The Last Debate (46 page)

I still was not finished.

There was one more happening after the Donatello dinner. Despite
several silly aspects of the event, I think it was important because it helped tie up some critical loose ends and bring my reporting to a real and satisfying conclusion.

The beginning came in a box of chocolate-covered toffee candies delivered by messenger to my apartment in New York City. They came two days after a small item in the “Book Notes” column of
The New York Times
reported the fact that the movie rights to my book—the one you are reading now—had been bought by Dawn Now Productions and that a serious bidding war was under way for the paperback rights. The candy box was carefully wrapped in pages of that particular section of the
Times.

The box was about ten inches square and an inch deep. In the center, wrapped in cellophane among the candy, was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. On the front a handwritten block-printed note on a blue Post-it said:
HERE IS THE REAL SWEET
.

I knew enough about computers to expect either nothing—or absolute confusion. The computer industry still has not latched on to the fact that there are millions to be made from all of us out there in consumer land who are not interested in becoming computer nerds or whizzes. We just want to use them to write things.

I stuck the disk into my computer, prepared for all kinds of signals and messages in computer gibberish about incompatibility and other stupid problems that would make it impossible to ever read what, if anything, was on the disk. It could be because I used WordPerfect 5.1 software in my computer and the disk was written in WordPerfect 4.2—or something idiotic like that.

But no. I hit all of the proper
LIST
and other keys, and in a few seconds I was staring at the following message:

My knee-jerk distrust of computers—I expect them to eat everything I write—caused me to do something smart. I immediately hit the
PRINT
key on my computer, and in a few seconds I had the printed text of the message. A few seconds after that the words disappeared from my computer screen. I tried to call them up again, but nothing happened. Somebody had obviously sent me a message that was programmed in some mysteriously nerdy way to self-destruct off the disk after a certain amount of “read” time had elapsed.

Now, on that printout at least, I finally had it. The goods. I had the goods.

Nelson, or someone who worked with Nelson, gave the statements to somebody at a news organization other than
The Washington Morning News.
That was why I could not find the relations cutout Nelson talked about. I had checked only Tubbs/Howley possibilities.

But, of course, I really had nothing. Once I got over my initial euphoria, I came to my senses. The fact that I had read and printed this off a floppy disk did not make it any more believable or credible than if it had come in an anonymous phone call. In fact, that was all it was. The computer equivalent of an anonymous call or letter.

But it had the ring and read of truth to it. It really did. It made common sense. I had it. I knew I had it. Almost.

But there was nothing I could do with what I had. I certainly could not put it in the book—I was already hard at work on the final draft—without some further confirmation. I had to have names—of the organization and the people involved. More, more, more. I had to have it all. And how could I get that? Walk into
The New York Times
and
Time
and
Newsweek
and
The Wall Street Journal
and
This Week
and NBS News and all the other major news organizations and announce that I was here on a raid? Everyone up against the wall! Now, tell me if you are the organization that had those statements! And, if so, who gave them to Tubbs of
The Washington Morning News
?

I immediately did the only two things I could think of to do. I again called Tubbs. It was no surprise that he refused to talk to me. And I put in a call to Sid Nelson. He, too, would not speak to me. The exact words of his secretary, however, were: “Mr. Nelson told me to tell you that the only Tom Chapman he knows is a dishonorable man, and he does not talk to dishonorable men.” I did not believe I had that coming. I still don’t.

So I had to wait for “more to kum,” the old newspaper term for telling the typesetters and others that the story is not yet finished. “Carl Bob,” where are you?
Who
are you?

The very next evening I found out the answers to both of those questions.

I went with a woman friend to the new Lucille Thomas play,
My Tornados
, at the Roundabout Theatre at Broadway and Forty-fifth Street. Curtain time was eight o’clock. My friend and I arrived at 7:45 and went upstairs to the lobby bar for a drink. In the course of sipping my glass of cheap chardonnay at the bar, I noted the arrival across the room of a famous person. That person was famous because of his/her work as one of America’s leading and most recognizable journalists.

A few moments later he/she walked my way, our eyes met, and he/she dropped his/her program in front of me. He/she stopped and leaned down to pick up the program. So did I. While our heads were down and close, he/she whispered: “Carl Bob.” He/she let me pick up the program and he/she walked on.

Inside the program was stuck another 3.5-inch floppy disk.

I told my woman friend that a “journalistic emergency” had arisen and that I had to leave. I told her to enjoy the play without me and I would join her before the final curtain. She was furious, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was easy come, easy go, for us sexually active types anyhow.

Back at my place several minutes later, I again turned on the computer. This time I hit
PRINT
at the same time it came on the screen.

All that came was a phone number. I immediately dialed it.

After the third ring a woman said: “Yes?” There was the noise of talking and laughing and music and glasses being emptied and filled in the background.

Was it a bar? A restaurant?

I said: “This is Tom Chapman.”

“So?”

“Is Carl Bob there?”

The woman said: “Go park your car on the second floor down in the garage between Eighth and Ninth and Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“Figure it out.”

I figured it out, all right. I took a taxi to the parking garage and simply walked in via the ramp from the Fifty-ninth Street side. The place was full of cars, attendants, and a few people picking up or depositing their cars. On the second level down, where there were no people and few cars, I came across a parked dark blue BMW four-door sedan. It looked new and expensive. There was somebody sitting in the driver’s seat. I recognized the person as the famous journalist I had seen an hour ago in the bar at the Roundabout.

He/she, apparently having watched me approach in a rearview mirror, got out of the car and motioned for me to follow him/her over to a far and obscure corner of the parking level.

“You know who I am, I assume?” he/she said once we had stopped and faced each other.

“Yes.”

“This meeting never happened. We have never talked. I am a source that will never be revealed no matter what. Do we understand one another?”

“No,” I said. “I cannot agree to that.”

“Fine,” he/she said. “Good-bye.”

And there before my very eyes, the person who had the information that would put a capper on the story of Williamsburg—
my
story of Williamsburg—began walking out of my life.

“Wait a minute, please,” I said.

He/she stopped. “Talk, Chapman.”

Talk, Chapman. People were all the time giving me orders or warnings. Go, Tom, go. Now or never, Chapman. Talk, Chapman.

“It’s a deal,” I said. “I want your story more badly than I want to identify you.”

He/she came back to me. “I need a way to enforce the deal, though, don’t I, Chapman? It’s not a matter of trust, it’s one of simple precaution. Call it a source condom, if you will.”

I had no idea where he/she might be headed. I was only listening.

He/she said: “If you reveal my identity to anyone—not just to your book readers and thus the world—I will make you sorry the thought ever entered your mind.”

This person—this most famous person—was threatening me. Reveal him/her as the source for the story and I will be punished. How will I be punished?

I asked: “How will you make me sorry?”

“If I told you that, you could turn from here now and claim in a separate story that I had threatened you. I have made no threats. I have only made you a promise. Screw me and ye shall be screwed, so help me God.”

Now those were words to live by in the profession of journalism. Or any other profession, for that matter.

“OK, OK,” I said.

“Spell it out.”

“I will never reveal your name.”

“Or organization.”

“Or organization.”

“Directly or even through oblique suggestions or references.”

“OK, OK,” I said.

“No tape recordings.”

I had stuck my trusty little Sony microcassette recorder into a trouser pocket before leaving my apartment. I had clicked it on when I walked into the garage.

“Empty your pockets, please,” said he/she now.

I emptied my pockets there on the fender of a car parked by us. The
contents included my recorder. He/she looked down, saw the recorder was running, and switched it off.

Then he/she told me the story:

This person’s news organization killed the story for themselves on grounds of timing. There would not be time for their reporters to personally and completely verify each of the statements. There were heated arguments at the highest levels of the organization about the public’s right to know this about a presidential candidate and the duty of journalistic organizations to tell the public. One group argued that not “running full-blast” with the story amounted to a dereliction of duty comparable to treason. The other argued that to go with a story of this magnitude this close to an election was tantamount to “an assassination.” The final decision went to the very top man of the conglomerate that owned the journalism organization. He said, Kill it. He gave orders that the one copy of the statements in the possession of the organization be destroyed. That destruction was assigned to two employees, one of whom managed to make copies before the destruction took place. That employee then took the statements to the person now telling me the story. What should I do? asked the colleague. My source said he/she went into a rage when told that a corporation executive with no journalism background or experience or feel had made such a decision. He/she told his/her colleague that he/she would take charge of getting the story out before the election. Through what he/she described as a “carefully designed series of triple cutouts,” the statements were transmitted to Tubbs. And the rest is history.

Yes, it was history. But as he/she finished, I realized it wasn’t that much of a story without the names and faces that go with it. I said that to this person and then I asked for his/her own motivations for telling me this.

“Why bother?” I asked. “The material got out during the debate. Meredith was stopped dead and now Greene is president.”

“I think what happened at our place should be known,” he/she said. “I think the American public should know what has happened to their journalism.”

I told him/her I was not sure I knew what he/she meant.

“They should know that corporate CEOs are the ones making the journalism decisions these days,” he/she said.

I resisted saying what I was thinking. That some people believe the American public should be more concerned about what journalists like him/her are doing to journalism these days than what corporate CEOs are doing.

His/her story was not in the hot-commodity category that I had hoped for. But it did tie up some important loose ends.

I asked the Carl Bob person why he/she went through the elaborate computer-disk and other Woodward-Bernstein/parking-garage antics to get this story to me. A simple telephone call to make an appointment for a simple lunch somewhere off Columbus Avenue would have done the trick, I said.

“I was trying to feed the need to make it sound good,” he/she said, “and give you something to write about instead of me.”