On the morning of Saturday, September 27, 1980, Cooke told Coleman to release the story. That afternoon, Bob pitched it at the news conference. “Ben was there,” he told me. “It had that drawing, and I remember him saying, ‘Wow, this is a hell of a story.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it really is.’ ” Front page, they all agreed, though not above the fold. Two of the sharpest and most powerful men at the Post—in the recent history of American journalism—had been fooled without ever having had the slightest suspicion about it. That night, at 9:54, the presses for the next day’s edition of The Washington Post began to roll, eventually churning out 892,220 copies of the newspaper that would make Jimmy a household name in Washington.
“It was kind of Ben and Bob who pushed that story,” David Maraniss told me. “Ben wasn’t overly involved in it, but it was clear that he loved her, and that story. It was a holy shit story, and he was bored. He’s easily bored. Ninety percent of the time he was bored. Nothing was big enough for him.”
* * *
1 Right after I started working for Ben back in 2007, I came across a topless picture of Elizabeth Ray somewhere in the files. (At some point after the scandal, she had posed for Playboy.) I brought it into his office, where Ben looked at it approvingly for a minute, eyes on her chest, before handing it back to me and saying, “Lungs.”
2 At the time, Condon Terrace was known as one of the roughest neighborhoods in D.C.
DEFENSE
Obviously the occasions when a reporter will witness a so-called natural crime in confidence, and the occasions when he will find it conformable to his own ethical and moral standards to withhold information about such a crime, are bound to be infinitesimally few. It does not strengthen a valid case for the press to claim an absolute privilege and then to say, trust us not to exercise it absolutely. We trust much to benevolent discretion, in public and private sectors, but generally only when countervailed.
—Alexander Bickel, The Morality of Consent
Janet Cooke, “Jimmy’s World,” The Washington Post, September 28, 1980, A1:
[begins:]
Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.
He nestles in a large, beige reclining chair in the living room of his comfortably furnished home in Southeast Washington. There is an almost cherubic expression on his small, round face as he talks about life—clothes, money, the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an addict since the age of 5.
[ends:]
[Ron, adult male] grabs Jimmy’s left arm just above the elbow, his massive hand tightly encircling the child’s small limb. The needle slides into the boy’s soft skin like a straw pushed into the center of a freshly baked cake. Liquid ebbs out of the syringe, replaced by bright red blood. The blood is then reinjected into the child.
Jimmy has closed his eyes during the whole procedure, but now he opens them, looking quickly around the room. He climbs into a rocking chair and sits, his head dipping and snapping upright again, in what addicts call “the nod.”
“Pretty soon, man,” Ron says, “you got to learn how to do this for yourself.”
David Maraniss, July 19, 2010:
DM: There were several people who were skeptical of the story after it ran.
Q: Just right away.
DM: Right away. Not just the city government, which was denying … but [black Metro reporter] Courtland Milloy was skeptical, and I was skeptical. For one smallest of reasons, which was that she said Jimmy was a Baltimore Orioles fan. No fucking way, inner city kid in Washington would be an Orioles fan. Baseball even. Maybe a Redskins fan or a Bullets fan, not an Orioles fan. So I just thought that was so wrong …
Q: Didn’t ring true to your ear.
DM: No.
Mike Sager, GQ, 1996:
The story didn’t feel right. The dialogue, for instance, sounded like a white person imitating jive. Blacks in D.C.’s ghettos didn’t say, “I be goin’.” They said, “I goin’.” And the appointments in the shooting gallery—matching chrome-and-glass tables? Could Janet, with her terrible sense of direction, even have found Jimmy’s house at night?
Vivian Aplin-Brownlee to Bill Green, April 1981:
I never believed it, and I told Milton that. I knew her so well and the depth of her. In her eagerness to make a name she would write farther than the truth would allow. When challenged on facts on other stories, Janet would reverse herself, but without dismay or consternation with herself. I knew she would be tremendously out of place in a “shooting gallery.” I didn’t believe she could get access. No pusher would shoot up a child in her presence.
Bill Green, “Janet’s World,” The Washington Post, April 19, 1981, A13:
Jimmy’s story struck at Washington’s heart. The paper had no sooner reached the streets than The Washington Post’s telephone switchboard lit up like a space launch control room.
Readers were outraged. The story was described as racist and criminal. The concern was for Jimmy. “What about the boy?” was the central question. It was repeated for the next four days in as many versions as the human mind can invent.
By Monday, Washington Police Chief Burtell Jefferson had launched a mammoth citywide search. He had called on his youth division to get to work Sunday. Mayor Marion Barry was incensed. All schools, social services and police contacts were to be asked for “Jimmy’s” whereabouts.
“An Addict at 8,” Washington Post editorial, September 30, 1980, A18:
In starkly revolting and heart-rending detail, staff writer Janet Cooke introduced readers of Sunday’s editions to “Jimmy’s World”—the story of an 8-year-old, third generation heroin addict in “a world of hard drugs, fast money and the good life he believes both can bring.” So repugnant, depressing and foreign to most people is this morally corrupt “world” of one child in the city that it would be a relief to dismiss this account as an exaggeration or an aberration.
The Washington Post, October 1, 1980, A1:
[after the jump:]
The question of whether the newspaper should reveal the name or location of the boy had become a major issue throughout the city, as D.C. officials raised concerns that the child’s life could be in increasing danger.
“We’re going to do everything we can to get that information and save that child’s life. We’ll see how much The Post is willing to do to protect its First Amendment rights at the expense of that child’s life,” police spokesman Gary Hankins told a radio audience yesterday morning.
The Post’s lawyer, John B. Kuhns of Williams & Connolly, said yesterday, “The enormous public response to this article reflects the serious concern of the community about drug use, particularly by our youth. No article about this boy’s tragic circumstances would have been possible if The Post could not protect the confidentiality of its news sources.
“Although the immediate pressures to reveal sources in a single case are often intense, such disclosure would gravely jeopardize The Post’s ability to report on this and other issues of vital concern to the community,” Kuhns said. “The Post’s decision to protect the confidentiality of its sources is essential if it is to continue to fulfill its constitutional function of informing the public.”
Bob Woodward to Bill Green, April 1981:
We went into our Watergate mode: protect the source and back the reporter.
Don Graham personal note to Janet Cooke, October 7, 1980:
The Post has no more important and tougher job than explaining life in the black community in Washington. A special burden gets put on black reporters doing that job, and a double-special burden on black reporters who try to see life through their own eyes instead of seeing it the way they’re told they should. The Post seems to have many such reporters. You belong very high up among them.
“Mayor Says City Ending Its Search for ‘Jimmy,’ ” The Washington Post, October 16, 1980, C1:
Mayor Mari
on Barry said yesterday that city officials are giving up on their search for an unidentified 8-year-old heroin addict whose life style, including daily injections of the drug, was the subject of a Washington Post article last month.
“We are kind of giving up on that,” Barry said when asked about the comprehensive search for the youth, known only as Jimmy.…
Barry said that he and police department officials are convinced that the Post report, including a description of the boy being injected with heroin by his mother’s live-in-lover, is at least part fabrication.
“I’ve been told the story was part myth and part reality,” Barry said. He said that after talking to police narcotics officers, and from his own personal knowledge of the drug world from his days as a community organizer, “We all have agreed that we don’t believe that the mother or the pusher would allow a reporter to see them shoot up.”
Washington Post editors said yesterday that the newspaper stands by its story.
Bill Green, “Janet’s World,” April 19, 1981:
By the following weekend, Coleman was uneasy. It was a slight feeling, but it was real. “I thought the police would have found him in three days at the outside. I’m not one of those people who believe the police can’t do anything right. They could find him. I knew it.”
Courtland Milloy was also worried. He and Cooke had gone out to find the second “Jimmy” [for a follow-up story].
“We were supposed to be finding another kid,” Milloy said. “But I’ll tell you the truth, I wanted to find Jimmy. Hell, that kid needed help. So as we drove around I circled through Condon Terrace, the general area where Janet said he lived.
“It didn’t take long to see that she didn’t know the area. It’s one of the toughest sections in town. I know it well. She said she didn’t see the house. I asked her if it was to the right of us, the left of us, or had we passed it. She didn’t know.”
Ben to Bill Green, April 1981:
Nobody ever came in this room and said, “I have doubts about the story”—before or after publication.
Richard Cohen, October 9, 2007:
Everybody in the office knew that that story was bullshit, but him. And it was a vast, you know, it’s one of these vast conspiracies in which nobody said anything. And he’s sitting there with his open door policy, as he used to call it, in his glass office, and nobody came in. And afterwards, [National reporter] Walter Pincus and I went to him and said, you know, Ben, you got this open door and a glass office, but nobody came in. You ought to think about that. And he said, “Get the fuck out of here.”
Walter Pincus, September 26, 2007:
He had the big glass wall. This was the argument. When we were complaining … he said, “My office is open to anybody. Why don’t they just walk in and tell me?” And if anybody other than those of us who really knew him did it, they’d be scared shitless. Because he wouldn’t even look up.
BCB to Wendy Wick, Ontario Apartments, December 15, 1980:
Dear Ms Wick:
I have been asked by Janet Cooke to write you about her, and I hasten to do so.
Janet Cooke has been a reporter at this newspaper for 11 months. She is a person of extraordinary maturity and responsibility. Her career here has been characterized by commitment, hard work and courage; and, on top of that, she is a nice person.
I commend her to The Ontario without reservation. I consider that you would be fortunate to have her … and predict that you will be happy with each other.
If I can answer any questions more specifically, I would be delighted to do so.
Elsa Walsh, August 28, 2010:
[Elsa lived with Cooke at the Ontario from December of 1980 until April of 1981, when the hoax was discovered. She began to date Woodward at the same time.]
Now, looking back on it, I can see that she was just under enormous stress. There were little clues that things weren’t quite right to me. I used to play a lot of tennis, and I guess this was just before we moved in and I was staying at her other place, and I was going to go play with Marty Schram, we had this regular kind of tennis time and my tennis stuff was all packed away and I said can I borrow your tennis racket? And she had told me she had been on this top doubles team at Vassar or wherever it was she said she’d gone to college. And she said sure, it’s in the closet. And I pulled out the racket and it was kind of like a Walmart racket, and it was not a tennis player’s racket. So I thought, that’s bizarre. And then all of her checks started bouncing from our landlord at the Ontario, so the landlord said she would only accept the checks from me, not from Janet.…
There began to be a lot of rumblings about the story.
Q: But initially you didn’t read it and think “Uh-uh.”
EW: No … but then I asked her about it. I remember sitting in our kitchen once, and she was working on this new story about the hooker,1 and she was really complaining about Bob and Milton Coleman, saying that they wanted to meet the woman. And that, you know, she was really attributing that to them being kind of perverts. And I said, well, you know, other people have said things about Jimmy. What do you think about that? And she said, well, they’re just really jealous. And I thought, maybe that’s what I am, too, and I dropped it.
* * *
1 In the wake of the “Jimmy” story, in mid-November of 1980 Cooke told her editors that she had found a fourteen-year-old prostitute. This time Coleman insisted upon meeting the girl in question; after a series of failed or canceled meetings, the story was dropped. Though Woodward and Coleman agreed in hindsight that this should have tipped them off about “Jimmy,” it didn’t.
PRIZE
Dear Gene and Lee:
No matter what we may think, nor how we may bend current definitions, there is no Pulitzer Prize now offered for feature writing, a category which must represent 30–40% of today’s newspapers.
We have the public service gold medal. No room for features in this category.
We have local general or spot news. I’m not sure what general news is, but it is news, not features, and spot news is the opposite of features.…
And yet some of the best writing in the press today is being done in this category. Not a paper worth its salt has not started a feature section during the last two decades. Profiles, life-styles, features … these are the lifeblood of a newspaper. These are the categories where the fine writers are found. And no Pulitzer to urge them on to greater heights.
I propose that a category be added thusly:
“For a distinguished example of feature writing, a single article or series: One thousand dollars ($1,000).”
—BCB to fellow Pulitzer board members Gene Patterson and Lee Hills, November 9, 1977
Without the Pulitzer prize, Janet Cooke’s fabrication would probably never have been exposed. There was no way to disprove her, particularly once she invented the fable—after one too many unfruitful attempts to find Jimmy with other reporters and editors—that Jimmy and his mother had moved to Baltimore to avoid further attention. The various doubters in the newsroom would continue to doubt, and editors might attend to later stories of hers with heightened scrutiny, but in essence her secret was safe.
In 1981, Ben was no longer on the Pulitzer advisory board, having ceded his seat in 1979, but prior to his departure he had sought and secured the new feature-writing category. Ben’s motivation for creating that category is patently obvious, summed up in a memo from Henry Allen, a Post reporter who made a pitch to Ben in 1976:
You’ve assembled the greatest bank of feature writers in the newspaper business. But every year, at prize time, none of us gets a shot at the Pulitzer, unless one of our stories edges into another category, such as comment or local reporting.…
The age of mere color stories and human-interest sidebars ended when Style was born. Feature writers get read, get famous, get people buying newspapers, and should get their own Pulitzer.
Ben responded by noting that each year he protested the lack of a feature category, but “every yea
r my peers (smile!) impugn my motives, saying that I rise only because of the great collection of feature writers here.” He promised Allen he would “give it a new whack,” and the next year he did. In 1978, at Ben’s continued instigation, the full advisory board voted to create a new category in feature writing, and in 1979 the first Pulitzer Prize in that category was awarded to Jon Franklin, of the Baltimore Evening Sun.
Two years later, “Jimmy’s World” took the prize.
That Cooke’s piece was ever even put up for a Pulitzer in the first place is odd. In all of their various testimonials after the fact, Bob and Ben and Milton Coleman—three editors with direct responsibility for the story—would dwell on the idea that it would have been suspicious for them not to have nominated the story. “Not to submit it,” Ben told a New York Times reporter a few days after the scandal broke, “would have meant something that you didn’t want to say, that you didn’t believe the story.” This is a very strange reason to nominate a newspaper piece for the most prestigious prize in journalism.
“I have used the phrases ‘in for a dime, in for a dollar’ to describe my overall conclusion about submitting the Cooke story for a Pulitzer or any other prize,” Bob said in the wake of the incident. “I believed it, we published it.… It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes. If so, our posture would be as follows: we published the story and said it was true, but now we are going to nominate it for a Pulitzer—now that’s serious business.” They had backed themselves into a situation from which the only perceptible exit was a deeper commitment.
Yours in Truth Page 37