1 The Long Arm of Watergate
At twilight, the sky over Lackawanna would glow electric coral, but we kids were savvy enough to know that this spectacle was no gorgeous sunset over Lake Erie. It meant, to use the neighborhood slang, that “they dumped the slag at the plant.” The plant was Bethlehem Steel, the hulking factory covering more than thirteen hundred acres along the shoreline just south of Buffalo; the slag was the molten industrial waste that was poured nightly out of huge vats onto the shoreline or right into the lake. We took this environmental travesty for granted as another daily ritual—like fetching the morning newspaper, the Buffalo Courier-Express, from the side door, and, some eight hours later, doing the same with The Buffalo Evening News.
Just as we believed in steelmaking as a community good—union wages, after all, for more than twenty thousand workers who didn’t need a second income to support a family—we believed what appeared on those front pages. All the explosive issues of the day came to us that way: the Vietnam War, second-wave feminism, civil rights protests, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the deadly National Guard shootings of student protesters at Kent State University. My whole family read the papers, and like many of our neighbors, we watched the nightly CBS newscast anchored by “the most trusted man in America,” Walter Cronkite, whose pessimistic appraisal of the Vietnam War in 1968 dealt a death blow to the American government’s decades-long involvement. (“It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” he told his millions of viewers after the surprise attacks known as the Tet Offensive rocked South Vietnam, and following his own reporting trip there.)
My parents subscribed to both dailies, each owned by a prosperous Buffalo family. One carried Ann Landers’s advice column; the other published her sister, known as Dear Abby. One supported Richard Nixon until nearly the end of his ill-fated and corrupt presidency. The other wanted him gone much sooner. The news all seemed personal, close to home. In these pre-internet days, it didn’t come to us immediately via iPhones in our pockets, but it reached us, and touched us, nonetheless.
When I was in first grade, I was sitting at my desk at Our Lady of Victory Elementary School when our teacher, Sister Romana, a diminutive nun of the Sisters of St. Joseph order, was called out of our classroom. She returned to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot to death in Texas and she was sending us home for the day. Our school sat next to the parish’s grand European-style basilica, which dominated the Lackawanna skyline; here, the assassination of the first Roman Catholic president hit especially hard. My family members, like most of our Lackawanna neighbors, were observant Catholics; my father, a defense attorney, walked the short block to Mass at the basilica and received Communion every morning before heading to his firm’s office in downtown Buffalo. Like my parents, most people in our blue-collar community were Democrats, with plenty of them members of the steelworkers union, though both of my mother’s brothers, a doctor and a lawyer, were Republicans. At home, we talked and argued about all that was happening, with my father as the acknowledged expert on most subjects—everything from the seemingly endless Vietnam War to classic literature—but with opinions flowing freely from all five of us. I was the youngest, and always felt that I had less to contribute, but I was absorbing it all. I was reading the daily newspapers, too, or at least taking in the headlines.
* * *
Then came the Watergate scandal. Like most Americans and many Lackawanna residents, my family was glued to our one television set, a focal point of the living room, as we watched the Senate Watergate hearings, broadcast initially on every network, live and during the daytime hours. Later, the networks rotated coverage and public television replayed the hearings in the evening. You could hardly miss what was happening: 85 percent of households in the United States watched some part of the hearings. This high political drama played out for months as charges of corruption, even criminality, were leveled at Richard Nixon’s administration, kicked off by a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. As the investigation unfolded, the players—Washington politicians—became as compelling and familiar to us as the characters of The Sopranos, or later still, Mare of Easttown, would be to generations several decades on. There was the folksy Sam Ervin, the conservative Democrat from North Carolina and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. There was the senator from Tennessee, Howard Baker, who, although a staunch Republican, put aside partisanship and embraced patriotism when he memorably asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” There was former White House counsel John Dean, the young preppie in his tortoiseshell glasses, who ultimately, and devastatingly, would characterize the scandal and its lie-filled cover-up as “a cancer on the presidency.”
When the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held its hearings, we were riveted by Barbara Jordan’s soaring opening remarks about the Constitution, about being a Black woman in America, and about her obligation to her fellow citizens. It was a real-time lesson in civil rights, racial injustice, and governmental checks and balances. Her authoritative voice commanded attention as she talked movingly about her racial identity, and her mere presence as a Black woman was a stark contrast to the hearings’ parade of white men. “I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake,” Jordan said. “But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’” We could hear her conviction when she added: “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” In 1974, a Black woman member of Congress was unusual enough, but Jordan was even more noteworthy because of this Judiciary Committee role that catapulted her onto the national stage. A lawyer in her late thirties, she was a first-term congresswoman who had grown up in segregated Texas and become the first woman and the first African American elected to Congress from her state.
* * *
My mother, in particular, seemed captivated by her eloquent passion. This admiration affected me. Barbara Jordan was my homemaker mother’s idea of a powerful and accomplished woman of integrity, someone worthy of emulating. At a subconscious level, I took note. I had heard confusingly mixed messages as I was growing up about what a woman should be and do: Get married as soon as possible and have children? Have a successful career, but quit it, as my mother had done when she married? Do some kind of work in the public interest? But now, through the Watergate scandal, of all things, I absorbed an unspoken, but also unmuddied, message: Be like Barbara Jordan. Be brave, be authentic, make a difference, and have the courage of your convictions.
* * *
I was far from alone in my youthful reaction to the hearings. Timothy O’Brien, who would become an investigative business reporter for The New York Times, was twelve years old, attending a science camp in Illinois, where a camp staffer encouraged the youngsters to watch the Senate hearings. The drama and the characters affected Tim, just as they did me. “I remember Sam Ervin saying [of Nixon], when he thought his mic was off, ‘He’s just a goddamn liar,’” O’Brien recalled many years later when I interviewed him for a piece in Columbia Journalism Review. “Those televised hearings gave me one of my first civics lessons about checks and balances and holding power accountable.”
O’Brien and I, and countless other Watergate-era kids, were drawn into our careers—and not just in journalism—by this high-stakes spectacle on Capitol Hill. Sherrilyn Ifill, the prominent civil rights lawyer, recalled that seeing Barbara Jordan’s Watergate appearance on TV changed her life, too: “A woman, a Black woman, with a voice of absolute moral authority … very, very powerful for me in thinking about who I could be as a woman.” Ifill became the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, founded by Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2021, she told Your Hometown podcaster Kevin Burke that Barbara Jordan’s televised prominence was part of “how gender roles … began to open up, particularly in the early seventies.”
* * *
As a teenager, I was living through a period of huge societal change brought about by the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the counterculture revolution. Journalism may not have been as high-profile as civil rights activism as a way to create reform, but as Watergate made abundantly clear, it certainly could be an effective way of holding power accountable.
After all, the dogged investigative reporting of two Washington Post staffers, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, lit the kindling that led to Nixon’s eventual resignation, as they revealed the White House cover-up of the break-in and all kinds of other government malfeasance. Granted, my juvenile understanding of this was somewhat murky; it wasn’t until the movie version of All the President’s Men came out in 1976 that it all came into sharper focus. Journalism began to look downright fascinating as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, in the lead roles as the reporters, dashed from office to underground parking garage, or worked their sources on deadline in the newsroom. The ringing phones and clattering typewriters added to the ambiance of a movie set that uncannily resembled the real-life Post newsroom of that era. Journalism seemed not only crucial for the good of the nation’s democracy but also enticingly glamorous. There were untold numbers of us, the budding journalists of the Watergate generation; we flooded into newsrooms large and small after seeing the movie and connecting it to the real-life history we had witnessed only a few years before.
How could we resist the intrigue? “I wanted to be Robert Redford moving that ceramic pot,” O’Brien recalled, referring to Woodward’s secret signal to his confidential source, jocularly known in the Post newsroom as “Deep Throat.” (That moniker was a play on the reporting term “deep background”—an agreement between reporter and source that is not quite as restrictive as “off the record”—but also a bawdy reference to a then-current pornographic movie.) O’Brien remembers thinking, “Wow, these are the guys that set everything in motion.” I knew exactly what he meant: These two young reporters not only revealed corruption at the highest level of government and played a part in bringing down a corrupt president but also kicked off an intense new era of investigative journalism. And, despite the mostly male newsroom staff on display in the film, it never occurred to me that being a woman would be an impediment to joining this ultra-cool club. Maybe that was another Watergate-era message from seeing Barbara Jordan’s strength and authenticity: Seize your power. It’s certainly notable that a twenty-six-year-old Hillary Rodham also had a Watergate role, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Not long out of Yale Law School, she worked on the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee. Sitting in a windowless hotel room across the street from Congress, Hillary was one of the first to hear the Oval Office tapes that would bring Nixon down. Yes, Watergate’s tentacles reached far and wide.
* * *
During the summer of the Senate hearings, my eldest brother, David, home from college, asked me what I thought I might like to do as a career. We were sitting in his bedroom, which, like my brother Phil’s, featured curtains with a ships-and-maps pattern that evoked Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. (Another unspoken gender message, that boys should be adventurous and set off to see the world? My room, by contrast, featured girly pink gingham, and—what’s galling to me now—it lacked a desk like the big sturdy ones both of my brothers had. In adulthood, I’ve always made sure I had a substantial desk.) I told David what interested me, and what I thought I might be good at. Reading. Words. Knowing what’s going on. Communicating. In one of my life’s more significant moments, my brother looked me in the eye and offered a single word of advice, as if it were perfectly obvious and preordained: “Journalism.” I wasn’t quite sure how to move forward on the suggestion, or even fully sure what it meant.
Luckily, my all-girls high school, Buffalo’s Nardin Academy, had a student newspaper and an inspiring advisor, Joanne Langan. She was married to the school’s headmaster, Michael Langan, who shared my Lackawanna roots and became a mentor, too. Mrs. Langan was an enlightened English teacher who, long before most schools had diversified their reading lists beyond the canon of dead white men, had us reading Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Joyce Carol Oates’s them, and the poems of Maya Angelou. Apparently, she saw something promising in me, and pushed me to put my name forward to edit the student newspaper, Kaleidoscope. The year after Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace (escaping inevitable impeachment and likely conviction), Nardin’s faculty and newspaper staff named me the editor in chief. Classroom 210 became my first newsroom—the first of many—and one of my best friends, Sheila Rooney, was my second-in-command. (We also shared the captaincy of Nardin’s varsity basketball team.) As editor, in addition to making story assignments and ferrying the pasted-up newspaper pages to an off-campus printing plant, I wrote editorials on serious subjects. One reluctantly supported President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon, thus sparing the country endless turmoil and division. Another considered the merits of the court-ordered busing to integrate Buffalo’s schools; this was a controversial topic locally and in many parts of the country.
All the while, I was looking ahead. I had asked my uncle, the managing editor of The Cleveland Press, the evening paper at the other end of Lake Erie, how to get started for real as a working journalist. I was lucky to have a close family member showing me what a career in journalism could look like; even better, it was obvious that Bob Sullivan enjoyed his job, which contrasted with my father’s observation that his own profession, the law, too often was nothing but “drudgery.” My uncle insisted that the best foundation for journalism was a liberal arts education, not an undergraduate journalism degree; I could follow that with a master’s degree in journalism like the one he had earned at Columbia University. I took his advice to heart.
The gender issues at play in the late 1970s for an ambitious girl like me were complicated, though I never stopped to think about them too hard since I was busy listening to music, playing sports, and hanging out with my friends. Maybe I didn’t have the internal language to grapple with the role of women in American life. I knew this much: My mother had given up a promising future as a women’s fashion buyer for a department store to get married and start a family in the 1950s; she was a rising star, scheduled for her first buying trip to Paris and Milan, when she resigned at age thirty to marry my father. Growing up, I was aware that she had some regrets about abandoning her career; but, as an American whose parents were born in Lebanon (soon after immigrating, her father opened a men’s clothing store in Lackawanna, which became the family’s livelihood), she channeled her urges for upward mobility into her children’s lives. She propelled my older brothers toward academic achievement and careers in respected professions. Taking heed, they became a doctor and a lawyer. But she thought I might be best suited to become, as she put it, an “executive secretary.” What she really wanted, it seemed clear, was for me to marry well (someone like my brothers would do fine) and to have children. This double standard, however, had a hidden advantage: Since she was pressing no specific vocation on me, I was forced—and also free—to imagine my own path. My brothers went to prestigious colleges in Massachusetts; I was initially restricted to someplace closer to home. I spent freshman year at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, a Jesuit school with a fine reputation, but one that I was determined to outgrow. I yearned for a major city and a big-name school. After earning close to perfect grades at Le Moyne, I persuaded my parents to let me transfer as a sophomore to Georgetown University; it would appeal to them, I calculated, in that it was also run by Jesuits, the scholarly order of Roman Catholic priests to which my family had close ties.
My plan worked. Suddenly, still a teenager, I was living in a Georgetown University dormitory only a few miles from the sites of those dramatic Capitol Hill scenes that had mesmerized me just a few years earlier during the Watergate hearings. And the big-journalism world of Washington was right there for the taking. Soon I was riding the city bus from campus to a part-time clerk’s job downtown at Gannett News Service. Like a smaller version of the Associated Press, the service provided news to the chain’s newspapers around the country. I did whatever tasks were sent my way, mostly typing articles from the bureau’s Washington correspondents into the computer system for national distribution. Back at school, I was a reporter covering the medical-school beat for The Hoya, the more traditional of Georgetown’s two student newspapers; later, I became the arts editor of The Georgetown Voice, an alternative student newspaper that styled itself after The Village Voice, where I assigned theater and music reviews to student critics.
After my junior year, the Gannett connection paid off. My mentor in the Washington bureau, a generous editor named Anita Sama, helped me get a summer internship at the Niagara Gazette in Niagara Falls, New York, one of the papers in Gannett’s national chain. I might have spent the summer writing concert reviews and feature stories from the compact newsroom, almost within view of the cascading waters of the natural wonder. That’s how my Gazette internship started out. I was having fun, answering to the encouraging young editor for features, Susan LoTempio, and finding it hard to believe I was collecting a paycheck. Getting bylines and hanging around with the Gazette’s wisecracking wordsmiths suited me well.
But then disaster struck, quite literally. In mid-summer, President Jimmy Carter declared the city of Niagara Falls a national disaster area. An environmental calamity was unfolding in the Love Canal neighborhood, where for decades local chemical companies had dumped huge quantities of toxic waste. The long-buried poisons had begun bubbling up in residents’ basements and yards. Children and adults were getting sick, as Gazette reporter Michael Brown had been reporting for years without garnering much attention. Once the chemical leaks and the residents’ illnesses became too obvious to ignore, Love Canal became a huge national news story, and maybe the biggest story ever for the Gazette. The paper’s small staff was so overwhelmed that the paper’s city editor, Dave Pollack, had little choice but to assign me, an inexperienced intern, to cover some aspects of it. He must have been desperate; I didn’t have much confidence, but I stumbled through whatever assignments came my way.
A journalism axiom dictates that there’s “no crying in newsrooms,” but I shed tears that summer. The formidable reporting duo of David Shribman and Paul MacClennan from our big-city competition, The Buffalo Evening News, had scooped us again on yet another important part of the fast-developing Love Canal story. (Shribman, then only in his mid-twenties, was a big talent, and eventually a Pulitzer Prize winner.) I was a competitive person, whether on the basketball court or in the newsroom, so it hurt to have our head handed to us, day after day, at the Gazette. Apparently, my tears of frustration didn’t alienate my bosses or make them think less of me. At the end of the summer, the Gazette’s top editor, Fletcher Clarke, someone I had barely spoken to all summer, called me into his office. He startled me by offering a full-time reporting job—to begin immediately. Since that would have meant dropping out of college, I decided against it, an easy enough call, and went back to Washington for senior year.
* * *
After that summer, I knew that I was in the right field. The Gazette’s job offer and my front-page stories had boosted my confidence. I had an affirming sense, too, that journalists were held in high regard. Not by everyone, of course. Nixon had kept an enemies list that included media people, and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, famously had ranted about journalists as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Roger Ailes, who would help found Fox News two decades later, had given Nixon and his cronies advice on how to depict journalists as out-of-touch liberals, not quite “the enemy of the people” yet, but getting there. The nativist populism that would help elect Donald Trump was festering. With its growing resentment of the press and other supposedly elite institutions, it bubbled under the surface of American society like the toxins at Love Canal. Still, that mindset wasn’t yet pervasive.
Gallup, the public opinion polling company, began measuring trust in the national press in the 1970s. The trust number, already high, ticked upward in the years after Watergate and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the United States’ disastrous involvement in Vietnam, first by The New York Times and then by The Washington Post. The national newspapers were ably performing their watchdog role, the TV networks were following suit, and the vast majority of citizens seemed to appreciate it. In 1976, two years after Nixon’s forced resignation, an impressive 72 percent of Americans had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the press—and the numbers would never again reach that height. Of course, this was also an era in which other institutions were held in relatively high regard, too: schools, churches, business, law enforcement, even government to some extent.
Journalism certainly wasn’t despised; far from it. When I told friends and family members that I was planning to be a reporter, that I’d been the top editor of my high school paper, and that I had gotten paid to write stories about the Love Canal disaster, they seemed impressed. After being wait-listed at Columbia’s graduate school of journalism (a crushing blow, since I had assumed for years that I would get my master’s degree there), I accepted a scholarship at Northwestern University’s highly regarded Medill School. Was journalism school a necessity? Definitely not, but I’ve always been glad I had a master’s degree, had formal education in media law and ethics, and had the chance to spend time in the Chicago area. During one semester, I got to do some reporting from Washington, D.C., for two small newspapers as part of the Medill News Service, in which students worked as national correspondents and had their work published on a near-daily basis. After an internship at one of my hometown dailies, The Buffalo Evening News, turned into a full-time reporting job, I covered hard-news beats—business, county government, public education—and broke my share of stories, including an investigation of financial malfeasance in Erie County government.
By the end of the 1980s, I had been named an assistant city editor, supervising a six-man (yes, all-male) team of politics and government reporters. That was stressful at times; the veteran politics reporter, in particular, didn’t much like taking guidance from an editor barely in her thirties with much less experience than he had. We worked it out, though, and supervising this group meant that I had started my climb up the newsroom management ladder.
Not only was I mostly having fun, reveling in the newsroom atmosphere, but I also felt the reporting and editing work was important for my city and region. We were keeping powerful institutions honest, or at least helping to do so. I got no sense that I had entered a field that most people mistrusted. As the 1990s approached, many local newspapers were financially successful; profit margins well above 30 percent were nothing unusual. And the press was undeniably important in the United States, perhaps not beloved but recognized as vital to the way American democracy functioned. What’s more, journalism offered a viable career path: not a great way to get rich but certainly a way to earn a living wage. As a bonus, it struck me as exceedingly cool.
2 Little Miss Lifestyles Breaks Out
Copyright © 2022 by Margaret Sullivan
