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Chasing beliefs Lawrence Wright doesn't have to think long when asked what thread runs through his body of work, which now includes six nonfiction books: "Trying to understand the role of belief," Wright says, sitting in the spacious writing quarters of his Tarrytown home. "I've spent a good portion of my career trying to understand why people believe the things they do. I realized that by writing about people's beliefs, I could understand their behavior." This is certainly true of "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," which Knopf publishes this week and promises to be one of the Big Important Books of the Year — 40,000 first printing and another one under way, author tour and all that. Already the thing has gotten pre-publication raves that other authors would throw their mothers down a well to get: "Wright has written what must be considered a definitive work on the antecedents to 9/11," says Kirkus, a trade publication used by booksellers. And LBJ biographer extraordinaire Robert A. Caro says, "Lawrence Wright's integrity and diligence as a reporter shine through every page of this riveting narrative." Even for Wright — a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine who's long been regarded as a superhumanly tireless journalist — the book is a feat of terrific endurance. He has traveled for much of the past five years, conducted some 600 interviews, compiled a reference library of 150 or more books and inhaled tens of thousands of documents. The guy's work ethic makes every other scribbler look like a punk. And every single fact, element or category — what Osama bin Laden has had to say about Saddam Hussein, for example — has been annotated and cross-referenced using Wright's famously meticulous index card system. "I have developed a system over the years," says the 58-year-old Wright. "I require a system because I have so much material. Every single instance I can find I've got readily at hand." Oddly enough, this organization doesn't extend to other areas of his life. "I'm the object of fun in the family because I can never find anything that's in front of my nose." Well, the system works. Besides writing articles for The New Yorker and books, Wright also writes plays (he's at work on one now, a one-man show starring himself chasing al Qaeda; he'll do a preview at the LBJ Library Aug. 29 before taking the play to The New Yorker Festival), and movies (he co-wrote 1998's "The Siege," which spookily predicted elements of Sept. 11). As he says in the publicity material accompanying "The Looming Tower," "When I watched the attacks on America that Tuesday morning in September, I thought, 'This looks like a movie.' Then I had the sickening realization, 'This looks like my movie.' " With good reason. The movie is about a string of terrorist bombings in New York — but no passenger jets as missiles — and the government's treatment of people of Arab extraction in their aftermath. If it sounds like all Wright does is work, that's a bingo — he works at his job and his fun. He started playing piano halfway through his 38th year specifically so he could play "Great Balls of Fire" on his 40th birthday, and plays in the local blues collective Who Do. His piano teacher, Floyd Domino, says, "As people get older they get more comfortable and challenge themselves less. Larry challenges himself more." Wright is a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. And a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And a board member of Capital Area Statues Inc., the nonprofit responsible for Philosophers' Rock sculpture outside Barton Springs Pool and, more recently, the cannon-blasting Angelina Eberly statue by cartoonist Pat Oliphant on Congress Avenue. A new quest Strangely enough, the writer, winner of the 1994 National Magazine Award (for a two-part piece on "recovered memories," "Remembering Satan," later published as a book), had been planning to get out of journalism until that day to concentrate on writing and directing movies. But Sept. 11 ended thousands of lives and altered numberless others, Wright's among them. "I felt obliged to get into this and find out what had happened. I didn't trust anybody else to do it as thoroughly." And he came out of it with a far deeper understanding of the principals, their motives, strengths and flaws. "I've never attached myself to any other project with such intensity and with a sense of history looking over my shoulder," he says. "I knew it was the most important thing I would probably ever do, so I felt that I had to give it everything I had . . . I had some advantages in that I spoke some Arabic and had lived in that part of the world, but I was constantly aware of how much I didn't know, how much I had to learn in order to understand the perspectives of the people I was writing about. "I was drawn into very challenging situations that really caused me to question who I was — as a journalist, as an American — and to wonder what I might have done if I had been placed in similar circumstances. I guess this is all a way of saying that I was tested in a manner that I had never experienced before." And at first, he wasn't thinking the project would be a book. It took fellow local author Stephen Harrigan ("Challenger Park," "The Gates of the Alamo") to talk him into it. Odd coincidences: The two were born in St. Anthony's Hospital in Oklahoma City — "but not close enough together to be switched at birth," Harrigan says — and later lived in Abilene at the same time but didn't know one another until they worked at Texas Monthly. And, no lie, they were both struck by lightning — although Harrigan was in utero when it happened (his mother was doing the dishes at the time) and Wrightwas on an Abilene schoolyard among a group of children "splayed out like 10-pins." Sept. 11 seemed, to most Americans, about as unexpected as a bolt of lightning. And it was a monumental event that Harrigan, at the time, was convinced would slip unexamined into history. "These big events are never really covered," Wright recalls Harrigan telling him. "I sort of unwisely egged him on to write a book about it,"
Harrigan recalls. "I thought this was an event that nobody
else would write a book about. Six hundred books later, I have been
proven wrong, but I have been proven right that Larry would write
the best book about it." Cairo and Wright share a long history. If ever you think pure chance doesn't retain the power to permanently alter lives, here's a tale. It was 1969. Back home in Dallas after finishing at Tulane, Wright had been granted conscientious objector status — not for religious reasons but a strong objection to the Vietnam War — and had to find an alternative service job in a hurry. He went to New York City and tried to get a job at the United Nations, but nothing was available. Directly across the street was the office for American University in Cairo. They asked him if he could leave immediately. He pleaded for another day, said goodbye to his girlfriend, Roberta — she later taught with him in Cairo and they married — and called his parents from New York's Kennedy Airport to tell them his plans. Becoming a writer In Percy's first novel, "The Moviegoer," which won the award, the hero drives a red MG. As it happens, Wright had a red MG. As it happens, Percy had never been in an MG, so the student gave the scribe a ride. Things went pretty well from there. "I took him into town," Wright recalls. "That kind of broke the ice. He'd just bought a couple of new ducks that he was putting into his duck pond, so we got a bottle of bourbon and went out and watched the new ducks meet the old ducks. He was really, really kind. He was the first writer that I ever met, and the first one that had ever paid attention to me and made me feel that my aspirations weren't completely out of line. It made it real to me." This is exactly the sort of encounter that can make a difference in an aspirant's life — bolstered by a brief correspondence with Percy while Wright was in Cairo and preceded by much earlier influences. Wright says his mother "was always buried in a book." In fact, Wright's two younger sisters are also writers: Kathleen Minnix is a religious historian; Rosalind Wright has published two novels, including one about a fire at a nursing home in East Texas. Wright's career has taken him from the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville to alternative newspapers to Rolling Stone magazine to what is almost without question the best general-interest periodical in America. Wright caught the eye of The New Yorker during the controversial Tina Brown era, but Harrigan said the Austinite had no reservations about hiring onin 1992 because: "One thing Tina Brown's reign did was it allowed writers who weren't traditionally part of the club to get a hearing. The door was open a crack. He didn't have to be this blue-blooded member of the New York aristocracy." At his home office, the system Wright devised to keep track of every interview and notation almost becomes a decorating motif. For the al Qaeda book, there are hundreds of notepads, 15 boxes of index cards, upward of 100 cassette tapes — "That was before I went digital," Wright says — and books and books and books and books. Gregory Curtis, a former editor of Texas Monthly, read early drafts of "The Looming Tower" and says: "I don't know anybody like Larry. It's extraordinary. The thing about his system is it's so orderly and logical and useful. . . . None of the work is lost." In addition to Wright's organizational and research skills, Harrigan says, "He's got this furious core of energy and ambition that I guess is just in his genetic makeup. "A large part of what Larry is, is someone who grew up in a kind of cloistered society in Dallas in the late '50s and '60s, and he understands on a visceral level the danger to humanity that a lack of tolerance represents. I think in some ways he's a man on a mission to try to understand fundamentalist religion — drives that are sometimes hysterical and superstitious. He wants to understand why and how people are squeezed by institutions, by narrow frames of thought. "In some ways in his own youth he saw that firsthand. Not in his family, certainly, but in that kind of stuffy, conservative Dallas world of that time, all these issues of race and religion and conformity. I think all that had an impact on him." Indeed it did. Wright's memoir, "In the New World," is about growing up in Dallas and the Kennedy assassination's fallout. Wright's approach to making sense of what is to many in the West a baffling conflict that spans the globe is to focus his book on four principal players: al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and eye-doctor-turned-monomaniacal fanatic Ayman al-Zawahiri (who these days is spending a good deal of time calling for Muslims to wage jihad against Israel and fight in Lebanon and Gaza); FBI counterterrorism head John O'Neill ("a flawed and polarizing figure" who was living with three different women who didn't know of one another until O'Neill's funeral when he was killed on Sept. 11 after rushing back into one of the towers); and Prince Turki al-Faisal, the onetime head of Saudi intelligence. "I wanted to make this a human story," Wright says. "These were all human decisions made by sincere personalities." Spanning the post-World War II era to the post-Sept. 11 bombing of Tora Bora, much of the book reads like a spy novel, with tectonic shifts in allegiances, the deadly consequences of the U.S. playing nice with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, betrayals, garden-variety human bungling, failed attempts to get bin Laden and an overflowing cornucopia of bureaucratic infighting — particularly the longstanding animosity between the FBI and the CIA, of which Wright learned initially in his research for "The Siege." (Similarly, relationships got so ragged between I-49 — the FBI's lead investigative unit on al Qaeda — and other intelligence and law enforcement organizations that when they phoned and were denied information, they took to holding the phone next to a CD player and playing Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall.") Wright says he never felt he was in danger while reporting the story, noting that reporters who cover Mexican elections often face more palpable danger. His family did, however, make him promise not to go to Iraq, a pledge he honored. Then, when it came time to mull the book's dedication — at first, Wright didn't think he'd do one because it didn't seem appropriate after so many people had died. Roberta, however, expressed another view. The family — they have two grown children, Caroline and Gordon — had been fairly stoic through the years and Wright hadn't realized what it had taken out of them, how much they had worried in silence, not wanting him to know their depth of anxiety, the moments he'd missed. Wright was in Pakistan when he learned his son was engaged. (He's on vacation this month for the first time in half a decade.) The dedication reads, "This is for my family, Roberta, Caroline, Gordon & (daughter-in-law) Karen." Wright's boss at his day job is ecstatic — pleased with the book and pleased that Wright will be in the magazine more. "I think this book is remarkable," says Remnick, before diplomatically going on to praise his other writers — Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Steve Coll, George Packer, John Lee Anderson and others — "who've covered this very broad, complex, bewitching waterfront so well. And Larry has come up with a narrative that is as compelling as a terrific thriller, but the tragedy is that it's not harmless." Years of teasing out the roots of one of the worst days in American history can take a psychic toll, which perhaps is one reason why, when he wasn't riding airplanes and interviewing people who want to kill us and take their "total and uncompromising" vision of Islam to global domination, Wright spent a part of each day at his Grotrian-Steinweg piano. He found the rare 1928 European model in "a piano rehabilitation shop here in Austin. I have no idea how it traveled." He jokes that his last teacher "fired" him because his rhythm was lacking. Current teacher Domino recalls that Wright has said, "I've had eight piano teachers, more than Elizabeth Taylor has had husbands." So maybe he will have more time to play now, maybe not. Aside from the one-man play, he's not sure what's next. He's aware that he only has so many big projects left in him. And he still can't wean himself from the terrorism beat. In the last five years, about the only book he's read for pleasure was Harrigan's "Challenger Park," and he's spent recent days poring over al Qaeda training manuals. Asked a few weeks back what plans he had for Independence Day, Wright chuckled and said, "Probably working. Holidays for me are just days the mail doesn't come." Before 'Tower' |