Book Review: How to Cause a Scandal

If I mentioned the words, “Lovelorn Astronaut”, I suspect the penny would instantly drop that one of the four subjects of this book is Lisa Nowak who gained notoriety for driving from Houston to Florida, non-stop, with the use of some astronautic aids, normally used to deal with calls of nature in outer space.

The second subject, and perhaps the most interesting to lawyers, concerns the downfall of the then chief justice of the New York State Court of Appeal who got busted and imprisoned for five felonies associated with his attempts to end an extra marital relationship.

The third subject is Linda Tripp, she of Monica Lewinsky fame, who kept tapes of her conversations with Lewinsky and blew the whistle on the Clinton affair.

The fourth is a person I had never heard of, James Frey. He was the author of an autobiography entitled “A million little pieces”, which became an overnight sensation when endorsed by Oprah, only to later be revealed as largely imagined. As a result of this betrayal, Oprah destroyed him in an interview. No one lies to Oprah, was the message.

This book could only have been written in America for no other country is so obsessed with public figures, or perhaps more realistically, the public figures of other countries are either better behaved or show a degree of cleverness that enables their misconduct to go undetected. If detected, most other public figures retreat gracefully from the public’s eye, but not in America.

The style of this book annoyed me at times, to the stage where my eyes glazed over, as I fought against the innumerable and unnecessary adjectives. That criticism apart, I read nothing new about Lisa Nowak, but I read a great deal more of Sol Wachtler who had canvassed for election in an advertisement filmed in a prison, slamming doors metaphorically on criminals and ended up behind bars himself, after masquerading as two different people, in a childish attempt to intimidate his former girlfriend.

So much has been written about the Lewinsky affair, that perhaps we have forgotten what we once knew about the role of Linda Tripp.

This book is as much an analysis of what made these stories into scandals, what motivated the subjects to do what they did, (with frequent references to Freud), why the “whistle blowers” blew and how public opinion treated them, as is it a consideration of the motivations of the perpetrators themselves.

In this respect, the author did not hold back in her analysis of Tripp. She says (pg 122)

“The problem with Tripp’s self-justifications for betraying Monica’s trust was that they were basically garbage”.

Nor did she hold back as to Tripp’s facial expressions and what they showed.

“The mouth was a renegade, marching to its own drummer; it seemed to have an existence independent of the rest of her face and independent of the words emerging from it. When she spoke, her mouth did a peculiar thing: the upper lip reared up, exposing the top row of teeth, something between a snarl and a sneer”.

Did I enjoy this book? You’d better believe it. Having lived in America and worked there for substantial periods of time, I think I have a reasonable understanding of the American psyche. I have never understood the reasons behind the headlong leaps into tragedy of the Bill Clintons, tele-evangelists such as Jim Bakker and all the other public figures who have been exposed as having a darker side. I still don’t understand their motives, but I thoroughly enjoyed this analysis of four of the more interesting examples.