Just before the Pulitzer entries were submitted, David Maraniss reread “Jimmy’s World” and didn’t believe it. He warned Bob about it, but his warning was compromised by the fact that tensions were high between Maraniss and Coleman. It would have seemed like sour grapes on Maraniss’s part to try to quash Cooke’s nomination. “A number of people felt strongly that it should not be nominated because it could disgrace us,” investigative reporter Jonathan Naumann, who talked it over with Maraniss, would later tell Bill Green. “A couple of dozen people talked about it but we didn’t go to top editors. I think we felt it wouldn’t be fair to put her on the carpet when we couldn’t prove anything.”
Despite the doubts, Woodward and Coleman submitted Cooke’s story under the “local reporting” category for the Pulitzer Prize. It didn’t win. The prize was awarded to the Longview Daily News for its coverage of the Mount St. Helens eruption. According to Roger Wilkins, the former Post editorial writer who was then working for The Washington Star (and who was a member of the board), Warren Phillips, the chairman and chief executive of The Wall Street Journal, then proposed that Cooke’s story be jumped to the feature writing category. Everybody agreed.
When that category came up for a vote, Phillips moved to have Cooke’s story win, bypassing the three finalists that the feature writing jury—who had never even considered Cooke’s piece—had voted for. Eugene Patterson, Ben’s former number two and now the editor in chief of the St. Petersburg Times, didn’t like that one bit. As he explained after the scandal broke, “I expressed my opinion that I would not have assigned a reporter to cover a life-and-death story with the pre-condition [Cooke] accepted—namely to refuse to give information that might save the life of the child.” As he later told me, he objected for other reasons, too. He had read “Jimmy’s World” when it first ran in the Post, and “to an oldtime editor’s nose the story just didn’t smell right.”
“My doubts got swept away,” he told me, “when Roger Wilkins differed.” After Patterson had presented his objections, Roger Wilkins, the only black member of the board present, defended Cooke’s article. Wilkins said, among other things, that he thought he could find young heroin addicts within blocks of the Columbia School of Journalism, where the board met. His argument carried the day. “How do you fight that?” Patterson asked me. He abstained from voting because, as he put it, “I was beaten.” The rest of the board voted unanimously to present Cooke with the prize.
The board often overruled the juries, so there wasn’t anything suspicious about that. But it was yet another twist in the warped world of the “Jimmy” story, that Cooke lost out in the category she’d been nominated in but somehow managed to win in an entirely different category, without that jury ever having read her story. The truth was looking for a way out.
On April 13, the Pulitzer Prizes were publicly announced, and on the 14th the Post ran a front page story hailing Cooke’s victory. A glamour shot of a windblown Cooke on a rooftop appeared on page six of the Metro section, set above a reprint of the story that had gotten her there.
Ben was sitting in his office on the afternoon of April 14 when the call came in—two calls, actually, one to Howard Simons and one to Ben, at almost precisely the same time. The executive editor of the Associated Press was calling for Simons, and the assistant to the president of Vassar was on the line for Ben. Both were calling with questions about Cooke’s credentials, which the Post had never checked. Information on the form that Cooke supplied to the Pulitzer committee differed from the information that she had supplied to the Toledo Blade when she applied for a job there. In fact, the information Cooke submitted to the Pulitzer committee differed substantially from the résumé she had submitted to the Post only a year before. The latest iteration was Supernigger Plus, including previously unmentioned study at the Sorbonne and proficiency in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Vassar’s records, Ben was told, showed that Cooke had only studied there for one year—not the four she had claimed when she had been hired.
“My heart sank,” Ben told me.
“Did you know right then?”
“You could see ahead where it was going,” he said.
Ben has always maintained that the possibility that Cooke had made the whole thing up never occurred to him. “In all my life in the business, there were people who made up scenes—that doesn’t seem to me to be preposterous—or who exaggerated things,” he said to me. “But to make the whole fucking thing up …”
Within a few minutes the top editors at the paper and on the story were assembled in Ben’s office. Ben also called Don Graham to tell him about the Vassar problem, and as Graham told me, “We knew immediately what that meant.” Even the briefest scan of Cooke’s personnel folder revealed the seriousness of the discrepancies, and so Ben and Simons sent Coleman to talk to Cooke, to see if she might come clean. “Take her to the woodshed,” Ben said.1
After some grilling, Cooke revealed that she hadn’t graduated from Vassar but insisted that Jimmy was real. Later that afternoon they brought her up to an empty eighth floor office, where Ben and Bob prepared to give her the third degree. As they walked in, Cooke was beginning to realize her fate. Crying, she said, to nobody in particular, “You get caught at the stupidest things.”
Ben was cordial, but he told her that the lie about Vassar and some of the other issues with her various résumés had caused them to doubt her. The entire Jimmy story hung on her word, and their trust in her word. If that trust had been abused, they needed to know it now.
“Say two words to me in Portuguese,” Ben said.
Cooke admitted that she couldn’t.
“Do you have any Italian?” Ben asked.
Again, no.
Then Ben started to ask her some questions in French. Cooke later claimed that she could speak French but hadn’t wanted to give in to Ben at that moment; whatever happened, her answers fell far short of the proficiency she had claimed for herself.
“You’re like Richard Nixon,” Ben told her, perhaps the most loaded words he could use. “You’re trying to cover up.”
Out of sheer desperation, Cooke concocted a fake name and address for Jimmy, his mother, and her boyfriend. Ben gave her twenty-four hours to prove that the story was true. Coleman went out with Cooke to the address she provided, but they couldn’t find the house. “Now, everybody dealing with Cooke believed she was lying,” Bill Green wrote a few days later. “But she stuck with her story.”
Later that night, around 11:30—long after Ben had gone home—Bob grilled Cooke in a fifth floor conference room, just off the newsroom. The editors had recalled her notes, which had been held for safekeeping at the Post’s law firm in case of any legal claim against the paper. Reading through them, Bob saw what he described as “echoes” of the story, but no evidence that she had actually interviewed anybody remotely like Jimmy/Tyrone. Maraniss told me that even from the first bits of her notes he could tell that she’d made the story up.
“It’s all over,” Bob told her now. “You’ve got to come clean. The notes show us the story is wrong. We know it. We can show you point by point how you concocted it.”
Maraniss, who was friendly with Cooke, played the good cop. “Give up the Pulitzer,” he said, “and you can have yourself back.”
Eventually, after prolonged questioning but without any admission, Bob and Milt Coleman and Tom Wilkinson, the assistant managing editor for personnel at the Post, left Cooke alone with Maraniss. The two talked for a long time, with Maraniss trying to be as empathetic as he could. Bob and Ben had seemed angry to Cooke, and that had scared her. “Once she was laid that vulnerable,” Maraniss told me, “I wasn’t angry. So that made it possible for her to tell me what happened.”
Slowly, the secret began to unravel. She talked about how scared she had been when she was nominated for the Pulitzer. Eventually, Maraniss told her, “You don’t have to say anything to the others, I’ll do it for you. What do I tell them?”
“There is no Jimmy
and no family,” Cooke said. “It was a fabrication. I did so much work on it, but it’s a composite. I want to give the prize back.”
Just as this was happening, Bob and the other editors outside the conference room reached Ben at home. He told them to stop the interrogation, that maybe it was overkill. But when they walked back in, ready to call things off, Maraniss told them that Cooke had just admitted to the hoax. Bob and Milton Coleman and Tom Wilkinson all hugged her, their fury spent.
“I’m sorry I was such a son-of-a-bitch,” Bob said.
“I deserved it,” Cooke said.
“Yes, you did,” Bob said.
At seven the next morning, Ben called Don Graham and told him that Cooke had confessed. Shortly thereafter the two men met for breakfast at Ben’s house, where they discussed what steps the paper would take next. The news had come too late for that morning’s paper but certainly wouldn’t hold for another full day, so they decided to prepare and release statements of their own. During that breakfast, Maraniss, who was with Cooke at her apartment building, called Ben’s house to ask what he should do. Ben told him that Cooke was to produce a resignation letter and a written statement.
“I don’t know why Bradlee asked me to get her to write a letter of resignation,” Maraniss told me. “I’ve never quite figured that out.”
“Why he didn’t just fire her?”
“Yeah. I have no problem with it—either way, she’s gone—but he directly asked me to get her to resign.”
In his memoir, Ben says, “I can’t explain now why I let her resign rather than fire her on the spot for the grossest negligence.” But privately, the motivation was exactly what one suspects it would be. “If I was really honest with myself I would probably say that if she’d been white I’d have canned her, because she was black I let her resign,” Ben told Barbara Feinman in one of the interviews for his memoir. “You know, I didn’t know how that would play racially and I was concerned about that.”2
I ask Bradlee why he thinks Kay chose him and he said that she told him she respected his ability to spot talent and his ability, if he made a mistake, to clean it up.
—David Halberstam, interview notes, late seventies
Ben often says that the main thing he learned from his time in the Navy was damage control. In a speech in Prague in 1990, he talked about how serving as the assistant damage control officer on the USS Philip during World War II had shaped him as a newspaperman. “In that job, one is charged with thinking about trouble and how to handle trouble before it handles you. I’ve often thought that ability to control damage is one of the essential skills of an editor.”
In the case of Janet Cooke, Ben made a couple of quick decisions that helped to minimize the damage. The first was a relatively simple one: Cooke, and the Post, would return the Pulitzer Prize. Early in the morning of August 15, with Cooke’s written admission in hand, Ben called Joe Pulitzer in St. Louis to inform him of the decision. Later that morning, he sent this cable to the Pulitzer Prize Foundation in New York:
Click here to view a plain text version.
At two that afternoon, Ben released a statement to the entire newsroom, covering much of the same ground but adding a final optimistic note about the task now facing the paper:
Click here to view a plain text version.
Shortly after releasing the statement, Ben asked Tom Wilkinson to come into his office. Wilkinson was one of Ben’s closest confidants at the paper, and he had helped to uncover the fraud on Cooke’s résumé the previous day. “Go tell people in the room to gather at the news desk,” Ben said, meaning that he wanted to talk to the whole news staff.
Within an hour or so, everybody who was in the building at the time was assembled in the newsroom. Ben walked out of his office and stood near his secretary’s desk.
“He said, ‘We’re giving it back, but goddammit, this is a great place, and we do great work,’ ” Wilkinson told me. “But as he said it, his voice broke. That was the first time I’d ever seen or heard anything like that. And then he said, ‘Let’s get back to work.’ ”
“I remember thinking to myself,” Ben told me, of what he felt as he spoke, “are you sure you’re going to be here for a long time?” He didn’t yet know whether he would keep his job.
Later that afternoon, Ben walked over to the Style section. Jane Amsterdam, an editor of the section at the time, remembers how he looked as he passed through. “It was the first I ever saw sadness in Ben,” she told me. “He looked tired.”
“You wanna talk, Benjy?” she said, trying to keep things light, to cheer him up. Ben took a stray chair, turned it around backwards—a favorite move of his—and sat straddling the backrest of the chair, facing Amsterdam and Tony Kornheiser and a number of other Style reporters.
“Nobody knows what to say,” Kornheiser told me, “and he tells the whole story. He talks for about forty minutes, how he found out and how he talked to her in French and she wouldn’t respond. And the crowd grows from me and Jane until there’s like thirty people sitting around listening to him. A lot of people might tell you there was sadness. There was anger. He was pissed off. This was bullshit. I mean, we were giving back the Pulitzer Prize. You don’t ever want to give back the Pulitzer Prize.”
“Everybody wanted to be with him,” Amsterdam told me. “Everybody just wanted to be together. I think we all realized what was coming, which was what did come, which was you’d go in for a question in an interview for a story and they’d say, ‘What does it matter? Just make it up.’ ”
How to begin to move on from the lowest moment of your professional life? The discovery of a way out hinged on the moment when Ben had turned to Cooke, during his interrogation of her foreign language capabilities, and told her that she was like Nixon, that she was covering up. If there was a lightbulb moment in Ben’s career, this was it. Most people agree that Nixon could have avoided resignation had he confessed to the low-level sins of Watergate right away. One of the central lessons of Watergate, which has been hammered home innumerable times since, is that it’s always the cover-up that gets you.
And so Ben decided that he and the paper would let it all hang out, that they would tell the truth about the Janet Cooke episode in the pages of The Washington Post. Instead of allowing others to gore the ox, they would gore their own.
In making that decision, Ben was helped by an institution that he had put into place at the Post shortly after taking over as executive editor. While his creation of the feature writing category at the Pulitzer committee ended up coming back to bite him with Janet Cooke, his support for the creation of an ombudsman position at the Post in 1969 would come full circle, too—to save him.
Most major news outlets have an ombudsman on the staff now. Ombudsmen are internal critics, charged to represent the interests of viewers or readers while remaining insulated from regular editorial process and pressure. Freed by that insulation, ombudsmen are expected to speak truth directly back to the organization they work for.
The first American news ombudsman was appointed in 1967, at the Louisville Courier-Journal. The original charter for the ombudsman in Louisville was to offer internal criticism to the staff, without printing those observations in the newspaper itself. There wasn’t a public component. In November of 1969, Phil Foisie, the longtime foreign editor of the Post, proposed that the Post create an ombudsman position with the added responsibility of publishing an uncensored column in the newspaper. In essence, he wanted to create a forum for accountability to readers and a way for the paper to air its own dirty laundry. “I realize the risk in this,” he wrote to Ben and to Gene Patterson on November 10, 1969. “There could be embarrassment.” But, he went on, “There should also be an enormous gain.”
This was a serious proposal, and it would cause a good deal of reflection among the higher-ups at the paper. According to Don Graham, Ben wasn’t overly thrilled about empowering an ombudsman, but Kay pushed him hard on it because she thought it was a good idea. In 1970, the formal pos
ition of ombudsman was created at the Post, and Dick Harwood, one of Ben’s closest companions and a fiercely fair and independent man, was chosen as the first. At Pugwash the following year, Ben went so far as to call the installation of Harwood a “bold self-destruct step” because of the breadth of the ombudsman’s charter and the unpredictability of the outcome. Asked why he wanted to stick with it in the end, Ben said, “Fairness.”
The vision of 1969–1970, and the hard work required to make the ombudsman position stick at the Post, paid off in the wake of Janet Cooke. There was a great deal of demand inside the Post for a thorough account of how the fabrication could have happened; at one point, nearly twenty reporters wanted to staff the story. But Ben didn’t need twenty reporters, and he resisted them. (“This was no time for the inmates to take over the institution,” he wrote later.) The reason he could resist them was that he had an ombudsman by the name of Bill Green.
Green wasn’t a career journalist. He worked in the administration at Duke University and served only for a year as the ombudsman at the Post before returning to Duke. He was at the Post for the publication of Cooke’s story, and he was there when it all fell apart. On the day that the Post announced its return of the Pulitzer, Ben approached Green about putting something together about Cooke, and Green accepted. “I wrote this story of ‘Jimmy’s World’ after being invited to do so by The Washington Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee,” Green wrote in his story, four days later. “It is important to understand the verb, ‘invited,’ because if I had been assigned to do it, that would have violated the relationship The Post has maintained with its ombudsmen for over a decade. The central idea is autonomy for the person who sits in this chair. Without it, the ombudsman would be a fake, like ‘Jimmy.’ With it, the Post takes its chances, as it should.”
Yours in Truth Page 38
