The Last Debate (27 page)

I read this press release when I arrived at the
Tatler
office in the National Press Club building that Monday afternoon. I had gone there to set up shop in the office suite that was used mostly by the magazine’s Washington correspondent and a secretary-researcher. But it also had
three other small fully equipped offices for staff and freelance writers who came to Washington on assignment.

By the time I got there Jennifer Gates, the secretary-researcher, had already assembled much of what I had called ahead and requested. There on the desk in the office that would be the most important space in my life for the next seven months were several stacks of newspaper clippings, wire-service stories, and transcripts and tapes of television and radio broadcasts. They completely covered the desk. I was stunned at first sight at what they represented in millions of words that had already been generated in less than twenty-four hours.

Chuck Hammond and Jonathan Angel, my editor, appeared to have called it right. Jonathan’s feeling the earth moving was real. The early reaction was also bearing out Hammond’s hyperbole about the debate being as big as Desert Storm and maybe even Watergate. It had already made television history. The Nielsen people estimated the American television audience to have been 132 million by the time Meredith screamed the F-word and Howley said good night. Never before had that many people watched any single program at the same time.

The Associated Press set the pattern for the coverage of Howley, Joan, Barbara, and Henry. Its first story on their news conference began:

“The four journalists who turned Sunday’s presidential debate into an attack on Republican nominee David Donald Meredith stormed out of a raucous news conference afterward.

“They answered only one question about why they had done what they did. Michael J. Howley of
The Washington Morning News
, the debate moderator, acknowledged that nobody appointed him and his three journalist-colleagues God but said, ‘We did not see what we did tonight as playing God.’ ”

The Reuters and UPI stories were similar, the Reuters story calling the news conference “out of control,” UPI labeling it “stormy.” None of the three major news services explained why the four panelists had left the news conference. None reported the fact that the news conference was raucous, stormy, and out of control because the reporters from their own news organizations and others made it so.

I was stunned, mortified also, by the way the wires handled the earlier “journalists’ disturbance” in the Virginia Room right after the debate.
The woman from
The San Diego Union-Tribune
had wondered how we were going to cover ourselves, and the initial answer was clear—poorly. None of the wire services even did separate stories on the mêlée. All three just stuck paragraphs about it into their press-conference stories. UPI, for instance, said only that “five reporters suffered minor injuries as the assembled press corps raced to cover one of the most important stories of the campaign.”

The daily-newspaper stories mostly took the same approach on the disturbance. On the news conference, they, too, took the line that the four panelists, apparently unable or unwilling to explain themselves, ran for cover from the
real
truth seekers of American journalism. It was left to a handful of television critics to point out what everybody who watched it all already knew—that a few hundred of America’s leading national journalists had made absolute fools of themselves on live television.

“I turned to my wife and children, my dogs and cats, my mice and rodents, and screamed: ‘I am not one of those people!’ ” wrote the
Los Angeles Times
television critic.

Doug Mulvane said similar things in, according to my rough count, a record-setting twenty-seven separate television and radio appearances that first night, morning, and afternoon. From his seventeenth appearance on, he had taken on a line from the Bush administration’s rhetoric in launching Desert Storm. “This will not stand,” said Mulvane, referring to the new conduct of journalists as “mobsters—to each other as well as to the democratic process.”

The New York Times
led the print editorial attack against Howley, Henry, Barbara, and Joan. In a lead editorial that Monday morning the
Times
called them “America’s first journalistic usurpers” and said there may be evils such as the Holocaust and Joe McCarthy that were so evil that such drastic “journalistic vigilantism” was called for, but the probable election of David Donald Meredith did not qualify.
USA Today
called the four “journalistic felons” and demanded that their employers immediately dismiss them to send a “message to the public and to other journalists that this is not acceptable behavior.” The
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
added the recommendation that all four be banned forever from employment anywhere in the business of journalism. “Yes, call it blacklisting,” said the
Star-Telegram
editorial. “Call it anything you wish—
but do it.” Several other papers picked up the Debate-gate theme from Perot.

The condemnation was anything but unanimous.
The Washington Morning News
, while noting the conflict-of-interest fact that Michael J. Howley was one of its own, labeled the four “America’s first journalist-activists” and said that a new form of journalism might be in the making. “It may not be to everyone’s liking, but neither are such things as rain, thunder, and snowstorms,” said the
News
editorial. “But we live with them, we cope with them, we accept them. We can do the same with journalistic activism.”
The Washington Post
, the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, The Denver Post, The Atlanta Constitution, The San Diego Union-Tribune
, and the
Chicago Tribune
used terms like “unorthodox,” “out of the ordinary,” and “precedent-shattering” to describe what had happened. All said one way or another that they wished the four journalists had not done what they did, but having done it—maybe the dire possibilities of a Meredith election justified it. Just this once.

The most amusing sidelight to the print coverage was the variety of ways the large dailies—the family newspapers of America—chose to cope with “the ‘fucking’ thing.” Most never used the word itself. Some—including all eighty-seven of the Gannett papers—wrote it, “f—–.” Some—including the
Los Angeles Times
and the other Times-Mirror papers—used “f—–ing.” The truly skittish covered it up altogether in other words, calling it things like “a well-known curse word,” “a pornographic expression.” The few who used it included most of the largest newspapers—all five New York City dailies, the Washington papers,
The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Constitution
, the
Chicago Tribune
, plus
The Miami Herald
and the others owned by Knight-Ridder. All did so with a variety of Editor’s Notes such as the bold-faced one in
The New York Herald
that said: “More than 132 million Americans of all ages, politics, and moral and language standards heard the word spoken by a candidate for president of the United States. His speaking of that word could very well influence the outcome of the election. To deny its existence at this point would be similar to denying the existence of a smoking gun in a dead man’s hand.”

The New York Times
even went to columnist William Safire, its famous language man, to write a straight-faced piece on the origins of the
word. According to Safire, it came from
fokkinge
, the Low Dutch word for sexual intercourse, and
fukka
, the Norwegian word for same. First usage had been traced back to the fifteenth century. Safire gave the sailors of the world credit for spreading it from port to port and eventually into the English language.

An overnight poll by Gallup for CNN and
USA Today
showed 57 percent approved of what Howley, Joan, Henry, and Barbara had done in triggering Meredith’s anger and use of that ancient word. Thirty-nine percent disapproved; 4 percent had no opinion.

Pro-con seminars, many of them featuring Mulvane and led by Socratic-method law-school professors, sprouted up immediately on C-SPAN and local public-radio and cable-television stations. By that Monday afternoon teach-ins, forums, seminars, and debates-about-the-debate were organized for thousands of college campuses and luncheon clubs all over America.

The
San Francisco Chronicle
, an “f—–ing” paper, surveyed the political-science, mass-communication, and sociology departments at the seven major universities and colleges in its area. They found “an interest in the debate-about-the-debate on a par equal to that of a presidential assassination or military coup.”

“History is already recording this as the seminal man-made political event of this cycle,” said one professor, who was either not asked or the
Chronicle
felt it unnecessary to report what he meant by “this cycle.”

The story also predicted it was only a matter of time before heavy seminars featuring linguists, semanticists, and other experts would be scheduled to discuss the “impact such a dramatically public use of the word ‘f—–ing’ may have on public discourse in the future.”

I checked in with Jonathan in New York. He was as excited about the story this afternoon as he was last night. His go-Tom-go’s were delivered with even more force and intensity. He also—for the record—approved my staying at the Georgetown Inn in a $335-a-night “junior suite” and keeping the Toyota “for the duration.” We did not discuss how long that might be.

Another thing I had asked Jennifer Gates to do was get Joan Naylor’s home address. She presented it to me in the form of a photocopied page
from
The Washingtonian
, a local gossip-type city magazine that regularly ran photographs, addresses, and estimated values of homes of prominent Washington people. TV anchorwoman Joan Naylor and her lawyer-husband, Jeff Grayson, lived with their twin daughters in a three-story white stucco house. The address was 3542 Newark, NW, in Cleveland Park. The estimated value was $1.2 million.

There were two private security guards in uniform sitting in a car in front of the house when I got there. So I kept driving. I circled the block and parked on Thirty-sixth Street, the next cross street, in a way that kept me out of view of the guards but with the help of binoculars made it possible to see the front of the house.

After about forty-five minutes I saw a man come out of the Naylor-Grayson home. He waved and did a thumbs-up in a friendly manner to the two men in the car and walked down the street east in my direction. He crossed in front of me. I waited until he was gone and followed. He was headed toward Wisconsin Avenue, a major business and shopping thoroughfare a block away.

He went into a drugstore on the corner and so did I. He was dressed in classy sports clothes—racing green corduroy pants, a white sweater, and beige buck shoes, all from J. Crew, Country Road, or some other upscale place. This was not a security man. This was Jeff Grayson. It had to be Jeff Grayson.

Go, Tom, go.

He was looking at contact-lens cleaners and other items in the eye-care section.

“Mr. Grayson, please forgive me for accosting you like this,” I said. He stiffened. He shrunk back as if I had hit him in the face. “My name is Tom Chapman. I am a contributing editor of
The New American Tatler.
I met your wife in Williamsburg yesterday. I want to help her tell her story and the story of the debate in our magazine. Could you let me talk to her for a few minutes, just to make my case?”

“No way,” he said. “She likes you-all—that was a great piece in the magazine about her—but she’s laying low for now.”

“I know about the threats and the security people.”

“How do you know that?”

“The network put out a press release.”

I watched the red come from his neck up through his face. “Those stupid bastards,” he said. “That only makes it worse.”

“They said she was suspended for her own good.”

“That is absolute network bullshit.”

And in a few minutes we were walking together, past the security men into his house.

Joan Naylor was at first surprised that her husband had brought a reporter back from the drugstore along with the contact-lens saline solution. But after he quickly explained and I made my case for cooperation, she invited me into their library, an old-fashioned room full of bookcases and photographs and dark furniture. We sat down and she talked to me. It was the first of many sessions we had over the next several weeks.

The first thing she and Jeff did was explain the network suspension. Yes, there had been some death threats, which were scary and unpleasant, but there was actually no connection between them and the suspension. Joan said that Carol Reynolds, the CNS Washington bureau chief, talked to Joan late Sunday night after the debate and after Joan had appeared on
Jack and Jill.
She said that the presidents of the network and the news division, plus their appropriate executive vice presidents and other helpers, had decided to “let things cool off.” She said that they were troubled by the fact that one of their leading anchors had acted in such an “activist manner,” but they did not yet know how troubled they were.

Joan said that Carol Reynolds said to her: “In other words, they might fire you for having disgraced the network and the principles of broadcast journalism in America today, but on the other hand they might promote you and rename the network after you. They just don’t know yet whether they should or shouldn’t do anything, whether this or that or that or this would help them or hurt them. They won’t know what they think until the affiliates and the press and the vibes and the spirits and the gods and the markets and the polls tell them what to think.”

Joan said Carol ordered her to go home and stay home and off everyone’s air and grant no interviews with anyone about anything until further notice.

She did as she was told—until now, when she started talking to me.
Jeff had stayed home with her to help fend off the outside world of phone calls, of threats and taunts, praise and worship, that came crashing in on their unlisted line at the rate of thirty an hour. They said she was offered everything from rare forms of sex to stock tips and honorary degrees.