Days of Grace (4 page)

About five weeks later, Doug sent Jeanne and me a touching letter about what he called “the fiasco in New York,” in which he confessed to “the disturbance in my [Doug’s] soul caused by my role in the experience.” Nevertheless, he believed that “this traumatic event, and my role in it, were meant to be. The Lord, as my mother used to explain when logic was illusive, sometimes works in mysterious ways.”

I couldn’t bring myself to blame Doug himself for anything, and I certainly didn’t have him in mind when I told the news conference that someone had “ratted” on me. Still, something in his letter didn’t set well with me. Although he surely hadn’t intended it in his letter, he had identified the role of the press, specifically
USA Today
, with the Lord. I was pretty certain at the time that Jesus Christ or Jehovah was not on the staff of that newspaper. In his appeal to scripture I thought I saw a claim to the divine right of the press. I am a firm believer in the freedom of the press, and in the First Amendment, broadly construed. I knew more than a little about the history of press censorship in the United States from John Peter Zenger down to our time. But I was still angry every time I thought about what the press had done to me.

Was I justified in claiming that I had a right to privacy? Or was
USA Today
justified in asserting its privilege? For the record, the newspaper had acted with some deliberation. The editors had decided at about eleven o’clock on Tuesday evening, the day before my announcement, not to carry the story. The decision had involved not simply Policinski but also Peter Prichard, the editor of the paper. With some accuracy,
USA Today
could assert, and did assert, that it never broke the story. Once I had made my decision, the newspaper enjoyed only a minor scoop of sorts. At one o’clock, before my conference, it sent the story to the newspaper’s international edition, which mainly reaches Europe and Asia. The story was also sent to the Gannett News Service, which supplies a chain of eighty newspapers, including
USA Today
, as well as Cable News Network (CNN). “Tennis
great Arthur Ashe has AIDS,” the item began, “he will announce Wednesday afternoon at a New York press conference.”

No one could doubt, however, who had forced my hand. To my surprise, and my satisfaction, this aspect of my announcement generated great controversy. More than seven hundred letters reached
USA Today
on the issue of my right to privacy, and about 95 percent vehemently opposed the newspaper’s position. In other newspapers, the story created less of a stir but still attracted a suprising number of letters and comments, often angrily expressed. “I didn’t want to turn on the television or read a newspaper ever again,” a woman in Indianapolis wrote. “I cried last night, and I’m crying today.… Shame on
USA Today
.” “I think
USA Today
is a villain this morning,” one man from Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote. From a man in Sioux City, Iowa: “It seems to me that this story would be something I’d read in the grocery store sleaze journalism department, not
USA Today
.” A man in Topeka, Kansas: “Linking AIDS with a public figure is titillating but rarely newsworthy. There is no compelling reason in this case to reveal Ashe has AIDS.”

Among famous tennis players, long accustomed to the ways of the press, at least two had comments. “It’s like the press has given up a touch of humanity,” Chris Evert told a reporter. And Billie Jean King, who certainly had been burned badly by publicity, remarked knowingly: “It’s almost like your life becomes a competition between members of the media.”

A few readers felt differently. If Ashe had disclosed his condition earlier, a man from Huntsville, Alabama, wrote, “he might have saved a lot of people, including Magic Johnson. Because he is such a notable individual, especially in the black community, he could have done a lot of good work for minorities, since we make up 12 percent of the population, but 29 percent of those with AIDS.” And another man, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, declared that Ashe “should have come out earlier and made his announcement
when he discovered it or at least sooner than he did. Maybe he felt that his privacy would be invaded. I feel at the same time that AIDS needed a spokesman.” A woman in Salem, Oregon, wrote the newspaper to “completely support your story on Arthur Ashe. He was not secretive about his life-threatening heart problem and the whole thing about his particular situation is the stigma attached. That stigma is the thing that needs to be changed.… I thank you for running the story.”

A woman in St. Louis, Missouri, probably speaking for a lot of people, testified both to the solid reputation that
USA Today
had built in the few years of its existence and to the complexity of the issue. “You are really taking a public beating for breaking the Arthur Ashe story,” she observed. “Good luck, and maybe something good will come of this somehow.”

As the adverse criticism rolled in to
USA Today
(with 481 telephone calls, most of them negative, and 60 canceled subscriptions by 7:00 p.m. the following day), its editor took to its pages to defend the role of the newspaper in the affair. Not to have followed up the lead, argued Prichard, would have been to help me keep my secret. “Generally,” he insisted, “I think it’s a mistake for journalists to keep secrets—or to protect some friends who happen to be public figures, but not others.” Citing some famous instances of the American press keeping a secret, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralysis or Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, he insisted that such a “conspiracy of silence has not served the public. Ashe is not a public official, but for many people, young and old, he’s probably as influential as any president.” By sharing the story, “Ashe and his family are free of a great weight.”

I was flattered by his assessment of my influence, and by the comparisons to Roosevelt and Wilson, if only through our various infirmities. But my family and I did not now feel ourselves free of a burden. Camera, for one, had not been aware of any weight at all, but now had to assume one. Jeanne and I may have put down one heavy weight,
but we had certainly picked up another, and one far more imposing.

One good result, at our expense but worthwhile on the whole, was the spirited discussion of the rights of the press and the right to privacy that echoed in the media itself. Inevitably certain cases were brought up. These were not references as arcane as Roosevelt and Wilson but of more recent vintage, about what the press had done to certain people in the name of its vaunted rights. Some had been presidential candidates such as Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and Jerry Brown. Hart seemed to dare the reporters to find out something untoward about him, but Clinton’s accuser was paid (reportedly $100,000) and prompted to tell her story of alleged marital infidelity on national television, to some 21 million viewers, according to
The New York Times
. Again on national television, Jerry Brown was accused by two men, unidentified and disguised, of allowing drugs to be used in his home while he was governor of California, even though the accusation seemed poorly founded. Then there was the case of William Kennedy Smith, of the Kennedy family, accused of rape and tried in a court of law; and of his alleged victim, whose name was revealed by one of the three major television networks in contravention of established journalistic practice concerning the victims of rape. And Senator Brock Adams of Washington, accused in the Seattle
Times
by eight women of sexual harassment—eight women who were not identified by the newspaper.

In the days that followed my announcement, several other newspapers, journalists, and organizations joined in the debate, quite apart from the many ordinary citizens who wrote to magazines and newspapers to express their opinion.
The New York Times
reported “a wave of public criticism of news organizations that was joined by some who have normally been among the press’s staunchest champions.” And indeed the executive director of the reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press said of the position taken by
USA Today
, “My visceral reaction was that this is the kind of thing that’s going to get us regulated.”

Several writers who defended my position used a special term—“outed”—to describe what had been done to me. The term refers to the growing practice among militant gays of deliberately publicizing the names of well-known individuals who are homosexual but live “in the closet.” The aim, as I understand it, is both to discourage hypocrisy and to increase the power of gays by showing how pervasive gay culture really is. Ellen Goodman, the respected columnist and associate editor of the Boston
Globe
, called my case “the medical equivalent of an outing.” She also called Policinski’s explanation “pretentious.” Another syndicated columnist, DeWayne Wickham, wrote that I deserved “the same privacy considerations” routinely given to rape victims; like them, I “should not be twice victimized by being made to suffer the harsh glare of the public spotlight.” Michael Olesker in the Baltimore
Sun
declared that my privacy had been violated “because we in America live in a state of constant feeding frenzy now. Gossip is our snack food. The need for empty caloric titillation never goes away, it only arrives in a different wrapping each new morning.”

Anna Quindlen, a syndicated columnist for
The New York Times
, eloquently went back and forth, caught in a dilemma that was evidently heartfelt. “I am disquieted by the Arthur Ashe story,” she wrote. “I can’t help but feel that in the medical sense we outed him, a practice that, in the sexual sense, I deplore. That’s the human being talking. The reporter understands: public figure, big news.” And: “Privacy, privacy. The white light of the press and the closed doors of our homes are two of the most deeply prized aspects of our lives as Americans. It just so happens that … they are often in direct opposition to each other.” Raymond R. Coffey, editor of the editorial page of the Chicago
Sun-Times
, conceding that his position would be counted “treason” in some quarters, supported me. “What the news media (most specifically
USA Today
) did to Arthur Ashe,” he argued, “was, in my view, something for all of us to be ashamed of.” To Jonathan Yardley in the Washington
Post
,
the editors of
USA Today
had gone after the story “with all the fury of a cur attacking a T-bone because the story had sensational potential. That Ashe had long ago ceased to be a ‘public figure’ as anyone in his right mind would interpret the term was entirely beside the point; the point was that red meat was there to be eaten.”

Despite all of these vigorous attacks on the approach taken by
USA Today
, however, support for its position among editors and other journalists was clearly strong. One poll of seven editors who were then visiting Washington for the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors revealed that six of the seven would have acted as
USA Today
had done. An editorial in
The New York Times
accused me of aiming my “barbs at the wrong target.” Instead of being annoyed with the person who had put out the word about my condition, or with
USA Today
, I should have aimed at “the cruel and benighted public attitudes that compelled Mr. Ashe to keep his disease secret for three years.” Needless to say, I considered the
Times
’s position self-serving.

The issue of privacy is far more important than one would think. The U.S. Constitution does not mention privacy, but the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution. A long essay in the
Times
, prompted specifically by what had happened to me, pointed out that in a 1965 decision,
Griswold
v.
Connecticut
, the Supreme Court had validated the idea of a constitutional basis to the right to privacy. In that case, the state of Connecticut had tried to bar the sale of contraceptives; but the Supreme Court ruled that the law violated the privacy of married couples.
Roe
v.
Wade
, allowing abortion, has been one of the most controversial decisions of the Supreme Court in my lifetime, and few people know that the court based its decision on the concept of the right to privacy. Laws against abortion, according to the court, violate the right to privacy of women who happen to be pregnant.

Nevertheless, the court had definitely been on the permissive side in supporting the right of journalists to report
on events in the lives of public figures. One of the most dubious decisions, I think, was that involving the young man who sued the San Francisco
Chronicle
after it published a news article referring to his having helped stop someone from trying to kill Gerald Ford, then president of the United States. Instead of enjoying his status as a hero, the man had to cope with his inadvertent “outing” by the
Chronicle
. The paper reported that he was gay, and that was how his family found out he was gay. The man sued the newspaper, and lost. He had become a public figure when he tried to save the life of the president; therefore, he was fair game for the press.

The press, in effect, has to decide what is fair and what is not. It has to discipline itself. Obviously I thought that one important newspaper had not done so in my case. I am, when I wear one of my hats, a member of the press as a television commentator on tennis and as an irregular columnist in the Washington
Post
. I see both sides of the issue, but I do not believe that the line between the two sides is nearly as fuzzy as some people suggest. In a column in the
Post
right after my “outing,” I tried to express myself on this point. “I know there are trade-offs in life,” I wrote. “I understand that the press has a watchdog role in the maintenance of our freedoms and to expose corruption. But the process whereby news organizations make distinctions seems more art than science. I wasn’t then, and am not now, comfortable with being sacrificed for the sake of the ‘public’s right to know.’ Doctors, lawyers and journalists have gone to jail rather than expose a client or source without his or her permission. Perhaps sportswriters’ organizations should take another look at the currently accepted rationale for making these decisions.”