In early May, as student protests for Palestinian rights rippled across university campuses, including at the University of Oxford, Patrick Radden Keefe, the award-winning investigative journalist for the New Yorker and author of numerous books, sat down with the Oxford Political Review to discuss the current state of press coverage of pro-Palestine student encampments and the broader role of objectivity in journalism, as well as a host of other topics.
During the interview, Keefe expressed disappointment in the professional press’s coverage of the student activism in opposition to Israeli’s assault on Gaza. ‘It has actually been, I’m afraid, not the finest hour of journalism covering these protests, not just at Columbia [University] but campuses all over the place,’ said Keefe, who completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia University. He highlighted the inclination of journalists to overly fixate on student encampments and the authorities’ ‘draconian’ and ‘militarised’ response to such an extent that coverage can often obscure the reasons why students are protesting in the first place. Keefe views the current moment as a unique opportunity for student journalists to step up given their valuable access and perspective. He cited New York Magazine’s collaboration with the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university’s student newspaper, to chronicle the momentous events unfolding at Columbia University as an model to empower student journalism. Given the proximity of student journalists to campus protests, our conversation flowed into a broader discussion about the how journalists should conceive of neutrality and objectivity in their work.
For Keefe, pure objectivity in journalism has always been an unattainable reality. While he considers objectivity an ideal to strive towards, he believes it a highly individualised and idiosyncratic concept. ‘I think this stuff is messy and fraught,’ Keefe said. ‘We should all aspire to objectivity while also recognizing the institutional matrix in which we operate, the various kinds of elements of our own identities. There are all kinds of ways in which that aspiration to objectivity can be frustrated in subtle ways.’ Keefe, as a journalist, draws a bold line between activism and reporting, even if he has a particular point of view on an issue he is writing about. An essential element of journalism, for Keefe, is an openness to all the evidence uncovered and a willingness to go in whatever direction such evidence leads. This process differs, for instance, from the practice of writing a legal brief where lawyers selectively choose the evidence to support their case. Keefe’s rationale for these guidelines is that even the mere appearance of resembling an activist can open him up to accusations, whether valid or not, of writing with an agenda—leverage that can be used to discredit his work.
Inspired by an early love for short fiction, Keefe has mastered the medium of long-form, narrative journalism. Engaging with his work has a novelistic feel. He is motivated by the complexity of his characters and the contradictions that lie at the heart of human behaviour. The narrative structures of his work unfold in seductive ways with reversals and reveals that consistently leave the reader wanting more. Keefe’s most notable recent books include Empire of Pain, a devastating account of the Sackler family’s campaign to push OxyContin and its contribution to the opioid epidemic in the United States, Say Nothing, a riveting portrait of The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the ensemble of Irish Republican Army officials fighting for Irish independence, and Rogues, a collection of his standout New Yorker articles whose topics range from rampant insider trading to a profile of Anthony Bourdain. We discussed these works and more in the below interview, which has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Michael Wakin (OPR): I wanted to pick up on something you said in a New York Magazine interview a couple of years ago that I found interesting. You said you needed a story about people, an anecdote, that can lead into a broader phenomenon. I wanted to ask how you think about this relationship between the individual and structure. Focusing on individuals can be far more powerful and compelling, but there seems to be this potential risk of obscuring larger structural forces. On the flip side, focusing more on the structural, you may lose some of the personal. What is your mindset when it comes to the tension between these two?
Patrick Radden Keefe (PRK): I’m driven chiefly by the stories as stories. I tend to get pulled into a subject by the characters that I’m writing about. That’s what animates me. One of the amazing things about narrative is that you can use it as a device to get people to engage with any kind of complex material that they otherwise might not profess an interest in. In practice what that means is, in my case, I never thought to myself, ‘Oh, I’d like to write a book about The Troubles in Northern Ireland.’ I read an obituary of Dolours Price, who’d been a member of the IRA and died in 2013. I read her obituary in the New York Times and I thought, ‘that woman sounds really fascinating.’ That was the beginning of what ultimately became this long process of writing an article and then a book. And, actually, now we’re working on a television series based on that story.
I didn’t set out to write about the opioid crisis per se. I learned that there was this family, the Sackler family, who had produced this drug, OxyContin, which had a terrible legacy. I happened to know the Sackler name because many institutions, among them Oxford University, proudly had that name on the wall because the Sacklers were giving so much money. I went to Columbia, which was a recipient of Sackler money. I was a student at Yale, which also got Sackler money. So I knew the name and that was what drew me in. As you rightly point out, some of the greatest crimes are, in effect, systemic kinds, structural crimes, right? There are big injustices that are hard to capture in a little opera about a handful of characters. And believe me, there are issues. I mean, climate change would be first in my mind that I really want to write about because I feel as though it is among perhaps the most pressing issues facing us all today. I haven’t found the right kind of narrative mode in which to do that. I’m actively on the lookout for the kind of story that I know I can tell and tell in a compelling way that would allow me to illuminate the larger series of issues there.
But if implicit in your question was the idea that it’s maybe a shortcoming in my approach—that I’m so focused on people—I’ll cop to that. I think that’s right. I think it is. This is the kind of writing I do. Other people do other sorts of writing. I wish in some ways that I could write a book about climate change and be certain that it’s a book that people would actually read and engage with and not just feel a kind of mild sense of ‘Oh jeez, I probably should read that but never pick it up.’ The trick for me is, can I come up with a way to actually make you turn the pages.
OPR: In your most recent article published in The New Yorker, you have this tragic story about the disappearance of Zac Brettler but you also include these incredible descriptions of London and its changing nature, which I haven’t read elsewhere as eloquently and accurately, this city resting on colonial plunger and also having all this foreign money coming in and changing the essence of the city. What I also find so incredible about this piece is the way you parcel out the insights where it’s almost like readers are investigating themselves, coming across these pieces of information and their own discoveries. I’m curious how conscious this was in your process and how you were thinking about the reader when you’re writing these pieces?
PRK: I guess by a kind of default I have become an investigative journalist. That’s what I do. I’m very happy when I’m doing the spade work of an investigation and digging in. I find that process to be quite thrilling. It’s the detective work of piecing things together and trying to figure out what that missing piece of information you don’t have is. That’s most of what I do all day. You have these moments of elation when you have a breakthrough, and then you have these incredible setbacks, and you think you’re never going to make any progress. And then slowly, you eke your way to another breakthrough.
When I sit down to write, it would be too stenographic to try to recreate exactly the experience that I’ve had in the reporting for the reader. The process of revelation for the reader probably shouldn’t map on to exactly the process for the reporter just because it’s lazy. There are ways in which it’ll actually be more interesting for the reader if you withhold a piece of information or you’re very deliberate about when you choose to dole out each card. I’m always thinking about that.
Ideally, even if the journey of discovery for the reader is not identical to mine, or in the case of the Brettler story where I’m actually looking over the shoulder of these mourning parents who are trying to figure out what became of their son, there are almost three different levels, right? There’s the experience that the Brettlers had. There’s my experience of doing my own investigation and learning about their [experience]. And then there is the reader’s experience of navigating all of this different information. I’m always giving a lot of thought to what would be the most effective and, frankly, seductive way to pull the reader through the story and have there be little switchbacks and reversals and new clues. I just think that there is a natural narrative appeal when done right about those kinds of stories.
OPR: Another one of my favourite New Yorker pieces of yours is Empire of Edge, about insider trading occurring in Steve Cohen’s firm and the authorities’ quest to flip firm employee, Matthew Martoma. I actually heard you do a podcast with Preet Bharara a couple years ago about it. What I particularly liked about the article, and in general in your work, is that these characters are never monoliths. These figures have tension and diverging motivations. They are complex. I’m curious to hear whether this is something you can pick up early on in the process of investigating and writing these articles. Or is this something that slowly develops?
PRK: As a general rule, I think that life is pretty complex, and I think people are complex. If I have a gripe with a lot of journalism and a lot of our discourse, it’s that there is a tendency, particularly in the age of social media, to flatten everything out to a sentiment on a bumper sticker. I tend to want to get into stories that feel more complicated.
So to give you an example, there’s a story I wrote that’s in the same collection as that story you mentioned. It’s a story about this woman, Amy Bishop, who was a mass shooter. In 2010, she was a professor at the University of Alabama, and she shot six of her colleagues in a faculty meeting. When my editor approached me about that story, he said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in writing about this?’ And I just said, ‘No,’ because Amy Bishop was just kind of nuts. The inner workings and emotions of a mass shooter were ultimately not that interesting to me. It just felt like a void, not something I particularly wanted to try to capture because I just didn’t think that there were many places I could go. I think that ultimately some people are just deeply mentally imbalanced in a way that might be shocking or titillating or upsetting for the reader, but won’t shed a lot of light.
My editor then said, ‘Oh, but there’s this interesting moment in her history, which is that when she was younger, college age, she shot and killed her brother with a shotgun, her little brother. There had been one witness to that shooting, and it was their mother. So the mother has two kids, and she comes into the kitchen, and she sees the daughter shoot and kill the son with a shotgun at point-blank range. The police are on the way, and the mother has to tell them something. When the police come, the mother says, ‘I saw the whole thing. It was an accident.’’ That, to me, spoke of a kind of human complexity that felt very worth exploring, in part because I was a young parent at the point when I started working on that piece. I could understand the dilemma of a parent who has two kids and has just lost one and has to make a split-second decision about whether they hand the other one over to the police or whether they paper over what happened in order to protect that child. In this case, there were devastating repercussions decades later in Alabama of that decision. But that decision, to me, felt like something I wanted to explore.
In the case of Matthew Martoma, the story you’re talking about, famously, Preet Bharara—at the time the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, a very ambitious federal prosecutor—was looking to take down this guy, Steve Cohen, who ran a hedge fund that was just awash in insider trading. He couldn’t get him because Cohen was very careful. There are all these other people in his fund who worked for him who ended up pleading guilty to insider trading, but not [Cohen]. They finally find this one guy, Matthew Martoma, who made this massive insider trade and he had spent about 20 minutes on the phone with Steve Cohen on a weekend just before the trades were initiated and after he found out the inside information. It seemed like this easy thing where they would get Martoma and say, ‘What was that call about?’ Clearly, anybody who sees that you made that 20-minute phone call and then this big thing happens knows that you must have consulted with the boss. They assumed, as the FBI often does with white-collar criminal defendants, these are guys with families and good educations and big houses and soft hands. They assumed that Martoma was going to be the guy who would deliver up Cohen. And then Martoma didn’t. He wouldn’t flip. He insisted on going to trial, pleading not guilty. That created this mystery, right? Why wouldn’t he flip? And I knew that going in, [but] I didn’t know what the answer was. As I learned more about Martoma and particularly about his family, I developed a kind of a thesis of my own. This often happens in my pieces where I don’t really know what the truth is. But what I can tell you is, I’ve spent months and months and months looking at this story and talking to anybody who will talk to me and trying to piece together some mystery of human behaviour. I have a working theory on the basis of what I’ve looked at, and I’m going to present it to you. You, the reader, may be convinced. You may not be. But the nice thing about the freedom that I have at The New Yorker is that I’m writing these long pieces. At the end, often I will offer you my conjectural hypothesis about what has really gone on.
OPR: You’ve written some amazing profiles, particularly of Larry Gagosian and Anthony Bourdain. I would love to hear you talk a bit about your approach to these profiles, on a tactical level. Do you adopt more of a law enforcement strategy where you approach people further away and then slowly build closer and closer to the subject? How do you try to break down these often highly guarded and very powerful people?
PRK: It varies. I, at this point, have developed a bit of a reputation as somebody who will do what we call a ‘write-around’ where if I tell you I’m going to write about you and you say, ‘Well, I’m not going to give you an interview’ and then when you hope I go away, I won’t go away. I’ll usually write the piece anyway. It is interesting, having done that a lot over the years, because it means you get situations like Larry Gagosian. Gagosian is often referred to as famously press averse, which is not true at all. When you actually look at the record, he has given hundreds and hundreds of interviews. He gives them under specific circumstances…He has not cooperated with many profiles. When I set out to write about him, it was my full expectation that he would not play ball in part because I had written pretty unflattering stories about both Steve Cohen, who is one of his big clients and friends, and Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, who is another one of his big clients.
I think he’s savvy enough and he has got a very good press person who works with him—who used to run PR for Sotheby’s. They probably just did the math and realised, ‘Look, the article is going to come out anyway. He is going to do it one way or the other.’ I think it was actually a fairly wise decision on their part. If you’re pretty savvy and you feel like you are the best advocate for yourself—then the math becomes pretty simple. It is, ‘Okay, well, there is going to be this great, big article that is going to come out. I would like to claim as much of that real estate as I can.’ And so he ended up kind of killing me with kindness. He gave me lots of access. Initially, I felt a little like I had some mild vertigo because it wasn’t the way I thought the piece was going to go.
There are other pieces that are more straightforward. So, Anthony Bourdain from early on said, ‘Yes, absolutely. Love this idea.’ There I spent a full year. I had a huge amount of access to him. We travelled together. We had a whole bunch of meals together. We had very, very intimate conversations. In Bourdain’s case, it was sort of the opposite of Gagosian in the sense that he’d been profiled 1,000 times and had always cooperated. Very, very generous source. On top of that, he had written about himself in numerous books. And on some level, he’d made, I don’t know, more than 100 episodes of this television series. It was sort of all about him in some ways. So the challenge there was how do you say something new? Then there’s a third kind of profile where I don’t get any access at all. There are any number of those types of pieces. To give you an obvious one, I wrote a big story about Chapo Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. I never met him. Years later, when he was on trial in New York, I went to the courtroom, and that was the first time I’d ever seen him in the flesh.
OPR: Particularly from the Sackler family, it seems like you faced a lot of pushback and resistance and intimidation for your writing. I’m curious how you process this pushback and how it shapes the story in your mind. In other words, to what extent should this be a part of the story? Additionally, do you feel that you’ve reached a certain level of stature and prominence that you could write these big stories without significant fear of retribution? Perhaps more than someone without as much notoriety as you have?
PRK: Let me take the second part first. I don’t think of it as a function of my stature as a writer, but I will say there is a kind of privilege that comes with the institutional backing that I have when I’m writing articles for The New Yorker and when I’m writing books that are under contract with DoubleDay. Part of it is that there are these great, big institutions themselves that have their own kind of power and have experience with this, right? The New Yorker published Larry Wright’s great piece on Scientology and had to go toe-to-toe with the band of lawyers that the Scientologists sent. My editor at DoubleDay publishes Jane Mayer. They had published her book on the Kochs, who hired private investigators to go after Jane Mayer.
I have the really dramatic benefit of the backing of these big players who are experienced and also who I have a personal history with. I’ve been writing for The New Yorker since 2006, nearly 20 years. 2006 was also the year that I signed my first contract with DoubleDay. That ends up being really significant because what happens in these situations often is that the lawyers for the people whom I am writing about try to put a wedge between you and your publisher or your magazine. They’ll do anything they can to undermine you in the face of the people whom you rely on, who are actually going to be publishing the thing. They know how I work and their confidence in me is rock solid. That’s really helpful, too. So I have advantages, but I don’t think any of them stems from my name per se. It’s more from the institutional power of the folks I’m working with.
In terms of how to incorporate this stuff into the story and how to deal with it, I think this is an area in which the rich and powerful are often very misguided in terms of how they approach these things. In the case of the Sacklers, the more they tried to intimidate me, the more determined I was to tell the story and tell it in a way that would be really bulletproof. But also, the more I felt like, ‘All right. If you want to do this, I’ll just put all this stuff in the book. If you think it’s going to help you to send me all these threatening letters, in a weird way, you’re proving my point.’ One of the questions in the Sackler book (Empire of Pain) was, how did they get away with it for so long? How is it that, if we knew that OxyContin was killing people by the late ‘90s, for another 20 years, nothing really stuck to the family? Part of the answer, I came to believe, was their tactics to shut down any criticism. So when they started using those tactics on me, they were playing into my hands because I felt like, ‘You want to send me these letters? I’ll reprint these letters in the book. You want to send somebody to my house? I’ll write about it afterwards.’ I don’t think they really got any mileage out of it. There was very little that we left out of the book because of the legal onslaught.