Within another day or two, three-quarters of the colleges and universities in America were on strike. More than four million students joined in the protest, and one by one every college and university in Rochester shut down for the rest of the academic year.
The day after Ferguson filed his Buffalo story, he had a brief talk with McManus at the front entrance of the Times-Union building. Staring out at the traffic as they smoked their cigarettes, they both reluctantly acknowledged that there would be no point in publishing any more articles about the sixties. Eight had been enough, and the ninth and tenth were no longer necessary.
AFTER NANCY SPERONE found her new man in the early days of the student strike, Ferguson squandered the next six months pursuing two different women who were not worth the effort of pursuing and shall remain nameless because they are not worth the effort of naming. Ferguson was beginning to grow restless, feeling that perhaps he had had enough of Rochester after a year and a half in that minor league city, wondering if he shouldn’t try his luck somewhere else with another paper or perhaps leave journalism altogether and try to earn his living as a translator, for however much he still enjoyed the pressures of high-speed composition, wrestling with Villon’s fifteenth-century French was ultimately more satisfying to him, and even though time was scarce, he had polished off a not-bad first rendering of The Legacy and was halfway into a preliminary version of The Testament, not that he could ever feed himself by translating poetry, of course, but a fat book of prose every now and then might help cover the bills, and if nothing else, even if he did stay in Rochester for a while longer, wouldn’t it make sense to leave the crummy, roach-infested dump on Crawford Street and move to a better place?
It was January 1971, February 1971, the darkest, coldest days of the year in that glum hibernal outpost, a time when only glum things could be expected to happen, a time of death fantasies and daydreams about living in the tropics, but just as Ferguson was beginning to think he should bury himself under a pile of quilts and remain in bed for the next three months, his job at the Times-Union became interesting again. The circus was back in town. The lions and tigers were roaring, a crowd was gathering under the large tent, and Ferguson hastily jumped back into his tightrope walker’s costume and scrambled up the ladder to take his spot on the platform.
After the Kent State shootings, he had been reassigned to the national desk and was now working under a man named Alex Pittman, a young editor with good instincts and a more tolerable disposition than Dunlap’s. Ferguson had handed in dozens of stories to Pittman over the long weeks between May and February, but nothing as compelling as the two big stories that broke in the first half of the new year, which curiously enough turned out to be two versions of the same story: tying up loose ends from the fifties and sixties because someone had been brave enough to steal classified government documents and release them to the public, which meant that even if the sixties were chronologically over, they weren’t over and were in fact just beginning — all over again. On March eighth, an unknown group of invisible activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I. broke into the small, two-man government office in the oddly named town of Media, Pennsylvania, and swiped more than a thousand secret documents. By the next day, those documents had been sent to various news organizations across the country, exposing the F.B.I.’s covert spy operation, COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program), which had been started by J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 to harass the fourteen or twenty-six Communists still left in America and then had expanded to include members of black civil rights organizations, anti — Vietnam War organizations, Black Power organizations, feminist organizations, and over two hundred organizations from the New Left, among them SDS and the Weathermen. Not just spying on them but infiltrating their ranks with informants and agents provocateurs to disrupt and discredit them, and just like that the nuthouse fears of sixties activists were turning out to be true, Big Brother had indeed been watching, and Nobodaddy’s craziest, most loyal soldier had been behind it all, squat little J. Edgar Hoover, who had amassed so much power during his forty-seven years in office that presidents quaked when he knocked on their door. The documents revealed hundreds of crimes and hundreds of low blows to smear the names of innocent people, but none lower than the job he had done on Viola Liuzzo, who was the subject of one of Ferguson’s articles, the Detroit housewife with five children who had gone down to Alabama for the Selma-Montgomery march and for the simple act of opening her car door and giving a lift to a black man had been murdered by a group from the Klan, one of the murderers being Gary Thomas Rowe, “an acknowledged F.B.I. informant,” and then Hoover had had the temerity to write a letter to Johnson telling him that Mrs. Liuzzo had been a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children in order to have sex with black men from the civil rights movement, a bogus accusation that suggested she had been an enemy of the people and therefore someone who had deserved to die.
Three months after the COINTELPRO scandal, the Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times, and Ferguson worked on that story as well, including the story behind the story of how Daniel Ellsberg had smuggled the papers out of the building and given them to Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the once abhorred New York Times perhaps atoning for the lies it had printed in sixty-eight by taking the risk of going public with classified documents, a bright moment for American journalism, as Pittman, McManus, and Ferguson all agreed, and suddenly the lies of the American government were standing naked in front of the entire world, the things that had never been reported anywhere in the press, the secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos, the coastal raids on North Vietnam, but beyond that and before that the thousands of pages delineating the step-by-step process by which something that had once seemed to make sense had collapsed into utter senselessness.
THEN THE CIRCUS left town again, and Ferguson fell into the arms of Hallie Doyle, a twenty-one-year-old student from Mount Holyoke with a summer job at the paper, the first woman he had met since moving north who might have had the power to break the Amy-spell at last, a deeply intelligent and insightful person who had been raised in the Roman Catholic Church but was no longer part of it because she didn’t believe that virgins could be mothers or that dead men could climb out of their graves, yet she lived with an inner certainty that the meek would inherit the earth, that virtue was its own reward, and that not doing unto others what you didn’t want them to do unto you was a more sensible way to conduct your life than struggling to follow the precepts of the golden rule, which forced human beings to turn themselves into saints and led to nothing but guilt and unending despair.