Joan Juliet Buck– author of the infamous “Rose in the Desert” profile of Asma al-Assad for Vogue– has written an account for Newsweek of how she came to write the piece about “the first lady of hell.”
She says she originally advised a Vogue editor to send a political journalist instead of her.
“We don’t want any politics, none at all,” said the editor, “and she only wants to talk about culture, antiquities, and museums. You like museums. You like culture. She wants to talk to you. You’d leave in a week.”
Now Buck says she should have known better than to take the assignment. But:
It was an assignment. I was curious. That’s why I’d become a writer. Vogue wanted a description of the good-looking first lady of a questionable country; I wanted to see the cradle of civilization. Syria gave off a toxic aura. But what was the worst that could happen? I would write a piece for Vogue that missed the deeper truth about its subject. I had learned long ago that the only person I could ever be truthful about was myself.
Buck was accompanied on her visit by Mike Holtzman of the Assads’ PR firm, Brown Lloyd James; and by Sheherazade Ja’afari, daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations.
She reveals that her laptop was broken into and she was given a cell phone to use which was bugged. She describes the Potemkin-like nature of her visit with the Assads and their children.
Asma pulled open three boxes of fondue mix. The base of the saucepan she used was bright and brand new. The president attempted to ignite a little can of Sterno with a match. “I’ve never tried it, this is the first time,” he said.
If this was a set, the props were well chosen: rubber boots and slickers piled by the lower-level door, a collection of completed Lego projects—trucks, buildings, a shark, all perfect—lining the edge of the plate-glass walls, a decorated Christmas tree. There was no staff to be seen, no nannies, maids, or cooks. Friday, the staff’s day off?
Of course this is precisely the sort of information that the “profile” should have included.
In the end Vogue yanked the fawning and spectacularly ill-timed piece from its website. And Buck was fired by Vogue, for which she had worked since she was 23.
