THE LAST (WE HOPE)
JOSEPH ELLIS COLUMN

BY DICK TERESI
 

Nora Ephron was briefly a twice-a-week columnist for a daily newspaper. She had to quit. "I simply did not have two opinions a week." Ephron remains in awe of columnists. "Every thing that is set before them, every book, every newspaper article, every English muffin bristles with the possibility of inspiring 850 words."

As I write this, it is day thirty-five in the Joseph Ellis affair here in western Massachusetts. The news ended on day two, but that hasn't stopped the columnists and editorial writers. Ellis is the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who was caught fibbing about his past. He did not see combat in Vietnam as he told his students, but rather taught at West Point. He did not score a critical touchdown in high school, having never played on the football team. Both Ellis and I live in Amherst, a long touchdown pass from each other, and he teaches at Mt. Holyoke College, in South Hadley, a mortar shot away. I don't know him, only his reputation and those details about his made-up past published in The Boston Globe on June 18. I read the story, and I thought, "Ellis shouldn't have fibbed. He was bad." On June 19, the Globe reported that Ellis had apologized. He admitted he had been bad. "That settles it," I said naively to myself, and turned to see how the Red Sox were blowing yet another season.

It didn't stop there, of course. Ellis is our current English muffin. A local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran a very short, restrained editorial on June 26. ellis erred, said the headline. Then, perhaps unsure of itself (we are small-town folk), the Gazette sought corroboration from both coasts, running columns on June 27 by The Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman and the Los Angeles Times columnist John Balzar. "I don't have the stomach for public humiliation," wrote Goodman, who then proceeded to publicly humiliate Joseph Ellis. She thought that what he did was bad. Balzar went straight for the Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. "'The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth,'" he wrote, quoting Cicero. Balzar's undies were inexplicably in a bundle over lies being told in South Hadley classrooms 3,000 miles away. Is there a shortage of phonies in the greater Los Angeles area? Balzar called Ellis's actions "creepy," by which, I guess, he meant bad.

On June 28, the Valley Advocate weighed in. Perhaps, I thought, our weekly alternative paper would have an alternative view. Oddly, no. Editor Tom Vannah began by writing that a buddy of his once lied about going to Vietnam. Vannah forgave him. Clearly, though, he wasn't forgiving Ellis, who he thought was bad. I'm not sure why the buddy got off, perhaps because he had the keen judgment not to win a National Book Award.

One can't be too careful, so I sought mainstream opinion, the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal. Would the newspaper with a soft spot for the convicted swindler Michael Milken have mercy? No. The Journal also said Ellis was bad. "Perverse" was the actual word.

The problem is the C-word, the Column. It has its uses, of course, but it is often a handy pasture for the reporter who has lost his or her nerve, lost the taste for conducting hostile or heartbreaking interviews. The late John G. Fuller, a free-lance journalist, told me at the age of sixty-nine that he still feared that first day of reporting-out an exposé: sitting on the bed in a cheap motel, in a strange town, staring at the phone, getting up the nerve to make that first phone call, to interview someone who would hate his guts before the week was over. Some part of every reporter yearns for a column: sitting in the Jacuzzi reading yesterday's news, sipping our Drambuie and grapefruit juice. With Bartlett's now on CD/ROM, the column pretty much writes itself. Except for the opinion. Was Ellis bad? Was he creepy? Was he perverse? Or just error-prone? So many decisions.

In his wicked novel, The Columnist (Books, cjr, July/August), Jeffrey Frank creates a George Will-ish "journalist" who couldn't cover a fire if it started in his pants. "I don't intend to be the sort who rushes all about and writes about fires and crime," Brandon Sladder tells his father. "I intend to write about the fabric of our time." Our newspapers are overrun with fabric writers. The Boston Globe, for instance, recently bought out the contracts of 185 employees, yet retained the services of thirty-five columnists. So much fabric. So little thread.
One name that appeared in only one column (Vannah's) cited above was Walter V. Robinson. Robinson is one of those people who "rushes all about" -- a reporter. He broke the Ellis story. Every fact about Ellis's fibs in every column I surveyed came straight from Robinson's coverage for The Boston Globe. Not one additional fact was introduced by the above columnists. Worse, four of the five commentators listed above made no attempt to contact Ellis, despite their public condemnations of his soul.

Robinson was the only writer to show compassion. Denied an interview by Ellis, he drove the five-hour round trip to Amherst, and knocked on his door. "I couldn't write the story without looking the guy in the eye." Ellis answered the door, and made only two comments: "Look, I'll have to suffer the consequences. I believe I am an honorable man." For Robinson, a Vietnam veteran, the encounter humanized Ellis.

A Nexis search by cjr editors turned up seventy-two pieces on Ellis since the story broke on June 18. Robinson was "dumbfounded" by the volume of follow-up, especially since he has seen only one newly uncovered fact about Ellis's prevarications in all that "coverage." (The Springfield Union-News dug up a 1994 interview with Ellis about the shotgun execution of his golden retriever by a would-be mugger; on that occasion Ellis claimed parachute-combat experience in Vietnam.) The New York Times alone ran six related pieces from June 22 to July 15. None of the six writers attempted to reach Ellis. That's no big deal. One column, by the media writer Julie Flaherty, was an interview with Robinson. John Tierney's Big City column was a hilarious spoof, a fictitious letter to Ellis from his editor critiquing a fictitious Vietnam memoir. ("Dear Joe, 'A Quagmire Too Far' is lovely.") The other four Times pieces explored the periphery of the story. No call to Ellis was mandatory. Still, it should be a reporter's instinct. "I am not really a journalist," one Ellis commentator tells me.
"I'm a massive over-reporter," Ellen Goodman says, but she didn't do any reporting for her Ellis column. On the phone she repeats Ephron's complaint, that you need two ideas a week. "Some weeks you have six stories," she says. "Other weeks, zero." Obviously, columns serve a purpose, but shouldn't they include some new information, something beyond simple moral judgments we can trust readers to make on their own? Our local Gazette tried several times to reach Ellis (as did I) before writing that he "erred." Its editor, Jim Foudy, says, "How we can best serve the reader is through reporting, but we've become obsessed with opinion."

The Los Angeles Times columnist John Balzar, who judged Ellis "creepy," didn't try to call him. "Newspapers are already full of reporting," he says. "There are lots of facts floating around. We need context." Yes, context. That's sort of like, you know, fabric.