Riclad Reeves on Political Books
My Side of the Story by Laura Foreman This is a story about politicians and the press, and it’s arguable, I suppose, whether I’m the most qualified person to write it or the least. Several...
...It also did some important investigating of Rizzo’s finances, which were rather more magnificent in scale than those of most lifetime city employees...
...It’s typical of the ethics-code mentality of journalism today that a relationship isn’t corrupting unless something of value changes hands...
...but in the end, Rizzo won easily...
...I do remember his mentioning Lance and saying he was sure this kind of thing went on all the time, but I had been caught and had to pay the price...
...Everybody in the bureau hated Rizzo, and Rizzo hated everyone in the bureau...
...The dinner appearance [at a Northeast Philadelphia restaurant one night] involves The Speech, the handshaking, and another staple-the pictures...
...You had hair then, too.’ “The badinage continues around the room...
...The paper’s city hall bureau, headed by Aaron Epstein, covered the day-to-day public workings of the city government and did investigative stories about Frank Rizzo...
...His favorite activities in the world, as far as I could tell, were trading cop stories, listening to police radios, and reminiscing about his own years on the force...
...If it was a bad situation, it was bad because we were in love, not because of the gifts Buddy bought me, which were the immediate cause of my downfall...
...Partly it was because my job was writing about something Rizzo was very good at, politicking, so my coverage was basically favorable...
...With apologies for having gone too far in the other direction, I still believe the press should ponder this question of distance, and with less detachment than we could once afford...
...The second kind will involve a lot of personal moral choices, some of which will be made mistakenly, and it will produce richer dividends...
...On August 27,1977, the Inquirer ran a page-one story saying I had accepted gifts from Buddy worth more than $10,000, some of them while I was still on the local political beat...
...The first kind of reporting will produce incorruptible journalists who don’t understand the world behind the interviews, press conferences, announcements, and leaks...
...I doubt that any other reporter has ever been as close to what he covered as I have been, and I’m sure that no other reporter has ever been the target, rather than the author, of extended, deep, and painful probing into the most private crannies of life...
...It was common knowledge around the Inquirer newsroom that Buddy and I were having an affair, and people may not have liked it, but there were no consequences for me professionally at the time...
...To some extent I felt (and still feel) that my old friends in journalism were washing their hands of me...
...I wrote that there were 400 people there, which was a good turnout, and I predicted that Rizzo would do better with the black vote in his reelection campaign than he had before, which in fact he did...
...When I finally did, I had the eerie sensation of reading about a stranger who had somehow taken possession of my name and face...
...As long as I liked him, I could write pretty much what I wanted...
...The Rizzo-Hill primary was at the end of May 1975, and it was in the months between it and the nocontest general election in the fall that Buddy Cianfrani and I developed a serious relationship...
...Too Close to Cianfrani I was the constant subject of complaints to my editors, mostly from Epstein and his bureau...
...I was watching the accretion of a grotesque legend around someone I didn’t even know, couldn’t even recognize...
...The Hill camp sincerely felt I was out to get its man, and Hill and others wrote letters to the Inquirer complaining that I was slanting my stories against him and f o r Rizzo...
...The Appearance of Impropriety The press reaction to my story was intense-there was a page-long story in Newsweek, a longer one in Esquire, a 17,000-word opus in the Inquirer, two columns in The Washington Post, three stories in The Washington Star, a long lead story in The Village Voice, and uncounted other pieces in publications throughout the country...
...One early result was that a zealous colleague accused me of being on Rizzo’s payroll...
...The eventual outcome, two years later, was a public scandal, a good deal of private anguish, and the loss of a highly rewardingjob with the Washington bureau of The New York Times...
...Grievous though the experience has been, it has at least afforded me a unique viewpoint...
...Usually they talked about the campaign, but in relaxed moments the conversation would come around to Rizzo’s favorite subject-the police...
...In a time when politicians’ principled positions on the issues usaally change from minute to minute, the real need, I thought, was to know who they werehow they thought and felt and reacted, where they stood in that inner battle between the swine and the angel that is common to us all...
...That meant exploring the reasons-most of them personal and instinctual, having nothing to do with “the issues”-he won so many votes...
...In any event, what my old coworkers had known about for two years and not printed was now news, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time...
...He was a great raconteur...
...He liked me, partly because he could tell I liked him...
...But I always thought the most important thing was that he felt I liked him personally and the city hall bureau didn’t-which was true...
...He was well scheduled and well advanced...
...I thought the press often reflected the worst side of this innocence, and compounded the problem by maintaining a distance between writer and subject that might have been professionally correct, even necessary, but that limited insights and reinforced judgmental extremes...
...He hadn’t talked to any of them in months...
...I realized that this was a conflict, but I wanted to cover the election through to its conclusion in November...
...I got closer than most, it’s true, and the situation was tricky at times, but I think it paid off in terms of what I was able to write...
...My editors continued to like my stories...
...Hostile and Distant When I became the Inquirer’s political writer in August 1974 I walked into the middle of a longstanding bureaucratic war...
...He exerts an almost hypnotic fascination for some people and utterly repels others...
...My relationship with Buddy may well have been corrupting, but those gifts certainly weren’t the reason why...
...As soon as was practicable, I got myself transferred so that I wouldn’t have to cover him any more, and in the interim I mentioned him as little as possible and stuck as much as I could to what was commonly known...
...Don’t say that,” Hill said gently...
...While the city hall bureau had no access to the mayor, I was often in his company...
...It didn’t take long for me to discover that that sort of reporting was fraught with certain hazards...
...It’s too soon, I think, to gauge the effect that what happened to me might have on the way politicians are covered...
...Downstairs at Dugan’s, Police Academy Class 123 is having its 20th reunion-a tailor-made Rizzo crowd...
...But if they were wrong about Rizzo and me, I think it’s probably right that I was too close to one politician I covered-Buddy Cianfrani, the man I fell in love with (since then put behind bars by U.S...
...Hill was a surprisingly innocent man...
...Large programs either bored or mystified him, but I never saw him drive over a pothole when he didn’t call in right away with orders that it be paved over...
...I was very upset at the time, and I don’t remember exactly what he said...
...It would hardly do, then, for the Times to harbor a conflict of interest of its own...
...There were also debates among my colleagues, the dinner parties that never made it into print where people assessed my culpability or lack of it and considered whether it made any difference that I never slanted a story because of my relationship with a politician, or whether my merely allowing the appearance of impropriety to exist was enough to justify what happened to my career...
...I believe now that I know...
...Abe Rosenthal, the Times’ managing editor, called me up to New York and asked me to resign...
...There’s old Flanigan,’ booms the mayor as he descends on the room...
...At campaign stops, Rizzo was impressive...
...All these people he kidded and berated often...
...When the story came out Aaron Epstein spent the better part of a day looking at a photograph of the banquet and counting the tiny heads, in an effort to prove that I had inflated the attendance in order to make Rizzo look better...
...The bureau-and especially Epsteinhadn’t liked my predecessor as political writer, Jon Katz, who also had access to Rizzo and wrote more about his character than his policy stands...
...Partly this was because Rizzo was mercurial...
...Otherwise, I wrote absolutely what I saw, without thinking about whether it would close off my access to Rizzo...
...He desperately needed to be loved by everyone...
...Nice-Sounding Rules of Journalism Aaron Epstein and his bureau did have a point, however...
...Of course, he would sometimes tell me things off the record and, like any reporter, I’d honor our agreement...
...It would be wrong, I thought, to forego the risk of being corrupted if it meant also foregoing writing things like this, from one of my campaign stories: “Much has been made of the Rizzo ‘charm,’ but that’s too effete a word...
...The story was factually accurate, although I have some quarrel with the thinking behind it...
...I don’t think they should fall in love with themthat makes honest reporting well-nigh impossible...
...Maintaining access to Frank Rizzo was a complicated matter, one that didn’t fit easily into any nice-sounding rules of journalism...
...That isn’t to say that the city hall bureau wasn’t good at what it did...
...I never slanted a story in his favor...
...reelection campaign of Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo in 1975...
...Hill was unfailingly kind and well-meaning, but totally lacking in accurate selfperception, political savvy, and toughness...
...Their relationship with the mayor-remember, this was at the zenith of the Watergate mood of the press, with all that implies-was just what most people now think reporters’ relationships with politicians should be...
...Takinaisks to Gain Access And I saw a lot...
...Occasionally at the end ofa workday I would go out fordrinks ordinnerwith Rizzo and his entourage...
...At the same time, he is a peerless campaigner and a fascinating and complex individual...
...He said they had been...
...An irony of the case was that I had just finished my best story for the 7 h e s when all hell broke loose-an interview with beleaguered Labelle Lance, a sweet, pampered Southern belle...
...I hope not...
...I honestly believe that I gave the Inquirer’s readers a fuller and more honest picture of the political world than they would have received if I had kept my distance...
...But it’s obvious that I hit a raw nerve, too...
...Barely made the weight...
...I used to ponder, inadetached sort of way, whether my colleagues and I were not too Olympian in our treatment of our subjects, whether we allowed them to be human and therefore fragile, whether we properly restrained ourselves from deifying them for their virtues and crucifying them for their faults...
...Hill was a patrician, the stepson of former Philadelphia mayor Richardson Dilworth, a man with great integrity and a good record in the senate but a feel for people that was as weak as Rizzo’s was strong...
...That may sound like a strange bargain, but that’s the way Rizzo was...
...Otherwise, I think my critics were wrong...
...Once a little boy came up to him at a campaign stop and said he hated Rizzo...
...I think reporters should try to walk the narrow line of friendship with politicians they cover if it Will help them write better stories...
...At the start of the primary Hill had a good chance, because he was the candidate of the Philadelphia Democratic machine, with which Rizzo had split...
...That’s part of it, but my case was so controversial because there is a lot more involved toowhether reporters should dispassionately cover public events or empathetically cover the harder-to-getat areas as well...
...I believe they were...
...I don’t think I got too close to the people I covered...
...Complaints About Stories I had similar access in that campaign to Rizzo’s Democratic primary opponent, State Senator Louis G. Hill-not because Hill liked me but because he desperately needed the exposure...
...Everyone calls him ‘The General.’ “ ‘We all called him that,’ a retired officer says...
...They thought the same about me, in spades...
...He drew crowds and knew how to handle them...
...On the other hand, there are thoughtful people within the profession who argue that my experience should serve as a warning to reporters inclined to dip beneath facades and run the risk that entails...
...So forceful is his personality that ever since his ascendance to political power, Philadelphia has been divided into two roughly equal, eternally hostile, and utterly irreconcilable camps-those who love Rizzo and those who hate him...
...The first time I bad lunch with Rizzo and some of his aides in his office, he happened to let slip the word “damn” and apologized to me profusely...
...The Bert Lance affair was at its fevered peak, and the Times was leading the pack of papers looking into Lance’s conflicts of interest...
...Rizzo had four full-time bodyguards from the police department (with whom I made sure to have a good relationship) and an ever-present campaign strategist, Martin Weinberg...
...People will say the real issue in what happened to me is reporters’ accepting gifts from sources...
...I continued to do well at the Inquirer...
...While the city hall bureau reported (accurately) that Rizzo was bad at government, I reported (accurately) that he was good at politics...
...For a time I was too heartsick to read the reams of print describing my career, my character, my personality, my triumphs and mistakes...
...Rizzo is indisputably a frontrunner in the race for worst mayor of any town of any size in the United States...
...In early 1977 I went to work for The New York Times, where 1 was supposed to cover Washington with a fresh eye, as if it were a foreign province...
...There seems to be an unease within the press, a need at once to codify its standards and to humanize them, to come to some kind of peace with itself and its incalculable power...
...By that afternoon, all would usually be forgotten...
...My job was to cover political campaigns, and that meant it was my job to write about a different RizzoRizzo the campaigner, a man who was fantastically good at winning elections...
...He kidded me mercilessly, as he did his aides...
...Rizzo has probably done more for group portraits than anybody since Grant Wood...
...I have always thought it must be the innocence of youth in this young country that has caused Americans to view their leaders in such extreme terms, as saviors or demons, rather than as fallible fellow beings entitled not so much to respect or blame as to compassion...
...And that did not endear me to the city hall bureau...
...My thesis at the time was that the public’s right to know was ill served by reporting merely the official actions of politicians, the speeches and press conferences and new programs...
...I wouldn’t have known this Rizzo if I had stuck to covering press conferences and speeches, and I wouldn’t have been able to write the stories I wrote...
...A photographer travels with him, and anyone who wants his picture taken with the mayor is promptly obliged...
...That was a charge brought against me from the start...
...Rizzo was, justifiably, afraid of what his wife would do to him if she found this out, and I, like many a reporter before me, kept quiet about it...
...Rizzo is a genuinely terrible mayor and that was reflected in the bureau’s reporting...
...I didn’t understand what was happening to me...
...I don’t think adversary relationships and shunning any friendly contact are the way to cover politics...
...They thought he was in Rizzo’s back pocket...
...Recently Ievensawit written that Rizzo provided me with a limousine and driver to cover his campaign-an untruth that appeared in print as an absolute fact, In an atmosphere as volatile as Rizzo’s Philadelphia, I probably should have foreseen the consequences of what was happening to me in the turbulent days of that campaign: to wit, that I was falling in love with a politician, a powerful one and a staunch Rizzo ally-State Senator Henry J. “Buddy” Cianfrani...
...Part of my job was to cover the Laura Foreman, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, now lives and writes in the Washington area...
...you just have to know when you’re shortchanging your readers and when you’re not...
...Another put forth the theory that I was sleeping with him...
...I’m afraid, however, that it may well widen further the gap between writer and subject and discourage reporters who honestly try to depict their subjects on a human scale...
...Once, for instance, I did a story on a black political banquet that Rizzo attended...
...It wasn’t just last fall that I was accused of being too close to the people I covered...
...I think it’s important for reporters to judge the politicians they cover in human terms, and that means judging their own behavior the same way-knowing where that subjective line is between getting close and getting co-opted and stayingon the right side of it...
...Sure, gaining access to a Rizzo without compromising yourself took some skill, but it was a skill that I think I had and that I’d trust other reporters to have...
...Don’t ever say you hate anybody...
...Attorney David Marston...
...He eventually brought his head count to a higher-up at the paper, but the police estimate agreed with me...
...We would’ve followed him through a brick wall...
...Frank Rizzo is a primal force, like fire or a hurricane...
...She didn’t understand what was happening to her husband...
...My editors liked the story so much that they considered running it without a byline, I heard later, but in the end they decided that since I had left the paper it couldn’t see the light of day...
...So when I wrote something he didn’t like-for instance, when I wrote that a number of people at a labor dinner had booed him-he’d call me up at six in the morning, knowing I’m a late sleeper, and call me a bitch and a lot of other things...
...He was with me as a rookie...
...What’d you weigh then, Flanigan, 145...
...It was hostile and distant and devoid of understanding...
...I used to wonder sometimes how the people I wrote about felt when they read my stories...
...Rizzo is about ready to leave, but Weinberg has uncovered a bonus...
...As is the case with a lot of politicians, Rizzo’s emotional development seemed to have stopped at the age of six...
...I hope not...
...It was true that many people who wrote stories hostile to Rizzo were denied access to him, mostly because of those stories...
...At once crude and courtly, polished and primitive, his overwhelming personality defies a neutral reaction...
...So I wrote about Buddy as little as possible and asked to be transferred after the election-which I was...
...If it was a cold day, on the other hand, you could count on Hill to be outside...
...There was a whole phalanx of reporters at the Inquirer-the city hall bureau-whose sole mission was to chronicle the mayor’s shortcomings and evildoings...
...He had an instinctive feel for people and their needs that was as complete as his bafflement at how to run a government...
...Several years ago I was the political writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer...
...There was also one matter he asked me not to write about, and Ididn’t-he was one of the world’s most flirtatious men and often turned on the charm to women he met in the course of campaigning...
...He never met anyone for the second time when he didn’t remember his name, his wife’s name, his children’s names, and where he worked...
...During his campaign for reelection in the spring of 1975, I spent many a day riding with him in his chauffeured limousine...
...But I think it was also true that you could stay close to the man and still write honestly about him...
...He started to let me spend more time with him than the other reporters, which of course is what I had wanted all along...
...Walking the Narrow Line Although my relationship with Buddy would never have started if I had been a standoffish, distance maintaining reporter, I wouldn’t put it in the same category as my relationship with Rizzo...
...When, after following him around for days, I wrote a long story on Hill’s campaign, I began with an incident that stuck in my mind: Hill on a beautiful spring day choosing to take his campaign underground, to a subway stop where he handed out leaflets to commuters from New Jersey...
...The complaints got so bad that eventually Gene Roberts, the Inquirer’s editor, asked my replacement as political writer, Paul Critchlow, to review my stories on Hill to see if they had been fair...
...I have a feeling I lost those arguments...
...But when he saw Icould take part i n the office back -and -f o rt h without being offended, he spoke to me as he did to everyone elsearound himwhich is to say, every second or third word was unprintable...
...Myjob, or so I thought, was to try to get to know him so that I could explain him in some depth as a man and as a social and political phenomenon...
Vol. 10 • May 1978 • No. 3
