A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President by Jeffrey ToobinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I picked this up because I liked two of this other books; on the OJ Simpson trial and on Patty Hearst. This one made less of an impression on me, partly just because I knew more of the history already, but it still had many of the same things to recommend it.
I was thinking while reading it about what motivated me to, when eg I still have no idea what the Mueller Report is or what it says. My patience for learning about current events is selective, and for better or for worse I tend to be more driven by the meta level; not by the events, but by people’s reactions, and the narratives that spring up, and the way opinions form.
Looking at events from a historical perspective, even if it’s only with the benefit of a few years, often feels like a better way to do that. And this book works as a chronicle of that sort of metanarrative on multiple levels. On one, it’s a lot of what Toobin focuses on; the blurring lines of public and private life, the changing landscape of attitudes toward sexual behavior, the burgeoning role of the internet in disrupting traditional media. And on another, of course the book itself is a document of its time and often seems to be jarringly missing the point to a reader in the #MeToo era, and has been updated with an introduction apologizing for as much.
Yeah idk, I appreciated that approach to having written a book that is now sort of irredeemably problematic. I can only hope that in another 20 years there will be another introduction apologizing for the ways this introduction was terrible in ways we can’t even anticipate yet.
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