would have seen one of the most dangerous sights in Iraq: smoke rising from a shattered Humvee, a stopped convoy, and American soldiers in full fighting mettle coming at them down the street. The Marines halted the car from a distance. When soldiers do this in Iraq, they are supposed to follow a progressive escalation of force, with hand signals first, followed by raised weapons, then warning shots with tracers visible, then shots to the engine block, and finally, if the car keeps coming, shots directly into the driver. Because of the risk of car bombs, however, the procedure is typically shortened: weapons go up, and if the car doesn't stop, the driver and other occupants are liberally sprayed with fire. Those are the rules of the road, and so be it; given the circumstances, they are well enough understood to seem fair.

Profile Writing
Another of Vanity Fair’s nominations comes in the profile writing category, for Todd Purdum’s June 2006 piece “A Face Only a President Could Love,” about vice president Dick Cheney. Here’s an excerpt:

In fact, it is hard to reconcile the old Cheney with the new Dick. How did the young aide who, the political consultant Stuart Spencer recalled, was almost "spastic" with anxiety to quickly clarify Gerald Ford's inadvertent liberation of Poland in a 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter become the grumpy old veep who waited four days to explain to the public (and 36 hours to explain to his increasingly unhappy boss) how he managed to accidentally shoot a 78-year-old quail-hunting companion in Texas in February?

How did the cool political hand who vanquished a finger-flipping and bullheaded vice president named Nelson Rockefeller, and who hid out at the Republican convention in Detroit in 1980 to avoid being drawn into what he regarded as a ludicrous discussion of a possible "co-presidency" between Ronald Reagan and Jerry Ford, become the most powerful vice president in history, and one who muttered "Fuck yourself" to Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, on the Senate floor?

Almost 30 years ago, a White House chief of staff suggested one possible answer.

"The problem when you try to put a vice-president in roles, you're always trying to fit him somehow in staff operations inside the White House," he said. "And the fact of the matter is you've got a different set of criteria for selecting a vice-president than you do staff. And by virtue of the fact that he is a constitutional officer, that he isn't subject to the same kinds of—that it's a different relationship, that other staff people oftentimes will defer to him as vice-president, rather than treat him as a staff person and argue and debate with him and so forth. There are just some very basic fundamental problems there in trying to make that work."

Who was that chief of staff? Dick Cheney, of course.

Columns and Commentary
Vanity Fair was nominated in the columns and commentary category for three columns by writer Christopher Hitchens: “Childhood’s End,” from the January 2006 issue, “The Vietnam Syndrome,” from August 2006 and “Oriana Fallaci and the Art of Interview,” from December 2006.

Below is an excerpt from “Oriana Fallaci and the Art of Interview” in which Hitchens compares her technique with that of former CBS anchor Dan Rather:

Here is an excerpt from an interview with what our media culture calls a "world leader":

Dan Rather: Mr. President, I hope you will take this question in the spirit in which it's asked. First of all, I regret that I do not speak Arabic. Do you speak any … any English at all?

Saddam Hussein (through translator): Have some coffee.

Rather: I have coffee.

Hussein (through translator): Americans like coffee.

Rather: That's true. And this American likes coffee.

And here is another interview with another "world leader":

Oriana Fallaci: When I try to talk about you, here in Tehran, people lock themselves in a fearful silence. They don't even dare pronounce your name, Majesty. Why is that?

The Shah: Out of an excess of respect, I suppose.

Fallaci: I'd like to ask you: if I were an Iranian instead of an Italian, and lived here and thought as I do and wrote as I do, I mean if I were to criticize you, would you throw me in jail?

The Shah: Probably.

The difference here is not just in the quality of the answers given by the two homicidal dictators. It is in the quality of the questions. Mr. Rather (who is in mid-interview in one of Saddam's palaces and who already knows that his subject doesn't speak English and uses only his own interpreters) begins to ask a question, half apologizes for doing so, and is then completely unhorsed by an irrelevant remark about coffee. It's unclear whether he ever returned to the question that he hoped would be taken in the spirit in which it was asked, so we will never know what that "spirit" was. And at no point in the interview, which was in February 2003, did Rather ask Saddam Hussein about his somewhat, shall we say, spotty record on human rights. It was enough that he had secured what the networks call "the big get."