Steven Brill is one of those rare characters who travel easily between worlds that are often at odds and are highly influential in all of them. As a best-selling author, he received much praise for his book “The Teamsters,” published in 1978. But he is also known as an entrepreneur who shakes up whatever establishment he encounters. He founded the American Lawyer in 1979, a monthly magazine that penetrated the legal world, and went on to launch Brill’s Content, which sought to do the same thing in the insular media orbit. Another one of his ideas, Court TV, has gone a long way toward pulling back the curtains that have shrouded trial proceedings. A review of Brill’s latest endeavor, “After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era,” appears on this page. On a recent visit to Chicago, Brill discussed the making of his book with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor:
Q. The structure of this book is cinematic, more like a Robert Altman movie than a straight narrative. How did you come to this decision about structure?
A. The really strange thing about it is, from the beginning I had this idea of structuring it this way, and it didn’t really come to me as an epiphany. For years Alice Mayhew, who was my editor on my first book about the Teamsters, had been bugging me to write another book. And as you know, I’d gone off and done some other things that worked out pretty well. But in her mind I had just wasted my life doing all these other things–I should really write books. And after Sept. 11, I finally had a topic I really wanted to do. I called her and I said, “I think I could write a book about how this country really works, based on using the shock of Sept. 11 almost as a laboratory experiment to see how the country does when the system is shocked like this.” My background since writing “The Teamsters” had been in business, starting businesses, aiding businesses, somewhat in politics and in lobbying because a lot of Court TV was lobbying court systems and legislators and Congress to get cameras in courts. I thought I was in the unique position to get the confluence of business, politics and law, and cover that in a way that hadn’t been done before, that really explained how America worked.
So I gave Simon & Schuster a two-page outline. And I remember in the proposal I said I’m going to find characters who will carry this story, and by telling the story of these characters I will hit all these seemingly boring subjects, like lobbying, insurance, which you knew by Sept. 12 or 13 was going to be a giant issue. But who wants to read about insurance? We knew that the charities were going to be a great issue, but I didn’t want to write an essay about the Red Cross. The only other thing I said in the proposal, in addition to how I was going to do this with people and I’m going to narrate their life for a year, is that somehow or another I want a book that is part Bob Woodward and part Jonathan Harr.
Q. “A Civil Action”?
A. Yeah, part “Civil Action,” meaning that it’s going to get inside how policy gets made and legislation gets made in Washington, but it’s going to take it out to the front lines and watch how the stuff they do in Washington actually works out on the streets.
So it’s one thing to deal with Tom Ridge or John Ashcroft, but it’s another thing to get on the docks in Elizabeth, N.J., and be with the customs inspectors and see [what] is happening. It’s one thing to hear Ashcroft testify in the Senate about all the stuff they’re doing or not doing vis-a-vis Muslims, and it’s another thing to get with people who’ve been rounded up and thrown into the lockup, and lawyers who’ve tried to deal with that.
So that’s what I’m really proudest of, that I think I connected Washington to the rest of the world.
Q. You’ve made a name for yourself nationally as a media critic. This book seems like a departure for you.
A. I did that on purpose. I think a lot of people expected me to do a lot more about the media than I did.
The media, the newspapers right after Sept. 11, did a really good job. I mean, the major newspapers in this country really stepped up and did good work. And I found that I’d be going back and I’d gathered zillions of clips on all these kinds of issues. And I’d read the news clips and I’d say to myself, “This guy with a six-hour deadline has 30 or 40 percent of the stuff I think I have for the book.” They’d really sort of gotten it. And there’s some of it they screwed up. And some of it they–it was the nature of the beast, which was on one day it looks like this, and another day it looks like this, and I have the luxury of a lot of days later figuring out what it really is.
I really sort of decided that the media is much more of a follower than a leader, which I don’t think is a good thing by the way, but it’s a reality. Especially television. Television is so ratings driven. It chases the stories that they think people want to watch instead of doing the stories they think people ought to watch.
Q. If newspaper journalism is good, why do a book? Or to put it another way, what can a book bring to the debate that journalism can’t?
A. Sometimes it brings fresh facts and breaking news. There’s a fair amount of that in this book. But more importantly it brings perspective and some real thought. The parallel would be a feature magazine article in a monthly magazine. It can’t hope to tell you what happened yesterday. I mean, newspapers have trouble telling you what happened yesterday, because you already know it because you’ve been watching television. So magazines really have trouble doing that. And a book shouldn’t try to be out fast or try to catch up with or leak news. It should explain things in a way that lets people understand what’s going on so they can think about what should happen next. And I think that a lot of that is illustrated in this book. The whole discussion of the debate, the balance between liberties and security. That’s much better done in a book.
Q. You suggest this, but it’s not really explicit in the book: How did you and your views change in the course of writing the book?
A. I think I changed in two ways.
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One is, I think I appreciate more the nature of terrorism as the threat that requires us to think about issues of security very differently. Because the criminal-justice system–one of its bedrock principles is that punishment [is a deterrent] which stops people from committing crimes. Well that is just out the window with terrorism. One of the more ridiculous things that Ashcroft said right after Sept. 11 was that we have to expand the death penalty for terrorist law. I don’t think those guys were actually that concerned about whether or not they got the death penalty. They flew these jets into buildings. I mean, come on! Deterrence is just gone as an issue. Another thing that’s gone as an issue is–a really good terrorist, if you read the Al Qaeda training manual, if you just think logically, a really good terrorist doesn’t do anything bad until he does this terrible thing. He lives quietly among us. The whole idea is to blend in. They’re literally doing nothing that you can catch them for until they do this extreme thing. You have to think differently about what kind of protective system you have to have. And that means changing something. It means prevention much more than prosecution, which is the thing Ashcroft has become obsessed with.
And I spent all the time I spent with customs inspectors, Border Patrol agents, civil servants in the Transportation Security Administration. And I developed an enormous respect for those people. People who aren’t scouring the gossip columns and headlines every day for news about themselves [but] were just working very hard at trying to get something done. And I just appreciate those people a lot more.
Now that’s an admission of weakness, really, because I should have appreciated them before. It’s not like a great revelation. And the book is about those people. Or about a family in Queens that wants nothing more, nothing less, than to just find some piece of their brother so they can have a funeral. They don’t want to go on television. They don’t want money. They’re not professional victims. They just want this to be a piece of dignity.
Q. You interviewed about 350 people, worked with countless documents. How did you organize it all?
A. I carved out these big four areas that I wanted to cover. One was protection, homeland security. What do we look to our government and our system to do for us? Two, provide some kind of safety net for the least fortunate, in this case the victims. So that’s where the charities and all that stuff came in. Three is prosecute the bad guys. That’s how the John Walker Lindh thing came in and all that Justice Department stuff, the Patriot Act. And fourth is to provide prosperity, which is make the economy work. And that’s how the airline stuff came in, the reopening of the stock market and that.
I took all my notes of all these people, and I then did this massive calendar, organized around well-known events in my year, such as the day that they closed up Ground Zero. So I started showing the obvious event days, and then filled in the days that were important to the people that I was interviewing.
Q. With so many books published much earlier about Sept. 11, did you think–
A. No, because I knew I wasn’t writing a book about Sept. 11. To the extent I thought about it, I thought about it in terms of the title. And “After” kind of makes that clear.