In their excellent book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation (Portfolio), New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly demonstrate that while journalism may be the first draft of history, it is far from the finished copy. In the book, Pogrebin and Kelly build on their newspaper coverage of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 confirmation hearings, exploring accusations made by research psychologist Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez. The timing of the charges was incendiary, because they coincided with swelling national passions over the #MeToo movement.

Pogrebin and Kelly’s book benefits from their own immersion in Kavanaugh’s world. Though nether knew him, their early lives were adjacent to his: Pogrebin was in Kavanaugh's class at Yale, and Kelly grew up in his Washington social milieu. They speak partly from personal experience when they draw conclusions about the formative years of a man remembered by his classmates and friends as “ham on white.” The book Pogrebin and Kelly produced is rigorous reporting that rises to the level of social history. They spoke about it with The National Book Review.

Q: Can you talk about how you came up with the title? It’s so effective in multiple ways, and it really frames your perspective. Was this early or late in the process? 

RP: We pitched the book idea to Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio. 

KK:  He came up with this title himself right off the bat. And he really wanted the college years as well as the high school years. So as you said, it worked on both of those levels. And Robin obviously was the person to do the Yale years as well as collaborate on the 2018 piece of it, the confirmation process. So the partnership in a way was an outgrowth of the title, because the title came about so early on. But in addition to what you mentioned, which is it works in a very literal sense, I think it also works in a metaphorical sense.

RP: On a couple of levels, one of which is even for Brett Kavanaugh, who was once dismissed by conservative leadership as being too “swampy,” too much a creature of the swamp. The experience of 2018 and his own confirmation was no doubt an education for Kavanaugh as well, because I don't think even he appreciated just how toxic our national discourse had become. How polarized and politicized Supreme Court nominations had become. What the impact of the Me Too Movement would be a year in. It was a year at that time, two years as of now. He said last week in comments to the Federalist Society—which were his first expansive comments that he's made probably since his own installation on the Court— that he didn't realize how ugly this process would be. So, it seemed to us like the process itself was an education for him.

KK: There's also a level on which the whole culture got schooled. An additional resonance of the title is just learning on so many levels about how all of this can play out.

Q: But let's talk about your chapter headings, in English as well as Latin and Greek. (For example: “Nostos: Homecoming,” “Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus? False in One Thing, False in All Things?”  “Inde Ira et Lacrimae: Then Anger and Tears”) How did you come to them?

RP: The chapter headings are almost all in Latin, although a couple of them are in ancient Greek. We worked with a classicist to come up with the chapter titles that we hadn't found on our own.

Q: You really worked with a classicist on these chapter titles?

RP: We did. We hired a classics expert to consult with us.

Q: So, how did you decide: Latin or Greek?

RP:  So, we were thinking Latin, although we weren't wedded just to that . . . .

KK:  There was some natural stuff like Lux et Veritas is the motto for Yale. Georgetown Prep has Hoya Saxa.

RP:  We basically felt like Latin is the language of these English-inspired American educational institutions. It's the language of governance and the law in so many cases in the United States. It's a language that the Catholic Church has used for many, many years. So, on a number of levels it seemed resonant, and some of the chapter headings were obvious.

Others not so much. And the Greek came in with our consultant who said, "You know, I love this idea of Nostos from the ancient Greek for the homecoming."

This is that the very beginning of the book, the prologue in which Kavanaugh returns to Georgetown Prep for a reunion, and what that's all about. And then there is a parallel at the very end “Hamartia: Missing the Mark,” which is an encapsulation of how we sort of feel at the end of this process and the Epilogue.

Q: The chapter headings dramatize Georgetown Prep’s deep influence on Kavanaugh?

RP: There’s a classical quality to the story itself, a level of tragedy— people talk about it as a fall from grace. There are epic allusions that we think are appropriate given the scale of these events and how dramatic they were.

Q:  So how did you move from daily journalism to book writing, from covering news as it breaks to considering what you had to do to make this need a real book with heft?

RP: We had both been enlisted for the coverage because of our personal associations with the story. We were left feeling like there was stuff on the cutting room floor so to speak, and in our notebooks. And there were a lot of lingering questions from people we were talking to, which made us curious to go back at it. Kate had written two books before; I had never written one. Kate and I only met through this coverage, we did not know each other, so it was something of a shotgun marriage.

Kate had been at the Times for two years, she used to be at the Wall Street Journal and was on the air at CNBC.

I have been at the Times for 25 years; we're 10 years apart. We have different generational perspectives.

Fortunately,  there was a lot of serendipity in the sense that you don't know what it's going to be like to work with someone in terms of temperament, standards, voice. But we found that there was a lot of synergy around those important tent poles. Both being at the Times, we had a certain value system that we brought to it that was similar. There was a seamlessness in that we would each take a crack at a chapter initially, and then pass it back and forth and edit each other and write into it and expand on it.

KK: There was definitely the benefit of more time. Which was valuable and important, and exactly what was missing from covering this in real time for the hearings. For example, we didn't put the Deborah Ramirez story into print initially, even though we were neck and neck with The New Yorker on trying to pin that down.

Because at the time, the corroboration that we ultimately did find for the book, we hadn't solidified in time for publication in the New York Times. That ended up being made much of by the Right, which said that indicated the weakness of her allegations. But, in fact, it really was a question of reporting at the time, and whether we felt we had it. We also didn't have access to Ramirez directly, which The New Yorker did.

There was also the sense that you want to be able to kick these issues around, and play devil's advocate for each other and be a sounding board. And so, while this is a book that doesn't necessarily have to be written by two people, I think it was important to the process. Because every day we were on the phone multiple times to each other if we weren't in person, to test theories and lines of reporting and be able to say where are the holes, and what more do we need? And what haven’t we explored fully, and who haven't we reached?

RP: We were also sometimes able to do a good cop, bad cop kind of thing where somebody was hitting a wall on something and another person could come back at it from a different angle. Or one of us was just saturated and needed a break, and the other person could pick up.

KK: Meanwhile, Robin was doing exhaustive research into Kavanaugh's career years, while I was driving around Montgomery County, Maryland. [Kelly was looking for the house where the alleged Ford assault took place.] We wrote all our own reporting, but then we became one another's editor. By book standards it was really fast.

RR: We were very resistant to anything knee-jerk and wanted to make sure that we had some sense of what we were going to set out to do. And I think that took some time.

KK: Michael Lewis, who is an acquaintance, told me once to write as soon as you could in the sense of . . . if you go out and do an interview with somebody for a book, and you know there is a scene that's going to be an outgrowth of that, go home and write it.

Don't wait after six months and then sit down on the first day of the seventh month and have this blank screen, and risk having an anxiety attack. Do it as you go along, and that makes complete sense to me. But it's so hard to write if you don't have the reporting, you just can't do it.

RP:  One great anecdote which I keep meaning to mention: There was a time when Kate had finally encountered Mark Judge and it wasn't clear whether she'd be able to use any of that encounter, but she wanted to download it in the moment, and she was driving. And she said, “Can you please take notes on what I'm about to tell you, about what transpired?”

KK:    So I was driving and I had gone to his house outside of D.C.  I had knocked on a family member's house where he was staying, or I believed he was staying. And the family member came to the door, turned me away, but I left a business card, explained why I was there. And I was driving back to the city and he called me.

So, we had this conversation, loosely him telling me to sort of buzz off. But he said a couple of things and they were interesting. And because I was in the car, I couldn't take proper notes, so I immediately called Robin and had her take dictation basically. It was like a contemporaneous memo.

RP: And I feel like that perspective on Kavanaugh, people don't necessarily know that's important. You get this guy, who also frankly was something of a covert intellectual as a youth. People didn't know he was smart at Yale, and then they end up hearing he gets awards at graduation, and they see him get admitted to Yale Law School— which is very difficult to do— and realized, "Wow, Brett is smart." And they see this guy getting appointed to these clerkships, and going on to become a Supreme Court justice when they didn't know him as politically minded when he was young.

So there are these ways in which you start to understand who this person is. He may not be the most brilliant guy in the room, but actually was incredibly effective at getting ahead. And had enough intellectual heft and intelligence to pull off the substance required of those positions.

Q: And he was very ambitious, right?

RP: Right, he was strategic, and perhaps he was careful not to offend anyone, because he knew that's important to do if you want to be confirmed and politically viable. He worked for two terms for George Bush, who he counts as a real mentor and role model for him. That said, ambition is not per se a bad thing. And the fact that he had it, more power to him on a certain level that he was able to realize his dreams.

But I think also that it’s hard to do a psychological profile of Brett Kavanaugh. It's hard to understand what made this guy tick; even his closest friends describe him as ‘ham on white,’ and say they did not have insight into Brett on a psychological level.

Q: Last question: Do you think it’s possible to write a biography of a living person? And if it’s not a biography is it a different genre?

KK:    It's funny, I was talking to a journalist-author friend, recently, who said, "You know, the next book I write, I want it to be about someone who's no longer alive."

It actually got my wheels turning a little bit about the difficulty of writing about someone during their life, versus the challenges of someone who's deceased, and literally cannot tell their story to you even if they wanted to.

In this case, there was always the prospect of getting an interview with Justice Kavanaugh, or at least talking to someone who spoke to him yesterday or last week. I am hidebound in my ways. I see myself as a nonfiction writer and a journalist, and I'm much more comfortable dealing in the now and the recent past. Or, I guess in this case, we were going back 35 years. But living people, our current generation?

I like that infinite set of possibilities of getting new and additional information as opposed to when the parties are in a past generation, and all you have are the primary documents that might survive. I was a history major, and I always found that limiting. But maybe, I don't know, down the road.

RP: But I would say that to your question, I don't think this is a biography per se. There are — those certainly on the Right — who question, why is what he did in high school and college relevant? Why does it have a bearing on his fitness for the court?

The reason that it does is because A) The degree to which he was honest about that past became material in evaluating him for the Court, and B) Those formative years can shed light on his character and behavior going forward. So to that extent, we felt it was germane.

But it's not as if we just told the life story of Brett Kavanaugh here. What we brought to it was the experience from high school and college that was relevant.

It was all about intersecting with the confirmation hearings and those decisive days in September 2018— connecting his life to the events of our political process and to this cultural moment.