Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Read online

  ROAD WORK

  Also by Mark Bowden:

  Doctor Dealer

  Bringing the Heat

  Black Hawk Down

  Killing Pablo

  Our Finest Day

  Finders Keepers

  ROAD WORK

  AMONG TYRANTS, HEROES, ROGUES, AND BEASTS

  MARK BOWDEN

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2004 by Mark Bowden

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  “Tales of the Tyrant,” “The Kabul-Ki Dance,” “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” “Pompadour with a Monkey Wrench,” and “A Beautiful Mind” originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

  “Gore’s Stiff Competition” originally appeared on Salon.com.

  “The Game of a Lifetime” and “The Unkindest Cut” originally appeared in Sports Illustrated.

  “The Great Potato Pick-Off Play,” “Schmidt’s Misfortune,” “Rhino,” “The Urban Gorilla,” “Breeding the Better Cow,” “Battling ‘the Baddies’ in Fantasyland,” “Fight to the Finish,” “Fight with Fame,” “The Fight Rocky Lost,” and “Cops on the Take” originally appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

  “Mayberry Vice” originally appeared in Rolling Stone.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bowden, Mark, 1951–

  Road work: among tyrants, heroes, rogues, and beasts / Mark Bowden.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-55584-609-1

  I. Title.

  PN4874.B6297A25 2004

  070'.92—dc22

  2004052841

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  To Jim Naughton and Gene Roberts,

  for enlarging my ambition

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  TALES OF THE TYRANT

  THE KABUL-KI DANCE

  THE DARK ART OF INTERROGATION

  POMPADOUR WITH A MONKEY WRENCH

  GORE’S STIFF COMPETITION

  THE GAME OF A LIFETIME

  THE UNKINDEST CUT

  SCHMIDT’S MISFORTUNE

  THE GREAT POTATO PICK-OFF PLAY

  A BEAUTIFUL MIND

  RHINO

  THE URBAN GORILLA

  BREEDING THE BETTER COW

  BATTLING “THE BADDIES” IN FANTASYLAND

  FIGHT TO THE FINISH

  FIGHT WITH FAME (NORMAN MAILER)

  THE FIGHT ROCKY LOST

  MAYBERRY VICE

  COPS ON THE TAKE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Ben Bradlee, the iconic editor of The Washington Post, was not impressed when he interviewed me for a job in 1979. I had worn a suit and a new pair of shoes for the occasion, and had stepped off the Metro on my way to the newspaper building into the heart of Hurricane David. It was only a two-block walk, but I was soaked to the skin.

  He appeared before me in all his craggy magnificence, straight white hair falling across his forehead, the immaculate starched white collar of his blue shirt worn unbuttoned, silk tie askew. Bradlee was tan and athletic, prosperous and in charge. I confess to being in awe. Just six years from Watergate and only three years after being portrayed by Jason Robards in All the President’s Men, he was the most famous and esteemed newspaper editor in the world.

  My damp entrance immediately triggered an anecdote.

  “When I was just starting out,” he began in his gravelly voice with a grin, “I had two job interviews scheduled, one with The Baltimore Sun and the other with The Post….” It was a story he would retell years later in his memoirs. When he got to Baltimore, riding down on a train from Boston, there was a downpour, so he decided to forgo The Sun interview and just to proceed on down to D.C. The rest was history.

  He probably didn’t mean anything by it, but his telling me that story as I sat dripping across from him made it seem like the most famous and esteemed newspaper editor in the world was telling me that a cleverer fellow might have avoided the rain.

  Clearly, coming down on the train from Harvard, Bradlee had had reason to be more complacent about landing a job with a good newspaper than I did. For six years I had been writing for the declining and little-read Baltimore News-American, a backwater in the unimpressive Hearst newspaper chain. I craved the respectability of a good newspaper and, with two small children at home, needed a better paycheck if I was going to stick with journalism. The Sun, the newspaper Bradlee had so cavalierly written off, had been the object of my fervent desires for years, and had for all that time been spurning my applications.

  But I had gotten lucky. All at once opportunity had knocked. By the time I met with Bradlee, I already had a job offer from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

  “Before you take the job in Philly, you ought to at least see what The Post has to offer,” said Jon Katz, my editor in Baltimore, a former reporter at both The Post and The Inquirer who was kindly trying to further my career. He had arranged for a day of interviews in Washington.

  I had already met that rainy day with Bob Woodward, of Woodward and Bernstein, one of the two most celebrated newspaper reporters in America. He was then metro editor of The Post. It had been a peculiar session. Woodward has a broad, friendly face and the flat hard accent of his hometown of Wheaton, Illinois. I had grown up in the town next door, Glen Ellyn, so we had some common ground. Early in our conversation he noted that I had been covering Maryland politics, and asked me, “Who do you think is the most corrupt official in high office in Maryland?”

  It took me a moment to figure out what to say.

  “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I don’t assume people are corrupt unless I know something that suggests they are, and if I had information like that I would have written about it.”

  He seemed satisfied with that answer, and we talked for a while more about other things. Then he leaned abruptly across the desk, thrusting that wide face at me, and asked, conspiratorially, “No, just between you and me, who do you think is the most corrupt official in high office in Maryland?”

  I was taken aback. I wondered if this was some high-powered interrogation technique I had never heard about. I couldn’t think of what to say.

  “I already answered that question,” I said.

  Woodward moved on to other things, and didn’t seem put out, but I felt like I had disappointed him. The exchange had left me feeling that there was something basically different between his approach to reporting and mine. So I was already feeling a little off balance when I went in to see Bradlee. Other than that first anecdote—and I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it—Bradlee was charming. He is an accomplished raconteur, and he told me a number of good stories. Then, perhaps remembering that I was the one who was supposed to be answering questions, he asked, “Tell me, what is your biggest weakness as a journalist?”

  I was not accustomed to evaluating myself in such terms, but I felt I owed him an honest answer.

  “I think I am a better writer than I am a reporter,” I said. “I know I enjoy writing more than I enjoy repor
ting.”

  That was all I told Bradlee, and it was the truth. Whenever I set out to report a story I felt like I was inventing the process. Every story was different, and I always felt there was something else I ought to be doing but didn’t know what. Whenever I sat down to write, it was with the feeling that I didn’t know enough yet to do so. There was always something else to find out, someone else to talk to, some other fact to run down. The truth is that I’d never had a particularly strong ambition to be a newspaper reporter. I had met ones for whom the job was a life goal, people who had grown up devouring newspapers, memorizing bylines, imagining themselves in far-flung places covering the big breaking story. I was a newspaper reporter because I wanted to write, and it was a place where you got paid to do it. I had taken the Baltimore job because I figured it would be better to get paid for writing than for running a cash register at a supermarket, which was how I had put myself through school. I had what real newspapermen would have called, somewhat disparagingly, a “features mentality.” I was perfectly happy working on stories that had nothing to do with breaking news, that interested no one else, and that ran deep inside the paper. I had actually conspired on occasion to keep my stories off the front page, where most would be hacked and reedited over the course of the day’s various editions. My stories were safer inside. What I really wanted was to write books and articles like those of the “New Journalists” of that era—Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and others—but that goal seemed as distant as Mars. I did love the newsroom: the characters, the hustle, and the deadlines. I loved working all day, driving out to meet people and interview them, gathering enough information to write a story, and then picking up the newspaper the next day and seeing it in print. Even ideas that didn’t appeal to me grabbed me once I got started. There was something about the drama of real life that always kicked in. But my favorite part of the process always came when I had a chance to sit down and write.

  I left Bradlee feeling uncertain about my prospects at The Post. Most reporters in 1979 would have given a lot for a job at that newspaper, myself included. It still shone with the afterglow of Watergate, one of the great investigative efforts in the history of journalism. When I returned to my desk in Baltimore the next day there was a message asking me to call Woodward.

  “Bowden, you idiot, why did you tell Bradlee that you are a lousy reporter?” he asked.

  I had not told Bradlee that. Woodward told me not to worry about it, that he was sure a job offer was still forthcoming, but I decided not to wait for it. I made up my mind then and there to take the job at The Inquirer.

  It was the best decision I ever made. In retrospect I am grateful that Bradlee and Woodward made it easier for me. Interviewing in Philadelphia, I had liked immediately Jim Naughton, then The Inquirer’s eccentric metro editor (one could not help but notice the giant chicken head hanging outside his cubicle), and Gene Roberts, its shrewd, slow-talking, no-nonsense editor. Roberts was genuinely odd. Throughout his interview with me, between long silences after each of my replies, he would pour amber liquid from a decanter into a small glass and chug it. I only found out later that it was tea. They had played no games with me, and seemed to share an interest in the things that most excited me about journalism. I had been picking up the Sunday Inquirer for several years because it was startlingly good, the talk of the business. All through the 1970s it had been winning prizes for remarkably ambitious and original work. It didn’t have the same high profile as The Post or The New York Times—where both Naughton and Roberts had worked before Philadelphia—but it had a hip luster that the bigger papers didn’t. It was the hot place to work, a newspaper where you could do great things the day you walked in the door, as opposed to climbing a long-established employment ladder. What appealed to me most was the emphasis Naughton and Roberts placed on creative writing. My friend Richard Ben Cramer had recently won a Pulitzer for his amazing and original writing from the Middle East. Donald Drake, the paper’s medical reporter, was turning out four- and five-part series that read like plays. This was precisely the kind of work I had always wanted to do.

  The Inquirer was my home for more than twenty years, and it was, as Roberts once put it, the greatest care and feeding system for writers in the world. A little more than a year after I started, he dispatched me to Africa for several months to research and write a series of stories about the threatened extinction of the black rhinoceros—a series that became a notorious symbol of Roberts’s excesses, but one that nearly every reporter I knew would have thrilled to get (one piece of that series is reprinted here). Before leaving on that assignment, I traveled to New York City to meet with the late Harold Hayes, the legendary editor who had coached Tom Wolfe’s breakthrough articles in Esquire. Hayes had a lifelong interest in African wildlife, and had written a good book on the subject, entitled The Last Place on Earth.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Your newspaper is going to send you flying all over Africa to research and write about what’s happening to the rhino?”

  He shook his head with amazement.

  “That’s just extraordinary,” he said, “and wonderful. It restores my faith in daily newspapers. Don’t blow it.”

  Don’t blow it—those words stayed with me through all my years at The Inquirer. It was an extraordinary place to work. The paper hired some of the best and most ambitious young journalists in America, and enlarged their ambition. It let reporters grow in whatever direction their talent and interests led. Some specialized in “investigative” work, others became foreign correspondents, still others became specialists in certain areas of reporting. For me, the goal was always to become a better writer. My instincts drove me to work on ever-bigger, longer, more complex stories. I was evolving from a newspaper reporter into a magazine writer and author, and The Inquirer let me do it. Many of the articles reprinted in this collection were originally published in The Inquirer’s Sunday magazine. The process wasn’t always easy. For instance, when I was writing “Cops on the Take,” the last article in this collection, I realized early on that the dimensions of the story wouldn’t fit into a single issue of the magazine. I warned my editor, the ever-practical David Boldt, what was coming.

  “Then stop,” he said. “Don’t write the whole story. Just write a piece of it.”

  “But why leave out so much good material if I have it?” I asked.

  “Because it won’t fit in the magazine,” he said.

  “Why not run it as a series over several weeks,” I suggested, never one to be timid about granting myself more space.

  “Because we don’t do that at the magazine,” David said.

  “Why don’t we do it?”

  “Because people would lose track of the story from week to week. Because it’s our policy. It has come up before. Roberts says we can’t do it.”

  Invoking Roberts was the final word in all arguments at The Inquirer. I ignored David. I figured that even if the whole story didn’t get published, I wanted to write it. I wanted to write it fully, to push myself, to see if I could sustain such an extended narrative. When I gave it to David, he was horrified.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” he said.

  “If we have to, I’ll cut it, but I at least wanted you to see the whole thing.”

  David read it, and liked it.

  “But I can’t use it as is,” he said.

  “If Roberts is the one who made the rule, can’t he also break it?” I asked.

  So David showed the piece to Roberts, who suggested in his soft Southern drawl, “Why don’t you run it as a series.”

  It ran over four successive weekends.

  The Inquirer was like that. Whenever I pushed at the paper’s limits, it bent to accommodate me. It was famous for pulling out all the stops for a big story, and breaking any rule in order to encourage its reporters to come up with something new. Three of my books—Finders Keepers, Black Hawk Down, and Killing Pablo—were originally printed in the newspaper,
the latter two in twenty-nine and thirty-one parts, respectively. The Inquirer was the only newspaper in America that would do that.

  In a way, a strong body of magazine articles is proof that a writer really loves what he is doing. Because here is the sad truth about writing for magazines: You will never make a living at it when you need the living, and if you ever are in a position to make enough writing for them, you will no longer need it. It is very much like a piece of wisdom I heard from a friend in college about sex. He said, “The more you want it, the less you get it; the less you get it, the more you want it.” I have found this to be true about life. Nobody except those famous and established enough not to need it can make a living wage writing for magazines. Most newspapers don’t pay extra for the longer works. So writing long was always a struggle, driven by ego and ambition, never encouraged. For reasons I cannot fully fathom, I was born stubborn enough to persist. Here is the proof. My goal was always to be working on the most ambitious thing that I had ever done, and most of these stories, particularly the older ones, represent the best work I had done to date. Today, The Atlantic Monthly affords me the same kind of opportunity, and all of the recent work in this collection originally appeared there.