In public life for half a century, my image and reputation have had more ups and downs than the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. I have been called savior and sinner, fool and wise man, crusader and exploiter, hothead and dope. I am routinely scorned, admired, beloved, and belittled. Those passing judgment usually base it on when they tuned in. Were you around for my early days as a crusading local newsman? Did you waste an evening inside Al Capone’s empty vault? Were you watching when the bombs dropped in Afghanistan or Iraq, or did you tune in to the raucous talk show when my nose got broken in the best television studio brawl ever caught on tape?
I am hard to nail down because of a shifting self-image. A moving target, even to myself, I have been intent variously on doing good or doing well, being taken seriously or just being successful. In the beginning it was easy. Money was a byproduct. The media was the message, and I used its power to fix what ails us. I made a historic start. In 1972, at age twenty-eight and with only two years in the news business, I changed the world for families touched by developmental disabilities. With a crusade targeting Willowbrook, a notorious institution that was America’s largest and worst, I wrote and reported a searing exposé, “The Last Great Disgrace.”
The blockbuster launched a movement that eventually closed all of the nation’s major institutions for the population once described as mentally retarded. That was forty-five years ago, but in many ways it was my professional peak. I have never been more popular or highly regarded. The rest of my life since Willowbrook has been a postscript, a long and winding follow-up, never matching that period of renown and acceptance. Respected by peers and public, I had it all. I was famous. Coming from a mediocre background—a skinny, asthmatic, pimply-faced mutt—to have wealth and fame was enormously appealing. It drew me into the quandary that tormented much of my professional life. Am I a journalist or a celebrity? Juggling those sometimes-competing goals is a challenge I have not always won.
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and my employment by the conservative rabble-rousers of Fox News, and more recently with the coming of the Age of Trump, my professional life has been even more difficult to define. How could a sincerely progressive native-born Jew-Rican New Yorker like me ever work for an outfit better suited to the vibes of Orange County, Dixie, Appalachia, or the Mountain West? How could I not condemn and obstruct a wrecking ball like Donald Trump, who so many of my progressive friends abhor?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not complaining about the choices I made. Sometimes seduced by the dark side of show business, I have been on a hell of a ride. Despite macho posturing and more serious lapses, I have also kicked some major journalistic butt. What makes me grind my teeth is that because of my tabloid history I am not taken as seriously as my work often deserves.
This narrative will reassure friends, infuriate enemies, and settle some grudges, especially surrounding my obsessive pursuit of Osama bin Laden, which is the real core of this book. It will also explain where my head and heart are late in a life lived in plain sight. Not as self-assured or certain as I once was, for better and worse, I have followed the traditional cliché that if you are not liberal as a young person, you have no heart, but if you are not more conservative deeper in life, you have no brain. I still support Roe v Wade, gun control, civil and immigrants’ rights, and the need for universal health care, but detest liberals who shun responsibility and blame cops, rich white people, and corporations for everything that ails us. I call it pragmatic idealism.
Over five decades, I have met most of the era’s good guys and bad, from Ronald Reagan to Charles Manson, Fidel Castro to Yasser Arafat, Muhammad Ali to Elvis, John Lennon, and Michael Jackson. Two from that larger-than-life crowd figure heavily in this book, both longtime friends. Donald J. Trump, who I met as an up-and-coming real estate developer and playboy from Queens, New York, is our President. Despite the fact that I disagree with many of his policies, and despite the peer pressure from my old downtown crowd, our friendship endures.
Erica and me with Roger and Beth Ailes. Chelsea Piers, New York, August 2003.
The late Roger Ailes was a mentor and founding chief of Fox News. Once ruler of the media universe, and brilliant creator of the most important conservative news outlet ever, Roger was forced to resign in July 2016 after being accused of serial sexual harassment of young female staffers. The scandal that destroyed his career also ended his life. With his already deteriorating health, compromised by the stress and shame of his dismissal, he died less than a year after being outed by a ground-breaking lawsuit filed by former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson. His scandal was the fuse that helped ignite a firestorm of harassment allegations that burns to this day from New York newsrooms to Congress and the White House, to the casting couches of Hollywood, scorching scores of powerful old men including sixty-eight year-old Bill O’Reilly, another former colleague from my unfashionable era whose ratings long dominated cable news.
Ironically, many of those targeted in the purge had until recently been hailed as champions of progressive life. Celebrated actors Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey and Democratic Party stalwart Harvey Weinstein apparently hid disgusting secrets behind masks of political correctness. Former Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken was forced to resign from the Senate when photos surfaced of him pretending to grope the breasts of a bulletproof vest-wearing female radio host as she slept. Civil rights icon, eighty-eight year old Congressman John Conyers left public life in tottering disgrace as did three more friends, CBS’ Charlie Rose, PBS’ Tavis Smiley and, stunningly, NBC Today’s long-reigning host Matt Lauer.
I tweeted in sympathy for the wreck of Lauer’s career that “News is a flirty business & it seems like the current epidemic of #SexHarassmentAllegations may be criminalizing courtship & conflating it with predation.” An explosion of anger and ridicule followed. In attempting to be compassionate to someone who always treated my family and me with respect, I was insensitive to his alleged victims. I survived the cacophony of outrage, but have much in common with those who did not. Our generation are dinosaurs, creatures of a bygone era struggling despite our success to remain relevant. Because our lives crisscrossed during this pivotal time in America’s history and mine, some of my contemporaries are necessarily part of this narrative, especially Roger Ailes and President Trump. I am not here to tell their stories, only how they intersected and impacted my own.
Several months after I completed the first draft of this manuscript in 2016, all hell broke loose at Fox News. With Beth and Roger Ailes at Erica’s fortieth birthday party at the Monkey Bar, New York, January 2015.