The Nation's Pulse / A Great Pair of Eggs
Lawler, Philip F.
A GREAT PAIR OF EGGS by Philip F. Lawler In July 1969, the Eagle landed. Man walked on the moon. And Time magazine, in its coverage of the story, canvassed the country to report American...
...These stories evidently satisfied the highest canons of Washington Post journalism, because Woodward was promoted to his current spot as Assistant Managing Editor...
...Why not...
...Bob Woodward confronted Cooke with the vow that he knew the story was a phony and "I'm going to prove it if it's the last thing I do...
...So much for investigative journalism...
...He was voluble, emotional, unable to conceal his feelings...
...In Britain, where libel laws and press ethics are more scrupulously observed, a reporter who abuses his investigative powers can find himself serving time for contempt of court...
...If he wanted a meeting, he left a message in the newspaper at Woodward's front door...
...So every backstabber and slanderer in Washington can manipulate the press...
...He had access to information from the White House, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, the Justice Department, and the FBI...
...After making his bones on the Watergate story, Woodward enjoyed two more signal successes in investigative journalism...
...And yet, with all that information, no one has been able to identify him...
...And the reporter's word is no more reliable than the paper's reputation...
...But when that same politician is quoted anonymously, his tawdry motives disappear...
...Throughout the development of the Watergate investigation, Deep Throat consistently offered confirmation of stories that would otherwise have been too sketchy to print...
...But in America, top newspapers are eager to fight against disclosure of reporters' notes...
...Still, Woodward and his colleagues continued their questioning until at last Cooke confessed...
...No harm done, right...
...No one truly knows, except Bob Woodward-and, I suppose, maybe Deep Throat himself...
...The show must go on...
...That's the very nature of an anonymous source: No one can ever prove that he doesn't exist...
...And in The Brethren, Woodward and Scott Armstrong reconstructed the private thoughts and emotions of Supreme Court Justices, using reports from anonymous third parties...
...Remember him...
...Every editor knew that Cooke had lied repeatedly about her background, her credentials, and her research...
...Woodward froze...
...Mrs...
...An occasional anonymous quotation adds spice to a story...
...Because if Janet Cooke cannot be written off as an aberration, the whole genre of investigative journalism is cast in doubt...
...How does an editor protect his reporters and at the same time control his reader's queries...
...From the descriptions available in that book, we know that he held an "extremely sensitive" position in the Executive Branch...
...Despite his paranoid fear of being followed, he stopped past Woodward's apartment virtually every day-over a period of months when Woodward twice moved to new locations-to check for their secret signal...
...By the way, the Journal story included seven anonymous quotations...
...Although he had access to myriad sources of information about Watergate, he never divulged anything that Woodward had not heard elsewhere...
...much of what passes for "investigative journalism'' is woven together from leaks, background briefings, and off-the-record interviews...
...Graham laughed, touched his arm and said she was only kidding, she didn't really want to carry that burden around with her...
...Now he supervises the investigations of lesser mortals like Janet Cooke...
...And Time magazine, in its coverage of the story, canvassed the country to report American reactions...
...that she was fluent in four languages...
...He lost weight noticeably during the peak of the Watergate frenzy...
...They needed corroborating evidence...
...The editors had even checked over Cooke's notes and figured out how she had pieced together the story from various unrelated bits of information...
...he periodically advised Woodward that the Watergate story was much more important than anyone realized...
...Who was Deep Throat...
...In the Janet Cooke episode, the Post stood by its reporter even after an all-out police effort had failed to locate Jimmy...
...The announcement of these credentials came as a surprise to both schools...
...By forcing Janet Cooke to confess her unique private sin, the Post thought to extirpate the doubts that every sensible reader should have whenever any reporter uses unattributed quotations or unnamed sources...
...Cooke had resigned...
...Yet the Post would not- could not-print a retraction until the reporter herself confessed...
...But in other cases, an anonymous source can transform a tired old story into a sensation...
...Woodward never divulged his friend's identity...
...To this day, no one knows...
...In a small neighborhood bar, when the news came over the television, a little old lady jumped to her feet, raised her stein, and led the assembly in singing the Star Spangled Banner...
...He was praying she wouldn't press it...
...During their investigation of the Watergate scandal, he and his partner Carl Bernstein often found themselves working on the basis of rumors...
...Despite the fact that the "Jimmy" story was not one of the finalists nominated by a Pulitzer jury, and despite that fact that at least one board member openly challenged the reliability of the story, Janet Cooke copped the award...
...He just made it respectable to print items off the grapevine...
...Suddenly, he is an "informed source...
...The Time reporter made up the story, as he sat comfortably at his desk: He thought it added a nice touch to his report, and of course it did...
...But here is a curious thing about Deep Throat: No one but Woodward ever met him...
...Perhaps that particular little old lady didn't really exist, but there was a little bit of her in every one of us...
...That award, the Wall Street Journal reported, provoked considerable consternation both on the Pulitzer board and in the Post headquarters...
...Now a.quiz: Was there, or was there not, a little old lady singing the national anthem in a neighborhood bar...
...The heart-rending tale brought immediate calls for reforms and investigations, and on April 15 the Post proudly announced that Cooke had won a Pulitzer Prize...
...No doubt Woodward enjoyed relaying that advice to his bosses...
...On April 16, the Post ran an embarrassing sequel: The Prize had been withdrawn...
...that she was a virtuoso pianist...
...Graham paused...
...Deep Throat never offered any revelations...
...When a politician attacks his rival through the press, even the dullest of readers knows that the politician has an ax to grind...
...Deep Throat, meet Jimmy...
...In the eyes of the Wall Street Journal, the Cooke episode raised serious questions about facial preference, to wit: "To what extent do the pressures facing big-city papers to recruit and promote promising minorities cloud the initial hiring procedures-as well as the decisions as to which of their stories should be published...
...He smoked and drank (Scotch), occasionally to excess...
...One delightful anecdote came from a Time correspondent in the Midwest...
...Despite the fact that he could have made a small fortune by publishing his memoirs, despite the fact that everyone in Washington (the city where there are no secrets) sought to identify him, despite the fact that magazine publishers have lusted for an article revealing his identity-despite all these things, Deep Throat remains anonymous today, seven years after he appeared as the hero of All the President's Men...
...Several years previously, Woodward had copped his own Pulitzer for investigative reporting-reporting that eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon...
...Not if you have a sensational story, written by a brilliant young black woman in contention for a Pulitzer Prize...
...Less than a day after the Pulitzer announcement, the entire Post editorial staff knew that the story was a fraud...
...As Bob Woodward surely realized, the Jimmy story is just the tip of the iceberg...
...There are rumors, of course, but they are contradictory...
...In some cases, little else...
...In a biographical statement to the Pulitzer committee, Cooke had awarded herself a bachelor's degree (magna cum laude) from Vassar and a master's from the University of Toledo...
...If the Post editors had admitted that Jimmy was a palpable fraud, how strongly could they insist that Deep Throat is an unimpeachable source...
...What sort of rules does Woodward enforce on his subordinates ? The Post is not unique in its willingness to rely on anonymous sources...
...Bob Woodward knows the frustrations that an investigative reporter encounters...
...Although some readers (notably DCs Mayor Marion Barry) had doubted the "Jimmy" story all along, the deception did not emerge until the Pulitzer committee made its announcements...
...But surely it requires more imagination to believe in Deep Throat than it does to envisage Woodward, an ambitious young reporter, inventing a source who could conveniently corroborate the details of a hot news story...
...In an editorial on the day the "Jimmy" hoax was uncovered, the Washington Post seemed to claim that the editors' mistake was understandable...
...As they pointed out, You just do not read a many-paged memorandum from an apparently reliable reporter, relating her visit to and prolonged conversation with several people in great detail, and then inquire: "Say, did any of this actually happen ?'' No, you don't ask that question...
...Now consider what we know about Deep Throat...
...Oh, yes, once or twice he did volunteer something new...
...Surely Woodward, of all people, was qualified to sit in judgment of Janet Cooke...
...A wonderful vignette, isn't it...
...Eventually she broke down and confessed her fraud to the interrogators, led by Managing Editor Howard Simons and Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward...
...Too bad about those eggs, of course, but don't the Post editors have a wonderful sense of confidence in their reporters...
...City editor Milton Coleman admits that he himself began to doubt the story ("I thought the police would have found him in three days at the outside"), but still the Post held its ground...
...It isn't true...
...Woodward and his informant developed an elaborate code of signals, and arranged meetings in an underground parking garage in the wee hours of the morning to avoid detection...
...Once-just once-someone at the Post pressed Woodward about Deep Throat...
...And somewhere, sometime, some little old lady probably did give a pot-valiant rendition of the national anthem...
...Fortunately for them, Woodward had a friend: an anonymous source code-named "Deep Throat...
...How do you know...
...The story was a fraud...
...He and Woodward had been good friends before the Watergate story broke, and had often spent pleasant evenings in conversation...
...He said that he would give her the name if she wanted...
...How long could other editors at papers all around the country guarantee the existence of their own unnamed sources...
...The Pulitzer committee showed the same willingness to overlook details...
...Tell me," she said...
...judges do not recognize the reporter's putative right to shield his source...
...One question led to another, and within hours the Post editors were cross-examining Cooke about Jimmy...
...The details might not be accurate, but the gist of the story rings true...
...Bob Woodward, meet Janet Cooke...
...Perhaps because they were anxious to hire a black woman, the Post never checked the claims on Janet Cooke's resume: that she had won a Phi Beta Kappa key...
...And the press gleefully obliges, chortling about the First Amendment and the public's right to know...
...Jimmy did not exist...
...Of course, Deep Throat might really exist...
...He loved literature...
...Every editor knew that the story had been fabricated...
...Why was that confession so important...
...Not even Bernstein...
...In The Final Days, he and Carl Bernstein depicted whole, detailed scenes from White House life, again relying on anonymous sources for most of their information...
...Just one problem...
...that she had studied at the Sorbonne, won several journalism awards, and been offered a job by Woodward's old pal, Carl Bernstein, at ABC News...
...Let the reader beware...
...In such cases, when the source is not named, the story is no more reliable than the reporter's own word...
...Woodward took a bite of his eggs, which were cold...
...Bob Woodward...
...In September 1980, the Washington Post carried a richly detailed investigative piece by staff reporter Janet Cooke, depicting the horrific life of an 8-year-old heroin addict identified only as "Jimmy...
...But of course he could not prove it...
...In All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein describe a breakfast meeting with publisher Katherine Graham: Woodward said that he had told no one the name of Deep Throat...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
