The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  “Spiritual?” he asked. He had that familiar mischievous twinkle in his eye as he posed the question.

  “Journalistic.”

  “Big difference.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Then I said, “I’m doing some research on pro-life groups and I’ve run up against a wall. I’m trying to find out about an organization called Fight for Life.”

  By the way, it’s important to note that Roger Sullivan is an active opponent of abortions, but with a twist. Rather than walk picket lines at abortion clinics or preach at Sunday mass, he instead works at teen centers throughout Dorchester, advising sexual abstinence where appropriate. And when he deems that impossible, he guides sexually active kids toward birth control.

  For this, the same church that for years tolerated so much pedophilia within its ranks threatened to defrock him. So Father Roger, as the kids call him, took his program underground, secretly providing high school age boys with condoms and steering girls to doctors who might prescribe the Pill. ARecord reporter uncovered evidence of his network about a year ago and wanted to run a story. Roger pleaded with me to intercede and stop it, and I’m not ashamed to say that I did. And here I was, playing life’s perpetual game of payback.

  “Bad news,” he said. “Very bad news.”

  My intuition was, as usual, correct. Roger leaned against the banister where people used to kneel for communion. He said, “You’re talking about a dangerous, militant group.”

  “An antiabortion group, I assume?”

  “They’ve gone beyond that these days.”

  I looked at him expectantly, and he added, “You of course remember that bombing last year at the stem cell research lab over in Cambridge? One of the lead scientists involved in embryo cloning was killed. Nobody’s ever been charged, but the word around the pro-life groups is that Fight for Life was behind it. I don’t know how you’d prove it now, because I hear they’ve all but disbanded and moved on to other states. Maybe state and federal investigators will tell you of their suspicions.”

  Well, so a Hail Mary journalistic maneuver comes true. Any better than this and I’d get down on my knees and say a prayer of thanks—something I hadn’t done in far too long. If I could prove in the pages of theRecord that Terry Campbell funded a fringe group that murdered a prominent MIT scientist, not only would his overtures to the paper be outright rejected, he might well be arrested.

  “Any contacts within the group?” I asked.

  Roger shook his head. “Not my kind of people.”

  I turned and quickly made my way down the aisle for the doors.

  “Peace be with you,” Roger called out to me.

  I turned and said, “I think it’s too late for that.”

  Oscar plunked two tumblers filled with gin and tonic on the marble bar of the Somerset Club and said to me in a soothing tone, “You just let me know what else you need, Jack.”

  Well, let’s start with a suit of armor, a bullet-proof car, a greater understanding of women, a takeover specialist to ward off Campbell Newspapers, and in case I get caught in another Florida swamp, a wet suit with a snorkel.

  “How about a bowl of pretzels, Oscar?”

  “I’ll bring them right over.”

  And with that, Robert Fitzgerald and I made our way through the empty, sunlit bar to a window table overlooking the gorgeous back garden, where the yellow, pink, and red tulips were full and round and open to the shower of light. As we took our seats, Robert said in that deep, sonorous voice of his, “You were beautiful from the altar, Jack. Paul would be so very proud of you. And I am.”

  I nodded my appreciation and took a long sip from my drink. Normally I don’t like to drink during the day. Today I’d make an exception.

  Regarding the venue, the Somerset Club is Boston’s oldest, and inarguably, most exclusive—read, Waspish—private haunt, which probably explains why it was so empty even during the lunch hour. There aren’t many true-blue, old school Wasps left these days, and those who are really don’t pay much heed to the old mores like their ancestors did. It also explains why I’m a member. In pursuit of new blood, the club fathers loosened their, ahem, lineage requirements, and with Paul Ellis’s help, accepted a young man, last name Flynn, from the hard luck streets of South Boston.

  Truth is, I don’t use the place very much, mostly because the closest thing they have to a gym is a busboy with the same phonetic name but none of the appeal. The University Club has a gym and several Jims, thus it’s where I choose to spend more of my time.

  The Somerset Club, though, was also where I came on the day John Cutter was buried five years ago. Paul Ellis invited me there for a drink. We sat and sipped scotch and talked about John, about the changing role of newspapers, about the peculiar difficulties of keeping a family business intact. And at the end, he asked me if I’d ever be interested in coming over to the business side of the paper. I told him no, and Brent Cutter was named president the next day.

  It was also the place where Paul, then the company president, took me for lunch on my first day as aRecord reporter. We dined on turkey clubs as he beamed across the table at me and told of the great relief in having me report at the one newspaper where I belonged.

  “You’ve found your life’s calling at this newspaper, just like your father before you,” he told me. “And what a great life it’s been, and a better life it will be.”

  Well, times change, even if places like the Somerset try not to change with them. Sometimes that change isn’t necessarily for the better, as evidenced by the prospect that the Cutter-Ellis clan may soon relinquish control of theRecord.

  “It’s been crazy, Robert,” I said, looking down at the table, then up at his face. “Paul’s dead. Someone’s trying to take our newspaper away from us. And on Monday morning someone took a few shots at me in Florida. I have to start figuring a way out of all this, and I need your help.”

  He leaned over the table and said, “What the hell do you mean that someone shot at you?”

  I told him, and he was surprised I hadn’t earlier. Then, just like Elizabeth, he asked if I had reported it to the authorities, knowing full well I hadn’t.

  “I’m going to tell Leavitt today,” I replied. “But look, I have an idea on another front.”

  He nodded, and I said, “I’ve thought about this long and hard. I’d like to launch a campaign to have you step in as interim publisher and get us through this mess. The paper needs you more than it ever has before.”

  I regarded him closely for a reaction. The room was so quiet I could hear Oscar start the dishwasher behind the bar. I could hear the steps of a busboy, I think Jim, walking with a tray of clinking glasses.

  Fitzgerald looked me in the eye and said, “My boy,The Boston Record has been published by a member of the Cutter-Ellis family for every one of its one hundred and twenty-seven years. Every one.” He paused here for effect, squinting at me he was staring so hard. “I’m flattered at the thought, but trust me when I tell you that I’m not the one to break that long and glorious streak.”

  He paused again, as if the backdrop of silence gave greater definition to his words. I remained quiet as well.

  He said, “You are. Paul Ellis looked at you as he would a son, and he wanted you to someday be publisher. I know that for a fact. I want you to be publisher. More important than any of that, you’ve gone out and learned the business inside and out. You’ve dedicated yourself to this wonderful paper. You should be publisher.” His voice was raised for these last few words.

  “Robert,” I said, “My name is Flynn, not Cutter or Ellis. My father was a pressman, not a fancy executive. I belong in the newsroom. You know that as well as I do. For chrissakes, I wouldn’t know an audit from an Audi.”

  “You belong,” he replied without missing a beat, “where this newspaper needs you most, and right now, that’s in the publisher’s suite. You know the journalism, the core mission. You hire people who know the rest.”

  We both sat the
re in silence, looking around but not at each other, or at least not me at him. What he was looking at, I’m not really sure.

  Finally, I asked him, “So you’re telling me no?”

  “What I’m telling you is that you should seek the job.”

  More silence, a longer silence. The busboy skirted out of the room carrying an empty tray. Oscar was pulling liquor bottles out of the well and wiping them down with a damp cloth. A young mother with a toddler in a white tennis sweater walked through the garden. I took a big swig of gin and tonic.

  “Well then,” I said. “How do I go about doing that? At least tell me that.”

  Fitzgerald reached his hand over the table and held my forearm as he drilled his eyes into mine.

  “Son,” he said, “I can’t tell you how you should be publisher. But I can tell you that you’ll make an excellent publisher. You have the foundation. What you don’t have in lineage, you make up for in brains. And you have the capacity to grow into the job. And I’ll be there to help you anytime you need it, including the day you start.”

  I looked down at my tumbler, which was either half empty or half full, depending on whether you were in the throes of a bender or in the midst of a twelve-step program. Either way, I pushed it to the side, suddenly figuring I didn’t need another drop of alcohol clouding my specious judgment.

  “Well,” I said, slowly, methodically, almost regretfully, “As always, Robert, I appreciate your counsel.” I paused and thought back to all those times that Paul had tried to lure me into a front office job. I thought about Sunday morning, when he let me know that he hadn’t even told Brent about the takeover bid, he had that little faith in him.

  I continued, “I’ve got to think this through more. I’ve got to figure out where the hell my life is going to go from here, and as importantly, where I want it to go from here.”

  As I said that, I thought back to Elizabeth’s visit the night before, her long legs in those faded jeans, the cut of her white tee shirt, the way her brown hair framed her perfect face. Then I thought of the way the moronic Brent Cutter thanked me outside the funeral a couple of hours earlier. Then I thought of the guy wading through the swamp, the look on his face as he took aim at me.

  The look on his face.

  I had seen him before, or at least someone who looked like him, someone who reminded me of him. I knew when I first saw him sitting in that car that he reminded me of someone.

  The look on his face.

  The North End. The basketball court.

  I slapped my hand on the table, rattling our respective glasses.

  “The guy who shot at me,” I said, apropos of nothing. “I saw him here in Boston on Sunday night. He was watching me play basketball on Prince Street and he was carrying a gun.”

  I stood up before Fitzgerald could say anything. I told him, “I’ll call you when I know more.”

  And with that, I went to seek danger, before danger once again sought me.

  Seventeen

  THE PLAINTIVE MOOD OFthe newsroom over the past two days had given way to a sense of palpable anxiety that smacked me upside the head the second I hurried into the safety of the building. Reporters were huddled around each other’s desks talking in low, dour voices. Sullen editors had lost the spring in their step as they paced the aisles. In a place accustomed to attaining truth and facts, all these good people seemed to have were unanswered questions right in their own midst, and now that Paul Ellis had been buried, their overriding fear was that theRecord as they knew it would be buried as well. There was not a thing I could do to soothe them.

  Ever since I broke into the business as a cops and robbers reporter so many years before, I’d been hearing constantly about how the death knell for the great American newspaper was about to toll.

  Back then, we were going to be replaced by network news that brought the daily news into tens of millions of homes in easy sound bites with dramatic video footage. By the late 1980s and early 90s, it was the twenty-four-hour cable stations like CNN and later, CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox 24, outlets that had a sense of immediacy that we, as a once-a-day publication, could never hope to match. Next it would be the freewheeling, lightning-fast Internet.

  Well, let me quote Paul Ellis from that talk he gave me in the lunchroom of the Somerset Club the day I pulled back into Boston for good: It’s not going to happen, not on our watch anyway.

  Here’s why: Newspapers in general, and theRecord in particular, form a bond with the community they cover in a way that any damned Internet site or cable TV news station can only dream about. It’s a crazy world out there. There’s information crashing down on people all over the place—from their computer, from their television sets, on their cellular phones, even when they step into a bar for an after work drink and the news is scrolling across one of those electronic signs. We alone, as a newspaper, make sense of it all. We alone, as a newspaper, carefully package it in a familiar but attractive format that people can read at their breakfast table, at their desks in the morning, over lunch, or in their laps as they doze off to the evening television, as Nathan likes to do down at the dock. There are millions of Nathans the nation over.

  For anyone who doesn’t believe me, come sit some time at the city desk or the newsroom message center and answer the calls and scan the emails that come in by the dozens every hour of every day. People phone with their life’s problems looking for answers. They complain about their politicians, about their neighbors, about spelling mistakes on our pages. I once had four retired English teachers write me because of a dangling participle at the end of one of my stories. Damned if I even knew what a participle was, never mind the fact you could leave one of the poor guys dangling.

  If there’s one thing that Paul Ellis and Robert Fitzgerald have taught me (and there’s actually not one, there’s many), it’s that the trust, the bond with readers, hasn’t come easy, and it’s the most important thing that we, as a newspaper, have to offer, and one of the key factors that separates us from everyone and everything else in the glibly described Information Age. At theRecord, under the Cutter-Ellis family stewardship, that trust has been built up over a century-and-a-quarter of work. It’s polished every day, nurtured with each issue.

  Look, we live in what has become an Internet society with snot-nosed kids in their twenties riding a high-tech rollercoaster by founding high-tech companies that have done nothing but lose money by creating products that you can’t even touch or feel. Compare that with what we do here at theRecord. We produce a daily miracle. Every morning, a motley group of editors and reporters wander into the newsroom at around ten with their cups of coffee and powdered doughnuts. By late in the day, we’ve written and edited dozens of stories spanning the state, the country, and the world. Then we kick it over to production.

  The paper gets printed on machines that hark back to another time. The flyers are added. It gets transported to the loading docks, still warm, piled onto trucks, and, regardless of the weather—whether it be the most glistening June day or the worst snowstorm in the throes of February, it gets delivered out across the New England region, personally to people’s front doors by sixA.M. or hawked on city street corners.

  And notice that now that reality has knocked on the doors of all those dot.com startups operating on nothing more than venture capital whims and quasi-creative dreams, we’re still around, publishing every day of the week, every week of the year, making money and making sense.

  This is what I found myself thinking as I climbed off my high horse, settled in at my desk and looked around the room at the people who depended on this newspaper and its proper stewardship to make their careers. Vinny Mongillo sat two desks over, a phone tucked under his ear and pounding so hard on a keyboard I thought it might break. Newspaper reporting is the only job he’s ever known. He’s sent police officers to jail. He got a wrongly convicted murderer released from prison on new DNA evidence. He sends money home to his mother in Revere every week. Gwendolyn Grower sits at the desk between u
s, the best byline in the business and the best body in the room—a bombshell in every way imaginable. She could pick a politician’s back pocket for more information than the guy ever knew he had, without a single regret—until the next day’s paper landed on the schmuck’s doorstep with that wonderful thud.

  How many dreams are being realized in this room every day, how many creative calories burned every hour?

  Too many, it appears, for anyone to take a moment to talk to me. I suddenly found myself being treated as a leper, which is to say, I wasn’t being treated at all. I was being ignored.

  A newsroom, it is important to note, is an incubator of intense gossip. Think about it. The same people who gather facts and write stories for a living are pretty damned good at grinding out information about their own company—information that affects their very lives. I have little doubt that at that exact moment, it was widely known I was up in the air on whether to pursue the publisher’s post and lead the charge against Campbell Newspapers. I assumed they’d want me to, but how could I be completely sure? The thought brought to mind former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s comment when he was told that the stock markets were going wild on speculation that he was about to tender his resignation. He looked a reporter in the eye and said, “Up or down?”

  Enough of this. I got up out of my chair and I could feel a hundred sets of eyes on me. I walked over to Mongillo’s desk. He held a fat, greasy finger in the air while he barked into the phone, “I’m not your bitch. You can’t keep stringing me along. I need the info—or else.” Then he abruptly hung up.

  My plan was to be eloquent, even dramatic, to inform my best friend in the room, not to mention the biggest gossip, that I realized that my responsibility was to push to be the next publisher of theRecord, and no longer could I afford to shirk it.