Author: Dwight Garner / Source: New York Times
Graphics/Reuters
In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Don DeLillo called the Warren Commission’s report “the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel.” He admired the way it captured “the full richness and madness and meaning” of the events surrounding President John F.
Kennedy’s death in Dallas.At 26 volumes, the report’s abundance impressed him, too. “When I came across the dental records of Jack Ruby’s mother I felt a surge of admiration,” DeLillo said. “Did they really put this in?”
The Mueller report is not that sort of kitchen-sink chronicle. At 448 hungrily awaited pages, it is long but hardly an epic.
It perhaps necessarily lacks both the novelistic sweep of the 9/11 Commission Report and the intimate — “prurient” would be a more exact word — scene-setting of the Starr report on President Bill Clinton. (“She and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or … ”)
The Mueller report is a dense slab of verbiage. It is not written in bureaucratese, but it is not far from it either. If you were to put a droplet of its syntax under a microscope, you’d find a swirling necktie pattern of small white starched shirts and three-ring binders and paper cups of stale black coffee. Reading between the lines, you might spy tiny handcuffs as well.
This is not a narrative that warms in the hands. There is no sweeping language. It appears to have been designed to make minimum political impact. Because its language about not exonerating Trump is written in the negative, the most important sections are hard to quote.
A typical line is: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.” A plausible title for the paperback editions that will soon be in bookstores might be, “We Didn’t Not Find Anything.”
Reports by special counsels and select congressional committees are a genre of their own by now. The Mueller report is a thorny, patriotic addition to this curious American shelf.
Its findings, especially those about the president’s ostensible attempts to obstruct justice, have been called a road map for further congressional action and other investigators. With its blacked-out redacted passages, the report more closely resembles a reverse crossword puzzle. We will collectively be solving for its inky elisions for some time, perhaps the rest of our lives.
This is a document that, like the Badlands National Park, one has to visit for oneself. If you rely on the velvet fog of Attorney General William Barr’s Cliffs Notes, you will get an “F” on the exam.
So much of what’s in the Mueller report is already known, thanks to what never again should be referred to as “fake news,” that reading it is like consuming a short story collection that’s already been excerpted in every magazine you subscribe to. But its two volumes nonetheless have the power to shock and appall.
Volume One is a report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. It commences, like a super-sleuth literary or political biography, with…
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