Capitol Ideas/Death of a Journalist
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS DEATH OF A JOURNALIST With the media so powerful these days, and the Presidency in such an enfeebled state, it seems hardly an exaggeration to say that the big news of the summer in...
...John Newhouse informed the large crowd of Larry Stern's friends gathTom Bethell is The American Specta-tor'5 Washington columnist and Washington editor of Harper's...
...Inevitably, many of them begin to adopt the same protective coloration...
...But she resumed her frosty gaze, and, if I am not mistaken, looked progressively frostier, as Teo Acosta, Fidel Castro's man in Washington, strode: confidently to the microphone and told the assembled company in some detail how good a friend Larry Stern had been to Cuba, what a "good" journalist he was because he had gone to Cuba and had written a "good" story about Fidel's domain...
...baying after broken glass...
...The revelation of inside knowledge does to power approximately what a puncture does to air pressure in a tire...
...called out Big Ben...
...At another point Bradlee paused to recapitulate some of the points that had been made by a variety of speakers, noting that Stern had recently enjoyed "tennis, dancing, Mustangs"-rather a poignant comment because it would more appropriately have been made of a youth whose country club membership was under consideration by committee...
...He was an educated man (this being less common among Washington's high and mighty than might be supposed) and he was, as Cockburn commented, entirely lacking the pomposity that normally accompanies the Washington press badge...
...ered in memoriam three days later at the Quaker Meeting House in Washington that a six-pack or two of beer was then consumed, and-in Stern's last conversation-" the right people got skewered...
...Stern knew everyone and everything-all the nuances and unexpected details which went to make up the real story -but he found it very hard to part with his secrets...
...he had even persuaded his own son to take a vacation in Havana...
...whereupon Izzy concluded on a childish note, as though he had already changed places with one of the youths in the car, denouncing "huge mindless institutions that devour our substance and corrupt our fundamental ideals, like the Pentagon and the CIA...
...He was really one of the most interesting members of Washington's journalistic fraternity...
...The characteristic feature of the highly-placed government official is that his prestige and importance-his "power," if you will-are proportional to the amount of "inside information" he has access to...
...Eventually an usher came and escorted her away, to the relief of everyone assembled...
...I believe he had even contracted with a publisher, and everyone eagerly awaited the work, which would indeed have been interesting if he had told all that he knew...
...CAPITOL IDEAS DEATH OF A JOURNALIST With the media so powerful these days, and the Presidency in such an enfeebled state, it seems hardly an exaggeration to say that the big news of the summer in Washington has not been anything that James Earl Carter has said or done or left undone, but the sudden death, while jogging on Martha's Vineyard, of Laurence Stern, the 50-year-old Assistant Managing Editor of the Washington Post...
...But in the end he could not bring himself to part with his secrets...
...By the time Stern was taken to Martha's Vineyard Hospital, he was dead of a heart attack...
...A couple of hundred guests followed suit, bringing to mind the saying that is written...
...One young lady, in the course of her remarks, said, "Whatever we may think of an afterlife...," and the collective skepticism thus imputed was probably not misplaced...
...Charlie Peters of the Washington Monthly once made the point that the late Peter Lisagor, a Washington journalist-insider, was a great deal more interesting in person than he was in print...
...He had once planned to write a book about a group of Washington insiders about whom he had been gathering information over the years...
...As far as I could see, Stern was beset not so much by the struggle between ideology and objectivity as by another, less commonly noted hazard, although it is one frequently enough encountered in the upper reaches of Washington journalism: the disease of "insiderism...
...I.F...
...At one point Bradlee said that Stern would have done "a helluva lot better" job of eulogizing the assembled company than vice versa...
...In any case, the gathering was, as Larry Stern himself would very much have appreciated, something of a Washington Event, and I kept thinking that Sally Quinn herself should write it up for the "Style" section...
...But then the service itself was unusual...
...That evening there was a party on the roof of the Washington Post building...
...Journalists live in and breathe this atmosphere, and in fact often derive their own prestige from their capacity to extract an occasional secret from such officials (crumbs purloined from the high table of government...
...Quinn flicked her fingers at the intruder, as one would brush at an insect, but she just went on sitting there stolidly...
...Such power, on the other hand, is in no way enhanced by revealing these secrets-far from it...
...He may have just wanted to see how people would react to it...
...At one juncture, as Bradlee spoke (he was standing at the microphone), a woman boldly walked over and sat in his seat...
...Sometimes it seemed that he prized discretion above all other virtues...
...We also heard from Alexander Cockburn, the recently naturalized Village Voice columnist, who made some appropriate remarks about Larry Stern's frequent and generous entertainment of visiting British journalists, who always seemed to intrigue him...
...Stern was for a while the editor of "Style" and is said to have played a by Tom Bethell significant role in developing Quinn's undoubted reportorial talent...
...stay in the network .. .remain on the inside looking out...
...Stern had played tennis in the morning with a couple of Post pals and with John Newhouse, an Assistant Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency-one of those hardy Washington perennials who are handsomely remunerated for making the right kind of accommodating noises in the realm of foreign policy...
...Henry Fairlie, the British journalist who disappeared into the hinterland after the Washington Post published a story earlier this year reporting that he was considered by the Immigration Service to be an "illegal alien," put in a surprise appearance...
...one got the impression she was sizing up a potential son-in-law...
...Stern and Newhouse then set off on a jog...
...Any way you look at it, this is a drawback for a journalist...
...keep your word...
...A shame, because now they have died with him...
...Well, the memorial service came to a rousing end with a first-rate performance by Mark Mirsky, editor of Fiction and rabbi manque...
...Thus "U.S...
...He once quite seriously explained to me that when Senator Abourezk and party visited Cuba, they never lacked a Cuban military escort because of the fear that some sharpshooting CIA agent would emerge from the shrubbery and assassinate Abourezk and make it seem as though the Cubans had done it...
...Katharine Graham, the Washington Post publisher, a distinctly forbidding-looking woman, with the corners of her mouth turned implacably downward, nevertheless perked up and leaned forward so as not to miss a word while Alexander Cock-burn spoke...
...A good case can always be made for confidentiality: Preserve your sources...
...Did one not detect a small stir of uneasiness making its way through the pews at this unpremeditated exercise in candor...
...people stood around outside the building after it was over and, with expressions of shared sorrow, left in fours and sixes for impromptu luncheon dates...
...Ben Bradlee made a short speech and in conclusion threw his glass against the brick wall behind him...
...Did Pol Pot poltroonery exceed Exxon villainy...
...keep the faith...
...Newhouse attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, to no avail...
...After a while Stern bent down and said he had been stung on the ankle by a bee...
...I looked for him in the chummy throng outside the Meeting House afterward, but the great journalist seemed to have disappeared into the hinterland once again...
...Seymour Hersh, formerly of the New York Times and currently writing a book about Henry Kissinger (which is not expected to depict the former Secretary of State in a favorable light), was called to the microphone by Bradlee ("Old Seymour...
...imperialism" took the rap for Cuban totalitarianism...
...Hersh had only recently returned from a mission to Hanoi, and he made only a very brief comment about his old rival on the intelligence beat...
...The reader tends to come in last in such an accounting...
...The same could be said of Larry Stern...
...My guess is that the increasingly difficult task of defending socialist regimes (1979 has not been exactly a vintage year for the Left), combined with his professional need as a Post editor to maintain a semblance of neutrality vis-a-vis current events-a neutrality which he did not in fact feel-ended up making life on the ideological frontier more and more uncomfortable for Stern...
...You had to be on your guard against such possibilities, right...
...In truth Stern was a man of the Left, with a soft spot in his heart for people's liberation movements everywhere...
...Who knew anymore...
...Stern won the set and they had lunch-a decent Beaujolais- after which they were joined by Ward Just, the frequently praised Washington Post reporter-turned-Vermont novelist...
...Ben Bradlee, the Executive Editor of the Washington Post, "emceed" the affair, introducing a prearranged sequence of speakers, and then, in the Quaker tradition, others spoke as the spirit (or flesh) moved them...
...V^uinn sat next to Ben Bradlee, her husband and Larry Stern's good friend and ally at the Post...
...In this aspect, of course, Washington journalists model themselves on government topsiders...
...Stone, another famous journalist, spoke at somewhat greater length, first telling an anecdote about seeing some car-riding youths in New York City, and realizing as he saw them that life after all does continue in the younger generation, and in this way we have a measure of immortality conferred upon us...
...The place was packed, but she obviously had no appreciation for the nuances of rank which are so important on these occasions (something that the egalitarian society has been unable to abolish, I fear...
...It would be a great mistake, however, to see Stern merely as a covert operative of the Left (as the Right has implied...
...Stern was a master of a weird kind of conversational indirection, in which he said things quite contrary to what he believed, as a way of eliciting hidden reactions and concealed information from his listeners, so it is possible that he did not really believe his own tortured defense of Cuban militarism...
...He arrived a little late, but he was seen with his nose pressed to the glass door, peering in owlishly at the proceedings...
...If what you know makes you what you are, why become as other men by letting the whole world know what you know...
...Perhaps ' 'meeting'' would be a better word to describe it, since it was distinctly agnostic in tone...
...I thought that Newhouse's remark about people getting "skewered" rather an odd reminder to make at a memorial service, even if the skewering was done "nicely," as Newhouse added in afterthought...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
