The Last Debate

by Jim Lehrer

  Jennifer Gates and I got right on it. But after three days we could not identify any such person in Tubbs’s life or in the lives of anyone else close to Tubbs or Howley.

  The key part of Nelson’s statement was clearly “something like.”

  My mind turned to thoughts of a Greek island named Santorini.

  But before Santorini something else happened. It was personal, sticky, and somewhat embarrassing, but I feel compelled to include it because of what various so-called media watchers have already said and are likely to say in the future.

  It’s the story of how no articles by me about the Williamsburg Debate came to be published in The New American Tatler—or any other magazine.

  I was on the phone to Jonathan Angel, my Tatler editor, within minutes after returning to my hotel room that night from my rendezvous with Sid Nelson. I detected a less than enthusiastic tone in Jonathan’s reaction to what I was saying. It was most uncharacteristic and surprising, but I dismissed it on grounds that he was distracted, probably by a roomful of dinner guests.

  “Jonathan, I need to go to Greece to confront Howley,” I said.

  “I’m coming to Washington in the morning,” he said. “We’ll talk about it then.”

  I had no idea until that moment that he was coming to Washington, and when I went into the office the next morning I discovered I was not the only one. Neither did Jennifer Gates or any of the other bureau staffers.

  Jonathan arrived around eleven o’clock. He was wearing his usual uniform—a long white canvas cowboy overcoat over tailor-made bleached blue jeans, square-toed black boots, a white tux shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. His dark brown hair was long and tied in a ponytail. He was thirty-five years old and probably thought his getup made him look twenty-five. Not so. He resembled an old hippie, and all of them are at least forty-five.

  He went around the office spreading a few seconds of joy to each of the others before he came into my office and closed the door behind him.

  “I’m killing your project,” he said.

  “No!” I screamed.

  “We’ll pay you a fifteen-thousand-dollar kill fee—double the usual—and then we zip it all up. You give me your notes and tapes and everything else. We flush them down the toilet of journalism and move on to other things—and back to the asshole basketball coaches, I should say.”

  There was an item in the “Media Whirl” column of The Washington Post under the headline WRITER DRAWS EDITOR’S BLOOD that said I slugged Jonathan and “grabbed him by his ponytail and slung him against a wall.” That is not true. It is true that I was angry and I expressed that anger physically. But all I did was throw a softball at him. The ball, left over presumably from somebody’s office softball game, was there in an ashtray on the desk I was using. Without really thinking, I picked up the ball and hurled it right at Jonathan. Unfortunately, we were only ten yards apart. I threw it too hard and the ball hit Jonathan in the forehead. He fell backward over a chair, hitting the back of his head against the sharp-edged comer of a metal file cabinet. A tiny bit of blood did come out of a tiny wound, but it was nothing serious. Within minutes he was safe and calm, I was calm, and we talked it out.

  The specific words between us are not important. What matters is that he adamantly refused to give a reason for canceling the debate assignment other than “It’s a matter of priorities.”

  I said it had to be a matter of some kind of politics, that Howley or somebody like him had gotten to him or the magazine. Jonathan kept denying that, and I kept saying I did not believe him and he kept saying he did not give a shit what I believed, those were the facts.

  Various other stories since the original Post item have distorted what happened even more. The New York Daily News said five of Jonathan’s teeth were kicked loose when I “stomped him in the mouth as he lay on the floor.” One of the grocery-store tabloids said I attempted to throw Jonathan out the window of our office to a certain death seven floors below. Another said the real hostility between Jonathan and me resulted from a “gay lovers’ quarrel”—despite the fact that neither of us is gay.

  Although I did not need it, the entire episode provided me another lesson in how grossly irresponsible some elements in the press of the United States of America can be these days. They write and speak lies about people—even about journalists, people of their own kind.

  The truly important purpose of my scene with Jonathan for me was making sure nothing disappeared down any toilets of journalism. I refused the extra kill fee and insisted that I felt bound only by our regular contributing editor’s contract language. That stated that if a commissioned article was rejected by the magazine on completion, then I would be paid a $7,500 kill fee and then be free to sell the article or other articles based on the material to another “outlet.” In all of my six years as a contributing editor at the Tatler, nothing like that had ever happened. They commissioned, I completed, they published.

  “I’ll see you and double that,” said Jonathan when I stated my contract case.

  “Double what?”

  “I’ll pay you thirty thousand dollars for the right to flush,” he said.

  Since the agreed-to fee for the completed and accepted work was only $50,000, it was clear to me that something was going on. And it was also clear to me that whatever it was meant very much to somebody, somebody with access to Jonathan, The New American Tatler, and a lot of money.

  I declined the offer.

  “All right,” said Jonathan, “we pay you the full fee as if it had been accepted.”

  “The full fifty thousand dollars?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to.”

  “Maybe you don’t have any choice.”

  He was right. The contract was clear on that. If they paid the full price it was theirs and only theirs. Except for the book rights.

  I nodded my agreement and he said: “This means the end of our relationship—yours and the magazine’s, you know.”

  I knew. “I keep everything I’ve done on the coaches’ story.”

  “Bullshit. That belongs to us, too, and I want it.”

  It was worth a try.

  Within a week three things happened:

  • My agent had arranged a book deal with Random House.

  • The New York Times had a source story about Herman Gerrard, the owner of The Washington Morning News, Howley’s paper, and all of those other things such as a health-spa chain and a Washington tour-bus company. The story said Gerrard was “reportedly President Greene’s choice for the plummiest of the plummy diplomatic posts—ambassador to Great Britain, to the Court of St. James’s.”

  • I was on my way to the Greek island of Santorini.

  13

  Chapman v. Howley

  My imagination went before me to Santorini. By the time I actually set foot on the place, my mind was already soggy with questions and answers, my soul was already marked by the scars and dripping with the juices of the battle. I had seen myself in triumph. I had seen myself in defeat. I came, I conquered; I came, I failed. I rose to the heights. I fell on my face. I, the hero; I, the defeated.

  I spent the night in Athens after the flights from London-Heathrow and Washington-Dulles so I would arrive on Santorini as rested as possible. But my racing mind allowed no rest. I was too fully consumed by the Chapman v. Howley—ta-da-ta-da!—coliseum-like dimensions of what I was about to do. It was so bad that I almost didn’t pay any attention to the island of Santorini, or Thíra, as it is also called.

  It was only during the last few minutes of the forty-minute flight from Athens on a small two-engine Greek-airline plane that I even looked down and out of the window. What I saw first was the sparkling blue of the Aegean Sea and then a treeless island of dark red, green, and brown volcanic ash with white buildings scattered over it.

  One of the white buildings was my hotel, the Santorini Palace, which was in Fira, population two thousand, the island’s major town. The ride in a t
wenty-year-old Mercedes taxi from the small-everything airport took less than ten minutes. It was at the hotel-room window that I began to realize what this island was all about. Fira and I were perched together on the top of a cliff. The water of the Aegean was out there in all directions, but it was also straight down, way straight down at the end of a sheer several-hundred-foot drop. The view down as well as out to sea and to several other even smaller islands was absolutely spectacular.

  But I was not here as a tourist to view spectacular sights. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, the air was hot and dry, and I was ready. I went off to find Michael J. Howley.

  All I had was Howley’s address. The young man at the hotel’s front desk, who spoke excellent English and said he had uncles and aunts who made and sold beautiful gold jewelry, gave me directions. It turned out to be a short, easy walk down a narrow street that paralleled the edge of the cliff. I paid little attention to the jewelry and souvenir shops and the open-air restaurants and bars on both sides of the street that I passed on the way to the residential area where I would find and confront Michael J. Howley.

  What if he isn’t there? What if he went back to Washington? Or Istanbul? Or Kalamazoo? What if he is there but won’t talk to me? What if I have come all of this way physically and emotionally for nothing? What if he gets mad? What if he throws something—a Softball, maybe—at me? What if he throws me off of this cliff?

  There he was.

  Michael J. Howley. There he was in front of me and down to the right. Michael J. Howley, in person. He was not in Washington, Istanbul, or Kalamazoo. He was here. Exactly where I wanted him to be. There he sat in a white folding chair on a balcony patio of a house that jutted out from the cliff below the path where I walked. He was reading something, a book, something. He was dressed in white pants and a short-sleeved light blue polo shirt. Everything I had seen here thus far was either white or blue.

  I went off the path to a small retaining wall and peered over at him. I was now less than fifteen yards away.

  “Hello, Mr. Howley,” I said.

  He turned around and saw me—my head, at least—from over the wall. “Oh, shit!” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Leave me alone, Chapman.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  He stood up and faced me. The look on his face was not a pleasant one. It was as if he had been smacked hard.

  “Stay away from me,” he said. “I really do mean that.”

  “I have come a long way to talk to you,” I said. “I will not leave until I do.”

  “My sister said you called her. And she talked to you. I can’t believe she talked to you.”

  “Everybody’s talked to me, Mr. Howley. Everybody but you.”

  Howley turned back the other way. His view in that direction was the same one of the Aegean and some islands I had from my hotel room. Then back to me he said: “I have nothing to say to you. Absolutely nothing. If the Tatler is stupid enough to spend big money sending you to Greek islands on wild-goose chases, I cannot help it or feel responsible for it.”

  “The Tatler is out of it now,” I said. “I am doing a book.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “You hoped the Tatler had killed the story for good, didn’t you?”

  Now he was looking right at me.

  “I know nothing about people who do your kind of journalism,” he said.

  “The kind that tries to find out about why four journalists would take the electoral process into their own hands and decide who should be the next president of the United States?”

  “The people voted, goddamn it! We didn’t interfere in the goddamn electoral process! I am tired of hearing that crap!”

  I bit hard into my tongue for several critical seconds. The silence paid off.

  “We can’t go on yelling at each other like this,” he said to me. “Go on down the path. You’ll come to a shiny brown door with a small painting of a man-in-the-moon on it. I’ll let you in.”

  I then drew in and expended my first real breath since I’d seen Howley there before me.

  He let me in, but he did not offer me his right hand or even a casual word of greeting. I followed him through a sparely furnished sitting room.

  The microphone! There was the microphone! The one Meredith had thrown at Howley. There it was lying on an end table. Howley had obviously taken the microphone as a souvenir—a trophy. I wanted to stop and pick it up and hold it. But I kept moving behind him through a small dining room and then a wide-open glass door to the balcony where he had been reading.

  The microphone! There was that microphone!

  He walked to the far edge of the patio, the one opposite the water, the islands—and the drop. I came up to his right side.

  “A whole civilization was destroyed here,” he said.

  “Where … what?”

  “Do you know about the Mycenaeans?” he asked.

  “No, not really,” I replied.

  “They lived around here way, way back—more than a thousand years before Christ. They had a language and they made pictures … and then there was an eruption of a volcano over there.” He pointed down and away in the direction we were facing. “It caused death and destruction as far away as Crete seventy miles from here. The people on Thíra—Santorini—must have known it was coming because no bodies were ever found here.”

  What is this he’s telling me? I am not here to worry about lost civilizations and volcanic eruptions. I’m here for Chapman versus Howley!

  “I love watching the people on the donkeys,” he said.

  Donkeys? I had no idea what he was talking about. But I looked down and saw them. Several donkeys with people or boxes of things on their backs were slowly going up or down the side of the cliff, to and from the water and the port below, to and from the town of Fira on high.

  “That’s nine hundred feet from here down there to the water—the port,” Howley said. “Eight hundred or so steps if you walk it with the donkeys. There’s also a cable car. You must have come in on a plane.”

  “I did.”

  “You missed the best part of being here.”

  I hope not, Mr. Howley.

  “Why did you come way over here to live?” I asked after realizing that I should take advantage of this small-talk opportunity to ease the hard way that might lie ahead. “How did you know about this place …?”

  “My wife and I came here for three days on our honeymoon. We sailed and walked through the islands here on the Aegean. Started in Athens, ended up in Istanbul.”

  Started in Athens, ended up in Istanbul. I liked the sound of that. I was about to say something pleasant to that effect, but I never got the chance.

  “You don’t take silence for an answer, do you?” he said suddenly, roughly.

  “No, sir. You of all people should understand that.”

  “Why me of all people?”

  “You know what it’s like to be onto a story.”

  He shook his head as if to shake off a fly or a mosquito. He clearly did not like my attempt at identifying the two of us together. He clearly thought he was something I was not. He saw me as something beneath him. He was a real journalist. I was something less than that. Much less than that, no doubt, from the exalted place from which he peered down at people like me.

  “I’ll give you an hour,” he said. “One hour by the clock. You can ask anything you want and then you get the hell out of here and away from me. Is that a deal?”

  “No … hey, wait a minute. No. I need more time than that.”

  “One hour or nothing. Take it or leave it, Chapman.”

  Obviously, I took it. It was an opening, a beginning. One hour could naturally and casually grow and grow and grow. It was an offer I could not refuse.

  There were several other white folding chairs there on the patio. He motioned for me to grab one and put it on the other side of a small table from his chair. “I’ll be right back,” he said. I though
t maybe he was going for some coffee, tea, or something pleasant like that.

  I got the chair and sat down. He returned in a few moments with a portable alarm clock. There was no coffee, tea, or something pleasant like that.

  He said: “Watch me, Chapman. It says it is now eleven forty-five. I am going to set the alarm on this thing for twelve forty-five. When it goes off, you go off. OK?”

  Sure. I was not concerned. Once we were going, we were going.

  “May I tape this?” I said, reaching into my small black canvas valise for a microcassette recorder and my large spiral notebook that I had filled with more than two hundred separate questions.

  “No problem,” he said. “When I was your age we only took notes.”

  That’s right, and you misquoted people, I resisted saying. That was the old journalism, Howley, the old journalism of inexact quotes and approximations and coziness with the powerful, I also did not say. We in the new journalism, Howley, keep our distance and we tape.

  He did what he said he would do to the clock, sat down, and said: “The clock is running, Chapman.”

  I had rehearsed and lived the opening line of questions as much as the tough, dramatic, jugular ones that I planned to build to for the thundering climax. All interviews develop a tone, a mood, a style, a life of their own. I felt it was important to establish at the beginning a tone of easygoing friendliness and then over time let it grow more confrontational and heated. The need for a soft takeoff seemed even more necessary now that I was in a position of having to work and con my way past an alarm on a clock.

  “I guess Williamsburg has changed your life a lot?” I said. It wasn’t really a question. It was grease.

  “That’s why I had to get away, why I came here,” he said. “It’s been incredible.”

  “Tell me about it, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  He did not mind. He seemed almost grateful even for the opportunity to talk about what Williamsburg had brought and wrought to him personally.

  He said: “From that Sunday night on, there were at least three television crews and another five or six other of what now pass for reporters staked out in front of my house around the clock. The new ghouls of American journalism. I had always ranted and raved about this barbaric vulturism, and here I was a victim of it myself. They even had them lying in ambush outside the News offices. These tabloid assholes—no offense, Chapman …”