They were the saddest things I had ever read, those notes. Each expressed in a few lines the pain of realizing, too late, that love might have been right next to you, and you had let it slip away. I tried to imagine the failures of nerve that lay behind each of the plaintive messages—the embarrassment that had come over someone’s face, the sentence that wasn’t finished, the pounding heart. They were afraid to speak. He’ll think I sound stupid. . . . She’ll think I’m too forward. And then the moment had passed, the person was gone—and instantly, they began to regret it, and wanted it back. So they bought these advertisements, in the hope they could rewind the tape and try again.
IF I HAD BEEN a real human being, I would have resolved that night to do something about my own loneliness and isolation. But I was a journalist, so I decided to commission a story. At my morning meeting the next day, I told my Lifestyle colleagues that we were going to do a piece looking for the people who were looking for love. We would investigate those notices on the “I Saw You” page and see if we could find the people—the brunette in Starbucks who smiled, the man in the pew at St. Mark’s Church—and bring them together. Love was the last frontier in our fragmented, bewildering country, I told my colleagues. Where did we find it? How did some people escape the inevitability of unhappiness? Was it luck, or an act of will?
Everybody thought it was a good idea. But I could tell by the looks in their eyes that they were wondering whether something was wrong with me.
EIGHTEEN
HOWARD BACON’S FINAL BATTLE WITH GALVIN WAS TRIGGERED by something so ordinary that nobody saw it coming—least of all Bacon. I saw him at a story conference the day before the flap began, and he was his usual self—those long silences punctuated by niggling questions about stories. I’m not sure he had focused on the story that ultimately got him in trouble. When the Local editor pitched it at the three o’clock meeting, the only question he asked was whether it had been lawyered.
The story concerned the pastor of New Calvary Full-Gospel Temple, a church in Northeast where the mayor sometimes worshiped. The pastor’s name was Elwood R. Carnes, and the story alleged that Mayor Marquand had been steering city contracts to him—to administer antidrug programs and senior-citizen housing. In return, the story said, Pastor Carnes had been a loyal lieutenant in Marquand’s political machine, delivering voters by the thousands on election day and contributing handsomely to his campaigns. It was an ordinary, garden-variety local corruption story—the kind the Sun ran every few months to absolutely no effect, other than infuriating black readers and convincing the mayor that the paper was out to get him. There was nothing libelous in the story; one of our lawyers had indeed vetted it prior to publication. But there was a tone, an implicit sneer at black Washington and its political and religious institutions—which had been intertwined for years, whether the Sun liked it or not.
Galvin arrived at his usual seven-thirty the next morning to read the paper and take phone calls. He’d started publishing a special phone number so people could call him between eight and nine and tell him what they thought about the newspaper with a heart. This morning, the phone had been ringing since dawn. The first to reach him was Pastor Carnes himself. He was in tears, Galvin told me later. He couldn’t understand why, among the dozens of local ministers who were on the mayor’s payroll, the Sun had landed on him.
Soon after that, Mayor Marquand called.
“So I see we’re back to the old racist bullshit,” said the mayor. “But now, you don’t just send your dogs after me, you go after my pastor! Racial Healing, my ass!” He was angry. He had stuck his neck out in the black community for Galvin, and now it had been chopped off.
“I didn’t know the Carnes story was coming,” answered Galvin. “Honestly, I’m as upset about this as you are.”
“Bullshit,” said the mayor succinctly. “You know how I found out about this? My wife, Edna, called me at six-thirty from the health club. Jesus!”
“Heads will roll, when I find out how this happened. I promise you that.”
“Bullshit,” the mayor repeated. “I don’t believe you. You’re the boss over there. Nothing runs in that newspaper without your say-so. Don’t lie to me! But at least now I know where I stand with you. I know how to deal with your racist newspaper—been doin’ it for years—and so does this community.”
“I am genuinely, deeply sorry,” said Galvin. And you couldn’t doubt it, listening to him tell the story. All that racial baggage he’d tried to clear away had been dumped back in the hallway, for him and everybody else to trip over.
BACON DIDN’T ARRIVE UNTIL nine forty-five—which made matters considerably worse, because it gave Galvin more time to listen to nasty calls, and more time to get angry. It also gave him time to summon me to his office. He wanted someone to watch, like a witness at an execution. When Bacon entered the building, the guard in the lobby told him to go up to the publisher’s office immediately.
“How could this have happened?” Galvin screamed at his editor, pointing to the Carnes story. Bacon was flummoxed. He hadn’t realized he was walking into a combat zone.
“This story is a piece of shit!” Galvin raged on. “It illustrates everything I hate about journalism. It’s a cheap shot. It pisses off the community to no purpose, and it’s racist to boot. It ignores the essential fact about this minister, which is that he’s done a lot of good for people. How the fuck could this have gotten into the newspaper?”
“The lawyers looked at it,” answered Bacon. “They didn’t find anything wrong with it. Neither did I.”
“Well, then, you are a sorrier editor than I ever imagined. a style="1">Why didn’t you tell me it was coming? I am the publisher of this newspaper. I have been working with the mayor to try to help our city. This story concerns me, surely. Didn’t it occur to you to give me some advance warning?”
“Mr. Hazen never asked to read anything in advance. He thought that was inappropriate.”
The reference to the previous publisher pushed Galvin’s fury to a higher level. He was usually careful not to show his anger or to curse. But he had lost control. “You chickenshit!” he muttered, and as he spoke, he impulsively grabbed a Plexiglas tombstone off his desk and hurled it against the wall—missing Bacon’s head by a few feet, but close enough that the editor ducked.
“You’re pathetic.” The publisher shook his head in disgust. “I want a correction in the paper tomorrow. That’s the least we can do to repair the damage this article has caused. I want the correction on the front page, in the same place where the article ran.”
Galvin was a big man, and he was in a towering rage. But the editor stood his ground. “We don’t have anything to correct,” he said. “There were no mistakes in that article.”
“The whole article was a mistake! It attacked the religious life of the mayor of this city and a majority of its population. Jesus! You don’t get it, do you? This is why America hates journalists. You people think it’s okay to take a shit on someone, and when they get upset, you tell them it’s unethical! What’s the matter with you? Do you like to piss people off for no good reason? Is that it?”
“I stand by the article.” Bacon was trembling now with his own indignation. “And I must say that just because this newspaper is in bed with the mayor—as a result of the publisher’s poor judgment—that doesn’t mean we should stop investigating local corruption, or apologize when we find something wrong. Your friend the mayor is wasting the taxpayer’s money to support his cronies. Taxpayers are readers too. Don’t they matter?”
“Publish the correction,” said Galvin.
“I refuse. It would violate journalistic ethics to correct a story that has no mistakes, simply because it embarrasses the publisher.”
“You cocksucker! Don’t you talk that way to me. This is why America hates you. Because you’re arrogant. You don’t know how to apologize when you’re wrong. I’m telling you for the last time: Publish the correction in tomorrow’s newspaper.”
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p; “I refuse.” Bacon’s voice was small but firm.
“Then you’re fired.” Galvin rose from his chair and walked over to where Bacon was sitting. He looked enormous, looming over the pink-faced editor. He took Bacon’s arm and pulled him to his feet. “I want you out of this building by twelve o’clock.” Galvin grasped his editor by the shoulders and pushed him out the door.
BACON CALLED A MEETING of the newsroom at eleven o’clock. He stood atop a desk so that everyone could see him, and told the staff that he had just been fired. He explained the publisher’s demand for a correction of the Carnes story, and the reasons for his refusal, and made a flowery speech about journalistic ethics that had a lot of people crying. Bacon knew his audience. Journalists are sentimentalists. They’re always ready to sing the “Marseillaise.”
When Bacon walked out of the building at noon, the whole staff stood and applauded. People were in tears again—praising the editor and cursing the publisher. And then something curious happened. A few reporters who had worked for years with Bacon walked out after him in protest, and then a few dozen more—and suddenly the whole newsroom was marching out of the building and down into the street. It was a mob scene. There must have been five hundred people raising their fists in the air and screaming up at Galvin’s office. I joined the walkout too, partly because I was afraid to look like Galvin’s stoolie. As I surveyed the angry crowd, I thought, This is how revolutions begin. They were chanting and hollering—calling for a strike to shut down the paper until Galvin resigned.
It would have gotten ugly, I’m sure, if Bacon hadn’t stepped in. He grabbed a bullhorn and called out to the crowd. He told them he appreciated their support, but the best way they could honor him was to go back upstairs and publish a great paper the next day. This wasn’t a strike issue, he said. The community might misinterpret their protest, and that would damage the Sun. “Please go back to work,” he urged them. “The battle for good journalism is one you’re going to have to fight with this publisher every day.”
A class act, you’d have to say. I still didn’t like Bacon, but I must concede that he played the last hand pretty well. It landed him a fat teaching job at Berkeley too, which illustrated another rule about Washington. If you leave it the right way, you’re in fat city forever.
GALVIN THEN COMMITTED WHAT people thought at the time was an act of desperation and folly. At one o’clock, he posted a notice on the board downstairs that he had accepted Bacon’s resignation. As Bacon’s successor, the notice said, he was naming the Sun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign editor, Candace Ridgway.
Candace raced up to his office when she heard the news. So did I. The announcement scared me. It was too quick, too open to misinterpretation. The newsroom was completely crazy by that point, and people were shouting to Candace as she headed upstairs that she should refuse the job. I met her in the lobby outside Galvin’s door. She was dressed elegantly in a blue suit, with a short skirt and a fitted jacket—too stylish for an editor.
“He’s gone nuts!” she said when she saw me. “What am I going to do?”
The door opened and out walked Sandy Galvin. He was beaming. As far as he was concerned, something wonderful had just happened. He’d found an excuse to get rid of an editor he regarded as incompetent and untrustworthy, and install someone talented and pliant.
“You can’t go through with this!” said Candace when we were inside his office. “This is a mistake.”
Galvin shook his head. Journalists were crazy. They didn’t understand management. That was the only explanation, in his mind, for Candace’s reluctance. “It’s not a mistake. You’re the best editor at the paper, with the credentials to prove it. The fact that you’re also my friend is irrelevant. You’re the best. I’d pick you even if I didn’t like you. Isn’t that right, David?”
I didn’t answer. This was one argument I didn’t want to be in the middle of.
“You should have told me, at least, before you announced it,” she said.
“But that would have given you a chance to say no. This way, you can’t back out.”
“Yes, I can. I can issue my own press statement declining the job. Things are so screwed up around here already, it wouldn’t surprise anyone.”
“Don’t do that, my dear,” he said tenderly. “Accept this promotion. You’ve earned it. I’m offering you a chance to run one of the greatest newspapers in the world. It’s my gift to you. It makes me happier than anything I’ve ever done. Take it, and do great things with it. That’s all I want.”
She folded her arms across her chest and looked him in the eye. “You may regret it,” she said.
“Impossible. How could I conceivably regret it?”
“If I take this job, I’m going to do it the right way. I’m a journalist, and I believe in our code of ethics, even if you think it’s stupid. Right now, the credibility of the newspaper is at stake. If people think I’m your lackey, it will destroy the Sun.”
Galvin’s smile widened. “I agree with everything you just said. That’s why I’m naming you editor. Because I trust you to do what’s right for the paper.” He reached out to shake her hand, but she wasn’t finished.
“I won’t run that correction,” she said. “Bacon was right. The Carnes article may have been a cheap shot, but it wasn’t factually incorrect.”
Galvin stiffened; the smile vanished. “Give me this one, Candace. The mayor expects a correction. He deserves one. I’ve worked hard to get this city on a new footing, and I don’t want to backslide. A correction will say to the community that we’re sorry we offended them. What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong is that it’s wrong. It’s the principle. Sometimes a great newspaper offends people. It’s inevitable. We don’t apologize for that; it’s our job. But people will forgive us in time, if we show we care about them.”
“I want that correction on the front page tomorrow, Candace. It’s important to me. I don’t want to have to back down on this. It would send the wrong signal.”
They stood a few feet apart—the highborn journalist and the lowborn tycoon who wanted to be a publisher. This was their moment; they had traveled such a long way to get here. I couldn’t see how either could back down; they would have to undo their life histories. But I didn’t understand then where the fulcrum really lay in that relationship.
Candace turned to me. “We need some time alone to work this out, David. Would you excuse us?”
I left the room and waited at the end of the corridor in one of the leather chairs set out for visitors. After five minutes, Candace emerged from Galvin’s office. She shook his hand; he kissed her cheek. She walked toward me, her eyes glowing, ready to step right out of the frame of that picture and into another.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We compromised,” she said. “I agreed to become editor, and he agreed not to publish a correction of the Carnes story.”
“You won,” I said, with genuine astonishment. But she had already headed down the hall to the elevator, to greet her new staff.
CANDACE HELD A STAFF meeting that afternoon at four. She didn’t stand on the desk the way Bacon had, but she bellowed out her remarks. There was a huge crowd, bigger even than for Bacon’s teary departure. A lot of people in the newsroom didn’t know Candace—she’d spent so many years overseas. And she was the first woman ever to hold the top editing job, so there was curiosity. People wanted to believe that she would be a good leader, but Bacon’s pals were already circulating the rumor that Galvin was sleeping with her.
Someone asked me whether it was true they were having an affair. I thought a moment. “Could be,” I said. I wasn’t going to lie to protect them. She was going to have to deal with it eventually.
People crowded around the new editor as she emerged from her office in Foreign. She had been to the beauty parlor since I saw her outside Galvin’s office. The wispy look I loved—the windblown hair falling across her face—was gone. It was all neat, clipped, hair-spraye
d in place. She looked so regal, people pressed toward her to get a closer look. It was as if they needed to touch her to make sure that she was real—that she had ballast, and wouldn’t just float away. And they did need her now. Publishing a serious newspaper requires an act of will. It’s so much easier to tell lies, bend to pressure, tell people what they want to hear. That was the part Galvin didn’t understand, in all his righteous indignation. There is a difference between newspapers that tell the truth, and those that don’t.
“This has been a roller-coaster day,” Candace began, “but I hope it will have a happy ending.” People clapped, even at that; they were so eager for something to hold on to.
“Mr. Galvin asked me to become editor today, as you know. What you probably don’t know is that I refused his offer, until he promised that I would be independent of the business side of the newspaper—including the publisher.” At this, there was a spontaneous burst of applause. Candace called out for quiet. I could see the determination on her face: She was going to lead this institution; it was her destiny.
“Mr. Galvin also asked me to publish a front-page correction of this morning’s story about Pastor Carnes, just as he had asked Howard Bacon to do this morning. Like Howard, I refused. I told Mr. Galvin I would not take the job unless he withdrew this demand. After some discussion, he agreed, and there will be no correction.” There were more shouts now, of real jubilation. She had forced him to back down. She had defied the publisher and won.
The Sun King Page 19