Just a month ago I invoked the name of Richard Jewell in a column that discussed whether the news media should publicly name suspects who have not been arrested or charged with a crime.
The piece had to do with the recent murder of a local boy and how some area news organizations named a “person of interest” in the case and others held off until the man’s attorney held a press conference to decry the situation.
I brought up Richard Jewell in that July 29 column because his was an extreme, and extremely painful, example of what can happen when someone is identified as a suspect in a heinous act, with no accompanying charge, and then is cleared of official suspicion.
I say “official suspicion,” because I’m not sure Richard Jewell ever got his life back after the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta, where he worked as a security guard and was initially hailed as a hero for saving lives before being cast as villain by law enforcement and news media.
Sure, he received financial settlements from some large news outlets that he felt wronged him in the nearly three months it took for officials to proclaim his innocence.
But were money and public statements enough to clear him, to wipe away what happened to him?
“I felt like a hunted animal, followed constantly, waiting to be killed. After 88 days of hell, it’s hard to believe it’s finally over,” a Morris News Service article quoted him saying at the time.
I write about Richard Jewell again today because he was in the headlines last week.
This time, it was because his life was truly, officially, finally over.
News reports say that Jewell, a former sheriff’s deputy in west Georgia, had been sick, at home, since earlier this year to deal with health problems stemming from diabetes. Last Wednesday, when his worried wife couldn’t reach him on the phone, she left work to check on him and found him dead on the floor of their bedroom. He was 44.
The short Associated Press news obituary in The Courier-Journal capably covered the basics of Jewell’s renown, but I think his life deserves more than a cursory 10 paragraphs.
I’d like to think that he found peace after the “Crossfire” treatment of him abated, after his front-page status waned. But I don’t know that that ever occurred.
I found a good piece about Richard Jewell from cbsnews.com, taken from interviews he did with Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes.” The 2002 story contained these observations by Jewell, six years after the bombing that made him a household name, and the removal of suspicion that didn’t seem to change much:
” ‘You’d be surprised,’ he says, ‘to know how many people come up to me and will still nudge me and say, ‘Hey, so tell me, did you really do it?’ That question is still asked.’ ” He noted that at the grocery store, people still pointed and stared and whispered his name.
” ‘When you come out to get in your, your car in the morning, you walk around it and look under it. And you look around the parking lot to see if somebody’s sitting in a car.’ ”
” ‘I don’t know what a hero’s treated like,’ he says, ‘but my mother and I have never been treated like that.’ ”
No, instead, as the FBI hauled off his mother’s food containers and Disney tapes for examination, late-night host Jay Leno riffed on Richard Jewell by calling him the Una-Doofus and his mother the Una-Momma.
One of the striking things in that same article was the sentence, “As the weeks went by, the torment by the media turned to ridicule.”
That snail’s pace belonged to 1996.
In 2007, given the “viral” nature of both our technology and our sensibility, it would take maybe a day.
Let’s look at last week’s news:
Until Monday, U.S. Sen. Larry Craig was known as a rock-ribbed, tough-talking conservative from Idaho. By Wednesday, after the news broke that he had pleaded guilty to lewd moves in a Minneapolis men’s room a couple of months ago, his public-john hijinks and his declarations that “I’m not gay, I have never been gay” were set to both “Dragnet”-like re-enactments and zippy video productions that placed him squarely as a Friend of Dorothy alongside the late, great Freddie Mercury and, well, Dorothy — Judy Garland, complete with Toto, in a video I saw.
Witness the unfortunate young woman who represented South Carolina in the Miss Teen USA contest. During last weekend’s interview portion of the pageant, she uttered the most incomprehensible set of words in English ever captured on tape — topping even some of the President’s more impenetrable utterances — about, of all things, education. By the first of the week, she was all over the place — print, ‘net, video, live — saying what she said, saying what she meant to say, even having an animated Barbie doll mouth speak sensibly for her.
Imagine what would happen with Richard Jewell in today’s climate.
I’ll make the argument that Sen. Craig is fair game, because he is a public figure, someone who ran for office, who knew the territory, who pleaded guilty, and was ripe for news coverage and comedic satirizing of recent events because of a public persona and voting record that put him at great odds with the behavior, and what it suggests, that got him busted by the cop in the next stall.
I’ll even make the argument that Miss South Carolina placed herself in a situation that she knew, or hoped, could put her on the public map in a big way, although not in the big way that happened, so we should save our crocodile tears when they come to her, too.
But Richard Jewell was different.
Events over which he had no control, in which he played no foul or pro-active part, placed this private citizen in the withering gaze and glare of big law enforcement and big media, when neither was doing its job particularly well. What happened to him was brutal.
Bob Steele, values and ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center and think-tank, wrote in October 1996: “Too many journalists were overzealous in pursuing Jewell and exhuming his background. Too few journalists were aggressive in examining law enforcement officials and investigating the strength of their case against Richard Jewell. The watchdog was wearing blinders.”
When I asked him last week whether any lessons had been learned from Richard Jewell’s case, Steele said, “Sure, journalists learned some key lessons. At the top of the list: to not rely so quickly and heavily on the assertions of authorities.”
I’d like to believe everyone had learned something from Richard Jewell, but I’m not sure that’s the case. Since his time in the sun, we have witnessed too many other police and media feeding frenzies that have been, in Richard Jewell’s words, “like piranha on a bleeding cow.” I wrote about another one just last month.
Now, his sun has set.
The New York Times ran this un-ironic headline on his news obituary:
“Richard Jewell, 44, Hero of Atlanta Attack, Dies.”
I like that, but I think the headline that appeared in The Courier-Journal is more reflective of Richard Jewell’s time on Earth:
“Guard wrongly linked to bombing dies.”
