The Last Debate (47 page)

It worked.

And said the famous person: “It was also a form of precaution. If this blew up and you decided to identify me, no one would ever believe you. No one would ever believe
I
would do anything as stupid and childish as putting floppy disks in candy boxes and having meetings in parking garages.”

That worked, too.

I had to take one last pass at Pat Tubbs before I finally rested.

The book that had transformed him from being a famous and respected newspaper writer to a famous and rich nonfiction book writer was
The Administrator.
It was the true story of Richard Dennison, the Vietnam War fighter-pilot hero who became the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. He was blackmailed into helping a group of international financiers and swindlers deal in used airliners—mostly 707s and 747s—with confused, falsified, or shady ownerships. A couple of the conspirators turned up dead in Paris with ropes around their necks, and three of the planes crashed under mysterious circumstances, and eventually, under Tubbs’s relentless pursuit, so did the scheme. Gene Hackman played Tubbs in the movie. Richard Gere was Dennison.

According to his book, one of the techniques Tubbs used to get an early interview with Dennison was what he called “the friendly stalk.”
For two and a half weeks, every public place Dennison went, Tubbs went. At lunch, at dinner, in the grocery store, in church, on Capitol Hill, in hotel meeting rooms, at FAA hearings, at news conferences, Tubbs was there for Dennison to glance up and see. Tubbs was even there when little nine-year-old Amanda Dennison played in a Saturday-morning soccer game on a rain-soaked field in Bethesda, Maryland, the Washington suburb where the Dennisons lived. Tubbs eventually got his interview.

After four unreturned phone calls to Tubbs, I decided to employ the friendly stalk on him. For two days I was there at restaurants and other places every time Tubbs looked up.

On the third day I followed him to Herb’s for lunch. Tubbs joined a man I did not recognize at the same table where Rhome and I had eaten our lunch. I now got a table across the room from it—but in full view of Tubbs.

It wasn’t long before he was standing there in front of me.

“Who in the hell are you?” he said, acting, it seemed to me, as if he were Gene Hackman, rather than the other way around.

“Tom Chapman.”

“I should have known.”

“I’m doing a little friendly stalking, Mr. Tubbs. I very much need to talk to you. Some new information has come my way which pretty much proves you were Howley’s conduit for those statements—”

“Good-bye forever, Chapman,” he said.

Tubbs walked out of Herb’s before I could pay my check, and he disappeared.

He was not at any of his usual spots the next day or any of the next several days, and I have not laid eyes on him since. All calls to his office and to his house have drawn either an answering-machine or voice-mail response.

All I know to do and to say is:

Come out, come out, wherever you are, Mr. Tubbs. If you’re reading this now, Mr. Tubbs, please call me. I would still like to interview you. It’s not too late. We can include what you have to say in the paperback edition, Mr. Tubbs.

Or in the movie.

H
ere now are my conclusions.

Michael J. Howley decided that David Donald Meredith should not be president of the United States. If Howley had been a wealthy person or labor leader or someone of political power and influence, he would have backed that belief with his own resources and/or he would have sought to rally those of others. But Howley was a journalist, one of our nation’s leading and most respected. He had no money or campaign troops to send to the front against Meredith.

What he did have was the force of his journalism. It was a force that he had always tried to exercise in a fair and evenhanded manner, as if the outcome of any story—any election—was irrelevant to him personally. But David Donald Meredith, to Howley, was different. Howley had come to believe the election of this man would be a catastrophe for the country. He had had similar feelings in past elections—particularly about Reagan in 1980—but the Reagan fear was nothing like the Meredith fear. I think it is possible that he considered using the force of his newspaper columns and television appearances to warn the public about Meredith
and then concluded that he would not have made that much difference. Not by himself in a newspaper column and a television commentary. It would take a lot more than that to keep David Donald Meredith out of the White House.

I believe it began to come together for Howley on that flight back from Texas—the appearance in San Antonio, his depressed thoughts about himself and journalism, the word on the poll showing Meredith about to surge ahead of Paul L. Greene, and the probable coming of the invitation to moderate the Williamsburg Debate. I think he disembarked from that American Airlines 757 at Washington National having made the decision to see if he could turn Williamsburg into an event that would change the outcome of the election.

Meanwhile, on another conspiracy track came others who wanted to do the same because they knew the secret of Meredith’s violent side. They included a Meredith security man and journalists in another news organization. Pat Tubbs was the last link, the intermediary who brought the two tracks, the goods with the means, together. By then Howley had already forced Jerry Rhome into changing the
News
policy so he could moderate the debate. All he had left to do was to manipulate his three debate panelist-colleagues into doing what he wanted. He got that done behind the closed doors of Longsworth D.

And now Paul L. Greene of Nebraska sits in the White House instead of David Donald Meredith of North Carolina.

My conclusions, obviously, are interpretive in nature. I was not in Mike Howley’s mind on that airplane or at any other time while he went about the business of preparing for the debate. But I believe there are supporting facts. Howley’s denials of a predebate plan look feeble and wan compared to the healthy evidence on the other side of the theory. Nelson and “Carl Bob” supplied the route the women’s statements took from Nelson and Associates to Tubbs and, finally, to Howley. There is no question about what Howley said and did in Longsworth D. A careful reading of his words and actions leads unambiguously to the fair conclusion that he came into that room to turn his colleagues into a journalist strike force against Meredith. He did it skillfully, letting it build, letting even the other three believe—and they mostly still believe—that it happened naturally as a joint action.

Tubbs’s and Howley’s refusals to talk about any of this are also indicators of a desire to keep a secret. Why won’t Howley tell the American people where he got those statements? What does he have to hide? The fact of his plotting and planning and manipulating is one thing he has to hide. Are there others? What did Tubbs and Howley talk about for so long that predebate Saturday night? Was going for a Meredith blowup Tubbs’s idea?

I had one further contact with Howley after Santorini. It came a week after that movie/paperback item in the
Times.
I received a faxed one-sentence handwritten note from Santorini.

I called him a few days later from New York. He screamed at me, and I screamed back that with his silly alarm-clock trick he passed up the chance to have his side of the story fully told. There were several back-and-forths with my book editor and Howley’s agent. Finally, we agreed to send Howley the galleys of the final manuscript so that he could write a formal response of not more than thirteen hundred words that would be published at the end of this book as an appendix. It was an unusual way to do it, but this was an unusual event. Fairness toward Howley, to be completely straight about it, was not our principal motivation. My publisher thought such an approach would also enhance advance media interest in the book—a gimmick, pure and simple.

And as you will see for yourself when you read it, the statement works only as a publicity gimmick. Howley does not deal in any serious or direct way with the specific factual questions raised by my reporting. He mostly vents anger and issues blanket, general denials.

His anger with Barbara Manning, Henry Ramirez, and Joan Naylor is understandable—from his point of view. But I would urge it be taken with a grain of salt—and perspective. Barbara, Henry, and Joan cooperated with me, I believe, because they felt the public had a right to know what happened. Journalists have a special responsibility to tell what they know, and those three people met that responsibility. Howley’s attempts to organize silence, I believe, were motivated by a desire to protect himself.
He wanted them mute about Longsworth D for his own sake. He did not get his way and he’s angry. So be it.

I concede, however, that the Donatello business is slightly different. It was difficult and there was some unwillingness at first, but eventually all three did talk to me some about what happened there, as they had before about Longsworth D. For my own selfish reasons, I am glad they did. I understand the uneasiness this kind of thing triggers among those who wonder about where we have arrived in our world of keeping our words and secrets, of telling lies and secrets.

I am not suggesting that Joan and Henry and Barbara are all pure in motive and action. All three have benefited enormously from having been part of the Williamsburg Four. But I found no evidence that any one of the three went to Williamsburg with any kind of plan to showboat or stunt his or her way that night into a special limelight of celebrity. Joan was—is—an extremely able combatant in the extremely competitive world of network anchors, and being on the Williamsburg panel helped her position—even if she really wanted to be the moderator. Henry came with a packet of tough questions all aimed at showing the world what a tough interviewer he was. Barbara came determined to do as professional a job as she could. But I picked up nothing in what was said in Longsworth D or anywhere else that points to any ulterior or hidden agenda by any of the three.

I—and many others, I am sure—share Joan’s confessed astonishment at the casual way she and Henry and Barbara decided to use those statements against Meredith. I find it amazing that three professional journalists, trained and committed to the precepts of fact-checking and fairness, would do nothing to verify even the fact of the women’s existence. Somebody—if not Howley, somebody else—could have simply manufactured the women and their stories. I believe they were blinded and dumbed by a combination of their hate for Meredith and their faith in Howley. That is an explanation, but it is not a justification. Based on what was said at the Donatello dinner and my own conversations with Henry, Barbara, and Joan, I am still not sure they realize even now how close they came to falling from the ridge of fame and fortune into the valley of professional death and destruction.

Some of the most vociferous supporters of Meredith continue to harp
on the race angle, citing Henry Ramirez and Barbara Manning as the ultimate examples of “affirmative action run amuck.” They charge that no two whites with their qualifications would have come anywhere near to being on the debate panel and then taking over the Sunday-morning show on ABS. That is probably correct. But I tend to agree with those who argue, What’s the problem? Henry and Barbara, alias Hank and Barb, at least have
some
journalism experience, which is more than Jack, Jill, Ross, and Norman can say. They are also not clownalists, as defined by Mulvane. Not yet, at least. Barbara and Henry also have perspectives as a result of their respective races that ought to be part of the Sunday-morning mix.

But I will leave these kinds of questions to the great seminars of the great worriers to sort through while I continue the hard and important work of detecting and exposing and disclosing lies and secrets. In that regard, Howley’s anger at having his secrets revealed has a slight double-standard stench to it. What I did to him is only what he and his—our—profession have been doing to nonjournalists since the beginning of First Amendment time. As I pointed out earlier, I have felt stings myself from some irresponsible reporting, and I am sure there is more to come from Howley and others. There is no question about the fact that they hurt.

There are more than stings involved, of course, in assessing the impact of Williamsburg on American journalism. First, Williamsburg was probably the last debate. It is likely no debate commission or group of journalists will ever be handed the responsibility of running such a debate again, because no candidate for president or political party would ever take a chance on another Williamsburg.

Within just the few months after that October Sunday night, there were several nonnational copycat incidents. Three print and two television reporters in Houston made their own headlines when they took turns at a news conference saying, “That’s a lie,” after various statements by the mayor. The reporters called what they did “a Williamsburg act.” Four press panelists on a regular Sunday-morning “Governor Meets the Press” program on public television in Arizona read from the governor’s income-tax and financial statements in what they said was “the spirit of Williamsburg.” A local television anchor in Denver used the same phrase in
introducing a special “I-Team Scandal Scope” on the twenty-year-old “love-appearing” letters a prominent—married, with two children—Methodist minister in the city had written to another man. A radio reporter in a small town in Louisiana had even said he was “only doing a Williamsburg” when he was caught stealing a murder-investigation report from a file cabinet in the local sheriff’s office. There have been other incidents, and there will be others now until the end of time. Journalistic terrorism, as it has been called, has arrived and is now being condemned or praised as an accepted part of our world.