America is a land without heroes these days. Indeed, we have become almost obsessed with the idea that there is no such thing as heroism. Our journalism, once full of breathless stories about the Herculean efforts of powerful men and the selfless acts of ordinary folk, has become mostly an exercise in debunkery. (Remember the reprehensible efforts of Sidney Blumenthal and the Nation to accuse George Bush and Bob Dole of cowardice, not bravery, during wartime?) Biographies, which used to follow the model of Parson Weems’s hagiographic life of George Washington, seek instead to cut their subjects down to size.
And now, it appears, our law-enforcement agencies are following suit. Did a security guard named Richard Jewell spot a suspicious package at Centennial Park during the Atlanta Olympics and immediately hurry people away from it, thus saving countless lives? This may not exactly have been heroic, but it was a very, very good thing, the sort of thing that Jewell and his family could have been proud of for the rest of his life. Instead, the FBI took one look at this overweight fellow desperate to spend his life enforcing the law and said: killer.
It had no evidence. None at all. In fact, the geography of Centennial Park told the tale; Jewell could not have gotten from the phone where a warning call about the bomb was made to the spot where he was standing when he saw the bomb in time. No matter. He fit some ludicrous, psychobabblical “profile” of a mad bomber conjured up by the wizards at Quantico — you know, the resourceful witch-doctors you saw figure out who a mass murderer was from almost no evidence but their brilliant psychological insights in The Silence of the Lambs. But The Silence of the Lambs was a movie.
And so the FBI destroyed Richard Jewell’s life. It did so first by pursuing him with no real cause, and second by being either so lax or so irresponsible as to allow word that he was a suspect to leak to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and NBC. Upon getting the tip that the FBI suspected somebody – – just suspected somebody — the Journal and Constitution published an “Extra” and NBC hit the air with puppy-dog excitement at a big scoop.
And this simple 33-year-old unmarried man living with his mother had his mother’s house turned upside down and his innocence called into question by one of those horrible journalist wolf-packs that look for all the world like a lynch mob. “For 88 days,” Jewell said in his halting and moving statement last week, “I felt like a hunted animal.”
But worse than the public exposure and the private inconvenience must have been the icy, sleep-depriving terror Jewell surely felt. He didn’t commit a terrible crime, but with the FBI clearly so eager to pin it on him, who knew what evidence they might “find,” what slender reed they might choose to hang an entire case on?
To be faced with injustice in a country you once thought just is a terrible, terrible thing. And that is what Richard Jewell went through for three months — three months during which the FBI had every reason in the world to tell him and the public he was no longer a suspect. It never did. It fell to the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta to release Jewell from the tortures of his own mind and the disgrace into which he had been cast.
The FBI’s conduct in this case is repugnant and deserving of congressional scrutiny for various reasons. First, it is probably true that FBI field agents and FBI headquarters in Washington weren’t directing this investigation. The Olympics offered the biggest terrorist target in years, and the games began two weeks after TWA Flight 800 exploded over Long Island. The goings-on at the Olympics were not simply a law-enforcement matter; they were a profound political issue that fell smack-dab in the middle of Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign. Surely there was a White House-Justice Department task force made up of senior government officials. Surely no move was made on Jewell without some consultation with FBI director Louis Freeh’s office, Janet Reno’s office — and the White House.
And what a suspect Jewell must have seemed! A fat, unmarried loser living with his mother! “The great white defendant,” as Tom Wolfe called the dream of every New York prosecutor in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Men like Richard Jewell have no interest group to demonstrate on their behalf — an Arab suspect would have raised complaints about a witch hunt, for example. And if it were just some loser, if the bombing weren’t a geopolitical incident, then Clinton could return to his happy-face campaign in time to talk his soothing nonsense about “building a bridge to the 21st century.”
Don’t worry about Jewell, cool heads around Washington and New York have been saying all week. This is the best thing that ever happened to him. He’ll make a million dollars. This, again, is simply a way of wooing us into somnolence, of luring us into forgetting that a severe injustice was done that must be addressed. Because it allows everybody involved to escape responsibility and culpability.
Immediately upon Jewell’s exoneration, media watchers and press people fell all over themselves seeking to place the blame on the FBI. “There was nothing we could do,” they said, “once we were told who the suspect was. And we reported the truth. He was a suspect. This is certainly a shame.” No. It was a crime. It may not have been a crime in the formal sense, but it was a crime in the moral sense. The editors of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the majordomos at NBC News are responsible for the fact that the world came to know an innocent man as a suspect in one of the crimes of the century. Are they having trouble sleeping? Have they, perhaps, even given one hint of a thought to resigning to show they understand the gravity of their actions?
Well, maybe they were struck by pangs of conscience late at night, but clearly nobody’s quitting nothing. And why should they? We now live in a country where the attorney general announces that the buck stopped with her on the Waco fire that left 81 dead and stays happily in her job after being lionized in the press for — for what? For taking responsibility? She took no responsibility. This week, the attorney general assured us that she had launched an inquiry “to make sure we are held accountable.” We’ll believe in that accountability if someone — someone high up — loses his job. We already know better than to expect any resignations.
Of course, the attorney general works for a man, William Jefferson Clinton, whose entire public life is an exercise in the avoidance of accountability and responsibility. He lies, he demagogues, he stonewalls. And he gets away with it. Because he is part of — the primary representative of — a new culture in which heroes are turned into villains so that the mediocre can live with consciences untroubled by their mediocrity, their careers unmarked by accountability, their jobs unburdened of responsibility.
