The Last Debate (34 page)

There were several questions at the Ritz-Carlton announcement event about Henry and Barbara’s personal relationship. They were astonishingly direct and personal, a reflection of how direct and personal matters had gone in some areas of American journalism.

“Are you two lovers—or what?” somebody asked.

“Come on, now,” Henry replied. “What ever happened to privacy?”

“How many times have you slept together?”

“Please,” Barbara said.

“More than twenty or less than ten?”

“Please!”

“Have you
ever
slept together?”

Henry said: “What kind of question is that?”

“Is that a yes?”

“Do you practice safe sex?”

Both Henry and Barbara just shook their heads.

“Seriously, do you use condoms or not?”

Both Henry and Barbara just shook their heads.

“All right, then, describe your relationship in your own words,” said a reporter.

Barbara and Henry looked at each other and then back at the assembled gossip-showbiz-TV press of America. With a smile, Henry said: “I would describe our relationship as one between two people who like and respect each other very much, who have decided that it is professionally to each of our benefits to join hands and forces every Sunday morning on the ABS television network.”

He reached over and took Barbara’s left hand with his right.

Barbara said: “The man said it and he said it right.”

“So you’re not lovers?”

Both Barbara and Henry only smiled.

I was convinced all of this was some kind of a charade—but I was not sure what kind. By the time of this news conference I had already had four separate interview sessions with each of them about the lead-up to the debate, most particularly about what happened in Longsworth D. But neither Henry nor Barbara, no matter how I came at it, would reveal anything that rang true about their real relationship. I honestly did not know if they were mad, passionate lovers or two partners in a business enterprise that required them to fake something.

“Is it true that Ross Perot is thinking of getting revenge by buying your network?” was the touchiest question asked of network president Joshua Simonsen at the news conference.

The answer: “Ross is an old friend who has done great work for us and for America. We understand his concern over what has happened, but we are sure it will pass. He is a man of business who understands the need for hard-nosed business decisions.”

“You really think he’s going to take this with a smile?”

“No question about that at all. He has given us assurances of a smooth and graceful transition. He will continue to do the program for the next two Sundays—and do it with full vigor and dedication and professionalism—until the new team takes over.”

As the whole world found out the following Sunday, Ross Perot had something other in mind than a smooth and graceful transition.

He threw a historic first on-air fit. After promising the network—according to the network, at least—that he would not say or do anything but his regular program the following Sunday, he opened the program with a squeaky, fiery speech about the awfulness of the people who run the ABS television network and all of network television.

His best lines were: “I’ve been asked if I might hit back by buying this network. Forget it, friends. I’ve got a lot better things to do with my money—which, by the way, I didn’t get by investing in the dying and the past. I’m not starting now. These people aren’t long for this world anyhow. I understand a merger with the Disney Channel is in the works. Makes perfect sense. One Mickey Mouse outfit deserves another.”

He talked for twenty-two minutes like that right to the camera and then walked off the set. The network’s Capitol Hill correspondent, who
happened to be in the newsroom that Sunday morning, was rushed into the studio to finish the program dressed in blue jeans and a sweater.

At a news conference outside in the ABS Washington bureau parking lot on upper Wisconsin Avenue, Perot denied he ever promised not to say anything about his “public beheading” and then took some more parting shots. His best: “These people aren’t qualified to run a toilet concession at a roadside park on the information superhighway.”

“What do you think of Hank and Barb?” he was asked by a reporter.

“I don’t think about dirty cartoons about little boys and girls trying to act like grown-ups,” Perot answered.

Jack Turpin. Source after source told me this man had gone into a hate fit because of Williamsburg, and that that fit consumed his mind and his spirit—his very being. That was allegedly why he had done only a few interviews and why only a few scattered quotes from him showed up in our massive postdebate clipping and transcript file.

Then one day I saw a story—by accident, really—in the
Washington Post
sports section. It said Turpin, who spent two years right out of college as a catcher in the Detroit Tigers organization, had been hired as a special assistant to the commissioner of baseball. The commissioner was a Northrop aviation heir, lawyer, and former Republican governor of California who had once been a minor-league pitcher in the Houston Astros farm system. Turpin, said the story, had worked on one of the commissioner’s gubernatorial campaigns. Turpin’s special task now for baseball would be to improve the public image of The Game, to design a public-relations campaign that would, in the words of “a source close to the commissioner’s office,” reestablish baseball as America’s number one pastime. What was common knowledge but unsaid in the story, of course, was that the well-publicized and competing greeds of the owners and of the players had finally begun to drive people away from baseball. Two days later Jennifer Gates brought me a computer printout of a piece by the great sports novelist Dan Jenkins that had appeared in the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
and other papers. He wrote about Turpin’s coming: “Anybody who could turn a jerk like Meredith into something semi-attractive
might have a chance of doing the semi-same for the jerks who run and play baseball. But let’s not cheer him on, OK? The problems are not about image, they’re about real.”

I called the baseball commissioner’s office in New York City. After being treated to about nine full innings of runarounds, I was able to determine that Jack Turpin was, in fact, already on the job and in the office. But it took a couple more tries before they would put me through to his secretary, and then he would not take my call. He finally did only after I told somebody that I was a representative of David Donald Meredith and I had some awful news for Mr. Turpin.

“What news?” Turpin said when he came on the line.

I told him who I was.

He said in a firm but unfrantic way: “Goddamn you. I should have known it would be one of you people. The idea of lying, of getting somebody on the phone by false pretenses, is a way of professional life for you and your kind. I have nothing to say to you now about anything and I never will. So you might as well quit calling me. I do not turn the other cheek. I do not forgive and forget. I do not do any of that crap.”

I felt he left me no choice but to play a bit of reporter’s hardball. It was now or never.

I said: “I have been told you were the source for those statements that were used and read during the debate. Can you confirm?”

Turpin’s voice remained controlled. He said: “That is a goddamn lie. You print that in your childish excuse for a magazine and I’ll end up owning your childish excuse for a magazine. I did not sabotage my own man. I would never sabotage my own man. You have just spoken a blood libel. Say it again and you are in a court of law. Who told you that? Did Meredith tell you that?”

Our conversation ended a few moments later, and the next morning I caught the 6:50
A.M.
Metroliner Express from Washington to New York to keep a 10:00
A.M.
appointment with Jack Turpin. The train, the only way Jonathan Angel and the other civilized people I knew ever traveled to and from New York, arrived on time at 9:25. And I was in a room with Turpin at 10:05.

The room was one of several conference rooms at the commissioner’s
office on the seventeenth floor of an office building at 350 Park Avenue. Its walls were covered with photographs of pitchers who had played and starred in the majors. The first one I saw was one of Robin Roberts, the great Philadelphia Phillie.

“I know you don’t really believe I leaked those statements,” Turpin said within seconds after he closed the door behind him. “Don’t think I fell for your high-school
Front Page
trick.”

I said: “Who did then?”

“How in the hell would I know? What is this? They were sprung on us like killers in the night.”

“I thought maybe you—the campaign—made an effort to find out after the debate.”

He looked away from me, then back. “Look here, Chapman, do you not understand that I was one of the victims of that public assassination? Do you not grasp the obvious fact that the perpetrators of this crime are the ones you should be talking to? They are the ones who must be interrogated, must be forced to tell all to the people of the United States. If you want to know where the assassination weapons came from, for Christ’s sake, ask the assassins. The victims are seldom in a position to have such deadly information, much less make it public.”

I told him the truth up to that moment. That three of the four panelists had told me they did not know the source of the statements and that I believed them. That left only Mike Howley, who clearly did know but was not talking—yet.

It kept Turpin in the room. He had appeared ready to end the conversation and escort me to the door and an elevator. Now he was listening, at least. So I asked: “Did you know about those allegations before the debate?”

Jack Turpin was probably on some kind of quieting drug. I am not a drug user myself, but I have been around many in the magazine-journalism world of frantic deadlines and never-stop production, writing, and editing sessions. There was something—I could not explain what, exactly—about his eyes and his movements that led me to suspect some kind of quieting, moderating substance. He was probably on a pill that kept his anger in check, that made it possible for him to function—even in difficult situations like this.

What he did now was blink and say to me: “What’s the point? What are you trying to prove?”

“I do not know where it will finally lead,” I said, again, telling the absolute truth. “But I am interested in how those statements came into the hands of Howley and, frankly, whether it was all cooked up beforehand.”

“By whom?”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

“Why?”

“Because … well, because I think the public has a right to know.”

“Oh, please, spare me that sanctimonious crap. You want to know because it will sell more magazines.”

“Whatever,” I said, still doing my best to tell the truth.

“Forget it,” he said. “I have nothing to say.” But I could not help but notice that he made no effort to get up from his chair. Go, Tom, go!

“What about on an off-the-record basis? Or on background. All I want to know is whether you-all in the campaign knew about those charges before they were read on television that night in Williamsburg.”

“Why should I tell you or anyone from the press anything? Why should I trust you or anyone from the press?”

I decided not to try to answer that.

I looked behind Turpin at a photo of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the two great Los Angeles Dodgers pitchers. Then I looked down at my own two hands and pulled a handkerchief out of my rear pants pocket and blew my nose.

Jack Turpin was making a decision that mattered very much to me—more than I even realized at the time.

He said: “Yes, I knew.”

“How did you know?”

“Somebody came to us, claiming she had been hit by Meredith. She was one of the people named by one of those thug-panelists during the debate. I asked Meredith about it. He gave me an answer that was more movement than fact. Alarms went off in my head and soul. So I had our security people do some checking. They dug up several more women with such allegations to make about my candidate. Most of the ones Howley
and his hooligans read that night sounded familiar to me. They must have all been in there.”

“In where?”

“The material our security people gathered.”

“What did you do with that material—those statements?”

“I showed them to Meredith. Again, he gave me some motion but very little else. At my urging—insistence, really—we decided to act like nothing had happened. I shredded all the statements and even the file folder in which they came.”

“Nobody else saw them?”

“Nobody.”

“No copies were made.”

“None.”

“Are you certain?”

Turpin grinned for the first time ever in my presence. The corners of his mouth actually turned up like they do on most normal people when something strikes them funny. He said: “As certain as I was nine days before the election that David Donald Meredith was going to be elected president of the United States, before four journalist-muggers decided they knew better than the people what was best for our country.”