Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (33 page)

“In the
Post
’s newsroom, on the other hand, I found no doubts, no second thoughts … the question was not whether they should be printed but how they should be displayed. When I talked to editors … they used words like ‘interesting’ and ‘riveting’ and ‘gripping’ to describe them. The pictures told something about life in the ghetto, they said (although the neighborhood where the tragedy occurred is not a ghetto, I am told). They dramatized the need to check on the safety of fire escapes. They dramatically conveyed something that had happened, and that is the business we’re in. They were news.…

“Was publication of that [third] picture a bow to the same taste for the morbidly sensational that makes gold mines of disaster movies? Most papers will not print the picture of a dead body except in the most unusual circumstances. Does the fact that the final picture was taken a millisecond before the young woman died make a difference? Most papers will not print a picture of a bare female breast. Is that a more inappropriate subject for display than the picture of a human being’s last agonized instant of life?” Seib offered no answers to the questions he raised, but he went on to say that although as an editor he would probably have run the pictures, as a reader he was revolted by them.

In conclusion, Seib wrote: “Any editor who decided to
print those pictures without giving at least a moment’s thought to what purpose they served and what their effect was likely to be on the reader should ask another question: Have I become so preoccupied with manufacturing a product according to professional traditions and standards that I have forgotten about the consumer, the reader?”

It should be clear that the phone calls and letters and Seib’s own reaction were occasioned by one factor alone: the death of the woman. Obviously, had she survived the fall, no one would have protested; the pictures would have had a completely different impact. Equally obviously, had the child died as well—or instead—Seib would undoubtedly have received ten times the phone calls he did. In each case, the pictures would have been exactly the same—only the captions, and thus the responses, would have been different.

But the questions Seib raises are worth discussing—though not exactly for the reasons he mentions. For it may be that the real lesson of the Boston photographs is not the danger that editors will be forgetful of reader reaction, but that they will continue to censor pictures of death precisely because of that reaction. The protests Seib fielded were really a variation on an old theme—and we saw plenty of it during the Nixon-Agnew years—the “Why doesn’t the press print the good news?” argument. In this case, of course, the objections were all dressed up and cleverly disguised as righteous indignation about the privacy of death. This is a form of puritanism that is often justifiable; just as often it is merely puritanical.

Seib takes it for granted that the widespread though fairly recent newspaper policy against printing pictures of dead bodies is a sound one; I don’t know that
it makes any sense at all. I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism; the fact is, however, that people die. Death happens to be one of life’s main events. And it is irresponsible—and more than that, inaccurate—for newspapers to fail to show it, or to show it only when an astonishing set of photos comes in over the Associated Press wire. Most papers covering fatal automobile accidents will print pictures of mangled cars. But the significance of fatal automobile accidents is not that a great deal of steel is twisted but that people die. Why not show it? That’s what accidents are about. Throughout the Vietnam war, editors were reluctant to print atrocity pictures. Why
not
print them? That’s what that war was about. Murder victims are almost never photographed; they are granted their privacy. But their relatives are relentlessly pictured on their way in and out of hospitals and morgues and funerals.

I’m not advocating that newspapers print these things in order to teach their readers a lesson. The
Post
editors justified their printing of the Boston pictures with several arguments in that direction; every one of them is irrelevant. The pictures don’t show anything about slum life; the incident could have happened anywhere, and it did. It is extremely unlikely that anyone who saw them rushed out and had his fire escape strengthened. And the pictures were not news—at least they were not national news. It is not news in Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles that a woman was killed in a Boston fire. The only newsworthy thing about the pictures is that they were taken. They deserve to be printed because they are great pictures,
breathtaking pictures of something that happened. That they disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that’s why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.

November, 1975

Barney Collier has written a book about Washington journalists, and the thing the Washington journalists in the book said to me when I called them up to say I was writing a column about it was: Don’t; don’t write anything about it; you’ll just give the book publicity and end up selling copies of it. This is interesting, since it implies that these journalists believe that all publicity is good publicity, and if they believed that, none of them would be half as upset about the book as they are.

Nonetheless, it’s a tricky problem.

Collier’s book is called
Hope and Fear in Washington (The Early Seventies): The Story of the Washington Press Corps
. The Dial Press is publishing it, and I’ll get to them in a minute. The author, who is thirty-seven, was a reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune
and later for the
New York Times
. He left the
Times
in 1969 under murky circumstances—he was not fired, but it is clear that he was in some way made to feel that his presence in the newsroom was no longer desirable. A few years later, he published an article in the
New York Times Magazine
on columnist Joseph Alsop; subsequently, he was given $7,500 and a contract from the David McKay Company
to write a book on Washington journalists. Because he was an old colleague, or a friend of a friend, the journalists he wanted to see gave him interviews; most reporters believe they have that obligation to other reporters. Because he was clearly down-and-out, they usually paid for lunch. Because he seemed a little strange—he did not take notes, and he asked odd questions like “What do you think of sex?” and “What is your definition of intelligence?” and “How much money do you make?”—most of them eventually stopped returning his phone calls. As Sally Quinn said to him at one point: “I get terrible vibes from you, and I don’t know why.”

Collier turned the book in to David McKay about two years ago, and it was rejected. His editor had expected a serious book on journalists and journalism; what Collier delivered, in the opinion of the publisher, was self-indulgent, inaccurate, impressionistic and libelous. “We felt,” said a spokesman for McKay, “that it would have been immoral to publish it.” The book was sent around to a number of other publishers—Collier claims that seventeen or eighteen of them turned it down, though his agent says that is a slight exaggeration. Finally, it came to rest at Dial, which paid ten thousand dollars for it. Dial felt the book would be controversial, and that it would sell. (I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.) This faith was bolstered when material from the book on Sander Vanocur appeared in
[MORE]
, the journalism review, and received more mail in protest than anything
[MORE]
had ever printed.

In his introduction to the book, Collier writes: “One of the ideas behind this book is that in order to more
nearly understand the news from Washington you must more nearly understand the life of the person who tells you what the news may be.” This is a valid proposition, and it might have made for a good book. It helps to know, for example, that Melvin Laird leaks to Evans and Novak when you read an Evans and Novak column saying that Gerald Ford is considering appointing Melvin Laird Vice-President. This sort of thing is not in Collier’s book. Instead, the reader learns that Bob Novak has just given up smoking, and that Rowland Evans won’t let Barney Collier see his tax return. (It’s unfortunate that Evans did not: Collier might have discovered, in looking at it, how to spell Evans’s first name.) Collier treats his subjects as celebrities. He writes about their marriages, hints leeringly at their infidelities, twists the quotes, jumbles the facts, misspells the names. He makes fun of what they order for lunch, how they eat it, and even that they paid his check. Nothing is off the record. “People tell you something and expect you to take care of them,” Collier says. “They assume that off the record is everything you as a pal would leave out. It’s a permeating thing in Washington.” It is indeed permeating—and it’s relevant when reporters end up taking care of someone like Henry Kissinger. But here it’s ridiculous. Anyone who has ever done interviews knows how easy it is to make an interview subject sound foolish by quoting his casual conversation with a waiter, or by asking him asinine questions.

And that, of course, is precisely Collier’s aim: to make his subjects look foolish. They have succeeded and he has failed; Collier’s bitterness at the injustice of it all permeates everything he writes. It makes for an incredibly ugly book, which is in no way redeemed by the fact
that Collier is open about his own life—his first marriage, his decision to give up his sons for adoption, his trials at the
Times
, and his travels in and out of sanity. The crack-up is one thing when Scott Fitzgerald writes it, and quite another when Barney Collier does.

But I wanted to write about Collier’s book because it raises a couple of interesting questions. The first is about its publisher, and what I think of as the lie-down-with-dogs-get-up-with-fleas syndrome. The Dial Press sent Collier’s book out with six jacket and publicity quotes. Two of them—from Sydney Gruson and Richard Goodwin—are accurate. Two others—from David Halberstam and Theodore H. White—were lifted from their letters to
[MORE]
objecting to the Vanocur piece; they were used without permission and referred only to the piece; Halberstam’s quote is completely out of context. I spoke to Donna Schrader, publicity director at Dial, and Joyce Engelson, Collier’s editor, and neither of them saw anything wrong with using the quotes.

Then there are quotes from Art Buchwald (“… I came out good, but you better make sure the hood of your car is locked after the other people in the book read it!”) and Helen Thomas (“I love it. I found myself going through all the emotions with it. I cried one minute and laughed the next. It’s thrilling. It’s spine-tingling. You got the people … just right … they all revealed themselves. It’s really the anatomy of the press corps”). I called Buchwald and asked if he had given Collier that quote. “I didn’t say that,” Buchwald said. “He asked me for a quote, and I said, ‘Weird.’ ‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Weird.
W-e-i-r-d
.’ It’s outrageous he’s using something I didn’t say.”

I then called Helen Thomas, who had no idea she
was being quoted at all. “I thought I was just talking to Barney,” she said. “He gave me the book, and then he called to ask my opinion of it. I haven’t really read it— I just went through it in a cursory fashion. If I wanted to put something in writing I would have done it myself. I didn’t realize it was going to be used in that form. Life is difficult, to put it mildly.”

“The first person I gave the manuscript to was Art Buchwald,” Collier said when I asked him about all this. “I told him I needed a quote and that I didn’t care if he liked it or hated it, but he could only read the book if he gave me a quote. My wife and I went to pick up the manuscript a couple of days later and I asked him if he would give me a quote. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’d like to get out of it. I don’t want to be known as a collaborator.’ ‘Art,’ I said, ‘you made a promise.’ ‘Will you settle for one word?’ he said. ‘What’s the word?’ I said. ‘Weird,’ he said. We got up to go, and as we went out the door, he pointed to our car. ‘That’s a nice car,’ he said. ‘I came out good, but you better make sure the hood of your car is locked after the other people in the book read it.’ ”

“Did you ask him if you could use that quote?” I asked.

“Nope,” said Collier. “He said I could use a quote, and he didn’t make a beginning or an end to it.”

Collier went on: “The second person I brought it to was Helen Thomas. I called her up afterward, and she said these things. She didn’t put a beginning or an end on it, and she said I could quote her.”

Collier sent both quotes off to Dial. Neither his editor nor the publicity director called Buchwald or Thomas to confirm the quotes; in fact, they seemed rather surprised when I suggested they might have done so. “I haven’t followed this step by step,” said Schrader. “I haven’t looked at the material. We have six authors out on tour.”

“This is the kind of book that obviously creates a sort of fuss,” said Engelson. “The point of the book is that these people are public figures. A lot of the negative reaction to it came because of the article in
[MORE]
, and a lot of that was people objecting to it because Sander Vanocur’s wife was dying. It’s certainly not Barney’s responsibility that his wife, I forget her name, was dying. The timing had nothing to do with Barney. Mr. Buchwald is another set of fish. One day he says he said it. One day he says he didn’t.”

“What about the Helen Thomas quote?” I asked.

“I have it in writing from Helen Thomas,” said Engelson.

“I don’t think you do.”

“I’m sure we do.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then Barney got it from her,” said Engelson. “I don’t see why she should object, anyway. It’s a beautiful portrait of Helen Thomas.”

I realized, as I read Collier’s book, that I would not have been nearly as offended by it if it had been about movie stars—and that brings me to the second question it raises, about journalists and celebrity. In the past few years, journalists have indeed become celebrities; meanwhile, as if nothing had changed, they continue to parrot the old rule: “I’m a journalist, and I feel I have an obligation to give interviews to other journalists since I ask for them myself.” Journalists may in fact have an obligation to help other journalists, particularly on substantive points, but they are under no obligation to promote themselves. And if they are going to—if they are going to behave like movie stars—eventually someone is going to come along and make fools of them. In some terrible
way, the profession deserves the Collier book; it’s the inevitable outcome of this daisy chain, this circle jerk of media interviewing media.