One morning in December 2007, a law-school dropout named David Shankbone sat on a couch in Shimon Peres’s office in Jerusalem. He’d been invited into the Israeli president’s inner sanctum for an exclusive interview with the elder statesman. Peres reclined on a velvet chair next to Shankbone, nibbling cookies while he talked in his soporific baritone about the future of nanotechnology, the likelihood of a first strike against Iran, and why Israeli youth turned to drugs. “He has a thick accent and he talks so low,” Shankbone recalled. “I couldn’t even understand him.”

Shankbone had flown to Israel earlier that week for a press junket on Israeli technology, organized by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Along with half a dozen reporters from news outlets like BusinessWeek, USA Today, and Slate, he’d been shepherded on a whirlwind tour of the country’s tech industry. Before the trip, Shankbone had optimistically requested an interview with Peres, and was caught off-guard when, four days in, he found out one had been scheduled the following morning. “I flipped out,” he said. Shankbone scrambled to assemble a set of questions. “I think the Shimon Peres interview is one of my worst interviews,” he told me. “I felt like I had this responsibility to ask certain things . . . things he gets asked a million times. I wish it had been a much more philosophical interview. I would love to ask Shimon Peres how he would choose his own death.”

The strange thing about this whole episode isn’t that a little-known reporter landed an hour-long interview with Shimon Peres. It’s that he isn’t a professional journalist. Shankbone isn’t even his real name. It’s the nom de plume of David Miller, who until recently was a paralegal at Herrick, Feinstein, a top New York law firm. For the past year and a...

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