Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (2 page)

PICKING OTHER PEOPLE’S BRAINS is an art worth cultivating. Frequently an investigation will lead you into some specialized field with which you are unfamiliar. This is the time to consult an expert, assuming you can find one who is sufficiently interested in you or your subject to give advice gratis. Rather than trying to unravel some tricky point of law yourself, ask a lawyer. If you need to understand corporate records, get an accountant to help. Technical literature in most fields is written (no doubt deliberately) so as to be unintelligible to the layman, and there is grave danger that in trying to decipher it without expert help you will make some ghastly mistakes upon which the professionals will gleefully leap once your piece is published.

I have found experts to be amazingly generous with their time—they actually seem to like the chance to expound their knowledge to us ignorami, although I recall one rather disappointing experience: wanting to know what 6 percent of a million is, I called the Department of Higher Mathematics at the University of California. The person who answered said, “Oh, it’s six hundred. No, it’s six thousand ... no, wait a minute, I think it’s sixty thousand. Could you call back after lunch?” I have long since forgotten the definitive, post-lunch answer. But thereafter I relied on a thirteen-year-old friend in junior high school, who knows such things off the top of his head.

Medical jargon is particularly confusing. I remember a horrifying moment in my doctor’s office when the doctor was called out of the room and I took a surreptitious peek at my file. “Head: Negative,” he had written. When he returned I confronted him with this unkind diagnosis. He said stiffly that it was not as bad as I supposed and that in the future I should refrain from reading my file which was confidential and for his use only.
*

For a chapter in
Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business
, I was exploring the use of convict populations by the giant drug companies as subjects for experimental research, and happened upon a copy of the
California Department of Corrections’ Annual Research Review
in which some thirty medical experiments are summarized in brief paragraphs. To me, these read like pure gibberish, so I sought out Dr. Sheldon Margen, chairman of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of California. He proved to be not only a good translator but excellent copy, exploding with fury as he examined the
Review:
“God, that kills me!” “Wow!”

A sample Margen translation: the study of “Cleocin HFC levels,” for which “10 healthy normal volunteers” were selected, to “determine antibiotic levels in various tissues and/or fluids.” Each subject gets “150 mg. of Cleocin q.i.d.” following which he will be relieved of “sebum, 2–4 ml.; sweat, 4–5 ml.; semen, amount of normal ejaculation; and muscle tissue, 1 gm....” As Dr. Margen put it: “Here’s what happens to these ten guys. First they make them masturbate to collect semen. Then they cut into the arm or go through the flesh to get the gram of muscle tissue. That’s the horrific part; this procedure is cockeyed, it would never be approved for student-subjects.” Had I tried to puzzle this out myself, with the aid of a medical dictionary and scholarly articles on the subject, it might have taken me weeks and I should never have had the benefit of Dr. Margen’s graphic comments.

TRADE MAGAZINES. I cannot overemphasize the pleasure and profit to be derived from reading trade journals and house organs in the field of your investigation. It is important, however, to distinguish between publications intended for public consumption and those that are “eyes only,” privately circulated to the trade. For example, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
(
JAMA
) and the
American Bar Association Journal
are well-reputed, widely known organs of their respective professions, their contents often the basis of press releases and news stories about medical advances or new legal breakthroughs. There is little muck to be raked in these journals, as they serve essentially a public relations purpose for their sponsors, projecting them as conscientious, upright professionals whose only concern is patient/client welfare.

If you were going after doctors, a more rewarding starting point would be
Medical Economics
, a publication that most laymen have never heard of but that is delivered free to every member of the A.M.A. In its glossy pages you will find many a crass and wonderfully quotable appeal to the avarice of the practitioners of the healing arts. Lawyers? Try such in-house publications as the
American Trial Lawyers Association Journal
, in which the nation’s top ambulance chasers exchange tips on how it is done. If you are, like most of us, a patient or a client, you will get many a bitter laugh out of these, as the whole point of the articles and editorials is how to diddle you out of more money.

The public posture of undertakers can readily be ascertained by reading their ads in the metropolitan dailies, generally on the obituary page, stressing dignity, refinement, professional competence, sincerity. Ah, but their private face! When preparing
The American Way of Death
, I first began to appreciate the enormous value of trade publications. “Without whom this book could never have been written,” as authors are wont to say in dedications, is certainly true of
Casket & Sunnyside, Mortuary Management
, and —my favorite title—
Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries
. Here were undertakers and “cemeterians” talking to
each other
, in the secure belief that no prying outsider would ever have access to their inner councils.

But how to lay hands on such magazines? They are not to be found in public or university libraries, and must be obtained by subscription. Although a simple request, accompanied by a check, may bring results (for these publishers are, like others, interested in expanding their circulation), you cannot always count on it. Paranoia tends to reign in some of these circles, a pervasive fear of the word getting out via a nosy journalist. You may have to spend much time and effort cajoling fringe types—backsliders in your field of investigation who are sympathetic to your viewpoint—to supply the coveted publications.

An example: When researching
Kind and Usual Punishment
, I kept thinking that lurking somewhere in this wide land must be an equivalent for the prison administrators of
Casket & Sunny-side
—a frank and explicit interchange of views and news by and for prison wardens. Finally I found a clue to the existence of such a publication, contained in a stuffy, almost unreadable sociological magazine called
American Journal of Correction
, official journal of prisondom and counterpart for the Correction crowd of
JAMA
or the
ABA Journal
. Leafing through this, I came across a sort of gossip column headed “News from the Affiliated Organizations.” Seeing my own name in there, I read more closely:

WARDENS TALK ABOUT HOSTILE NEWS REPORTING

G. Norton Jameson, editor of
The Grapevine
, mimeographed monthly of the American Association of Wardens and Superintendents, in its November 29 issue wrote about an interesting contrast between words spoken by Warden Lash of the Indiana State Penitentiary and Jessica Mitford....

The article went on to say, “Miss Mitford is noted for her caustic pen. Her kind of reporter is one of the realities of life in these troubled times....”

The Grapevine
, I felt sure, was the publication I was looking for. At the time, an undergraduate named Kathy Mill was helping me with research, and together we pondered how to find out the address of
The Grapevine
, and how to get a year’s back issues. I telephoned around the country to my undercover collaborators, disaffected workers in various Departments of Correction, and eventually one of these mailed me a copy of
The Grapevine
. Step one was completed; we now had the address, a box number in Sioux Falls. I suggested to Kathy that she concoct a letter to the editor saying she was a graduate student in the Criminology School at the University of California (then under severe attack by the law-and-order people for being too radical), that she was unhappy with the content of the instruction, and she wanted to get the viewpoint of the wardens as set forth in
The Grapevine
. She should sign a man’s name, I said, as Corrections is by and large a man’s world. She produced the letter, signed “Karl Mill.” I thought it masterly for the purpose, but fearing that “Karl” had a slightly subversive ring, I changed that to “Kenneth” and sent it off.

In the course of time twelve mint copies of
The Grapevine
appeared on Kathy’s doorstep. They proved to be just what I had hoped for, a gold mine of material affording rare glimpses into the Correctional mind: exchanges of opinion on how to circumvent court rulings favorable to prisoners’ rights without getting caught, how to starve out convict sit-down strikers, how to avoid investigation of prison conditions by the state legislature: “Warden Frank A. Eyman of Arizona State Prison revealed that he had refused three black legislators admittance beyond his office to meet with black prisoners last year. They stormed out of his office in a rage, he said.... ‘I’ll make Attica look like a picnic,’ the warden said today.”

I spent the afternoon underlining passages for quotation in the book. On the last page of the final issue, I came across this:

The following letter may be helpful in dispelling the idea that not much can be learned at the college level concerning the operation of prisons. Real intelligence is where you find it. Here is a young man who sees much farther than many and questions the soundness of the college courses. Now he just could be right and some day he might make a “top notch” prison administrator.

Dear Mr. Jameson,

As a graduate student in criminology at the University of California at Berkeley I was very impressed with a copy of your publication, “The Grapevine,” which I ran across here at school. I have long felt that my education here has been jammed into a liberal mold of propaganda. I see your publication as a credible news source of our profession undistorted by the rampant irresponsible and unrealistic biases of the media and campus liberals. Your publication offers the
real
current news. After all, as prison staff members you are the people who know what is really going on in our prisons. I am tired of reading the sentimental phantasies of reporters.

Our library does not receive your publication. How can I obtain the issues of the past year? I would be delighted to subscribe and to pay for a year’s back issues if available. Also, perhaps there is a local organization here that would have your newsletter on file. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your work.

Sincerely,

Kenneth Mill

INTERVIEWING is where the fun really begins, and where you may uncover information that is accessible in no other way. There may be some delightful surprises in store as you pursue your quarry. Over the years, I have found through trial and sometimes painful error that the following methods are useful.

The individuals to be interviewed will generally fall into two categories: Friendly Witnesses, those who are sympathetic to your point of view, such as the victim of a racket you are investigating, or an expert who is clarifying for you technical matters within his field of knowledge; and Unfriendlies, whose interests may be threatened by your investigation and who therefore will be prone to conceal rather than reveal the information you are seeking.

While your approach to each of these will differ, some general rules hold good for
all
interviews. Prepare your approach as a lawyer would for an important cross-examination. Take time to think through exactly what it is that you want to learn from the interview; I write out and number in order the questions I intend to ask. That way I can number the answer, keyed to the number of the question, without interrupting the flow of conversation, and if the sequence is disturbed (which it probably will be, in the course of the interchange), I have no problem reconstructing the Q. and A. as they occurred. Naturally other questions may arise that I had not foreseen, but I will still have my own outline as a guide to the absolute essentials.

Immediately after the interview, I type up the Q.s and A.s before my notes get cold. If, in the course of doing this, I discover that I have missed something, or another question occurs to me, I call up the person immediately while the subject is still freshly in mind.

In the case of the Friendly Witness, it often helps to send him a typescript of the interview for correction or elaboration. I did this to good effect after interviews with defense lawyers from whom I was seeking information about the conspiracy law for
The Trial of Dr. Spock
, and with Dr. Margen and other physicians who revealed the nature of drug experiments on prisoners for
Kind and Usual Punishment
. In each case the expert whom I had consulted not only saved me from egregious error but in correcting my transcription of the interview enriched and strengthened the points to be made.

For Unfriendly Witnesses—which in my experience have included undertakers, prosecutors, prison administrators, Famous Writers—I list the questions in graduated form from Kind to Cruel. Kind questions are designed to lull your quarry into a conversational mood: “How did you first get interested in funeral directing as a career?” “Could you suggest any reading material that might help me to understand more about problems of Corrections?” and so on. By the time you get to the Cruel questions— “What is the wholesale cost of your casket retailing for three thousand dollars?” “How do you justify censoring a prisoner’s correspondence with his lawyer in violation of the California law?” — your interlocutor will find it hard to duck and may blurt out a quotable nugget.