“The Shorenstein Center is not like the Carpenter Center,” Franken says. “It’s a pretty academic place. It’s not a run-away-with-your-imagination type of place. I assured them it was a serious book and it would be satirical and funny.’
The wave of criticism continued when it became public that Franken had written a prank letter to several conservative leaders asking for personal testimonies about their experiences with abstinence—on Shorenstein Center stationery.
Center Director Alex Jones said he was upset that the Harvard center’s name was being implicated in a prank of this nature.
“You could call it irony, I call it bad judgment,” Jones said in an interview last month. “It is inappropriate to use Shorenstein stationery to play a practical joke.”
Despite the incident, Franken says, both Jones and the benefactors of the Shorenstein Center have praised his book.
“So I don’t think it’s hurt my relationship with them,” he says. “I did feel bad about using their stationery to write a prank letter.”
“Al acknowledges he made a mistake,” McCormack said. “I think the Center was disappointed and somewhat upset, but I also think they put this incident in its proper perspective as a relatively small one without earth-shattering importance, and I think they have accepted Al’s apology.”
Franken says he even received a letter acknowledging his apology from Cardinal Edward Egan.
But the most publicized critique came in August, when Fox News sued Franken on the grounds that the term “fair and balanced,” which appears in the title of Lies, resembled the network’s own slogan too closely.
“I take full credit for getting us the best publicity ever,” says McCormack, who says it was his idea to add the phrase “fair and balanced” to the title.
“Fox is about as ‘fair and balanced’ as Mein Kampf,” Rabin adds.
Franken and his wife were vacationing in Italy with McCormack’s family when McCormack heard Franken had been sued. He came into the room where Franken was sleeping and gently prodded him awake to tell him the news.
“And I said, ‘Good,’ and went back to sleep,” Franken says. “I woke up a couple of hours later and got my e-mail. I just thought of good publicity…my feeling was that they would have no case, and that would be the best thing that would happen to us.”
McCormack says that before the lawsuit, Lies was number 388 on Amazon’s sales rankings.
By that evening it had reached number one.
“We opened a bottle of champagne,” he says.
—Staff writer Hana R. Alberts can be reached at alberts@fas.harvard.edu.