Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (3 page)

While some potentially Unfriendly Witnesses are more or less bound to grant interviews because they are public officials, or industry spokesmen, there are others—corporate executives, presidents of television networks, prosecutors—who will refuse, and routinely refer the inquiring reporter to their public relations departments. Occasionally it may be possible to break through this reticence. When I was doing research for
The Trial of Dr. Spock
, I chanced upon a most enlightening exchange with just such a witness.

Having interviewed most of the Friendly Witnesses (defense lawyers and defendants) and learned from them the circumstances leading up to the indictment of Spock and four others on charges of “conspiring to aid, counsel and abet” draft resisters, I was anxious to confront the prosecutors and hear their version. But my legal friends assured me that this would be impossible — “The prosecutors won’t talk to you, why should they? They’ll say they can’t comment on a pending case.” Nevertheless I called up the Justice Department whose press chief, Cliff Sessions, told me substantially the same thing: “We can mail you copies of our briefs and press handouts,” he said, “but you won’t be able to talk to the prosecutors while the case is in court.” I was going to be in Washington anyway, I said, so I would drop round to his office to pick up the material.

I arrived in Washington on the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and that night the town went up in flames. There were burning buildings a block from the house where I was staying with friends. In the morning I picked my way through the rubble to the Justice Department where I inquired for Cliff Sessions. His secretary told me he had flown to Memphis at 6 a.m. with the Attorney General. “Oh—well, he said
something
about me being able to see the Spock trial prosecutors,” I said (which was, after all, perfectly true). She answered that the prosecutors were there, and phoned down to John Van de Kamp, chief of the special unit set up to prosecute draft law violators. He readily agreed to see me—in fact seemed glad of the opportunity to chat. I gathered he was feeling a bit bored and neglected; the eyes of the nation were on the King tragedy, his colleagues were off investigating the ghetto uprisings, nobody was interested in draft prosecutions that day.

We talked about some of his earlier experiences in prosecutorial work—at one point, in Los Angeles, he had been involved in the prosecution of some undertakers for antitrust violations and in this connection had found
The American Way of Death
a useful source of information. “How lovely! You’re a fan, then.” Yes, indeed. We were soon on thoroughly cozy terms and I steered cautiously into the matter at hand. Had he read Dr. Spock’s famous baby book? Yes, and thought it was very good. Was he a Spock-raised baby? No, he was born a few years too soon.

Now to the point: “Who ordered the prosecution, and why? Did L.B.J. initiate it?” Van de Kamp explained: There had been a recent altercation between the Justice Department and General Hershey (then head of Selective Service), who had just been publicly rebuked by the Department for overstepping his authority in sending an injudicious letter to the 4,081 local draft boards. “The prosecution of these five came about as a result of our flap with Hershey. It was thought to be a good way out—it was done to provide a graceful way out for General Hershey.” “What made you pick out Dr. Spock and his four co-defendants from the tens of thousands protesting the draft?” I asked. “Because of their names and personalities,” answered Van de Kamp. “We managed to subpoena a large amount of television newsreel footage of their activities. We wouldn’t have indicted them except for the fact there was so much evidence available on film. They made no great secret of what they were doing.”

So that was it: Dr. Spock and the others were offered up in unabashed response to political pressure, as a sacrificial offering to placate an irascible old man who had become an embarrassment to the Administration. And the sole evidence of their “conspiracy” was contained in newsreels of press conferences and protest rallies that took place in a blaze of television publicity. The defense had suspected such grubby machinations, but confirmation from the chief prosecutor was an unexpected bonanza.

A good example of how
not
to conduct an interview was furnished by one of my Yale students, a seventeen-year-old freshman. He was investigating a publication called
Who’s Who in American High Schools
, sold to proud parents of the listed high-school seniors for $16.95 a copy. The volume looks something like a telephone directory and the purchaser may need a magnifying glass to find the distinguished scholar’s name, followed by a reference to the accomplishment that merited his or her inclusion as: “Smith, Susan, chr. ldr.” My student had done an assiduous and imaginative job of preliminary research: he had consulted reference librarians who attested to the book’s worthlessness; he had turned up several dissatisfied purchasers of
Who’s Who in American High Schools
.

He had arrived at the stage in his investigation where he was ready to call the publisher, who lived in Illinois, and attempt to interview him by telephone. I suggested that he should start off with some general questions about reference books: their usefulness to researchers, the number of libraries that carry
Who’s Who in American High Schools
.

We listed half a dozen Kind questions along these lines before proceeding to the Cruels: “Have you ever been sued by the Marquis people for breach of their trademark of the title
‘Who’s Who’
?” “How much profit do you realize from each sale to a high-school senior?” “Do you make many multiple sales for the same honoree—one for Auntie, one for Grandma?”

But somehow when my student had the publisher on the line he got flustered and, skipping over the first series of questions, waded precipitately into the Cruel ones. “Well, I don’t think I want to discuss these matters on the telephone,” the publisher said mildly. “Oh, so you won’t talk?” said the student belligerently, to which the publisher replied, “That’s right, I’m hanging up the phone.” Which he did, leaving my poor student bristling with impotent indignation.

There came a time when I regretted having imparted this particular secret of my trade. When
A Fine Old Conflict
was published, Knopf sent me on a publicity tour of various cities including Boston, where one of my favorite Yale students, now graduated, had a job on the
Globe
. He managed to wangle an assignment to interview me for the “Living” section, and came up to meet me in my room in the Ritz-Carlton hotel. I was delighted to see him all grown up and a working journalist; there was much gossip and giggling over the old days at Yale—only a year before, but it seemed to him like a lifetime.

“Actually, knowing you as well as I do, I could write up this interview without even talking to you,” he said. “But I suppose I should ask a few questions.” He pulled out his notebook. How are you enjoying the tour? he asked. Which cities have you visited so far? How is the book selling? And then: “Oh, by the way, somebody once told me that one should list one’s questions in order from Kind to Cruel, so here comes the Cruel one: How does a person of your alleged radical persuasion square her conscience living it up in this super-posh hotel?” Covered with confusion, I hedged and glugged, finally managing to get out the lame response “Well, my publisher is paying for it.”

LUCK. In my experience luck has always figured large, so often have I accidentally chanced upon invaluable slivers of information volunteered by informants who happened to know something about my subject.

This was especially true while I was writing
The American Way of Death;
it seemed that countless people wanted to get into this strange act with their own horror stories. One such shocker: a friend told me about making arrangements for her brother-in-law’s funeral. She had steadfastly insisted on the cheapest redwood coffin available, but the undertaker said the brother-in-law was too tall to fit into it, she would have to take a more expensive one. When she objected, he said, “Oh, all right, we’ll use the redwood, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.” This grisly little anecdote, which came my way just as the book was going to press, was eventually seized on by reviewers as one of the more telling examples of funeral salesmanship.

Another incident that illustrates the luck factor: I was curious to know what happens about funeral arrangements in the event of mass disaster, such as plane crashes in remote mountain areas. Do competing undertakers from nearby communities converge upon the scene in a wild scramble for the business? What would typical costs be, and who pays—the airline or the next of kin? Questions like these, I thought, could best be answered by a lawyer who, like the undertaker, makes his living out of such tragedies: one who specializes in personal injury cases. I called up Melvin Belli, San Francisco’s best-known practitioner in this line (nicknamed by the press “King of Torts”), and explained in detail what I was after.

Belli, never averse to publicity, readily gave me an appointment. I arrived promptly—and sat for five hours in his reception room while a parade of the lame, halt, and blind, some on crutches, some in wheelchairs, wearing surgical collars or plaster casts, filed past me into his inner office. By the time Belli came out, I was steaming with rage at being kept waiting for all that time, the more so when he admitted he actually had no information on the subject of my visit. Perhaps to mollify me, he said he did have an old trial transcript that might be of interest, and he sprinted up a huge ceiling-high ladder to fetch it down from a top shelf. The transcript (which had nothing whatsoever to do with plane crashes) proved to be a gem of rare fascination: a lawsuit brought against an undertaker charging negligence and fraud for his failure to properly embalm the plaintiff’s ninety-nine-year-old mother. The Q. and A. examination of the plaintiff by Mr. Belli made for one of the most bizarre, and successful, passages in
The American Way of Death:
although in the excitement of this discovery I forgot all about the plane crash possibilities and never did follow through on this.

BLIND ALLEYS. The converse of luck is blind alleys. Lest it appear from the comments in this collection that efficient investigation follows a straight and easily traversed path, that normally everything comes clattering neatly into place, I should say that I have come to expect blind alleys as a major natural hazard of investigating. Looking over old notebooks, full of “Possible Sources,” and lists of “Things to Do,” I see that I could fill a volume with accounts of endless days laboriously spent pursuing false leads—which would be depressing to write about and tedious to read. I have found, however, that tenacity does usually pay off in the end, and that frequently an apparent
cul de sac
will magically open up into a broad highway that makes the excursion all worthwhile.

ORGANIZATION—all-important; here is where the article does or does not come together. You now have a thick notebook full of interviews, plus your typed versions; a flock of papers with details of other research, manuals, financial reports, newspaper clippings overflowing your desk, or kitchen table, or both. How to put it all together in readable fashion?

One technique I have found useful in the early stages of an inquiry is to write letters to friends about what I am doing. In that way I perforce start editing the material for fear my correspondent’s eyes will glaze over with boredom if I put in everything I have learned. Also, one’s style is bound to be more relaxed than it will be at the dread moment when one writes “page 1” on a manuscript for an editor.

When preparing
Kind and Usual Punishment
, I went to a five-day conference of the American Correctional Association in Miami and filled up several notebooks during the many sessions I attended. Each night I wrote to a friend in California, drawing on my notes to give what I saw as the highlights of the meetings. These letters became the basis for that chapter in the book. Similarly, during the Spock trial I attended court for four weeks, took down what amounted to a longhand transcript of the proceedings, dashed back to the hotel, and wrote a seven- or eight-page single-spaced letter to my husband telling what had happened that day. Eventually I boiled these down to about 110 pages in my book about the trial.

Having reached this point, one is, of course, only at the beginning of one’s troubles; you have the letters (or carbon copies, if you remembered to insert the carbon paper) and all the other research paraphernalia, but you still have the problem of where and how to start and finish, plus what goes in the middle and in what order. With luck, the subject will suggest the form (see comments on “You-All and Non-You-All” and “Checks and Balances at the Sign of the Dove”).

Sometimes it helps to draft in haphazard order the most striking, and hence the easiest, sections of the work in progress. At least this is fairly pleasurable; you can juggle these fragments around later, determine the best sequence, string them together with other material, rewrite them as needed. In the course of this a good beginning paragraph may occur to you; good endings are in my opinion far harder, and your editor will not be pleased if you give up the struggle and simply write (as I have done on occasion) THE END, hoping he will not notice your failure to construct an elegant conclusion and a chic final sentence—what a journalist friend of mine calls a “socko ending.” Nor will he welcome a dreary summation of what went before. I can offer no useful guidelines here, as each piece of work will present its own unique problem. One can only hope the solution will occur in a sudden blinding flash of insight.

STYLE. Most textbooks on writing skirt around this knotty problem and caution against reaching to achieve “style”—be yourself, be natural, they seem to say. In a way I see what they are driving at, yet I am not totally convinced; I should have welcomed a splash of style (and did welcome it, when it occurred) in the student papers I read at San Jose and Yale. Many an important message in book or article is lost, founders on
lack
of style; unreadable, nobody has read it. Thus a conscious effort to foster style may not be amiss.