15

Janet’s World

WHEN TEDDY WHITE CONFESSED THAT MISS GOLDEN Flowers was, in large part, a figment of his imagination, no one seemed to think there was anything scandalous about it. He was just a newsman doing what newsmen sometimes did, especially on a day when not much was happening, and his saga of the young woman’s adventures was reminiscent of the cliff-hangers that would soon be so popular at American movie theaters. It brought him no derision, did not affect his career. He went on to publish a number of critically acclaimed books, including his four volumes about the presidency, and starting in the sixties began to appear on NBC News as the network’s resident election analyst.

When the editors of the Washington Post found out that “Jimmy,” the adolescent drug addict from one of the District of Columbia’s seedier neighborhoods, was entirely a figment of reporter Janet Cooke’s imagination, the reaction could not have been more different. She became an untouchable in the world of journalism and an object of scorn to almost all who knew about her. She has not worked in the business since. She will not work in it again.

What was the difference between White’s hoax and Cooke’s? It was not that White was white and Cooke black, nor that White was male and Cooke female, nor White Jewish and Cooke Christian. The most salient answer is: time. Almost four decades had passed between Miss Golden Flowers and Jimmy, the four decades during which reporters outgrew their timidity and turned not only on officials of the government and the military, but also, if circumstances called for it, on their fellow reporters. A journalist who lied in print, after all, was a blot not just on her own reputation but on the entire field.

And as such, Cooke’s hoax became a turning point in the public perception of journalism in the twentieth century, one that has not turned back since. She did not single-handedly undo all the good that Halberstam, Sheehan, Safer, Woodward, Bernstein, and others had done for the public perception of journalism, not by any means. She did not, however, contribute to it. In truth, the public has never perceived journalists as especially admirable figures. After all, the best work that reporters do is often controversial in nature, and that means it cannot help but make enemies among those who are accused of acting in an improper manner. Controversial stories often result in a backlash. There were, for instance, those who thought reporters had hounded President Nixon out of office, and in the process had gone further than they were entitled to go.

Cooke, however, raised suspicions not about journalistic bias or overzealousness, but about the even more important issue of veracity. For the rest of the century and into the next one, suspicions about the motives of the press would not only grow, but become too often justified.

It was certainly not what Janet Cooke had intended.

 

 

Cooke came to the Post from the Toledo Blade, a twenty-six-year-old woman of color who listed all the right credentials and, however subtly, gave off all the wrong vibes. According to her résumé, she had been a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vassar in 1976. She claimed various other academic honors as well, such as the ability to speak several languages, including Portuguese and Italian. Her manner was such that when she interviewed with the Post about six months before she got the job, no one with whom she spoke had any reason to doubt her résumé. They were impressed with her writing ability, her attire, her ambition. Perhaps too much ambition, a few people thought, but better too much than too little. And she was a minority, a so-called double minority—no wonder she was ambitious! And no wonder the Post wanted her so much, especially Ben Bradlee, who was no longer a cub reporter but the paper’s head man, its executive editor.

Another possible problem in addition to her ambition was her smarts. They were more of the classroom variety, some of the Post staffers thought, than the street variety. But that did not bother anyone more than her ambition did; she would get her street smarts where others got them, on the streets.

Finally, half a year after her first trip to Washington, a time during which Cooke was much on the mind of the Post’s editors, there was an opening at the paper that seemed just right for her, and she was hired. Everyone expected big things from Cooke, she most of all, and her initial stories gave every indication that she would realize her potential. They were written with a flair that was more literary than journalistic, and with a speed that seemed to indicate she had been on the job a long time.

Still, there was the occasional troubling sign, not apparent to everyone, but certainly to those closest to her. Cooke’s first roommate when she moved to Washington was fellow Post reporter Elsa Walsh, and although Walsh was looking forward to the arrangement, it did not work out as she had hoped. For one thing, Cooke’s rent checks kept bouncing. Perhaps it was because she seemed to do nothing with her money but buy clothes—not to impress men; there was no man in her life. She bought them to impress herself. The first day on the job, she “sashayed” into the Post newsroom “wearing a red wool suit over a white silk shirt, the neck opened casually to the second button, exposing a thin gold chain, a teasing glimpse of lingerie, the slight swell of a milk-chocolate breast. Her long acrylic nails gleaming in the hard fluorescent light, she made her way down a long aisle between the desk pods.”

For another thing, says Walsh, Cooke “was very hard to live with, very high-strung. . . . She had no sense of the past or even the present, except for its consequences for the future. She always looked to the future, and she didn’t care about the people she left behind.” It was too much ambition, all right, ambition to the point of ruthlessness. And, eventually, truthlessness.

Then came the early autumn of 1980 and “Jimmy’s World.” Cooke had been working on the story for a week or two, shown early drafts to her superiors. All were encouraging. Finally she got permission to publish. It was to be Janet Cooke’s big break, a story of her own that appeared right where she thought her name was always meant to appear, on the front page of the Washington Post. Street smarts? This was street smarts on parade:

Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms. He nestles in a large, beige reclining chair in the living room of his comfortably furnished home in Southeast Washington. There is an almost cherubic expression on his small, round face as he talks about life—clothes, money, the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an addict since the age of 5. His hands are clasped behind his head, fancy running shoes adorn his feet, and a striped Izod T-shirt hangs over his thin feet. “Bad, ain’t it,” he boasts to a reporter visiting recently. “I got me six of these.”

Jimmy’s is a world of hard drugs, fast money, and the good life he believes both can bring. Every day, junkies casually buy heroin from Ron, his mother’s live-in-lover, in the dining room of Jimmy’s home. They “cook” it in the kitchen and “fire up” in the bedrooms. And every day, Ron or someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a needle into his bony arm, sending the fourth grader into a hypnotic nod.

The story ends with Ron doing just that, and Jimmy’s “head dipping and snapping upright again, in what addicts call ‘the nod.’”

“‘Pretty soon, man,’ Ron says, ‘you got to learn how to do this for yourself.’”

The story leaves no doubt that Jimmy will, and that it will be a proud moment for him when he does.

 

 

Just as Miss Golden Flowers had been a sensation in Chungking and beyond, so was Jimmy in Washington. There was a demand for more information, not just from people in suburbs like Chevy Chase who had no idea children like Jimmy existed in the inner city, but from District officials who began searching for the boy, wanting to help him. Cooke said she could not cooperate, in part because her life would be imperiled by drug dealers if she did. There was also a demand for pictures of Jimmy, even television appearances. Cooke said no. She had promised to protect the privacy of Jimmy, his mother, Ron, and those who had led her to them; there was nothing more she could say or do for public consumption. She had given her word, and a journalist’s word to a source was gold.

One of Cooke’s supervisors was Bob Woodward, the Bob Woodward, now the Post’s Metro editor. “Janet had written a great piece,” he said. “In a way, both she and the story were almost too good to be true. I had seen her go out on a complicated story and an hour later turn in a beautifully written piece. This story was so well-written and tied together so well that my alarm bells simply didn’t go off. My skepticism left me. I was personally negligent.”

Others, however, were not. A veteran black reporter named Courtland Milloy was assigned to work with Cooke on a follow-up story. “We were supposed to be finding another kid,” Milloy said. “But I’ll tell you the truth, I wanted to find Jimmy. Hell, that kid needed help. So as we drove around I circled through Condon Terrace, the general area where Janet said he lived.”

Milloy became immediately suspicious. As reported by his Washington Post colleague David Maraniss, Milloy said, “It didn’t take long to see that she didn’t know the area.” Both Milloy and his co-workers were starting to believe that Cooke did not have sources to protect so much as secrets to hide. But Cooke dismissed the doubters. “They’re just jealous,” she told Walsh. “They are not going to get where I’m going.”

Thanks primarily to Woodward, Cooke went all the way to a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. But by the time she won the award for best feature report, those in the Post newsroom did not consider her work a prizewinner so much as an ever-growing source of controversy. Eventually Cooke was summoned to the office of Ben Bradlee. Much later, she would discuss what happened with journalist Mike Sager, a friend and onetime lover. In Sager’s version:

“Say two words in Portuguese,” challenged Ben Bradlee.

Janet shrugged.

“Do you have any Italian?”

“No.”

“If you had to speak French to me right now to save your job,” said Bradlee, sighing heavily, “what would you say?”

Janet could speak French. All those nights as a girl, lying in bed, conjugating verbs, dreaming of Paris. But as she stood before Bradlee, seated in his big chair, something just came over Janet, and she dug in her heels. Four French words echoed in her mind. They translated, “Go fuck yourself.”

In the end, it was the résumé that got her. Supernigger fell to earth.

Two days after Cooke won the Pulitzer, Woodward returned it, and Cooke resigned from the Washington Post, her career in journalism at an end.

In 1982, Cooke made her first and only appearance on national television, answering Phil Donahue’s questions about her actions. She explained to him that ever since the Washington Post had broken the Watergate story, making journalism a more glamorous profession and the Post its pedestal the pressure to succeed alongside the Woodwards and Bernsteins was unbearable; in dreaming up Jimmy and his tribulations, she had done nothing more than succumb to that pressure. She gave the impression that, at least in her opinion, most other people would have done the same.

What she did not say was that, however much pressure existed in the Post newsroom, and there was surely a great deal and had been even before Watergate, Cooke brought a suitcase full of her own pressures, for her own reasons, and that they, ultimately, were the reason for her cheating.

 

 

Another fourteen years would pass before Janet Cooke went public again, so to speak. In 1996, she asked Mike Sager to write a profile of her for Gentlemen’s Quarterly magazine. Seven years later, Sager published a collection of his interviews in a book called Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and Murder. Nothing in the title, except a fondness for Steely Dan and the Rolling Stones, has anything to do with Cooke.

Since ending her employment with the Post, Sager tells us, Cooke had “spent her life on the run: first as the wife of an American diplomat in Paris, more recently as a divorced, nearly part-time retail clerk in Toledo; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Kalamazoo.” Her Kalamazoo position was in the Liz Clairborne women’s boutique in a shopping mall department store. Her pay: six dollars an hour.

“I want my life back,” Cooke said to Sager the day they met, knowing it would never happen. “What I did was horrible, believe me, I think that. But I don’t think that in this particular case the punishment has fit the crime. I’ve lost my voice. I’ve lost half of my life. I’m in a situation where cereal has become a viable dinner choice. It is my fault that I’ve never spoken up. But I’m a 41-year-old woman now, and I’m starting to understand some things about life, about my life. If people only understood why this really happened, maybe they’d have a different take on things. Maybe they’d think I wasn’t so evil.”

And maybe she wasn’t. Maybe Sager, who was in a position to know, realized that Cooke was so tyrannized in her childhood by a father demanding perfection in everything from academic performance to piano lessons that only by lying about her accomplishments could she survive his scrutiny. Maybe Sager knew Stratman Cooke’s scrutiny was so great that his daughter had never learned how to relate to other people, that she never had any friends in school because the family lived in a run-down black neighborhood and Daddy believed none of the kids in a place like that were good enough for his daughter. Maybe it was Stratman Cooke who packed Janet’s suitcase for her.

This does not excuse her behavior as a journalist, but maybe it does provide an explanation, and in doing so will also provide a means for her to find the other half of her life, outside a newsroom, out of the shadow of her father’s insistent specter.