Janet Cooke is a beautiful black woman with dramatic flair and vitality, and an extraordinary talent for writing. She is also a cross that journalism, especially The Washington Post, and especially Benjamin C. Bradlee, will bear forever. At the age of twentysix, she wrote a vivid, poignant story about an eight-year-old heroin addict who was regularly shot up by his mother’s live-in lover. The story made page one, on Sunday, September 28, 1980, and held the city in thrall for weeks. The story earned Cooke the Pulitzer Prize for feature reporting on April 13, 1981.
In the earliest hours of the morning of April 15, 1981, Janet Cooke confessed that she had made it all up: there was no Jimmy, there was no live-in lover. From that moment on, the words “Janet Cooke” entered the vocabulary as a symbol for the worst in American journalism, just as the word “Watergate” went into the vocabulary as a symbol for the best in American journalism. *
I had known about the story as it worked its way up the reporting and editing ladder. I had read it thoroughly the week before it ran on page one, and found it riveting. It was titled “Jimmy’s World,” and it started this way:
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 frame. “Bad, ain’t it,” he boasts. “I got me six of these.”
And it ended this way:
[Ron] grabs Jimmy’s left arm just above the elbow, his massive hand tightly encircling the child’s small limb. The needle slides into the boy’s soft skin like a straw pushed into the center of a freshly baked cake. Liquid ebbs out of the syringe, replaced by bright red blood. The blood is then reinjected into the child.
Jimmy has closed his eyes during the whole procedure, but now he opens them, looking quickly around the room. He climbs into a rocking chair and sits, his head dipping and snapping upright again, in what addicts call “the nod.”
In between, around a startling illustration of young Jimmy reaching his arm toward the reader, Janet Cooke promised authenticity with details such as these:
• On Jimmy’s mother: She never knew her father. Like her son, Andrea spent her childhood with her mother and the man with whom she lived for 15 years. She recalls that her mother’s boyfriend routinely forced her and her younger sister to have sex, and Jimmy is the product of one of those rapes. Depressed and discouraged after his birth (“I didn’t even name him, you know? My sister liked the name Jimmy, and I said, ‘OK, call him that . . . who gives a fuck. I guess we got to call him something’ “), she quickly accepted the offer of heroin from a woman who used to shoot up with her mother.
• On Jimmy’s house: Death has not yet been a visitor to the house where Jimmy lives. The kitchen and upstairs bedrooms are a human collage. People of all shapes and sizes drift into the dwelling and its various rooms, some jittery, uptight, and anxious for a fix, others calm and serene after they finally “get off.”
White reporters, much less white editors, don’t circulate much in Jimmy’s World. I had smoked marijuana maybe a dozen times in all of the sixties and seventies. And I have never used cocaine or heroin. To me, the story reeked of the sights and sounds and smells that editors love to give their readers. The possibility that the story was not true never entered my head.
After the fact, some reporters, particularly Courtland Milloy, a streetwise black reporter, told me that they had questioned the story. Milloy had taken Cooke in his car to look for Jimmy’s house. When she couldn’t find it, he shared his doubts with Milton Coleman, the savvy city editor, en route to becoming a national reporter and then assistant managing editor for Metro. Coleman told others he thought Milloy was jealous, but he did pass on Milloy’s opinion to Howard Simons. The story still had a long way to go, and Howard kept his feelings to himself.
The day Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize, April 13, 1981, the story—and my world with it—began to fall apart. The Toledo Blade, where Cooke had once worked, and the Associated Press started preparing biographical sketches about Cooke. The sketches were fatally contradictory. The AP sketch was based on a Pulitzer Committee handout, which in turn was based on biographical data submitted by Cooke herself, a few months earlier. The Blade’s sketch was based on its own Personnel Department records, and started when Cooke went to work there some years earlier.
The contradictions that emerged were devastating. One story said she had graduated magna cum laude from Vassar. Another said she had been to Vassar only for one year. One story said she had a master’s degree from the University of Toledo, another said she had only an undergraduate degree. One story said she had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. The other said nothing about the Sorbonne. The Pulitzer bio said Janet Cooke spoke French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. The old résumé claimed French and Italian.
The exact moment when I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach came in the early afternoon, when Dixie Sheridan from the admissions office of Vassar College called to say that she thought “we had a little problem.” At the very same moment Simons was on the phone to Lou Boccardi, then the AP’s vice president and executive editor, who was explaining the exact dimensions of “the little problem.”
At this point in my life I didn’t know much about confession. Not that I had never had to confess, starting with forging my father’s distinctive signature on a bad report card from Miss Bean in the fifth grade of Dexter School. But I had spent rather more time witnessing confessions from others—and enjoying it much more. But thanks to Watergate, I had learned a vitally important lesson: The truth is the best defense, and the whole truth is the very best defense.
Once we had identified the fraud, we set ourselves a simple goal: No one should ever learn anything more about the Janet Cooke case than The Washington Post itself revealed. The only question was how to achieve that goal. Twenty reporters on the Post asked me to name them as an investigative team to get the whole story, an invitation I declined quickly. This was no time for the inmates to take over the institution. I believed the investigation was tailormade for the resolutely autonomous Ombudsman. *
The Ombudsman had a contract which allowed him to write on any subject he chose. He could not be edited; he could not be assigned; and he could not be fired. When “Jimmy’s World” landed on us like a Kamikaze bomb, the Ombudsman was William Green. Bill had never been a career journalist. All told he had a couple of years on small papers in the South. He had been a public affairs officer in India for the United States Information Service, and he had worked as a special assistant to the former governor of North Carolina, Terry Sanford, while Sanford was president of Duke University. He taught a sophisticated course in journalism at Duke, and he was one wise and fair sumbitch, as the locals say, respected by the staff for his common sense and his respect for the individual.
In four days, working almost around the clock, Bill Green accomplished an incredibly difficult task: a no-holds-barred, meticulously reported account of what went wrong—18,000 words spread over the front page and four full pages inside.
How could any reporter, even someone I once described as a one-in-a-million liar, penetrate the editorial defenses of a newspaper whose commitment to truth was unequaled?
“Jimmy’s World” got into the paper, Green concluded, because of the failure of the system that is called “quality control” in other industries and “editing” in newspapers. By publishing “Jimmy’s World,” The Washington Post was “humiliated,” Green said in the lead of his front page story, on Sunday, April 19, because editors abandoned their vaunted professional skepticism.
Cooke had first come to my attention in a letter saying she thought she was ready for the big time, after more than two years at the Toledo Blade. An editor gets dozens of such letters every month. Hers stood out because she produced clips that showed she could write like a dream; she had top-drawer college credentials; and she was black. The answer to a modern editor’s prayers. I passed her résumé on to Woodward, who was then assistant managing editor for Metro, with an expression of interest. Female Phi Beta Kappa graduates of Seven Sisters colleges who can write the King’s English with style don’t grow on trees, white or black, and we were a decade into our commitment to increase the number and quality of minorities and women on the staff. The Post hired Cooke six months later, after she impressed all the editors who interviewed her, myself included, except for Herb Denton, the black city editor who thought there was too much Vassar in her.
Her Vassar credentials were never checked. This was our first mistake, and it was fatal. If we had found out that she lied when she claimed she had an honors degree from Vassar, of course, that would have been the end of it. She wouldn’t have had the chance to make any more mistakes.
How come we never checked? Simply put, Janet Cooke was too good to be true, and we wanted her too bad.
There is a joke in our business that every blue moon or so, a reporter runs into a story, or more likely a rumor, that is so fantastic that it’s almost a shame to check it out. Check rumors like these, and you run the almost certain risk of finding quick, credible evidence that the story is just plain not true. We resist that impulse with stories, but we did not resist the same impulse in making this particular personnel decision. At a time when we were struggling to meet our commitment to increase the quantity and quality of minority and female journalists on the paper, Janet Cooke had “can’t miss” written all over her. What the hell were we waiting for? Grab her before the New York Times does, or Newsweek, or television.
And she was hired.
Janet Cooke hit the ground running at the Post, with fifty-two bylines in her first eight months on the staff. As Bill Green wrote later: “She was a conspicuous member of the staff. When she walked, she pranced. When she smiled she dazzled. Her wardrobe was always new, impeccable and limitless.”
Her immediate editor, Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, described Cooke to Green as “consumed by blind and raw ambition, but talented.” “She was Gucci and Cardin and Yves St. Laurent,” Aplin-Brownlee reported. “She went out on [a story from the black ghetto] in designer jeans, and came back to tell me that somebody asked her ‘What kind of a nigger are you?’ She thought it was funny.”
Cooke was not popular with black men on the staff, perhaps because she refused to date any of the many who asked. She did date several of the white reporters, but she was more interested in her work than in her social life. She told one friend she wanted a Pulitzer Prize in three years, and a job on the National staff in three to five years. She soon lost herself in an assignment to look into a new kind of heroin, circulating in the city, so strong it was said to ulcerate the skin.
She brought back 145 pages of handwritten notes taken during this assignment. Aplin-Brownlee thought they were good enough to show to Milton Coleman, and Coleman thought them good enough to bring Cooke in for a talk about how they should be “storified”—made into a story. It was during this conversation that she first mentioned reports of an eight-year-old addict. Coleman stopped her short: “That’s the story. Go after it. It’s a front page story.”
Three weeks later Cooke told Coleman she had found the eight-year-old addict, had even talked to his mother. Coleman told Cooke she could promise the boy’s mother confidentiality first, then anonymity. With that, Coleman felt no need to know the woman’s name, at least not then.
“The jugular of journalism lay exposed,” in Bill Green’s great phrase, “the faith an editor has to place in a reporter.”
Should Coleman have gotten the name of the “addict” and his mother? Probably. If not then, damn soon. Should he have gotten the address? In sober second thought, yes. An address is an anchor that can be checked by anyone, any time. Names of unknowns are ephemeral. But Cooke’s first memo, which we all saw, was filled with such a rich supply of apparently convincing detail—eight-foot plastic sofas, blue and green Izod shirts, Panasonic stereo equipment, fake bamboo blinds, rubber trees, brown shag rugs, and much more—that doubts died before they matured. For the first time, the “addict” had a name, Tyrone, and we knew which elementary school he attended when he wasn’t playing hooky. And so it moved—glacially, inevitably toward publication.
I knew nothing about Jimmy’s World. There were virtually no circumstances in which I would come into contact with Jimmy’s mother, or her live-in boyfriend, Ron, much less have a meaningful conversation with either of them. The same was true for Howard Simons. By the time the story was ready to publish, everyone concerned had so much at stake.
Almost 900,000 copies of the Post rolled off the presses early Sunday morning, September 28, 1980. The L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service took “Jimmy’s World” to more than three hundred newspapers in the United States and around the world. Jimmy was an overnight sensation. The Post’s phones rang off the hook. The police chief launched a mammoth search for the boy and his mother. Police threatened to subpoena Cooke and her notes, but backed off in face of Post resistance. Mayor Marion Barry quickly announced that the city knew Jimmy’s identity. There were also reports that Dr. Alyce Gullattee, director of Howard University’s Institute for Substance Abuse, knew Jimmy and his family.
It is hard for me to understand how those who later said they had doubts about “Jimmy’s World” could rationalize those doubts in view of the apparent corroboration of Cooke’s story by Barry and Dr. Gullattee. Aplin-Brownlee had been an early doubter and she stood by her guns. Courtland Milloy was a doubter, as soon as he took Cooke to look for Jimmy’s apartment and she couldn’t find it. But their doubts were more about Cooke than about her story. No one ever suggested that Cooke concocted the entire story. Worse, none of us editors thought about the life and safety of the child. If we had insisted that a Post doctor examine Jimmy, we would have escaped disaster. Pretty soon Cooke was working on another blockbuster about a fourteen-year-old hooker and her twenty-year-old pimp, and this time Woodward, who topped the reporting chain from Cooke up, and Coleman insisted on meeting the hooker themselves. When those appointments kept getting canceled, we thought the hooker and the pimp were getting cold feet. It did not occur to us that she had invented them, too.
By December, when newspapers nominate their best work for Pulitzer prizes, “Jimmy’s World” was the Post’s sole entrant in the category of local news reporting.
And on April 13, 1981, the worst happened: “Jimmy’s World” won a Pulitzer Prize.
In destroyers, under battle conditions, one of the most important jobs is damage control: how can the damage from a torpedo hit amidships, or a Kamikaze crash, or a boiler explosion be controlled so that the ship can limp back into port, and survive to fight another day? As an assistant damage-control officer of the U.S.S. Philip (DD498), I had learned that damage control is one of the most important jobs on any naval vessel. As the damage-control officer—read executive editor—of The Washington Post, I had learned that damage control is one of the most important jobs on a newspaper.
The first lesson of damage control is to get an accurate picture of the damage as soon as possible. At the Post, after “Jimmy’s World” exploded in the city room, we began our exercise in damage control by examining Janet Cooke’s Vassar credentials, figuring that if she lied there, it was likely that she lied elsewhere. I told Milton Coleman to take Miss Cooke “to the woodshed,” an old political practice described to me by Jim Rowe, once a member of FDR’s Kitchen Cabinet, and a longtime Washington powerbroker. Jim Rowe had taken Hubert Humphrey to the woodshed at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson, before LBJ decided on Humphrey as his vice-presidential running mate. When you take someone to the woodshed, Rowe told me, you get him off in a room alone and grill him about his taxes, his health, his girlfriends, his finances, his war record, his debts, his addictions, his innermost secrets. Both parties in the woodshed have to do their jobs for the process to be useful.
Coleman took Cooke to the woodshed by walking her across L Street to the bar of the Capital Hilton Hotel. At first Cooke stuck to her guns, but when Coleman called Vassar right then and there, she began her retreat. She had run into emotional problems at Vassar, she said, and completed only one year. What about languages, Coleman asked. Cooke insisted she spoke four. What about the Sorbonne? Cooke insisted she had attended the Sorbonne.
“And the Jimmy story?” Coleman asked.
“It’s true,” she lied.
At this point Coleman called in and we suggested he bring Cooke back into the side entrance of the Post, and up to the corporate offices on the eighth floor. When Woodward and I arrived, Janet Cooke was sitting on the sofa crying, Bill Green remembers, and said, “You get caught at the stupidest thing.”
But Janet Cooke was practicing her own brand of damage control—admitting to phonying her Vassar records but nothing else. I suddenly felt we had been pussyfooting around too long (because she was a woman and a black?), and what followed was not a pleasant conversation.
First, I asked her to say two words in Portuguese, any two. (I myself knew only two words of Portuguese, period: O gis . . . The chalk.) She said she couldn’t. I asked her if she had any Italian. She said she did not. I have spoken French since I was six years old, and I started asking her questions in French. Her replies suggested nothing like an ability to speak French. I told her she was lying. She was trying to cover up the truth. Just like Richard Nixon, I said, and that pissed her off. She didn’t like my questioning any more than I liked her answers. I finally told her she had twenty-four hours to prove that the Jimmy story was true, and walked out.
Woodward told her he didn’t believe the Jimmy story and was going to prove that she was lying if it was the last thing he ever did, and left the room.
Next we sent Coleman out with Cooke to find Jimmy’s house. Coleman called half an hour later, and said she couldn’t find it. He was now convinced that Cooke had made the whole thing up. The only holdout was Cooke herself. Simons and I went home, leaving Cooke in the hot seat answering tough questions from Woodward, assistant managing editor Tom Wilkinson, Coleman, and David Maraniss, the Maryland editor. Cooke complained that the questioning was “getting too cruel.”
“All I have is my story,” she added.
Finally, she was left alone with Maraniss, and Bill Green’s report described this conversation:
Cooke, crying: “I was afraid I was going to be left alone with you. The first time I saw you today I thought, ‘Oh boy! He knows and I’m going to have to tell him.’ I couldn’t lie to you. I couldn’t tell them. I never would tell Woodward. The more he yelled the more stubborn I was. Wilkinson represents the corporation. It means so much to Milton [Coleman]. You guys are smart. Woodward for the mind, you for the heart. . . . Why are you smiling?”
Maraniss: “Because I had a tremendous surge of empathy for you, refusing to submit to the institution in an absurd situation. You were strong not to give in. The institution will survive.”
Maraniss and Cooke talked for more than an hour, about their childhoods, about what she had gone through after her story was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
“You don’t have to say anything to the others,” Maraniss told her. “I’ll do it for you. What do I tell them?”
And suddenly the ordeal was over.
“There is no Jimmy, and no family,” Cooke confessed. She said she felt she knew enough to get away with it. She knew that Jimmy could never be found because he didn’t exist. She said she had prayed she wouldn’t get the Pulitzer, surely a first in the annals of journalism.
It was after 2:00 A.M. when I was called with the news that I had known for hours was coming. Once we had her written resignation in hand—and I can’t explain now why I let her resign rather than fire her on the spot for the grossest negligence—I woke Joe Pulitzer up in St. Louis to tell him we were returning the prize, with apologies. And at 7:00 A.M., I called Don Graham with the sledgehammer news, and I told him that if he felt I should resign, I would do so forthwith.
Sometimes I feel sorry for publishers. The best of them, meaning the only two publishers I have worked for in my entire adult life, ask only one thing of their editors: If you want us in on the landing, please include us in on the takeoff. Don and Kay would sure as hell be involved in this landing, taking heavy flak from colleagues jealous of their success and from natural enemies on the right who would start yelling for my scalp.
Don Graham’s support at this time, the lowest point in my career, was tremendous. And his support was public. Not only did he not want my resignation, he wanted us to get it behind us, get all the lesssons we could out of this misery, and get on with our task.
I have always worked better, more creatively even, when I am confronted with Augean tasks—when there is a pile of it in the middle of the road, if you will, and I have a good shovel, surrounded by good shovelers.
As if the pile in the road wasn’t big enough, the lions of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE)—almost one thousand strong—were in convention assembled in Washington, at that very moment. Not my favorite crowd, as I was not their favorite editor. The ASNE is composed predominantly of owners and editors of small newspapers—many of them southern—pillars of their communities whose problems and priorities did not coincide with mine. They are generally proud members of the establishment who don’t like to write about their fellow establishmentarians. Anyway, my old pal Tom Winship, then editor of the Boston Globe, was the ASNE president, and someone had convinced him that I would make an interesting program chairman, the guy who has to line up speakers and workshops for the four-day convention. There isn’t another man in the world I would have served as program chairman, especially after he prefaced his invitation by saying, “Everyone thinks I’m crazy to offer you this job.” The program I had arranged was fine, maybe even good, when Tom sidled up to me at the opening reception and suggested we have some kind of panel on the Janet Cooke affair. “There’s an awful lot of interest,” he remarked, as if I didn’t know.
Traditionally, program chairmen schedule one or two 8:00 A.M. workshops to begin each convention day, generally on esoteric topics, of interest to only a handful of editors. “Attitude Surveys . . . How Good Are They?” for instance, and good stuff like that. If you could draw a crowd of fifteen editors to one of these, you would set a new ASNE record.
I had scheduled an 8:00 A.M. session on the Ombudsman, an institution that interested me, but very few other editors. Charlie Seib, the Post’s former Ombudsman, and the wise and able editor of the Washington Star when it folded, was chairing the panel, and we spread the word that Janet Cooke would be Topic A, and that the program chairman, his very own self, would be among those present.
Well, more than 750 of my peers and their guests, plus five TV cameras, showed up at seven in the morning to watch me get raked over the coals. But the ordeal was made eminently survivable by the presence at my side of Don Graham. Photographers must have taken hundreds of pictures of me that day, but damn few—if any—without Don Graham’s arm around my shoulder. I’ll never forget it, and all these years later, his presence and his show of confidence still makes my neck tingle. And next to Graham, most of the time, was my predecessor as Post editor and a former president of the ASNE, Russ Wiggins, who had come down from Ellsworth, Maine, where he was editing a prize-winning weekly (and still does). Russ told everyone within earshot that he was delighted to learn of the lofty state of American journalism, a conclusion he had reached after listening to so many editors say that the Janet Cooke case could never happen on their papers. I’ll never forget the generosity of his presence that day, and so many other days.
It took no great genius to make the many mistakes we made in coming up with “Jimmy’s World,” just as it took no great genius to learn the lessons from our humiliation.
First, there really is no protection against a skillful liar, who has earned the trust of his or her editors. That is equally true of business, law, medicine, all professions. Unfortunately, it happens, however rarely, in the best of circles. Janet Cooke had been at the paper close to two years, and after the “Jimmy” disaster a careful examination of everything she had ever written for us revealed no other questionable facts.
• Michael Daly, columnist for the New York Daily News, resigned in May 1981 after fictionalizing aspects of a story about British troops bullying Irish rebels.
• WABC-TV faked letters from the public. The executive producer, the program director, a reporter, and two other staff members resigned.
• In December 1981—less than a year after Cooke won her Pulitzer—the New York Times Magazine featured an article called “In the Land of the Khmer Rouge,” describing a visit into the Cambodian hinterlands, where rebels under the deposed dictator Pol Pot were holding out. The story featured a vivid description of a battle, strongly suggesting that the author saw Pol Pot himself through field glasses on a distant hillside. Two months later, other publications (including The Washington Post and the Times itself) revealed that the author, one Christopher Jones, had never left his home in Spain, and had lifted entire passages from his own earlier dispatches to Time magazine and from André Malraux’s novel The Royal Way, set in Cambodia.
And others.
Second, check job applications and references carefully. Catch a liar at that stage of the employment process, and save yourself from a disaster you can’t imagine.
Third, beware of stories you want to be true, for whatever reason. And beware the culture that allows unknown sources to be accepted too easily. Double-check the one about the crooked politician, the arsonist fire chief, the philandering religious leader, the debutante madam. Then check them again.
On a really big story, find at least one naysayer, and listen to him (or her). If you can’t find one, assign someone to talk you out of running the story. We did that routinely on stories involving national security.
On a really big story, look for the reporters and editors who have some reservations. Encourage people to express their reservations about someone else’s story, and to listen to reservations expressed by others about their own stories.
And finally, never get discouraged by how easily things can go wrong, how hard it is to find the truth. Think of something else you’d rather be doing, if you can.
* * *
After all the crisis about Janet Cooke, I wrote this memo to Don Graham:
I have held a series of meetings—with Simons and Harwood, with AMEs, with the Metro staff, the National staff, the Sports staff and the Style staff, sharing my own thoughts and searching for information. I also had the “benefit” of many conversations with colleagues in town the week before, during the ASNE convention.
I have read more than 100 letters, most of them vile and hateful and vengeful.
And finally, I have walked the woods of West Virginia alone, looking for answers.
The frailties of our system are simple to identify:
• We put too much trust in Janet Cooke, given her experience, and given the obvious lack of precision in her information. I can find no sinister reason for that—sexual, racial, or anything else. Responsibility for this is uncomplicated, and direct from Coleman to Woodward to Simons to Bradlee.
• We failed to make even a cursory check of that part of her resume which dealt with her education. I take little comfort in the fact that I have been unable to find a newspaper (or law firm) which does make that check.
• We failed to insist that trust is a two-way street, from editors to reporters, and from reporters back to editors.
• We wrestled the complicated issue of witnessing a crime to a no-fall decision, probably because we got bogged down in the process of the Jimmy story.
• We have become careless about sourcing in general, losing sight of the Style Book injunction to seek maximum precision in the identification of sources, and to retreat from maximum identification with great reluctance.
• We have a communication problem, and a strange one: We share information down, better than we share it up. This one bugs me more than all the others, I guess, because I had thought I was “hanging out” with the staff so effectively that I could not miss anything as apparently prevalent as the doubts about Jimmy.
The corrections we should make seem equally simple:
• We routinely check all information in a resume, specifically including degree verification.
• Reporters must share the identity of any source with their editor. Any exception can be granted by the Executive Editor only, and there won’t be any exceptions.
• Reporters and editors must be reminded once more about the paper’s position on sourcing. Perhaps an addition to the Style Book along these lines:
“The source of information is a critically important part of any story. It gives readers the chance to decide for themselves what motives an informant may have for making information public. Accordingly, every effort must be made routinely to get information on the record with specific identification of the source.
“It is recognized, however, that valid reasons will exist for some source identification less than specific. In those circumstances, every effort must be made to give as precise an identification of the source as possible. The so-called ’geographical attribution’—State Department, Pentagon, Congress, White House, SEC, etc.—should be the minimum acceptable sourcing. And within those geographic areas, multiple refinements are almost always possible: House, Senate, staff, military, civilian, young, old, male, female, high-level, middle-echelon, etc.
“But it is essential that any retreat from specific identification be reluctant, grudging and precise.”
• We must find a way to insure that everyone shares fears and doubts with their superiors as well as with their colleagues.
• We must work on this whole question of our role as witnesses to crime. I doubt the wisdom of etching a policy on stone, but we need to be more comfortable before we make ad hoc decisions.
And we must not lose our nerve as a newspaper; we must not retreat into the safety of blandness. We must not give up on the role of a newspaper to have an impact on its community.
I never was any good at firing people, even after I came to understand that it was an essential management skill. I once asked Bob McNamara for advice on how to fire, since he had more top management experience—at Ford and the Pentagon—than anyone else I knew. I told him that one man I wanted to ease out was an eighty-two-year-old assistant city editor, who said he would jump off the Calvert Street Bridge if I fired him.
McNamara told me he had fired “dozens” of top managers at Ford, and almost all of them had threatened to kill themselves if he went through with it. Only one guy even tried, he said, and he made a botch of it.
I tried to delegate firing, but that never worked, either. Once a copy boy relieved himself in the desk drawer of our sports columnist, Shirley Povich, and I asked our assistant managing editor for administration, Robert E. Lee Baker, to fire him. Baker gave me a long lecture about compassion, about forgiving other people’s mistakes as they forgave mine, and the guy didn’t get fired . . . until some months later when he got drunk again, and passed out on the Ladies’ Room sofa.
I fired one reporter for plagiarism in a feature story about an historic Georgetown House. A Georgetown neighbor of mine, who had written a story on the house for the local historical society, stopped me in the street one day and said, “I didn’t know the Post sanctioned plagiarism.”
I fired a young Style reporter, with superstar credentials from Harvard, for lifting whole paragraphs without credit from J. D. Salinger in a feature story about the new singles communities in Washington’s suburbs. She found a job on one of the Detroit newspapers, but eighteen months after leaving the Post, she took her own life. She still haunts my memories.
I fired a political reporter for making up a quote from Robert Kennedy, a quite innocuous quote and one which Kennedy would probably have agreed to say. But between the first and second editions, he called me up to say that he had not said it; he had not even talked to the reporter.
I have never forgotten the Janet Cooke case, but the caravan does move on. Three months after the Cooke fiasco, the Washington Star folded. Just like that. After 129 years it disappeared, victim of mismanagement. It was already too late when the Kauffmanns and the Noyes heirs, whose forebears had founded this great newspaper in 1852, sold it to Texas businessman Joe L. Albritton. Too late, because they had let Phil Graham buy the Washington Times-Herald and get a morning monopoly, and they had let him keep that monopoly as reader habits shifted to morning newspapers.
The Star had one more go at survival, when Albritton sold the paper to Time Inc., but even the most powerful publishing force in the land couldn’t save it. They put more than $85 million into the paper in little more than a year, stole a few comic strips out from under the Post, tried to get the Post’s goat with an irreverent gossip column called “The Ear” (they got mine), but in the end they just plain slunk out of town.
They left a legacy of decency and principle. Newbold Noyes was responsible for that as the editor. After reading some flattering profile of me, a man who was a friend of Noyes and of me asked me, “Do you think you could have done with the Star what you’ve done with the Post?”
Answer: negatory.
I could take advantage of some of the finest newspaper people in the land, however. Especially the fabulous Mary McGrory. Everyone at the Post—owners, editors, just friends—had been trying to lure Mary away from the Star for years. She never gave any of us leeway. Far too loyal. I had known her, admired her, and loved her for years. In the sixties I had been allowed to carry her bags and typewriter during the presidential campaign. (We were known as McGrory’s “bearers.”) She had the best eyesight of any reporter in Washington. I’ll always remember a column she wrote about a Senate confirmation hearing for some pompous preppie. She never called him pompous; she just fixated on his garish argyle socks, and that was enough.
We had lunch. I said, “Now?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “How much?” She mentioned a number. We shook hands, and that was that. The Janet Cooke tide started to go out.