Philip Gourevitch (courtesy
of The New Yorker)

Philip Gourevitch has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1997. He is the author of “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda” (1998, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) and “A Cold Case” (2001). Gourevitch spoke with Campaign Desk from the Democratic Convention in Boston as part of our continuing series of interviews with reporters, editors and commentators covering the election.

Liz Cox Barrett: You spent time with John Kerry for a lengthy New Yorker profile recently, and you observed him during the primaries as well. Based on your experiences, are there any prevailing storylines about the candidate that you think the press corps is getting wrong — or has missed entirely?

Philip Gourevitch: Kerry is an interestingly difficult character to cover because to a large extent it seems that people who are close to him are better at describing him or better at telling you about him than he is himself — at least to make him personally accessible. He is, in person, quite a bit the way he has been on the campaign trail, very much focused on discussing the issues and not wanting to or not knowing how always to make himself kind of familiar, warm, recognizable, which results in this notion that he’s shy and/or aloof. But it also can make the press at times get impatient with him, I think, because he’s not giving them/us what we’re after. …

I think it’s very interesting that in this election, the complaint from the press quite often is that Kerry has not made his story accessible to the public, he has not made himself familiar, that people don’t know who he is. Which is really interesting considering that the guy he’s running against has no story at all, and considering that we live in this age of the politician who must have the story, the anecdotal story. [Bush] is born to extraordinary privilege into an intensely insular, emotionally repressed, dynastic family. He grows up with extremely mediocre performances and seeming to have neither interests nor excellence in any field, except he’s a good partier in college and he seems to be able to collect people around him. He has some kind of power there in his ability to make connections with people. He drifts through his 20s. He becomes an alcoholic — and an ugly one. He failed serially at businesses. None of this is stuff [Bush] could ever mention again, nor is it ever mentioned except, supposedly, hostilely. In other words if you mention it, it’s considered hostile rather than a matter of fact and of record which all of it is. And then, the idea is, all of that is completely erased and redeemed through a conversion experience. It’s a very weird story. One doesn’t feel that one knows [Bush].

And yet everybody seems to agree, the conventional wisdom of the press is: George Bush, very likeable, even by people who don’t agree with him; John Kerry very hard to like, even for people who agree with him. This is an odd kind of contrast. …

If there’s another [press] fault, it’s the extent to which the criticism of Kerry strikes me as being driven by the Bush campaign, whereas the criticism of Bush is not driven by the Kerry campaign — it’s driven by the record, and the Kerry campaign has picked up a lot of it. Dean drove it at one point. Other people have driven it. …

There were those two articles recently on the Bush campaign’s war room, and they found that reporters, when asked, said yes, we had not picked up on these quibbles and these lines in speeches until those complaints were fed to us by the Bush people. So there’s a real difficulty in trying to discern in the press coverage what are the judgments or assessments of Kerry as Kerry without the Bush spin. It’s a tough one because the Bush spin is part of the equation — it’s not like you can totally subtract it — but identify it, please. You know, “in a line flagged by the Bush campaign, in a line flagged by the RNC.” …

[Another] big mistake I think the press makes: They call anything that isn’t a strict policy issue “character,” when often it’s personality. There’s a big difference. Character has to do with things like honesty and integrity and honor. I don’t think anybody can, for instance, begin to look at both [candidates’] records and say Bush’s character, or let’s say his service during the Vietnam war, or his sobriety, his business record, his way of sort of being really quite indifferent about all sorts of things, that these are character issues where he comes off looking great. He has a winning personality, apparently, with a lot of people. Kerry, on the other hand, his character may be conflicted in places but his problem is a personality problem.

Character is a very strong word. It suggests a kind of fundamental quality of the soul, of the sensibility, it’s almost like the stuff somebody’s made of. If you say this guy has a character problem, it doesn’t mean he’s hard to like. I’ve interviewed war criminals and mass murders, and they’re often exceedingly charming … So charm and character or personality and character are separate things, and I think the press probably conflates them in a way that is not useful or is misleading…

LCB: How do you approach a lengthy campaign-related piece, such as your John Kerry profile? What do you look for?