{"id":199564,"date":"2026-08-02T07:36:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T15:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=199564"},"modified":"2026-08-02T09:15:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T17:15:29","slug":"the-man-who-would-not-vouch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=199564","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Would Not Vouch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Near the end of A Man in Full<\/a><\/i>, Charlie Croker stands at a podium in Atlanta with the mayor behind him and declines to say what he has been paid to say.<\/p>\n

The deal was simple. Wes Jordan, the young Black mayor, believes the city will burn if a Georgia Tech running back named Fareek Fanon is arrested for raping the daughter of a rich white businessman. Croker was a Georgia Tech hero in his own day and carries weight with white Atlanta. If he holds a press conference and declares Fanon innocent, the mayor will intervene with the bank that is dismantling him.<\/p>\n

Croker knows nothing about the case. He meets Fanon and hates Fanon as anyone in his position would, and he assumes Fanon did it. The accuser’s father is his friend. And he needs the money more than he has ever needed anything.<\/p>\n

He gets to the podium, says he has been threatened with ruin unless he vouches for a man he cannot vouch for, tells his creditors to come and take everything, and walks out.<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe<\/a> (1930-2018) published that in 1998. In July 2026, thirteen thousand people signed a letter<\/a> stating that plagiarism allegations against a Cambridge professor were entirely false, and among the first thirty-eight signatories were three heads of Cambridge colleges, five members of the House of Lords, six MPs, and the director of the university’s autism research centre. Almost none of them had read either of the two doctoral theses at issue. The letter’s assurance was not a finding. It was a character reference, produced because institutions needed one to exist.<\/p>\n

Wolfe wrote the scene of a man refusing to supply it. Nobody has yet written the scene of thirteen thousand people supplying it for free.<\/p>\n

Wolfe is periodically enlisted as a truth-teller about Black behavior, which is a radioactive claim. The more socially acceptable claim is that Wolfe’s subject is white institutional need. In each of these episodes the moral weight falls on the people with the money and the letterhead, and the Black figures in the frame are responding rationally to a demand that somebody else created and advertised. That is why he stayed publishable for fifty years while writing material nobody else would touch, and it is also what makes the work bear on the Jason Arday Cambridge plagiarism scandal.<\/p>\n

Start with an early case.<\/p>\n

Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers<\/em><\/a>, 1970. The San Francisco poverty program had money to distribute and no way to tell a real community organization from a man who walked in claiming one. It had no membership rolls, no audits, no method. What it had was a room, a scheduled meeting, and a bureaucrat whose job was to absorb whatever came through the door.<\/p>\n

So the program selected on the only signal available, which was the performance. The groups that got funded were the ones that arrived in numbers, made noise, and frightened the man behind the desk. Wolfe reports that Samoans did unusually well because they were large. The confrontations were theater with a script both sides understood, and the flak catcher’s function was to take the abuse and produce a check.<\/p>\n

Wolfe’s charge is against the program. It specified the performance, advertised the specification, paid for compliance, and then affected surprise at the performers it attracted.<\/p>\n

That is a complete theory of a selection problem, written thirty-four years before the sociology of cultural trauma<\/a> got around to carrier groups, and it applies without alteration to a system that rewards a particular biography and then expresses astonishment when biographies of that shape keep arriving.<\/p>\n

Radical Chic<\/em><\/a> is the same year and the same operation in a penthouse on Park Avenue. Leonard Bernstein<\/a> (1918-1990) and his guests are certifying the Black Panthers<\/a>, and the criterion of authenticity is menace, which is a standard no amount of reporting could confirm or refute. The detail that carries the essay is the staffing. The Bernsteins could not have Black servants passing canap\u00e9s to Black revolutionaries, so they hired South Americans. Wolfe understood that the entire evening was a problem of staging.<\/p>\n

He is markedly fairer to the Panthers than to the hosts. The Panthers want money and say so. The hosts want to be observed wanting to give it.<\/p>\n

In The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/a><\/i> the phrase is the Great White Defendant. Abe Weiss, the Bronx district attorney, convicts Black and Puerto Rican defendants every day of the year and needs a white one before the election, because the legitimacy of his office depends on it. The need precedes the case. When Sherman McCoy appears, he is not discovered so much as filled in.<\/p>\n

Sherman spends the novel unable to settle what happened on the ramp. Two young men approached him in the dark and he has never known whether they meant to rob him or to help.<\/p>\n

The other half runs through Reverend Bacon, whose funding from the Episcopal diocese is nominally for a day-care center. Wolfe’s suggestion is that the white donors would rather not learn what the money does, because learning would oblige them to act on it. The day-care center that does not quite exist is the same object as a five-and-a-half-million-pound fundraising total attributed to collectives whose members are said to be covered by non-disclosure agreements.<\/p>\n

And then A Man in Full<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

Notice what the mayor’s motive is — riot prevention. Jordan is a competent politician managing a city, and buying a testimonial from a bankrupt white businessman is the cheapest available instrument. Croker is a trad who assumes the worst about Fanon and would say the opposite for money. Inman Armholster wants his daughter’s account believed and will not let her go to the police. Everyone is acting rationally. Nobody is lying. And the process cannot produce a true statement about what happened in that dorm room, because no participant has any reason to produce one.<\/p>\n

Liverpool John Moores<\/a> investigated and cleared Arday<\/a>. Cambridge said the responsibility lay with the awarding institution and called the allegations a smear. A publication (Times Higher Education) with a sixty-three page dossier of text comparisons dropped the story on receipt of a letter from a defamation firm. Simon & Schuster is publishing the memoir on schedule. A campaigning organization is collecting signatures. Every one of those actors is behaving sensibly given its position, and the arrangement has no station at which a person with the power to find out has a reason to want to.<\/p>\n

Wolfe always includes the broker, and the broker is usually the one who decides what the story will be. Albert Vogel and Reverend Bacon hand Peter Fallow his exclusive and tell him to run with it. Roger White III, called Roger Too White, moves between Croker and the mayor and is the only man in the novel who understands both rooms. He is also Wolfe’s best Black character.<\/p>\n

The brokers’ interests match neither the institution’s nor the subject’s. They are paid in access and relevance, both of which increase with the intensity of the conflict. A man whose standing depends on there being a fight will reliably locate one.<\/p>\n

Both novels have been filmed. They were made thirty-four years apart, by different studios, in different decades of American racial politics, and they solved the same problem by opposite methods.<\/p>\n

Take the first.<\/p>\n

Brian De Palma made The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/a><\/i> for Warner Bros in 1990. Wolfe’s trial judge is Myron Kovitsky, a Jewish judge who faces down a courtroom mob. On screen he is Judge Leonard White, played by Morgan Freeman.<\/p>\n

Julie Salamon<\/a> had access to the production and published The Devil\u2019s Candy<\/a><\/i> about it the following year. Her account is that De Palma decided the script needed a sympathetic African American character, and that Alan Arkin, already cast and signed for a modest fee, was paid to go away so Freeman could be hired at a much larger one. Other accounts put the decision with the studio, which was worried about the film’s racial politics.<\/p>\n

Now watch what the film does with Wolfe’s argument.<\/p>\n

In the closing scene the judge denounces Reverend Bacon for race-baiting. He denounces the district attorney for pursuing the case to court minority voters rather than in the interest of justice. He tells a courtroom full of people that they have no standing to feel self-righteous. Then he asks them to be decent.<\/p>\n

That is Wolfe’s charge, delivered from the bench, in a major studio release at Christmas 1990. It survived because of who was speaking it.<\/p>\n

Three quieter changes in the same film run the same direction.<\/p>\n

Reverend Bacon goes from what Roger Ebert called the scheming, intelligent grafter of the novel to a comic blowhard. That may be the most effective of the three. A competent operator indicts a system, because a system is what he operates in. A buffoon indicts nobody. Making a man ridiculous removes the institutional charge while leaving the character on screen, and nobody can accuse you of having softened anything.<\/p>\n

The two youths on the expressway ramp become menacing symbols. In the novel Sherman is haunted by the possibility that they meant to help him, and the possibility is never resolved. The irresolution is the book’s subject. Nobody with the power to find out has any reason to want to. The film answers the question the novel refuses to answer, and a story about institutional incuriosity becomes a story about a man wrongly accused.<\/p>\n

And Peter Fallow becomes the narrator. He still arrives drunk at the Pulitzer banquet in the opening scene, so Wolfe’s joke is technically preserved. But the audience now watches the whole affair through the eyes of the man who laundered Rifkind’s word and invented Rifkind’s quotation. Wolfe’s Fallow is the machine. De Palma’s is the guide.<\/p>\n

Now the second.<\/p>\n

David E. Kelley (b. 1956) made A Man in Full<\/a> into six compelling Netflix episodes in May 2024. The Fanon storyline is deleted. There is no Black athlete, no accusation, no white heiress, no purchased press conference, no dilemma for Croker.<\/p>\n

In its place, the mayor schemes to expose a decades-old sexual assault committed by his opponent in the mayoral race, a white right-wing challenger named Norman Raymond, and he is portrayed by actor Peter Pasco, and the accuser is a woman played by Lucy Liu. <\/p>\n

Conrad Hensley, the white warehouse worker from Oakland whose imprisonment and discovery of Epictetus form the philosophical spine of the novel, is recast as a Black man in Atlanta, played by Jon Michael Hill, convicted of assaulting a violent police officer over a parking dispute and freed at trial by Roger White.<\/p>\n

And the Stoicism is gone, which means the adaptation removed Wolfe’s diagnosis and his remedy in the same pass and kept the corporate melodrama.<\/p>\n

Set the two racial substitutions side by side. A Black man accused of raping a white woman becomes a white politician accused of assaulting a woman. A white man brutalized by the criminal justice system becomes a Black man brutalized by a police officer.<\/p>\n

Two solutions, then, to one problem.<\/p>\n

In 1990 the criticism was kept and the speaker was changed. In 2024 the criticism was cut and the accused was changed. The earlier film relicensed Wolfe’s argument by putting it in a permitted mouth. The later one moved the accusation onto a permitted target and deleted whatever would not move.<\/p>\n

The 1990 method is the more sophisticated of the two and it leaves the work with something to say. Freeman’s speech is the most Wolfean thing in the picture. The 2024 method leaves nothing, which is what nearly every reviewer registered without quite naming: an adaptation whose subject has been removed and whose plot has been retained.<\/p>\n

Two things follow.<\/p>\n

The first is that this is documented. Salamon was in the room. The decision to change the judge’s ethnicity, the money paid to remove one actor and hire another, the reasoning offered at the time, all of it has been on the record for thirty-five years. That converts an inference into a minuted meeting.<\/p>\n

In 1998 a major American novelist could publish the unrearranged version and take the top of every bestseller list in the country. Neither book could be filmed as written, in 1990 or in 2024, and the two productions found different exits from the same difficulty. The template requires a defensible target or a licensed speaker, in the same way the trauma template requires a permitted victim. Those requirements are commercial, social, cultural, moral and political, which is why they persist across administrations and why nobody involved in either production experienced the decision as censorship. Each one experienced it as casting.<\/p>\n

Two more things about Wolfe and race.<\/p>\n

His Black characters are thinner than his white ones. Sherman McCoy, Larry Kramer, Charlie Croker, Conrad Hensley and Peter Fallow have interiors, contradictions and self-deceptions rendered from inside. Reverend Bacon and Fareek Fanon are surfaces. Wolfe worked in types, and the distribution of interiority is uneven.<\/p>\n

And the reading that makes Wolfe a racial thinker extracts one axis from a body of work that ran the same operation on everyone available. He did it to WASP bond traders, Jewish assistant district attorneys, art critics, Bauhaus architects, feminist demonstrators, Cuban policemen, Miami Russians, and the entire Baby Boom generation. <\/p>\n

What Wolfe had was a method for saying unwelcome things and surviving. The Right Stuff<\/a><\/i>, for example, recounts that Kennedy<\/a> wanted a Black astronaut, that a captain named Ed Dwight<\/a> (b. 1933) was put forward, and that NASA declined to advance him above his merit. <\/p>\n

Wolfe wrote as a reporter of status. He never advanced a policy claim. He aimed the moral charge at elites, who cannot claim victim standing and whose discomfort makes good copy. He wrote in a register mannered enough that the material arrived as comedy. In Hooking Up he reported the firing of a federal mental health administrator over remarks about a primate study, described two National Institutes of Health conferences on genetics and criminality that were shut down or disrupted, said he took the heritability of intelligence seriously, and predicted that the fight over Charles Murray<\/a> (b. 1943) and Richard Herrnstein<\/a> (1930-1994) was only beginning. He described what people did and declined to say what should be done.<\/p>\n

Which returns to the podium in Atlanta.<\/p>\n

Wolfe’s climax is a man who has every material reason to sign the statement and does not sign it, because he does not know whether it is true. That is the whole moral content of a nine-hundred-page novel: the refusal to certify what one has not checked.<\/p>\n

He put it at the end because he thought it was hard. He was writing about a bankrupt good ol’ boy who needed eight hundred million dollars and who could have had it for one sentence at a press conference.<\/p>\n

Thirteen thousand people gave the sentence away in a week, for nothing, and were praised for it.<\/p>\n

Notes and sources<\/strong><\/p>\n

The novel and the adaptation<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe<\/a>, A Man in Full<\/a><\/i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/a>, 1998). The press conference, the mayor\u2019s offer of bank relief in exchange for a public declaration of Fareek Fanon\u2019s innocence, Croker\u2019s refusal, and Conrad Hensley\u2019s imprisonment and discovery of Epictetus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kevin Mims, “Less Than Half ‘A Man in Full,’<\/a>” Quillette<\/a><\/i>, May 13, 2024. A detailed comparison of novel and miniseries, and the source I relied on for the plot of the book where my memory of it needed checking.<\/p>\n

A Man in Full<\/a><\/i>, created by David E. Kelley<\/a>, six episodes, Netflix<\/a>, released May 2, 2024. Cast and credits<\/a><\/p>\n

On the deletion of the Fanon storyline, the recasting of Conrad Hensley, and the substituted assault plotline involving the mayor\u2019s challenger and Joyce Newman: Daniel D\u2019Addario, Variety<\/a><\/i>, May 2, 2024, https:\/\/variety.com\/2024\/tv\/tv-reviews\/a-man-in-full-review-netflix-jeff-daniels-1235990141\/<\/a> ; Judy Berman, Time<\/a><\/i>, https:\/\/time.com\/6973213\/a-man-in-full-review-netflix\/<\/a> ; RogerEbert.com<\/a><\/i>, https:\/\/www.rogerebert.com\/reviews\/a-man-in-full-tv-review-netflix-2024<\/a> ; and Marie Claire<\/a><\/i>\u2019s ending explainer, https:\/\/www.marieclaire.com\/culture\/tv-shows\/a-man-in-full-ending-explained\/<\/a><\/p>\n

The reviews establish that the athlete plot is gone, that Conrad is played by Jon Michael Hill<\/a>, and that the surviving assault accusation is directed at the mayor\u2019s right-wing opponent. See the full credits at https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt15845610\/fullcredits\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 1990 film<\/p>\n

The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/a><\/i>, directed by Brian De Palma<\/a>, screenplay by Michael Cristofer<\/a>, Warner Bros.<\/a>, released December 21, 1990.<\/p>\n

Julie Salamon<\/a>, The Devil\u2019s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood<\/i> (Houghton Mifflin, 1991). The contemporaneous account of the production, including the decision to change the judge\u2019s ethnicity and the replacement of Alan Arkin<\/a> with Morgan Freeman<\/a>. Summarized with citations in the AFI Catalog entry<\/a><\/p>\n

Roger Ebert<\/a>\u2019s review<\/a>, December 21, 1990. Source for the characterization of the novel\u2019s Bacon as a scheming, intelligent grafter reduced on screen to a comic blowhard, and for the two youths on the ramp being played as menacing symbols.<\/p>\n

Plot, cast and the content of Judge White\u2019s closing speech: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Bonfire_of_the_Vanities_(film)<\/a> Budget and box office figures from the same entry. I have not rewatched the film; the account of the speech rests on these summaries and should be checked against the picture by anyone quoting it.<\/p>\n

The other Wolfe<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers<\/a><\/i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). The Bernstein<\/a> party, the staffing problem, the San Francisco<\/a> poverty program, the confrontation as scripted theater.<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/a><\/i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987). Abe Weiss and the Great White Defendant, Reverend Bacon\u2019s diocesan funding, Peter Fallow\u2019s interview with Zane Rifkind.<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff<\/a><\/i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), for the account of Ed Dwight<\/a>, which should be read alongside Dwight\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up<\/i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died” contains the material on sociobiology<\/a>, the dismissal of the federal mental health administrator, the disrupted National Institutes of Health<\/a> conferences, and the prediction about the reception of The Bell Curve<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

The letter<\/p>\n

Good Law Project<\/a>, “Stand in solidarity with Jason Arday<\/a>,” opened July 28, 2026, with the full list of signatories<\/p>\n

“Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm<\/a>,” Retraction Watch<\/a><\/i>, July 27, 2026. Source for the sixty-three page dossier and the letter that ended the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Near the end of A Man in Full, Charlie Croker stands at a podium in Atlanta with the mayor behind him and declines to say what he has been paid to say. The deal was simple. Wes Jordan, the young … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43259,29738],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jason-arday","category-tom-wolfe"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t