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  Should Hayden have printed the story? Probably not—the fact that it would eventually be printed in a quickie paperback is hardly justification. But if he decided to go ahead, he ought to have printed the whole story—including Miss Ackerman’s name and details about her financial transactions concerning the tapes. In order to nail Riegle, the News gave up half the story.

  Was the piece justified on the grounds that, finally, Riegle’s character was revealed? No. Anyone who reads Riegle’s book, O Congress, is perfectly able to perceive his “arrogance, immaturity, cold-bloodedness and consuming political ambition.” Among other things.

  Should Hayden have used the tapes? No. I can’t make a rule about what constitutes an invasion of privacy, but I know one when I see one.

  For some time after I came back from Detroit, I wondered what all this proved. Certainly it was clear that the voters of Michigan were more sophisticated than Seth Kantor and Martin S. Hayden, but that wasn’t much of a point: so is my cat. Then, on November 7, Larry Flynt published a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post promising to pay $25,000 to any woman who would tell her story about sex with a congressman to Hustler magazine, and I looked for some way to tie that in, but I couldn’t. I’m afraid, in fact, that I can’t come up with a real point to any of this. Which may be the point. Nobody really cares. Newspaper editors have stumbled into a whole new area they’re now allowed to publish stories about, and they’re publishing ridiculous, irrelevant, hypocritical, ugly little articles that aren’t dirty enough for Hustler or relevant enough for the papers that print them. “Maybe I’m on the wrong side of the pendulum swinging,” Seth Kantor said to me. Maybe so.

  —February 1977

  The Ontario Bulletin

  TWO YEARS AGO, my husband bought a cooperative in the Ontario Apartments in Washington, D.C. The Ontario is an old building as Washington apartment buildings go, turn of the century, to be imprecise, and it has high ceilings, considerable woodwork, occasional marble, and views of various capital sights. It also has the Ontario Bulletin. The Ontario Bulletin is a mimeographed newsletter that arrives every month or so in the mailbox. It is supplemented by numerous urgent memos and elevator notices; many of these concern crime. The Ontario is located in what is charitably called a marginal neighborhood, and all of us who live there look for signs that it is on the verge of becoming less marginal. The fact that the local movie theater is switching from Spanish-language films to English-language films is considered a good sign. The current memo in the elevator is now: “During the past eight weeks, FIVE ONTARIO WOMEN HAVE HAD THEIR PURSES SNATCHED on the grounds or close by. Three of these events occurred this week.” This memo, written by Sue Lindgren, chairperson, Security Committee, goes on to state: “Fortunately, none of the victims was seriously injured and no building keys were lost.” We were all relieved to read this, though I suspect that Christine Turpin was primarily relieved to read the part about the keys. Mrs. Turpin was president of the Ontario during the crime wave of May 1976, when she wrote a particularly fine example of what I think of as the Turpin School of memo writing:

  “There have been three purse snatchings at the Ontario’s front door in the last two weeks causing lock changes twice in the same period. All three incidents occurred in daylight hours; the three ‘victims’—all women—were returning from grocery stores on Columbia Road. Two of the three had ignored repeated and publicized advice: DO NOT CARRY BUILDING KEYS IN YOUR POCKETBOOKS. They also ignored other personal safety precautions. Much as we sympathize with them over their frightening experience and over the loss of their personal belongings, the fact remains that had these ‘victims’ heeded the warnings, everyone at the Ontario would have been spared the inconvenience of a second lock/key change in two weeks as well as the expenditure of $250 for replacements.”

  As far as I can tell, several of the early warnings Mrs. Turpin refers to appeared in the Ontario Bulletin, but I can hardly blame the “victims” for not noticing them. Until recently, the Ontario Bulletin was written by Mildred A. Pappas, who appears to be as blithe and good-humored as Mrs. Turpin is the opposite. Here and there Mrs. Pappas tucks in a late-breaking crime story: “As we were going to press Security Chairman Sue Lindgren called to say that the cigarette machine in the basement had been vandalized and that both cigarettes and some change were missing. There were no known suspects at the time of the call.” But Mrs. Pappas has a firm editorial philosophy, which she expressed in the January 1975 Bulletin: “Both the trivial and the important are vital in portraying a clear picture of life in the Ontario—or anywhere else.” And she has such a charming way with the trivial that her readers really ought to forgive her apparent tendency to skip over the important. In the February 1975 Bulletin, for example, Mrs. Pappas does mention the business of not putting keys into pocketbooks, but that item pales next to the report on the revival of a limp African violet at the Houseplant Clinic, and it fades into insignificance next to the tantalizing mention of the removal of a hornets’ nest from Elsie Carpenter’s dining room window.

  The information on the hornets’ nest appeared in a regular feature of the Bulletin called “News and Notes,” which includes birthdays, operations, recent houseguests, and distinguished achievements of residents, as well as bits of miscellaneous information like the announcement of the founding of the Ad Hoc Friends of the Pool Table Committee. Other regular sections of the publication are “The Travelers Return,” a list of recent trips by residents; and “Committee Reports,” summaries of the doings of the various building committees, of which there are nine. (This figure does not include the committee for the pool table, which has since disbanded, having successfully restored the table to use in the basement Green Room, which was recently and unaccountably painted yellow during the 1976 Painting Project.) The Ontario is surrounded by trees and gardens, so the Bulletin often mentions the planting of a new azalea or juniper tree, and it recently devoted an entire page to the final chapter of the eight-year controversy of the Great Red Oak, cut down on August 27, 1976, after the board of directors overruled what was known as the “wait and see” policy of the High Tree Subcommittee. Articles like these are often illustrated with simple drawings of birds and leaves. Occasionally, a photograph is used, but only on a major story like the flap over the water bill.

  Ontario residents first learned of the water-bill flap in a July 1975 Bulletin article headlined A SHOCKING BILL FOR A SHOCKING WASTE: “Chairman Chris Turpin has just announced that a staggering (and unbudgeted) $1,660.94 water bill for the last quarter has just been received, adding that the amount is more than three times the amount for the preceding quarter. A wrong billing? No. Uncommon usage for bad water, etc.? No…. The water company has advanced the opinion that only one malfunctioning toilet allowed to run continuously can be the cause…. The chairman stated that the board will decide on a method of payment of the unprecedented bill at its July meeting, the alternatives being (1) to find the resident or residents responsible and to bill accordingly, or (2) to specially assess all residents (owners and tenants alike) approximately $10 each to settle the bill.”

  For a month, we anxiously awaited word of what was up. Would ten dollars be added to the maintenance? Or would Chairman Turpin lead the Ad Hoc Committee on the Unprecedented Water Bill through each apartment in search of the hypothetical malfunctioning toilet? Finally, the July Bulletin appeared, with a terse report suggesting that the investigation was closing in: the prime suspect turned out to be not some irresponsible resident but the building’s thirty-five-year-old water meter, which had just been removed for inspection by the water company. Meanwhile, Clarence K. Streit, a resident who was apparently unaware that human error was about to be ruled out, made a guest appearance in the Bulletin as the author of the Flask Water Dollar Saver. “It is quite practical,” he wrote, “to save three pints of water every time one flushes a toilet. We have been doing it for a couple of years.” According to Streit, if everyone in the building placed three pint flasks in his t
oilet tank, the Ontario could save 150,000 gallons of water a year—or, as he put it, 150,000 gallons of water a year. Mrs. Pappas urged residents who took up Streit’s suggestion to submit their names for publication in order to encourage others. No one did; at least I assume no one did from the fact that Mrs. Pappas never again referred to the Flask Water Dollar Saver Plan. In the August Bulletin, however, the water meter was definitely fingered; it turned out to be not just out of order but thoroughly obsolete. A photograph of the new water meter appeared as an illustration.

  If I have any complaint at all about the Ontario Bulletin, it is simply that its even-handed approach occasionally leaves something to be desired. Accurate reporting was simply not enough to convey the passions engendered by the paint selections of the 1976 Painting Project, nor was it adequate to describe the diabolical maneuverings of President Turpin and the Ontario board in the face of these passions. Residents who read the loving tribute in the August Bulletin to the Great Red Oak and the account of its mysterious incurable disease could hardly have been prepared for the stunning moment at the annual meeting in September when it was moved that no tree be cut down without a membership vote. Mrs. Pappas’s low-key description of the restored iron grille entrance doors—“Unfortunately, the ‘Ontario’ inscription now faces the interior of the building since it could not be relocated from its solid iron casting to the outside”—does not quite do justice to the situation.

  And I cannot imagine that Bulletin readers were in any position to judge the item in March 1976, which announced Dr. Allan Angerio’s resignation as House Maintenance Committee Chairman. “In protest of the Board’s sanction of extensive remodeling in a neighboring apartment, Dr. Allan Angerio has resigned five months after his appointment. In a recently circulated letter to all residents Dr. Angerio states that during the extended period of renovation he was ‘unable to use my apartment for either business or pleasure.’ He also states that his letter has engendered a considerable response from the membership, many of whom have indicated interest in a proposed revision of the Bylaws and House Rules of the Corporation to preclude further extensive structural ‘modernization’ efforts in the Ontario.” This is certainly a fair summary of what happened—but it is not enough. I know. I am married to the man who hired the contractor who accidentally drilled the hole into Dr. Angerio’s bedroom wall.

  In any case, mine are small complaints. The main function of a newspaper is to let its readers know what’s going on, and I doubt that there are many communities that are served as well by their local newspapers as this tiny community is by the Ontario Bulletin. And I would feel even more warmly toward the publication than I do but for the fear I have, each month, that I will pick it up to read: “The residents of 605 had a fight last Thursday night over the fact that one person in the apartment never closes her closet doors.” I like neighborhoods, you see, but I worry about neighbors. Fortunately, my husband and I also have an apartment in New York. And I was extremely pleased several weeks ago when we moved to new quarters there in an extremely unfriendly-looking brownstone on an extremely haughty block. In the course of the week’s move, we carried some garbage out of the apartment and left it on the street for the garbage collectors. Ten minutes later—ten minutes later—a memo arrived from the 74th Street Block Association concerning the block rules on refuse. I’m not going to quote from it. All I want to say is that its author, Emma Preziosi, while not in the same league with Christine Turpin, definitely shows promise.

  —March 1977

  Gentlemen’s Agreement

  Esquire refused to run this column. It was printed in [MORE], the journalism review.

  IN NOVEMBER 1975, Esquire magazine published an article by a young writer named Bo Burlingham. It was called “The Other Tricky Dick,” and it was a long reporting piece, ten thousand words or so, on Richard Goodwin, author, speechwriter to presidents, and then-fiancé of Lyndon Johnson’s biographer Doris Kearns. I was the editor on the piece. Burlingham portrayed Goodwin as an ambitious, crafty manipulator, a brilliant man who loved to outsmart his friends and associates to further his career. The article was carefully reported, the facts in it checked by the magazine’s research department, and Esquire’s lawyer and managing editor grilled Burlingham on his sources for the article. All of us on the editorial side of the magazine believe that Burlingham’s article was solid. Which does not explain how it came to pass that a few weeks ago, Esquire, Inc., decided to pay Goodwin $12,500 and to print the apologetic column about the article which appears in the November issue.

  Magazines settle libel suits out of court all the time, of course. Not all magazines—The New Yorker has a strict policy against it; but many other magazines believe that it is cheaper to settle than to pay the high costs of litigation. At Playboy, I’m told, they say that they have never lost a libel case; the reason is that the magazine settles before it gets to court. All of this is a fairly well-kept secret in the magazine business; in fact, one of the arguments put to me against my writing this column was that if it becomes known that Esquire settles out of court, every joker whose name is mentioned in the magazine might end up suing. I rather doubt that will happen—but in any case, my concern is not with future nuisance suits, merely with this one.

  The trouble with Goodwin began in August 1975, before Burlingham’s article even appeared in the magazine. Doris Kearns, who is now Goodwin’s wife, came to New York to see me and Don Erickson, editor of Esquire. She asked us to kill the article. She said that Goodwin had become so nervous about what it might contain that he had taken to his bed on Cape Cod and had been there for two weeks. At that point, the article was on the presses and could not have been killed if Richard Goodwin dropped dead. We told her this. Then, a few days before publication, a telegram arrived—I can’t remember whether it was from Goodwin or from a friend of Goodwin—putting the magazine on some sort of legal notice. A rumor came floating through that Goodwin had hired President Nixon’s former lawyer James St. Clair and was planning to sue Esquire for libel. Then nothing for a while.

  In the early months of 1976—I’m sorry to be so fuzzy about dates, but I didn’t know what was going on—a man named Arnold Hyatt telephoned the president of Esquire, Inc., A. L. Blinder. Hyatt, a Boston shoe manufacturer and contributor to Democratic campaigns, knew both Blinder and Goodwin, and he apparently suggested the two men get together and work this thing out like gentlemen. A couple of points about Abe Blinder. The first is that a few years ago, he and the rest of the magazine’s management were slightly traumatized by the result of a lawsuit William F. Buckley filed against Esquire over an article by Gore Vidal. Esquire’s lawyers wanted to fight the suit; they were certain it would be dismissed in a summary judgment. But it wasn’t, and the ultimate cost to the company, including the eventual out-of-court settlement, was in the neighborhood of $350,000. A second point is that Blinder takes pride in the fact that he rarely interferes in the magazine’s editorial matters. When I interviewed him about the Goodwin matter, he told me that he probably would not allow this column to be printed in the magazine—but he added that he had vetoed only one other article in his thirty-three-year history at Esquire. “It was about Morris Lapidus, the architect of the Fontainebleau Hotel,” he said, “and it was very negative, very uncomplimentary. The Tisch brothers are good friends of mine, and they called and told me it would be bad for the hotel business if we printed it.”

  After Hyatt’s call, Blinder spoke to Goodwin and arranged a lunch for himself, Goodwin, Kearns, and Arnold Gingrich, the editor in chief and founder of Esquire. Goodwin arrived at the lunch with a set of papers containing a legal complaint and an itemization of grievances against the article. Blinder told Goodwin he had three alternatives: he could write a letter to the editor, he could sue, or he could forget it. Goodwin said that a letter to the editor would simply be his word against Burlingham’s. But he indicated that he would be willing to work something out short of a lawsuit. At this point, Arnold Gingrich made a suggestion. He wrot
e a monthly column in which he often commented on articles in the magazine, and he might be able to write something that would reflect Goodwin’s version of events. A token payment of one thousand dollars was mentioned, and everyone went home. A few weeks later, Goodwin met with Gingrich to draft the column. The next day, Gingrich was hospitalized with lung cancer; he died in July.

  While Gingrich was ill, the column that appears in this issue was written by Don Erickson, now editor in chief of the magazine. In it, Gingrich relates that after reading Burlingham’s article, which portrayed Goodwin as a Sammy Glick, he was surprised to meet Goodwin and find no trace at all of the ruthlessness Burlingham alluded to. Burlingham’s portrait, said Gingrich, “is sufficiently at odds with the man himself that an appraisal is in order…. The piece made him out to be a guy who didn’t pay his debts. But what we didn’t say was that he had never had his credit withdrawn anywhere and that, with his holdings in Maine, he has assets several times his liabilities. And we made him out to be a man who goes around scaring people, including women, with guns. We didn’t report that his gun hobby has never gone further than shooting at small birds and clay pigeons. He never owned a handgun, he told me. The one we reported on turned out to be a toy belonging to his son, he said. We implied that he had a streak of kleptomania and produced an incident that didn’t prove it.”

  As it continues, the column is extremely clever. It is framed as one man’s opinion, not as a formal apology, so there was no need for the magazine to show it to the author or editor involved. It is full of “he said” and “he told me,” so that nothing is actually denied; still, the impression is that there was somehow faulty, incomplete, or inaccurate reporting. Gingrich claims to be speaking as an editor in disagreement with the other editors of the magazine, but this is not really accurate. Gingrich was not just the founder of the magazine but its guiding spirit, and a reappraisal from him is considerably more loaded than a simple difference of opinion among equals.