Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Read Online Free PDF Page B

point of view impede the search for facts.
    But I do try to cultivate the appearance of objectivity, mainly through the technique of understatement, avoidance where possible of editorial comment, above all letting the undertakers, or the Spock prosecutors, or the prison administrators pillory themselves through their own pronouncements. “When are you going to get angry?” a friend asked after reading a draft of my article about the Famous Writers. Never, I answered; it is not in my sweet nature to lose my temper, especially in print.
    LIBEL. Many of my students lived in perpetual dread of committing the murky crime of libel, and were forever anxiously asking whether some statement or characterization in a paper was “libelous.” I begged them not to worry their pretty heads over this, because should one of their efforts be accepted for publication the author would be subjected to the dubious benefit of counsel from the publisher’s libel lawyers.
    To the extent that I have had dealings with this curious subspecies of the genus lawyer, which breeds and proliferates mainly in the swamplands of Eastern publishing centers, I have concluded that their main function is best summed up by the title of a recent best-seller: Looking Out for Number One . Like the prison psychiatrist who habitually overpredicts “violent behavior” by inmates in his care—fearing for his own skin should a violent crime be committed by a prisoner he has cleared as safe to release—the libel lawyer will go to wonderful lengths to identify passages in a manuscript that he asserts might give rise to a lawsuit. Thus in one effortless operation he protects himself and garners a fat fee for doing so.
    To illustrate: After my manuscript of The Trial of Dr. Spock was submitted, I received a six-page single-spaced letter from Knopf’s libel lawyers listing thirty-four potentially libelous statements, beginning with “Page 1, para 1: it is alleged that Mitchell Goodman, Michael Ferber and Marcus Raskin were co-defendants with Dr. Spock and Rev. Coffin, which would be libelous if untrue....” Some other gems from this bizarre document: “The statement that Rev. Coffin spent time in Southern jails is libelous and should be deleted unless it can be verified from court records.” “The statement that Bertrand Russell was prosecuted is libelous and should be deleted unless it can be proven true from court records.” “The statement that Dwight Macdonald said he was ashamed to be an American, as used in the context of this passage, may be libelous as charging a federal crime.” And my favorite, from a passage in which I was describing a particularly boring moment in the trial: “It is alleged that Mitchell Goodman’s lawyer ‘perhaps was dozing off.’ Since he was supposedly defending Goodman at the trial, this is libelous and should be deleted.”
    “But what am I supposed to DO with this pile of junk?” I wailed to my editor at Knopf. Shrieking with laughter, he said I would have to go over it with the lawyer, which I did, patiently elucidating as I went: “Page 1, para 1—that’s from the indictment, which lists the co-defendants.... All the newspapers carried stories about Coffin’s imprisonment in Southern jails—of which he was immensely proud.... Bertrand Russell describes his prosecution in his autobiography....” And so on. “Oh, then that’s all right, that can stand,” the lawyer would respond to each of my explanations. The upshot was that not a single change was made in my manuscript as a consequence of the lawyer’s labors. How much would he have charged for this memo? I asked a lawyer friend. He took it in his hands and weighed it thoughtfully; upward of a thousand dollars, he would guess, maybe two thousand.
    I am often asked if I have ever been sued for libel in the course of my writing career; the answer is no, alas. I have been threatened with suit a few times—after The American Way of Death came out, executives of