The Last Debate

by Jim Lehrer

  Psychiatrists, psychologists, and other behavior specialists also weighed in. Some contrasted Meredith’s predebate religious and Puritan pose with his debate profanity and the reports of his violent side to conclude that he suffered from a psychic disorder known as Jekyll-Hyde syndrome. Others stood at television monitors with pointers and made clinical observations about what the freeze-framed shot of Meredith’s forehead and mouth and fist said about the state of his emotional health.

  Much of it was ridiculous and stupid, but it was clear to me by the time I went to sleep that the trend was more than established. Ross, Norman, Jack and even Jill, as well as most of their guests and call-ins, bought the validity of the charge that David Donald Meredith was an unstable man of violence. All of the broadcasts went repeatedly to live feeds in front of the homes, apartments, and hideaways of the various women who had had their statements read by Howley, Joan, Barbara, and Henry. Some declined to be interviewed, so the television reporters interviewed their neighbors, friends, and anyone else they could find in the immediate vicinities who would talk. The scene in front of the duplex of the woman in Asheville who claimed Meredith kicked her after a fender bender was particularly grotesque. The woman insisted that all interviews be conducted with two uniformed Asheville police officers standing on either side of her. “My life is in danger,” she said to every interviewer. “The Meredith forces cannot let this stand. You saw him there at the end. You saw what a madman he is.”

  The F-word politics came into full focus when William Allen Tona-pah, the chairman of the American Christian Families Coalition, emerged from an emergency conference-call meeting of his executive council to issue the following statement: “We are outraged over the way those four press jackals attacked David Donald Meredith tonight. But we regret to say that their conduct does not excuse that of Mr. Meredith. We were stunned, disappointed, and repulsed by his use of gutter language. As an organization dedicated to furthering what is clean and Christian, we must withdraw our support for his candidacy. There were young people in that vast television audience tonight. They were looking for moral leadership from David Donald Meredith. They saw and heard the opposite. This is a sad day for America.”

  That statement helped develop a clear—and obvious—consensus through the evening and early-morning hours among the many varieties and types of pundits. The result of the Williamsburg Debate was going to be the election of Paul L. Greene as president of the United States rather than David Donald Meredith.

  There was one important picture and voice and view that was not seen or heard on anyone’s program that night. Its absence was noticeable not only to me but to most everyone else. Jack of Jack and Jill, for instance, said at one time into his camera: “Mike Howley, if you’re watching us now, call us. We need to talk to you. America needs to talk to you.

  “Defend yourself. Speak for yourself.”

  Part 3

  Why and How

  9

  Citizens First

  Michael J. Howley talked to Jack, me, and everyone else in the world the next morning. There across the top of the front page of The Washington Morning News was a story under the headline MIKE HOWLEY: “WE WERE CITIZENS FIRST.” It was above the main news story about the debate, which appeared under a larger hard-news banner headline: MEREDITH ACCUSED OF VIOLENCE. The subhead under the banner was “Candidate Throws Fit, Cusses.”

  It was Howley’s piece—his own account in his own first-person words—that gave me the first whiff of the scent toward the trail to finding out what had really happened in Williamsburg and why. The smell came not in what he said but what he did not say, what he left out.

  The length of the article, in fact, was the first thing that struck me as curious. It was less than two thousand words. Here was the guy who was involved in—led, probably—what even then, on the morning after, was shaping up as a major historical event of American politics and journalism, and this was all he had to say about it?

  The thrust of his message was contained in one paragraph. He said: “We came to a joint realization, the four of us, that we were confronted with a searing, crucial choice between conflicting duties and responsibilities. On the one hand were those we had as journalists to remain detached, uninvolved, and on the other those we had as citizens to participate, to take action. We concluded that in this case we were citizens first. Our country deserved and demanded that we act on our informed fears and knowledge.”

  He said the decision was “agonizing, wrenching, draining, and, yes, in the final analysis, terrifying.” He acknowledged that many people—Meredith and his supporters particularly—would probably never understand why it was done. Others might have the same problem, he said, closing with these words:

  “I am certain there will also be people with no political axes to grind—many within our own profession of journalism, no doubt—who will also take severe exception to our decision and actions. There is sure to be much debate about the debate.

  “Let it begin.”

  And that was pretty much it. I read his few words three times before what was wrong finally hit me. He had failed to speak to the central questions that the panelists’/citizens’ dramatic action raised.

  Were the women’s charges of abuse against Meredith what caused Howley, Joan Naylor, Henry Ramirez, and Barbara Manning to decide to move against him? Did they conclude that a man so prone to violent outbursts was unsuited for the presidency? Or were there other reasons about political philosophy and beliefs that made him unacceptable first? Were the abuse charges thus only the weapons for the attack and the kill, not the reasons? And then, of course, there were the simple logistics questions. Where did those interview statements from all of those women come from? Who conducted them? How did they come into the possession of those four panelists/citizens in Williamsburg? What kind of fact-checking, if any, was done by the four panelists before using them against Meredith in such a dramatic way? Did they count on his blowing up the way he did? Was that the real point, the real objective?

  One of the four people who knew the answers had decided, at least in his article, to simply ignore the questions.

  On impulse, I picked up the phone—I was still in my room at the Williamsburg Lodge—and called The Washington Morning News. It was only eight o’clock on a Monday morning, but something told me it was possible, probable even, that on this momentous Monday morning-after Mike Howley would already be at his office.

  I told the woman who answered the phone in the News newsroom that I was calling from Mr. Howley’s hotel in Williamsburg about “something he had left behind.” She put me through immediately.

  “This is Howley,” spoke the voice of the man who had changed the course of a presidential election just fourteen hours ago.

  I quickly identified myself, reminding him that we had talked briefly after the Thomas Jefferson press conference in Williamsburg the previous afternoon.

  “Hey, goddamn it, she said it was about something I left in my room.…”

  “I am doing some major reporting for some major stories for the Tatler about what you and the other three panelists did last night. And how and why you did it. I cannot do it, of course, without your help and cooperation.”

  “Sorry, can’t help you. What I have to say I will say in my own newspaper. Look, got to go. This is already shaping up as the busiest day of my life—”

  “Where did the women’s statements come from?”

  “Hey, forget it—”

  “Was it them or something else that caused you-all to go after Meredith?”

  “I’m hanging up, Bob.”

  “Tom—”

  “Sorry. Tom—”

  “Did you have any idea he would scream a word like ‘fucking’?”

  “Good-bye, Tom—”

  “I’ll be back, Mr. Howley.”

  I don’t think Howley heard that last line. By then I was probably talking into a dead phone.

  By the time I pulled my rented Toyota into the Georgetown
Inn in Washington three hours later, I had formed a rough working plan for how I would get back to Mr. Howley.

  Joan Naylor was the plan, pure and simple. If I could use her friendly attitude toward the Tatler as an entreé to get her, a veteran and respected professional, to talk to me in a full and open manner, then I could use that fact to bring in the younger and inexperienced Henry Ramirez and Barbara Manning. Then, with the cooperation of those three, I would go back to Mike Howley.

  Do I do my story with only their versions, their facts, their points of view, Mr. Howley? Who speaks for you, Mr. Howley? How can I do a fair and complete job without your slant, your perspective, Mr. Howley?

  Go, Tom, go.

  I could not get anyone on the phone at Joan Naylor’s CNS office to tell me one thing about where she was or how I might contact her. I took several stabs at it through various ploys, and after about the fifth time I had the feeling that I was being recorded or that my call was being traced. Something was going on. A man suddenly came on the line—all previous calls had been fielded by women—and started chatting me up. I had said this time that I was with Blue and Gray Motor Freight and we had a leather couch from a furniture company in North Carolina that needed to be delivered to Ms. Naylor. Did Ms. Naylor want it at her office or her home? The instructions we had were not clear, I said. The guy on the phone burst into a small talk about the weather and life on Mondays and I hung up.

  What I did not know at the time was that the people who ran the CNS television network had decided Joan Naylor’s life was in jeopardy. Their switchboards, fax machines, and mail and message receptacles in both Washington and New York had been deluged with threats to her life and person. CNS hired a private security firm to keep watch over her around the clock, and the chatty guy was undoubtedly part of the crew.

  The network also suspended her. “For her own protection,” said the written press statement from a network spokesman in New York.

  I read this press release when I arrived at the Tatler office in the National Press Club building that Monday afternoon. I had gone there to set up shop in the office suite that was used mostly by the magazine’s Washington correspondent and a secretary-researcher. But it also had three other small fully equipped offices for staff and freelance writers who came to Washington on assignment.

  By the time I got there Jennifer Gates, the secretary-researcher, had already assembled much of what I had called ahead and requested. There on the desk in the office that would be the most important space in my life for the next seven months were several stacks of newspaper clippings, wire-service stories, and transcripts and tapes of television and radio broadcasts. They completely covered the desk. I was stunned at first sight at what they represented in millions of words that had already been generated in less than twenty-four hours.

  Chuck Hammond and Jonathan Angel, my editor, appeared to have called it right. Jonathan’s feeling the earth moving was real. The early reaction was also bearing out Hammond’s hyperbole about the debate being as big as Desert Storm and maybe even Watergate. It had already made television history. The Nielsen people estimated the American television audience to have been 132 million by the time Meredith screamed the F-word and Howley said good night. Never before had that many people watched any single program at the same time.

  The Associated Press set the pattern for the coverage of Howley, Joan, Barbara, and Henry. Its first story on their news conference began:

  “The four journalists who turned Sunday’s presidential debate into an attack on Republican nominee David Donald Meredith stormed out of a raucous news conference afterward.

  “They answered only one question about why they had done what they did. Michael J. Howley of The Washington Morning News, the debate moderator, acknowledged that nobody appointed him and his three journalist-colleagues God but said, ‘We did not see what we did tonight as playing God.’ ”

  The Reuters and UPI stories were similar, the Reuters story calling the news conference “out of control,” UPI labeling it “stormy.” None of the three major news services explained why the four panelists had left the news conference. None reported the fact that the news conference was raucous, stormy, and out of control because the reporters from their own news organizations and others made it so.

  I was stunned, mortified also, by the way the wires handled the earlier “journalists’ disturbance” in the Virginia Room right after the debate. The woman from The San Diego Union-Tribune had wondered how we were going to cover ourselves, and the initial answer was clear—poorly. None of the wire services even did separate stories on the mêlée. All three just stuck paragraphs about it into their press-conference stories. UPI, for instance, said only that “five reporters suffered minor injuries as the assembled press corps raced to cover one of the most important stories of the campaign.”

  The daily-newspaper stories mostly took the same approach on the disturbance. On the news conference, they, too, took the line that the four panelists, apparently unable or unwilling to explain themselves, ran for cover from the real truth seekers of American journalism. It was left to a handful of television critics to point out what everybody who watched it all already knew—that a few hundred of America’s leading national journalists had made absolute fools of themselves on live television.

  “I turned to my wife and children, my dogs and cats, my mice and rodents, and screamed: ‘I am not one of those people!’ ” wrote the Los Angeles Times television critic.

  Doug Mulvane said similar things in, according to my rough count, a record-setting twenty-seven separate television and radio appearances that first night, morning, and afternoon. From his seventeenth appearance on, he had taken on a line from the Bush administration’s rhetoric in launching Desert Storm. “This will not stand,” said Mulvane, referring to the new conduct of journalists as “mobsters—to each other as well as to the democratic process.”

  The New York Times led the print editorial attack against Howley, Henry, Barbara, and Joan. In a lead editorial that Monday morning the Times called them “America’s first journalistic usurpers” and said there may be evils such as the Holocaust and Joe McCarthy that were so evil that such drastic “journalistic vigilantism” was called for, but the probable election of David Donald Meredith did not qualify. USA Today called the four “journalistic felons” and demanded that their employers immediately dismiss them to send a “message to the public and to other journalists that this is not acceptable behavior.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram added the recommendation that all four be banned forever from employment anywhere in the business of journalism. “Yes, call it blacklisting,” said the Star-Telegram editorial. “Call it anything you wish—but do it.” Several other papers picked up the Debate-gate theme from Perot.

  The condemnation was anything but unanimous. The Washington Morning News, while noting the conflict-of-interest fact that Michael J. Howley was one of its own, labeled the four “America’s first journalist-activists” and said that a new form of journalism might be in the making. “It may not be to everyone’s liking, but neither are such things as rain, thunder, and snowstorms,” said the News editorial. “But we live with them, we cope with them, we accept them. We can do the same with journalistic activism.” The Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Denver Post, The Atlanta Constitution, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Chicago Tribune used terms like “unorthodox,” “out of the ordinary,” and “precedent-shattering” to describe what had happened. All said one way or another that they wished the four journalists had not done what they did, but having done it—maybe the dire possibilities of a Meredith election justified it. Just this once.

  The most amusing sidelight to the print coverage was the variety of ways the large dailies—the family newspapers of America—chose to cope with “the ‘fucking’ thing.” Most never used the word itself. Some—including all eighty-seven of the Gannett papers—wrote it, “f—–.” Some—including the Los Angeles Times and the other Times-Mirror paper
s—used “f—–ing.” The truly skittish covered it up altogether in other words, calling it things like “a well-known curse word,” “a pornographic expression.” The few who used it included most of the largest newspapers—all five New York City dailies, the Washington papers, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, plus The Miami Herald and the others owned by Knight-Ridder. All did so with a variety of Editor’s Notes such as the bold-faced one in The New York Herald that said: “More than 132 million Americans of all ages, politics, and moral and language standards heard the word spoken by a candidate for president of the United States. His speaking of that word could very well influence the outcome of the election. To deny its existence at this point would be similar to denying the existence of a smoking gun in a dead man’s hand.”

  The New York Times even went to columnist William Safire, its famous language man, to write a straight-faced piece on the origins of the word. According to Safire, it came from fokkinge, the Low Dutch word for sexual intercourse, and fukka, the Norwegian word for same. First usage had been traced back to the fifteenth century. Safire gave the sailors of the world credit for spreading it from port to port and eventually into the English language.

  An overnight poll by Gallup for CNN and USA Today showed 57 percent approved of what Howley, Joan, Henry, and Barbara had done in triggering Meredith’s anger and use of that ancient word. Thirty-nine percent disapproved; 4 percent had no opinion.

  Pro-con seminars, many of them featuring Mulvane and led by Socratic-method law-school professors, sprouted up immediately on C-SPAN and local public-radio and cable-television stations. By that Monday afternoon teach-ins, forums, seminars, and debates-about-the-debate were organized for thousands of college campuses and luncheon clubs all over America.

  The San Francisco Chronicle, an “f—–ing” paper, surveyed the political-science, mass-communication, and sociology departments at the seven major universities and colleges in its area. They found “an interest in the debate-about-the-debate on a par equal to that of a presidential assassination or military coup.”