The Last Debate (23 page)

Turpin denies he meant anything he said as a threat to anybody’s life.

The four panelists kept their heads and their tongues down. And they walked right on by Turpin, Lilly, and Hammond through the curtain.

Hammond called after them: “In a few minutes the Secret Service is going to open it up back here. A tidal wave of your friends and colleagues in the press is going to come down on this place and you four people unlike anything that has ever been seen. Think about how you want to handle it. You have about two minutes to think. Buzz me on extension four fifty-two. I’m here to serve. I’ll set you up a news conference, whatever.…”

Mike Howley acknowledged the offer with a smile and a wave and, with the others, kept walking.

Tidal wave. A tidal wave was coming, Hammond said. They all four heard that. A tidal wave was coming in two minutes. What ever happened to the thunderstorm? Henry thought. Is a tidal wave worse than a thunderstorm? Barbara asked herself.

They opened the door of Longsworth D, their room. There was a man inside, there was a man inside their sanctuary, there was a man in there!

“Let me be the first ordinary American to say, simply, Thank you,” he said to Howley, Barbara, Joan, and Henry. “Thank you for coming to the aid of your country at its most excruciating moment of need. Not since the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor has there been a moment like there was tonight.”

Japs bombed Pearl Harbor? thought Joan. What is this? Who is this?

The man who said this was tanned, old, and dressed impeccably in a dark blue suit, shiny gold silk tie, white cuff-linked shirt, and a toupee of bright red hair.

“Who in the hell are you?” said Howley. He and the others were now inside. The door was closed behind them to keep away the tidal wave.

“My name is Sam. Sam Rhodes. I appear before you four American heroes now as the representative of Harry A. Mendelsohn himself.”

Harry A. Mendelsohn?

“The man who made Dawn Now Productions what it is today.…”

Dawn Now?

“Harry authorized me to offer the four of you one million dollars each for the rights to your story. Plus a piece of the back end for foreign rights, videocassettes, T-shirts, baseball hats, doll replicas, whatever. He envisions a made-for-TV movie for CNS, a deal I heard him confirm on the speakerphone just now while I was on the other line. They’re talking five nights during a sweeps week. One of you can write the screenplay. All four of you can write the screenplay. It’s your call. Everything is your call. The whole world is your call. What do you say?”

“We say, Good-bye,” Mike Howley said, moving Sam Rhodes toward the door.

“Harry’s already got a working title,” Sam said. “ ‘Williamsburg II.’ Get it? History was made here once, now twice. The man’s a genius.”

And then Sam Rhodes was gone. The door was closed.

“How in the hell did he get in here?” Joan said. “Guys like him are always in here,” she said, answering her own question.

A tidal wave was coming!

Howley said: “Before another second ticks away, let me say all of you were absolutely fantastic out there tonight.”

He shook Henry’s hand.

Barbara hugged Joan.

Henry hugged Joan, and Howley hugged Barbara.

And then Howley hugged Joan, and Henry hugged Barbara.

“You were incredible, brown boy,” Barbara said.

“So were you, black girl,” Henry said.

A tidal wave was coming!

“I can’t believe it worked,” Joan said. “He blew his cool. He blew it all.”

“Just like you said he would, Mike,” Henry said.

“ ‘Might,’ ” Howley said. “I said he might. If we got lucky.”

“We got lucky, all right. ‘Fucking.’ The man of God and goodness yelled ‘fucking.’ I could not believe it!”

Henry said: “Three times! He did it three times!”

Barbara said: “How are the Christian-families people going to take that? He’s a goner! We did it!”

Howley said: “The question now is what do we do about those awful jackals of the press? Hammond said we’ve got two minutes … less than that now.”

“I should call my newsroom,” Henry said. “I love the idea of somebody there having to interview me. ‘Mr. Ramirez, tell us how you did it, why you did it.…’ ”

Barbara said: “
This Week
is going to want an exclusive, the real story from me.…”

Joan said: “My folks are going to be knocking that door down in a minute.…”

Mike Howley, still in control, said: “First, do we agree to talk?”

Yes, yes, the other three nodded.

“But nothing about what was said in Longsworth D,” Howley said. “Can we agree in blood on that?”

Again, the other three nodded. Sure.

Howley said: “OK, then, what if we let Hammond set up a quick news conference first. Then we can go our separate ways with our own people.…”

So agreed. Howley’s control remained firm and complete.

Or so he must have believed.

Within a second after Howley said his good night the Virginia Room erupted. There was hollering and shouting and people up and running like a mob for the door. The San Diego woman on my left was one of the few who stayed seated. She phoned her office. The
Kansas City Star
man said to me: “Let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“Who knows? Where everybody else is going.”

I followed him out from behind our small table into a narrow aisle. We were immediately hit with the force of moving bodies behind us, almost picked up off the floor and swept away as if by a roaring current of a river flooding out of its banks.

There was a lot of good humor at first as we moved along toward the door. People laughed and there were jokes about pack journalism and feeding frenzies. Then I heard a scream up ahead. It sounded male, frantic. Somebody had been hurt. There was another scream from off in another direction. And another, and another. Somebody yelled: “Stop!” I heard some moans and other shouts of extreme profanity about pushing and shoving and knock it off.

I was caught, immobilized, squeezed in the center of a moving prison of bodies. I remembered the stories about the drunk fans being crushed to death at soccer games in Europe. I wondered how the
Tatler
would handle the story of their man dying in the line of duty, crushed to death by his colleagues in the media. The ultimate irony, the ultimate media event.

The
Star
man had disappeared! He had been right up against and almost in me on my right front, but suddenly he was no longer there. My God! What happened to him? I didn’t even know his name. I felt something soft against my right foot and leg and heard a voice shouting: “Help me! Help me!” It was the man from
The Kansas City Star.

I am thirty-four years old, five feet eleven inches tall, and I have what would probably be described as a medium build. I used all of what that added up to plus a rush of adrenaline to push myself down toward the
Star
man. I got hold of his suit coat with my right hand and pulled up with everything I had. He came up with me and I threw my arms around him in a bear hold. He was about my height, but he was limp. There was blood spewing out of his nose. I said to him: “You’re going to be fine. You’re all right.” I held him and moved toward what I saw as a patch of daylight on my right.

Another man about my age but much bigger than me saw my problem. “Follow me,” he said to me. I did. He told me afterward that he was a reporter in the Washington bureau of the
Baltimore Sun.
He said he had been a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and before that played football—offensive left guard—at the University of Wisconsin. He yelled things like “Make a hole! Wounded coming through! Get the fuck out of the way!” as he tossed his colleagues in the press to either side like they were department-store dummies.

In a few minutes we were at the daylight, up against a wall, still in the Virginia Room but away from the moving mob, out of harm’s way.

We lay the
Star
man down on the floor. The bleeding had stopped, but he was unconscious.

“You OK here with him?” said the
Sun
man.

“Right, right,” I said.

“I’ll go find a medic, a doctor, something, and send them over.”

And as if he were the Lone Ranger or Superman, he disappeared back toward and then into the moving human mass of media, all of whom I hated and detested at that moment. I saw them as something nonhu-man, as animals. I was ashamed to be one of them, ashamed that I had been part of the mob, the riot, the stampede. I was no better than any of them. I was one of them. It was the lowest point of my professional life as a journalist.

I stayed right there until a two-man medical team with a stretcher on wheels came for the
Star
man. By then an army of Colonial Williamsburg security officers and local and state police had restored order by forcing all of the rioters—we distinguished members of the national press corps—back into the Virginia Room and into their chairs.

I went back to my original seat. The San Diego woman was still there. I told her what had happened to the man from the
Star.

“How can we all cover what happened in here?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What can we say about ourselves?”

“I don’t know.”

“I almost forgot about the debate, what happened, what Meredith just did, and screamed—the
real
story.”

So had I.

In a few minutes—not more than five or six, to be more exact—Chuck Hammond appeared behind the microphones and the podium on the small stage down in front of us.

“First, let me say how terrible we feel about what happened here in this room,” he said. “The injured are being attended to. Initial reports seem to indicate that all of the victims will survive with no permanent or lasting effects. We’ll release what information we get here as it becomes available.”

“How many were taken to hospitals?” somebody—a woman—yelled out.

Hammond said: “I don’t have any exact counts at this point. But I understand it was less than ten.”

“Come on!” some other idiot—a man idiot—screamed. “Give us a count or let us out of here to find out ourselves!”

Hammond said: “The Virginia State Police and the Secret Service have ordered us to maintain the status quo in this room for now.”

“Status quo? What the hell does that mean?” some male reporter yelled out.

You would have thought that being part of a mob would have caused these people to back off, to calm down. But no. Without so much as a decent interval, here they were back in their attack mode, back to being animals, back in their pack.

Hammond said: “It means none of you is leaving this room until we say so.”

There was some grumbling, some profanity.

“Who do you people think you are?” another reporter shouted at Hammond.

Hammond said: “We are the people with the responsibility for keeping you people from trampling or otherwise killing or injuring yourselves.”

Chuck Hammond considers that to be the finest moment of his post-Marine life.

Then he said: “We are aware of your reporting needs, and as a way of trying to meet them I have asked the four debate panelists to come in for a news conference.”

That triggered a mixture of cheers and boos from the cream of American journalism. Hammond turned to his left rear, the cue for Mike Howley, Joan Naylor, Barbara Manning, and Henry Ramirez to come in and meet the press.

They had watched the press riot on a television monitor in Longsworth D.

Joan’s first fear was that of death. Many of those journalists were going to die, and then so would the four of them. She remembered scenes from an Elizabeth Taylor movie—with Dana Andrews, not Richard Burton—about a herd of elephants in Ceylon or somewhere that went wild and trampled people and houses to death and dust.

To Barbara and Henry the shock of watching a group of their heroes—the best of the national press corps—going berserk was beyond description.

Mike Howley had thoughts about how the riot in the Virginia Room confirmed his worst fears about what the American press had become.

Hammond had warned him and the others that most everyone in the Western world with a camera and/or a microphone would be on them live with pictures and audio from the moment they entered the Virginia Room.
Everyone.
And in case there was doubt about what he was talking about, he said it meant the three commercial networks, PBS, Fox, CNN, C-SPAN, MTV, plus the BBC, the CBC, NHK in Japan, and a variety of other foreign broadcasters, domestic independent stations, and cable channels. “Even before the press riot I was sure there’d never been anything quite like this,” Hammond told them. “Now it’s bigger even than Desert Storm—maybe even Watergate.”

Mike, Joan, Barbara, and Henry walked out to the small stage and bunched in a semicircle behind the podium, which was rigged with
seventy-seven microphones. (I personally counted them.) I am no master estimator of crowd sizes, but the pros there who are said there were three hundred people with more microphones, video and still cameras, and notebooks.

Joan spied a few familiar faces, but most of them were not only unfamiliar, they also seemed terribly unfriendly. She could not tell whether everyone was out of sorts with her and her three co-panelists for what they had done to Meredith or because of their own disturbance. So this is what it looks like from this side of it, she thought. She was not completely over the unsettling terror that hit her watching the press mêlée.