Inside section one, the Times ran a half-page box showing guns and ammo with small-type insets on technical specs and retail prices. On the opposite page it ran a mafia-style table of organization. There were small headshots of all the players, with lines connecting one to the other: Leonard, his wife, daughter, and grandsons; Wayne Korman and Floyd Ochs from Knowland amp; Sons in Lucas; Harlan Jennings off to the side; Billy MacNeal and Pat Grath of Second Houston Holding; Christopher Hopman from Alliance; the Wall Street gang of four-still alive and breathing-perspiring, Leonard hoped, to the point of dehydration.
Dr. Ganga Roy’s name was nowhere to be found. Leonard thought that the Times ’ bright lawyers might have fixed on the paper’s relationship with the Rockefeller Institute and related liabilities. Leonard knew that Isobel could not prove the material he provided was, to a certainty, Dr. Roy’s work product. Therefore, he suspected, the lawyers vetoed using her name. Isobel and her editors probably yelled themselves blue in the face. But as a lawyer he also knew that in the absence of proof absolute, legal had the better of the case.
Instead, the story credited “scientific data in the possession of the Times ” together with “reliable sources” in support of their description of what took place in Nathan Stein’s office. Leonard recognized everything Isobel wrote as the truth.
Isobel’s news report, distinguished by her exclusive ID of America’s most notorious home-grown desperado, offered no judgments on his crimes. Macmillan lobbied for a list of words and phrases: “corporate-terrorist,” “serial killer,” “unstable,” even “deranged,” a word that was dismissed by a quick, harsh look from the Moose. In light of his exasperation, that one wasn’t even considered. The others were talked through and all rejected. Macmillan offered his ideas in a high-level meeting attended by Gold and other senior types. A senior editor suggested three names-all seasoned, experienced Times reporters, who might “step in and help you out.” Isobel assured him, and everyone else, that she needed no help.
The same editor then offered the idea that Isobel ought not to write the story at all. “After all,” he said, “to some degree she’s now part of it. How can she be expected to write it?” He again brought up the same three names she previously rejected, and proposed they write the story “about you, and, of course, with your input.” Isobel recognized each of the three named reporters. She’d had not so much as a “good morning” from any of them. She knew them only by reputation.
“I thought they thought the story was b-b-bullshit,” she said. “You know, crap, and not the kind of crap that belongs in the New York Times. ” The Moose couldn’t help laughing. He quickly reached for a glass of water. Isobel said, “I don’t need help, and,” she smiled sweetly, “I always did poorly on the ‘works well with others’ marks.” They all backed off except Macmillan. A few minutes later he submitted a paragraph questioning Leonard Martin’s sanity, and citing the work of two forensic psychiatrists.
Had she asked him to, the Moose would have canned Macmillan right then, even in front of the others. Ed never knew how close he came to sniffing around the Daily News. Isobel felt her power building, not unlike the frightening force of a hurricane picking up steam over warm waters, hell-bent for landfall, God knows where.
The Times ’ unmasking of Leonard Martin dominated the media. Papers across the country drowned it in full-color ink. The Europeans noted it prominently, and even in Japan one paper’s front page screamed “Crazy American” across the same picture of Leonard Martin the New York Times printed. The cable networks and talk radio raised the story yet again, like Lazarus from a shallow grave. Isobel was more than a property now. As she once saw Kevin Costner remark in Bull Durham, she was in “the Show.” A second cover on Newsweek, and one on Time also confirmed it. Now the talking heads treated her differently-she was no longer the waif reporter. She had acquired gravitas. “I always believed in Isobel” pretty much summed up the general feeling. One deadpan prime-time showman used exactly those words. In New Mexico, Leonard watched it all unfold with more genuine pleasure than he had felt in years.
Isobel got calls from Time Warner and Newsweek offering her obscene amounts to join their stables. Rupert Murdoch himself called Isobel, his tacky accent bringing a whiff of Fiji bars that attracted Australians with schemes or lines of merchandise to sell. Rupert suggested that she decide precisely what it was that was she wanted, design herself a compensation package, and call him back. He emphasized that he felt she’d fit well on the air and in print. “Whatever you want, I already agree.” He even crammed a delightful smile somewhere into his voice.
After thanking Rupert and promising to do as asked, Isobel reflected that, like Alice, she was now in a world where things had spun out of control. Later on, the Moose told her Murdoch was well known to make such calls himself. “I suppose he gets off on it,” said Gold, adding that from what he heard Murdoch always reneged on the money part. The New Yorker and Rolling Stone were asking her for cover stories. “Write about Leonard Martin,” she was told by one. “Write any damn thing you want,” said the other.
Page six in the New York Post, and even the hometown London tabloids, linked her to a new job daily. If, as in olden days, the New York Post published twice a day, she’d have been changing employment twice as often. The silliness reached ridiculous proportions when the supermarket tabloids reported on her fight against cancer, her joyful pregnancy, her fun-filled weekend in the Swiss Alps with a European prince who was twenty years her senior. “How do they get those pictures?” she asked as she and the Moose studied a photo of Isobel on the high Tibetan plateau, arm-in-arm with a movie star she’d never met and didn’t recognize.
The heads of programming from every major cable news channel called with escalating numbers, some of which stood up handsomely against the print offers pouring in. They were encouraged no doubt by their edgy producers and highly stressed news directors. ABC and NBC let it be known that no cable outfit could make an offer that they would not match and exceed. CBS, hard-pressed to pay its ancient news performers whose packages reflected seniority and therefore weighed the network down, was forced to abstain from the frenzy.
Mysteriously, or so it seemed to many after the fact, no one in authority gave any thought to the notion that Isobel Gitlin might jump ship. She was not a contract employee. She worked at the pleasure of management; people departed at management’s pleasure. Thus it had always been and would always be. A New York Times senior vice president’s wife raised the subject at dinner one evening and was rebuked. In front of others, her husband told her, “People do not leave the New York Times. The New York Times is where they come to be !”
Isobel finally agreed to appear somewhere. She decided on 60 Minutes. She chose it because CBS never offered her a penny, not even a job. In a world gone crazy, she judged CBS to be the last refuge of sanity. They told her Ed Bradley would tape the conversation at Isobel’s apartment three days before the broadcast. She looked forward to the experience. The network promoted her all week. It seemed that every break had a promo promising “ Isobel Gitlin, only on 60 Minutes, this Sunday, after football.” These messages promised the “whole story” plus “exclusive revelations.”
“My God,” she told Mel Gold, “is this my fifteen minutes? When will it end?” He only smiled. He’d already told her it was too late.
“You never know,” he said. “Woodward and Bernstein got thirty years out of theirs.”
By Thursday, she’d just about mastered the stutter, partly by learning to make the camera an ally. The awareness of its harmlessness to her worked like an umbrella in hand on a threatening day; more often than not it kept the clouds away. In her mind the camera became a machine intended to help her focus. She also had come to understand that the defect itself, the stutter, loomed large in her legend. “Oh my,” she thought, “do I really have a legend?” Before the cameras rolled she asked Mr. Bradley if it was true that, as she’d heard, some producers at CNN, FOX, and MSNBC had lost their jobs for failing to book her.