March
9, 2006,
was a bad day for the White House. Weeks before, Claude Allen, the
president's chief domestic policy adviser, had resigned, saying that he wanted
to spend more time with his family. Then, on March 9, Allen was charged with
having stolen some $5,000 worth of merchandise from Washington-area depart-
ment stores during a months-long shoplifting spree. Even by the standards of a
White House already awash in negative publicity, it was an enormous
embarrassment.
A
few blocks north, at almost exactly the same time, David Gerson, the executive
vice president of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, was
dealing with a headache of his own. Staffers at
The
American Enterprise
--the think tank's magazine, which was published eight times per
year and boasted more than 20,000 subscribers--were threatening revolt against
its longtime editor, Karl Zinsmeister. Frustration with Zinsmeister had been
building for some time, and, by early 2006, one former staffer recalls, the
situation was so bad that "if I got a good offer from McDonald's, I would
have taken it." It wasn't just Zinsmeister's direct employees who were
disgruntled. In mid-February, one former
American
Enterprise
staffer wrote in an e-mail that Veronique Rodman, head of media
relations for the think tank, had urged staffers "to mount a coup' against
Karl within AEI." Magazine employees began meeting with Gerson and airing
their grievances. And, on Friday, March 10, one staffer e-mailed co-workers to
say that "I'm not feeling a whole lot of motivation to come to the office
on Monday." The staffer noted that another employee "feels the same
way, and we've even discussed not coming as a show of protest." Six days
later, Zinsmeister announced in a mass e-mail that he was "migrating"
from his post at the magazine "to a position as a scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute." Gerson's headache appeared to be over.
And
Zinsmeister's not-so-smooth departure from
The
American Enterprise
might have remained a footnote in AEI history--except that, two
months later, he was named Claude Allen's successor at the White House.
Zinsmeister
got off to a rocky start in his new job--which consists of overseeing the
president's domestic agenda on issues ranging from education to immigration and
working with Congress to implement it--when, two days after his selection,
The New York Sun
revealed that he had altered a
local paper's 2004 profile of him before it was reprinted on his magazine's
website. (A quote that had previously denigrated "people in
Washington" was changed to instead disparage the country's
"overclass.") But he soon apologized for what he called a
"foolish" lapse, and--perhaps because the White House isn't exactly
the Columbia School of Journalism, or perhaps because Bush officials found the
impulse to clean up quotes considerably less creepy than the impulse to rob
department stores--Zinsmeister was allowed to keep his post.
Publicly,
conservatives praised the appointment. Grover Norquist called him an
"intellectual's intellectual," while Zinsmeister's former boss, AEI
president Christopher DeMuth, said he was "thrilled" with the White
House's decision.
But,
privately, many conservatives were stunned--and horrified. "Everyone who
knows Karl that I've spoken to reacted with blatant shock," says a former
editor at
The American Enterprise
. Another former staffer at the
magazine told me that, after Zinsmeister's hiring, "the last vestige of
confidence I had in the Bush administration--which wasn't very much--was shot
to hell." A prominent neoconservative Washington journalist put it this
way: "Everyone thought it was wacky."
Exactly
how wacky became clear as I spent more and more time talking to Zinsmeister's
former colleagues at AEI. Why, I wanted to know, had they so despised him? And
why did he leave
The American Enterprise?
ZInsmeister--sharp-jawed,
tall, now in his late forties--first came to AEI as a research assistant to
neoconservative Ben Wattenberg in 1982, shortly after graduating from Yale. He
went on to work for Michael Novak as well as for Bill Bennett's Department of
Education. He also freelanced as a journalist and radio commentator. All the
while, he was honing his political philosophy--a mix of populism, religiously
inspired social conservatism, and hatred for coastal elites. In an interview
last year with Wattenberg, which aired on PBS, Zinsmeister said that "if I
had to put myself in any label, I'd say I'm a militant middle-American
advocate."
In
1994, Zinsmeister was named editor-in-chief of
The
American Enterprise
, where he quickly got results. With his fiery style and desire to
provoke, he changed a dry public-policy magazine into something more readable
and less esoteric. "Karl wanted his magazine to be seen not just as ... a
glorified newsletter for the institute but a serious intellectual publication,"
says one former AEI employee. The strategy worked. During Zinsmeister's
twelve-year tenure, the magazine's subscriber base would increase from fewer
than 4,000 to more than 20,000. (Full disclosure: I was an intern at AEI in the
summer of 2004, and I later wrote several pieces for the magazine's website. At
no point did I have contact with Zinsmeister.)
Among
Zinsmeister's personal trademarks was a visceral disdain for Washington, which
he avoided at all costs, editing the magazine from his home in Cazenovia, a
small town in upstate New York. In an e-mail, he once described himself as
"kind of an oddball who doesn't like the Washington whirl," and
former employees recall that he frequently referred to D.C. in general and AEI
in particular as full of "effete men in suits."
In
2003, Zinsmeister embedded with the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. That
summer, he published his first book,
Boots on the Ground
, a
celebration of the soldiers with whom he had traveled. "One thing I will
always admire him for," says Karina Rollins, a former
American
Enterprise
editor who now works at the conservative Hudson Institute,
"is his courage in going over there and reporting on the courage and
sacrifice of the troops." Zinsmeister was a steadfast supporter of the
war, and he would become a relentless critic of what he described as the
American media's "bias toward failure."
As
he spent more and more time on his Iraq projects--which would eventually
include a second book,
Dawn Over Baghdad
; a
comic book,
Combat Zone
; and a PBS documentary called
"Warriors"--Zinsmeister's attention to the magazine began to fade.
"Ever since he went to Iraq for the first time, he was out of the office
much more than before, and he would be gone on speaking tours without telling
us," Rollins recalls. "He was gone often during deadline time, and he
would blame deadline problems on us." Soon after his first trip to Iraq,
the daily morning conference call that Zinsmeister held with his Washington
staff abruptly ceased. Increasingly, Zinsmeister's managerial style veered
wildly between two extremes: neglectful and domineering. On the one hand, the
magazine often ran long excerpts from books that had been published months
earlier. As one current AEI scholar put it, during "the last couple of
years he was running the magazine, there were very few original features. It
doesn't take much genius to imitate
Reader's Digest
."
On the other hand, former editors recall that some authors, including Dr. Laura
Schlessinger, rescinded their work after Zinsmeister edited it beyond
recognition. "I can't say I know anyone at AEI who was particularly proud
of the magazine," says one former colleague. While Zinsmeister had
certainly turned
The American Enterprise
from a
wonkish journal into a pugnacious voice in the culture wars, a scholar at
another conservative think tank says that "the magazine had been
floundering under his leadership for many years, that's no doubt."
To
be sure, Zinsmeister was hardly the first magazine editor to neglect his
publication while writing books. The bigger problem was that he had come to see
the magazine as an extension of himself. Zinsmeister, according to a former
colleague, looked to another conservative magazine editor, William F. Buckley
Jr., as inspiration for marketing himself as an iconoclast. The prolific
Buckley had long offered his books as an enticement to potential subscribers.
The difference, of course, was that Buckley was a god to conservatives, and
there was reason to believe that readers of his magazine might actually
want
his books. The same couldn't exactly be said for Zinsmeister.
Still,
he pushed forward. And so it was that AEI began buying Zinsmeister's books to
give to new subscribers. The strategy, which debuted in 2003, was to lure
people into subscribing through direct mail by offering a free Zinsmeister book
with their subscription. At first, these mailings offered multiple options for
subscribing, some of which included a Zinsmeister book, some of which did not.
The magazine's then-business manager, Garth Cadiz, says that the offers without
Zinsmeister's books invariably received better response rates. Yet, in June
2005, Zinsmeister eliminated the option to get a subscription through direct
mail without buying one of his books as well. The move was a flop, according to
Cadiz. Around that time, subscriptions, which had been climbing for years,
began falling. No books by other AEI scholars were ever offered in similar
arrangements, Cadiz notes. Zinsmeister also printed ads for his books free of
charge in the magazine. In 2004, Zinsmeister wrote an e-mail to his editors
concerning
Dawn Over Baghdad
: "I have promised
Encounter [his publisher] we will run Dawn ads in TAE for the indefinite future
in return for them paying for some of the media interview travel. ... So please
treat the Dawn ad as a paid ad for the near future (i.e. pull something else,
not it, if there is a space crunch)." According to a former AEI employee,
it was widely known at the think tank that "Karl was in it for Karl,"
and his use of the magazine to promote his own books was "sort of like a
running joke." The books were shipped to Zinsmeister's home in Cazenovia
and mailed to subscribers from there. Over three years, according to an e-mail
David Gerson would later send to Zinsmeister after he had announced his plans
to step down, AEI purchased 13,700 Zinsmeister books at a cost of $131,000. And
what a gift that proved to be for Zinsmeister, as AEI's purchases wound up
accounting for 45 percent of the total sales of
Dawn
Over Baghdad
's hardcover edition--and more than half its paperback sales.
It
wasn't just
the books that irked Zinsmeister's colleagues. There was also his
wife, Ann, who was added to the magazine's masthead in early 2003 as its
marketing director--a job that Karl described in an e-mail as
"part-time." "The role of his wife Ann was never clearly
explained to us. ... She spent an awful lot of time scheduling radio and TV
appearances," says Rollins. According to several former employees of the
magazine, Ann did little besides arrange her husband's public appearances and
mail his books. Still, she made her presence felt. Ann would occasionally call
the D.C. staff to order editorial changes--once, while her husband was away,
spending several hours in a dispute with the Washington office over the correct
use of apostrophes. "How do you contradict someone sleeping with your
boss?" a former editor asked me. Jo Roback-Pal, the magazine's former art
director, says that Ann "screamed at me constantly." (Ann did not
return a call seeking comment for this article.)
But
the biggest grievance harbored by the magazine's staff concerned Zinsmeister
himself. "He went to his son's basketball game, and then he would give Jo
[Roback-Pal] a hard time about a doctor's appointment," Rollins says.
"That happened all the time. If one of these things just happened every
now and then you'd write it off. ... But there were so many of these things and
so often." Roback-Pal, who was originally hired to work four days a week,
says Zinsmeister demanded that she start working five days--with a small
increase in pay--or accept a salary cut to stay at four. She threatened AEI
with a lawsuit but eventually settled for a severance package. While
Zinsmeister frequently complained about Roback-Pal to other staffers at the magazine--telling
Cadiz that she was "useless" and "never there"--her former
colleagues say that she never missed a deadline and that he was
"abusive" toward her. When she angered him by taking a four-month
maternity leave, Zinsmeister told Cadiz, "I am never going to hire another
woman because they just get pregnant and leave." For her part, Rollins
says that her relationship with Zinsmeister--which she described as
"fantastic" during her first two years at the magazine, starting in
2001--eventually soured so badly that he stopped speaking to her for the two
months prior to her departure. Another former editor said that "people in
the office tried to avoid talking to him." Magazine employees began
referring to their think tank with the inverse of its acronym--IEA: the
Institute of Evil Administrators--and calling Zinsmeister "Captain
Queeg" behind his back.
Former
magazine staffers point to "Zinsmeister's Law," which he repeatedly
invoked, as the basis for his rudeness. "Remember Zinsmeister's Law:
Assume people are stupid," he wrote in one e-mail. His ire wasn't confined
to those who worked for him. A former editor at the magazine says Zinsmeister
called Gerson a "pinhead," and Cadiz says he referred to AEI's
director of human resources as a "boob."
Despite
all this--the declining quality of his magazine, his questionable use of
subscription sales to promote his own books, his unprofessional treatment of
co-workers--Zinsmeister still had one thing going for him: his relationship
with AEI President Christopher DeMuth. It was widely known at the think tank
that Zinsmeister was a DeMuth favorite; indeed, his officewide nickname was
"the golden boy." In 1997, he was given an endowed chair, and, as
late as 2002, he was one of the think tank's five highest-paid employees
(excluding officers and directors), making $125,000 per year.
But
even DeMuth's affection could not protect Zinsmeister from the growing
exasperation of his own staff. And so, on March 14--several weeks after his
employees had registered their disgust with their boss in discussions with
Gerson--Zinsmeister met with Gerson in Washington. Two days after that,
Zinsmeister sent out a mass e-mail announcing his resignation but said he would
continue editing the magazine while AEI searched for a replacement. Two months
later, he had a job in the White House.
as
Zinsmeister fired from
The American Enterprise
? Only
he and top AEI officials know for sure. Zinsmeister declined to speak to me,
while Gerson told me, in an e-mail, "Any suggestion that he was asked to
step down from running the magazine ... is completely false." For his
part, DeMuth wrote, also in an e-mail, that "Karl was not fired,
dismissed, moved aside, or in any way encouraged to step down from the
position. The decision was entirely, 100 percent his own. His performance in
the position was outstanding and he could have continued in it
indefinitely."
But
other evidence suggests that the move was not so amicable. "It's sort of a
little weird that you announce your departure without naming a successor,"
a prominent scholar at another conservative think tank says. Indeed, James
Glassman--a former
tnr publisher who would eventually take over for Zinsmeister--told
me that he was not approached by AEI until after Zinsmeister had disclosed his
resignation.
Moreover,
the day after Zinsmeister announced his plans to resign, Cadiz came to
Washington to meet with Gerson. At their meeting, Cadiz says that Gerson
discussed Zinsmeister's behavior toward staff and was insistent in his queries
about how many books the magazine had ordered, to whom it was shipping them,
and how much money was changing hands. He also brought up the subject of
potentially "missing" books that Zinsmeister had ordered on behalf of
AEI, estimating that as many as 6,000 were unaccounted for. Gerson, says Cadiz,
asked him multiple times, "What does Ann Zinsmeister do?" To which
Cadiz, long kept in the dark about Ann by her husband, replied, "I don't
know." "We have been sending 1.2 million dollars of AEI's money to
Cazenovia per year, and we don't know what he's been doing with it," Cadiz
recalls Gerson saying. Gerson made clear to him, Cadiz says, that Zinsmeister
had been "removed" from the editorship of the magazine. Another
former AEI employee recalls that Gerson had said a few weeks earlier that
Zinsmeister had committed "fireable offenses."
On
the morning of April 12, a month after Zinsmeister had announced his
resignation and six weeks before the White House announced his appointment,
AEI's controller sent an e-mail to Gerson. Zinsmeister was still running the
magazine at this point, and she had received a request from him, via Cadiz, to
pay for a further 1,000 copies of
Dawn Over Baghdad
at a
total cost of $7,500. In an e-mail to Zinsmeister that afternoon, Gerson wrote
that "over the past three years, AEI has purchased $131,000 worth of your
books (including $12,000 worth of comic books) to use as subscription premiums.
... That's been good for St. Martin's and Encounter--assuming a customary
commercial arrangement; you've received more than $32,000 in royalties on those
purchased." It seems clear from the e-mail that Gerson was annoyed.
"We haven't pushed books by other AEI authors in the same way," he
continued. "As we change our magazine and its marketing going forward, I
want to tip the balance of the book premiums we offer to a more representative
cross-section of AEI's products. Charles Murray's
In Our
Hands
sold more than 1,600 copies last week alone, and it costs us $3 a
copy. Let's try that book as a premium."
Then,
on May 24, Zinsmeister sent a triumphant mass e-mail to AEI staff. "I am
an admirer of Cincinnatus," he wrote, "and had intended to return
quietly to my writer's plow after I completed my last issue of
The
American Enterprise
. When I announced my departure, however, I received an unexpected
flurry of proposals, one of which I could not ignore. I have been asked by the
President to serve as his domestic policy advisor." A well-known scholar
at AEI says that many people at the think tank responded with "bemusement.
It's not a role we would have seen him as playing." "I personally
thought it was very strange," says the head of a prominent conservative
organization. "I was completely stunned. ... I think people were like,
What? KZ?'" But, while many conservatives found Zinsmeister to be an odd
choice for the job, others thought the appointment made perfect sense. With his
disdain for Washington and his hatred for elites, Zinsmeister undoubtedly
appealed to "Bush's weakness," speculates one former
American
Enterprise
editor, while another laughs at the thought of "two people
complaining about elites in D.C., who both went to Yale."
For
his part, Cadiz was offered the opportunity to relocate to Washington for the
relaunch of the magazine under new leadership. But, with a working wife and two
high schoolage children in upstate New York, he could not accept. He departed
AEI, he says, on agreeable terms. It will no doubt be tempting for AEI to paint
Cadiz as a disgruntled employee, but the words of Zinsmeister and Gerson
suggest otherwise. In an e-mail Zinsmeister sent just days before assuming his
job at the White House, he told Gerson that Cadiz had been "a diligent,
error-free, and creative employee for 4½ years, who has saved the magazine a
lot of money on various business processes during that time, so I hope
TAE
can be generous with him during this involuntary
separation." And, in an e-mail sent to AEI's senior staff the day after
Zinsmeister announced his decision to step down, Gerson wrote, "In
consideration of Garth's fine work in helping to build the magazine, I
committed that AEI will make every effort to treat him well as we sort things
out."
In
a
coup de grâce, Zinsmeister made sure that his last issue of
The American Enterprise
bore his fingerprints. A
tribute to Zinsmeister by writer Bill Kauffman, titled "KZ from A to
Z," related how Zinsmeister met his wife while on a trip to Tanzania.
"Karl, ever unwilling to observe rules and regulations, sneaked out of
camp with Ann on a sightseeing lark," Kauffman wrote. But, when he edited
the piece, Zinsmeister removed the phrase "ever unwilling to observe rules
and regulations." The irony of the change was not lost on Zinsmeister's
beleaguered staff, one of whom wrote to his colleagues, "Can't go breaking
rules at the WH, now can we?"
But,
propensity for rule-breaking aside, one imagines that Zinsmeister has proved a
good fit in the Bush White House. After all, like the president he now serves,
Zinsmeister long ago mastered the trick of railing against Washington while
arrogating to himself as much of the city's power and privilege as he could grab.
"People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human
beings," Zinsmeister told the
Syracuse New Times
back
in August 2004. That quote obviously bothered him, since he would later soften
it on his magazine's website. Perhaps it haunted him merely because he worried
administration officials would read it as an insult. Or, maybe, just maybe,
somewhere in the back of his head, Karl Zinsmeister knew that it described the
person he had become.