Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post’s local editor and the co-author of Paula Broadwell’s biography of her lover, former CIA Director David Petraeus, is finally breaking his silence on the affair today with a mea culpa on the front of the Post’s Style section. In the piece, Loeb calls himself oblivious to the affair between the retired four-star general and Broadwell, despite the “unusually close relationship” between subject and author.
“My wife says I’m the most clueless person in America,” Loeb begins.
Loeb writes that he was paired with Broadwell in July 2010 by their mutual agent, Scott Moyers, who was looking for a ghostwriter to guide a biography of Petraeus, who at the time was transitioning between running U.S. Central Command and taking over the American mission in Afghanistan. Loeb recalls Moyers’ pitch as irresistible:
He described his other client, with whom I’d be working, as a woman who had unique access to Petraeus. She was, in Moyers’s telling, a dynamo — a West Point graduate who’d worked in counterterrorism after Sept. 11 and was pursuing a PhD at King’s College in London. It sounded like an incredible opportunity.
Loeb recalls that he met with Broadwell at her home in Charlotte, N.C. (which was visited last night by FBI agents) at the outset, but did most of his work on the book from his home in Maryland. Broadwell, meanwhile, did the reporting in several trips to Afghanistan, with Loeb stitching a narrative from the information Broadwell sent back.
But Loeb insists that the cheerleading tone of the now-unfortunately titled All In was all up to Broadwell. Despite the book’s unyielding praise for Petraeus, Loeb appears to be standing by his work:
I had no say over the book’s ultimate take on Petraeus, which some have found excessively laudatory. Broadwell was free to make whatever revision or modifications she desired to the text, and did so liberally. To my mind, in any event, the book remains a valuable chronicle of his year in command and makes clear that the war wasn’t going all that well.
Still, the affair went completely unnoticed, though by her last trip to Afghanistan, Broadwell’s access to the general had become “exclusive.” But however close Broadwell and Petraeus appeared, Loeb says he was none the wiser: “Was something going on with Petraeus? I always said I didn’t think so.”
Loeb’s only interaction with Petraeus during the writing of All In came in 2011 when the general was back in D.C. while still running things in Afghanistan. Petraeus, fitness fanatic that he is, invited Loeb for an early-morning run at Myer. Loeb calls the experience “vintage Petraeus”:
No one cultivated e-mail relationships with journalists better than he did; no one could be more personable on a kind of superficial level that nonetheless made people feel good about their interaction with him.
In a video interview on the Post’s website that accompanied this article, Loeb says that he had planned to see Broadwell last weekend at her birthday party. But, given the last few days, that meeting didn’t happen.
Still, Loeb’s big takeaway is that in watching Petraeus unravel, he feels a bit like Nick Carraway:
“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”
David Petraeus as Gatsby and Paula Broadwell as Daisy Buchanan? Perhaps, but the deeper this story goes—with a renegade FBI agent and another top general involved—the more it feels like the Coen brothers’ 2009 farce Burn After Reading. In that scenario, Loeb comes out closer to Richard Jenkins’ unwitting gym manager.
