The Last Debate (48 page)

If so, the reasons are obvious. First and foremost, what the Williamsburg Four did was seen as successful and noble. It worked. A man deemed emotionally unsuited and unfit to hold the highest office in the land was prevented from doing so. Meredith’s bizarre behavior on the stage that night and afterward helped confirm the wisdom of what the four had done. So have the early returns on Paul L. Greene’s presidency. Every poll shows great—and increasing—support for him and for the four patriotic journalists who put him where he is.

The other simple and influencing fact was what happened to the Williamsburg Four. Henry and Barbara became Hank and Barb and rich and famous. Joan Naylor became the first woman solo anchor on a nightly network news program and rich and famous. How could anyone interested in making it to the top in journalism anywhere not have concluded that a whole new path had suddenly been invented. Go, Baby Tom, go!

I agree with Howley that the revolutionary changes in American journalism did not begin with Williamsburg—the debate itself as well as the riot and the other embarrassing conduct of the reporters covering it. His statement to me on Santorini that journalism was already headed over the cliff with the donkeys had a ring of sincere disgust and alarm to it. From the old journalism perspective of the Mike Howleys and the Pompous Perfect Doug Mulvanes, there was much to be disgusted by and alarmed about. The blight of what they called “checkbook journalism,” actually paying people money instead of column inches and airtime for their stories and information. The tabloidization of syndicated and cable-television magazine programs had already slopped over to network television and become the new standard of all television news, which had already adopted dramatic re-creations, stagings, and other entertainment techniques
as their own. The widespread use of anonymous sources, begun with Watergate, had consumed the straight reporters on even the largest and most mainstream print and broadcast outlets. Opinion and personal attacks were no longer restricted to editorial and op-ed pages. Gossip about sexual and other personal matters was no longer found only in gossip columns. All of it was everywhere. The coming of the star syndrome to network news—the one that transformed Henry and Barbara into Hank and Barb and promoted Joan to sole anchor—was already there and spilt over all of journalism. Print people, in order to make it in print and on the lecture circuit, had to have a television outlet and star persona, too. So they went on weekend programs and yelled at one another, all in the interest of drawing attention to themselves and increasing their incomes. Lines between reporting, analysis, and opinion became invisible. Snideness toward everyone in public life was the norm. The once unheard-of practice of television anchors and interviewers acting as if they were equal, if not superior, to the people they interviewed had already become common practice. The recent and celebrated interview Jock Reynolds of NBS News did with President Greene four weeks after the inauguration, according to Mulvane, set another standard for “the New Arrogants in journalism.” (At one point in the interview, Reynolds said to the president of the United States: “Well, I hear you, but what if I said that answer is simply not acceptable to those of us who follow the European security issue. You clearly are not well-informed at all on that—if I may be so bold as to say so.”)

So it was no wonder that Michael J. Howley, from his high perch, saw much in his profession that embarrassed him that predebate October. His way of journalism was going, going, going—and soon it would be gone. I believe him when he says he was as annoyed and upset with himself as he was with others. From his perspective, not only had he not done anything about it, he had participated. He had smelled the money of the stars and followed the odor.

There are those who reject much of his Old Journalism whine out of hand. I am one of them. We argue that a more vigorous, more pressing, more aggressive, more penetrating, more visible press is exactly what this country needs. Why shouldn’t reporters be the well-paid stars of a democratic open society? They still don’t make as much as basketball players
and corporate CEOs. Why shouldn’t they give their informed opinions about the subjects on which they report? Don’t they know more about them than anyone else? Why should people be expected to turn over news and information to reporters without compensation? Because it’s a public service? Aren’t
The New York Herald
and
The Washington Morning News
and ABS News and
World News
magazine profit-making organizations? Why shouldn’t the most personal details about everyone in public life be known? Why shouldn’t a television correspondent take on the president of the United States as an equal? Wasn’t this country founded on a non-royalty idea of national leadership? Doesn’t the incontrovertible list of evasion and lying at the highest levels of government—Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater, etc., etc.—make it imperative that the press never take the first answer as given? Why shouldn’t the makers of television news programs employ the best techniques of their craft to tell a story? It is a visual medium, you know, and the competition for viewers is terrific.

Back and forth, old
v.
new, the argument has gone.

I happen to believe, though, that even at the time of Williamsburg it was essentially already over. The new way had already become
the
way, and the likes of Howley and Mulvane were whistling against the wind. What Williamsburg did to what was left of the discussion was comparable to what that volcano did to Santorini. And the eruption came accompanied by some exquisite ironies. Mike Howley, from the old school, engineered what some have argued was the ultimate new-school operation. Wasn’t what those four reporters did on that stage simply a natural, heroic, and noble next step down the road of good clean aggressive journalism in the new world?

Within journalism itself there is probably nobody left at any level or position who has not been asked that question since that October night. At the rate the polls are being taken, it may not be much longer before there is nobody left
outside
journalism at any level or position who also has not been asked.

My answer, for what it is worth, is no. It is a close call for me, but I do not believe it was justified—or natural, heroic, or noble. I do not believe the Williamsburg Four acted properly or in a way that is good for the United States of America. Power abused is power abused. No matter how
well-meaning or in what name it is abused, the end result is an abuse of power. The demolition of the original, traditional power of the journalist to inform and influence the people in a democratic society could be the end result of Williamsburg, the most dramatic abuse of journalistic power in our history. To call it “New Journalism” is to mislabel. What happened on that auditorium stage really was a form of press terrorism. So was what happened afterward among the “donkeys” in the Virginia Room. One was organized and controlled, the other was not. Neither should be considered acceptable by any of us—old or new.

Howley ended his front-page postdebate piece in
The Washington Morning News
with the words: “Let the debate begin.”

I would submit that the debate about all of this, having begun, will—and should—never end.

I was given thirteen hundred words. I have taken them all.

I think this book should be titled
Confessions of a Trash Journalist.
All of the dirty and unethical tricks of the trade are here in how-to detail: lying to hotel maids, telephone operators and record-keepers, security guards, secretaries, and even singing Jesus cowboys; coercing and paying people to betray friends, colleagues, customers, and confidences; dishonoring ground rules and playing “transaction” con tricks with people in order to use their names, to burn them as sources. I found the proud, matter-of-fact recitals of Mr. Chapman’s fabrications, duplicities, and deceits astonishing—and disgusting.

His presentation of scenes and dialogue as straightforward fact without attribution or sourcing carries the practice of “Journalism as Novel, the Novel as Journalism” to a new and despicable extreme. So do his entrances into the minds of others—me in particular—to imagine what they might have been thinking, not only about the debate but about more personal matters. Nothing is out of bounds, off limits, or too much for him and his kind.

Even a casual reader of his account will notice further that when the fact-going got rough for Mr. Chapman, he went to an anonymous source. I would suggest that it is most likely that some are probably more than anonymous—they are nonexistent. I doubt seriously, for instance, that those scholars who are lucky enough to gain access to Mr. Chapman’s “tapes and notes” in fifty years will find anything to verify that any of that “Carl Bob” stuff happened. Anyone who now believes it did, please contact me. I have some bridges and uranium stock I would like to show you.

Mr. Chapman has also presented us with a near perfect example of “personal journalism” run amuck. The I-pronoun appears more in this I-the-reporter-hero book than in the average book of I-the-rock-star-hero memoirs. Why would Mr. Chapman believe it is in the reader’s interest to know about his jogging habits, train rides, and rent-a-car and hotel receipts? What caused him to think reporting on the blowing of his nose during his session with Jack Turpin was relevant?

But the most important question is about accuracy. Did he get it right? The answer is No. No, he did not. This book is full of inaccuracies, large and small. They are the end result of a reporter who was either too careless, too lazy, too sloppy, or too biased to do the hard work required to get it right, or of a reporter who was simply unable to penetrate the right sources of information and/or gather the right perspectives on what information he did get. I have no idea what exact combination of professional failures were at work here. I know only the failures of the end product.

But I have no interest in doing a line-by-line corrective edit. That should have been done by his book editor(s). I also have no desire to use these thirteen hundred words as a vehicle to tell “my side” of the Williamsburg story or to defend in any way what we did that night. The time and place for that may come, but this is not it. No, my central purpose in writing this response is only to set the record straight on one of the book’s overriding premises.

Let me say it directly, cleanly: I did not go to Williamsburg with a covert master plan to trigger an explosion in David Donald Meredith that would destroy his candidacy for president of the United States. I had not worked out in advance, in my mind or anywhere else, what we, the panelists, might do that night. I did not set out to manipulate my three panelist-colleagues toward the decision we finally took. It came about through spontaneous combustion and consultation among the four of us in the Longsworth D room of the Williamsburg Lodge.

Those are the facts. That is the truth. Inferences, allegations, and whatevers from Chapman to the contrary cannot change them into anything else. I would point out that none of the other three panelists has endorsed or taken up Chapman’s charge of manipulation against me. I also believe that even any fair reading of Chapman’s own re-created
account of what happened and what was said in Longsworth D—full of inaccuracies as it is—supports my position of combustion, not his of conspiracy and manipulation.

I would also like to say—for the record—that I had absolutely nothing to do with the decision of
The New American Tatler
magazine to take a large pass on Mr. Chapman’s mischief. I applaud them for their wisdom, but I cannot take credit for it. To suggest there might be a connection between that decision and that of the president to appoint my publisher the U.S. ambassador to Britain has the laughable smell of a conspiracy hallucination to it. This is Oliver Stone stuff. I’m sure Stone has an 800 number Mr. Chapman can call to offer it up for screen treatment. If he sticks a serial killer or a child molester into his hallucinatory mix, one of the prime-time network magazine lovelies might even bite. Go, Tom, go.

I was appalled and saddened to learn through the reading of this book the full extent of the separate decisions of Henry Ramirez, Barbara Manning, and Joan Naylor to violate our agreements on what we said about our private conversations in Longsworth D. I consider what they did to be a serious breach of professional ethics and to be a most grievous violation of my right of privacy. It is no less of an offense than the crime the Meredith campaign and its former-FBI-agent thugs tried to commit with their electronic bugs.

But I reserve my most extreme distaste and outrage for the talking they did after our Donatello dinner. I am perfectly willing to dump some of the blame on Chapman and his coercive tactics, but he did not put a gun to their heads. He did not have the power to force them to talk. Chapman claims my anger at Ramirez, Manning, and Naylor is motivated by some sinister desire to protect myself. Nonsense. It is motivated by the quite normal revulsion with three people who can’t keep their mouths shut. If they are the new faces and minds and souls and spirits of American journalism, then it will be out of sight over that cliff with the other donkeys even sooner than I feared. They and Chapman make a perfect quartet.

They also exemplify the new order in American public life. There are no secrets, no confidences, anymore in government or anywhere else. Everyone in the Oval Office, in the cloakroom, in the boardroom, in the
cafeteria, in the bedroom, in the closet, talks. And talks and talks and talks. Bill Clinton was correct, in my opinion, when he finally blew his stack and fired everyone around him—The Shut Up! Massacre, as it was called—after all of those “inside the Clinton White House” books came out.

I do not dispute Chapman’s opening and persistent line about the impact of Williamsburg on the practice of journalism. I will assume whatever responsiblity/blame I deserve. But I would submit that at least the point of our exercise in the debate was prompted by a noble and serious purpose. Rightly or wrongly, we really did believe what we were doing was for the good of our country. I wonder what those fools—those crazed donkeys—who rioted in the pressroom thought their purpose was. And I wonder what Mr. Chapman thinks his is when he pants after the condom scoop that will reveal the real sexual relationship between the newly famous Hank and Barb.