The Greening of a Guerrilla

By Thomas Griffith

NEWSWATCH

Against politicians he suspects of major wrongdoing, "the journalist's job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through that palace guard." This was Robert Scheer speaking, the self-styled "aggressive Berkeley radical" who got Jimmy Carter to confess to lust in his heart in that celebrated Playboy interview. Scheer's own matching candor about his right to lie and cheat seemed to confirm what Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew once said about the press; Scheer shocked even a number of his fellow "counterjournalists" when he made the remarks in November, and it mightily embarrassed the Los Angeles Times, which had just hired him.

That hiring is a strange union at best between the Berkeley Marxist and the conservative Times (which is not as intransigently conservative as it used to be). Editor Bill Thomas of the Times had been much impressed by Scheer's searching Playboy interviews with Carter and with Jerry Brown and decided "it's time we had something different going for us." And he detected a change taking place in Scheer himself, a change also evident in an interview with Scheer by Ken Auletta in the March issue of the journalism review More.

As editor for five years of the radical magazine Ramparts, Scheer thought of himself as a "guerrilla journalist" because he did not want to be part of "access journalism," which apparently refers to reporters who knock before entering. "We hung out at parties and eavesdropped and stole memos and every other damn thing to crash through. I wish we'd never had to do any of it." But, he argues, "a hell of a lot of the investigative journalism of the last five years has come from files that are lifted, people who are violating the conditions of their jobs and so forth." If the wrongdoing is important enough and "if that's the only way you can get that story, it should be done that way."

Changing Times. These views, set off with red headlines in More, have got Scheer in a lot of trouble. He insists that the lying and stealing question was hypothetical, and times have changed since the Nixon era: "I don't think you can make much of a case for burglary at this point in American history."

Scheer comes out of that generational journalism of the '60s, whose work is to be found in such magazines as Esquire, New York, New Times and Rolling Stone. Much of the tone of such writing is personal, confessional, full of macho bellicosity and show-biz put-on (Scheer acknowledges: "One of the ironies of celebrity is that you can probably advance your career by taking outrageous positions"). Scheer thinks of himself as a meticulous, aggressive fact gatherer, not a user of dubious means.

But though now an "access journalist," Scheer is not really housebroken. Attending his first Georgetown dinner party with a columnist, he relates: "I couldn't believe the conversation. Most journalists of power are part of a culture that is almost all 'off the record,' constantly swimming in a sea of information the rest of us don't get to see." If Scheer himself heard something of import at a dinner party, he would "violate that civilized behavior and maybe not get invited to any more parties." On the same grounds, he asserted his right to break confidences. These remarks enraged the Times's Washington bureau.

Keeping Secrets. The sea of information that Scheer imagines floating through Georgetown drawing rooms is not all that tidal, or ignored; access journalists fish rewardingly in such waters. Scheer seems to have confused "off the record" (which cannot be printed) with "not for attribution," where the sources cannot be named. But he nonetheless thinks the Washington press elite too cosily keeps secrets it should not.

His editor, Bill Thomas, still admires Scheer's abilities but "can't agree with his right to break confidences or to reveal sources he promised not to reveal. He's not going to behave that way in work he does for us, and we're not going to print anything got that way." Scheer says: "I accept the rules, I accept the restraints." He does not think he has been co-opted, even if the Times job did enable him at the age of 40 to buy the first real bed he has ever owned. He happily finds himself, and old colleagues from his radical and poor days like John Leonard and Seymour Hersh of the New York Times, able to get their "views printed in the mass media that would have ruled them out in the '50s and '60s." Access journalists have to live by more rigid rules than the fiercely "honest" radical journalists for whom, in more tumultuous times, the morality of righteous anger was enough.

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