bob greene's richard file

Few legal cases have generated as much passion and outrage from the media, public officials, or citizens as Chicago's adoption case known as "Baby Richard." Few columnists and commentators in that city haven't written about the boy, now four years old, who was transferred April 30 from the family he had lived with since he was a few days old to the biological parents he had never met. But no one has written more copy about Richard than Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene: more than 50,000 words (66 columns) since May 1993, when he first heard about the case. Most of the columns, syndicated to more than 200 newspapers, were written this year. Over and over again, Greene blasted the Illinois Supreme Court for reversing all previous court decisions and awarding Richard to his biological parents without a hearing to determine the child's best interests. For the eight weeks from when Richard was moved until the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, Greene wrote about nothing else.

Readers have reacted by writing two to three thousand letters. No one kept an exact count, but editors said this issue generated more letters than any story in recent memory, and that more than 90 percent agreed with the columnist. Among his colleagues in the media, however, Greene's obsession with the story has been characterized as overkill. Since January, Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly newspaper, has been running a monthly column called "BobWatch: We read him so you don't have to."

Greene, forty-eight, admits he can't shake the heart-wrenching scene he witnessed April 30 when he was invited into the adoptive parents' home in Schaumburg, Illinois. Shortly before the biological parents came to get Richard, Greene reported, the child was begging: "Please don't make me go. Please. Please don't send me away."

"If I go to sleep thinking about him and I wake up thinking about him, am I supposed to then come in and pretend that something else interests me more that day? Because it didn't and it hasn't," Greene says. He has been especially upset that Richard has not been allowed to see or talk to his adoptive parents and eight-year-old brother since the day he left.

Greene was denied access to the biological family and then decided not to talk to either family. He also did not publish their names. For the most part, he focused on the inequities in the court system, basing his work on documents. On several occasions, he ripped Illinois Supreme Court Justice James D. Heiple for what he called inconsistencies and factual errors in the written opinions. One column was titled the sloppiness of justice heiple. In another, Greene wrote: "There appears to be a chance that, before ordering Richard from his home . . . the state Supreme Court justices may not even have read the original trial transcripts."

In a highly unusual move, Heiple responded to Greene's accusations by devoting more than a page and a half to Greene in the July 1994 Illinois Supreme Court ruling that denied a rehearing. Heiple called Greene's columns "acts of journalistic terrorism."

Greene isn't alone in his passion for this story. Walter Jacobson, a commentator for television station WFLD, read Justice Heiple's publicly listed home telephone number on the air and encouraged viewers to call. Heiple and his wife, who was ill, received a number of abusive telephone calls after the report. "I wanted people to call him up and bother him until he did the right thing," says Jacobson, who has been an anchor and commentator on various Chicago stations for twenty-five years. In retrospect, Jacobson says, "I probably went over the line." A barrage of criticism from the Illinois and Chicago bar associations and the media led to an on-air apology.

Still, like Greene, Jacobson says he wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about Richard and the injustice of taking him away from the only family he has known. "How else do you undermine the arrogance of powerful people without getting rough on them?" he asks.

Not all of the watchdogs agree with Jacobson's and Greene's singular focus. Richard Roeper, a columnist for the fiercely competitive Chicago Sun-Times who wrote five columns on Richard, says the case isn't as black and white as Greene paints it. "This is the biggest journalistic meltdown I've ever seen," Roeper says. "It was like a broken record. It was the same thing, day after day, to the point of obsession."

Greene and his editors insist that he was prepared to stop writing about the case when he was no longer able to provide new information. But he seemed to be creating some of his own news when he ran comments from readers and went as far as asking Chicago's Roman Cath-
 olic Archbishop, Joseph Bernardin, to negotiate some sort of compromise between the two sets of parents. When Bernardin responded that he would like to help, Greene ran that in his column. (Soon after, Bernardin learned that he had pancreatic cancer, and nothing has come of the offer.)

Owen Youngman, Chicago Tribune managing editor for features, says Greene's passion fits well with the Tribune's continuing emphasis on children's issues. "It's important for our columnists to have passion," Young- man says. "Too much of journalism has been homogenized."

Even at the Reader, Michael Miner, the alternative's senior editor and media columnist, says Greene made a substantial contribution by pointing out a lack of legal rights for children in the Illinois legal system, not just with Richard's case. "No newspaper crusade is effective if it is not done to excess," he says.

Greene, who has written fourteen books, insists that he will not write a book and profit from Richard's case. But he said he won't stop writing columns about it until the boy is allowed to visit the family that raised him: "I'm not going away."

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