Needling Ron Rosenbaum

We're arguing at a back table of the noisy Upper East Side eatery E.A.T., which Rosenbaum, who works at home, has suggested as a meeting place. He is having scrambled eggs with onions, a sesame bagel and orange juice. I've ordered toast, but I'm hardly eating; I'm too uncomfortable about the fact that we seem to be arguing. He's uncomfortable, too?but not too uncomfortable, apparently, to eat.

Rosenbaum is an attractive red-haired man in his 50s with heavy eyebrows, a serious but friendly gaze and a slightly disheveled look. He's wearing a black t-shirt over black pants, and seems to have put on some pounds in the two years since he was photographed for the dust jacket of Hitler. He grew up on Long Island, in Bay Shore, but clearly doesn't like talking about his personal life. When I ask him about his family background, the usually articulate Rosenbaum, after a pause, says, "I have a sister."

"Older? Younger?" I prompt him.

"Younger," he says.

"And your parents?"

Pause. "My father's dead."

Long pause. I give up.

But that's not what we're arguing about. What we're arguing about is a little complicated and requires some background.

Rosenbaum, who writes for such publications as Harper's, Esquire and Vanity Fair, and has a column in the New York Observer, is particularly well-known for a certain type of investigation: the exhaustive delving into America's plentiful supply of cults, conspiracy theories and other out-there belief systems. One of his early stories included in this collection, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," about a group of fanatical telephone hackers, is credited with inspiring Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to build the first Apple computer. Another, "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Hoax," contradicted so-called scholarship about serial killers by exposing its source, Henry Lee Lucas, as a fake. Rosenbaum has probed the cancer-cure underground in Tijuana, combed Graceland for clues to Elvis' enduring hold on people and researched virtually every JFK assassination theory that's bubbled up in the feverish minds of conspiracy cultists. He is remarkably well-read. His intellectual curiosity is wide-ranging and seems limitless. I admire him tremendously.

Explaining Hitler was a survey of 50 years of theories?and their theorists?on the nature of Hitler's unique brand of evil. I've just asked him which of the many Hitler theories he himself leans toward, and he suddenly seems defensive. "My point is not to say, 'This is the right answer to all these questions.' Instead, it's to critique what I think are overconfident explanations, to examine what we can know and what's still impossible to know, and also, working upon that, to see what are the agendas that motivate people to insist, 'This is the right answer,' on the basis of inadequate evidence. So when you ask me what I think is the right answer, that wasn't really my goal, necessarily."

In the introduction to that book, Rosenbaum had written that "the hope of finding some satisfactory way of explaining Hitler was what initially drew me to the literature...the hope that I could track down...a glimpse of some truth, some answer to the question 'What made Hitler Hitler?"'

So I believe Rosenbaum's defensiveness, or what looks to me like defensiveness, stems from his disappointment at not, ultimately, finding answers. Gently, I hope, I suggest that someone who's made a career of parsing the theories of numerous true believers may himself have a secret yearning for definite answers to the world's hard questions.

Absolutely not, he insists. He mentions a philosophy professor he had at Yale, who eventually became a private eye. "He was my model for JFK case skeptics, because he was a genuine investigator, open-minded, skeptical of official truth, but he didn't have all the answers. And I think that's been succeeded by people who want to be able to brag they've cracked the case, they've got the answer, and that's what's so irritating, because these people generally do not have the evidence to back up their certainty."

In addition to the Yale professor/private eye, Rosenbaum cites as journalistic influences Charles Dickens and once, in another interview, mentioned Janet Malcolm. Malcolm's 1990 The Journalist and the Murderer examines the conflicting agendas in the relationship between journalist and subject, focusing on a lawsuit against Joe McGinniss by Jeffrey MacDonald, the convicted murderer McGinniss had written a book about. I ask Rosenbaum what he thought of Malcolm's book, and again we seem to find ourselves in a tug-of-war.

"She said something very important about being skeptical about journalists," he says. "But I think she was wrong about thinking Jeffrey MacDonald didn't kill his children."

I'm surprised. "Did she say that?"

"I think she was clearly on [MacDonald's] side."

"She's clearly on his side," I agree, "but not on that issue."

Rosenbaum laughs. "What other issue is there?"

"There's a very big issue," I start to say. MacDonald was convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two young daughters; however, the MacDonald-McGinniss trial, for fraud and breach of contract, concerned the fact that McGinniss, to ensure cooperation from MacDonald, had led MacDonald to believe he was writing a book that would argue he was innocent, when in fact the opposite was true.

"No, no, I think she clearly thinks he was an innocent guy," he interrupts me.

"I didn't get that at all," I say, after a hesitation.

"Go back and reread it," Rosenbaum says, pushing his plate away with an air of finality.

"But I've read it a number of times," I insist. "Here's what I think she was saying: that regardless of whether Jeffrey MacDonald killed his kids, what Joe McGinniss did to him was unethical."

Rosenbaum shakes his head. "I think there's more than that in the book. She's focused on McGinniss, but she's also in many subtle and overt ways saying that she believes Jeffrey MacDonald. She may disclaim it at some point, but it's clear she's sympathetic with his case."

"But the case wasn't?"

"The underlying case was the murder case. She's clearly sympathetic to his protestations of innocence."

"I never got that," I say finally, unconvinced but feeling very awkward.

"Well, we disagree on that," Rosenbaum pronounces. Here, finally, I can agree with him, and add, "I will go back and reread it."

The atmosphere feels very tense to me, but that may be normal for Rosenbaum, who describes himself as perennially uncomfortable?"an outsider"?and thinks choosing a career in journalism was, perhaps, a way around that problem.

"Talking to people about stories is one way of overcoming my shyness. It's certainly brought me into contact with an amazing range of interesting people. So I like that. But then I'm always a little on edge, not completely comfortable doing the interviews."

I ask him if he thinks this "outsider" thing is common to journalists.

"It might be. I don't know enough about it. Are you always uncomfortable?" he asks me.

"Well, there's something about the comfort of standing in something but outside of it at the same time that sort of defines the job," I respond. "You're there but you're not; you're in it but not of it."

"No, but I think what I'm talking about has to do with discomfort, with not being that comfortable in the world."

"Right, I know," I tell him, a little frustrated. "But I think the result is that you find something to do so that you can be in it, but not of it."

"But then I'm still uncomfortable," he says after a pause.

We both laugh. Uncomfortably.

It is just this unease, however, that Rosenbaum credits with attracting a certain type of person to him?other outsiders, who seek him out with outlandish tales that they believe he will be receptive to.

"I think other outsiders sense that I'm somehow, some way, still an outsider, that I'm someone who would be open to an heretical view of things. And I always thought of myself that way, as spiritually-slash-socially an outsider. Not a recluse, not a social leper, but someone who didn't feel like I fit in completely to various institutions."

"And you think that's what attracts those people to you?"

"That's my theory. I don't have the answer to that but that's my theory."

"I know," I say hastily. "You keeping tell me you don't have the answer. I know."

He looks a little sheepish. "Am I being too combative about this question about not having the answer?" Anyway, he continues, these "outsiders" often hold theories that challenge orthodoxy, which Rosenbaum views as a key component of his work.

"I guess I find that all too often there's a lot of consensus wisdom that isn't questioned," he explains. "The journalism of the 70s was about 'Follow the money,' and that was important in exposing corruption. But there's a lot of unexplored work to be done?follow the ideas, examine the ideas that are consensus wisdom and see if there's a sound basis for them?or is it just people repeating what they've been told, that serves some purpose for people in power?

"Like the consensus wisdom around serial killers. The FBI profiles: they're always wrong... The Henry Lee Lucas thing I wrote about, the big serial killer: well, there were all sorts of heavy tomes of serial killer science based on an analysis of Henry Lee Lucas. You still see those books around.

"He was a fraud; he wasn't a serial killer. But the fact that he was willing to talk to those shrinks made them think they had some insight into the nature of evil?which in fact they didn't, because they were more interested in pronouncing confidently than skeptically."

He also mentions, with particular antipathy, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whom he accuses of creating a virtual "cult of death."

"What was so irritating about Kubler-Ross is that she was so confident about whatever she said about these impenetrable mysteries, like the nature of the afterlife. But she'd figured it out. She'd done the five stages of dying. She sort of brainwashes people about the nature of death, out of a misplaced certainty.

"I just find it irritating, these people who think that, well, everyone else who has thought about it for centuries was wrong, and I'm right. Well, maybe you are, but maybe you're not."

I suppose it was Rosenbaum's surprising vehemence, contrasted with the thoughtful, unprovocative tone of his stories, that made me feel the need to be right. So, although I did not go back and reread The Journalist and the Murderer, I did call Janet Malcolm and leave a long phone message explaining the disagreement and asking what her intention had been.

She called me back. There's that famous moment in Annie Hall where Woody Allen, standing on line for a movie, is listening to the pretentious guy misinterpret Marshall McLuhan, and McLuhan magically appears to confirm that Woody is right and the other guy is all wrong. That's what happened here.

"I'm on your side," Malcolm told me. "When I was writing that book, I couldn't begin to tell whether or not [MacDonald] was guilty. Later, I read a book called Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders, by Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost, who were sympathetic to MacDonald's case, and I moved closer to feeling he might very well be innocent. At the time of writing the book, though, I had doubts."

"Would it be safe to say," I asked her, "that you felt the question of his guilt or innocence was irrelevant to your book anyway?"

"Yes, it would be safe to say that," she replied. "I felt comfortable, within the context of that book, with having doubts."

Rosenbaum, I think, protestations to the contrary, isn't comfortable having doubts. And Ron: That's okay. Really.