Dish (15 page)

“How did it feel?”

“I don’t know, it just hurt.”

“Was it a sharp pain?”

“No.”

“Was it more like a toothache?”

“No.”

“Have you ever felt anything like it before?”

“Not really, but it was something like an electrical shock.”

“Where did you feel it?”

“It hit me in the back of the neck and it went down my spine.”

“Did you scream?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You said, ‘The pain hit me. It was like an electrical shot that started in my neck and shot down my spine. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

The “quotes,” Pope cautioned, had to be believable: “A Japanese carpenter should not sound like Ernest Hemingway, or vice versa,” he noted, but “We need quotes that tug at the heart.” For example, Pope wrote, “Take the story about the mother who had the flag that covered her son’s coffin stolen. The writer wrote, ‘I wish they’d bring it back.’ But it was changed to ‘If they don’t bring it back, God help them.’ ” “We should touch our readers’ souls,” Pope wrote. “Cause them to smile, to get lumps in their throats, to break down and cry.”

Pope was looking for what he called “Gee whiz stories”—a phrase coined by Joseph Pulitzer. And indeed, Pope was in many ways following in the footsteps of Pulitzer and that other master of yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, both of whom he viewed as role models. Pope, like Hearst and Pulitzer, understood that to capture the masses, journalism had to be entertaining. Feel-good articles run by the
Enquirer
included “Amazing Candy and Chewing Gum Diet,” “TV Can Prolong Life,” “After 56 Men Refuse to Coach Little League Baseball Club, Housewife Takes Job and Wins Championship,” and, perhaps most ironic, “How to Stop Vicious Gossip.” On one occasion, former articles editor P. J. Corkery submitted a list of story ideas to Pope, including a suggestion for an article on how to throw parties.

“Parties?” Pope asked incredulously. “You mean like with hats?”

“We can leave the hats out of it,” Corkery said.

Pope was dismissive. “People don’t go to parties,” he said as he killed the story.

Pope was well aware that people do go to parties, Corkery knew, but he also realized that many people who bought the
Enquirer
weren’t invited to parties or didn’t have the time or money to give them. “The boss never wants the reader to feel bad about his or her life,” Corkery noted. “The job of the paper, aside from getting people to buy it each week, the boss says, is to entertain. Ameliorate … Never make our readers feel as if they’re missing something. Like parties. With or without hats.”

Another staple of the
Enquirer
was the harmlessly zany, believe-it-or-not story. On one occasion, a group of
National Enquirer
reporters decided the biggest scoop in the history of mankind would be if aliens landed on earth. “So we decided to do it,” said one of the editors involved in the charade. “We thought it would tell our readers a lot about human nature.” The
Enquirer
orchestrated a light show and a “landing” in a small town in Texas known for its UFO sightings. They hired a Hollywood makeup artist and a special effects team to disguise an
Enquirer
reporter as an alien. “I swear to god, he looked like a Martian,” said the editor. “So we drop him off in a small town. He walks up to people and says, ‘Take me to your leader.’ They fucking nearly killed him. He’s running away, screaming, ‘Stop, I’m with the
National Enquirer.’
They said, ‘The hell you are. You’re a damned alien.’ ” The article never ran. “It sure as hell did tell us something about human nature,” the editor said, “but it’s not something that our readers would have liked hearing about themselves.”

While the
Enquirer
tended to avoid writing about politicians, it made an exception with the Kennedy family. “Business will be fine as long as Ted Kennedy stays in the news,” Pope once said. The
Enquirer
pursued the Senator so tenaciously that eventually he struck a deal with the tabloid: His office would supply them with stories if they would hold back on some of the more salacious stuff they had uncovered—a deal that a number of Hollywood stars were to strike with the publication in the 1980s. The deal was negotiated by Kennedy’s brother-in-law, lawyer Steven Smith, ac
cording to Rick Burke, the Kennedy staffer who was assigned as the
Enquirer
contact. “I was the contact man,” Burke once admitted. “Once a week, I received a call from an ‘inquiring’ reporter to see if there was any family news to report.”

Because the mainstream papers were ignoring the Kennedy scandals, the tabloids were having a field day with them. For years before the story was legitimized by “credible” journalists like Seymour Hersch, the tabloids were filled with Kennedy scandals.
*

During this time, some of the most respected investigative reporters in the country were turning to publications like the
National Enquirer
to get stories on the Kennedys printed; no upscale publications would touch them. Articles by reporters like Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson began appearing in the
National Enquirer.
Peter Lawford, who had been banned from the Kennedy circle after the Marilyn Monroe embarrassment, and after
Confidential
disappeared, became a source for the
Enquirer
and regularly sold stories about the clan to the tabloid.
†
There, tucked between stories of freaks of nature and violent crimes, stories started appearing in the tabloid—complete with photos—about Kennedy’s infidelities and mob links that no other publication would run.
^‡

Perhaps even more shocking than what appeared in the
Enquirer
was the method by which material was obtained. Reporters went to extraordinary, and frequently appalling, lengths to investigate the private lives of public figures. “Probably the sleaziest thing I had to do while at the
Enquirer
was when Art Carney was in some kind of accident and alcohol was rumored to be involved,” a former reporter recalls. “My assignment was to go to Carney’s hometown and hit all the liquor stores to see if he was a drunk, then check into his hospital to see if he was in detox. But I couldn’t find any dirt, and I thought I was going to get axed for it.” Indeed, eventually, like so many of the
Enquirer’s
reporters, he was.

Despite the search for and publication of such material, Gene Pope frequently insisted, and genuinely seemed to believe, that in contrast to the cynical, pessimistic tone of much of the journalism of the early 1970s, his magazine offered an upbeat, optimistic view of the world. “We refuse to run anything that is depressing,” Pope once said. “We try to make sure that when you read the
Enquirer,
you’re never depressed. You feel good about it and yourself.”

To make this point, Pope had a time capsule buried in front of his headquarters and above it installed a plaque with this inscription:

March 4, 1975, was a smoggy, somewhat soggy Tuesday in the swank Hancock Park section of Los Angeles when Mike Wallace sat down in H. R. Haldeman’s elegant living room and pumped the convicted Watergate conspirator about the scoops and scandals which CBS News had paid him $100,000 to reveal. Nixon’s former chief of staff was one of the most notorious men in the country. He was the former President’s closest confidante, his hatchet man. “Every President needs a son of a bitch, and I’m Nixon’s,” Haldeman once famously said. “I get what he wants done and I take the heat instead of him.” He had recently been convicted of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice for his role in covering up Watergate. That’s what made him such a ripe subject for
60 Minutes,
the highly respected “news magazine” of crusading investigative journalism.

Haldeman had refused to speak to any reporters for the previous three years, but in October 1974, shortly before his case went to trial, his agent Ron Konecky had approached CBS and said that Haldeman might be willing to talk. Bill Leonard, the network’s senior vice president for news, and Gordon Manning, CBS
vice president for hard news, met with Haldeman in Washington to negotiate the interview. Over dinner, Haldeman handed Leonard and Manning an outline for a tell-all book he was planning to write; it promised to deliver sizzling anecdotes about Nixon, Henry Kissinger, John Mitchell, and John Ehrlichman. Those stories, he told them, could be presented on CBS first. What’s more, Haldeman had a potential gold mine: he had privately used a Super 8 mm camera to film dozens of hours of behind-the-scenes activities of Nixon and his top aides. It was, in essence, actual film footage of the events leading up to Watergate.

Haldeman wasn’t motivated by the public’s right to know. For the interview and the film—which he wouldn’t show to CBS before the deal was struck—Haldeman was asking $200,000. CBS had a written policy against paying news sources, but there were ways to hide or disguise such payments. Besides, earlier that year, when 60
Minutes
paid convicted White House burglar G. Gordon Liddy $15,000 for an interview, the results were explosive, and the fee didn’t become much of an issue. An exclusive with Haldeman would add some muscle to a show reviewers said was “an intelligent weakling,” “having brains but lacking brawn.” CBS negotiated Haldeman’s payment down to $100,000 and quietly signed a contract.

When Leonard got back to New York, he called Mike Wallace into his office. Leonard asked Wallace if he’d like to interview H. R. Haldeman. A contract had been signed, Leonard said. Wallace would have six hours to question Haldeman off the record; there were no ground rules and no topic was off limits. Wallace leaped at the chance.

In the days leading up to the actual interview, Wallace and the 60
Minutes
team had spent nearly forty-four hours with Haldeman, pumping him for details, prepping him on what he was going to say. The conversations went well. Haldeman had a reputation for being rigid and elusive. Yet, Wallace found him more likable, more “amiable” than he had expected. Haldeman, who for years had worn his hair in a militaristic buzz cut, had let it grow “modishly long,” Wallace noticed. He smiled and joked a lot. Wallace had high hopes for the interview.

The interview took place over two days, March 4 and 5, 1975.
Haldeman and Wallace were miked, the lights were on, and the cameras started rolling. The Grand Inquisitor bore in, and he found out why some journalists called Haldeman “The Berlin Wall.” He was impenetrable.

“Mr. Haldeman,” Wallace asked the convicted perjurer, “has it never occurred to you to confess?”

“If I felt I were guilty of any crime for which I have been charged or any other crime, I’d confess to the guilt of that,” Haldeman replied. “But on the basis of living with yourself, I’ve got to be able to know that I’m in a truthful and honest position. And a plea of guilty would not be truthful or honest on my part and so I can’t do it.”

Was Watergate the result, Wallace wanted to know, of a White House that was paranoid about “enemies”?

Haldeman looked slightly taken aback. “I don’t think there was any mind-set that led to Watergate,” he said.

Haldeman backpedaled from things he had said before the interview. During the off-camera conversations, Haldeman had called Nixon “the weirdest man ever to sit in the White House.” Once the cameras were rolling, however, Haldeman insisted that he simply meant that the disgraced President was “a very paradoxical man.” When pressed, he offered this insight: “Richard Nixon’s complexities are not surface complexities that by study and exposure one can see through and then deal with.”