The Last Debate

by Jim Lehrer

  Then, Lilly said he said to Greene in a fit of anger and stupidity, “You can’t fire me.”

  Greene said: “After what happened back there tonight, I can do anything I want. Out, go.”

  Out, go. After a good two to three minutes of absolute silence between them, Lilly said he came back with what he admitted to me was nothing more than the plea of a desperate man.

  “Governor, could you give me some time—until after the election? I will stay out of the loop, out of command, out of everything, if you wish.”

  “How about out of my sight?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Lilly said Greene honored the commitment and he was saved the jarring humiliation of being fired right then on the spot, but it leaked, as everything does, and he was, in his words, “only half humiliated instead.”

  Then I decided to toss a phony grenade. I said: “I would love to know any details you can give me on how you-all got on to Meredith’s violent side, how you found the women, got their statements, passed them on to the panelists—all of that—”

  Lilly did not let me even finish the question. “You must think I am some kind of idiot, Chapman.”

  “Well, I know it’s confidential stuff, but it’s all over now. Why not give me a lead or two at least?”

  “Here I sit in this shithole closet of an office because I had nowhere else to go. My guy won. But he fired me, disowned me, ruined me—my network-commentator possibilities, my book contract, my consulting opportunities. I took this because they were willing to give me the use of this tiny desk, this phone, and this fifteen-year-old computer if I would write them a paper on the campaign. Now you come in here insulting my intelligence, screwing around with me. Please, buzz off. I have enough problems.”

  The man was clearly upset. I said: “Are you saying you did not know about those statements until they were read during the debate?”

  “Yes, goddamn it. Yes. That is what I am saying. I can promise you they would have gotten out a helluva lot sooner than they did if I had. We had heard the same rumors everyone else heard about Meredith’s so-called violent side. But we never had the interest or the resources to run them down. The governor didn’t believe in that kind of campaign stuff anyhow. Go ask Howley or somebody who knows. Leave me alone.”

  I told him Howley had thus far refused to talk to me, and the other three panelists—again, thus far—had said they did not know where the statements came from.

  “Have you asked Turpin?”

  “Turpin? How could he know?”

  “He had those Nelson thugs working for him. He knew everything.”

  Turpin had reluctantly agreed “in principle” to an interview at some unspecified time in the future but had turned down all my approaches since. I made a note of Lilly’s suggestion but without much faith in its value. First, it made no sense that Turpin or any other Meredith people would have had anything to do with acquiring those statements from the women and/or giving them to Howley for the debate. Second, if they knew who did, they would be screaming bloody murder about it on Jack and Jill and all the other shouting spots on all the other networks from sea to shining sea.

  If I had been doing a different kind of book, one that concentrated on the candidates and the campaign rather than the debate and the panelists, I might have said something more to Lilly. I might have said it must be an unbearable hell to have come as close as you came to the ultimate prize in American politics and have it snapped away. Tell me about it.

  I didn’t say any of that. I simply asked a last question: “I guess it would not make sense to ask if there is any way you might be able and willing to help me get an interview with Greene?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It makes absolutely, one thousand percent, all the way, full house, shithouse no ‘fucking’ sense.”

  I thanked him for his cooperation and left his tiny little office and future.

  Within two days Jennifer Gates produced a recording of a recording that she thought I ought to hear. She said various cross-checking and cross-referencing and other attempts did not produce a name to go with that unlisted phone number I had given her. So she took direct action. She simply dialed the number. After the fifth ring an answering machine took over. She hung up and called it back with her phone on RECORD. That made it possible for me to now listen to an arrogant male voice say:

  “Hello, this is Pat Tubbs. Neither Mary nor I am able to take your call now. Leave a message at the tone and we’ll get back to you. I promise.”

  Pat Tubbs. The Pat Tubbs of The Washington Morning News. Pat Tubbs, one of the richest and most famous investigative reporters in America. The man who ran presidential candidates and cabinet officers and Supreme Court nominees and all kinds of other public figures back to where they came from—or to jail.

  Why was Mike Howley talking to Pat Tubbs so long on that Saturday night before the debate?

  I decided to call Pat Tubbs right then and ask him. I assumed he would not take a call from me, so I told the woman who answered his phone that I was Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I had read in one of the gossip columns that Tubbs was working on an “inside the Fed” exposé book and Greenspan had thus far refused to talk to him.

  He came on the line immediately and I quickly told him who I was and asked my question.

  “What were you and Howley talking about that Saturday night before the debate?”

  “I do not answer questions, you lying asshole, I ask them” was his answer, delivered in the gruff, arrogant style that was his famous trademark.

  Then he hung up the phone with a loud smash, another of his famous trademarks.

  11

  Historic Firsts

  The birth of Sunday Morning with Hank and Barb was announced in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. It was a Washington news conference—cocktail party pageant catered and attended by the most expensive of their respective kinds.

  There were an army of well-dressed waiters, many baskets of flowers and trays of drinks, finger sandwiches, hot snacks, and sweets fit for a prince and princess—if not for a king and queen. The nation’s print and electronic press sent its top radio-TV, media, show-business, feature, and gossip people. One television critic, speaking most satirically, called it “another eye-watering, momentous development in television, that electronic marvel that remains the greatest potential for good ever invented.” The network spokespersons and press releases, speaking seriously, called the teaming of an African American and a Hispanic on a regular national program “a historic first.”

  Barbara Manning and Henry Ramirez had been dressed and otherwise prepared by a network team of designers, makeup experts, and others from New York. Henry wore a dark blue double-breasted suit—the first double-breasted suit he had ever had on his body. Barbara, her hair sparkling and perfect, wore a light blue suit.

  There were several to-the-point questions asked of them and the network executives on hand.

  “How do you know it’ll work?” was the toughest.

  “We don’t,” Henry said. “But I agree with the people here who hired us—it is sure worth a try.”

  “Seriously,” said a reporter, “what makes you two think you can whip Jack and Jill?”

  “We’re not out to whip anybody,” Barbara said. “We’re just going to do our best and hope and pray we don’t make fools of ourselves.”

  That brought some laughter from throughout the room.

  “Are you really worried that might happen?” somebody asked. “That you might make fools of yourselves?”

  Barbara was afraid she had already made a fool of herself just standing there in a thousand-dollar suit. She honestly believed there was every good chance that she and Henry—Hank and Barb—would last one Sunday and one Sunday only, just as Mark Southern, the original clownalist, had done.

  Henry answered the question. “Barbara is the modest one on this team. Obviously, we know we can and will do this, and d
o it successfully, or we wouldn’t be out here now, and out there beginning two weeks from this Sunday.”

  Henry swore to me that was not just talk. He really did have a terrific feeling about what he and Barbara were going to do. “It seemed as natural as music with salsa,” he said. I resisted the urge to say I had always believed it was chips, not music, that went with salsa.

  Henry and Barbara and all of the others who stood on a small stage for the brief question-and-answer period declined to say how much the new team was being paid or disclose anything else about their contracts. Neither Henry nor Barbara would give me the details either. All I knew—know—was what came out at that first Four Seasons breakfast about two million dollars a year guaranteed for two years, no matter what, and a lot of limo and apartment perks. Not only did Henry and Barbara clam up on the details in my later conversations, the agent from William Morris who ended up negotiating their final ABS contract wouldn’t say anything either. Neither would the people at the network on an official basis. But I was told unofficially by someone who claimed to know that the contract had what this person called “an unprecedented ratings escalator.” If Hank and Barb caught and overtook Jack and Jill, the amounts of money that would go to Henry and Barbara, according to my source, were of “Sawyer-plus dimensions.” I asked if a figure even as high as ten million was out of the question. The answer was a simple no.

  There were several questions at the Ritz-Carlton announcement event about Henry and Barbara’s personal relationship. They were astonishingly direct and personal, a reflection of how direct and personal matters had gone in some areas of American journalism.

  “Are you two lovers—or what?” somebody asked.

  “Come on, now,” Henry replied. “What ever happened to privacy?”

  “How many times have you slept together?”

  “Please,” Barbara said.

  “More than twenty or less than ten?”

  “Please!”

  “Have you ever slept together?”

  Henry said: “What kind of question is that?”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Do you practice safe sex?”

  Both Henry and Barbara just shook their heads.

  “Seriously, do you use condoms or not?”

  Both Henry and Barbara just shook their heads.

  “All right, then, describe your relationship in your own words,” said a reporter.

  Barbara and Henry looked at each other and then back at the assembled gossip-showbiz-TV press of America. With a smile, Henry said: “I would describe our relationship as one between two people who like and respect each other very much, who have decided that it is professionally to each of our benefits to join hands and forces every Sunday morning on the ABS television network.”

  He reached over and took Barbara’s left hand with his right.

  Barbara said: “The man said it and he said it right.”

  “So you’re not lovers?”

  Both Barbara and Henry only smiled.

  I was convinced all of this was some kind of a charade—but I was not sure what kind. By the time of this news conference I had already had four separate interview sessions with each of them about the lead-up to the debate, most particularly about what happened in Longsworth D. But neither Henry nor Barbara, no matter how I came at it, would reveal anything that rang true about their real relationship. I honestly did not know if they were mad, passionate lovers or two partners in a business enterprise that required them to fake something.

  “Is it true that Ross Perot is thinking of getting revenge by buying your network?” was the touchiest question asked of network president Joshua Simonsen at the news conference.

  The answer: “Ross is an old friend who has done great work for us and for America. We understand his concern over what has happened, but we are sure it will pass. He is a man of business who understands the need for hard-nosed business decisions.”

  “You really think he’s going to take this with a smile?”

  “No question about that at all. He has given us assurances of a smooth and graceful transition. He will continue to do the program for the next two Sundays—and do it with full vigor and dedication and professionalism—until the new team takes over.”

  As the whole world found out the following Sunday, Ross Perot had something other in mind than a smooth and graceful transition.

  He threw a historic first on-air fit. After promising the network—according to the network, at least—that he would not say or do anything but his regular program the following Sunday, he opened the program with a squeaky, fiery speech about the awfulness of the people who run the ABS television network and all of network television.

  His best lines were: “I’ve been asked if I might hit back by buying this network. Forget it, friends. I’ve got a lot better things to do with my money—which, by the way, I didn’t get by investing in the dying and the past. I’m not starting now. These people aren’t long for this world anyhow. I understand a merger with the Disney Channel is in the works. Makes perfect sense. One Mickey Mouse outfit deserves another.”

  He talked for twenty-two minutes like that right to the camera and then walked off the set. The network’s Capitol Hill correspondent, who happened to be in the newsroom that Sunday morning, was rushed into the studio to finish the program dressed in blue jeans and a sweater.

  At a news conference outside in the ABS Washington bureau parking lot on upper Wisconsin Avenue, Perot denied he ever promised not to say anything about his “public beheading” and then took some more parting shots. His best: “These people aren’t qualified to run a toilet concession at a roadside park on the information superhighway.”

  “What do you think of Hank and Barb?” he was asked by a reporter.

  “I don’t think about dirty cartoons about little boys and girls trying to act like grown-ups,” Perot answered.

  Jack Turpin. Source after source told me this man had gone into a hate fit because of Williamsburg, and that that fit consumed his mind and his spirit—his very being. That was allegedly why he had done only a few interviews and why only a few scattered quotes from him showed up in our massive postdebate clipping and transcript file.

  Then one day I saw a story—by accident, really—in the Washington Post sports section. It said Turpin, who spent two years right out of college as a catcher in the Detroit Tigers organization, had been hired as a special assistant to the commissioner of baseball. The commissioner was a Northrop aviation heir, lawyer, and former Republican governor of California who had once been a minor-league pitcher in the Houston Astros farm system. Turpin, said the story, had worked on one of the commissioner’s gubernatorial campaigns. Turpin’s special task now for baseball would be to improve the public image of The Game, to design a public-relations campaign that would, in the words of “a source close to the commissioner’s office,” reestablish baseball as America’s number one pastime. What was common knowledge but unsaid in the story, of course, was that the well-publicized and competing greeds of the owners and of the players had finally begun to drive people away from baseball. Two days later Jennifer Gates brought me a computer printout of a piece by the great sports novelist Dan Jenkins that had appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and other papers. He wrote about Turpin’s coming: “Anybody who could turn a jerk like Meredith into something semi-attractive might have a chance of doing the semi-same for the jerks who run and play baseball. But let’s not cheer him on, OK? The problems are not about image, they’re about real.”

  I called the baseball commissioner’s office in New York City. After being treated to about nine full innings of runarounds, I was able to determine that Jack Turpin was, in fact, already on the job and in the office. But it took a couple more tries before they would put me through to his secretary, and then he would not take my call. He finally did only after I told somebody that I was a representative of David Donald Meredith and I had some awful news for Mr. Turpin.

  “What news?” T
urpin said when he came on the line.

  I told him who I was.

  He said in a firm but unfrantic way: “Goddamn you. I should have known it would be one of you people. The idea of lying, of getting somebody on the phone by false pretenses, is a way of professional life for you and your kind. I have nothing to say to you now about anything and I never will. So you might as well quit calling me. I do not turn the other cheek. I do not forgive and forget. I do not do any of that crap.”

  I felt he left me no choice but to play a bit of reporter’s hardball. It was now or never.

  I said: “I have been told you were the source for those statements that were used and read during the debate. Can you confirm?”

  Turpin’s voice remained controlled. He said: “That is a goddamn lie. You print that in your childish excuse for a magazine and I’ll end up owning your childish excuse for a magazine. I did not sabotage my own man. I would never sabotage my own man. You have just spoken a blood libel. Say it again and you are in a court of law. Who told you that? Did Meredith tell you that?”

  Our conversation ended a few moments later, and the next morning I caught the 6:50 A.M. Metroliner Express from Washington to New York to keep a 10:00 A.M. appointment with Jack Turpin. The train, the only way Jonathan Angel and the other civilized people I knew ever traveled to and from New York, arrived on time at 9:25. And I was in a room with Turpin at 10:05.

  The room was one of several conference rooms at the commissioner’s office on the seventeenth floor of an office building at 350 Park Avenue. Its walls were covered with photographs of pitchers who had played and starred in the majors. The first one I saw was one of Robin Roberts, the great Philadelphia Phillie.

  “I know you don’t really believe I leaked those statements,” Turpin said within seconds after he closed the door behind him. “Don’t think I fell for your high-school Front Page trick.”