The Last Debate (31 page)

“Mike Howley does not clear things like that with me.”

“Do you wish he had?”

“I don’t know.”

“What would you have told him if he had asked for your OK?”

“I don’t know. Jesus.”

Our lunch arrived and his relief was obvious. I could tell that here was a man who was uncomfortable, who was doing this in much the same way he would have corrective gum or open heart surgery.

“After the fact now, what do you think of what he and the other three did?” I asked after we ate a few bites accompanied by some irrelevant small talk.

He said: “I think it could change journalism forever. I think the idea of people like you and me, Mike and those others, deciding the people don’t know what they’re doing is dangerous as hell. We’re accused of doing it all the time, but it took something like Williamsburg to make me realize we really don’t do it very often. I’ve got to think about it some more, to tell you the real truth. I really do. I’ve got to wonder if the pants were on the other legs, if Mike and them knew all of that about a good guy, would they have sprung it on him like that a few days before an election? I know the argument. I know no two cases, no two elections, no two candidates, are the same. Meredith really was a prick who definitely should not have become president of the United States. I might have moved to Venice or Paris, in fact, if he had. He was more than a prick, he was a menace to the country. He was all of those awful things all of us who have ever covered politics always worried would come along. Here in this one person were all of the worst traits of Perot, North, both Jesses, Farrakhan, Limbaugh, Dole, Brown, and Zhirinovsky, all rolled into one. I know all of that. But I wonder. I’ve got to think about it some more.…”

I tried to read what he said for anything more, any hidden agendas—personal or otherwise. I could find none. I had the feeling that he was
merely answering a difficult question as truthfully as he could. I continued to be very impressed with Jerry Rhome.

“Is there an official
News
position on what Howley did?” I asked.

There was a flicker in his eyes—they were green—that signaled trouble.

“Sure,” he said. “It was in our lead editorial the next morning.”

“I mean on a more personal basis, say, with the Gerrards.”

There was another flicker. This time the message was clear. Oh, shit, it said.

Herman Gerrard was the owner-publisher of the
News.
His two sons, one niece, and two nephews worked for him as vice presidents and assistants to the president of the holding company that owned the
News
plus a discount bookstore chain, a discount beauty-shop chain, seven neighborhood health spas in northern Virginia, a flock of Wendy’s hamburger restaurants, and the Washington area’s largest charter and tour bus operator, called Vision Lines.

Rhome said: “Look, it was what you would have expected. At first they were appalled along with most everyone else, and then they were confused, and finally, now, they are proud. Right on, Mike, and God bless America.”

I asked what Howley’s status was with the
News.
He told me what I already mostly knew from reading the clippings. Howley was not allowed to write anything about the election between the debate and Election Day. The ban was ordered, said the announcement, to “avoid potential appearance problems.” It applied to straight news stories, analytical pieces, and even his column. He also agreed to a management request to avoid all outside interviews on television and radio as well as all print outlets. This meant he did not even take his regular slots on the NBS morning program or the opinion food-fight program on Saturday night.

“What happens now?” I said.

“He has a job at
The Washington Morning News
as long as he wants it.”

“Does he want it?”

“I’m sure he does.”

“You haven’t talked to him?”

“Not lately.”

“Where is he?”

“None of your business.”

The green eyes were full of play and mischief now. Anything else, young man? they said to me.

Yes, I had something else.

“Where did that stuff about Meredith come from?” I asked.

There was no change in his expression or eyes. He said: “If I knew I probably wouldn’t tell you, but I don’t know so it isn’t even a problem for me.”

“Have you asked Howley?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t want to know.”

Now he was mad. Not at me, I didn’t think, but at somebody else. Howley? Yeah, it had to be Howley. Why, why, why? Then I had the answer. The obvious answer.

I said: “I guess you must have wondered the same thing I did. If it came from Howley, then why hadn’t it all appeared in
The Washington Morning News
before that night in Williamsburg?”

“I’m not talking,” he said.

“One can’t help but wonder why he saved it for the debate instead of writing it up for his own newspaper.”

I had Jerry Rhome on the horns of several dilemmas. He took a long swallow of iced tea and fooled with a black olive on his plate and looked off at the bookshelf at Howley’s, Tubbs’s, and the other books.

I said: “I’m willing to go on background, if you wish. I use it but not attributed to you.”

“I’m a goddamn newspaperman, Chapman, not—to use Meredith’s word—the fucking deputy under assistant secretary of state for bilateral governmental intercourse or something. I don’t go on background with anybody.”

I shut up and let him fool with his napkin and rearrange the salt and pepper shakers and the saucer of little pink packets of sugar substitute there in the center of the table between us.

The waiter came and asked if we wanted some dessert and coffee. We both said no to dessert, yes to coffee. It bought Jerry Rhome some
more time. I knew what he was doing. As a journalist himself, he was trying to imagine how what he was tempted to say would look in the cold type of
The New American Tatler
magazine. It is one thing to say something to somebody in a relaxed setting such as this, but he knew from his own hands-on experience on the other side that cold-type print is transforming. Innocent words can become something very different.

Finally, he spoke: “I am not going to dodge it. OK? Sure, I got hot watching that debate. I didn’t understand why with all of the great goddamn reporters we have working for my great goddamn newspaper we didn’t get that story. It doubled—tripled—the hot when I’m listening to
the
story of the presidential campaign being thrown out there in Williamsburg by my leading political reporter, a man who works for me, a man who draws a nice salary from me, a man who I thought understood that I get first dibs on all stories he comes across in the course of his exciting work as a famous journalist of our times. OK? I said it. OK?”

He said it, all right. But it didn’t make sense. Something did not add up.

“So I guess you really jumped Howley about that, right?” I asked.

“Nope, not really. Whatever I said is none of your business anyhow.”

“I’m confused.”

“Good.”

The coffee came and Jerry Rhome changed the subject. To me. He asked me questions about how I got into magazine writing and about Jonathan Angel and the
Tatler.
He told me how Jonathan had worked for him as a kid reporter and how he always read our magazine. Rhome was doing to another what he as a reporter had probably had done to him many times by people skilled in handling reporters. I am sure there is a rule among the smart, experienced interviewees: No reporter can resist the opportunity to talk about himself.

I resisted—almost. I told him only a little bit about growing up in Connecticut and going to Williams College. I said almost nothing about Jonathan and the magazine.

Then, as we walked out—he insisted on paying the check—I resumed my business.

“There is no real doubt that those statements were brought to Williamsburg by Howley, is there?”

“I have some doubt.”

“I don’t.”

He looked at me as if to say, OK, bud, stop it there. If I want to know anything more I’ll ask. We walked in silence back across Rhode Island. Rhome again shot the finger to the NRA building, and we headed toward his newspaper.

As we got closer to the
News
I realized that while with some of the others on my master interview list there might be second, third, and even fourth or fifth chances for follow-up and cleanup questions, this was probably it for Jerry Rhome. I either got it now or I didn’t get it.

I said: “So where do you think Howley would have gotten those statements?”

“
If
he had them, you mean. If he had them, he could have gotten them from the Greene campaign or from some other troublemaking Democrat. There are lots of places he could have gotten them.”

“But wouldn’t he have brought them right to you or somebody else at the
News
if it had happened that way?”

He closed his eyes, shook his head. We were past the waiting-for-Howley TV crews now and were only seconds away from parting. He was only seconds away from escape. I was only seconds away from getting a scrap of information that I was certain—still without knowing what it was—would be extremely important.

“I hear you,” he said. “But that’s all I do.”

“Could somebody from the
News
—another reporter, say—have given them to him?”

“Not and kept his balls if I ever found out about it.” His eyes reinforced his words. There was no question he would have personally de-balled such a person.

I walked away from Jerry Rhome convinced that he had either already found out about it or had a damned good guess about it. It meant, if my reading was right, I now also knew how those statements got to Howley. All I had to find out was the name of the
News
reporter who did it—and how and why it was done.

Go, Tom, go.

There was a man waiting to see me when I returned to the
Tatler
office that afternoon. It was the man from
The Kansas City Star.
I knew from reading accounts of the Virginia Room riot that his name was Richard Fisher and he was fifty-nine years old. He was holding a cane by his right side when he stood up to shake my hand, but otherwise he looked fine.

“I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that you saved my life, Tom Chapman,” he said. “I came by just to say thank you.”

He gave me a copy of the first-person account of his experience in the Virginia Room that he had written for his newspaper. The headline was
A SCRAPE WITH DEATH BY PRESS-ING.

In the story he gave full credit to me as his savior. He did not mention the former football player–SEAL from the
Baltimore Sun.
He said he didn’t know about any of that because by then he was completely out of it, but he would find the guy and thank him, too.

I liked Richard Fisher. Maybe the foxhole rule is real. Maybe difficult experiences do bond people together quicker and firmer than all others. Whatever, I found myself talking to him like we had known each other for years.

After a while he asked me what I was up to and I told him. I told him all about my assignment, all about how I was trying to piece together the many parts of the what, how, and why of the debate. I talked a lot more than I should have and revealed a lot more than I should have, violating a working-press rule against telling another reporter anything you would mind seeing in/on that other reporter’s newspaper, magazine, newscast, or whatever.

But with this man, this man whose life I had saved, I forgot myself. I told him about my need to find out where those women’s abuse statements came from. Richard Fisher, without a second’s hesitation, said: “Ask them.”

“Who?”

“The women. Somebody had to approach them and interview them.”

In retrospect, I think it is fair to say that it is more than likely that I would have eventually arrived at that simple—and obvious—approach on my own. But sitting there at that moment in my office, I saw the man in front of me, Richard Fisher of
The Kansas City Star
, to be a journalistic genius of some kind.

The way I saw it at that moment, he had returned the favor. He had saved
my
life.