Vanity fair magazine coverage of jeffrey wigand story essay

The story is presented by summarized narrative, bits of drama, interpolated essays, without much recourse to the minds of the characters. If there is any doubt as to how the reader should judge an individual, the author steps in and makes appropriate comment.

Try Vanity Fair and receive a free tote. Join Now Wigand is trapped in a war between the government and its attempts to regulate the $50 billion tobacco industry and the tobacco companies themselves, which insist that the government has no place in their affairs.

By his own description, Wigand is a linear thinker, a plodder. On January 30, when he and I arrange to meet at the sports bar at the Hyatt Regency in Louisville, he is in the first phase of understanding that he has entered a particular American nightmare where his life will no longer be his to control.

Wigand wears the same clothes I have seen him in for days—jeans and a red plaid flannel shirt, his basic wardrobe for a $30,000-a-year job teaching chemistry and Japanese. In front of us, on a large screen, a basketball game is in progress.