“We can make a good case that as a judge, Buchan is a public figure,” one of the lawyers explained. “So the only way we could be guilty of libel is if the story is wrong and we knew when we wrote it that it was wrong but we wrote it anyway out of malice.”
“Did you do anything that would indicate malice?” Walker asked.
“No,” Bullock said. “We’re in good shape on that. I had to knock the lights out of one ol’ boy down there, but I don’t recall it being the judge.”
“It was Brad’s dad,” I pitched in.
“Right,” Bullock said as the lawyers looked on slack-jawed. “And it wasn’t malice. I was defending my honor as a Southerner.”
“I think we should move on,” one of the lawyers said.
By the time we left the conference room an hour later, we had decided that fairness required that we record Buchan’s denial, even though he would still not submit to an interview by any Charlotte Times staffer, including Columbia Bureau Chief Henry Ashley. Tuesday, despite our misgivings, we published the full version of what appeared in The News. But the story also included a statement from Walker saying that the Charlotte Times stood by its reporting and a quote from Reverend Grace expressing the community’s thanks that Wallace Sampson’s murder had not been forgotten.
With all the distractions and with me working half days, our efforts to answer the unanswered questions weren’t making much headway. We didn’t know who pulled the trigger and we didn’t know how Wallace Sampson became the victim. Those were details that likely would come out only if a grand jury was impaneled and Billy Bascom were granted immunity.
Our best shot for a story, we figured, was one that pinned down what state officials had been told about the Wallace Sampson killing and when they had been told it. And once they had information, why had they never pursued it?
But officials from the State Law Enforcement Division said it would be days before they could tell us if they could even respond to inquiries relating to possible informants, and Solicitor Red McCallum’s office said he would have no comment about whether he would initiate an investigation into the Wallace Sampson shooting.
“Usually, Red will trust me with most anything,” Ashley, the Columbia Bureau chief who’d been assigned to dog McCallum, told me. “On this one, he won’t even acknowledge that he’s read your story.”
The best we could do in terms of a quick follow-up was a piece that ran Wednesday saying that the South Carolina Judicial Standards Commission would investigate Buchan if it received a formal complaint about his conduct as a magistrate. The story went on to point out that, to date, no such complaint had been received.
The next day we caught a big break. The Associated Press bureau in Atlanta produced a version of the Sampson story for southeastern newspapers, television and radio stations, crediting the Charlotte Times for the investigation and incorporating Buchan’s denial. Then, an editor on the AP’s general desk in New York decided to boil the Wallace Sampson story down to fifteen paragraphs and put it on the AP’s national wire. Because the story used Buchan’s “Woodward and Bernstein” quote, the story mentioned Bullock and me by name. By Thursday evening, the Wallace Sampson story and Buchan’s denial had gone nationwide.
Friday morning I was awakened by a call from Brad Hall saying that the AP version, with an additional paragraph highlighting his local connection, had appeared in the New York Times.
“You’re going to be famous!” Delana said when I called her.
I enjoyed that thought for maybe thirty seconds—until the phone rang again. It was Marjorie Stark, the British-accented secretary to Warren Reich, the publisher.
“Matthew, I’m sorry to trouble you so early but Warren would like to meet with you, Ronald, and Walker immediately. Can you be available by nine?”
So the hammer falls, I thought. We’d flown successfully below Reich’s radar for so long that I’d almost forgotten about him. But not quite. I understood from the beginning that our defiance of his orders to abandon the Wallace Sampson story was not likely to be overlooked, that our Judgment Day would come. Now, it had.
“Not famous,” I told Delana when I called her back. “Fired.”
We gathered at nine in the anteroom outside Reich’s office on the third floor, right next to the advertising department, the department that brought in the money, the place where most publishers feel most at home.
I searched the expression of the prim and proper Miss Stark for a clue to our fate. She betrayed nothing. “Mr. Reich will see you now.”
We trudged in like schoolboys summoned to the principal’s office after being caught smoking in the bathroom. The silver-haired Reich, dressed in a yellow tie, blue pinstripe shirt with a white collar, and the usual gold cufflinks, sat at his desk, studying spreadsheets. He didn’t look up until Walker cleared his throat.
“Ah, yes,” he said, as if he had suddenly remembered why we were there. With the back of his hand, he waved us to his couch. “Gentlemen, we have a problem. This Sampson story is getting quite a bit of attention. It’s in this morning’s Washington Post.”
“The New York Times, too,” I added.
“I’m assuming it’s accurate,” Reich said.
“Bullet proof,” Walker answered.
“It had better be. People magazine called this morning. They want to do a story. I am disinclined to cooperate.”
Bullock and I exchanged surprised glances. I could read his shrug: People magazine? Why them?
“I wish it were Time or Newsweek but I’m not sure I see what the problem is,” Walker said.
Reich pulled his chair closer. “I’ll tell you what the problem is. I will not be the black hat in this thing. I can see where this People story is going. Courageous reporters pursue the truth against the orders of their publisher. Murder is solved and justice prevails. I will not have it. I will not be the black hat.” He stared hard at Walker.
“I don’t believe that’s the story,” Walker said. “The fact is, whatever was said internally, the story got done. The right thing happened. Debates over the worth of stories happen all the time.”
Bullock and I sat forward, surprised by Walker’s uncharacteristic diplomacy.
Reich’s jaw unclenched. “If asked, what would you say about my role in this Sampson thing?”
“That we’re the kind of newspaper where this sort of journalism can happen.” Walker looked at Bullock and me for confirmation. I followed Walker’s lead and nodded. Bullock remained stone-faced.
The look of relief on Reich’s face told me what I’d failed to perceive earlier. The national attention the Wallace Sampson story was receiving was protecting us. Reich no longer had the power either to prevent us from pursuing the Sampson story or to punish us for disobeying his orders to end our “ceaseless thrall.” Not only that, we now had the ability to do serious damage to him by portraying him in the press as an impediment to the investigation. The balance of power had shifted.
“Do you think if we let People do the story, that I could be the one to be quoted saying that?” Reich asked.
“I think you’re just the right person to say it,” Walker said.
“Jesus, Walker, what a damn hypocrite,” Bullock spat when we were outside the office. “You should have hammered him.”
“Pardner,” Walker smiled, “When you’re holdin’ the cards you want everyone to stay at the table. I walked in there thinking we’re gonna get told to stop by and pick up our final paychecks. Instead, we’re walking out with the publisher beggin’ to be quoted in the national press supporting investigative journalism. We don’t need to be hammerin’ anyone. Besides, he’s still the trail boss and I’m on the ride.”
The People reporter and a photographer came a day earlier than scheduled, a day I’d taken off to visit Dad. Bullock drove them down to Hirtsboro and they spent the day shooting pictures and interviewing Brad at
Windrow. Later that day, they flew back to New York. The next day, the People reporter interviewed me by phone.
At the University Hospital, Dad was still keeping up with the daily papers, although what used to take forty-five minutes now took all day. Friends and colleagues dropped by from time to time to visit and to pay their respects. He was awake to talk with fewer and fewer.
But more than once he surprised me. He was snoring as two visiting colleagues from the law school fell into a bedside discussion of English Common Law and its relationship to the Magna Carta, which was, one of them said, written and agreed to in 1216.
“1215,” my father corrected, suddenly awake. “June. Runnymede.” He closed his eyes and was soon snoring again.
When I got to work the next Friday, an advance copy of People was already circulating. I joined Carmela Cruz and her colleagues on the news desk as they dissected the four-page spread.
“Justice on Trial in South Carolina” read the main headline. “Yankee Blueblood and Investigative Reporters Say They’ve Cracked Old Civil Rights Case.”
I scanned the photos as Carmela turned the page: black children at play on Jefferson Davis Boulevard in downtown Hirtsboro; Brad Hall in a hunting jacket with Tasha and Maybelle beside the fireplace at his home at Windrow; the widely-circulated photo of the photo of Wallace Sampson; a head shot from the church directory of Rutledge Buchan; a photo of Bullock looking tough in a trench coat posed at the site of the shooting in front of De Sto; a simple mugshot of me, the one from my press pass.
“People magazine!” sighed Carmela. “The depths to which we have sunk!”
I took a minute to read the story and captions. The writer, Gerry Hostetler, had done a good job. She got the facts right. She quoted the publisher. She was generous in her praise of me. “He’s carrying on the tradition,” she wrote, describing me as “the third generation of a great family of journalists.”
But clearly, Bullock had made the biggest impression. “His voice comes from the bottom of a pit all the way up through the gravel, and by the time it hits your ears it has settled into a growl,” Hostetler wrote of him. Indeed, one of her main angles was the unlikely partnership between the Yankee, Harvard-educated, botanist, patrician Bradford Hall and the washed up (she wrote “throwback”) street-wise, pistol-packing, redneck (she wrote “Southern”) reporter Ronnie Bullock.
Even among the pictures, Bullock’s was the biggest of all.
Of course, when a producer for Ted Koppel and Nightline called the following Monday, Bullock was who they wanted on the air.
The next day Reich was quoted in a story for The Columbia Journalism Review saying that Ronnie Bullock “was one of the finest investigative reporters ever to walk through the doors of the Charlotte Times.”
“Can you believe that?” Bullock said when he read the quote. “Two months ago I was a politically incorrect has-been stuck on the night shift and qualified only to write obits. Now, I’m the best journalist on the planet, not to mention a damn TV star. Matt, I gotta thank you.”
Late in the week, Walker announced that once the Wallace Sampson investigation was over, Bullock would become a permanent member of the dayside projects team.
“Let the fancy pants journalism school graduates chomp on that,” Bullock gloated.
I couldn’t have been happier for journalism or for Bullock. His rehabilitation was complete.
As for me, it was another week of travel back and forth over the river Styx. Though unconscious most of the time, Dad was still hanging on to dear life.
On a bright and sunny Monday afternoon in March, the first day of the year that it felt and smelled like spring, Dad let go.
I reached his hospital room just as two orderlies showed up pushing the gurney to take him away.
“Give us a minute,” the hospice nurse told them. As Dad would have wanted, I held the door and followed her in. A sheet on the bed outlined his impossibly withered body. Even though I knew it was coming, even though I’d gotten to the point where I had wished for his death, and even as difficult as it had been sometimes, I couldn’t imagine life without him. I pulled the sheet back.
One last time, I buried my face in his chest. I took his cold, stiff hand, already turning purple and blue, lifted it to my face, and wiped the tears from my eyes.
I called Walker from a phone in the room reserved for grieving relatives.
“He’s gone.”
“I’m sorry, Big Shooter. He was one of the all-time greats. You and a lot of other people are going to miss him.”
“I know.”
“It was thoughtful of him to go out on our news cycle.”
I laughed. “He probably planned it that way.” I thought for a moment. “If there’s going to be an obit, I’d like to write it.”
I could sense his unease. “Too much of a conflict. You can’t be objective. I’ve asked Ronnie to do it.”
I thought of Bullock and me cranking out obit after obit in the nook of Brad and Lindsay’s kitchen.
“He’ll do a good job,” Walker said.
“I’ll tell you what. He can write it. Let me edit it.”
Back in the office later that day, that’s just what I did. When I was done, we gave the story to The Associated Press which deemed it worthy of the national wire. The next day The Detroit Free Press and the other papers where Dad had worked played the story on the front page. Even the New York Times ran fifteen paragraphs on their famous obituary page. In Charlotte, the Times played the story and a mugshot on the front of the local section, just below the fold. It was the right call, given that my father hadn’t ever worked at the Times.
And as it turns out, Bullock was the right choice. He got all the facts right and he put in a paragraph that I would never have felt comfortable writing.
“As the son of the late respected publisher Lucas Harper Sr., Lucas Harper Jr. was the heir to a superb journalistic tradition,” the second paragraph of the obit said. “As the father of Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper, he died having successfully passed on that great legacy.”
For the first time together in the newspaper, grandfather, father and son.
The university’s memorial service—“A Celebration of the Life of Lucas Harper Jr.”—took place at noon a week later in University Chapel, a huge on-campus stone cathedral with gargoyles and stained glass meant to recall a time when churches were as much the center of academic inquiry as of worship.
Instead of waiting in the back and making an entrance after everyone was seated, Delana and I stood on the chapel steps and greeted the parade of people who came to pay their respects and to say good-bye—scores of colleagues from his newspaper days, dozens of fellow faculty members, students present and past, friends of Dad’s, and friends of mine and Delana’s. A brisk breeze sent bilious white clouds scudding across the sky, plunging us from light into shade in an instant and causing the arrivals to alternately don and remove their sunglasses.
Walker and Bullock led a delegation from the paper. David Riley, the reporter from the student paper, made it a point to shake my hand.
“He was the best teacher I ever had,” he said. “He made me passionate about reporting.”
“He had that effect.”
“I hope you’re not upset about my story. I thought long and hard about how your father would have handled the situation. He trusted in the truth.”
I smiled. “You learned well. He said you did a great job.”
I was surprised to see Glenn Hudson, the editor of The Hirtsboro Reporter, arrive with his son Jimmy.
“I appreciate it, but you didn’t need to come,” I told him.
“How could I not come? I took your father’s media law course. He’s the reason I went into this business.”
I watched Brad and Lindsay park their Volvo and cross the street holding hands. Delana hugged them both.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” she said to Lindsay. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for Matt.”
Lindsay blushed and said, “I’m so sorry for the occasion but I’m so glad to meet you. I want you to know, we think Matt is a hero.”
“I think so, too. And you’re married to one.”
The chapel bell rang the first five notes of the university fight song and then began the slow toll of noon. A long blue Buick pulled to the curb. Reverend Clifford Grace unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and opened the rear door. Mary Pell emerged wearing a lavender dress and matching broad-brimmed lavender hat festooned with fabric irises. With one hand on the rail and one arm supported by Reverend Grace she struggled up the stone chapel steps.
I hugged them both and introduced them to Delana. “Let’s go in,” I said. “Sit up front with Delana and me.”
An unlikely foursome, we walked up the aisle as the packed congregation rose in unison. I looked from face to face, overwhelmed by the number of people who seemed to have been touched one way or another by my father. As the organist finished Bach’s ethereal “Adagio in A Minor,” we entered the first pew and sat down—first Reverend Grace, then Mary Pell, then Delana and me.
The chancellor of the university, a vigorous, long-strided, sixty-year-old whose habitual bowtie accentuated his height, ascended the pulpit.
“Lucas Harper Jr. was a man accustomed to letting people know what he wanted,” he began. “He was also a man who did not fear the truth. So it will come as no surprise to you that he faced what was coming and made his wishes known.” Scattered chuckles.
“At Lucas’s request, this service will consist of a few great hymns and some brief words about his life from his dear friend and colleague Dr. Archibald Murphy. Since Lucas is not here to edit me, I will also add a few words of my own.”
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