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Books
Hamill is a columnist for the New York Post and the author, most recently, of the novel Loving Women.
JUST CAUSE; BY JOHN KATZENBACH, PUTNAM. 432 PP. $ 22.95
The engine of this novel is an agonizing professional dilemma: What does a journalist do about a major story that he discovers is based on lying sources?
This happens more often in the practice of our imprecise craft than we like to admit. Political reporters should assume that most of their sources, from the president down, are lying -- either directly or by omission. During the fighting of wars, generals and their flacks almost always lie, saving the truth for their memoirs (which are, of course, always briefs for the defense). But the Unreliable Source is also a figure of more mundane events. Years ago, I published a column based on a horrific story related to me by a man in east Harlem; three weeks later someone sent me a copy of a thirty-year-old short story on which the lie was based. My friend Jimmy Breslin once wrote a column about a New Yorker who escaped from a burning office and then proudly told Breslin about his cool heroism and need for job; the next day, this splendid hero was arrested for arson for setting the building on fire. Every editor in America could tell similar stories. They are the stuff of great hilarity in newspaper bars.
Most of these inadvertently transmitted lies are innocent enough, with few serious consequences. But in Just Cause, John Katzenbach raises the ante. His protagonist, Matthew Cowart, is a former reporter reduced to the daily boredom of writing editorials for a newspaper called the Miami Journal (Katzenbach was a fine reporter for The Miami Herald). He is divorced,living in a dreadful loveless solitude; even in the communal world of the newsroom, he has no friends. And his ex-wife has taken his daughter to live with her new husband in Tampa. Every day slides into the next and the banal terrors of middle-age lie directly ahead.
Then he receives a letter from a convict on Death Row. It appears to be another sample of that familiar newspaper category "jail mail," in which the absolute innocence of the correspondent is angrily proclaimed. Cowart is, of course, skeptical; as a reporter he had covered too many homicides, too many trials, "but he could not recall someone genuinely innocent." Still, something in the tone of the letter -- "articulate, educated, and sophisticated" -- intrigues Cowart. He looks at the meager clips. The crime is one of those American atrocities: a young girl raped and butchered and left in a swamp in northern Florida. But to Cowart the horror of the crime is at odds with the intelligence of the letter. Cowart is intrigued. He wonders whether he still has the legs to be a reporter. He gets permission to go off and investigate.
He then does what appears to be a splendid job of reporting. In prison, he interviews Robert Earl Ferguson, the young black man who wrote the letter, and follows a number of his leads. He confirms the lack of physical evidence: footprints at the site, the weapon, bloodstained clothing. He is convinced that the original defense attorney did a second-rate job. He notes evidence of old-fashioned racism (the murdered girl is white). He discovers that the arresting officers -- one of whom if black -- did use physical force to extract a confession, as claimed by Ferguson. Then a serial killer on the same Death Rows tells Cowart that he, not Ferguson, killed the little girl, a tale apparently confirmed when the serial killer sends him to a culvert to recover the knife used in the killing.
That seems to be enough. Cowart writes several major stories and they cause a sensation. Ferguson is freed. Cowart has produced one of those classic "wrong man" stories beloved of journalism-awards jurists and the awards flow to Cowart, up to and including the Pulitzer Prize.
And then he discovers that his great Pulitzer Prize-winning story was all based on lies. The Ferguson character lied. So did the serial murderer, who gleefully reveals his deception to Cowart just before his own execution. A killer has been released to the streets and the reporter put him there.
Clearly, Cowart should go immediately to his editors and tell themwhat he knows, or suspects. He doesn't. Instead, he lies. And, holed up in his apartment, he begins to rationalize his lies. "The newspaper suddenly no longer seemed a place of sanctuary, but instead a swamp or a minefield." He remembers how William F. Buckley was taken in by Edgar Smith, how Norman Mailer was blamed for helping free Jack Abbott. "I'm not the first reporter to make an error, he thought. It's a high-risk profession. The stakes are always tough. No reporter is immune from a carefully executed deception." All true. But he doesn't act on such sentiments. Pride and ego divert him, along with that sickening disease that now infects all modern newsrooms: careerism. A proud craftsman admits a mistake; the careerist wonders first and last how it will affect him and his precious march to the heights.
Cowart thinks: "The only way he could protect himself, his reputation, and his career, was to conceal Ferguson's role." He knows this means, for the moment, allowing the killer to roam freely. "For a single instant, he considered simply telling the truth about everything, but, in the same instant, he wondered, What was the truth?" And at another point: "He no longer knew whether what he'd done compounded truth or lies. He realized that for the first time in his years as a journalist, he had no idea which was which, they had become so entangled in his head."
This crisis happens at the half-way point in the novel. The second part of the story is about Cowart's attempt to redeem himself, as he joins with the police to bring Ferguson back to justice. The drama is transformed into melodrama, some of it quite scary. But the ethical dilemma is never quite resolved. In some ways, the second half of the novel resembles those scenes in horror movies in which the lone woman decides to climb into the attic to face the nameless beast, instead of dialing 911 or simply running into the street. The thriller writer's essential task is to get the reader tosuspend disbelief. For me, that doesn't happen. If Cowart truly cared about the consequences of his prize-winning mistake, he should have immediately gone into print, thus warning various police departments and saving the lives of new victims. This doesn't seem a genuine choice for Cowart until his own daughTer is mentioned by Ferguson as a possible victim.
Still, he doesn't make that choice. He plays cop instead. That's an inescapable requirement of the suspense genre, of course, and if Katzenbach's protagonist had simply come clean, there'd have been no novel. Or rather, there would have been no thriller. There might have been another kind of novel, perhaps a more disturbing and scary one. It's unfair to criticize a writer of Katzenbach's skill for not writing the novel you wish he had written. But in this long, sometimes bloated thriller, a leaner, darker, more disturbing novel seems aching to come out.
