See, this is one of the reasons I dig the Star-Telegram. The brass gave FrontBurner permission to put up the entire article I wrote for them back in 1998. Thanks, guys:
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The Starr Report proves one thing: Endnotes are hot!
By Tim Rogers
It’s tempting — if you’re lazy and if you don’t know better — to skip the endnotes. There are just so many. One thousand, six hundred and sixty, to be precise.1 Then, too, most of them lean toward prosaism. Endnote No. 424 of the first section comes to mind. It reads: “V006-DC-00003712.”
We are talking, of course, about the celebrated Starr Report.
But you shouldn’t be lazy, and you should know better.2 The endnotes — paid for, remember, with your tax dollars3 — contain some of the most provocative material in the entire report. And not provocative as in “not fit for a family newspaper.” But provocative as in “Huh?” And “Why is this in here?”
Endnote No. 838 probably takes the checkered flag and gets champagne sprayed on its head, provocationwise.4 Last December, after Monica Lewinsky had received her subpoena, she visited Washington super-lawyer Vernon Jordan for advice. At the end of the meeting, the report notes, Lewinsky asked Jordan if he would give the president a hug (on her behalf, presumably). At which point, according to endnote No. 838, Jordan responded, “I don’t hug men.”
Now, why would the authors of the Starr Report have chosen to include this seemingly insignificant detail about Jordan’s hugging policy? Scholars will surely debate the question for years to come.5
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1. Odd thing, though: Two versions of the Starr Report have been released. The first one, released Sept. 11, contained 1,660 endnotes; the second, released days later, contained 1,611. The 49-note expurgation — really a re-expurgation — occurred when the Office of the Independent Council noticed that the first version contained endnotes that the OIC had previously expurgated but which “magically” reappeared when the House Oversight Committee converted the 445-page document from WordPerfect into hypertext markup language, or HTML.a One temporarily unexpurgated endnote concerned a kerfuffle Lewinsky caused at a Secret Service guard shack last December when officers refused to let her into the White House.b All citations in this report, the one you are reading, will refer to the first version of the Starr Report.c
2. Mom, from various statements made 1974-present.
3. According to a Sept. 16, 1998, Associated Press report obtained by the Star-Telegram, the Office of the Independent Council has spent at least $4.4 million investigating l’affaire de la Lewinsky.
4. Auto-racing metaphor.
5. Or not.
a. Nathan Abse, John Mintz, “Glitches Altered Version of Starr Report Online,” the Washington Post (Sept. 16, 1998).*
b. Ibid. When Lewinsky learned that her entry was denied because the president was meeting with TV journalist Eleanor Mondale, she speculated that Mondale and the president were starting a “relationship.” “Maybe she’s not sleeping with him yet,” Lewinsky said. “Anyway, there’s the excitement. It’s the president.”^
c. Otherwise endnote No. 739 wouldn’t exist.
* Really, really interesting thing, though, and probably the point of this whole thing: the Washington Post story referred to the endnotes as footnotes, even though the paper, in its hard-copy version of the Starr Report, printed endnotes — which is patently fool-headed (confusing footnotes and endnotes and printing endnotes rather than footnotes in the first place).# Many news organizations, in fact, have confused the two forms of notes in recent weeks. This paper published a special edition of the Starr Report with the textual notes at the end, but mislabeled them as footnotes.+
^ Endnote No. 739 of the unexpurgated report.
# Footnotes, which appear at the foot of a page, are far superior to endnotes, which appear at the end of a document. “Footnotes are definitely superior,” says Anthony Grafton, a Princeton history professor and author of The Footnote: A Curious History.~ “The point about notes, which developed really in the 17th century, is that they assume an intelligent reader who is reading with the argument, wants to know why he or she should actually believe what he or she is being told in the text. And you can do that easier at the foot of the page.”
Grafton says that he’s particularly fond of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine for its use of footnotes.$ “They’re quite brilliantly done,” he says. “It’s complete artistry. The book is about a lunch break, and it’s about stopping and starting and delay and writing in real time. And the footnote is wonderfully adopted to that.”
Naturally, not everyone is a fan of footnotes. Noel Coward made the observation that “having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”@ Which would mean that, to Coward, having to read an endnote would resemble having to go downstairs and get in the car and drive to the funeral of a close friend while in the midst of making love.
Luckily for Coward-like folk, HTML is easing the burden of having to answer the door. Within three days of its release, an estimated 5.9 million people had read the Starr Report online in HTML format,! whereas nowhere near that many people had read a hard-copy version.% HTML eliminates any notion of a “foot” and a “page.” It relegates annotation — prosaic and poetic — to a click, making notes more readily accessible, yes, but also far easier to scroll past, overlook. HTML kills the artistry.
Perhaps that is why the authors of the Starr Report originally wrote the thing in WordPerfect, with footnotes.? Perhaps that’s why they chose to include seemingly insignificant details like the one about Vernon Jordan’s hugging policy. Because it was fun.
+ “The Starr Report and the Presidential Responses” (Sept. 14, 1998).
~ This reporter reached Grafton in Hamburg, Germany. “The united voice of Germany,” Grafton says, “says that Americans are the biggest bunch of lunatics in the universe.”
$ Curious bit of symmetry: Monica Lewinsky gave the president a copy of Vox, a novel by Nicholson Baker about phone sex.symbols exhausted
@ Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (1997, Harvard University Press).
! Ted Bridis, The Associated Press (Sept. 15, 1998), from information gathered by market-research company Relevant Knowledge.
% Very reliable guess.
? This reporter cannot divulge how he knows that the original report employed footnotes. But he does.
(symbols exhausted) Endnote No. 79, section A of the unexpurgated Starr Report.
— originally published in the Star-Telegram, September 26, 1998
