necessary. “Any other television interviewer
would let it go,” Rutenberg says. “You have
to admit that that’s a dangerous proposition
on TV. You might lose your viewers. No one’s
done it quite to that degree.”
It’s also the kind of thing that, if not
tempered, could veer into pompousness.
“I want to dislike him,” Politico’s media col-
umnist, Jack Shafer, says, “if only because
of the way he pu≠s himself up to anchor-
man size, sort of like Jerry Dunphy,” the L.A.
newscaster who partly inspired The Mary
Tyler Moore Show’s vain and fatuous Ted
Baxter. “But having pu≠ed himself up, the
boy delivers. He’s probably the best inter-
viewer TV has these days, as unshakable as
that diamondback that chases you in your
dreams. His reporting seems to come from
the heart. He’s probably the only genuine
romantic in TV news.”
As much as he seems born for this, as
much as any anchor seems like he or she
has been gunning for the chair from the
cradle, Tapper backed into this life. Hegrew up in Philly, the son of a nurse and
a pediatrician, in a house where the con-
versations often “focused on injustice,”
Tapper says—crooked politicians, children
in poverty. He went to Dartmouth, then a
semester of film school, then worked for
a congresswoman. He didn’t seem to have
a plan. He thought for a while that he
might go into cartooning. He wrote a novel,
but it was never published.
In 1998, for Washington’s alt-weekly
City Paper, Tapper wrote about a date
he’d recently been on with a woman who
was just then beginning to appear in the
news named Monica Lewinsky. (He does
not regret the story, but he does regret
using the words “chubby” and “zaftig.”)
He freelanced for a number of magazines,
including this one, and worked at Salon
for several years, notably covering the
Bush-Gore election.
After stints at CNN and VH1, he turned
up at ABC News and started then to become
the Jake Tapper who is now a household
name. Diane Sawyer, who was co-anchor
of Good Morning America at the time, was
instantly impressed. “You could send him
an e-mail and within 15 seconds get the
entire history, back to the War of the Roses
and three references to Saint Augustine
and the movie and the remake of the movie
and how he felt about the casting of each.
It’s all in his brain,” Sawyer says. “It’s not
that he learns the facts and that he stud-
ies. It’s that he wakes up in the morning so
curious, and I think you can tell.”
While serving as White House corre-
spondent at ABC News, Tapper published
The Outpost, an excellent account of one
of the fiercest battles in America’s war in
Afghanistan. In 2013, after CNN hired Je≠
Zucker to run the network, he made Tapper
his first hire. Tapper was everything he was
looking for, Zucker told me: “Smart, witty,
and holds everybody’s feet to the fire.”
His indignance isn’t inborn. No, he insists,
“I’m quite calm when all is well.” His wife,
Jennifer, says Tapper’s psyche isn’t that
complicated: He’s “an honest and truthful
man” who gets mad when people aren’t
being forthright.
One of his best friends, the novelist
Matthew Klam, told me that a few years ago,
their families rented a condo in Rehoboth
Beach, Delaware. After their first day there,
an aggressive group of vacationers whom
they’d set up near on the beach said, “Tomor-
row, why don’t you find another place?” It
was unpleasant and silly to claim turf like
that, and Klam stewed over it a bit.
The next day they did set up somewhere
else—but Tapper, holding his small baby,
went right back to where they’d been,
found that obnoxious group of people, and
told them with the same sureness and clar-
ity he used to eviscerate Kellyanne Conwayall of which forces his glabella to form a very
satisfying omega sign.
While so many anchors feel obliged to
maintain their Ron Burgundy anchor-y-
ness, Tapper allows an incredulousness, and
maybe even a smidge of disgust, to sneak
on through. In those moments, when he
augments the standard newsman persona
to include his own come-o≠-it realness, he
has a way of embodying all of us. This may
be his biggest public service.
“Jake is rising to the moment,” says Jim
Rutenberg, media columnist for The New
York Times. “Just by doing very basic fact-
checking and calling things out bluntly, it
kind of comes as this giant cathartic act
for the audience, because they’re all so
anxious and they want to see a lie called
a lie so badly. So they’re just desperate for
fact-checking, even though it’s the most
basic thing we do.” But also, it’s his style.
“He doesn’t let anyone o≠ the hook.”
It can be risky, this asking question after
question, repeating himself as often as is
- Tapper thinks Trump could be a surprisingly effective president, “but he keeps undermining himself.”
62 GQ.COM MAY 2017
GQINTELLIGENCE MEDIA