Dear Gene and Lee:
No matter what we may think, nor how we may bend current definitions, there is no Pulitzer Prize now offered for feature writing, a category which must represent 30–40% of today’s newspapers.
We have the public service gold medal. No room for features in this category.
We have local general or spot news. I’m not sure what general news is, but it is news, not features, and spot news is the opposite of features.…
And yet some of the best writing in the press today is being done in this category. Not a paper worth its salt has not started a feature section during the last two decades. Profiles, life-styles, features … these are the lifeblood of a newspaper. These are the categories where the fine writers are found. And no Pulitzer to urge them on to greater heights.
I propose that a category be added thusly:
“For a distinguished example of feature writing, a single article or series: One thousand dollars ($1,000).”
—BCB to fellow Pulitzer board members Gene Patterson and Lee Hills, November 9, 1977
Without the Pulitzer prize, Janet Cooke’s fabrication would probably never have been exposed. There was no way to disprove her, particularly once she invented the fable—after one too many unfruitful attempts to find Jimmy with other reporters and editors—that Jimmy and his mother had moved to Baltimore to avoid further attention. The various doubters in the newsroom would continue to doubt, and editors might attend to later stories of hers with heightened scrutiny, but in essence her secret was safe.
In 1981, Ben was no longer on the Pulitzer advisory board, having ceded his seat in 1979, but prior to his departure he had sought and secured the new feature-writing category. Ben’s motivation for creating that category is patently obvious, summed up in a memo from Henry Allen, a Post reporter who made a pitch to Ben in 1976:
You’ve assembled the greatest bank of feature writers in the newspaper business. But every year, at prize time, none of us gets a shot at the Pulitzer, unless one of our stories edges into another category, such as comment or local reporting.…
The age of mere color stories and human-interest sidebars ended when Style was born. Feature writers get read, get famous, get people buying newspapers, and should get their own Pulitzer.
Ben responded by noting that each year he protested the lack of a feature category, but “every year my peers (smile!) impugn my motives, saying that I rise only because of the great collection of feature writers here.” He promised Allen he would “give it a new whack,” and the next year he did. In 1978, at Ben’s continued instigation, the full advisory board voted to create a new category in feature writing, and in 1979 the first Pulitzer Prize in that category was awarded to Jon Franklin, of the Baltimore Evening Sun.
Two years later, “Jimmy’s World” took the prize.
That Cooke’s piece was ever even put up for a Pulitzer in the first place is odd. In all of their various testimonials after the fact, Bob and Ben and Milton Coleman—three editors with direct responsibility for the story—would dwell on the idea that it would have been suspicious for them not to have nominated the story. “Not to submit it,” Ben told a New York Times reporter a few days after the scandal broke, “would have meant something that you didn’t want to say, that you didn’t believe the story.” This is a very strange reason to nominate a newspaper piece for the most prestigious prize in journalism.
“I have used the phrases ‘in for a dime, in for a dollar’ to describe my overall conclusion about submitting the Cooke story for a Pulitzer or any other prize,” Bob said in the wake of the incident. “I believed it, we published it.… It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes. If so, our posture would be as follows: we published the story and said it was true, but now we are going to nominate it for a Pulitzer—now that’s serious business.” They had backed themselves into a situation from which the only perceptible exit was a deeper commitment.
Just before the Pulitzer entries were submitted, David Maraniss reread “Jimmy’s World” and didn’t believe it. He warned Bob about it, but his warning was compromised by the fact that tensions were high between Maraniss and Coleman. It would have seemed like sour grapes on Maraniss’s part to try to quash Cooke’s nomination. “A number of people felt strongly that it should not be nominated because it could disgrace us,” investigative reporter Jonathan Naumann, who talked it over with Maraniss, would later tell Bill Green. “A couple of dozen people talked about it but we didn’t go to top editors. I think we felt it wouldn’t be fair to put her on the carpet when we couldn’t prove anything.”
Despite the doubts, Woodward and Coleman submitted Cooke’s story under the “local reporting” category for the Pulitzer Prize. It didn’t win. The prize was awarded to the Longview Daily News for its coverage of the Mount St. Helens eruption. According to Roger Wilkins, the former Post editorial writer who was then working for The Washington Star (and who was a member of the board), Warren Phillips, the chairman and chief executive of The Wall Street Journal, then proposed that Cooke’s story be jumped to the feature writing category. Everybody agreed.
When that category came up for a vote, Phillips moved to have Cooke’s story win, bypassing the three finalists that the feature writing jury—who had never even considered Cooke’s piece—had voted for. Eugene Patterson, Ben’s former number two and now the editor in chief of the St. Petersburg Times, didn’t like that one bit. As he explained after the scandal broke, “I expressed my opinion that I would not have assigned a reporter to cover a life-and-death story with the pre-condition [Cooke] accepted—namely to refuse to give information that might save the life of the child.” As he later told me, he objected for other reasons, too. He had read “Jimmy’s World” when it first ran in the Post, and “to an oldtime editor’s nose the story just didn’t smell right.”
“My doubts got swept away,” he told me, “when Roger Wilkins differed.” After Patterson had presented his objections, Roger Wilkins, the only black member of the board present, defended Cooke’s article. Wilkins said, among other things, that he thought he could find young heroin addicts within blocks of the Columbia School of Journalism, where the board met. His argument carried the day. “How do you fight that?” Patterson asked me. He abstained from voting because, as he put it, “I was beaten.” The rest of the board voted unanimously to present Cooke with the prize.
The board often overruled the juries, so there wasn’t anything suspicious about that. But it was yet another twist in the warped world of the “Jimmy” story, that Cooke lost out in the category she’d been nominated in but somehow managed to win in an entirely different category, without that jury ever having read her story. The truth was looking for a way out.
On April 13, the Pulitzer Prizes were publicly announced, and on the 14th the Post ran a front page story hailing Cooke’s victory. A glamour shot of a windblown Cooke on a rooftop appeared on page six of the Metro section, set above a reprint of the story that had gotten her there.
Ben was sitting in his office on the afternoon of April 14 when the call came in—two calls, actually, one to Howard Simons and one to Ben, at almost precisely the same time. The executive editor of the Associated Press was calling for Simons, and the assistant to the president of Vassar was on the line for Ben. Both were calling with questions about Cooke’s credentials, which the Post had never checked. Information on the form that Cooke supplied to the Pulitzer committee differed from the information that she had supplied to the Toledo Blade when she applied for a job there. In fact, the information Cooke submitted to the Pulitzer committee differed substantially from the résumé she had submitted to the Post only a year before. The latest iteration was Supernigger Plus, including previously unmentioned study at the Sorbonne and proficiency in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Vassar’s records, Ben was told, showed that Cooke had only studied there for one year—not the four she had claimed when she had been hired.
“My heart sank,” Ben told me.
“Did you know right then?”
“You could see ahead where it was going,” he said.
Ben has always maintained that the possibility that Cooke had made the whole thing up never occurred to him. “In all my life in the business, there were people who made up scenes—that doesn’t seem to me to be preposterous—or who exaggerated things,” he said to me. “But to make the whole fucking thing up …”
Within a few minutes the top editors at the paper and on the story were assembled in Ben’s office. Ben also called Don Graham to tell him about the Vassar problem, and as Graham told me, “We knew immediately what that meant.” Even the briefest scan of Cooke’s personnel folder revealed the seriousness of the discrepancies, and so Ben and Simons sent Coleman to talk to Cooke, to see if she might come clean. “Take her to the woodshed,” Ben said.1
After some grilling, Cooke revealed that she hadn’t graduated from Vassar but insisted that Jimmy was real. Later that afternoon they brought her up to an empty eighth floor office, where Ben and Bob prepared to give her the third degree. As they walked in, Cooke was beginning to realize her fate. Crying, she said, to nobody in particular, “You get caught at the stupidest things.”
Ben was cordial, but he told her that the lie about Vassar and some of the other issues with her various résumés had caused them to doubt her. The entire Jimmy story hung on her word, and their trust in her word. If that trust had been abused, they needed to know it now.
“Say two words to me in Portuguese,” Ben said.
Cooke admitted that she couldn’t.
“Do you have any Italian?” Ben asked.
Again, no.
Then Ben started to ask her some questions in French. Cooke later claimed that she could speak French but hadn’t wanted to give in to Ben at that moment; whatever happened, her answers fell far short of the proficiency she had claimed for herself.
“You’re like Richard Nixon,” Ben told her, perhaps the most loaded words he could use. “You’re trying to cover up.”
Out of sheer desperation, Cooke concocted a fake name and address for Jimmy, his mother, and her boyfriend. Ben gave her twenty-four hours to prove that the story was true. Coleman went out with Cooke to the address she provided, but they couldn’t find the house. “Now, everybody dealing with Cooke believed she was lying,” Bill Green wrote a few days later. “But she stuck with her story.”
Later that night, around 11:30—long after Ben had gone home—Bob grilled Cooke in a fifth floor conference room, just off the newsroom. The editors had recalled her notes, which had been held for safekeeping at the Post’s law firm in case of any legal claim against the paper. Reading through them, Bob saw what he described as “echoes” of the story, but no evidence that she had actually interviewed anybody remotely like Jimmy/Tyrone. Maraniss told me that even from the first bits of her notes he could tell that she’d made the story up.
“It’s all over,” Bob told her now. “You’ve got to come clean. The notes show us the story is wrong. We know it. We can show you point by point how you concocted it.”
Maraniss, who was friendly with Cooke, played the good cop. “Give up the Pulitzer,” he said, “and you can have yourself back.”
Eventually, after prolonged questioning but without any admission, Bob and Milt Coleman and Tom Wilkinson, the assistant managing editor for personnel at the Post, left Cooke alone with Maraniss. The two talked for a long time, with Maraniss trying to be as empathetic as he could. Bob and Ben had seemed angry to Cooke, and that had scared her. “Once she was laid that vulnerable,” Maraniss told me, “I wasn’t angry. So that made it possible for her to tell me what happened.”
Slowly, the secret began to unravel. She talked about how scared she had been when she was nominated for the Pulitzer. Eventually, Maraniss told her, “You don’t have to say anything to the others, I’ll do it for you. What do I tell them?”
“There is no Jimmy and no family,” Cooke said. “It was a fabrication. I did so much work on it, but it’s a composite. I want to give the prize back.”
Just as this was happening, Bob and the other editors outside the conference room reached Ben at home. He told them to stop the interrogation, that maybe it was overkill. But when they walked back in, ready to call things off, Maraniss told them that Cooke had just admitted to the hoax. Bob and Milton Coleman and Tom Wilkinson all hugged her, their fury spent.
“I’m sorry I was such a son-of-a-bitch,” Bob said.
“I deserved it,” Cooke said.
“Yes, you did,” Bob said.
At seven the next morning, Ben called Don Graham and told him that Cooke had confessed. Shortly thereafter the two men met for breakfast at Ben’s house, where they discussed what steps the paper would take next. The news had come too late for that morning’s paper but certainly wouldn’t hold for another full day, so they decided to prepare and release statements of their own. During that breakfast, Maraniss, who was with Cooke at her apartment building, called Ben’s house to ask what he should do. Ben told him that Cooke was to produce a resignation letter and a written statement.
“I don’t know why Bradlee asked me to get her to write a letter of resignation,” Maraniss told me. “I’ve never quite figured that out.”
“Why he didn’t just fire her?”
“Yeah. I have no problem with it—either way, she’s gone—but he directly asked me to get her to resign.”
In his memoir, Ben says, “I can’t explain now why I let her resign rather than fire her on the spot for the grossest negligence.” But privately, the motivation was exactly what one suspects it would be. “If I was really honest with myself I would probably say that if she’d been white I’d have canned her, because she was black I let her resign,” Ben told Barbara Feinman in one of the interviews for his memoir. “You know, I didn’t know how that would play racially and I was concerned about that.”2
I ask Bradlee why he thinks Kay chose him and he said that she told him she respected his ability to spot talent and his ability, if he made a mistake, to clean it up.
—David Halberstam, interview notes, late seventies
Ben often says that the main thing he learned from his time in the Navy was damage control. In a speech in Prague in 1990, he talked about how serving as the assistant damage control officer on the USS Philip during World War II had shaped him as a newspaperman. “In that job, one is charged with thinking about trouble and how to handle trouble before it handles you. I’ve often thought that ability to control damage is one of the essential skills of an editor.”
In the case of Janet Cooke, Ben made a couple of quick decisions that helped to minimize the damage. The first was a relatively simple one: Cooke, and the Post, would return the Pulitzer Prize. Early in the morning of August 15, with Cooke’s written admission in hand, Ben called Joe Pulitzer in St. Louis to inform him of the decision. Later that morning, he sent this cable to the Pulitzer Prize Foundation in New York:
Click here to view a plain text version.
At two that afternoon, Ben released a statement to the entire newsroom, covering much of the same ground but adding a final optimistic note about the task now facing the paper:
Click here to view a plain text version.
Shortly after releasing the statement, Ben asked Tom Wilkinson to come into his office. Wilkinson was one of Ben’s closest confidants at the paper, and he had helped to uncover the fraud on Cooke’s résumé the previous day. “Go tell people in the room to gather at the news desk,” Ben said, meaning that he wanted to talk to the whole news staff.
Within an hour or so, everybody who was in the building at the time was assembled in the newsroom. Ben walked out of his office and stood near his secretary’s desk.
“He said, ‘We’re giving it back, but goddammit, this is a great place, and we do great work,’ ” Wilkinson told me. “But as he said it, his voice broke. That was the first time I’d ever seen or heard anything like that. And then he said, ‘Let’s get back to work.’ ”
“I remember thinking to myself,” Ben told me, of what he felt as he spoke, “are you sure you’re going to be here for a long time?” He didn’t yet know whether he would keep his job.
Later that afternoon, Ben walked over to the Style section. Jane Amsterdam, an editor of the section at the time, remembers how he looked as he passed through. “It was the first I ever saw sadness in Ben,” she told me. “He looked tired.”
“You wanna talk, Benjy?” she said, trying to keep things light, to cheer him up. Ben took a stray chair, turned it around backwards—a favorite move of his—and sat straddling the backrest of the chair, facing Amsterdam and Tony Kornheiser and a number of other Style reporters.
“Nobody knows what to say,” Kornheiser told me, “and he tells the whole story. He talks for about forty minutes, how he found out and how he talked to her in French and she wouldn’t respond. And the crowd grows from me and Jane until there’s like thirty people sitting around listening to him. A lot of people might tell you there was sadness. There was anger. He was pissed off. This was bullshit. I mean, we were giving back the Pulitzer Prize. You don’t ever want to give back the Pulitzer Prize.”
“Everybody wanted to be with him,” Amsterdam told me. “Everybody just wanted to be together. I think we all realized what was coming, which was what did come, which was you’d go in for a question in an interview for a story and they’d say, ‘What does it matter? Just make it up.’ ”
How to begin to move on from the lowest moment of your professional life? The discovery of a way out hinged on the moment when Ben had turned to Cooke, during his interrogation of her foreign language capabilities, and told her that she was like Nixon, that she was covering up. If there was a lightbulb moment in Ben’s career, this was it. Most people agree that Nixon could have avoided resignation had he confessed to the low-level sins of Watergate right away. One of the central lessons of Watergate, which has been hammered home innumerable times since, is that it’s always the cover-up that gets you.
And so Ben decided that he and the paper would let it all hang out, that they would tell the truth about the Janet Cooke episode in the pages of The Washington Post. Instead of allowing others to gore the ox, they would gore their own.
In making that decision, Ben was helped by an institution that he had put into place at the Post shortly after taking over as executive editor. While his creation of the feature writing category at the Pulitzer committee ended up coming back to bite him with Janet Cooke, his support for the creation of an ombudsman position at the Post in 1969 would come full circle, too—to save him.
Most major news outlets have an ombudsman on the staff now. Ombudsmen are internal critics, charged to represent the interests of viewers or readers while remaining insulated from regular editorial process and pressure. Freed by that insulation, ombudsmen are expected to speak truth directly back to the organization they work for.
The first American news ombudsman was appointed in 1967, at the Louisville Courier-Journal. The original charter for the ombudsman in Louisville was to offer internal criticism to the staff, without printing those observations in the newspaper itself. There wasn’t a public component. In November of 1969, Phil Foisie, the longtime foreign editor of the Post, proposed that the Post create an ombudsman position with the added responsibility of publishing an uncensored column in the newspaper. In essence, he wanted to create a forum for accountability to readers and a way for the paper to air its own dirty laundry. “I realize the risk in this,” he wrote to Ben and to Gene Patterson on November 10, 1969. “There could be embarrassment.” But, he went on, “There should also be an enormous gain.”
This was a serious proposal, and it would cause a good deal of reflection among the higher-ups at the paper. According to Don Graham, Ben wasn’t overly thrilled about empowering an ombudsman, but Kay pushed him hard on it because she thought it was a good idea. In 1970, the formal position of ombudsman was created at the Post, and Dick Harwood, one of Ben’s closest companions and a fiercely fair and independent man, was chosen as the first. At Pugwash the following year, Ben went so far as to call the installation of Harwood a “bold self-destruct step” because of the breadth of the ombudsman’s charter and the unpredictability of the outcome. Asked why he wanted to stick with it in the end, Ben said, “Fairness.”
The vision of 1969–1970, and the hard work required to make the ombudsman position stick at the Post, paid off in the wake of Janet Cooke. There was a great deal of demand inside the Post for a thorough account of how the fabrication could have happened; at one point, nearly twenty reporters wanted to staff the story. But Ben didn’t need twenty reporters, and he resisted them. (“This was no time for the inmates to take over the institution,” he wrote later.) The reason he could resist them was that he had an ombudsman by the name of Bill Green.
Green wasn’t a career journalist. He worked in the administration at Duke University and served only for a year as the ombudsman at the Post before returning to Duke. He was at the Post for the publication of Cooke’s story, and he was there when it all fell apart. On the day that the Post announced its return of the Pulitzer, Ben approached Green about putting something together about Cooke, and Green accepted. “I wrote this story of ‘Jimmy’s World’ after being invited to do so by The Washington Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee,” Green wrote in his story, four days later. “It is important to understand the verb, ‘invited,’ because if I had been assigned to do it, that would have violated the relationship The Post has maintained with its ombudsmen for over a decade. The central idea is autonomy for the person who sits in this chair. Without it, the ombudsman would be a fake, like ‘Jimmy.’ With it, the Post takes its chances, as it should.”
Ben was willing to take his chances, and he gave the order from on high that everybody was to cooperate with Green’s inquiry. He also ordered that Green be given as much space in the paper as he wanted, no restrictions. With the blessing of Ben and Don Graham, Green interviewed everybody involved in the story—all the editors, other reporters who had doubts, everybody—except for Cooke herself, who wouldn’t cooperate.3 On Sunday, April 19, just four days after the Post had discovered the fraud, Green ran a comprehensive fourteen-thousand-word piece about how “Jimmy’s World” had ever come to be. The story, “Janet’s World,” ran as the off-lead on the front page and then jumped to four complete pages inside.
“It is the classic work of ombudsmanship, still to this day,” Mike Getler told me. His opinion matters more than most. At the time of our interview Getler was the ombudsman for PBS, but before that he had been a longtime Post reporter, editor, and ombudsman himself. “It was sensational. Thorough and excellent, no punches pulled.”
Green’s report is the reason that most of the facts of the story are known today. He gives the full blow-by-blow, and nobody comes out looking perfect. Woodward is full of self-blame, as is Milton Coleman. Ben is presented not as negligent but as removed, too insulated to have heard the doubts. Though nobody questioned the basic facts in Green’s report, some would fault him for being too positive about the Post generally, largely because of his “conclusions” section in which he made the basic point that the Janet Cooke episode had been an “aberration that grew in fertile ground.”
“To believe that this mistake, big as it was, challenges the honesty of any other story in The Post or any other newspaper, is over-reaching. It won’t wash. There is no evidence whatsoever that this kind of thing is tolerated at this paper. To over-reach the other way, if this experience tightens discipline in the news process, it may have done some good,” he wrote. His final sentence: “The Post is one of the very few great enterprises in journalism, and everybody associated with it ought to be proud of it.”
That conclusion rubbed some people the wrong way,4 but for the people who worked at the Post it offered a kind of public redemption: Janet Cooke couldn’t and wouldn’t taint them forever. As one reporter told me, Green’s piece “in a way exonerated us, because we were a very serious newsroom, very dedicated to truth, and that came through shiningly.”
“There is only one damage control, and that’s the truth,” Ben told Charlie Rose in 1995. “And you get it out. And I must say, in that dark, dark moment, I was very proud of that.”
Green delivered his report on the morning of Saturday, April 18, and Ben read it shortly thereafter. Years later Green wrote to Ben about that moment, surely one of the most potentially uncomfortable in the history of the Post:
No compliment can rival the one you delivered on that Saturday morning when you came in from your place in West Virginia to see my Janet Cooke piece. It had been punched into the system by Bill Greider because I wrote it on a manual typewriter. After reading it through, you emerged from your office and said precisely this, in a voice that could be heard all the way to the sports desk: “Green, you ungrateful son-of-a-bitch, I salute you!”
That was one for the ages. It ranks high among my private treasures.
At a conference on ombudsmanship in the nineties, Ben would say that they could never have gotten out of the Janet Cooke mess without Bill Green. “I could have talked myself blue in the face and been on every radio station and television station and written a piece for ‘Outlook,’ and the critics and skeptics would have said, ‘Sure, sure.’ ” Green had written a definitive account that the public could believe—and that was all that he needed to do.
One questioner wanted to know if Ben ever thought that any of the Post’s ombudsmen, including Green, had criticized the paper unfairly.
“I sure did,” Ben said.
“What did you do in that case?”
“I ate it.”
1 All dialogue (and most reconstruction of events) from Cooke’s interrogation comes from Bill Green’s piece that appeared in the Post on April 19, 1981. It was written in the days immediately after the discovery, when what people had said and done was still fresh in their minds. Nobody has disputed the basic accuracy of Green’s account to me.
2 Even in her resignation letter, Cooke had problems with accuracy, though she was admittedly under duress. She said that her story of September 28, 1981, had been a “serious misrepresentation,” when in fact the story had run the previous year. As she told me, through the reporter Mike Sager, David Maraniss had dictated the letter to her. “I simply signed it,” she wrote. “Hindsight being what it is, I would handle that quite differently now.”
3 The only public comments Cooke has ever made about the “Jimmy’s World” scandal were in an appearance on Phil Donahue’s talk show in 1982 and in a mini-PR blitz around the publication of Mike Sager’s article about her in GQ in June 1996. She cooperated with that article, which she and Sager then shopped for a movie deal. TriStar pictures bid $1.6 million, paying the two $750,000 up front and promising an additional $850,000 if the movie were ever made, which it hasn’t been. Since then, her silence has continued; through Sager, she provided one comment about her resignation letter but otherwise rejected my requests for an interview.
4 “Here then, after zillions of hard-hitting interviews with some of the finest friends and co-workers it has ever been my privilege to know, are all the facts, every single one, about the scandal that has rocked the known universe to its very core,” Michael Kinsley wrote in a parody of Green in The New Republic. Under a mock “conclusions” section, Kinsley urged that “2) Bob Woodward should continue to be quoted in The Washington Post every day expressing appealing sentiments of self-effacement and modesty. 3) The Washington Post should remain a triumphant vindication of the First Amendment.”