Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Read Free Page B

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 prosecutors 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