Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  The newsroom of the Enquirer had an incredibly competitive atmosphere. Many of its reporters came from England, Scotland, or Australia and imported the aggressive Fleet Street brand of reporting. “They’re the masters of the Enquirer’s kind of ‘hit-and-run,’ make-a-story-out-of-one-fact journalism,” former articles editor P. J. Corkery once observed. “The English support a half dozen national newspapers like the Enquirer. In fact, that’s how I got interested in this stuff. For a long while when I was in England, I was fascinated by the fact that every Sunday morning, sober, respectable people would leave their churches and homes to pick up papers much more lurid than even the Enquirer. The reason for this is that while the stories are often outlandish, the reporting is exceptionally well organized and researched. They come up with all sorts of small details that are very revealing. In fact, the better papers of this kind in England are fun to read.”

  To motivate staffers, Pope paid them $100 for any idea that resulted in a published story and “The Far Out Story Idea of the Week” was worth $1,000. Pope also liked to pit editorial teams—two editors and six reporters—against each other to see which could come up with the most provocative, shocking stories. Editors who got the most stories in the tabloid received the highest pay; the number of stories each reporter produced was posted in the newsroom. Those in the bottom third were put on thirty days’ notice; if their ranking didn’t improve in a month, they were fired. One Friday, thirteen reporters were fired for not producing more.

  Turnover was so high at the Enquirer that its rival, the Globe, moved to nearby Boca Raton in the early 1980s so it could more easily hire fired Enquirer employees. But Pope never had trouble finding replacements; starting salaries at the Enquirer were among the highest in the industry, and the perks were unparalleled. “Money was no object to him,” noted former freelancer Colin Dangaard. “Planes, yachts, traveling to wherever. Whatever it took, he [Pope] didn’t care. I used to freelance stories to him during my lunch hour when I was a reporter at the Miami Herald. For what took me thirty minutes of work on the telephone for the Enquirer once a week, I was paid almost as much as I made for the entire week from the Herald. And these were little human interest things, not even celebrity stories.”

  The reporters and editors themselves, in addition to being compensated handsomely, funneled money to their sources. The publication had an editorial budget of $15 million. It made some 5,000 payments a year to sources for tips and spent $850,000 on stories that went unpublished. Reporters were given thick wads of $20, $50, and $100 bills to use as bribes in getting stories. “You go into a bar and you leave twenty dollars. You have one drink, you leave twenty dollars. You have no drinks, you leave twenty dollars. You use the phone, you leave twenty dollars,” said Mike Walker. “This was back in the 1970s, when twenty dollars really meant something. We can easily spend $20,000 for something that’s going to end up in the trashcan.” “I would walk into that newsroom and I could do anything I wanted,” said Tom Kuncl. “To be able to do that, to have those sorts of resources, was truly exciting.”

  Contrary to charges made by its critics, the National Enquirer didn’t have an official policy of making up stories. It merely sensationalized them. Its reporters knew just how to manipulate people into giving them the quotes the magazine needed. Pope himself spelled out the techniques in a confidential memorandum in 1975. “Prod, push and probe the main characters in the story,” Pope wrote. “Help them frame their answers,” he advised. The memo gave this imaginary interview between an Enquirer reporter and an inarticulate source:

  “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 Enqui
rer 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:

  The National Enquirer newspaper on February 28, 1974, buried here a sealed capsule containing good news items of 1973. When opened on February 28, 2074, these items will prove that despite the many crises of the year 1973, Americans still showed the courage, kindness and strength that made this country great.

  * As early as 1964, an article appeared in Photoplay magazine reporting that Robert Kennedy was at Monroe’s house the day of her death.

  † When Lawford died in 1988, the Kennedys allegedly refused to pay the cost of his burial and the tab for a ceremony to have his ashes scattered at sea was picked up by the National Enquirer.

  ‡ Because the National Enquirer was one of the few newspapers in the 1960s and early 1970s that would print scandals about the beloved slain President, in February 1976 it broke an astonishing story that was all but ignored by the mainstream press: that Ben Bradlee’s former sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, had an affair with the President shortly before she was killed, shot once in the head and once in the chest, while walking along Washington, D.C.’s Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where she used to go with her friend Jacqueline Kennedy. A drifter was charged but never convicted of the murder. The Enquirer described Meyer and Kennedy smoking pot together and revealed that, after Meyer’s death, her diary detailing the affair was located, with the help of Ben Bradlee, and given to the CIA to destroy. When the story broke, a Washington Post reporter called Bradlee, who was vacationing in the Virgin Islands. Bradlee wouldn’t comment on the record, but off the record he excoriated his former friend Jim Truitt, a former vice president with the Washington Post, who was the source of the story.

  8

  60 minutes

  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.”

  When presented with a truly tough question, he would say, “You know, Mike, that’s a good question. I wish I knew the answer.” or “Hmm. Let’s get to that question on the next reel.” Somehow, that next reel never came. Haldeman’s much-touted film footage of Nixon and his staff behind-the-scenes was an even bigger bust. CBS had bought exclusive rights to twenty-five hours of grainy images like a smiling Nixon waving at the camera, Nixon taking Kissinger for a ride in a golf cart, and White House staffers sitting beside a hotel swimming pool. CBS found only four minutes worthy of putting on air, including one shot of Kissinger eating a hamburger.