Vanity Fair's David Friend about investigating the tale of JFK's now-adult love child.
Journalists live to weave stories. Truly obsessed journalists live to weave the perfect story: a narrative laden with human drama or humor or mystery that shimmers with its accumulation of precise detail. And then there are the most obsessed reporters of all, who sometimes also edge toward the foolhardy. They are the ones who live, to their last breath, to obtain the killer scoop—the worldwide exclusive that will throw some permanent kink into the arc of history.
The addiction to the scoop is the reason so many journalists choose to tote that notepad and stanch that hangover and, ignoring a gathering avalanche of doubts, listen so intently to a succession of batty and battier strangers who phone or e-mail or show up in the lobby unannounced to say they know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.
I am one such reporter. Preoccupied with stories like these, I’ve become Vanity Fair’s in-house designee for cold-call wack jobs. A Nazi-hunter on Line 2? Claiming that SS doctor Josef Mengele once sought refuge in Westchester? On a tip like this I once drove up to Bedford Hills with a map, only to find a mailbox marked “Magale”—across from a yeshiva. A man with proof of how George W. Bush really avoided the draft? I once stood with a sinking heart in Manhattan’s Bryant Park and watched an unkempt and belligerent Pennsylvanian, who’d been riding the bus all morning, unfold a patchwork of annotated newsclips and letters, like John Forbes Nash’s toolshed tapestries in A Beautiful Mind.
And then, as it happens, there was that lawyer who phoned up insisting that his client, a former F.B.I. official named Mark Felt, would like to “come out” after 32 years as Watergate’s confidential source, Deep Throat. Sometimes the long shots really do pay off, though who am I to trust, convinced as I am that the Chicago Cubs are due this year?
This, then, is a story about the pursuit of a story. At this magazine we field scores of inquiries every day: from publicists, from freelance writers and photographers, from individuals who traffic in the editorial kudzu of rumor or gossip. Most of these leads come to naught. But this particular story was too outsize to ignore, and the quest to corroborate it took on a life of its own.