The Last Debate Page 17

  There was a lot of good humor at first as we moved along toward the door. People laughed and there were jokes about pack journalism and feeding frenzies. Then I heard a scream up ahead. It sounded male, frantic. Somebody had been hurt. There was another scream from off in another direction. And another, and another. Somebody yelled: “Stop!” I heard some moans and other shouts of extreme profanity about pushing and shoving and knock it off.

  I was caught, immobilized, squeezed in the center of a moving prison of bodies. I remembered the stories about the drunk fans being crushed to death at soccer games in Europe. I wondered how the Tatler would handle the story of their man dying in the line of duty, crushed to death by his colleagues in the media. The ultimate irony, the ultimate media event.

  The Star man had disappeared! He had been right up against and almost in me on my right front, but suddenly he was no longer there. My God! What happened to him? I didn’t even know his name. I felt something soft against my right foot and leg and heard a voice shouting: “Help me! Help me!” It was the man from The Kansas City Star.

  I am thirty-four years old, five feet eleven inches tall, and I have what would probably be described as a medium build. I used all of what that added up to plus a rush of adrenaline to push myself down toward the Star man. I got hold of his suit coat with my right hand and pulled up with everything I had. He came up with me and I threw my arms around him in a bear hold. He was about my height, but he was limp. There was blood spewing out of his nose. I said to him: “You’re going to be fine. You’re all right.” I held him and moved toward what I saw as a patch of daylight on my right.

  Another man about my age but much bigger than me saw my problem. “Follow me,” he said to me. I did. He told me afterward that he was a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun. He said he had been a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and before that played football—offensive left guard—at the University of Wisconsin. He yelled things like “Make a hole! Wounded coming through! Get the fuck out of the way!” as he tossed his colleagues in the press to either side like they were department-store dummies.

  In a few minutes we were at the daylight, up against a wall, still in the Virginia Room but away from the moving mob, out of harm’s way.

  We lay the Star man down on the floor. The bleeding had stopped, but he was unconscious.

  “You OK here with him?” said the Sun man.

  “Right, right,” I said.

  “I’ll go find a medic, a doctor, something, and send them over.”

  And as if he were the Lone Ranger or Superman, he disappeared back toward and then into the moving human mass of media, all of whom I hated and detested at that moment. I saw them as something nonhu-man, as animals. I was ashamed to be one of them, ashamed that I had been part of the mob, the riot, the stampede. I was no better than any of them. I was one of them. It was the lowest point of my professional life as a journalist.

  I stayed right there until a two-man medical team with a stretcher on wheels came for the Star man. By then an army of Colonial Williamsburg security officers and local and state police had restored order by forcing all of the rioters—we distinguished members of the national press corps—back into the Virginia Room and into their chairs.

  I went back to my original seat. The San Diego woman was still there. I told her what had happened to the man from the Star.

  “How can we all cover what happened in here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What can we say about ourselves?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I almost forgot about the debate, what happened, what Meredith just did, and screamed—the real story.”

  So had I.

  In a few minutes—not more than five or six, to be more exact—Chuck Hammond appeared behind the microphones and the podium on the small stage down in front of us.

  “First, let me say how terrible we feel about what happened here in this room,” he said. “The injured are being attended to. Initial reports seem to indicate that all of the victims will survive with no permanent or lasting effects. We’ll release what information we get here as it becomes available.”

  “How many were taken to hospitals?” somebody—a woman—yelled out.

  Hammond said: “I don’t have any exact counts at this point. But I understand it was less than ten.”

  “Come on!” some other idiot—a man idiot—screamed. “Give us a count or let us out of here to find out ourselves!”

  Hammond said: “The Virginia State Police and the Secret Service have ordered us to maintain the status quo in this room for now.”

  “Status quo? What the hell does that mean?” some male reporter yelled out.

  You would have thought that being part of a mob would have caused these people to back off, to calm down. But no. Without so much as a decent interval, here they were back in their attack mode, back to being animals, back in their pack.

  Hammond said: “It means none of you is leaving this room until we say so.”

  There was some grumbling, some profanity.

  “Who do you people think you are?” another reporter shouted at Hammond.

  Hammond said: “We are the people with the responsibility for keeping you people from trampling or otherwise killing or injuring yourselves.”

  Chuck Hammond considers that to be the finest moment of his post-Marine life.

  Then he said: “We are aware of your reporting needs, and as a way of trying to meet them I have asked the four debate panelists to come in for a news conference.”

  That triggered a mixture of cheers and boos from the cream of American journalism. Hammond turned to his left rear, the cue for Mike Howley, Joan Naylor, Barbara Manning, and Henry Ramirez to come in and meet the press.

  They had watched the press riot on a television monitor in Longsworth D.

  Joan’s first fear was that of death. Many of those journalists were going to die, and then so would the four of them. She remembered scenes from an Elizabeth Taylor movie—with Dana Andrews, not Richard Burton—about a herd of elephants in Ceylon or somewhere that went wild and trampled people and houses to death and dust.

  To Barbara and Henry the shock of watching a group of their heroes—the best of the national press corps—going berserk was beyond description.

  Mike Howley had thoughts about how the riot in the Virginia Room confirmed his worst fears about what the American press had become.

  Hammond had warned him and the others that most everyone in the Western world with a camera and/or a microphone would be on them live with pictures and audio from the moment they entered the Virginia Room. Everyone. And in case there was doubt about what he was talking about, he said it meant the three commercial networks, PBS, Fox, CNN, C-SPAN, MTV, plus the BBC, the CBC, NHK in Japan, and a variety of other foreign broadcasters, domestic independent stations, and cable channels. “Even before the press riot I was sure there’d never been anything quite like this,” Hammond told them. “Now it’s bigger even than Desert Storm—maybe even Watergate.”

  Mike, Joan, Barbara, and Henry walked out to the small stage and bunched in a semicircle behind the podium, which was rigged with seventy-seven microphones. (I personally counted them.) I am no master estimator of crowd sizes, but the pros there who are said there were three hundred people with more microphones, video and still cameras, and notebooks.

  Joan spied a few familiar faces, but most of them were not only unfamiliar, they also seemed terribly unfriendly. She could not tell whether everyone was out of sorts with her and her three co-panelists for what they had done to Meredith or because of their own disturbance. So this is what it looks like from this side of it, she thought. She was not completely over the unsettling terror that hit her watching the press mêlée.

  Barbara’s attention was on how few dark faces she saw out there. These white boys and girls look like they want to hang me from a limb of a tree with a rope around my neck. OK now, Gramma Maude, I need that hand of yours again
.

  Henry felt great up there in front of all of those ladies and gentlemen of the international media. After watching you-all make absolute fools of yourselves just now, I am even more at peace about myself, about this brown boy. Ask me your questions and I will tell you no lies.

  And then the yelling started. Several voices, a mixture of all genders, ages, and volume, came right at them.

  “Mike Howley! Mike Howley! Is it true the idea for this conspiracy was yours?”

  “Was destroying Meredith what you came here to do?”

  Howley’s mouth moved, but it was impossible to hear what he said. It was not impossible to see him shaking his head. No was the answer.

  The questions continued at full volume all at once. The press riot continued all at once.

  “Are the four of you satisfied?”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Is this what the press is supposed to do?”

  “Who appointed you four to decide who gets elected president of the United States?”

  “Where did all of that abuse stuff come from?”

  “We hear you got it from the Greene campaign.”

  “Did the Greene people pay you?”

  “Are any of you going to work for Greene in the White House if he’s elected?”

  They were pretty good questions. But there was no way to answer any of them. There was not enough quiet space between and among the screamed questions for Howley, Joan, Barbara, or Henry to get even a word in.

  Jesus, thought Barbara. Am I one of these?

  Shut up, you fools! thought Henry. Let us answer!

  Mike Howley held up his hands for quiet.

  Trying to read his lips at the time and listening carefully to the tape afterward, I am fairly sure he only said: “There will be no answers under these circumstances.”

  The yelling continued.

  Mike Howley said: “Look, unless you give us some quiet …”

  A few stopped screaming questions and started screaming at each other. “Pipe down!” “Let ’em talk!” “Shut up!”

  Joan knew that Jeff and the twins, along with the rest of the world, were watching. She wanted to tell the twins she was not like the people in this room. Their mom did not screech at people like this. Their mom was a real journalist, one of the old-fashioned kind. The kind who treated people with dignity and respect. These screaming crazies are not journalists! They’re not even human!

  Howley shouted: “There will be no answers until we and you can be heard. So shut up, goddamn it!”

  There were pockets of quiet now. Shhhhhhhhhs ricocheted around the room.

  “All right, Mike!” boomed a loud male voice. “Tell us who appointed you four people God!”

  Howley clearly recognized the voice, and when he found it he recognized the face. So did most everyone else in the room, including me. They were those of T. R. (Teddy) Lemmon, Jr., the lead political reporter and analyzer for The New York Herald.

  Suddenly, magically, the room was absolutely silent.

  Howley waited a few more beats and then said to the room: “Did everyone hear the question?”

  That drew a few hundred laughs and/or snickers. Howley said to Lemmon, who was in the middle of the room about eight rows up: “Nobody appointed us God, Teddy. We did not see what we did tonight as playing God, as a matter of fact. If you do, then so be it. Write it.”

  Jesus, thought Barbara. Mike Howley is one tough sunavabitch. That was Teddy Lemmon himself!

  Howley pointed at Tom (Bat) Masterson of The Boston Globe. He and Bat had known and liked each other for years. Bat talked, but nobody could hear him in the avalanche of questions that came shouted from all around the room.

  Mike Howley held up his hands again for quiet. “Please, let’s have some quiet.”

  There was no quiet. I heard a male voice from over somewhere yell out the question: “Do you bear some responsibility for the injuries suffered in the disturbance in this room a while ago?” I would have loved to have heard an answer to that one. But it did not get answered by anyone.

  Howley, on the platform, turned to Joan, Barbara, and Henry. “What do we do?” he asked.

  “This is appalling,” Joan said, raising her voice to be heard. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She turned to Barbara. “I’m with you,” Barbara said.

  “Henry?” Barbara said after repeating what Joan had said.

  “We’re press. How can we walk out of a press conference?” he said to Barbara. He moved in front of her toward the podium. Mike Howley smiled and slapped him on the back, helping him to a place right behind the microphone.

  “Hey!” Henry shouted into the microphone. “Everybody in the world is watching all of us! Do you realize what kind of scene you-all are making for them to see? Don’t you realize what you already did a while ago?”

  “Don’t lecture us, Ramirez!” a man yelled back. He was in the front row and thus one of the few who could hear what Henry had said.

  Henry turned to face Barbara, Joan, and Howley, and gave them a palms-up what’s-the-use gesture.

  And they all four walked off the stage and out of the Virginia Room after twelve minutes and having answered only one question.

  What they heard as they left were boos and shouts of scorn for having run away.

  I could not even begin to imagine at that moment what the American people were thinking about me and the others of their free press.

  After a state and sound of civilized behavior returned to the Virginia Room, I phoned Jonathan Angel, my Tatler editor. He had caught sight of me on television during the press riot. “Are you all right?” was the fourth question he asked me from New York. The first three were: “Are those people nuts?” “Was it as bad as it looked?” “Is it over?”

  My answer to all four questions was yes—yes, they are nuts, it was as bad as it looked, it is over, and I am all right.

  “Jesus,” said Jonathan. “Did you hear what Jill just said?”

  “Jill?”

  “The Jill of Jack and Jill. She said the panelists should be indicted for criminal conspiracy. Jesus … Let me see what Ross is up to.”

  I heard the sounds of another set of televised voices in Jonathan’s background. “He’s got Gerry Ford and Walter Mondale.…” I heard a click. “Norman’s got a bleacher full of senators.… Tom, are you watching this stuff? It’s incredible. Look! PNN’s got shots of cars full of Meredith supporters turning around in the middle of the highway. They were on their way to Williamsburg. They heard him say ‘fucking.’ It’s unbelievable. They heard him on their car radios. I cannot believe this.”

  I could see glimpses of Jack and Jill and Ross Perot and Norman Schwarzkopf and their guests and all kinds of other things in the various TV monitors around the room. But I could not hear what anybody was saying.

  Said Jonathan: “Jesus. Jack and Jill just announced they were going to stay on the air until they got to the bottom of this thing.”

  “That’s what I want to do, too, Jonathan,” I said. “I want to stay on this story.…”

  “Go, Tom, go. Yes, yes. Go after this story with everything you have. Go until you have everything, until you have every drop, until you get to the bottom of it, until you drop.”

  I was delighted. I said: “Thank you, thank you.”

  He kept talking. “The earth moved a while ago, Tom. I felt it. We all felt it. The earth movers were those four people out there on that stage. Go get ’em, Tom. Who are they? What are they? Where are they? Jack and Jill said Joan Naylor was coming on their show. Ross and Norman said they were trying to get all four of them. Jesus, think of the questions. Particularly for Howley. Howley! Who would have thought Howley? Why did he and the others do what they did? Who are they? How are they? I want to know it all. Every tiny little detail, Tom. Give it to me. Give it to America. They moved the earth, Tom. Four journalists moved the political earth of America. They got Meredith to say ‘fucking’ in front of everybody! How did they do it
? Go get that story. Go, Tom, go.”

  Go, Tom, go.

  “Jesus, Norman’s already gone to the phone calls! He said there’s never been so many in the history of the phone! Not just to him but everybody. Everybody’s on the phone, Tom! Jesus! Perot’s doing something now with Lilly.… He’s something with Greene.”

  “He’s the campaign manager,” I said.

  “Right, right. He just compared the four debate panelists to the signers. The guys who signed the Declaration of Independence. Jesus!”

  It was time for Tom to go.

  I left Jonathan in the hands of his channel switcher and Jack and Jill, Ross and Norman. My intention was to go, Tom, go immediately from the Virginia Room in search of the four earth movers. But the authorities had yet to alter the room’s “status quo,” meaning they had yet to conclude that the press could be trusted to move about Colonial Williamsburg and elsewhere in the outside world without hurting ourselves or others.

  So I moved over to a corner of the room where there were a cluster of television sets. All of them were tuned to some kind of debate-reaction programming. Except on some of the specialized cable channels that ran nothing but old movies or documentaries about icebergs and wolves mating, there was nothing else to watch. Reaction to what had happened on that stage some fifty feet down the hall from where I was then standing had consumed all of television, and through it not only Jonathan Angel and his friends on the West Side of New York, but most everyone in America, too.

  And there on the screen of one of the monitors came Joan Naylor on the Jack and Jill show. Several of us there in the corner moved right up to the set so we could hear. But in a few moments it was no longer necessary. Miraculously, the Virginia Room got absolutely silent. Everyone—all three-hundred-plus members of the confined press—also wanted to hear what Joan Naylor had to say. They wouldn’t listen to her before when she was right there in the room with them, but now they did. Now they would listen.