The Last Debate

by Jim Lehrer

  I said: “Who did then?”

  “How in the hell would I know? What is this? They were sprung on us like killers in the night.”

  “I thought maybe you—the campaign—made an effort to find out after the debate.”

  He looked away from me, then back. “Look here, Chapman, do you not understand that I was one of the victims of that public assassination? Do you not grasp the obvious fact that the perpetrators of this crime are the ones you should be talking to? They are the ones who must be interrogated, must be forced to tell all to the people of the United States. If you want to know where the assassination weapons came from, for Christ’s sake, ask the assassins. The victims are seldom in a position to have such deadly information, much less make it public.”

  I told him the truth up to that moment. That three of the four panelists had told me they did not know the source of the statements and that I believed them. That left only Mike Howley, who clearly did know but was not talking—yet.

  It kept Turpin in the room. He had appeared ready to end the conversation and escort me to the door and an elevator. Now he was listening, at least. So I asked: “Did you know about those allegations before the debate?”

  Jack Turpin was probably on some kind of quieting drug. I am not a drug user myself, but I have been around many in the magazine-journalism world of frantic deadlines and never-stop production, writing, and editing sessions. There was something—I could not explain what, exactly—about his eyes and his movements that led me to suspect some kind of quieting, moderating substance. He was probably on a pill that kept his anger in check, that made it possible for him to function—even in difficult situations like this.

  What he did now was blink and say to me: “What’s the point? What are you trying to prove?”

  “I do not know where it will finally lead,” I said, again, telling the absolute truth. “But I am interested in how those statements came into the hands of Howley and, frankly, whether it was all cooked up beforehand.”

  “By whom?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because … well, because I think the public has a right to know.”

  “Oh, please, spare me that sanctimonious crap. You want to know because it will sell more magazines.”

  “Whatever,” I said, still doing my best to tell the truth.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I have nothing to say.” But I could not help but notice that he made no effort to get up from his chair. Go, Tom, go!

  “What about on an off-the-record basis? Or on background. All I want to know is whether you-all in the campaign knew about those charges before they were read on television that night in Williamsburg.”

  “Why should I tell you or anyone from the press anything? Why should I trust you or anyone from the press?”

  I decided not to try to answer that.

  I looked behind Turpin at a photo of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the two great Los Angeles Dodgers pitchers. Then I looked down at my own two hands and pulled a handkerchief out of my rear pants pocket and blew my nose.

  Jack Turpin was making a decision that mattered very much to me—more than I even realized at the time.

  He said: “Yes, I knew.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Somebody came to us, claiming she had been hit by Meredith. She was one of the people named by one of those thug-panelists during the debate. I asked Meredith about it. He gave me an answer that was more movement than fact. Alarms went off in my head and soul. So I had our security people do some checking. They dug up several more women with such allegations to make about my candidate. Most of the ones Howley and his hooligans read that night sounded familiar to me. They must have all been in there.”

  “In where?”

  “The material our security people gathered.”

  “What did you do with that material—those statements?”

  “I showed them to Meredith. Again, he gave me some motion but very little else. At my urging—insistence, really—we decided to act like nothing had happened. I shredded all the statements and even the file folder in which they came.”

  “Nobody else saw them?”

  “Nobody.”

  “No copies were made.”

  “None.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Turpin grinned for the first time ever in my presence. The corners of his mouth actually turned up like they do on most normal people when something strikes them funny. He said: “As certain as I was nine days before the election that David Donald Meredith was going to be elected president of the United States, before four journalist-muggers decided they knew better than the people what was best for our country.”

  He was still grinning, so I asked him if he knew—or thought—it was possible Meredith himself had somehow kept copies or told somebody else about the charge.

  “That is about as possible as it is for me to ever see people like you as anything other than the enemy.”

  I thought at first that the medicine was wearing off and I was soon going to be out of there. But there remained a pleasantness in his face. This man was obviously fulfilling a need to get something off of his chest. This had suddenly turned into a therapy session for this angry man.

  So I asked him: “Had you ever heard Meredith use words like ‘fucking’ before? Was he a closet cusser? The image you-all put out was just the opposite—”

  “I was as surprised as anyone by his outburst. Not once did he even say as much as ‘shit’ in front of me. Not once.”

  “How important do you think it was that he said ‘fucking’ that night?”

  “Important enough to cost him the election. Without that word he might have made it. We could have attacked the credibility of the abuse charges, fought back—and possibly made it. The word made recovery impossible.”

  I glided into asking him for his version of the debate-panel selection meeting and other predebate meetings and happenings about which I had already talked to Lilly, Hammond, and many others. He was direct and full of detail, but in several instances—the panelist selection meeting in particular—also full of bald-faced lies. I am no expert on polygraphs, but I had a feeling Jack Turpin was one of those people who could beat any of those machines. He could lie and it would never show.

  As Lilly had done before him about his dismissal by Greene, Turpin also laid out blow-by-blow his firing by David Donald Meredith.

  It happened the morning following the debate after the end of the First Light meeting in the education room at the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Illinois, where Meredith had spoken to a late-night downtown rally the night before. This morning he and his staff were to go over the details of the National Day of Prayer they were halfheartedly attempting to organize.

  Turpin said Meredith’s opening prayer was the shortest ever. “O heavenly Father, give us the might to fight and to be right,” he said. “In Your name we pray.… Amen.”

  Then there was the news, all of it bad. Turpin said he and the others reviewed the instant polls, the editorials, the commentaries, the phone calls that had come from voters to Meredith for President offices all over America. None of it was good except for those who condemned the press. But the reaction to the abuse allegations and to Meredith’s anger and F-word performance was almost universally and resoundingly negative.

  He said he and Meredith received each tidbit of awfulness as a spear to their hearts and souls. He said the redness around Meredith’s eyes and in his face got redder with each new criticism.

  When the meeting was over, Meredith asked for a few private moments with Turpin. They walked together out of the church building toward a far corner of the parking lot, in the opposite direction from where the Meredith motorcade was waiting with about twenty limo, van, police-cruiser, and motorcycle motors running.

  Turpin said he had no idea what was coming. His own thoughts were all of rage at others—at those four panelists, at those women accusers, at t
he Jacks and Jills and others who commented about it all night on television, at even God Himself for letting this happen to His man, His candidate.

  Meredith waited until they were in the corner, way out of earshot of any possible eavesdroppers, before saying to Turpin:

  “You gave those statements from all of those women to the enemy, didn’t you?”

  Turpin said he almost fell over. He said the charge was so unexpected and so powerful he really did almost fall. He said he yelled: “No! In the name of all that is right and true, no!”

  “You wanted me to lose. You are the true agent of the devil, Jack Turpin. The Democratic devil sent you here to do his work, to destroy me.”

  “That is simply nuts, sir. Simply and unquestionably nuts.”

  “You were the only one who had those statements.”

  “I believe in you. I have worked my ass off for you. I am your friend, your everything.”

  “You are my nothing.”

  Jack Turpin said he realized that he was standing there shouting at a crazy man. What had happened last night had sent David Donald Meredith up, over, and out. And why not, for Christ’s sake? What person could go through having the presidency of the United States snatched out from under him this way and emerge anything but up, over, and out?

  Turpin said he then spoke what he thought would be words of comfort and help to Meredith: “Sir, I think it might be prudent for you to consider the possibility of your withdrawing as a candidate. Larry Ward could be affirmed quickly as the party’s presidential candidate. I have checked the law. The Republican National Committee has the power to do that, almost over the phone. If you do not wish to do that, you could tell the voters that if elected you would immediately step down in favor of Ward. He is already in place as the vice presidential candidate. The convention affirmed him in that spot. You have said yourself many times that he is ready and able to be president. I am not saying you should do either now, but I am saying that you might want to begin to think about something along these lines. Clearly, the tide has been turned against you in a way that I do not believe it is possible to reverse. I also believe you must, you simply must say something—an apology, an explanation, anything—about ‘fucking’….”

  Turpin said he saw Meredith’s right fist coming in time to deflect it with his own left arm and duck away. His work behind the plate as a baseball catcher helped.

  “You are the enemy!” Meredith screamed at Turpin as he broke into a run for his limousine. “You will burn in hell with the fucking rest of them!”

  Turpin told me those were the last words David Donald Meredith spoke to him.

  “That’s why I took that phony call from you yesterday,” he said. “A message from Meredith was worth taking.”

  He said he knew nothing about Meredith’s whereabouts, except what he had read in the papers after the election. What those stories said was that the former Republican nominee for president of the United States had left his family, dissolved Take It Back, and gone to live in a fortified commune in the Ouachita Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. It was run by a strange conservative religious sect that believed all communication with God and Jesus, as well as humans, should be musical. Nobody there talked or wrote. They only sang, hummed, or played an instrument. Only certified true believers were allowed into the place, which had few creature comforts but lots of pianos, violins, saxophones, drums, and sheet music.

  “I understand why he ran away,” Turpin said. “I almost did myself.”

  “I guess there is no way I could get you to help me get an interview with Mr. Meredith?”

  “You guessed right. I couldn’t help you if I wanted to and I do not want to. The man has suffered enough at the hands of people like you. So have I.”

  The smile was gone. He stood. So did I. It was a few minutes after noon. We had talked for two hours. I left with so much, much more than I’d ever dreamed was possible to get from this terminally angry man.

  The three-hour Metroliner ride back to Washington gave me a chance to assess what I had and where I was. But I did not need that much time. It was clear by the time the train had come and gone from its first stop at Newark, New Jersey, that the next stop in my search for the truth of Williamsburg was the security firm that worked for Turpin and the Meredith campaign.

  Nelson and Associates was its name. Sidney Robert Nelson was its founder and president. The regular Tatler Washington correspondent helped me discover that within the practical political world Nelson was known as an honorable man who ran an ethical and honest operation. Meaning, apparently, if you believed it was honorable to bug Longsworth D or anybody else’s meeting, telephone, office, or bedroom, or have someone’s intimate personal life and secrets investigated, then Nelson and Associates would do it well and do it in a way that might not turn your stomach or get you found out and indicted.

  According to the national registry of licensed private security and detective agencies, Nelson and his fourteen full-time associates—investigators/counselors, they were called—were all former FBI and Secret Service agents. Nelson had been FBI agent-in-charge in Seattle, New Orleans, and Chicago before becoming the assistant director for internal security, the bureau’s chief spy hunter. Jennifer Gates turned up only one small seven-year-old Washington Post story about Nelson in the Nexis computer file of past news stories. It said he left the bureau over a policy dispute with an unnamed assistant attorney general. The story said there was an unconfirmed report that the assistant attorney general had “requested FBI action on an intelligence-gathering matter” that Nelson refused to do. I made a note to ask Nelson what that was all about—if I ever got a chance to talk to him.

  The word among the political operatives was that Nelson was politically nonpartisan. He would work for anybody who had the funds, payable in advance. If the Turpins and Lillys of the world were hired guns, in other words, Nelson was a hired spy. That was a hopeful sign because it was likely that he was not a Meredith fanatic, that he did the Meredith assignments for money, not love. But there was the additional word that Nelson never talked about any client or any work he did for them. That was a trademark. He was a secure security man.

  After much deliberation and back-and-forth argument with myself, I decided the direct approach would probably not be the way to go. Nelson would likely decline to take so much as a phone call from Tom Chapman of The New American Tatler, as he would from anybody else from any other news or journalism organization. He clearly did not get where he was by spilling his guts to reporters. And in a matter like the Williamsburg Debate, he was likely to have an even safer lock on his mouth and secrets.

  So. I would have to do it the hard way.

  I put on some old clothes and sunglasses and began watching Nelson go about his business day. I watched him drive his car, a black Mercury four-door sedan with three radio or telephone aerials whipping in the breeze, into the underground garage in the small building at the corner of Van Ness and Wisconsin in northwest Washington where Nelson and Associates was headquartered. I watched Nelson eat lunch, usually with men who looked just like him, at restaurants in the neighborhood. And, most important, I watched Nelson enter the Tenley Health Club just down the street from his office every evening shortly after six P.M. and then come out again forty-five minutes later.

  The health club was where it was going to happen. I bought a special introductory thirty-day Tenley Health Club membership for $125 and showed up at 6:15 one evening in a sweat outfit that I normally wore for my morning jogs. I chose an old sweatshirt with an American flag and the symbol of the 1988 Olympics. You never know what might help break some ice.

  I found Nelson in the machine room on a turbobike. Our eyes met. I nodded and climbed on the bike next to him.

  Nothing happened except that I rode my bike and he rode his.

  I knew from my reporting that Sid Nelson was fifty-seven years old, but close-up in shorts and a T-shirt—it said IOWA STATE on the front—he looked forty-seven or even younger. I
knew he had been a star athlete in high school and college and was the fourth child born from the marriage of Sarah Field Nelson, high-school guidance counselor, and Frank Peter Nelson, high-school basketball and track-and-field coach, in Davenport, Iowa. He looked like the son of a coach. His body was solid and lean. It wasn’t long before I saw why. Nelson’s legs pumped the pedals on that turbo with no apparent effort or sweat. I was in pretty good shape myself, but it was obvious that this man next to me was in a whole other physical league.

  After more than twenty minutes of pumping and nothing, I decided to make my move. I said: “I’m a new member.”

  “Congratulations,” Nelson said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Time for the whirlpool,” Nelson said.

  And without another word and before I could utter one myself, Nelson was off the bike and gone.

  I saw it as a beginning.

  There was no splashy press event to announce Joan Naylor’s historic first. Her moment in the announcement sun was badly botched by and for all concerned.

  Don Beard, the famous CNS anchor, took a call one morning in his New York City network office. It was from a reporter on the New York Daily News.

  “We hear you are being replaced by Joan Naylor,” said the reporter.

  “Wrong, wrong, bullshit, bullshit,” said Beard. “She isn’t even back to work yet.”

  A few minutes later Beard took a call from a reporter for New York Newsday.

  “Somebody at the network just told me they have decided to put Naylor in for you. True or false?”

  “False!”

  There was another call on hold from a guy at Variety. And Beard then listened to the same question for the third time and gave the same answer for the third time.

  But this time Beard—he was my primary source for all of this—walked immediately and quickly and angrily out of his office, through the CNS newsroom where everyone was staring in silence at him, to the office of Calvin Hill, president of CNS News.

  Without a word to Hill’s secretary, who sat outside Hill’s office, Beard opened the closed door and walked in. Hill was sitting around a coffee table with five other people, all of whom he recognized as vice presidents and public-relations officials of the network. They were looking at a piece of paper in the center of the table.