Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (40 page)

After that, I am pretty much through looking at
Gourmet
magazine. And where has it gotten me, you may ask. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. Last April, when I began my second round, I think I expected that this time I would get around to cooking something from it. Then May passed and I failed to make the rhubarb
tart pictured in the centerfold and I gave up in the recipe department. At that point, it occurred to me that perhaps I bought
Gourmet
because I figured it was the closest I would ever get to being a gentile. But that’s not it either. The real reason, I’m afraid, has simply to do with food and life, particularly married life. “Does everyone who gets married talk about furniture?” my friend Bud Trillin once asked. No. Only for a while. After that you talk about pistachio nuts.

December, 1976

A few months ago, Seth Kantor went and laid an egg. Kantor works in Washington as an investigative reporter for the
Detroit News
, and in October, 1976, he broke a big one, a scoop on the Michigan Senate race, a front-page story that he clearly thinks ought to have earned him praise, if not prize nominations; instead, it got him nothing but criticism. Two columnists on his own paper attacked him. Mike Royko of the
Chicago Daily News
suggested that the
Detroit News
be awarded a large bronze laundry hamper for “the most initiative in poking around in somebody else’s dirty underwear.” Even Kantor’s wife thought he went a little overboard.

Kantor’s story said that Democrat Don Riegle, a Michigan congressman then running for the Senate, had had an affair in 1969 with a young woman who tape-recorded several of their conversations with his permission. (In 1969 Riegle was married to his first wife; he is now married to his second.) The
News
printed selected portions of the taped transcripts. Seth Kantor claims that the episode “tells you a lot about a man’s judgment as well as his stability.” A
News
editorial that endorsed Riegle’s opponent Marvin Esch claimed that
the story revealed Riegle’s “arrogance, immaturity, cold-bloodedness and consuming political ambition.”

The voters of Michigan apparently felt otherwise. The day Kantor’s story appeared, Riegle had slipped to a bare 1 percent edge in the polls; on election day three weeks later he won the Senate seat by a 6 percent margin, and his staff considered sending the
News
a telegram reading: “Thanks. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

In the year or so since Fanne Foxe jumped into the Tidal Basin, journalists have begun to debate a number of extremely perplexing questions concerning the private lives of political figures. How much does the public have the right to know? How much does an editor have the right to determine what the public has a right to know? Where do you cross the line into invasion of privacy? Last summer, in the most successful book promotion stunt ever pulled off, Elizabeth Ray brought down Wayne Hays—but she was an editor’s dream, the-mistress-on-the-payroll-who-can’t-type. What about mistresses who
can
type? Editors justify printing just about anything about a politician on the grounds of character. Are those adequate grounds? These questions are worth thinking about, but they all assume that decisions on what to print will be made by responsible journalists. As it happens, that may not be the correct assumption in the case of the
Detroit News
.

The
News
is the largest afternoon newspaper in America (circulation 613,000), and until last year, when the
Detroit Free Press
overtook it, it was one of the few big-city afternoon papers that sold more copies than the local morning paper. The decline in
News
circulation is generally attributed to a number of factors: editorial lethargy, a rising number of white-collar workers
within the city as well as overall population decline, and an increased antagonism toward the paper in Detroit’s black community. On the editorial page, the
News
supports civil rights; but following the 1967 riots, publisher Peter Clark bricked up the first-floor windows of the
News
building; the paper also began printing a daily roundup of minor crimes, identifying suspects by race. In 1971, under a photograph, the
News
ran this caption: “Milton B. Allen, fifty-three, of Baltimore, isn’t letting the fact that he’s the city’s first Negro state’s attorney deter him from his crusade against narcotics, crime and corruption.” Last year, Mike McCormick, news editor of the
News
, sent his staff a memo that leaked to Mayor Coleman Young, who attacked it in a widely reported speech. “We are aiming our product,” McCormick wrote, “at the people who make more than $18,000 a year and are in the twenty-eight to forty group. Keep a lookout for and then play—well—the stories city desk develops and aims at this group. They should be obvious: they won’t have a damn thing to do with Detroit and its internal problems.”

Since 1959, the
News
has been run by Martin S. Hayden, a conservative who was one of the few editors of a major newspaper to oppose the printing of the Pentagon Papers. Hayden is the last of a breed—a power broker as well as an editor; one
News
political reporter recalls a recent Detroit mayoral campaign in which Hayden persuaded
both
candidates to run. In 1969, Hayden and publisher Clark were supporters of the missile program; during the ABM debate in Congress, Hayden sent a memo to the
News
Washington bureau that read: “The Washington staff should watch our editorial page, know our policy and help support it” by looking for “interpretative pieces and sidebars that help
drive home the editorial point of view.” Hayden insists he never asks reporters to slant the news, but several journalists who have been offered jobs in the Washington bureau got the impression that he expected them to investigate Democrats slightly more carefully than Republicans.

Now sixty-four, Hayden is retiring in June, and in the last year his power has become less than absolute. In 1975, a group of
News
employees met to discuss ways to improve the paper; they discovered that part of the problem was that the paper was perceived as stodgy and conservative. This group, which subsequently became known as the Kiddie Committee, set to work to hire younger reporters and columnists who were “with it” or “hip” or merely bearded. Meanwhile, publisher Clark offered a column to the
News
’s most outspoken critic, a local talk-show host named Lou Gordon. Gordon and the new columnists began to snipe regularly at each other and at the way the
News
handled various stories. Hayden was not amused. “It’s too much of a discussion of the newspaper business,” he says. “I’ve always disliked reporters who make themselves part of the story. It wasn’t the way I was brought up.” Hayden continues to keep a close eye on the Washington bureau, while the other editors deal directly with the local staff; as a result, the paper occasionally seems schizophrenic. During the Riegle-Esch campaign, for instance, two young local political reporters wrote a story saying that Republican Esch had lied about his role in passing a piece of legislation; twelve days later, John Peterson of the Washington bureau wrote a story saying that Esch’s lie was only a
little
lie.

Seth Kantor reported directly to Martin Hayden on
all three stories he wrote about Don Riegle. The first, which ran in September, said that Riegle had signed his estranged wife’s name to a tax rebate check in 1971 and then failed to give her half the refund. This was followed by a story quoting a Jack Anderson study that called Riegle one of the ten most unpopular members of Congress. Both stories were attacked by Riegle: the first was clearly a shabby episode in an acrimonious divorce, the second a harsh way of describing an unsurprising fact—congressmen who switch parties (as Riegle did, in 1973) are bound to be unpopular. Then Kantor got the tapes story.

In 1976, following the Elizabeth Ray revelations, a writer named Robin Moore (
The Green Berets
,
The Happy Hooker
) came to Washington to write a paperback about congressional sex. He was introduced to one Bette Jane Ackerman, who had had an affair with Riegle in 1969 while she was an unpaid staff worker in his office; during that period, she made some tapes of her conversations with him and supposedly replayed them like love letters while she was home sick. Eventually, the romance ended, Riegle divorced his wife and married another staff member. Last summer, Miss Ackerman accepted five hundred dollars from Robin Moore for her help as a go-between with other Washington women, and she played her tapes for New York
Daily News
reporter Joe Volz, who was then working with Moore. The tapes are predictably adolescent, childishly dirty and thoroughly egomaniacal. “I’ll always love you,” Riegle tells Miss Ackerman. “I—I—God, I feel such super love for you. By the way, the newsletter should start arriving.”

Kantor got hold of a transcript of the tapes. He also obtained some love letters Riegle wrote to Miss Ackerman.
And at some point, with editor Hayden’s approval, he drew up and signed an agreement with Miss Ackerman’s lawyer, David Taylor, pledging that he would not use her name in the stories. Kantor then flew to Detroit and went to confront Riegle with the story. Kantor’s version will give you an idea of the tenor of the meeting:

“He agreed to meet me with a lawyer. They had a tape recorder. I had a tape recorder. I asked him about this relationship with this unpaid staff worker, taped with his knowledge, and I got a strong blast at both the
Detroit News
and at me. He said it was a well-known fact in Washington that I had been assigned by my editor to get him. I asked him who had told him that. He refused to tell me. He said I was absolutely the worst journalist in Washington. I said, Well, if I can’t be the best, I’d just as soon be the worst. Well, he said, we all have to make a living.”

Both Seth Kantor and Martin Hayden deny that anyone at the
News
was out to get Don Riegle—but somebody must have been; there’s no other way to explain the decision to run the story Kantor turned in. Written in pulp-magazine style, it’s loaded with phrases like “sex-tainted,” “provocative brunet,” “kiss-and-playback romance,” “tell-tale tapes,” “boudoir antics,” and so forth. It refers to Miss Ackerman as “Dorothy”—allegedly her code name on the tapes—and fails to mention the fact that she was paid by Robin Moore. It also leaves out something that Kantor and Hayden knew—that Miss Ackerman had been what newspaper reporters call “close” with South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park, as well as several other congressmen. The lead of the story says that Riegle once described the affair as “more important than ‘a lousy subcommittee hearing.’ ” Later
in the article, it becomes clear that Riegle used the expression in a casual, offhand way: “In one of their conversations, Riegle said he had to break away ‘to go to a lousy subcommittee hearing now.’ ” Kantor added sanctimoniously: “It is in the subcommittees that Congress does its basic legislative work.”

The article backfired totally, of course.
News
columnists Lou Gordon and Fred Girard wrote columns protesting it. The Associated Press and United Press International refused to run the story the day it broke. Says AP executive editor Louis Boccardi: “We try to make a decision like this based on whether there’s some relevance to the individual’s public responsibility, and we couldn’t satisfy ourselves that was the case here.” Within days, Riegle was the recipient of a wave of sympathy; he took the offensive, attacking the
News
and charging the paper with conspiring with his opponent to smear him.

Two weeks later, Saul Friedman of the
Detroit Free Press
wrote the other half of the story—he identified Miss Ackerman by name, linked her to Park, and revealed the financial details of her transaction with Moore. Which proved that in a healthy, competitive, two-newspaper town, the public is occasionally subjected to twice as much trash.

When I interviewed Martin Hayden in Detroit after the election, he did not believe he had made a mistake in running the Riegle story. “Seth said that all this information was coming out in Moore’s book,” said Hayden. “What if the book came out and people said, ‘Did you know about this?’ ” Did Hayden ever consider not printing the transcript of the tapes? “Not after we had them. Without the tapes I don’t know if there would have
been any story. The question was of his judgment, not his sexual morality.” Did he think the story was heavy-handed? “As a matter of fact, we went easy. Before we were through we became convinced this was not an isolated case.” Did Hayden meet with Kantor or any
News
editors to discuss whether the story should be printed? “No. I handled it. Whatever blame there is is mine.”

Should Hayden have printed the story? Probably not—the fact that it would eventually be printed in a quickie paperback is hardly justification. But if he decided to go ahead, he ought to have printed the whole story—including Miss Ackerman’s name and details about her financial transactions concerning the tapes. In order to nail Riegle, the
News
gave up half the story.

Was the piece justified on the grounds that, finally, Riegle’s character was revealed? No. Anyone who reads Riegle’s book,
O Congress
, is perfectly able to perceive his “arrogance, immaturity, cold-bloodedness and consuming political ambition.” Among other things.

Should Hayden have used the tapes? No. I can’t make a rule about what constitutes an invasion of privacy, but I know one when I see one.

For some time after I came back from Detroit, I wondered what all this proved. Certainly it was clear that the voters of Michigan were more sophisticated than Seth Kantor and Martin S. Hayden, but that wasn’t much of a point: so is my cat. Then, on November 7, Larry Flynt published a full-page advertisement in the
Washington Post
promising to pay $25,000 to any woman who would tell her story about sex with a congressman to
Hustler
magazine, and I looked for some way to tie that in, but I couldn’t. I’m afraid, in fact, that I can’t come up with a real point to any of this. Which may be the point. Nobody
really cares. Newspaper editors have stumbled into a whole new area they’re now allowed to publish stories about, and they’re publishing ridiculous, irrelevant, hypocritical, ugly little articles that aren’t dirty enough for
Hustler
or relevant enough for the papers that print them. “Maybe I’m on the wrong side of the pendulum swinging,” Seth Kantor said to me. Maybe so.