Jake Tapper on How the Rise of Tabloid Journalism, Evel Knievel, and One Super Weird Year in the 70s Shaped His New Novel

When Jake Tapper isn’t behind the anchor desk of his two-hour CNN show The Lead, or preparing to host the flagship program, he finds time to write historical fiction. On Tuesday, All the Demons Are Here, the third novel in an acclaimed series written by the CNN anchor, officially comes out.

As a guy who long ago became dead inside, a handicap that allows me the privilege of approaching most everything with a jaded eye and deep skepticism, I am delighted to report that the book is a most enjoyable read. It helped tremendously that it was set in the particularly weird year of 1977, which brought the New York City blackout, the death of Elvis Presley, the Son of Sam, and the media spectacle of Evel Knievel. I turned 11-years-old in 1977, so reading historical fiction based on the events of my youth was remarkably enjoyable.

The book brings more than nostalgia, however. History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes, the old saying goes, and Tapper does a remarkable job using 1977 and all its weirdness to tell a story that feels eerily relevant to what we are dealing with today — it’s cocktail mixing tabloid journalism (or clickbait!), the rise of charismatic political charlatans, and aggrieved groups of Americans eager to protest something that they cannot quite describe.

We talked about Knievel, Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and how Covid-treatment denialism was foretold by something similar in the 70s, and so much more.

Following is our interview, which has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

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Hall: For those unfamiliar with the previous books in this series, how would you describe the story you’re telling?

Tapper: I’ve written each one of them so that you don’t have to have read any of the others to understand what’s going on fully. But the first one deals with a young Republican congressman from New York and his wife, a zoologist. Congressman Charlie and Margaret Martyr thrust into Joe McCarthy’s Washington, D.C., with all of its conspiracy theories and shadowy groups pulling levers in 1954. The second one has Charlie and Margaret being blackmailed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to go out and investigate to see if Frank Sinatra is actually mobbed up or if it’s just an affectation. And that one takes place in Hollywood in 1962 and is more of a look at Hollywood images, sexism, and the like. And then the third book is Charlie and Margaret’s Kids, who make an appearance in the first book, The Hellfire Club, when Margaret is pregnant with Lucy. Lucy is an aspiring journalist in Washington, D.C. in 1977, her heroes are Woodward and Bernstein, and she joins a brand new tabloid in D.C. Ike is an Angel Marine working on the pit crew of Evel Knievel out in Montana. The plot centers around all the wild stuff that was actually going on in 1977. The death of Elvis and the career of Evel Knievel and the Son of Sam murders and the rise of tabloid journalism and the prevalence of cults and UFO sightings and the disco and Studio 54, and the New York City blackout and all these wild, bizarre things that all happened in this one year in the United States. I try to make all these books fun for the reader and fun explorations into the wildest things going on in the United States at the time. I know I’m competing not only with other books but with streamers and Twitter and Instagram, and I’m very mindful of that. I want to make sure that I keep people turning the pages.

Hall: I grew up in a news-obsessed household in the 1970s, so reading this book was great fun. How much of this was from recollection as an eight-year-old, and how much of it was research and just being a student of political pop culture?

Tapper: Very little of it is from memory. I remember disco. I remember Star Wars. I remember Jaws. I remember the death of Elvis. But other than that, most of it I’ve learned about subsequently or while researching the book. I did not like, for whatever reason, the Evel Knievel phenomenon. And it was a true phenomenon. Passed me by. I was much more focused on the Philadelphia Phillies than on Evel Knievel. The whole subplot about Laetrile, which was this fake cure for cancer that there were huge fights about at the time in government and reminded me of some of the fights we had culturally about and politically about COVID. I learned about that. I’d known about it, but I learned more about it from listening to this great Slate podcast by Josh Levin called One Year, which they did 1977. And that laid a trail for me, like, “Wow, this is great. I need to put this in the book.” So it really was an education for me.

Hall: Reading the book, it felt like you saw a lot of parallels between 70s pop and political culture and the past five or ten years. Did you plan on writing this as a metaphor for the Trump era, or did that fall in your lap?

Tapper: That was the inspiration that [Knievel] was — and I don’t mean this in a pejorative way — but he was a precursor to Trump in the sense that he was a showman, and he had a really good feel for how to get media attention. And maybe there was also a darker side as well. And it’s interesting because I don’t personally know much about motorcycles because my dad’s a doctor and my mom’s a nurse. And so the only way I got a car was by threatening to buy a motorcycle when I was a kid because doctors and nurses call them donor cycles. So I don’t know anything about motorcycles. But obviously, motorcycle usage is a big part of the book. And as you know, a lot of very important scenes take place with Ike on a motorcycle or Evel Knievel on a motorcycle. So I had to learn how to write about it. So after I wrote the book I submitted, I hired a writer/editor who is a motorcycle expert named Mark Gardner. I thank him in the acknowledgments, and he helped me write about motorcycles in such a way that it sounded like I knew what I was talking about. And for me, you know, and Colby, I don’t know if you’re the same way, but if I’m watching a movie or reading a book or a TV, watching a TV show and they’re discussing journalism or politics in such a way that is just completely disconnected from reality, it always lets me down because it’s not that difficult to understand, it ruins it for me.

Hall: I loved Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries but could not watch the movie version because Leo DiCaprio clearly couldn’t play basketball.

Tapper: Literally, I have never ridden a motorcycle in my life. I rode on the back of one once in college from my fraternity to the river. I remember very vividly my friend Tom was driving it. Anyway, I hired Mark Gardner to help me write this, to help edit it, and to make it sound like I knew a kickstand from a carburetor. And later, when we were all done with our business, he sent me an essay he had written comparing Evel Knievel to Donald Trump that I did not know he had written. But it is right there. I mean, in the same way, that the connective tissue between Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump is Roy Cohn. Like, Roy Cohn was Joe McCarthy’s protege… Donald Trump was Roy Cohn’s protege! All these things are real. I mean, it was ripe, and it seemed to be rich and an opportunity for good fiction. I also thought it would be a good way to get into the heads of people who would follow a man like Evel Knievel if he ran for president or the people who stormed the Capitol or came to the Capitol on January 6th. Why were they there? What is there about this charismatic figure that they believe in and in a way that was not a caricature but was a way to try to actually understand.

Hall: Let’s discuss the Max Lyon character, which seems modeled after Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. How did that come about, that idea?

Tapper: 1977 was also the Summer of Sam. So it was also a huge opportunity for tabloid journalism to rise in this country. And I read a lot about Rupert Murdoch, who obviously is not just a huge figure today, but was rising back then in 1977, and tried to understand his philosophy of news media. Again, not to caricature him, as you know, Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, but as an actual person offering an alternate and less ethical form of journalism and news as entertainment. And that’s Lucy’s story, right? Ike is with Evel Knievel. Who is this stand-in for the charismatic figure we have in politics today known as Donald Trump. And Lucy is with Max Lyon and the Lyon family, which is definitely a precursor to the Murdochs or what he is modeled on. He is modeled on Rupert Murdoch. And some of the things he says in the book are direct quotes from Rupert Murdoch. I wanted to try to understand the point of view that would create what we now have to deal with in journalism, which is this whole form of journalism that is not rooted in fact or news, and try to understand his point of view. And his point of view was that there was, and I think it’s on page 50, there’s a quote where he says something about the disdain with which so many editors hold their readers, which was something that resonated with me because I sometimes think that about the people who run the mainstream media. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the Murdoch empire has been able to thrive.

Hall: So this side of the book deals with not just tabloid journalism but also how commercial success can easily influence if not corrupt, quality journalism.

Tapper: It’s not just Murdoch versus right. And that’s the debate, and that’s the fundamental issue in the book and that you and I and so many others deal with every day: it’s the difference between The Economist and a clickbait factory-like, well, I don’t want to name one, but you know what I mean, like a clickbait factory online. And the difference between trying to get eyeballs and trying to report something that’s important and the tension between the two and then the importance of everything being rooted in fact, and how sometimes when you emphasize the clicks or the ratings or the or the publication level, you completely get away from the need for it all to be rooted in fact. Hey, this is just page 90. There’s a quote midway through the page. Max says, “I cannot help wondering whether there is any other industry in the country that presumes so completely to give the customer what he does not want.” And that’s a direct quote that’s a quote that Murdoch actually said. I don’t sympathize with that comment. I understand what he’s saying there, and if you look at the difference in the coverage between The New York Post, The New York Daily News of the serial killer, the Son of Sam, and The New York Times, which treated it like an aberrant local crime story. It is big. It is a big difference. And you have the Lyon family arguing to Lucy. The New York Times isn’t even covering this. Like, why do you want to be on that side of journalism? I didn’t want it to be a complete caricature of people who want to cover things that people actually want to read. Because, as you and I know, that’s not necessarily wrong or evil.

Hall: Another theme that stuck out to me in this book is almost a lamentation of the lack of Rockefeller Republicans. Is that fair?

Tapper: Charlie Marder, who at this point in the series is a senator, he is a World War Two hero, he worships President Eisenhower and he is a politician from New York, from New York City. It made sense for his politics to be because the first book started in 54; it made sense for his politics to be that of an Eisenhower Republican, which was mainstream at the time. And what you have happening here is Charlie in the first book, worshiping Eisenhower in the second book. He’s doing the bidding of the Kennedys, but he hates them. He hates President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy because he’s a Republican, and he doesn’t like those guys. And then now it’s 1977, and the politicians that he has really liked, Vice President Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, are gone or at least out of power. And he is watching his party in 1977 be taken over by very conservative Republicans. I don’t know that it’s a lamentation. It’s just from his point of view; he’s watching this all happen. In the book, there’s this conference of Republicans trying to figure out the party’s future, and the spectrum of Richard Nixon hangs over them. He’s just given the Frost interviews, and the party is trying to figure out what it will be. And you have at one table more moderate Republicans like George H.W. Bush and Charlie and others. And at another table, there’s Ronald Reagan. And Pat Buchanan is at a different table. What Pat Buchanan says, by the way, this racist diatribe that he makes about the New York City blackout, that’s like word for word from a column he wrote in 1977. That’s not me making up some racist thoughts. That’s directly from Pat Buchanan. This is the struggle going on in the Republican Party right there. I’m an admirer of Ronald Reagan in a lot of ways, but this was part of what was going on. Remember, Ronald Reagan was more moderate in many ways as a governor than a president.

Hall: So this isn’t a mediation on the rise of extremist politics, especially on the right?

Tapper: Charlie is a moderate Republican. And you can look at it that way. You can also look at it like, has there ever been a thriller series in which the hero is a Republican member of Congress, which I don’t know is true or not. But he’s a heroic character.  I haven’t gone into his views on anything other than he is a Rockefeller or Eisenhower Republican. Which means he supports equal rights. And he’s also more conservative on foreign policy issues and the like. Remember, this is also a period where the Democrats are very leftward in their international relations thinking. But I don’t go too much into any of that. Charlie just exists. He exists as a moderate Republican, Eisenhower, Republican, I should say, because of the first book, because I wanted Eisenhower to be his hero. And his son is obviously his son. Dwight, a.k.a. Ike is named after him, named after President Eisenhower. But it’s not about conservatism per se. It’s more about the party trying to figure out what it’s going to be post-Nixon.