Opening Credits
                              THE RULES ACCORDING TO CLARE
 
       I always tell the same story to the new reporters on their first day.
      It goes like this: Two guys are sitting in a bar bragging about their sexual exploits. As they get drunker and drunker, the conversation becomes more outrageous about how far they’d be willing to go. Would you ever have sex with an animal, one of them asks? Of course not, the other guy replies angrily. What if someone paid you $50 to do it with a dog? That’s ridiculous, he says. How about $500? Same answer. Okay, the first guy says to him, would you have sex with a dog for $5,000? The other guy thinks about that for a while, then asks: “What breed?”
       The point here is that once you ask the question “what breed?” you’ve already crossed over a very important line and can never go back.
       It’s based, I suppose, on the famous old Winston Churchill story. They say Churchill was seated at a dinner party next to a very elegant and beautiful lady. During the meal, he turned to her and asked if she’d be willing to have sex with him if he gave her $1 million. The woman laughed and said sure. Then he asked if she’d have sex with him for $25. “Of course not, what do you think I am?” the indignant woman replied. To which Churchill told her, “Madame, we’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
This is a crucial concept in the news business where I work. Because there is no gray area for a journalist when it comes to honesty and integrity and moral standards. You can’t be just a little bit immoral or a little bit dishonest or a little bit corrupt. There is no compromise possible here.
      Sometimes I tell a variation of the dog story.
      I call it the Woodstein Maneuver.
     The idea is to come up with a new scenario for the Watergate scandal. To speculate on what might have happened if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (“Woodstein!” in the Robert Redford-Dustin Hoffman movie) had not written their stories which led to Richard Nixon’s ouster, but instead gotten hush money to cover up the scandal. What if Nixon had paid them to make it all go away?
      I ask a new reporter to put themselves in Woodward and Bernstein’s place and think about what they would do if offered such a bribe.
      Most of them immediately say they would never take money under any circumstances to compromise a story. I’m not sure if they do because they really mean this or simply say it because they believe it’s the answer I want to hear. A few laughingly say they’d go for the money, but I’m not sure I believe them either. I figure they’re just trying to be outrageous or different.
      Only a few reporters ask the key question.
      The “what breed?” question.
      “How much money?” they want to know.
       Those are the ones I worry about the most.

The most important thing a journalist has is his integrity.

An old newspaperman taught me that once. He said it was the one constant, inviolate truth to remember about this business. More important than all of the scoops, the bylines or the number of press awards you won. “If you ever compromise your integrity, Malloy,” he told me, “you are lost.” I believed that then, and I believe it now.

There’s something else that I have learned too. Integrity is an absolute value. You can’t lose a little bit of your integrity any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. You’re either all in or all out on the integrity issue. And, once you’ve crossed over that irrevocable moral line, you can never go back. No matter how hard you try.

I think about all of this a lot these days. Mostly late at night when I lay awake, replaying all of the events that got me to where I am.

And trying to make some sort of sense out of the incongruity of it all.

The most important thing a journalist has is his integrity.

I lost my integrity somewhere along the way.

And yet I am still a journalist.

                                                                   So what does that say about me? 

                                                                                             Part One

                                                                                     THE MAGIC BULLET  

            We’ve come to know it as the "magic bullet" theory.   

            The magic bullet enters the President’s back, headed downward.at an angle of 17 degrees.  

           It then moves upwards to leave Kennedy's body from the front of his neck – wound number two - where it waits 1.6 seconds, presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left, right, then left .and continues into Connally's body at the rear of his right armpit – wound number three.  

          The bullet then heads downward at an angle of 27 degrees, shattering Connally’s fifth rib and exiting from the right side of his chest – wound number four.

          The bullet then turns right and reenters Connally's body at his right wrist – wound number five.

           Shattering the radius bone, the bullet then exits Connally’s wrist – wound number six - .makes a dramatic U-turn and buries itself into Connally's left thigh – wound number seven -from which it later falls out and is found in almost pristine condition on a stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital. .

          That’s some bullet.

                                                                                          --- From the movie JFK

      
      I met Nikki Reynolds for lunch on a summer afternoon in New York City.

      We were sitting at an outdoor table of a restaurant called Gotham City, on Park Avenue South in the East 20s. The pasta she ordered cost $33. My hamburger was $26.50. The prices weren’t on the menu though. It was the kind of place where if you had to ask the price, you didn’t belong there. Me, I didn’t care how much the lunch cost. Nikki Reynolds was paying.

      Reynolds was a New York literary agent. In another lifetime, when I’d needed a literary agent, she’d been mine. But I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. So I was surprised when she called me up out of the blue and invited me to this lunch.

      “I suppose you’re wondering why I wanted to talk to you today,” she said.

      “Why?” I asked.

      I always like to ask the tough questions first.

      “I have an author with a new book – a nonfiction blockbuster about the John F. Kennedy assassination – that’s going to make big news,” she told me. “It’s very timely too, coming right after all the attention everyone paid to the 50th anniversary of the JFK killing.”

      “Timely,” I said.

      “The basic concept of the book is that more than a half century later, we still haven’t solved the greatest crime in our history. It’s called The Kennedy Connection. Catchy title, huh?

      “Catchy,” I agreed.

      “The book will reveal shocking new information about what really happened that day in Dallas and afterward.”

      “Wait a minute, let me guess,” I said. “Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t really do it, JFK really isn’t dead and both of them are living secretly somewhere right now with Jim Morrison and Elvis.”

      Reynolds sighed. “You know, everyone told me – ‘don’t take this to Gil Malloy. He’s a smart ass, he’s an arrogant, sarcastic son of a bitch - hell, he’s pretty much of an all-around-pain in the ass.’ I keep trying to defend you, Gil. But that’s getting harder and harder to do.”

      “Some days I guess I just wake up kind of cranky,” I shrugged.

      Nikki Reynolds was somewhere in her 50s, but plastic surgery and botox had taken about 10 years of that off of her face. Blonde, pixyish hair and a tight, trim body from lots of workouts at the health club. She was wearing a navy blue pinstriped pants suit; a pink silk blouse open at the collar; and a pair of oversized sunglasses that probably cost even more than the meal we were eating. The Manhattan power broker look. She looked like she belonged at Gotham City.

      I had on a pair of blue jeans, a white T-shirt that I’d washed specially for the occasion and a New York Mets baseball cap. No one else in the restaurant was wearing blue jeans. Or a T-shirt or a baseball cap. When I’d walked in, someone at one of the tables had mistaken me for a busboy. I had a feeling – call it a crazy hunch – that I might be a tad underdressed for this place.

      “Who’s the author?” I asked.

      “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

      I smiled.

      “Right.”

      “No, I’m serious.”

      “Lee Harvey Oswald is alive and a client of yours?”

      “Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.”

      “He had a son?”

      “Yes.”

      I thought about that for a second.

      “I don’t remember anything about Lee Harvey Oswald having a son. Didn’t he have a baby daughter or something with that Russian woman he married?”

      “Oswald had two daughters with Marina, who he married while he was living in the Soviet Union. One of them there before he returned to the U.S. Another baby girl that Marina gave birth to just a few weeks before the assassination in Dallas. There’s never been any mention of a son. Until now.”

      “I don’t understand…”

      “Lee Harvey Oswald had an affair. In New Orleans where he lived in the months before he went to Dallas.”

      “So you’re saying ol’ Lee Harvey was as much of a horndog as JFK, huh?” I laughed.