Becoming Jeff Gannon

By Michael Dietz, AlterNet.

When James Dale Guckert gave notice to his employers at Karmak, a West Chester, Pa. large-vehicle body shop, at the end of 2001, no one found any drama in the event. After nearly three years as manager of Karmak's small office, JD wanted to move on; he was going to find work in Washington, D.C., he told his boss. He didn't say what kind of work, and there seemed no particular reason to ask; he'd been an office manager before Karmak; he would probably be one again.

Barely a year later, in January 2003, Jeff Gannon is seen on video attending a State Department press briefing. He authored opinion pieces published on a number of conservative web sites, and his byline was set to appear on Bobby Eberle's GOPUSA News, whose parent organization would, just a month later, list him as a director. He was a hustler, an aggressive networker, a figure in the D.C. Free Republic community. From out of nowhere -- no history in journalism, no apparent interest in it -- Jeff Gannon was a right-wing up-and-comer.

When J. D. Guckert exited the confines of the western Philadelphia suburbs where he had lived most of his adult life, to emerge rechristened as Jeff Gannon of the D.C. press corps, he did more than just adopt a pseudonym. He acquired an identity and a sense of purpose. From one perspective, he was playing out the classic narrative of American reinvention: a big new self in a big new place, the old, failed self sloughed off and forgotten. From another perspective, he was tracing a darker but no less familiar American arc: that of the man of no fixed character, the enlistee without an army, ready to shape himself to the needs of whatever cause might promise to give his own life shape.

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