Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  In May of 1976, just after the movie premiered, the Post broke the news that Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio had kept Elizabeth Ray, his mistress, on the federal payroll for two years, at an annual salary of $14,000. It wasn’t exactly Watergate, but the Post had Hays cold and it was certainly the kind of story that made you say “Holy shit” to yourself as you made your way through your bowl of Wheaties. Ray played the part of kept woman with flair. “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone,” she told a Post reporter.1

  Hays denied aspects of the story—thus heightening the stakes—but he didn’t realize that Post reporters had observed him eating dinner with Ray the week before. Three days after the first story, another ran on the Post’s front page: “Hays Reverses Himself, Admits ‘Relationship.’ ” The lede: “After two days of denials, Rep. Wayne L. Hays (D-Ohio) admitted yesterday that he had had a ‘personal relationship’ with Elizabeth Ray, but denied her charge that he put her on the public payroll to be his mistress.” Hays had taken to the House chamber itself to deliver what the Post described as a “dramatic confession.”

  The story made a splash. For starters, it had sex in it—always a plus, in Ben’s book. One veteran reporter said that the Hays story was the only time he had seen Ben fully engaged since Nixon had resigned two years before. These were the years of an acknowledged malaise at the Post, when people (including Kay) thought Ben was out of touch.

  By the late seventies, the Post was starting to come back around. When Bob took over as assistant managing editor for Metro on May 1, 1979, he commanded the largest news staff of any of the assistant managing editors—108 reporters, nearly one fourth of the reporters on the entire newspaper. As he told me, this was the moment when he threw his hat in the ring in earnest to succeed Ben as editor of the Post. The way to the top was to produce, plain and simple, and Bob knew those rules better than anybody. Where he had thrown all of himself into his own reporting for more than eight years at that point, he now threw himself into the task of prodding the huge Metro staff into coming up with the kinds of holy shit stories that would make page one of the paper.

  In November of 1979, six months after he took charge of Metro, Bob and Pat Tyler came up with just such a story. Tyler had uncovered evidence that the head of the Mobil Oil Corporation, a man named William Tavoulareas, had installed his son as a partner in a London-based shipping management firm that had made millions of dollars operating Mobil ships under exclusive, no-bid contracts. Keep in mind that in the summer of 1979 Americans had been forced to endure daylong waits for gas during the oil crisis. Public anger at the oil companies was high.

  The story ran on November 30, 1979. Ben, from his memoir:

  If I had known that the 84-inch story would cost the Post more than $1,500,000 to run the story, plus thirty lousy days as a defendant on trial in District Court, plus another seven and a half years of appellate litigation, I would have told [Woodward and Tyler] to go piss up a rope.

  Tavoulareas was upset with a few words that had appeared in the headline on page one and then in the lede of the story itself: “Sets up Son” and “set up his son.” The words seem harmless, and from the context of the story quite obviously true, but Tavoulareas took exception to them and brought suit against the Post for libel.

  “We got sued because the president of Mobil, in order to say that we were right, would mean that he had deceived his board on how much of a related-party transaction that was,” Tyler told me. “That was the issue. He either sued us and blew smoke or told his board he fucked up and fell on his sword. And Tav’s not the kind of guy to fall on his sword.” Over a long, drawn-out process, the Post would spill a good deal of financial blood to defend the story, a process that Ben didn’t think was worth it in the end—even though the Post eventually won. But the journalism was solid, the kind of reporting Bob was pushing for.

  “Of course Woodward is swinging for the fences,” Tyler told me, of the Mobil story. “Showing that Metro runs the paper, and that he’s the next editor of the paper.”

  “And, of course, sitting across from me in Metro,” Tyler said, “was Janet Cooke.”

  Cooke had been hired for the staff of the District Weekly, a kind of subsidiary of the Metro section that was distributed every Thursday. It was widely known that if you did well on one of the weeklies—there were sections for Virginia and Maryland as well—you stood a good chance of being promoted to write for the daily newspaper.

  Cooke was ambitious, and she worked hard. After six weeks she had her first big cover story in the District Weekly, a long piece about 14th Street and the U Street corridor, which was still burned out from the 1968 riots and had become a haven for drug users and prostitutes. A police officer had been killed in the area, and she rode along with a patrol for an evening to get the pulse of the place. There was a lot of complexity to the story—the dead policeman had a reputation for unwarranted violence, for one thing—and she managed to convey subtlety and atmosphere in a convincing way. The language is vivid: “4:05. Police are called to 14th and Q streets, where an apparent robbery victim has received a deep cut on the neck. He is screaming, blood flowing like burgundy from the open wound.”

  “It was a fine piece of journalism,” her editor, Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, would later tell Bill Green, the man who was tasked with writing the postmortem on Cooke’s fabrication of the “Jimmy” story. “She was consumed by blind and raw ambition. It was obvious, but it doesn’t deny the talent.” Aplin-Brownlee wasn’t yet skeptical of Cooke, but others in the newsroom were. One reporter who sat near Cooke’s desk didn’t believe any of the dialogue in her story; he reached for a red crayon and began to underline every quote that he thought was invented. As he was doing this, he watched as Ben walked over to Cooke’s desk, took a seat on it with one foot in the air, and told her, “That’s the best story I’ve read in the paper for a long time.”

  “I was standing there when it happened,” the reporter told me. “And I said, well, I’m not taking [my doubts] to him and telling him. But I had my eye on her after that.”

  There had also been something in the reporting of the story that presaged what was to come. “She was Gucci and Cardin and Yves St. Laurent,” Aplin-Brownlee told Green. “She went out on that 14th Street story in designer jeans and came back to tell me that somebody asked, ‘What kind of nigger are you?’ She thought it was funny. She had to learn the street.” Janet had grown up in a strict and cloistered household in Toledo, drilled in reading and writing by a disciplinarian father and sent off to an elite private school filled with white kids. From there she’d gone on to Vassar, then to the University of Toledo and on to the Blade. Very little in her background had prepared her for 14th Street in Washington, D.C., in 1980.

  For this reason, among others, Cooke struggled with Aplin-Brownlee from the start. By Aplin-Brownlee’s metric, Cooke wasn’t black enough. She didn’t date black men, didn’t have the slang down. Even as Cooke produced story after story for the District Weekly, she never felt that Aplin-Brownlee liked her—and she wasn’t wrong. “A whole lot of glamour and flash, as opposed to substance,” Aplin-Brownlee told Sager, of Cooke, in 1996. “I would look at her preening at her desk, getting ready to go out in the street and talk to the people. She didn’t speak the language. She was hardly useful to me at all.” In the years after her fabrication, Cooke would insist that her primary motivation for making up the Jimmy story in the first place had been to get away from Aplin-Brownlee.

  In the wake of the police patrol story, which had been such a success, Cooke stayed on the 14th Street drugs-and-poverty beat. In late July of 1980, Aplin-Brownlee had begun to hear rumors about a new strain of powerful heroin in D.C. that ulcerated the skin of the people who used it. She put Cooke on the story, and Cooke spent a month or so digging around. At an interview with the head of a drug abuse program at Howard University, she heard a tantalizing reference to an eight-year-old kid who was apparently being treated at a local residential drug treatment
facility.

  Aplin-Brownlee was in and out of the office for the month of August, so Milton Coleman, now the city editor on the Metro desk, was overseeing Cooke’s reporting. “I talked over Janet’s materials with her,” Coleman would later tell Bill Green. “She talked about hundreds of people being hooked. And at one point she mentioned an 8-year-old addict. I stopped her and said, ‘That’s the story. Go after it. It’s a front-page story.’ ”

  At any newspaper, the front page reflects an explicit editorial judgment of what’s important. At Ben’s Post, the front page was also where the stars of the National desk shone. Metro stories had to meet a high bar before they’d even be considered for it. Competition for page one at the Post was daily, and it was intense—starting from the very beginning of Ben’s tenure as executive editor. At The New York Times, where decision making was more formalized and less ad hoc, the front-page decisions were often made by the night news editors. People waited in line for their turn. Not so at the Post, where Ben and Howard Simons and everybody else spent a lot of time trying to construct the perfect menu of stories for the next day’s front. Flashy people and flashy subjects tended to get a far greater hearing, and be pushed for the front page much more consistently, than the kinds of process stories that Ben always called “room-emptiers.”

  In the wake of Cooke’s fabrication, much would be made of the competition in the Post’s newsroom. People would call the place a snake pit, a place where everybody was striving to get ahead, where Ben coddled the stars and everybody else tried to become one of them. Cooke’s lie was often contextualized in this way. “The allegation is that you ‘play favorites’ and glory in pitting people against each other,” journalism professor George Reedy wrote in 1974, in a study that Ben commissioned to get a bead on dynamics in the newsroom. “In many instances, this may well be nothing but the alibi of the second-rate. But nevertheless, it is a widespread perception.”

  This notion of pitting reporters against each other—something that Ben claimed he never consciously did—took on a euphemism that shadowed Ben for most of his career: “creative tension.” You can’t read a contemporaneous account of Ben as executive editor without coming across the phrase.

  “Creative tension is real,” Len Downie told me. “But not in sort of the clichéd way. What’s real is that the whole newsroom was competition. Ben brought in lively, competitive people. We all were competing for the front page.”

  Harry Rosenfeld was legendary for making histrionic appeals for Metro stories to go out front. He threatened, on a slightly too frequent basis, that Ben was going to “go down in the history books” if he left a certain Metro story off the front page. This routine became so predictable that Larry Stern once hired a Gypsy violinist to wait outside the news conference; once Rosenfeld began his customary spiel, the violinist came waltzing in to provide appropriately dramatic accompaniment.

  There is little doubt that, at the twice daily news conferences—and particularly at the earlier of the two—the idea was to get Ben’s attention. (He sometimes brought a toy siren into the news conference to shut people up when he found their story pitches boring.) What got Ben’s attention was a big story pitched with verve and macho humor and a good punch line. All of the assistant managing editors—the people who ran the various sections, National, Metro, Style, and the like—vied for Ben’s and Howard’s attention. A story about an eight-year-old addict would certainly have stood out in that crowd.

  But whether Janet Cooke and the other reporters were also a part of the “creative tension” bubble is a little less clear. David Maraniss started off as a reporter at the Post, and when Cooke made up her story he was an assistant editor on the Metro section. At our lunch, I asked him whether he believed in creative tension, and he said, “It was not there. It’s complete bullshit.

  “I know it,” he went on. “I lived it. I mean, when I got to the paper it was still being sort of bandied about as part of the philosophy of the Post, and I never ever felt it. The only tension was really between Ben and Howard. And it didn’t affect us, much. But other than that, it was an incredibly good place for a writer. It wasn’t because of the tension. It was because of the possibilities. Tension tends to stifle possibilities, and this was the opposite.”

  When I asked Ben about it, he said that whether he ever intended to create a dynamic of “creative tension” at the paper or not, he gradually came to understand that the perception of it was real. “It may have been unconscious,” he said of his own role. He was not a micromanager, and has often described his own style as extremely informal, haphazard, and spontaneous. He couldn’t imagine how he would have set about actively implementing a policy of creative tension. “I wouldn’t know how to do it,” he told me. “I don’t want to deny that there was that around me. But it’s not right that I woke up in the morning and said I’ve got to really spend some time creating tension today or else I won’t be able to do my job. Never.”

  “Ben hired a lot of people,” Jim Hoagland told me, “and not all of ’em made it through.… I think Ben had a sense that that would happen. And it was up to you. I mean, this is very much the Bradlee philosophy as I understand it. You had to figure it out. You have to manage your own career. If you’re depending on an editor to manage your career, you’re dead.”

  If you take her at her word, Janet Cooke was mostly just trying to manage her own career. When she heard Coleman tell her “it’s a front-page story,” what she really heard was: this is my chance to get off the District Weekly, to get away from Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, to take a shot at a position working for Woodward and Milton Coleman on the daily Metro staff. She knew intuitively what Hoagland described.

  “Everyone has to become an entrepreneur,” the Frenchman wrote of the Post in the mid-eighties, likening the newsroom more to “a free-jazz orchestra than to a military band.” You could make big leaps if you had a chip to play in the game, a hot story, and so you tried to get everything out of it that you could.

  The only catch was that Janet didn’t have a chip: she had the promise of a chip. In order to have the chip she had to find the boy, which proved impossible. Not because he didn’t exist—perhaps there was, in fact, an eight-year-old addict out there somewhere—but because Cooke’s sources at various drug treatment facilities refused to divulge any further information. The director of the residential treatment program that had been referred to as the possible location of the eight-year-old addict reported that he had no such patient, and others who had initially been helpful refused to go any further. After nearly eight weeks of reporting and searching, the trail ran cold.

  Cooke told her editors this, but the story didn’t die there. Coleman checked with Howard Simons and then reported back to Cooke that she could offer her sources complete anonymity. “The jugular of journalism lay exposed,” Bill Green would write later, in the most widely quoted sentence of his comprehensive report on Cooke’s fabrication, “the faith an editor has to place in a reporter.”

  A week later, Cooke came back to Coleman and said that she had found the boy. “I kept hearing Milton telling me to offer total anonymity,” she said later. “At some point, it dawned on me that I could simply make it all up. I just sat down and wrote it.”

  What she fabricated at first was a thirteen-and-a-half-page double-spaced memo of an interview that she claimed to have conducted with a boy named Tyrone at his mother’s house, somewhere in the Condon Terrace neighborhood of Washington.2 It was full of the details that would later make it into the story: the kind of shirts Tyrone wore, the sofas covered in plastic, a rubber tree plant, fake bamboo blinds, a brown shag rug, and on and on. In his memoir Ben would write that “we all saw” this memo of Cooke’s, but Woodward told Bill Green he didn’t—and that if he had, he might have had some questions about how perfect and complete the quotations were. Coleman saw it for sure, and felt reassured by the presence of Tyrone’s name.

  “It was a great story,” Coleman said later, “and it never occurred to me t
hat she could make it up. There was too much distance between Janet and the streets.”

  Coleman told her to write up her story based on the memo. He wanted it to read, as he put it, “like John Coltrane’s music, strong.” After she wrote up a second draft, a Post artist was commissioned to illustrate the story—an unusual step in an era of ubiquitous high-quality photographs, but for obvious reasons there couldn’t be any photos. The illustration, of a young black boy with sad eyes being injected with a syringe held by a pair of oversize hands, was shocking and powerful. It also borderered on socioeconomic and ethnic caricature. (The cast of the illustration would contribute to the widespread perception in the community, after the story ran, that the Post had sought to exploit the story for its own purposes. The oversized hands were supposed to be those of the dealer, “Ron,” who routinely injected Tyrone/Jimmy and had threatened Cooke’s life, but more than one reader felt that the Post was as complicit in the work of those hands as Ron was.)

  About a week before the story ran, Bob saw it for the first time. “This story was so well-written and tied together so well that my alarm bells simply didn’t go off,” he told Bill Green. “My skepticism left me. I was personally negligent.” He interviewed Cooke about the story but detected nothing amiss in her description of how she had come by her information. If there was anybody at the newspaper who understood the importance of protecting anonymous sources, it was Bob. Shortly thereafter Ben also read the story, and told Bill Green that at that time he thought it was “a helluva job.”

  Howard Simons was on vacation the week before the story ran, but he instructed Coleman to tell Cooke one last time that she didn’t have to run the story if she didn’t want to. “I told her what Simons told me to say,” Coleman said later. “I said she had written a story that is certain to be controversial. You have seen a crime and you may be subpoenaed. We don’t think so, but you can. You should know that the Post will stand behind you 100 percent.” She might have to spend time in jail if she refused to identify her sources. “Before the story goes,” Coleman continued, “if you don’t want to face that, we won’t run it.”