Years of backstabbing and betrayal start to catch up with one of Washington’s elite opinion writers, “a character that deserves to jump outside the Beltway and enter the language like ‘Uncle Tom,’ ‘Peter Pan,’ or ‘Scrooge.’” (Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor). During a cocktail party, George H. W.

Bush encourages Brandon Sladder, the prominent Washington columnist, to write his memoirs. Sladder has, after all, known just about everyone of importance. From talking on intimate terms with world leaders, being a witness to enormous change, and expressing his weighty opinions on matters of state, he believes that his own story could add so much more than a footnote to our age.

But what is meant to be a look back at his life and our times turns out to be far more revealing. The Columnist is Sladder’s attempt to burnish his image for posterity. What emerges is something else: the misadventures of an irresistibly loathsome man—self-important, social climbing, dangerously oblivious, “an unforgettable character w