Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 9:49 PM by Gene

Chicago Magazine runs an article on the missing former columnist Bob Greene that does to him what Los Angeles Magazine did to Peter Bart. Three words come to mind: chameleon, two-faced, fraud. (Two other words come to mind: statutory rape.) I must cut-and-paste a particular example, about a 1972 piece on the Munich Massacre that won him fame:

“It took this one night to make us know” what it is to be a Jew, he wrote.

“Rabbis were quoting it in High Holiday sermons,” recalls [the columnist Robert] Feder. “That’s how big it was. It seemed to be deeply personal, deeply felt.”

Apparently, it was not. In the mid-seventies, Greene returned to Northwestern to talk to students. The appearance was well attended—Feder was among the students eager to hear Greene speak. Alan Rosenberg, who today is an assistant features editor at The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, was also there. Rosenberg looked up to Greene, and he was curious about the 1974 column that Greene had written about President Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon. “It was so extreme in its emotionalism,” recalls Rosenberg. “It was very virulent—‘We got this guy Ford and the one thing people had wanted of Ford was that he must not pardon Nixon. And now he’d gone and done that and now he’d have to pay.’ I had wondered if Greene had felt that angry when he wrote it, and when it was time for questions, I asked him.”

Greene said no, he had not felt that way. “He said that he had sat down and thought about what he should say. And that that was the way he normally conducted his business—calculate what the right reaction was, what would make a good piece.” Then Greene went on to tell the story about how he had written his column about the Israeli athletes. He said he had been watching TV and having a drink when he heard the news about the murders. And the thought that had crossed his mind was, If I handle this right, I could be famous.

“It seemed so ethically bankrupt, to have this wonderful forum and to just calculate it, to weigh it, and to say what you think would bring you to prominence,” says Rosenberg. “I could never look at him in the same way again.”

Feder corroborates Rosenberg’s story. “Greene said he didn’t really feel anything. It was all just a device that he knew would resonate with people. It made us feel like we had been taken in.”

Ethical bankruptcy -- from the man who became the Court Jester of Bathos in Oprah's Empire of Self-Pity, a fount of gaseous wisdom for the future Lord Koppel of Eisnerdom.