After the Tall Timber (67 page)

Why, then, was the
Times
so heavily committed to the received idea that Sirica was “an authentic hero,” “by seemingly unanimous agreement an honest man,” even “a great scholar,” and so forth. Part of the reason is that the
Times
itself has said so, in its obituary—an accretion of myth, clichés, received ideas, and self-serving fables recounted by the subject himself, unusually fulsome even for obituaries. Partly because a relatively recent, complacent kind of sloth on the part of many reporters—sitting at a desk, phoning around, either repetitively badgering or, more commonly, passively receiving quotes from anonymous, self-interested, possibly lying, or even nonexistent sources—tends to welcome and to perpetuate every sort of conventional wisdom and cliché. Partly because the
Times
is committed most profoundly to a certain notion of itself. In the past, this commitment took a highly honorable form. The publisher and his family, one knew, were devoted, financially and in almost every other way, to the quality of the newspaper. Now, much of the paper is devoted to itself in quite another sense—as a bureaucracy, a complacent, unchallenged, in some ways totalitarian institution, convinced of its own infallibility.

As for what it was that made the
Times
so very cross about my sentence, nothing could be clearer than that it was not concern about Judge Sirica’s reputation. The most distinguished First Amendment lawyer I know said that the
Times
did more damage to Sirica’s reputation in three days than I could ever do. The reputation they were concerned with was, oddly, mine. Virtually every sentence in Ms. Barringer’s piece gave that much away: “You could say this is a churlish, lowdown thing Renata Adler has done,” for example, and “You could take the position that it says more about the writer than about what she’s writing.” There it is. These, and other examples of prose in this series of pieces—“smear,” “cheaply smearing,” “off-handed evisceration of various literati” (imagine, if you will, an off-handed evisceration), “veering from her literary prey,” “cavalier,” “even more irresponsible,” elsewhere “despicable,” “Iago,” “lacking a conscience and a soul”—were not, whatever else they may have been, the prose of journalism.

I have friends who have said jokingly, and some not so jokingly, that they fear retaliation from the
Times
. As well they might. I am not entirely lacking in experience in the writing of polemical pieces. I have always found that it is not that easy. It requires some thought, and some familiarity with the material under review. On the other hand, honorable polemic, I would have thought, does not call in reinforcements, attacks rather than joins mob journalists. Here we find almost a parody—journalists not addressing underlying fact but interviewing
one another
about what they “heard” or “smelled.” The
Times
editorial said that my “charges” had “startled some of the nation’s best investigative journalists who had covered Watergate and found Judge Sirica to be a principled jurist.” “Startled” them! The herd, advancing bravely not as single spies but in battalions, thinks the real world consists of received ideas they share with colleagues.

It is true I had criticized, sometimes directly, sometimes by implication, not just Mr. McGrath and the
Book Review
but the
Times
. I had written a book,
Reckless Disregard
, that was largely a criticism of the press. There may even have been implicit criticism, in pieces I wrote over the years. In recent articles, for example, in
Vanity Fair
and the
Los Angeles Times
, I had found, in writing about the Starr Report and its accompanying volumes, proof that Linda Tripp had not required, as the
Times
kept reporting, a set of “elves,” under the direction of the literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, to make her way, surreptitiously and at the last minute, to the Special Prosecutor’s office. She had, in fact, been working for that office for almost four years.

But that did not account for it either: the eight pieces, the alternately derisive and punitive tone, the pressure to recant. And the prose itself—there can be no clearer indication than this sort of writing that there is no news, no information, no substance there. I had written a sentence. Someone, offended, had asked me to document the sentence. I had said I would do so. Not much of a story, one would have thought. In the days when there was still a standard of reporting, and of editing, “those who have read just about all the books on Watergate” and “those most steeped in Watergate lore,” whoever they might be, would have been utterly unacceptable, in the
Times
, as sources. If the reporter had any genuine interest in the matter, she would have “steeped” herself in “Watergate lore” and read the “books on Watergate” (beginning perhaps with Judge Sirica’s book) herself. But no. Here’s what it was. At one point, in answer—not, as Ms. Barringer would have it, to the question “Why wait?,” to which I gave, repeatedly, the answer that I was not waiting at all—but to a repetition of yet another ad personam question, I said, “How can you be a working journalist and phrase a question as silly as that?”

This is not the way you are supposed to talk to the
Times
. I knew that. But here obviously was the core of the offense, and so seriously did Ms. Barringer take it that she attached it to the wrong question, and so seriously did the
Times
take it that the editorial was virtually based on this intimation on my part that a
Times
reporter could phrase a deeply silly question. “Even more irresponsible,” the editorial went on, was a line, inaccurately quoted, in which I asked Ms. Barringer whether she worried “that much about reputation.” “Of course we do,” the editorial actually said. (Of
course
.) “And so should she.”

I have always known, and even written, that the strongest, perhaps sole remaining taboo on freedom of expression, in this country, is any criticism of the press. But here I had not only questioned a received idea cherished by the
Times
but I had not been sufficiently deferential to this
Times
reporter—and the whole
Times
bureaucracy, instinctively, needed to
stamp out this disrespect
. It would, of course, have gone without saying, until the
Times
, through Ms. Barringer, cited it with indignation, that a writer does choose what to write and when to write it. Now the matter had come to this: If you do not accept some cliché, bromide, or myth of theirs, and are not sufficiently deferential to them, this is not just insubordination. It is a
breach of ethics
.

You must be admonished. You must be taught a lesson, so that other people may learn from it. Not only is your own reputation affected. You must, above all, recant. And this, this last issue—retraction—is where the question is inescapably, dangerously, altered. And why the whole series of attacks addresses something more serious than my little book. Look again at Ms. Barringer’s formulation:

This is nothing if not a coercive formulation, pressure not just on a writer but on her publisher, and even her publisher’s owner, “Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom,” to retract. Whenever—and I think this is true without exception—you find a publication, or a journalist, calling for a retraction or a recantation by, of all things, a single writer (and actual pressure on her publisher, “cheaply smearing”), you know what sort of realm you are in. It is a realm where received ideas are not just propagated but enforced—and it is an unmistakably totalitarian realm. What “issue,” after all, could be “resolved” by a retraction? Nothing about Sirica, certainly. The only issue would be the power of
The New York Times
, in the person of Ms. Barringer and other writers, to coerce retractions. What this whole series amounted to was a show trial, with serial accusers, disinformation, designed to end, as show trials do, with recantations.

Well, it nearly worked. The
Times
, of course, is still drawing on trust and respect well earned some years ago. In the course of this recent episode, Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor, told me as early as April 3 that he had no idea the
Times
had published so many disparaging pieces about my book. He would look out for this sort of thing. Later, he said he would, if it had been his call, have run my letter (revised, of course, to conform with
Times
policy), but he had no jurisdiction over the Letters column. I knew he had no jurisdiction over the editorial page or the op-ed pieces. (Either John Dean is inspired, and writes, submits his work, and is edited with extraordinary speed, or his piece was solicited right after I told Ms. Barringer, to her evident disappointment, that my source was not G. Gordon Liddy.) The editorial board, of which, as we know, Ms. Barringer’s husband is a member, does have jurisdiction over both pages. Mr. Lelyveld is, however, in charge both of Corrections and the Editor’s Note. On April 7, he sent me a fax. “I try to lean over backwards in matters of corrections and editor’s notes,” he wrote. He, and Ms. Barringer and her editor, had considered my note. “At this point the only solution I can see,” he concluded, “is for us all to give the matter a rest.” This was wonderful. The
Times
had attacked me eight times (only the last four of them had even the pretext of Judge Sirica), citing (perhaps this goes without saying) exclusively hostile “sources.” These pieces had directly impugned my “ethics.” They would not print a letter, an Editor’s Note, or a Correction. In fairness he now felt that the only solution “for all of us” was to let the matter rest. Of course, the paper did not let it rest. Two days later, there was the news item in the Week in Review.

Other journalists—in solidarity and taking their cue from the trusted and venerated
Times
—checked in. Some were apparently under the impression that I had used the Sirica passage as a sort of headline, to “hype” my book. Why else, after all, would the
Times
have devoted so much space and so many pieces to it? Piece after piece, in one medium after another, accepted as fact John Dean’s speculation that my source was Liddy. One spoke of my “trying to sell” my book with a libel that “shames all caring, responsible journalists.” That sort of thing. A media reporter for the
Daily News
wrote, on the basis of the
Times
editorial, that my book had been “plagued by” a series of “forced retractions.” In a novel use, by a media reporter, of the formula, she wrote, “Ms. Adler was unavailable for comment”—on the basis, perhaps, of having made no effort whatsoever to reach me. Perhaps the most surprising instance of this herd of indignant
Times
-inspired colleagues occurred on April 8, on CNN’s
Capital Gang
. Mark Shields, not usually, I would have thought, so orthodox a member of the guild, said, “And now for ‘The Outrage of the Week.’ ” I had “defamed,” he said, Judge Sirica, who was (in the by now altogether obligatory mantra) a scrupulously honest hero. “Renata Adler owes the family John Sirica loved and the nation he served so well an immediate and public apology.”

Owing the nation an immediate and public apology does seem a bit much. But the
Times
’s campaign began, I suppose, with that first letter from the editor who subsequently “said he had decided to distance himself.” I should have left the galleys as they were. There followed the whole set of pieces, right through the almost laughably disingenuous characterization of John Dean. Disinformation. Show trial. Confession. Retraction. Not just yet. The
Times
, financially successful as it may be, is a powerful but, at this moment, not very healthy institution. The issue is not one book or even eight pieces. It is the state of the entire cultural mineshaft, with the archcensor, still in some ways the world’s greatest newspaper, advocating the most explosive gases and the cutting off of air.

Harper’s Magazine
August 2000

AFTERWORD

When I first wrote this piece, many journalists seemed to go more or less berserk. Without realizing it, they conceded that every word of my original sentence about Judge Sirica had been borne out. The ground, however, had shifted. The criticism now was that Sirica’s dishonesty, incompetence, connections, and ties were not sufficiently grave, or sufficiently recent, or sufficiently “hot” to justify my having referred, however briefly, to them. There seemed no doubt, however, that if the
Times
itself had discovered any element of the story, especially the reference to Sirica’s closeness to Senator Joseph McCarthy, it would have treated each element as a major scoop. Instead, the
Times
ran two more pieces, raising the total to ten, before my
Harper’s
piece even hit the stands. One, by Alex Kuzscinsky, was the only one of the ten that could not have served as an example of execrable work in any sophomore journalism class. Another, by Martin Arnold, cited in my Introduction, assured readers that there was nothing in the
Harper’s
piece; Martin deplored what was apparently his impression, that neither books nor magazines could meet the checking standards of newspapers like the
Times
. Ms. Barringer said, in an interview, that nothing I said about Judge Sirica could not be said equally about the heavyweight champion Joe Louis—which would be true, I suppose, if Joe Louis had ever fought, under fictional names, in districts where boxing was illegal, or if he had organized and promoted boxing, and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in a district where his father ran an illegal liquor business, and so forth.

What seemed most to infuriate those journalists who reacted angrily was that I had based my passage mainly on evidence in Sirica’s own book. I should, apparently, have claimed an “anonymous source.” As it happens, I did have other sources, and other facts, which I would have thought Judge Sirica, or at least his co-author, John F. Stacks of
Time
, would have thought worthy of inclusion, and which the
Times
and its acolytes might have found with a modicum of research. In 1927, in Chicago, for example, John J. Sirica himself (not his father) was indicted, along with several co-conspirators, for fixing a prizefight and for income tax evasion. The indictments were sealed. The case never went to trial.