by Nora Ephron
Q: Is that because of moving to New York?
BAKER: I’m not so aware of that. The change is the subject matter. It’s so easy to do Washington. You have nothing but subject matter. But what happens in New York? Who, after all, knows who Abe Beame is, or Hugh Carey? I’ve had to work a lot harder, to take special subject matter and make it mean something to people outside New York.
Q: Someone once said something to the effect that he’d never known a writer who had a happy childhood.
BAKER: I’ve had an unhappy life, thank God. I suspect all childhoods are unhappy. My father died when I was five—it’s my first memory—and I was lugged off from Virginia to New Jersey to live with a brother of my mother. He was the only member of the family who was employed, and he was making thirty-five dollars a week. He was married to a lovely Irishwoman who ran the household. My mother had a job where she sewed smocks for twelve dollars a week, and I was raised in a matriarchy. I was imbued with the business that you’ve got to get ahead. I always had a job, an awful job, usually selling Saturday Evening Posts. I was just terrible at it. They’d open the door and I’d say, “Well, I guess you don’t want to buy a Saturday Evening Post,” and they’d slam the door in my face.
Q: How did you get into journalism?
BAKER: I’d always been a drifter. When I was at Johns Hopkins, I was the only guy on the campus who didn’t know what he wanted to be. Everyone wanted to be a doctor or a scientist or an engineer. It was very depressing. In a vague way I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway—that was in the days when he was still read. There was a guy on the faculty who lectured on T. S. Eliot and also wrote for the Sun, and he told me about this job. I went to see the managing editor, and he offered me a job, and I thought, It’s a good way to kill time until I get around to writing a novel someone can publish. It was 1947 and I did police reporting at night. I never went to the office, never wrote anything. I drifted from police station to police station, hung around hospitals listening to people die, and phoned in police-blotter stuff. I did that for two years. I was in love at the time; I was leading this strange upside-down existence, hanging out with raffish characters all night and sleeping till one or two in the afternoon. I kind of liked it. I was getting an education. But after a year, I decided to go ahead and write a novel. I spent a summer and wrote a ninety-thousand-word novel in three months. You know Capote’s famous comment on Kerouac—“That’s not writing, it’s typing.” That’s what the novel was. I was a self-taught typist, and I was combining the typing exercises with the writing of a novel. It was very valuable to me later. I’m a very fast typist.
Q: And what happened to the novel?
BAKER: Shipped it around a few places and then I put it in the attic. It was about what it was like to be twenty-three years old. I discovered then that the world I was living in was so much more interesting than the world I was capable of conceiving. I was hooked on journalism. That was the end of it. I never went back to writing fiction.
Q: How did you get to the Times?
BAKER: The Sun sent me to London as its correspondent. I was twenty-seven, very young to be in London, but very adventurous. Things were very difficult in England then, and most of the American reporters went to the PX for food. I didn’t. I lived like an Englishman off the English economy, and I lost a lot of weight. I was hungry all the time. I cut myself off from the American community. Most of the reporters hung around the foreign office to get the diplomatic poop. I felt the AP would provide that. I went to Parliament and wrote about the nature of British political debate. I wrote about what Sunday afternoon was like, and British eccentrics. I was really a kind of travel writer. Everybody was writing about the British economy and taxes except me. So I began to attract some attention. Scotty Reston was head of the Times Washington bureau, and he wrote and asked me to come work there. I said no. I was happy—the Sun was about to bring me back to be White House correspondent, and that was my idea of paradise. I mean, what more was there? I came back, and after two weeks I realized I had made the worst decision of my life. I’d given up London for this pocket of tedium. I was sitting in this awful lobby waiting for Jim Hagerty to come out with a handout. At one point I was vacationing in Denver—when you covered Eisenhower you were always vacationing in Denver, writing stories on how many fish he had caught that day, or what he’d said at the first tee. Reston came through and offered me the job again. So I came to the Times on the condition I get off the White House. I went up to the Hill for a while, and the following year I was back at the White House. I got to Denver in time to cover Eisenhower’s first heart attack. I handled the first presidential bowel movement in the history of the New York Times.
Q: I read somewhere that you eventually became unhappy in the Washington bureau.
BAKER: I didn’t have a period of unhappiness where I was unhappy with the Times. I was just at the end of my rope. It wasn’t possible to deal with Washington in a very sophisticated way, and the Times was not a paper where you could be very creative or innovative. For a long time I was more than willing to trade all that for the education. It was the best graduate school of political science in the world. If you wanted to know what was going on in the Senate, you went up there and Everett Dirksen explained it to you. But I’d spent over seven years doing it. I knew the personalities. I knew what speeches they were going to make on any issue. I became restless. It was really a matter of discontent with myself—I knew the limitations of the Times. Then the editor of the Sun offered me a column, a blank check, really, any kind of column I wanted. I thought, Yeah, that’s what I want to do. It was a great out for me. There was an intimation it would lead to a bigger job at the Sun. We shook hands on it. I told Reston I was leaving and he was appalled. I was shocked that anybody cared. I went home and that night Orvil Dryfoos, the publisher, called and said, We’re not going to let you leave the Times, and then they began making offers to me, and that’s how the column began.
Q: And why did you decide to move to New York?
BAKER: Basically it was because a pipe burst in my home in Washington on a Saturday morning. I was very depressed. I suddenly realized I was going to have to put a lot more money into this house, and I said, “Let’s sell the son of a bitch and get out of here.”
—April 1976
The Detroit News
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 exe
cutive 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.”
