“There are no friends in politics,” they reminded me.
I sat up in my bed and looked at the clock on my phone. 11 p.m. I was supposed to be sleeping. But a late-night call from this person usually meant I had a lead for a story I couldn’t pass up. I picked up the phone despite my New Year’s resolution to protect my sleep. We chatted for a minute, then they went into their usual dance of dropping a news bit without directly dropping it.
“Did you hear…” they began.
“I heard,” I said, then paused, waiting a bit impatiently for them to get to why they’d called so late.
They danced around the bits. Creating the thread I needed to pull, enough to be able to say, without lying, they didn’t tell me anything. Plausible deniability. At this point, I knew how to tango. Then, like many of my conversations with sources, this veered off topic, to their relationships in the system. That’s when they said it.
And the no-friends line stuck with me.
I imagined the journey it must have taken to get to that conclusion. The number of times they felt backstabbed by people they thought they could trust. I’d seen at least one of the instances, but I suspected there were many more I wasn’t privy to. It was the kind of path that explains why so many politicians become transactional once they’re inside the system. You’re either useful or you’re not. You have something they need or you don’t. And anyone who’s polite to everyone deserves even more suspicion.
“It’s the nice ones. The ones who are always smiling and telling you you look good that have the most to hide,” they went on.
I knew the mindset. When I was a career diplomat at the State Department, the sentiment was similar: no permanent allies, no permanent enemies, only interests. I saw it most clearly in Saudi Arabia, where security and economic interests bound together two very different countries and cultures. As part of the machinery of the U.S. government, a machine whose goals were survival and growth, your job was to play the cards you were dealt. It could feel a little less than human. I imagine many jobs feel that way to some degree, but in politics it’s much more obvious.
As human as politicians are, the power and the systems they work in, local or national, seem to grow a second skin over them. It keeps them safe. As a reporter, I spend a lot of time trying to coax them out from under it, because to get to the truth, you need to talk to the human.
Then I thought about us. We were cordial. On the call, we talked about things that had nothing to do with work. But we were not friends. Whatever thread had been dropped certainly served a purpose for them. Some of it I thought I understood. Other parts, I’m sure, I couldn’t see.
Which makes me wonder: does politics make people this way, or do only the ones who can wear that second skin survive?
Updates!
On the book, meetings with publishers are on the horizon (and yes, I’m nervous, because this is uncharted territory for me). But I’m not waiting for them. Last weekend, I started drafting the book beyond the proposal. I’ve taken inspiration from Patrick Radden Keefe, who described his writing process on this linked podcast. I LOVED his book Empire of Pain. He talks about holding cards back and teasing them for readers, and about structuring nonfiction like a screenplay. I’ve never written a screenplay but I went and read one after the podcast, and I get the idea. I’ll share more as it progresses.
Lecturing as part of the masterclass on AI, Journalism and Society at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute was amazing. Here are some highlights. Maybe when life slows down, I’ll return to the classroom.
So far, I’ve really enjoyed writing Worth Mentioning. It’s fun to share parts of conversations that don’t make it into stories but are still worth discussing. Let me know what you think. I read everything.
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