Ben was willing to take his chances, and he gave the order from on high that everybody was to cooperate with Green’s inquiry. He also ordered that Green be given as much space in the paper as he wanted, no restrictions. With the blessing of Ben and Don Graham, Green interviewed everybody involved in the story—all the editors, other reporters who had doubts, everybody—except for Cooke herself, who wouldn’t cooperate.3 On Sunday, April 19, just four days after the Post had discovered the fraud, Green ran a comprehensive fourteen-thousand-word piece about how “Jimmy’s World” had ever come to be. The story, “Janet’s World,” ran as the off-lead on the front page and then jumped to four complete pages inside.
“It is the classic work of ombudsmanship, still to this day,” Mike Getler told me. His opinion matters more than most. At the time of our interview Getler was the ombudsman for PBS, but before that he had been a longtime Post reporter, editor, and ombudsman himself. “It was sensational. Thorough and excellent, no punches pulled.”
Green’s report is the reason that most of the facts of the story are known today. He gives the full blow-by-blow, and nobody comes out looking perfect. Woodward is full of self-blame, as is Milton Coleman. Ben is presented not as negligent but as removed, too insulated to have heard the doubts. Though nobody questioned the basic facts in Green’s report, some would fault him for being too positive about the Post generally, largely because of his “conclusions” section in which he made the basic point that the Janet Cooke episode had been an “aberration that grew in fertile ground.”
“To believe that this mistake, big as it was, challenges the honesty of any other story in The Post or any other newspaper, is over-reaching. It won’t wash. There is no evidence whatsoever that this kind of thing is tolerated at this paper. To over-reach the other way, if this experience tightens discipline in the news process, it may have done some good,” he wrote. His final sentence: “The Post is one of the very few great enterprises in journalism, and everybody associated with it ought to be proud of it.”
That conclusion rubbed some people the wrong way,4 but for the people who worked at the Post it offered a kind of public redemption: Janet Cooke couldn’t and wouldn’t taint them forever. As one reporter told me, Green’s piece “in a way exonerated us, because we were a very serious newsroom, very dedicated to truth, and that came through shiningly.”
“There is only one damage control, and that’s the truth,” Ben told Charlie Rose in 1995. “And you get it out. And I must say, in that dark, dark moment, I was very proud of that.”
Green delivered his report on the morning of Saturday, April 18, and Ben read it shortly thereafter. Years later Green wrote to Ben about that moment, surely one of the most potentially uncomfortable in the history of the Post:
No compliment can rival the one you delivered on that Saturday morning when you came in from your place in West Virginia to see my Janet Cooke piece. It had been punched into the system by Bill Greider because I wrote it on a manual typewriter. After reading it through, you emerged from your office and said precisely this, in a voice that could be heard all the way to the sports desk: “Green, you ungrateful son-of-a-bitch, I salute you!”
That was one for the ages. It ranks high among my private treasures.
At a conference on ombudsmanship in the nineties, Ben would say that they could never have gotten out of the Janet Cooke mess without Bill Green. “I could have talked myself blue in the face and been on every radio station and television station and written a piece for ‘Outlook,’ and the critics and skeptics would have said, ‘Sure, sure.’ ” Green had written a definitive account that the public could believe—and that was all that he needed to do.
One questioner wanted to know if Ben ever thought that any of the Post’s ombudsmen, including Green, had criticized the paper unfairly.
“I sure did,” Ben said.
“What did you do in that case?”
“I ate it.”
* * *
1 All dialogue (and most reconstruction of events) from Cooke’s interrogation comes from Bill Green’s piece that appeared in the Post on April 19, 1981. It was written in the days immediately after the discovery, when what people had said and done was still fresh in their minds. Nobody has disputed the basic accuracy of Green’s account to me.
2 Even in her resignation letter, Cooke had problems with accuracy, though she was admittedly under duress. She said that her story of September 28, 1981, had been a “serious misrepresentation,” when in fact the story had run the previous year. As she told me, through the reporter Mike Sager, David Maraniss had dictated the letter to her. “I simply signed it,” she wrote. “Hindsight being what it is, I would handle that quite differently now.”
3 The only public comments Cooke has ever made about the “Jimmy’s World” scandal were in an appearance on Phil Donahue’s talk show in 1982 and in a mini-PR blitz around the publication of Mike Sager’s article about her in GQ in June 1996. She cooperated with that article, which she and Sager then shopped for a movie deal. TriStar pictures bid $1.6 million, paying the two $750,000 up front and promising an additional $850,000 if the movie were ever made, which it hasn’t been. Since then, her silence has continued; through Sager, she provided one comment about her resignation letter but otherwise rejected my requests for an interview.
4 “Here then, after zillions of hard-hitting interviews with some of the finest friends and co-workers it has ever been my privilege to know, are all the facts, every single one, about the scandal that has rocked the known universe to its very core,” Michael Kinsley wrote in a parody of Green in The New Republic. Under a mock “conclusions” section, Kinsley urged that “2) Bob Woodward should continue to be quoted in The Washington Post every day expressing appealing sentiments of self-effacement and modesty. 3) The Washington Post should remain a triumphant vindication of the First Amendment.”
FALLOUT
One of the reasons why the Cooke thing was such a crashing blow was that everybody felt, well, look at the Post, they’ve stepped on it. Look at those guys, walking with their noses in the air, stepped on it. That was number one.
—Peter Osnos, October 9, 2008
[It was] a very big injury, and I can only imagine that Ben took it really very hard, even though, in the aftermath, they behaved in an exemplary way. But you shouldn’t underestimate the power of the blow and the level of the embarrassment. It wasn’t just a piece that had been made up by somebody that was pernicious. It was made up, they were told it was made up by the mayor of the city, and by a lot of other people, there was suspicion of the piece inside. And then it won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s like a Soupy Sales pie to the face.… And it came on the heels of the biggest journalistic triumph imaginable.
—David Remnick, October 26, 2009
Readers of the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for March of 1981 were treated, toward the back of the bulletin, to “Ben Bradlee’s Convention Preview.” Ben had been dragooned by his friend Tom Winship, the editor of The Boston Globe, into serving as the program chairman of the annual ASNE convention, which was to be held in Washington in late April of 1981. The title of Ben’s preview, written before the curtain fell on Janet Cooke, was “We’re Lookin’ Good.” “With lots of irons still in the fire,” the budding event coordinator wrote, “we have the beginnings of something pretty good, although much of the program is still to come.”
Prophetic words. The conference was held in Washington the week after the Cooke scandal hit the papers, and now all eyes were trained on Ben—for all the wrong reasons. At the reception that kicked off the convention, Winship told Ben that he thought they ought to have some kind of organized discussion of the Cooke episode. “There’s an awful lot of interest,” he told Ben, with a good deal of understatement.
And so an early morning session that was coincidentally supposed to be devoted to ombudsmen—“one of those early bird meetings normally attended by a dozen editors with insomnia,” as Ben put it in a l
etter to a friend—became the Janet Cooke session. According to Ben, seven hundred fifty people and five television cameras showed up. As Al JaCoby, the ombudsman of the San Diego Union, put it after the fact, “Everybody here today came looking for red meat.”
BCB with Barbara Feinman, May 24, 1990:
BF: How’d you feel?
B: I felt terrible. I felt so terrible. You know, I had to do it. I was performing. It’s always been, I’ve always understood that when I perform I perform. I know that I’m on, and it has been ingrained in me somehow not to fuck up: to be prepared, you can make it look casual if you can get away with it but you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it right. So I knew all of that and I didn’t have the strongest hand.…
BF: To say the least.
B: To say the very least. But there were sort of about fifteen or sixteen questions from the floor. I guess Winship was presiding and it was obvious that I had to get up and say my piece, which was essentially that we had acted quickly, I forgot what the hell I said.… The fucking television cameras were there. And to their great and everlasting credit [Don] Graham and [Russ] Wiggins were there by my side, never left my side.
In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, Ben had gone to Graham and offered to resign. “If it’s the right solution for you, it’s the right solution for me,” Ben had said. “I’ll quit, or you bag me—it doesn’t make any difference. I leave.”
“I don’t think they considered it,” Ben told me. “Whether they should have or not is something else. But by that time I was locked into the furniture, for Christ’s sake. I was part of the place. And it might have been more costly to them than I thought, or than they thought it was.”
“I got all kinds of advice that we should change editors as a result of Janet Cooke, and I didn’t consider that a very close call,” Don Graham told me. Ben’s sixteen years of results as editor far outweighed the one mistake. There were a lot of other people along the line of authority over that story who were equally, if not more, culpable, and Graham didn’t fire any of them, either. “I made no change,” he told me, “and I’m glad I didn’t.”
That morning, at the ASNE meeting, the most important thing to Ben—the thing he has always said about it, since—was that Don Graham wrapped his arm around Ben for much of the panel. “Never said a word,” Ben would say later of what Don Graham did that morning, “but every time anybody looked, there was the publisher with his arm around his editor.”
As the panel began, Ben was sitting in the audience, but all assembled knew that he was the main event. Eventually he stood up and began to take questions from the audience. After a rueful joke about how he’d done more for the conference than any other program chair in history, he tried to modify expectations a little bit. “I haven’t had time to collect my thoughts and formulate rules, which I suspect we will do,” Ben said. “One conclusion I’ve reached is that you cannot legislate, you cannot make a rule that is going to prevent, preserve you, save you from a pathological liar.
“Eventually you are going to have to trust somebody,” he went on. “If you have a rule that has an editor check every single fact by every reporter, you are not going to put out a daily newspaper, you’re going to put out a monthly newspaper.”
On the matter of race, Ben said that any suggestion that the Cooke case should call into question the value of affirmative action programs was “just baloney.” He was right, though in a certain sense it was a dodge. Janet had been hired in large part because she was black, and everybody knew it. “I think where race came into this question had to do with the white editors,” Ben said. This is the part of the racial dynamic that he has always felt most comfortable addressing. “Editors have only a limited number of worlds in which they consider themselves well qualified. In this case, Condon Terrace in Southeast Washington is an area that I do not know anything about.…
“The fact that Janet Cooke is black and her immediate editor was black probably made me trust them more, not less,” he said.
“Isn’t there something wrong with watching a crime being committed?” Al JaCoby, one of the folks who had come looking for red meat, asked a bit later.
This was the main question that people wanted answered, and a fair one. Charlie Seib, who had once been the ombudsman at the Post, followed a similar line. When confronted with an eight-year-old being injected with heroin, “Do you wrap yourself in the First Amendment and your traditions and let the child die?” Seib asked. He said that if Ben and Bob and everybody else had “realized that they were dealing with a life and not just a good front page story,” they might have tried to find the boy and discovered the hoax before the damage had been done.
“You’ve got your point,” Ben conceded.
Click here to view a plain text version.
Readers felt the same way Charlie Seib did. Ben could talk all he wanted about press independence and the difficulties posed by journalists who cooperate with law enforcement, but the basic point was that when they’d been challenged on the story they had fallen back on cold, idealized journalistic standards instead of real, human, and empathic ones. Cooke would later tell Phil Donahue that Howard Simons was the only person at the Post who ever asked her about Jimmy’s well-being or showed any interest in figuring out what the paper could do to help him. Everybody else was just worried about the story.
“It was a moral failure on my part,” Bob told me. “The kid was being tortured. An eight-year-old. You should protect children. And so if I’d just been thinking morally, ‘We have a responsibility to this kid,’ and said to Janet, ‘What’s the address? We’re dropping a dime, I am, personally, to the cops and a doctor, to save the kid, and then we’ll do the story,’ it would’ve exposed the fabrication, presumably …
“We were so caught up in this kind of muscular, First Amendment, ‘Don’t fuck with us’ [mentality],” he went on. “I kind of liken it to the Haldeman thing. There was almost a Shakespearean element to it. But you don’t get to the Haldeman story, you don’t get to the ‘Jimmy’s World’ story, unless you’re pushing the envelope. If there are ever kind of instructions from Ben, it’s push the envelope.”
“I don’t want to absolve myself in any sense,” Ben told me when I asked him about the moral dimension. “I mean, there it is. It happened. And it should never have happened.”
If other editors at lesser newspapers were taking a small amount of guilty pleasure in Ben’s and Bob’s difficulties, so, too, were readers of a certain persuasion. This, from a reader in Goldsboro, North Carolina, April 24, 1981:
Sir:
My, my how the mighty have fallen. Who has the last laugh now? Richard Nixon? At least he wasn’t hoodwinked, humiliated and made the laughing stock of the world by a 26 year old black woman!
Or this, from Washington, D.C., a few days later:
Dear Mr. Bradlee:
I find the Washington Post’s agonizing over the Janet Cooke affair both boring and hypocritical.… In fact, very few people were shocked by the affair. It was viewed as simply another example of the type of misrepresentation and fraud that one routinely expects from the media.…
No one has any respect for journalists anymore. The profession has destroyed itself. Many public figures flatter you, because they know you have the capacity to destroy those with whom you do not agree. But do not confuse fear with admiration or respect.…
I expect that Janet Cooke’s sense of ethics and integrity is about average for the profession. You should have considered firing Walter Pincus, for example, rather than Janet. At least Janet writes with style.
Ben had given his critics a stick to beat him with. But, Ben being Ben, there was only so much he was going to take. In June of 1981, a Yale student wrote to remind Ben of an answer that he had once given to a question addressed to him at an event on campus. Somebody had asked Ben who holds the media accountable when they make mistakes, and Ben’s response had been “our readers.” “The brevity of your reply to such an earnest question was am
using to many in your audience, who let you escape to other issues,” the student wrote.
Other members of your audience, however, remained uneasy with that answer, because it is not believable.… The American people will not soon forget the Pulitzer hoax at The Washington Post. They will remember it as an early chapter in what may someday be called “Mediagate.” Just as important, I hope you will remember this lesson and think a bit longer before answering the next time someone asks you, “Who keeps the press honest?”
Very truly yours,
Ben’s response, dated June 22, 1981:
Dear [student with incredibly WASPy sounding name]:
My God, you have gotten pompous at an early age!
Your paraphrased question asks how often do we see the media admit to inaccurate reporting? In the Janet Cooke case, you saw The Washington Post admit to inaccurate reporting. You saw The Washington Post do it before anyone else. You saw The Washington Post do it on the front page. You saw The Washington Post apologize in an editorial. You saw The Washington Post—unasked—return the Pulitzer Prize. There quite literally was no other step I could have taken in the department of autocriticism. Unique in the annals of American journalism. Really.
I am speechless at your injunction that I should remember this lesson and think a bit longer. Before you settle down as a stockbroker or whatever, and join the racquet club or whatever, try to think for yourself, if I may give you a piece of advice.
Yours in Truth Page 39
