MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU C3
BY JEREMY BARRIt’s hard to assess Meghan Mc-
Cain’s tenure on “The View.” On
the one hand, she fought relent-
lessly with her co-hosts as the
show’s lone conservative for most
of her run. On the other hand,
poli tically tinged smackdowns
and heated debates are exactly
what “The View” has always
thri ved on.
And McCain has sent mixed
messages. When she announced
her planned departure in July to
spend more time with her family,
she called her co-hosts “strong,
brilliant, intelligent and incredi-
ble broadcasters,” and the nearly
four years she worked with them
“one of the hands-down greatest,
most exhilarating, wonderful
privileges of my entire life.”
But in a new audiobook re-
leased Thursday, “Bad Republi-
can,” McCain says the ABC show’s
work environment was “toxic”
and contends that clashes with
left-leaning colleagues such as
Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar
were not playacting — they really
were as rancorous as they seemed
on television. The tension and
animosity between her and her
fellow panelists that radiated off
the screen were apparently genu-
ine, and for McCain, deeply un-
pleasant.
“There’s stuff that happens on
‘The View’ that shouldn’t be al-
lowe d,” she writes, describing
Goldberg’s “open disdain” for her.
Although she says she em-
braced the lonely role of “the
villain” by serving as “the Repub-
lican on a liberal show,” McCain
says she was particularly hurt
when she returned to work after
maternity leave in January and
Behar told her on air that she
hadn’t been missed. “I felt like I’d
been slapped,” McCain writes.
She cried during the following
commercial break, vomited and
was “embarrassed and shaking.”
She denies, however, that she
hates Behar. “From the begin-
ning, I always respected her,” she
writes. “And she often hugged me
and told me she was glad I was
there.”
McCain also describes herself
as a victim of “media abuse” and
unfair coverage, pointing to a
steady stream of articles during
her tenure that included barbs
about her attributed to anony-
mous sources. “Think of all the
famously combative male TV an-
chors on shows with far smaller
ratings and much lower profiles,”
she writes. “If they raise their
voices, they’re respected as pas-
sionate and serious. If I push for
my ideas, I’m a princess menac-
ing everyone with snow mon-
sters.... The constant media
slams were so emotionally and
mentally taxing that I thought
about leaving many times during
those first months.”
She accused ABC of using
“scare tactics” by fomenting a
media narrative about clashes
and tensions, hoping that viewers
would tune in “to see if this is the
day that someone storms off the
set forever.”
A spokeswoman for the show,
however, pushed back on her
assertions. “For 25 years, ‘The
View’ h as been a platform on air
and behind the scenes for strong
women,” she said. “Live television
and different perspectives can
often lead to surprising mo-me nts, but the team is collabora-
tive and supportive — focused on
delivering an informative daily
talk show to our loyal viewers.” (A
network source also said that all
of McCain’s complaints were ad-
dressed during her tenure on the
show.)
McCain’s memoir and promo-
tional appearances this past week
have prompted questions about
her television future, on top of her
gig as a columnist for the Daily
Mail.
Her next stop could be the
network she worked for be-
tween 2015 and 2017, the Fox
News Channel. She says in the
book that her decision to leave
Fox was driven by her desire totend to her father, then-Sen. John
McCain (R-Ariz.), who had re-
cently been diagnosed with brain
cancer.
Much of her press for the au-
diobook has included advocacy
for more progressive parental
leave policies, and she praises
Fox’s plan. “For all its flaws, Fox is
a family company,” she writes.
When she announced plans to
leave “The View” in July, a Fox
News spokesperson said that
“Meghan McCain is a star and we
are always interested in excep-
tional talent.” Network represen-
tatives did not respond when
asked this past week whether the
network has had any formal talks
with McCain.
But it was notable that McCain
chose Sean Hannity’s show on Fox
News for her first television inter-
view on Tuesday. On the show, she
inveighed against “the liberal me-
dia” and “the radical left,” the
latter being one of Hannity’s go-to
phrases. “Being a conservative
woman in mainstream media is
deeply threatening,” she said.
She praised her “sisterhood” of
former colleagues at Fox. “I prob-
ably would not have survived
emotionally the past five years of
my life, between my dad’s passing
and cancer, and everything that I
speak about in my memoir hap-
pening at ‘The View’ and other
things in my personal life, if it
weren’t for the women I met at
Fox News.” She has also praised
anchor Harris Faulkner as a men-
tor. And McCain’s husband, Ben
Domenech, recently joined the
network as a paid contributor.
McCain, however, might not
enjoy working with one specific
Fox personality, Saturday night
host Jeanine Pirro. Pirro made a
historically contentious appear-
ance on “The View” in 2018. After
her segment ended, McCain
claims in her book that Pirro
cursed out the panelists, then
threw her microphone, hitting
McCain in the chest.
The support for former presi-
dent Donald Trump among the
network’s top opinion hosts could
also pose a challenge if he runs for
president again in 2024. Trump
routinely insulted John McCain
before and after his death, and his
daughter says in the book that “it
felt like too much of a conflict to
work for a place that was pro-
Trump even as Trump was obses-
sively taunting my sick father.”
Trump was at it again amid the
book release. In a s tatement re-
leased Friday, he called McCain a
“lowlife” and her father a Repub-
lican in name only.
McCain thanked Trump for the
book publicity.
[email protected]‘The View’s’ work environment was ‘toxic,’ McCain says
THEO WARGO/GETTY IMAGES“It’s a blip, according to Head
Office,” the man tells Proctor.
“Last night, it was a lapse. Which
is worse? Blip or lapse?”
Eventually, Proctor finds his
way to the home of two retired
spies — Joan and Philip — once
the service’s “golden couple.”
Proctor’s cringeworthy, and
frankly offensive, observations of
them read like a m etaphor for his
increasingly jaundiced view of
the service’s decline. He makes
disparaging comments about
Joan’s appearance and snootily
makes note of her “elastic-topped
slacks and... T-shirt with a
wide-angle print of Old Vienna.”
As Proctor is preparing to
leave, Philip pulls him aside.
“The thing is old boy — between
ourselves, don’t tell the trainees
or you’ll lose your pension — we
didn’t do much to alter the
course of human histor y, did
we?” Philip said. “As one old spy
to another, I r eckon I’d have been
more use running a b oys’ club.”
In an era when the failures
and misdeeds of intelligence ser-
vices around the world can shock
and alarm, reading Philip’s re-
marks feels like a c larion call
that slices straight to the bone,
and hurts. John le Carré did not
just leave the world an engaging
novel, he also left us with a
warning.
manuel.roig-
[email protected]Manuel Roig Franzia is a
Washington Post staff writer and
former foreign correspondent.called the “Hawk Sanctuary” that
he imagines will soon be a tourist
trap.cratic bogs with little or no real
relevancy. He speeds off to look
into a breach at a n uclear silovered Middle Eastern analyst for
the British intelligence services
who is dying of cancer, in a
fading mansion called Silverview
that took its name as an homage
to the philosopher Friedrich Nie-
tzsche’s house, Silberblick.
Avon befriends Julian Lawnd-
sley, a 33-year-old who has
dropped out of his lucrative big-
city financial trading career to
open a small bookstore. Avon is
an odd but irresistible sort, and it
takes him no time to shimmy
into the naive Lawndsley’s world
by portraying himself as a school
chum of the bookseller’s ne’er-
do-well deceased father, a s can-
dalized Anglican priest.
At one point, the younger
Lawndsley is easily manipulated
by Avon into delivering a secret
message to a woman with whom
Avon claims to be having an
affair. “What does the well-
dr essed man wear for a blind
date with his father’s friend’s
mistress at the Everyman Cin-
ema in Belsize Park?” he pon-
ders.
Avon is being tracked by Stew-
art Proctor, the head of domestic
security — “witchfinder-in-
chief”— for the book’s fictional-
ized British intelligence service.
Proctor is a man for whom “the
very idea of a consuming pas-
sion” is bewildering, which
makes Avon, a man prone to
emotional attachment to people
and causes, all the more elusive.
The people and places Proctor
encounters in his inquiries about
Avon are relics, stuck in bureau-to the bone,” portr aying the Brit-
ish intelligence apparatus as un-
sure of whether it can justify
itself and whether its mission is
worth the cost.
It’s fitting that “Silverview”
should arrive the same month as
the latest James Bond 007 movie,
“No Time to Die.” In Bond films
audiences get a cartoon depic-
tion of spycraft, with triumphs
that are plain to see. A le Carré
book, in contrast, is so rich —
beyond the intricate, perfectly
crafted story lines and brisk
writing — because his spies,
while enmeshed in or at least at
the edge of grand moments of
world affairs, are engaged in a
more nuanced calling, with out-
comes that may not even be clear
to themselves. They are often
beleaguered victims of office pol-
itics — one misstep away from
being put out to pasture. They
tend to be cuckolds, loners, mis-
fits and other non-Bondian sorts
— wary of each other almost as
much as they are of the Crown’s
enemies.
In “Silverview,” le Carré untan-
gles the life of Edward Avon, a sly
former intelligence field agent
emotionally scarred from har-
rowing experiences during the
Bosnian conflict. We first en-
counter Avon in a broad-
brimmed Homburg and a drip-
ping, fawn raincoat in a seaside
town in East Anglia where he is
posing as a retired academic.
Avon lives with his wife, a re-
BOOK WORLD FROM C1
In le Carré’s last novel, the spies are confidential if not confident
V IKING
John le Carré’s la st novel, “Silverview,” has been published
posthumously. In an afterword, his son Nick Harkaway wonders if
the book was withheld because it cut too “close to the bone.”“There’s stuff that happens
on ‘The View’ that s houldn’t
be allowed.”
Meghan McCain in “Bad Republican”In Meghan McCai n’s new book, “Bad Republican,” she says
clashes on “The View” w ith le ft-leaning colleagues such as
Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar weren’t playacting.OUR PRESSES
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