Reviewed by John Hope

Several weeks ago, when I first became aware that Ted Koppel had written a new book that promised to say things he didn’t feel comfortable saying on television, I made a mental note to get it from the library when it was available. I’ve liked Koppel for many years. I’ve appreciated his show, "Nightline," even though I’m often sound asleep by the time it comes on and haven’t seen as much of it as I would like. So the idea of learning more about Koppel and how he really feels about things was very appealing.

Then MODE Weekly got a review copy of Koppel’s book and offered it to me. Things don’t get much better than that. I eagerly started reading, looking forward to all the insights I knew I would gain. After 30 or 40 pages, a question had started forming in the back of my mind and I eagerly read on to learn the answer. When I closed the book after 320 pages, I realized I never had gotten the answer to my question: Why was this damn thing accepted for publication?

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been this disappointed in a book that I actually read all the way through.

The premise is simple. Koppel decided to keep a journal through 1999 — it being the end of a century and all — so that we would have "a journal of subjective snapshots of the twentieth century’s final year, and some memories and observations it triggered." It probably takes a certain amount of arrogance to assume that thousands of people are interested in our daily musings on events, but for Koppel and the life he leads, it is a reasonable assumption.

In his introduction to the book, Koppel also relishes the opportunity to present more of himself than he does on camera. He recognizes that people presume to know his opinions and likes and dislikes based on what they see on "Nightline." "They draw their inferences from a raised eyebrow or a tone of voice," Koppel writes, "If my questions are nonconfrontational, they presume my sympathy for the person being interviewed. They appear to have a hard time believing that I would ask a tough question of someone I like. It occurs to surprisingly few people that I am principally concerned with extracting information from a guest, and that my tone or apparent mood or facial expression has little or nothing to do with what I really think."

Koppel promises to give opinions he never would express on the air, either dealing with stories he’s covered for ABC News or on matters unrelated to his work. Some observations were deleted, he says, because his editor at Knopf, Jonathan Segal, "found them too labored or trivial to merit inclusion." Memo to Jonathan Segal: You didn’t work nearly hard enough to take out everything that didn’t merit inclusion. Your role should have been to tell Koppel that the book wasn’t working and the project should be dropped.

If these musings represent Koppel’s off-camera beliefs, he has to be one of the most shallow and surface individuals in a business known for shallow and surface people.

I don’t really believe he is so utterly lacking in depth as he is portrayed in this book. I think the problem is with the format. Each day is given generally a paragraph or two and no effort is made to put any meat on what is a skeleton of information. Koppel teases us with meetings he held with interesting people, but never says what they talked about, or what they concluded, or how he and they agreed or disagreed. They simply met and it was interesting and that’s all we need to know.

I can’t decide whether the book does a better job of minimizing Koppel or minimizing the rest of us. Does he really think his readers couldn’t cope with deeper insights and so should be denied them? In the March 30 entry we read that the Clinton administration "is desperately afraid of losing American lives over Kosovo." Now there’s a shocker. After talking for a few sentences more about what is happening there, Koppel concludes to his journal, "What a mess."

Or take this entry from May 7. He talks about the award of Purple Hearts to three U.S. soldiers who were captured in Macedonia. "Technically, it’s because the Serbs beat them up; in reality, it’s because the White House need American heroes, not patsies. The first planeloads of refugees are arriving in New York and New Jersey. There are to be twenty thousand in all. They, I suppose, are the lucky ones. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by a stray missile today. Not so lucky."

Wouldn’t you like to know what Koppel really thinks about an administration that uses soldiers shamelessly to create heroes and divert public opinion? Why does he only suppose that 20,000 refugees given an opportunity to come to the U.S. are lucky? Is there nothing more to be said about a U.S. missile destroying the Chinese embassy than "not so lucky"? Come on, Ted, talk to us!

The sad thing is that you can open this book randomly to any two-page spread and find equally banal examples of Koppel’s journal-writing. Again, I think the problem is in the format. Had he taken four or five major issues and written chapters about them, I think we’d have had something worth reading. But his simplistic babblings to a journal leave us wondering about his decision to write this book and Knopf’s decision to publish it.

It is true that we learn some nice things about Koppel and his childhood and family. But this isn’t a biography and those entries are hardly enough to justify this waste of paper and ink.

Perhaps the failure of this book is best summed up for me in the entry for July 7. There we learn that writer David Halberstam, who reported from Vietnam for the New York Times and has gone on to write some extraordinarily insightful books on a number of important themes, met Koppel in Vietnam in 1964. Halberstam and a couple of other reporters were the young Koppel’s heroes. Obviously they have remained in contact and remained friends over the years. We learn that Halberstam has called Koppel to say he wants to "come by tomorrow to talk about what’s happening to the United States in terms of its world role as we come to the end of the twentieth century. He especially wants to discuss television’s role in diminishing the importance of foreign affairs."

Can’t wait to read the July 8 entry to see what these two talked about, can you? Well don’t bother. There’s no reference to the meeting, no further mention of the topic or of Halberstam, ever.