Babylon Was

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

—H. G. WELLS

I know you came for stories about the tech billionaires like Elon and Mark and Sheryl and Peter and Jeff and Steve and Tim.

Don’t worry—you’ll get to meet all of them, as I did over my three-decade career covering these moguls. But this is a book about me and tech, a relationship that started as a meet-cute love story then turned sour over time. Be assured, this book is mostly about those guys—and let’s be clear, they are mostly guys. But to truly understand my relationship with tech, you also have to know a little about me. I’ll keep it short (also like me IRL, at five-foot-two).

The Internet and I were both born in 1962. That year, a scientist from MIT suggested connecting computers to create an Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPAnet, which became the technological foundation of the Internet. While there are conflicting explanations as to its inspiration—to create a hardened communications system in case of nuclear attack, to allow researchers to be able to access a limited number of powerful supercomputers from across the world, or because it was simply a long-dreamed technological challenge—the push to build a communications network emerged from the fecund brain of J.C.R. Licklider. He was a famed computer scientist who sketched out the idea in a 1963 memo that described an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” I always loved this conceptual notion since it was both lofty and a little bit silly. It spoke of a unity among humankind, too, brought to you by the miracles of technology. Many others followed his lead into tech, all with the base intent of bringing humanity together for higher purposes.

My origin was a lot less heady. I grew up in Roslyn Harbor, New York, on the northern part of Long Island, the middle child of three. When I was five, my beloved father died. To say my life changed in the moment he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage without warning would be an understatement.

“Just imagine right now if half of your friends died,” I said to an interviewer decades later, referring to a book called The Loss That Is Forever, about children whose parents die at a young age. “Your parents, when you’re five, are really pretty much your entire world. If one-half of your friends just suddenly died, it would be shocking and devastating, and so I think it also gives you a sense of the capriciousness of life; that life can change on a dime, that bad things happen, and that you survive them just fine. You just keep going.”

Actual memories faded quickly and all that was left were analog photos. In every single image, my father looks sunny and hopeful as he beams at the camera. It’s clear he loved the life he had built from a modest West Virginia upbringing. A stint in the Navy had paid for college and medical school, and after rising to a lieutenant commander rank, he took his first big civilian job running the anesthesiology department at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. He used the windfall to buy his first house for his growing family. Then he died before he had even moved in.

Can I articulate such a loss? Hardly. How can you account for what you never had? You cannot. I wrote about this in 1989, after I had my father’s body exhumed and moved back to his home state at my grandmother’s behest. In the piece, I am clearly beginning to think about what we lose and leave behind. Ironically, this is in contrast to the digital medium I was soon about to cover: the Internet, where everything is essentially indelible.

Not for me, though, as I wrote in the Washington Post:

I remember no living face at all, only the one I see frozen in snapshots. I suppose there was a moment when I did that final time, and he answered as always in his languid drawl, “Good night, good night, good night,” before turning out the lights. I do remember many nights like that, but not the last one. I try sometimes, squeezing my memories dry, but years ago I just about gave up on it. As I dial the cemetery to make arrangements, it seems as though I will try again, despite the pain all my friends say will undoubtedly come from “unearthing” the past—yes, that’s the word one used—an attempting to preserve that which is lost.

He was only 34 years old. Dr. Louis Bush Swisher died from the complications of a brain aneurysm that burst without warning one sunny Sunday morning more than 20 years ago. My room was so dark that when I came out into the hall to help wake him for breakfast, the brightness of the day slapped me back to the shadowy doorway. I watched from there as my brother knocked purposefully on the door of my parents’ bedroom to get my father up. The door was locked, and Jeffrey turned the knob round and round and hit the door with his hip. He just didn’t give up, though no amount of shoving was going to open it, I remember thinking at the time. That was me, the practical one, with the unlikely childhood understanding that some things just aren’t ever going to move.

We both thought my father had fallen into a deep sleep in there while writing a speech he was to give the next day. So, my older brother Jeff kept kicking the door and smacking it and making such a noise that my mother finally came up, knocked impatiently and said, “Bush, Bush, open up the door right now; you’re making Jeff very upset.” But he did not wake.

After that, it was quick: The firemen coming to ax the door to splinters, the ambulance and stretcher with all sorts of things hanging off of it. And the extraordinary silence when it was over. I went back into my cocoon of a room, well before they carried my father out, and only imagine now the gurney with him on it, the white sheet, the hysterical cries of my mother following behind, saying, “What is wrong with him?” I stayed in my room, where it was quiet, and fell back asleep. I never did see my father again. He lingered for weeks through January and finally died after two horrible operations. They buried him on a very cold February day. I didn’t go to the funeral.

Heavy, right? And it got worse. After Dad died, my family moved to Princeton after my mother remarried. Her choice for a second husband was the polar opposite of my kind and merry father, who was, I always thought, too good for this world.

One of the first things my stepfather did was to take the house my dad was so proud of and sell it. He also gave away my father’s dog, a basset hound named Prudence. Erasing all those parts of my father seemed a weird flex, and my mother—whose own life had gone off the rails so abruptly—did not resist. He provided a very comfortable upper-middle-class environment and then ruined it with a cavalcade of casual cruelties. We had a tennis court, but he locked access to it. I had a phone in my room, but he bugged it (and found nothing, as I was perhaps the dullest of teens, with no interest in drugs or drinking). Dinners served by a cook were an ongoing series of exhausting mind games and tests of knowledge for me and my brothers.

But don’t feel sorry for me, and if you want to play a game of Thorns and Roses, there was a plus to being raised by someone I came to think of as a villain—I became extraordinarily fast on my feet. My stepfather also taught me to play backgammon and Risk, games of both luck and boldness, which helped me become a very good tactical and strategic thinker. I lost a dog but got very good at gamesmanship and general mindfuckery.

It helped that I was smart, reading and doing math well above my grade level, a whiff of early genius that would not last past seventh grade when everyone else caught up. Still, like many in tech, I got bored easily in school. In second grade, I walked out of class one day, so the teacher sent me to the principal’s office. My mother was called in and asked why I had left and I answered: “I already read the material.” Clearly, I was already prepping for the obnoxious arrogance I would later cover.

My attitude toward school barely changed through college, which I largely thought was a huge waste of time, a sentiment I seem to share with Peter Thiel, God help me. I attended the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, which was not my first choice. That was Stanford, where my brother Jeff had gone and where I did not get in. Back then, Georgetown was a backup school and attracted a lot of middle-level students, especially from Catholic schools. I was Catholic, too, though quite lapsed. I got confirmed for my beloved grandmother when I was thirteen, and that was the last time I walked into a church for any religious reason.

Despite the Jesuits’ influence, my college classmates liked to get shit-faced drunk every weekend and fornicate badly. I still did not drink and was a closeted lesbian, which made Georgetown the absolutely worst fit. I watched angrily as the school waged a contentious legal battle with a student group called Gay People of Georgetown University. Not only did it fight the funding of the organization, but it also didn’t even want gay people to meet on campus. The irony, of course, was that many of the priests who ran the school were obviously (but, fine, allegedly) closeted. Years after I graduated, Georgetown invited me back to give a speech about my experience. I outlined their hypocrisy in detail, which they took pretty well, considering I called them out strongly for their perfidy.

Back then, though, it was difficult to breathe. So, as a freshman, I applied to transfer to Barnard. I was admitted and made plans to move to New York City in January. But sometime later that fall, I ran into a junior named Roberta Oster, who worked on the student newspaper. She’d read some of my work and promptly told me, “You’re not leaving. You’re going to write for me and be a star.” She eventually persuaded me of my pending journalistic genius, so I let the Barnard spot go and started reporting for the school paper called The Hoya. My voice-heavy columns covered topics from how to get along with different kinds of roommates (mine partied in the extreme, of course, and I still loved them) and wanting to get a tattoo, to the town-and-gown clashes between students and area residents.

By the end of my freshman year, I had won the student journalism award—the Edward B. Bunn Award named after Father Bunn—that was typically given to a senior. “Best Bunns,” I crowed to the pissed-off seniors. It was obnoxious, but I loved journalism and was indeed good at it from the get-go. I’ll also admit that I loved the attention and acclaim it brought.

Because Georgetown was in D.C., I read the Washington Post every day. I revered the paper until one day they wrote about something on campus that I cared about—a speech by a notorious military murderer from El Salvador. I also covered the speech, along with the student protests. To my surprise, the short Post story was rife with small errors.

Even though it was just eight inches long, I was furious that a news organization that I admired could be so sloppy. I decided to call the paper on my dial-up phone and was so irksome in my desire to correct the record that I managed to get then Metro editor Larry Kramer on the line. I told him that I was disappointed in their inaccuracies.

He challenged me to come down and say that to his face and asked me if I thought I could do better. I would, and I could. I took the bus from campus to the Post’s headquarters on 15th Street NW. When I appeared, Larry and I continued to debate the crappy story he had published. Exasperated by my insistence that it was an embarrassment, even for a very short story, Kramer hired me on the spot as a stringer for the paper. My beat was to cover Georgetown, which I did for several years, gathering clips and invaluable experience.

Working for the Post was much more fun than school, except for my history courses. My focus was on propaganda and how groups like the Nazis used media and communications tools to twist facts, radicalize their populace, and demonize the targeted populations. Obviously, Hitler and his henchmen had conducted a master class in evil. But what struck me was how easily people could be manipulated by fear and rage and how facts could be destroyed without repercussions.

I think about that college version of me a lot. I was subjected to much propaganda about my own self, as the general public’s understanding of what being gay was like was quite different than the actual experience. Media was central to this warping of reality. I was particularly attracted to Vito Russo’s 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, which surgically traced the way gays and lesbians were portrayed by Hollywood as compared to how they were treated in real life. Movies were filled with tragic suicidal dykes, conniving gay men, silly fops, and butch aggressors. Those depictions were not a fair reflection of me or anyone I knew. But these were the tropes that needed changing.

So strong was the prevailing negative attitude toward gays that I did not pursue the life I had long considered. My dream was to follow my father into the military and work as a strategic analyst there or at the Central Intelligence Agency. I have long been a firm believer in the most vaunted parts of the American experience and wanted to be part of protecting that against the darker forces of our national DNA. But pushing against the antigay tide was nearly impossible at the time, and the ferreting out of gays in the military continued for over a decade. Even the 1993 Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rules were atrocious. The problem was I didn’t want anyone to be forced into the closet. I wanted them to ask, and I was compelled to tell.

With my first-choice career path blocked due to discrimination, I fell back on becoming a journalist. I applied to the top school at the time, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and got in. Looking back, I wish I had taken that tuition money and bought Apple stock, which was then languishing. The Columbia program was run mostly by quaint professors who had lived in a very different era of media. Computers were scarce and learning how to write headlines using a pica rule seemed like a waste of time. While the basics of journalism remained important, the medium was about to become the message—a famous line of Marshall McLuhan’s—on steroids, and how to navigate that gap was not part of the curriculum.

To be fair, it was the early days of digital, and the use of computers at the time was rare. After graduation, I applied to a spate of newspapers and was roundly rejected (often and ironically by people who later tried to hire me). I returned to D.C. and began freelancing. As luck and a purge of editors would have it, I showed up at the Washington City Paper right when its pugnacious new editor, Jack Shafer, was without a staff.

Shafer hired me to be a deputy editor, but I immediately felt out of my depth. Despite his obvious editing skills, Shafer was not exactly the mentoring type. I’d been hired for a role I wasn’t qualified for, and I don’t think I did a very good job. Well, I know I didn’t, because Shafer fired me within a year, and I don’t recall feeling that it was deeply unfair.

In fact, I’m not one of those people who finds life deeply unfair, but I do remember thinking that while I was not more experienced than these guys were, I was going to be bigger than them. In those early days, I’d see some of the decisions my bosses made and think, This is how I’d do it. I was beginning to get an inkling of my own tastes and judgment. I just didn’t have the certainty and maturity to act on it. Once, I interviewed for an internship at the Washington Post, and the editor said I was “too confident.” I’ve since come to understand that this is something men say to women to shut them up and undercut them. I was not going to let that happen. And so, I replied: “I’m not too confident. I’m fantastic. Or I will be.” I have always, always been like this. It’s hard to neg me. Those who do only encourage me to try to win even more.

My next boss was John McLaughlin, of the famed and pioneering TV scream fest The McLaughlin Group. I mostly ghostwrote his column in the National Review, with him adding in the right-wing invective. I also worked on his show, a precursor to reductive cable news that oversimplified complex policy for entertainment. I was a liberal, obviously, but most of the staff were suck-up McLaughlin acolytes who considered him a very big deal because he’d written speeches for Richard Nixon. That was his power.

McLaughlin was also a truly awful human being. He was abusive to the staff in the broadest and strangest ways. He would demand that everybody make him toast buttered in a specific way. Even his chief of staff had to make him toast. So, I wasn’t surprised when one day he called me into his office to ask, “Would you make toast for me?”

I told him, “No, I’m not making you toast. I have a graduate degree in journalism and that means no toast-making of any kind, even rye.”

He did not take the hint.

“Everybody on staff makes me toast,” he continued. “And if I ask and you don’t, then you will be fired.”

“Well, I’m not making you toast if you ask,” I replied. “So, you’re going to have to fire me when you do that.”

He repeated the threat. “Just so you know, if I ask you and you don’t make it, I’ll fire you.”

“Okay, I got it,” I said, nodding.

Part of me wanted him to ask me so I could leave. But he never did. Not once.

When he was planning his annual party, McLaughlin—or Dr. McLaughlin as he preferred, thanks to a dusty PhD in philosophy—kept most of the staff waiting as he figured out whom to invite and whom not to invite because of some perceived slight. He truly believed that not getting to attend his party would cause someone pain. I rolled my eyes visibly as he regaled the room with his plans to ding some undersecretary of whatever in the then Reagan administration. He noticed my disdain immediately, since I was the only one not nodding in violent agreement.

“Well, young lady, aren’t you impressed by the collective power of the people I am assembling in that room?” he thundered at me in his patented stentorian voice. “They are coming to see me and pay homage!”

I paused and held my tongue. Then I thought, What the hell, Kubla Khan, and forged ahead. “Listen, Dr. McLaughlin, I was in Greece this summer at a temple and there was some writing on the wall. I asked the guide what it said, and he told me it read: ‘Babylon was.’ Which means, I think, that every major power falls at some point no matter how they strive and struggle. So, someday soon enough, that means I’m going to be really powerful and you’re going to be, like, in a wheelchair in an old folks’ home being fed stewed apricots or something.”

McLaughlin looked at me like he was going to erupt and fire me on the spot. Then he burst out laughing. “Right you are,” he said, before addressing his other more terrified employees, all of whom thought I was about to be ritually sacrificed. “She gets what power is!”

So did he. As it turned out, he was also a sexual harasser and eventually started bothering a woman on staff who was my friend. I accompanied her to report his behavior to his chief of staff, who told us we “must be lying.” I quit on the spot. Later, I would be deposed in a lawsuit of another woman that McLaughlin grabbed in some desperate clinch to avoid the inevitable demise that was coming for him. When he settled and that case did not go to court, I didn’t want him let off the hook, so I talked to a features writer named Eric Alterman who was working on a Washington Post magazine piece about McLaughlin. The 1990 piece was called “Pundit Power” and included this quote from a twenty-eight-year-old former staffer:

“I think that sexual harassment is like pornography,” Swisher says. “You know it when you see it. People can tell you look nice and there will be no menace to it. With John McLaughlin, there was menace.”

Letting the Post print my full name was considered brave, but it was a professionally stupid thing to do. I felt compelled to speak on the record because journalists wouldn’t quote anonymous victims and I could, at least, bear witness. As I later told another interviewer: “I essentially called him a pig, with my name attached. You have to stand up and not be embarrassed or victimized.” It was a value that would never change in me and a characteristic to which I owe a lot of my career.

I found my way back to the Post, first as a copy aide, then working my way up to a news aide and, afterward, an intern. At the newspaper I learned more about power and who wields it, with exhausting machinations that were a typically pointless and time-wasting exercise to me. I decided very early to never try to run anything too big.

And there were other ways to advocate for change, as I did when I listened to editors who wanted to print erroneous and hateful antigay statements. When I pointed out that the statements were both inaccurate and disingenuous, I was warned against being an “advocate” and “emotional.” Another time, Post editors wanted to publish an egregious photo that perpetuated an old gay trope. Again, I objected, reminding them, “We contain multitudes.” (I love Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”)

Did those all straight, all white, mostly men grasp the meaning of the quote or even know Whitman? They did not and insisted on using the photo. As a lowly news assistant, you know what I did? There was no digital photography back then, so I swiped the actual physical photo off the design desk and stuck it in my desk drawer. They had to pick another photo, which, fortunately, wasn’t an insulting caricature.

Do I regret my subterfuge? Not for one fucking second. Then and there, I decided that was the best way to go through life—not caring about the consequences of saying or doing what I believed was right.

Around the same time, the Style section sent me to cover a party. A few minutes after I arrived, I spotted McLaughlin across the room. This was after I’d been quoted in the Post’s “Pundit Power” piece, and I thought maybe he’d try to avoid me. But no. He was a very tall and imposing man and he strode right over to me with massive puffed-out chest in full plumage.

“Kara Swisher,” he said loudly, as if he were on a TV set. “Kara Swisher, most people in this town stab you in the back, but you stabbed me in the front and I appreciate it.” Then he let out a giant laugh.

In some ways, I admired McLaughlin for that. He was a nasty old goat, but he understood the terms of the battle. I looked him right in the eyes. Reticence and subtlety were definitely not going to be my style, especially when accuracy and honesty were so effective. And so, without hesitating, I shot back: “Anytime, you son of a bitch.”

McLaughlin guffawed at that, too, since it was clear he had taught me well. It was such a moment of fantasticness for me—for someone I considered an evil person, I got along with him rather well, one of many rogues I would spark with. Then, he said goodbye and that was the last time I ever saw him. What I did not say to him before he left, except in my head afterward, was this: “You can’t die soon enough for me, Dr. McLaughlin.”

I wish I had. In years to come, I would not miss those opportunities. Life is far too short, as I had learned at five years old. I did not have the time to waste.

Neither did McLaughlin. That year, 1990, was the peak of his career. From that point on, he became less and less relevant until he finally keeled in 2016. By that time, I was right where I had told him I would be—and so was he.

Babylon was, indeed.