Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Read online

  An example: When researching Kind and Usual Punishment, I kept thinking that lurking somewhere in this wide land must be an equivalent for the prison administrators of Casket & Sunny-side—a frank and explicit interchange of views and news by and for prison wardens. Finally I found a clue to the existence of such a publication, contained in a stuffy, almost unreadable sociological magazine called American Journal of Correction, official journal of prisondom and counterpart for the Correction crowd of JAMA or the ABA Journal. Leafing through this, I came across a sort of gossip column headed “News from the Affiliated Organizations.” Seeing my own name in there, I read more closely:

  WARDENS TALK ABOUT HOSTILE NEWS REPORTING

  G. Norton Jameson, editor of The Grapevine, mimeographed monthly of the American Association of Wardens and Superintendents, in its November 29 issue wrote about an interesting contrast between words spoken by Warden Lash of the Indiana State Penitentiary and Jessica Mitford....

  The article went on to say, “Miss Mitford is noted for her caustic pen. Her kind of reporter is one of the realities of life in these troubled times....”

  The Grapevine, I felt sure, was the publication I was looking for. At the time, an undergraduate named Kathy Mill was helping me with research, and together we pondered how to find out the address of The Grapevine, and how to get a year’s back issues. I telephoned around the country to my undercover collaborators, disaffected workers in various Departments of Correction, and eventually one of these mailed me a copy of The Grapevine. Step one was completed; we now had the address, a box number in Sioux Falls. I suggested to Kathy that she concoct a letter to the editor saying she was a graduate student in the Criminology School at the University of California (then under severe attack by the law-and-order people for being too radical), that she was unhappy with the content of the instruction, and she wanted to get the viewpoint of the wardens as set forth in The Grapevine. She should sign a man’s name, I said, as Corrections is by and large a man’s world. She produced the letter, signed “Karl Mill.” I thought it masterly for the purpose, but fearing that “Karl” had a slightly subversive ring, I changed that to “Kenneth” and sent it off.

  In the course of time twelve mint copies of The Grapevine appeared on Kathy’s doorstep. They proved to be just what I had hoped for, a gold mine of material affording rare glimpses into the Correctional mind: exchanges of opinion on how to circumvent court rulings favorable to prisoners’ rights without getting caught, how to starve out convict sit-down strikers, how to avoid investigation of prison conditions by the state legislature: “Warden Frank A. Eyman of Arizona State Prison revealed that he had refused three black legislators admittance beyond his office to meet with black prisoners last year. They stormed out of his office in a rage, he said.... ‘I’ll make Attica look like a picnic,’ the warden said today.”

  I spent the afternoon underlining passages for quotation in the book. On the last page of the final issue, I came across this:

  The following letter may be helpful in dispelling the idea that not much can be learned at the college level concerning the operation of prisons. Real intelligence is where you find it. Here is a young man who sees much farther than many and questions the soundness of the college courses. Now he just could be right and some day he might make a “top notch” prison administrator.

  Dear Mr. Jameson,

  As a graduate student in criminology at the University of California at Berkeley I was very impressed with a copy of your publication, “The Grapevine,” which I ran across here at school. I have long felt that my education here has been jammed into a liberal mold of propaganda. I see your publication as a credible news source of our profession undistorted by the rampant irresponsible and unrealistic biases of the media and campus liberals. Your publication offers the real current news. After all, as prison staff members you are the people who know what is really going on in our prisons. I am tired of reading the sentimental phantasies of reporters.

  Our library does not receive your publication. How can I obtain the issues of the past year? I would be delighted to subscribe and to pay for a year’s back issues if available. Also, perhaps there is a local organization here that would have your newsletter on file. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your work.

  Sincerely,

  Kenneth Mill

  INTERVIEWING is where the fun really begins, and where you may uncover information that is accessible in no other way. There may be some delightful surprises in store as you pursue your quarry. Over the years, I have found through trial and sometimes painful error that the following methods are useful.

  The individuals to be interviewed will generally fall into two categories: Friendly Witnesses, those who are sympathetic to your point of view, such as the victim of a racket you are investigating, or an expert who is clarifying for you technical matters within his field of knowledge; and Unfriendlies, whose interests may be threatened by your investigation and who therefore will be prone to conceal rather than reveal the information you are seeking.

  While your approach to each of these will differ, some general rules hold good for all interviews. Prepare your approach as a lawyer would for an important cross-examination. Take time to think through exactly what it is that you want to learn from the interview; I write out and number in order the questions I intend to ask. That way I can number the answer, keyed to the number of the question, without interrupting the flow of conversation, and if the sequence is disturbed (which it probably will be, in the course of the interchange), I have no problem reconstructing the Q. and A. as they occurred. Naturally other questions may arise that I had not foreseen, but I will still have my own outline as a guide to the absolute essentials.

  Immediately after the interview, I type up the Q.s and A.s before my notes get cold. If, in the course of doing this, I discover that I have missed something, or another question occurs to me, I call up the person immediately while the subject is still freshly in mind.

  In the case of the Friendly Witness, it often helps to send him a typescript of the interview for correction or elaboration. I did this to good effect after interviews with defense lawyers from whom I was seeking information about the conspiracy law for The Trial of Dr. Spock, and with Dr. Margen and other physicians who revealed the nature of drug experiments on prisoners for Kind and Usual Punishment. In each case the expert whom I had consulted not only saved me from egregious error but in correcting my transcription of the interview enriched and strengthened the points to be made.

  For Unfriendly Witnesses—which in my experience have included undertakers, prosecutors, prison administrators, Famous Writers—I list the questions in graduated form from Kind to Cruel. Kind questions are designed to lull your quarry into a conversational mood: “How did you first get interested in funeral directing as a career?” “Could you suggest any reading material that might help me to understand more about problems of Corrections?” and so on. By the time you get to the Cruel questions— “What is the wholesale cost of your casket retailing for three thousand dollars?” “How do you justify censoring a prisoner’s correspondence with his lawyer in violation of the California law?” — your interlocutor will find it hard to duck and may blurt out a quotable nugget.

  While some potentially Unfriendly Witnesses are more or less bound to grant interviews because they are public officials, or industry spokesmen, there are others—corporate executives, presidents of television networks, prosecutors—who will refuse, and routinely refer the inquiring reporter to their public relations departments. Occasionally it may be possible to break through this reticence. When I was doing research for The Trial of Dr. Spock, I chanced upon a most enlightening exchange with just such a witness.

  Having interviewed most of the Friendly Witnesses (defense lawyers and defendants) and learned from them the circumstances leading up to the indictment of Spock and four others on charges of “conspiring to aid, counsel and abet” draft resisters, I was anxious to confront the prosecu
tors and hear their version. But my legal friends assured me that this would be impossible — “The prosecutors won’t talk to you, why should they? They’ll say they can’t comment on a pending case.” Nevertheless I called up the Justice Department whose press chief, Cliff Sessions, told me substantially the same thing: “We can mail you copies of our briefs and press handouts,” he said, “but you won’t be able to talk to the prosecutors while the case is in court.” I was going to be in Washington anyway, I said, so I would drop round to his office to pick up the material.

  I arrived in Washington on the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and that night the town went up in flames. There were burning buildings a block from the house where I was staying with friends. In the morning I picked my way through the rubble to the Justice Department where I inquired for Cliff Sessions. His secretary told me he had flown to Memphis at 6 a.m. with the Attorney General. “Oh—well, he said something about me being able to see the Spock trial prosecutors,” I said (which was, after all, perfectly true). She answered that the prosecutors were there, and phoned down to John Van de Kamp, chief of the special unit set up to prosecute draft law violators. He readily agreed to see me—in fact seemed glad of the opportunity to chat. I gathered he was feeling a bit bored and neglected; the eyes of the nation were on the King tragedy, his colleagues were off investigating the ghetto uprisings, nobody was interested in draft prosecutions that day.

  We talked about some of his earlier experiences in prosecutorial work—at one point, in Los Angeles, he had been involved in the prosecution of some undertakers for antitrust violations and in this connection had found The American Way of Death a useful source of information. “How lovely! You’re a fan, then.” Yes, indeed. We were soon on thoroughly cozy terms and I steered cautiously into the matter at hand. Had he read Dr. Spock’s famous baby book? Yes, and thought it was very good. Was he a Spock-raised baby? No, he was born a few years too soon.

  Now to the point: “Who ordered the prosecution, and why? Did L.B.J. initiate it?” Van de Kamp explained: There had been a recent altercation between the Justice Department and General Hershey (then head of Selective Service), who had just been publicly rebuked by the Department for overstepping his authority in sending an injudicious letter to the 4,081 local draft boards. “The prosecution of these five came about as a result of our flap with Hershey. It was thought to be a good way out—it was done to provide a graceful way out for General Hershey.” “What made you pick out Dr. Spock and his four co-defendants from the tens of thousands protesting the draft?” I asked. “Because of their names and personalities,” answered Van de Kamp. “We managed to subpoena a large amount of television newsreel footage of their activities. We wouldn’t have indicted them except for the fact there was so much evidence available on film. They made no great secret of what they were doing.”

  So that was it: Dr. Spock and the others were offered up in unabashed response to political pressure, as a sacrificial offering to placate an irascible old man who had become an embarrassment to the Administration. And the sole evidence of their “conspiracy” was contained in newsreels of press conferences and protest rallies that took place in a blaze of television publicity. The defense had suspected such grubby machinations, but confirmation from the chief prosecutor was an unexpected bonanza.

  A good example of how not to conduct an interview was furnished by one of my Yale students, a seventeen-year-old freshman. He was investigating a publication called Who’s Who in American High Schools, sold to proud parents of the listed high-school seniors for $16.95 a copy. The volume looks something like a telephone directory and the purchaser may need a magnifying glass to find the distinguished scholar’s name, followed by a reference to the accomplishment that merited his or her inclusion as: “Smith, Susan, chr. ldr.” My student had done an assiduous and imaginative job of preliminary research: he had consulted reference librarians who attested to the book’s worthlessness; he had turned up several dissatisfied purchasers of Who’s Who in American High Schools.

  He had arrived at the stage in his investigation where he was ready to call the publisher, who lived in Illinois, and attempt to interview him by telephone. I suggested that he should start off with some general questions about reference books: their usefulness to researchers, the number of libraries that carry Who’s Who in American High Schools.

  We listed half a dozen Kind questions along these lines before proceeding to the Cruels: “Have you ever been sued by the Marquis people for breach of their trademark of the title ‘Who’s Who’?” “How much profit do you realize from each sale to a high-school senior?” “Do you make many multiple sales for the same honoree—one for Auntie, one for Grandma?”

  But somehow when my student had the publisher on the line he got flustered and, skipping over the first series of questions, waded precipitately into the Cruel ones. “Well, I don’t think I want to discuss these matters on the telephone,” the publisher said mildly. “Oh, so you won’t talk?” said the student belligerently, to which the publisher replied, “That’s right, I’m hanging up the phone.” Which he did, leaving my poor student bristling with impotent indignation.

  There came a time when I regretted having imparted this particular secret of my trade. When A Fine Old Conflict was published, Knopf sent me on a publicity tour of various cities including Boston, where one of my favorite Yale students, now graduated, had a job on the Globe. He managed to wangle an assignment to interview me for the “Living” section, and came up to meet me in my room in the Ritz-Carlton hotel. I was delighted to see him all grown up and a working journalist; there was much gossip and giggling over the old days at Yale—only a year before, but it seemed to him like a lifetime.

  “Actually, knowing you as well as I do, I could write up this interview without even talking to you,” he said. “But I suppose I should ask a few questions.” He pulled out his notebook. How are you enjoying the tour? he asked. Which cities have you visited so far? How is the book selling? And then: “Oh, by the way, somebody once told me that one should list one’s questions in order from Kind to Cruel, so here comes the Cruel one: How does a person of your alleged radical persuasion square her conscience living it up in this super-posh hotel?” Covered with confusion, I hedged and glugged, finally managing to get out the lame response “Well, my publisher is paying for it.”

  LUCK. In my experience luck has always figured large, so often have I accidentally chanced upon invaluable slivers of information volunteered by informants who happened to know something about my subject.

  This was especially true while I was writing The American Way of Death; it seemed that countless people wanted to get into this strange act with their own horror stories. One such shocker: a friend told me about making arrangements for her brother-in-law’s funeral. She had steadfastly insisted on the cheapest redwood coffin available, but the undertaker said the brother-in-law was too tall to fit into it, she would have to take a more expensive one. When she objected, he said, “Oh, all right, we’ll use the redwood, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.” This grisly little anecdote, which came my way just as the book was going to press, was eventually seized on by reviewers as one of the more telling examples of funeral salesmanship.

  Another incident that illustrates the luck factor: I was curious to know what happens about funeral arrangements in the event of mass disaster, such as plane crashes in remote mountain areas. Do competing undertakers from nearby communities converge upon the scene in a wild scramble for the business? What would typical costs be, and who pays—the airline or the next of kin? Questions like these, I thought, could best be answered by a lawyer who, like the undertaker, makes his living out of such tragedies: one who specializes in personal injury cases. I called up Melvin Belli, San Francisco’s best-known practitioner in this line (nicknamed by the press “King of Torts”), and explained in detail what I was after.

  Belli, never averse to publicity, readily gave me an appointment. I arrived promptly—and
sat for five hours in his reception room while a parade of the lame, halt, and blind, some on crutches, some in wheelchairs, wearing surgical collars or plaster casts, filed past me into his inner office. By the time Belli came out, I was steaming with rage at being kept waiting for all that time, the more so when he admitted he actually had no information on the subject of my visit. Perhaps to mollify me, he said he did have an old trial transcript that might be of interest, and he sprinted up a huge ceiling-high ladder to fetch it down from a top shelf. The transcript (which had nothing whatsoever to do with plane crashes) proved to be a gem of rare fascination: a lawsuit brought against an undertaker charging negligence and fraud for his failure to properly embalm the plaintiff’s ninety-nine-year-old mother. The Q. and A. examination of the plaintiff by Mr. Belli made for one of the most bizarre, and successful, passages in The American Way of Death: although in the excitement of this discovery I forgot all about the plane crash possibilities and never did follow through on this.

  BLIND ALLEYS. The converse of luck is blind alleys. Lest it appear from the comments in this collection that efficient investigation follows a straight and easily traversed path, that normally everything comes clattering neatly into place, I should say that I have come to expect blind alleys as a major natural hazard of investigating. Looking over old notebooks, full of “Possible Sources,” and lists of “Things to Do,” I see that I could fill a volume with accounts of endless days laboriously spent pursuing false leads—which would be depressing to write about and tedious to read. I have found, however, that tenacity does usually pay off in the end, and that frequently an apparent cul de sac will magically open up into a broad highway that makes the excursion all worthwhile.