Culture and Society

Tom Wolfe's New YorkPeter Huber, Myron Magnet, Charles Murray,

Walter Olson, Terry Teachout, Richard Vigilanteand Walter Wriston

OLSON: The first question that comes to mind in consid-ering Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities is this:Why did it take a novelist to tell us so many of the strikingtruths (or, at least, assertions) about New York City whichthis book contains? Why didn't the working press of NewYork do it first? When I asked Terry Teachout about thisrecently, his reply was: "That's easy. Novelists can get awaywith things that journalists would never dare say in print."What exactly is Wolfe getting away with in this book?

TEACHOUT: He is saying publicly things that most peo-ple in New York are only willing to say behind closeddoors and not for quotation. In particular^and this as-pect of the book has received the most criticism fromunsympathetic readers—Bonfire fiies in the face of anynumber of pieties about the nature of ethnicity and racerelations in New York City.

New York is a virtual laboratory of liberal pieties, aplace where all of the old-fashioned liberal assumptionsabout the proper role of government have been carriedout to their furthest extremes. If you want to see a real-lifeexperiment about how a policy as absurd as, say, rentcontrol really works when systematically put into prac-tice, this is the place to go. Moreover, merely to suggest inpublic that any of these assumptions might be untrue is tobe immediately found guilty of first-degree heresy.

A great many of these pieties have to do with ethnicity.Even though most New Yorkers subscribe wholeheartedlyto the notion of ethnic identity, it is simply not sociallyacceptable to draw general conclusions about the predic-table behavior of ethnic groups in a set of given circum-stances. Not only does Tom Wolfe do that in The Bonftreof the Vanities, he dares to draw negative general con-clusions—something that it has long been impossible todo in New York without being ostracized from polite pub-lic discourse.

MURRAY: The particular piety Wolfe treads on mostunforgivably has to do with blacks and whites. He saysout loud things that have been said at cocktail parties foryears. He talks about the massive racial antagonism that'sbeen out there for years, something nobody can talkabout.

Back in the mid-1970s, when I was evaluating a pro-gram on juvenile delinquency, I first became acquaintedwith the statistics on who gets arrested for juvenile crime.I saw that juvenile crime is predominantly a black phe-nomenon and that juvenile crime rates were skyrocket-ing. Looking at those numbers, I said to myself. "This isreally explosive. People can't ignore it for very long. It'sreally going to hit the fan when these numbers becomecommon knowledge." Well, it never did hit the fan. Peo-ple will talk privately about juvenile crime as a blackphenomenon, but nobody has ever been willing to talkabout it officially, publicly, in print. This is what Wolfehas done in Bonfire.

MAGNET: The first piety which Wolfe has broken, infact, is to say that what the average middle-class white isworried about is black people. Note Bonfire's recurrenttheme: the white man who is restored to primal malenessby taking on and triumphing over a young black man.

OLSON: With the aid of several thousand pounds ofmetal.

MAGNET: The point is that Sherman McCoy's Mercedesis an extension of himself That particular fantasy issomething that nobody would have confessed to, even inprivate, before Bonfire.

WRISTON: Tom Wolfe is probably the only writeraround who can say these things without getting peopleangry at him.

TEACHOUT: But lots of people are terribly angry overBonfire.

WRISTON: They're not vocally angry. If anyone else hadwritten a book that says what this book says, Al Sharptonwould be denouncing him on the evening news. Maybethat has happened, but I certainly haven't seen it, andthat's one of the most extraordinary things about Wolfe'sskills as a writer.

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TEACHOUT: To the extent that this is true, it's in largepart because Bonfire is a novel. The fictional treatmentputs a kind of prophylactic distance between the action ofthe novel and the reality of everyday life.

HUBER: Another reason Bonftre has not triggered asmuch antipathy as one might have expected is preciselythat it's not exclusively about the vanity of black-whiterelations. Interestingly enough, most of the New York

Being a landlord in New York City israpidly becoming a criminal

profession.

liberal critics have read it as a book which deals not withthe poor or the legal system or race, but with the vanitiesofthe wealthy. That doesn't capture the spirit ofthe bookat all. Bonfire savages people Right, Left, and Center.

WRISTON: That's why nobody's attacking Wolfe. Hehasn't singled out any one group—he evenhandedly ex-poses them all.

VIGILANTE: I think Wolfe has correctly assessed certainfacts about racial and ethnic groups in New York. I alsothink he has correctly concluded that the old liberalpieties are beginning to fall away of their own weight. Themessage of Bonfire is that in race relations in the late1980s and certainly the 1990s—which may be very hotindeed—the pieties will be largely gone.

This may not be all to the good. One ameliorating fac-tor in the great racial disturbances of the sixties was thefact that the average white American, liberal or con-servative, Republican or Democrat, with a few blatantand obvious exceptions, approached this difficult timewith enormous goodwill because he expected that therace situation would eventually be settled, and in a de-cisively better way.

Today, by contrast, you have a rising generation ofyoung black leaders who have never experienced a signifi-cant civil rights victory and who want action. At the sametime, you have a white populace which has grown sub-stantially more cynical about the prospects for immediateimprovement in race relations. Wolfe hasn't so much vio-lated convention by stripping away the liberal pieties as hehas announced—just a little bit ahead ofthe curve, in hisusual fashion—that those pieties are falling away.

OLSON: I don't think it's just the respecting of someancient liberal piety that causes Wolfe to make at leasthalf of his black characters reasonably sympathetic. Mrs.Lamb, for instance, is no worse than a pawn; and her sonis as much a victim as anyone in the book. It seems pretty

clear that Wolfe's real target is Reverend Bacon and thesystem that created him, and he is painting most ofBacon's supposed constituents as his victims, too. Thismay explain why the charge of racism can never really bemade to stick to Bonfire, why it's a more devastating at-tack on the New York political system than any simple-minded racist tract could ever be.

VIGILANTE: I think that's very right, and that's why Idisagree to some extent about it containing things thatpeople wouldn't say even in private. Bonftre is obviouslynot a racist book. It's not about condemning black NewYorkers for not having achieved more. It's a book aboutthe fact of racial animosity and the opportunities that itgives people like Bacon.

TEACHOUT: It's true that many ofthe black charactersin the book are portrayed sympathetically—as pawns inReverend Bacon's game. But what we carry away over-whelmingly from the book, as far as Wolfe's portrayal ofthe black community goes, is the image of ReverendBacon himself.

Granted, Bonfire is a caricature, and there's nothingwrong with that. But anyone who takes Wolfe's portrayalof New York at face value will inevitably see the blackcommunity of New York as an opinion monolith. That'san oversimplification. Just before the Tawana Brawleycase, the Daily News did a survey of public opinion in theblack community in New York. We found out, amongother things, that name recognition among blacks for Al-ton Maddox, Vernon Mason, and Al Sharpton was insingle digits. You don't see that kind of thing in the book,because it doesn't suit Wolfe's purposes to present theblack community of New York in three dimensions.

VIGILANTE: We do see it, though. We see it, for in-stance, in the black cops oi Bonfire. Wolfe is not so muchportraying an opinion monolith as he's portraying a kindof media agitprop politics. The black community is cer-tainly not monolithic in opinion, but the portion of theblack community that can be mobilized to make noisetends to be the portion that's willing to make noise aboutthe issues that have typically been raised in the past.

WRISTON: Is the character of the newspaper reporter100 percent accurate?

TEACHOUT: That's not my paper.

WRISTON: All I mean is that we're talking about thingswe really don't know firsthand.

TEACHOUT: That's absolutely right. New York jour-nalists—the white ones, anyway—don't cover the blackcommunity very well. We don't know much about it.

OLSON: Wolfe's critique ofthe reporter in Bonfire is notjust that he didn't really know what was going on in the

TOM WOLFE'S NEW YORK / 69

black community—that's taken for granted—but that hewas a cat's-paw of manipulators. Wolfe is also saying thatReverend Bacon is in some ways the creation ofthe whiteestablishment. It would probably be hard to find a signifi-cant white institution that had not helped to create Rever-end Bacon.

MAGNET: We err if we focus on Bacon as the only realityof race relations in the novel. One thing that can happento whites in the world of The Bonfire ofthe Vanities is thatthey can be assaulted by blacks. The race question of thenovel is at least as centrally focused on the shadowy exis-tence of that man in the fourth chapter who yells out"Yo!" at Sherman McCoy as it is on the machinations ofReverend Bacon.

Unless we believe that there is an authentic threat con-tained in that man, unless we are willing to entertainfairly seriously the possibility that McCoy and his mis-tress are about to be mugged, then it's hard for our feel-ings to be much engaged in what happens in the rest ofthenovel. If all one can say is that Henry Lamb is a misun-derstood victim ofthe social circumstances coming out ofthe shadows to help these poor travelers as they passthrough, that these victims of stereotypical thinking rushaway and accidentally kill one poor victim, this noveldoesn't make any sense.

What, really, are the relations between the rich and thepoor in this book? How are they connected? Everybody issaying that Bonfire is a "Dickensian" novel. But one ofthe things that Charles Dickens does so successfully isshow how this ragged boy and that respectable middle-class member of the community are in labyrinthine andhidden ways closely connected with each other. That's theweakest part of Bonfire, the fact that Wolfe is not inter-ested in exploring these direct connections. Instead, heanatomizes a variety of little subcultures. He's brilliant oneach one, but they don't come together to form the largecoherent whole which is New York.

That may actually be Wolfe's message—that what we'vegot is a bunch of little groups, all coherent in themselves,and all capable of banging up against the other groups. Arich guy changes his life by running over some poor guy,but it's an accident. The relations among socioeconomicgroups in\Bonfire are quite accidental.

TEACHOUT: Wolfe says that the rich are doing their bestto minimize the contact that they do have. They use theirmoney to buy "insulation."

HUBER: There is a very profound and important dif-ference between Bonfire and E Scott Fitzgerald's TheGreat Gatsby, a novel which in many respects is TomWolfe's point of departure. At the end of Gatsby, you'releft with the sense that there will be some justice for thecharacters. Yes, Gatsby himself gets shot, and that's aninjustice; but one still has the sense that something bene-ficial will come out of the action of the book.

In the great social novels ofthe nineteenth century, too.

one is left with some feeling that there's an exit, thatthere's something to build on, that there's a shared moral-ity or rule of law. There's no exit in Bonfire. At least Idon't find any. You end up with a sense of unrelievedgloom and despair. Even in New York, until very recently,we've always had the sense that somewhere down the linethere might be justice and a rule of law. In Bonfire, thatsense is gone. The only good guy in the book, the onlygood legal figure, is Judge Kovitsky—and he gets thrownout of office by the machine as soon as he takes a standfor anything decent.

WRISTON; At the end of the book, Sherman McCoy isasked, "What do you do?" He replies, "I'm a professionaldefendant." As a person with a few lawsuits against him atthe moment, I can relate to that.

OLSON: Sherman McCoy is really standing in for theclass that he comes from. They may not realize it, butthey are all in the dock. Some choose to defend them-selves. Others—as when McCoy couldn't tell his littledaughter what he did and why it was productive—pleadnolo contendere.

MAGNET: Let's not be too sympathetic to McCoy. An-other way the classes are held together in this book is by ageneral decadence. McCoy seems to love his family in amoving way, is loyal to his class, and cares about his firm,at least until the end of the book. But, in fact, there'snothing he won't do to gratify his own appetities; and ifthis gratification requires the utter wreckage of his family,he's willing to do it.

It is very difficult to find anybody in Bonfire who hasany kind of moral authority whatsoever. At the end ofthebook, with the net closing around him, Sherman McCoygoes to his father, and he realizes that his father is just agrown-up boy like him, also impotent in some importantway, also without power, also simply playacting at being aman. This scene is very touching—in a modern kind ofway. But it's also slightly pathetic. McCoy is saying "OK,we're all boys and this bad thing happened and it's too badand my life's going to be ruined, but it's not really myfault" instead of "I'm a man who made a choice and actedin the world, and my fate is to some degree my ownmaking."

MURRAY: Take almost any other novel ofthe last twentyyears or so that has had genuine political resonance.Those novels have all implied some kind of political solu-tion—usually a state in which there is a more equitabledistribution of things. By contrast, the political projectionfrom Bonfire is altogether scarier.

OLSON: Let's see if we can formulate exactly what thisawful vision is. It seems to tie in with the title. The Bavar-dages and all their friends seem totally unmindful of thesocial forces that are bubbling up underneath them. Theyare doing nothing to come to terms with these forces.

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They're simply going to be knocked off the top of thevolcano at some point.

MURRAY: But one of the things that I took from thebook was the sense that they were not in jeopardy interms of their power.

VIGILANTE: I agree. Bonfire, however, is about frag-mentation and encapsulation and a complete absence ofcivic virtue. In that environment, although there is greatreason to doubt that the city will prosper, there is no greatreason to believe that the Bavardages, whom I would callhustlers, will not prosper.

Sherman McCoy made a mistake, but his downfall wascertainly not an inevitable result of social forces. As Wolfehimself says in interviews about the book, in many waysthe city is in the middle of an economic boom. It hasenormous social problems, but I don't think there's anyparticular reason to expect the disappearance of the Ba-vardages, who are doing very well.

MAGNET: The extraordinary thing is that there is nosense of economic exploitation in this novel. Take a typ-ical Victorian social novel—Dickens's A Christmas Carol,for example, where you have poor Tiny Tim, who will dieif Scrooge doesn't raise Bob Cratchit's wages. But in TheBonfire of the Vanities, we're really talking about an un-derclass. Wolfe asks, "You think the future can't cross abridgeT Well, if Salomon Brothers were suddenly to offerjobs to all of the folks over the bridge, nothing wouldhappen, because that isn't the problem. They wouldn'ttake them.

MURRAY: The incendiary thing about this book has lessto do with blacks racially than with the "victimology"with which blacks have been so closely identified. I thinkthere is a terrific weariness on the part of the people whohave been holding up the orthodoxy of the victim all theseyears. In a sense, Wolfe has given them the sanction to beopenly cynical.

MAGNET: Some novels are social landmarks. They sumup the ethos of their era, and the huge response to them isas much a part of their reality as the words on the page.This book is one of them.

TEACHOUT: The Bonfire of the Vanities has sold some-thing like 700,000 copies so far. One assumes that severalhundred thousand of them were not bought in New YorkCity. That has a lot to do with its potential influence. Welive in New York. When we read Bonfire, we're not justreading a novel. We're reading a chronicle of our experi-ence of New York and our understanding of it, and webring that experience to our reading of the book. We rec-ognize the elements of caricature and we allow for them.But I gave a copy oi Bonfire to my mother, who lives in asmall town in Missouri, for Christmas. As soon as sheread it, she asked me when I was planning to move.

WRISTON: That is extremely typical. I travel a great dealacross the country and that's what people say: "My God,you walk to work every day?"

MAGNET: In most of Dickens's novels, there is a note ofpersonal redemption. The protagonist, as a result of hisexperience, undergoes a kind of personal transformationwhich will illuminate all his own personal relationships inlife and provide a spot of light in what was otherwise arather dark tableau. Dickens is continually pushing thenotion of personal regeneration, with the implication thatif we could all have this regeneration, the problems ofthose lower on the social scale would be solved.

Now suppose somebody like Sherman McCoy couldhave this kind of personal regeneration. So what? Whatwould a bond trader at Salomon Brothers be able to do,being socially transformed?

OLSON: I think Wolfe answers your question with theconstant misgivings he gives McCoy about whether itmight not be better to change his style of life and becomea pillar of an actual community, Knoxville. The grim im-plication does seems to be "Leave New York."

TEACHOUT: Leave New York and set the torch to yourvanities. That's the only exit.

VIGILANTE: We seem to agree that Wolfe is describingin Bonfire an enormous city without a center, with theseencapsulated, noninteractive groups in conflict. Why isNew York like that?

WRISTON: One reason is that it's a transient city. FrankSinatra sings, "If I can make it there, I can make it any-where." New York is a magnet for talent. Everyone whohas made it here came from somewhere else.

Remember that Mayor Koch was elected by 29 percentof the registered voters in the last election. If he has thesupport of only 29 percent of the registered voters in acity of 7 million, that says right there why the city can't begoverned centrally. The coverage of the city in the localpapers is another reason that New York is fragmented. Wehave no real coverage of the city as a city.

TEACHOUT: New York is also a town which in large partconsists of people who are descendants of clearly identi-fied ethnic communities.

WRISTON: But lots of people have come in. Like theDominicans and the Haitians and the Puerto Ricans. Orlike you, Terry.

OLSON: Here you have almost the reverse of the classiclate nineteenth-century social structure in Americantowns, which had an upper class of natives and a lowerclass of immigrants doing the harder work and looking foradvancement. The outsiders come into New York and get

TOM WOLFE'S NEW YORK / 71

most ofthe fancy jobs and the natives still find themselvesdoing much ofthe hard work.

TEACHOUT: Which is why the natives see their salva-tion in the ethnic bloc, in the community bloc. It's thatdiversity of blocs that makes any attempts to radicallychange the system in New York hopeless. The paralysis ofleadership that The Bonfire ofthe Vanities describes isexactly what Bill Buckley was talking about in 1965 whenhe ran for mayor. He spoke of New York as havingreached a point of marginal disutility of bloc satisfaction.That's why Mayor Koch won with 29 percent ofthe regis-tered voters. He couldn't get more than that—no onecould.

WRISTON: New York has no establishment. It's the onlycity in the United States that doesn't have one. We foundthat out in the fiscal crisis. We have fractured this citywith local school boards, local environmental groups, allsorts of other local groups. Whole new alliances have tobe built. The result is that there's no place in this citywhere it's actually run.

VIGILANTE: I'll take the ideological plunge. New Yorkis the country's most nearly socialist large city. Here, as inmost socialist societies, people live without a natural ex-pectation of justice. Everything is premised on being ableto make a deal or pull a string or, as they say in the blackcommunity, "get over."

New York's most important reality is real estate, whichis socialized. In an environment where some people have$200-per-month three-bedroom apartments and somepeople have $2,000-per-month studio apartments, peopledon't assume that the reward for working hard is gettingahead. They don't have a natural expectation of justice.

TEACHOUT: Which explains Bonfire's emphasis onwhat Wolfe calls the "Favor Bank"—a system in whichthe "contract," the exchange of favors, is the principalmedium of social interchange. Wolfe implies that thesereciprocal favors are based solely on personal loyaltywithout regard to the ethical propriety of either side ofthedeal.

VIGILANTE: It's the modern social contract.

OLSON: Note the pivotal role that the rent control sys-tem plays in the downfall of McCoy and Larry Krameralike. One of the most valuable items in the novel is thetenancy of Maria's apartment, which is fought over. Sim-ilarly, McCoy's co-op board, though technically a privateinstitution, is actually the plaything of political forces,and it, too, is not a place where merit can ever protect itsown, the way it could in cities where people get to owntheir own homes.

VIGILANTE: It's absolutely wonderful that Kramer hasan affair because he sees the small size of his apartment asan impugnment of his virility.

OLSON: There is the echo of a very different novelist,Tama Janowitz, with her emphasis on how the desirabilityof singles in the New York romance market hinges somuch on the apartments to which they have access.

WRISTON: On the housing side you have two groups:those who have rent-controlled apartments and thosewho do not. The gap is both very wide and structural.New York is the only major city in the United States thathas had rent control since the 1940s. We abandon 30,000apartments per year in New York. We've been doing thatsince I can remember, and nothing can be done about' it.One reason why there is no expectation of social justice isthat there's no expectation that rent control will ever goaway. People living side by side will be charged wildlydifferent rents.

HUBER: This is such a multitextured book that we allbring to it our own experiences. That's what a great bookdoes. From a lawyer's point of view, what hits home is thatno lawyer in the book is trying to push for any abstractconception of justice and right.

Lawyers have given up on that. It has become un-popular to try and do justice in the narrow individualcase. We're all trying to further some greater social policy.It has become routine to accept injustice of one sort oranother in the individual case in pursuit of larger aims.We now have a "broader" conception of justice thateclipses justice in the particular.

MAGNET: The great legal theme of the 1970s was pre-cisely to substitute for the rule of law a set of politicalagendas. The seventies was the era of affirmative action.Everyone was asking: What is law except an instrumentfor the reform of society according to somebody'sideology?

OLSON: The law in The Bonfire ofthe Vanities reflectsthis compartmentalization and all its problems, just asthe wider social scene in New York does. I'm thinking ofWolfe's anecdote about an ambulance going from LongIsland to Westchester County, committing a continuousact of malpractice which can therefore be sued in theBronx, where such cases are very likely to be won. Sher-man McCoy is in his own way a victim ofthe same sort ofdisintegration of what had once been a fairly unified andconsistent system of justice. He's much more at the mercyof local prejudices.

HUBER: Bonfire also takes on the classic myth that thewealthy can always get what they want out of the legalsystem. This book suggests exactly the opposite. And ifone accepts Wolfe's picture ofthe New York legal systemas accurate, which I do, then it is a devastating answer tothe Critical Legal Studies movement, which presents thelaw as an instrument of oppression of the poor by thewealthy.

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WRISTON: If you have a legal zoning problem, you gofind somebody who grew up at City Hall who knowswhere the bodies are buried, rather than entrusting it tothe usual legal system.

TEACHOUT: Don't forget that the pols in the book arelooking for a fall guy.

MAGNET: They need the great white victim, the greatwhite criminal.

HUBER: That simplifies it too much. The larger point isthat the legal system has come to operate for purposesother than doing individual justice according to normsrooted in history and longstanding practice. The legalsystem is now trying to do something else. In the case ofBonfire, it happens to be trying to soothe black-whiterelations. But it's the idea of a legal system being used forabstract, larger purposes that is the source of the problemhere. Granted, Wolfe's particular caricature may not be allthat common. But the picture he paints of the legal sys-tem co-opted for other purposes—increasing safety or re-distributing income or what have you—is very accurate.

MAGNET: But one part of it is very traditional, as loversof Dickens would know: the notion that the law is a tre-mendously effective instrument of violence. To ruinsomebody's life, just sic the lawyers on him.

MURRAY: You know, I can't figure out how Tom Wolfe,a man who's been a zillionaire for the last twenty-fiveyears, can characterize Kramer's apartment and life in allthese little tiny ways which make you think he's actuallybeen a struggling lawyer.

TEACHOUT: It's all reportage. This book may well be thegreatest single piece of reportage that has appeared in mylifetime. It's certainly comparable to Truman Capote's InCold Blood or anything Rebecca West ever did.

OLSON: It is very Balzacian. Balzac hung out in theFrench bankruptcy courts for awhile to research a novel.Wolfe went around in this way, and I am told by thosemore intimately involved in the New York City criminaljustice system than I ever hope to be that, if anything,Wolfe has understated the awful reality.

MURRAY: My wife and I have been working on a bookabout the Apollo space program and have talked to a lotof people about The Right Stuff. We frequently hear thatwhile Wolfe has dramatized and thus to some extent dis-torted the events he writes about, he's invariably right onthe overall picture, on the feel of things. I've had fiightcontrollers say to me, "It took me years to figure out whatmade these astronauts tick, and here this guy comes inand he has got it right down the line. It's exactly whatthey're like."

TEACHOUT: Wolfe is willing to listen, which is an in-creasingly lost art among young reporters. Far too manyreporters—and Tom Wolfe himself, interestingly enough,is part of the reason this is true—go out and try to fitwhat's in front of them into the predetermined schematathat they bring along with them. Wolfe doesn't do that inhis own work. He seems to start as a pure listener, as asensitized plate.

OLSON: Which brings us back to Peter Fallow, the jour-nalist in Bonfire. Possibly there is symbolic significance inthe fact that the one character who had the responsibilityof blowing the whistle at each stage of injustice in thenovel was the one whose mind had been quite thoroughly,and by self-infiiction, befogged.

Fallow is a good candidate for watchdog in some ways.He's not partial to either side. He probably started outintelligent. He's certainly well-placed. But he is oftencalled the worst character in the book. This suggests thegreatest guilt belongs to the people who should be callingattention to the nature of the system.

VIGILANTE: I think that's right. The press accepts NewYork's desperate condition with remarkable equanimity.I'm not sure why. It seems as if ideological bias plays arole, but I'm so tired of the bias explanation.

TEACHOUT: As a conservative, I'm predisposed to findideological bias in the news media, but I haven't encoun-tered all that much of it in the course of my own career asa mainstream journalist. It exists, but I don't think it's amajor factor—it's certainly not presented as one in Bon-fire—and most of the people who point it out as a majorfactor don't really understand the inner workings of thenews media.

The real problem with the media is that we expectsomething that is particularly hard for them to provide: asustained view of events in their larger context. The realfailure of the media to tell the truths contained in Bonfirehas more to do with the fact that daily papers have shortattention spans than with questions of systematic ide-ological bias. We tell our stories one day at a time and wedon't easily think in terms of the larger, longer stories thatcan't be explained outside of the compass of a long, de-tailed book like Bonfire.

MAGNET: I don't agree. If not an intentional, premedi-tated slanting of stories, there is at least a kind of careless,habitual outlook on the world. On the whole, those whosay that the media are infected by liberal pieties are right.Most journalists do have a kind of sloppy, optimistic, lib-eral view of the world.

Papers like the New York Times are suffused through-out with utterly unexamined liberal assumptions in theircoverage of poverty. Year after year after year, you get adose of it every day: "Look at these poor victims. Whatare we in the heartless city doing to help?" That's why the

TOM WOLFE'S NEW YORK / 73

case of Joyce Brown is so important. It forces us to reex-amine some of our assumptions about people like her.

VIGILANTE: Going beyond the dailies, there are power-ful media in New York that have both the time and theresources to do a better job and, to some extent, a morehonest job ideologically: The New Yorker, New York; theVillage Voice, Manhattan, inc. None of these institutionsis willing to be even remotely honest about what's goingon in the city. The Voice does the annual feature "NewYork's Ten Worst Landlords," which is a good story in away, but no one is willing to take up the far more interest-ing question of why being a landlord in this city is rapidlybecoming a criminal profession. That may be the mostimportant New York story there is.

MAGNET: If you were going to write that story, though,you would have to say, "The story is that a lot of the liberalbromides of the last twenty years simply have been dis-proved by events. Let us look at what the actual socialsituation is here. Let us look at what kinds of governmen-tal programs have and have not worked. Let's do a CharlesMurray kind of investigation of what the unexpected re-sults of well-intended efforts have been."

HUBER: Exactly what unforgivable sin does journalistPeter Fallow commit? He's a repulsive character, ofcourse. But what, after all, did he actually do? He starts bysaying that Henry Lamb has been killed in a hit-and-runaccident, and that nobody's much interested in it becausehe's a poor black kid. I don't know that that necessarilyreflects an exclusively liberal bias.

TEACHOUT: He also falsiOes the background of the kid,saying he's an honor student, to make it a better story.

HUBER: That's a pretty small-time falsification, though.The kid has never been arrested, which makes him an"honor student" in the rough terms of the New Yorkghetto.

OLSON: Fallow's major fault is simply allowing himselfto be spoon-fed a story that benefited its source. His prob-lem is laziness, not bias. He is insufficiently critical, un-willing to step back and ask, "What interest is beingserved by planting this story with me and what are thepotential harms it may do if printed?"

HUBER: What he does wrong seems to me much thesame as what everyone else in the book does wrong. He isnot interested in taking his job and simply doing it as wellas he possibly can. He's on the make, just like everybodyelse in Bonftre. He views reporting not as a goal in itself,not as something that has its own internal dignity, butsomething that provides him with his Aegean cruise andhis Pulitzer Prize.

This is McCoy's failing, too. He's a patrician, but withno sense of the responsibility that goes with it. Every

lawyer in the book—and this is what hits me so hard—isexactly the same. They are not interested in law or theprofession in and of itself as something valuable andworth doing. They are all prisoners of their vanities andtheir hidden, personal objectives.

VIGILANTE: Is it possible to change that?

HUBER: The book doesn't leave much room for hope.

TEACHOUT: I think the message of the book is thatindividual salvation is the only kind of salvation possible.

We have a rising generation of younghlack leaders who want action.

MAGNET: Yes, and there's not much of it in Bonftre,either. If you have so shrunken a conception of the self asthis novel puts forward, it is very difficult to think aboutindividual regeneration.

TEACHOUT: It depends on whether you're convinced byMcCoy's conversion at the end.

MAGNET: Has anyone noticed that in Bonfire peopledon't have inner lives? They have appetites, but the mostcartoonlike feature of the book is that nobody has aninside. I think it's a failure in the book, but I don't knowwhat to make of it.

TEACHOUT: Is it a failing in the book or is it merely apart of the message that Wolfe is trying to convey?

VIGILANTE: It's a very contemporary error: the wholemyth surrounding the yuppies, the myth of people with-out an inner life. Everyone has an inner life.

OLSON: Because of the rapid, telegraphic way in whichWolfe wraps up the book, what might have been moreeasily perceivable as the continuing education of Sher-man McCoy is harder to see.

Still, I think Wolfe intends for us to see McCoy as hav-ing finally figured out exactly where he went wrong and tohave come to understand the full gravity of society's situa-tion. Of course, it's too late for him to do anything aboutit except go on struggling; but in a way the book is acautionary tale. It says to the reader, "Consider the fate ofSherman McCoy. Possibly you can learn better withouthaving to go through it yourself."

MAGNET: But McCoy becomes a crank in sneakers inthe end, a man obsessed. His eyes may have been opened

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to some degree, but all he's gotten out of his experience ishis injustice.

TEACHOUT: Perhaps Wolfe is trying to say that in theclosed world of New York, this kind of suffering is theonly path to goodness.

MAGNET: I don't think so. I don't think McCoy turnsout good.

TEACHOUT: Have you noticed that nobody sees himselfin this book? Everybody sees other people.

HUBER: I see a lot of my profession.

TEACHOUT: But there's no character about whom yousay, "That guy's like me." I think that's one of the reasonsfor Bonfire's popularity. None of Wolfe's characters isreally deep enough to have a kind of tragic triumph.

MURRAY: In most of the other things that Tom Wolfehas written, one of the chief characteristics is the deepaffection he clearly feels for the people he writes about.This is the first book of his where you don't get that senseof affection.

OLSON: I think there's a fair amount of affection, actu-ally. But hasn't Wolfe said on one of his magazine inter-views that he eventually got to like nearly all of thecharacters? They're not the figures of sheer mockery andfright that you make them out to be.

MAGNET: Speaking of mockery, I'm struck by the pas-sage where McCoy can't explain to his daughter exactlywhat he does for a living. Wolfe seems to be implyingwhat is often said about the Reagan boom: that it's merepaper-shuffling, creating nothing tangible or valuable,and that therefore this activity is part of the general nul-lity of a decadent society—that these well-educated menfrom the greatest educational institutions of our land areout there baying for money on the bond market. This isone way in which Wolfe falls into a kind of easy criticismof the ethos of our age, and I would take exception to hisjudgment.

OLSON: I would like to believe that Wolfe did not actu-ally go along with that critique, that he knows that there isan answer McCoy could give but doesn't know, and somakes this central partly because it's McCoy's own trag-edy. If he had known better what sort of person he wasand why he was a legitimate member of society, he mighthave dealt with his other problems.

MAGNET: What in the novel would lead you to thinkthat Wolfe disassociates himself from this implication?

VIGILANTE: The fact that he attributes it to the wife, insuch a nasty way.

WRISTON: The flip side is that Wolfe does write aboutthe gladiators who lose all touch with any reality but thegame. And it's nice to stand back and say that it's good forAmerica, but if you are thirty-eight-years-old with a wifeand three kids and payments on two mortgages and yourdivision's being sold in the morning, that's a whole dif-ferent kettle of fish. To a certain extent, the deal thatMcCoy puts together is a typical gladiator deal in whichthe playing of the game is an end in itself I've seen thelawyers and the investment bankers and the M&A guysand the traders and it's an invisible hand all right, becausethey don't know what is going on with the people in-volved down in the organization.

TEACHOUT: Still, I think McCoy's motives are clear: Hewants to make a lot of money. We're told in endless andfascinating ways why he needs to make all that money. Weknow how much his mortgage payments are and howmuch his shoes cost. We're fully informed about his needfor a lot of money in order to lead the kind of life he wantsto lead.

VIGILANTE: I'm not normally disposed to share thiscriticism of Reagan-era acquisitiveness, but in the par-ticular context of New York there is a way in which itmight behoove us to take it seriously. Part of the problemcan be seen in the difference between McCoy and hisfather.

One of the great tragedies in New York is the absence ofgood guys, of a force of individuals who are trying to dealwith the city's problems at a level of more than coping. Idon't mean the fact that the city went bankrupt, or thefact that it's going to go bankrupt again as soon as it has tobuild some bridges, but the lack of a moral center, thelack of a system of justice, the lack of a rule of law. Thereis no articulate voice or group of voices in New York foran ethos of community service and community values, ashared moral system.

Now, the difference between Sherman McCoy's profes-sion and his father's, however pompous and ineffectualhis father may seem, is that his father's profession wasintegrated into the community. His father's commercialrole was simultaneously a social role. 1 wouldn't blameSherman McCoy or the other people up at his office forbeing solely concerned with their private affairs. The en-vironment in New York is not such as to encourage themto find other satisfactions in life. Sherman McCoy isnever encouraged to explore the satisfaction of being aforce for virtue in the community, and it is one of NewYork's tragedies that there isn't such encouragement andthere aren't such forces.

I'm dissatisfied with the idea that personal salvation inthis context is sufficient. I think this book should be arallying cry. New York is the apple of my eye. I rearrangedmy career to come back here. I love New York more thanany other place on earth, but I'm continually distressedby the lack of a force for virtue in the community.

TOM WOLFE'S NEW YORK / 75

WRISTON: There's a growing force, but it's invisible, per-haps because virtue doesn't sell.

TEACHOUT: There are a lot of people in this town thataren't here because they love it. Maybe most New Yorkersare here for reasons other than love.

VIGILANTE: I applaud the problem-solvers. It's wonder-ful that they're still around. But what New York needsmore than anything else—Peter Huber is absolutely rightabout this—is a community-wide sense of justice and fair-ness and honest dealing. The moral atmosphere of NewYork has to change, and it can only change when peopleare willing to admit that we are suffering fundamentallyfrom a moral deficit.

That's why this is such an important book. That is therallying cry; the personal salvation which Wolfe holds outat the end oT Bonfire is not sufficient. It should be a fableof collective salvation, community salvation.

TEACHOUT: One of the problems with effecting thatchange is that everybody is compromised. In a systemwhere some of the basic structures of governance arecompromised—as is the case with, say, rent control oraffirmative action—you end up with a Kafkaesque situa-tion: If you want a fearful society, make the laws so out-rageous that everybody is forced to break them as amatter of daily survival.

VIGILANTE: When there's no predictable law, of courseeveryone involved in any kind of significant activity inNew York will fairly soon degenerate into being criminal.

HUBER: Personal salvation, personal rededication, is ob-viously not enough. The problem with all the charactersin Bonfire is that they see their professional work not asan end in itself, but as an instrument to some other end.That is the core problem of today's legal system. The idealof law and the system of law have lost the Kantian notionabout justice and morality. But in law, you either operateopenly, for the stated ends at hand, or else you havenothing left at all.

OLSON: I don't think Wolfe sees the causality in theworld of Bonfire as running from bad characters whosomehow all wind up in New York to the awful systemthey make. It's that people who start out reasonably ide-alistic, no worse than people in any other system—LarryKramer, the prosecutor, may be the best example of this—get turned into scamsters because the system has no gen-eral moral code for prosecutors that would seem anymore attractive than trying to seduce some juror. In a way,the system that prevails in the city has corrupted all thecharacters, and I suppose the largest single slice of thatsystem is the law.

MAGNET: But look at the central case of Sherman Mc-Coy. How is that true for him? Sherman McCoy does his

bond deals and they're fun. You can't say there's anythingimmoral about that. They may be only marginally usefulfrom an economic point of view, but here's a guy whosereal ethical failing in the book is that he's involved in acareless extramarital affair. What does that have to dowith any kind of system? It's more general than that.

VIGILANTE: His agonizings about whether to pursuethe affair, in relation to his dissatisfactions with his wife,may not have a systemic ring, but they certainly have acontemporary ring.

TEACHOUT: Why not consider McCoy's dilemma in theterms that Charles used in Losing Ground! What are theincentives for Sherman McCoy to be good?

MURRAY: Wolfe is almost like Carlyle in a way—hiscode of ethics consists of an injunction to put your handto something and do it right and do it well. Nobody doesthat in this book, and the indictment is particularly rele-vant to the Sherman McCoys because they represent theIvy League schools. I recently went through my Harvardalumni twenty-year book, the one they send out to tellyou how everybody's doing. Being a man of statistics, Imade a little list. It turns out that if you go to Harvard,you join one of the most disadvantaged subpopulations inthe country, because you have very few options of profes-sion. You either become an attorney or a professor or aphysician or an investment banker. You will not produceor sell a widget. You won't become an engineer.

The people that Wolfe has written about in his otherbooks can become engineers. But like Harvard graduates,the characters in Bonfire end up shuffiing paper, broker-ing relationships, and all the rest. As a result, the onlyincentive McCoy has is money—and that's a terribly dis-piriting incentive.

MAGNET: But in The Bonfire of the Vanities, the onething people care about other than money is reputation.These are people who wish to be admired, and while it'ssurely not as powerful a motive as it would have been withLord Chesterfield, these characters do want to paradethemselves in front of the "social X-rays" and be given theauthentication of having arrived by sitting at SusanGutfreund's dinner table.

MURRAY: But in what sense are you distinguishing thisfrom the money incentive? It's a socially useful force ifyou want your neighbor to think well of you and if thisdrives you to behave in a social, civilized, and useful way.That's different from a desire for things.

HUBER: The problem with all these folks is that theythink that money or power is sufficient, in fact the entireobject of existence.

MAGNET: Why does some guy give $20 million to themuseum? Vanity!

76/SOCIETY • SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 1988

WRISTON: Or the impulse of charity. But let me ask youfellows this: Assuming all the things in this book are true,why do you live in this town? And what impact do youthink a novel like this is having on our country's percep-tion of New York City?

MURRAY: It confirms the prejudices of non-NewYorkers.

TEACHOUT: It does much more than that. My mother,for example, doesn't know a lot about New York. Shemay have prejudices, but they're not particularly deepones because they're not rooted in firsthand experience orknowledge. Well, this book gives her that knowledge. Itcreates, in large part, her vision of New York. Yes, it alsoforces all of us to answer the question which she askedme: Why do we live here?

MURRAY: I'm sure many people who read this book willsee the events in it as something very much like tribunalrites. As a result you're going to see a much keener senseof moral outrage over Wolfe's portrayal of New York. It'slike having Sodom and Gomorrah over there on the EastCoast while they're engaged in virtuous behavior out inthe Midwest.

TEACHOUT: Who would defend the world of this book?

MURRAY: Yes, it is so unlike the world that a whole lotof other people live in.

VIGILANTE: I like Terry's question of who defends thisworld that does exist. How many people do we reallyknow who are like the characters in this book? Andwhether you blame the system or the people, how manypeople do we really know who are as thoroughly caughtup in scamming as they are in this book? The answer, Isuspect, is not that many. Why, then, don't the non-scamsters form a more powerful force in this city?

HUBER: A lot of the people I deal with are scamsters. I'ma lawyer. Many of the people I see are amazed that any-thing else happens in life other than deals and scams.

OLSON: We know each other around this table. But I'mnot sure how much a typical forty-year-old prosecutor inNew York City is like Kramer because I don't know anyof them. The few people I know who might have beenprosecutors would have done it as a way station for a yearor two and moved off to pursue their careers.

WRISTON: I think Terry can make a very rational argu-ment to his mother for living in New York.

TEACHOUT: Oh, sure. To begin with, I live here becausethe Daily News is not in Kansas City. But I also live herebecause the New York City Ballet is not in Kansas City.

Because the Museum of Modern Art is not in KansasCity. Because Carnegie Hall—and the Carnegie Deli—arenot in Kansas City. Because the people around this table,and all the people like them that I know, don't live inKansas City. That seems pretty rational to me.

WRISTON: Exactly. I came from a town of 30,000 peopleand I'm going to live in New York for the rest of my life.Why? Because New York is a cafeteria and you can putanything on your tray that exists in the world if you havethe time and money. Where are you going to meet, whereis your mother going to meet, some of the folks you couldmeet here? With all the warts, this is still the greatest cityin the world.

TEACHOUT: But when do its undeniable advantagescease to be cost-effective?

MURRAY: It would seem to have gone beyond that pointin The Bonfire of the Vanities.

WRISTON: Remember "Naked City"? The old TV showwhere the announcer started off by saying, "There are 8million stories in the naked city"? Well, this book is abouta few of them. The other 7 million-odd are a lot morepleasant.

MURRAY: If you folks aren't going to say New York is asbad as Tom Wolfe paints it, I would say that Washingtonprobably is. If you go listen to a bunch of Capitol Hillstaffers, talking about their jobs and what they are doing,it is the complete unadulterated scam. I just don't hearthem saying things like "Here is the polity that we want tobuild."

TEACHOUT: Washington doesn't even have the com-pensating romance, however false, of New York.

VIGILANTE: There are some things that Wolfe clearlymisses. There's one sense, for instance, in which the bookis five to seven years behind the times. What about, say,Bedford-Stuyvesant? Bed-Stuy was a land of myth when Iwas a teenager. When my cousin first joined the NewYork City police force and found out that he'd have tomake out a report every time he pulled his gun from hisholster, he decided to patrol Bed-Stuy, where he was sta-tioned, with his gun in his hand. But now Bed-Stuy is areal estate frontier. It's being resettled, with houses sellingfor $195,000.

WRISTON: It's been done by some very committedpeople.

VIGILANTE: It's also been done by some other forcesthat you can't necessarily explaini in personal terms.Wolfe writes of the New York of five-to-seven years ago,when Manhattan was a fortress surrounded by hostileproperties. But New York today, in a way different from

TOM WOLFE'S NEW YORK / 77

all previous eras, is breaking the bounds of Manhattan,and the outer boroughs are growing and becoming moreimportant.

OLSON: You invite us to consider the honesty of Queens,then?

VIGILANTE: Don't forget that Queens is for the mostpart not rent-controlled, because the houses are too small.In Queens you have good old-fashioned political crookswho steal money.

TEACHOUT: What happens when the liberals get tootired to hold the orthodoxy up? Nothing! Institutions likerent control will hold it up for them. When you fix thegame like that, you're fixing it for decades. Sure, the lib-eral orthodoxy can go to hell, but there's still going to berent control, because it's rooted in human nature and thepower of greed.

MURRAY: Except that people, perhaps from readingBonfire, might finally feel liberated to say things that theyhad been denying they were thinking. That might lead tosome changes.

MAGNET: It used to be that property was politics, but incertain ways it has ceased to be so. I live on the gentrifiedand gentrifying West Side. I am surrounded by people likeme, people with families, and I keep wondering why thepolitics of the neighborhood does not in the least refiectthe social and economic realities which now obtain there.

WRISTON: Do you vote?

MAGNET: Sure I vote, and what I have to vote among isvarious varieties of irrelevance, as far as I'm concerned.

QLSON: Aside from rent control, what are some of theother reasons why no matter how fast the old orthodoxyfalls away, things are not going to improve soon?

VIGILANTE: Tom Wolfe once did a great piece about theday when the special lanes came to Los Angeles freewayswhere you could only drive if you had four people in thecar. This marked a crucial change in the goals of urbanplanners, the moment when their goal first became tofrustrate human happiness so that physical systems wouldnot be overused. This change has certainly come about inNew York. All the plans for transportation in New York,for controlling traffic, for moving people, have to do withmaking people sufficiently unhappy so that they won'tcome into Manhattan and overuse the city.

OLSON: In Bonfire, Tom Wolfe often seems to be strikingresonances with the earlier ways in which America hashandled ethnic and immigrant frictions—namely, the riseof the Irish and various other groups to positions wherethey ran city government which had previously been lim-

ited to the WASPs. These people, of course, became prettygood at governing. Does Wolfe see the current situation inNew York as fundamentally different?

TEACHOUT: The big difference is that there's never beenan underclass in this country before. What happens whenyou empower an underclass, as will surely happen in thiscity, given changing demographics? Does it cease to be anunderclass when given power?

MAGNET: The other difference is the one referred toearlier—the fact that there is no establishment and thusno way to assimilate the newly empowered underclassinto an ethical and political system.

VIGILANTE: Clearly, New York's black politicians thinkthat after Ed Koch there is going to be a black mayor. Thatseems very unlikely to me.

WRISTON: I would think there will be. But not an under-class representative—he'll be a Mayor Harold Wash-ington, not a Mayor Bacon.

TEACHOUT: Yes, but if the establishment no longer ex-ists to socialize the Reverend Bacons of New York, just astheir predecessors were socialized, some very un-scrupulous people will be able to get their hands on thelevers of power at last. Surely there's no question aboutthat.

MURRAY: I take it as given that the powers-that-be inNew York City, with the financial clout and the rest of it,are not going to let that happen. To use Wolfe's phrase,they simply won't let the future come over the bridge.That will be prevented—probably by some fairly nastymeans if necessary.

HUBER: The theme of this book is that the future hasalready come over the bridge. This process of power pol-itics—which is perfectly normal and acceptable in someareas of government—has in fact corrupted our legal sys-tem. Rather than a traditional seizure of power in thelegislative and executive branches, which is an integralpart of democracy, it has taken the form of a dilapida-tion—and, in fact, a dismantling—of the legal system.

WRISTON: Is it unique to New York?

HUBER: I don't think it's just New York. I think Bonfireis a national book.

VIGILANTE: The institutions by which successful ethnicgroups in the past have had their turn have largely washedaway. We have replaced patronage, which was a relativelyrational system that involved some work on the part ofthe recipients, with welfare and affirmative action.

That not only means we have cut off paths for integra-tion into the establishment, but since welfare and affir-

78/SOCIETY • SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 1988

mative action are systems without a lot of internal logicand without a clear rationale of reward and punishment,we've also depressed the underclass's organizing abilities.The patronage system made it possible to build parties orinstitutions or alliances that could eventually take overthe city. But underclass politics in New York is extremelydisorganized—in part because blacks lack the patronagesystem to encourage them to organize.

MAGNET: Underclass politics in the past has generallybeen the politics of the mob. I don't know that the under-class can be organized as a political force in any tradi-tional sense, but they can certainly be fomented to riot.When Tom Wolfe talks about the future coming over thebridge, I think that's what he means—the urban riotersare coming with their pikes and so on. Isn't that thespecter?

OLSON: There are a couple of vignettes along these lines.One of them is when the demonstrators assemble outsideof McCoy's own apartment building and there is no oneto say them nay There is the doorman, of course, butthere is no one who still feels outrage at the tactic ofpicketing a home.

What you get in the novel, I think, is the breakdown ofthe social sanctions that would once have caused collec-tive horror at demonstrators gathering at someone's frontdoor. But in the real world, what you also get areorganized and successful efforts to shut down the city'ssubways to make ideological points, as happened last De-cember with no particular reaction from the custodians ofcivic virtue in the press.

TEACHOUT: Perhaps the most significant developmentin the modern history of black America is that for thefirst time, the black community is no longer thinking ofitself as a single community. An underclass and a middleclass have emerged more or less simultaneously. What willthat mean? The black community, as Jesse Jackson hasdemonstrated lately, continues to vote as an opinionmonolith. But the monolith is starting to split. When theDaily News polled New York about the Tawana Brawleycase, some 80 percent of the black respondents said sheshould cooperate with the authorities. That doesn't fit thesolidarity model which traditional black politicians haverelied on for decades. What happens when the black mid-dle class realizes that its true allegiance is not to the un-derclass but to its own economic and social interests?

WRISTON: That has already happened.

TEACHOUT: Not quite. But when it does— and the in-creasing geographic separation of the black middle classfrom the underclass will speed the process—you'll start tosee the emergence of a new bloc of black voters who beginto feel for the first time that there's not a black ticket forthem to vote, that there's not a single set of black interests.When that happens, all political bets are off.

MURRAY: Assuming Wolfe is as accurate a commen-tator in Bonfire as he has been in the past, one thing thebook suggests to me is that the next decade is going to be afascinating time to live in for observers of social and polit-ical change.

TEACHOUT: But does the prospect please you, Charles,or does it make you want to run for the nearest falloutshelter?

MURRAY: I'm pretty pessimistic about it. On the otherhand, out of chaos can come a new paradigm.

WRISTON: Hasn't the American experiment time andagain reached points similar to this one in history wherewe have overcome the difficulties of the day? One of theproblems with Americans is that they don't read theirown history—or anybody else's. If you look at what thiscity was like when Canal Street was a canal, and WallStreet had a wall, when they were hanging people downthere and throwing them in the canal, when diseasespread across the city and there was no political structure,it may increase your confidence in the abilities of Amer-icans to change things for the better.

New York today is certainly better than it was ten yearsago. The transportation system is better. We've finallydecided that we need a good public school system—whichis a great step forward. We've created an enormousnumber of jobs here. I wouldn't be pessimistic about thiscountry or this city.

MAGNET: Twenty years ago the specter of the urban riotwas widespread. Now it isn't. Why?

WRISTON: I don't know why. But I do know that whenwe were working on the city crisis, the common beliefreally was that they're coming over the bridge. I had peo-ple come in all the time and say, "You know, they'll bemarching down Park Avenue, carrying torches and burn-ing out the city." You don't hear anybody saying that now.And I know that if we're in real trouble, there will bepeople who will come forward and work with the prob-lem. But you have to reach a point of crisis first before youcan galvanize the city. D

Peter Huber is an attorney and author His publications includeLiability: The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences.

Myron Magnet serves on the Board of Editors o/Fortune and isauthor o/Dickens and the Social Order.

Charles Murray is a policy analyst and author. His publicationsinclude In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government.

IValter Olson is a writer living in New York CityTerry Teachout is a member of the Editorial Board of the New

York Daily News.Richard Vigilante is a writer living in New York City.Walter IVriston is a banker and was a key architect of New York

City's fiscal recovery in 1975.The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research convened this

panel as a Lehrman/Manhattan Round Table.