The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon

happened to be baring their souls, everything they had to say—everything relevant, that is—was in the paper the next day. And—at least before the eminent graduate of Columbia J School came to do a better job than I—the halls of power in Albany, New York, were filled with people who wished they had never met me or that, when they met me, they had kept their mouths shut tight.
    When, therefore, my editor, Richard Harmon, told me to spend a few days researching who Sharon Solarz was and what she had done, I experienced an instant regret at having gotten involved in the story in the first place. The hell with that geek who called me with his anonymous tip, was my feeling. What I said to my editor, however, was:
    “Rick, they’re about to put a generator in Saugerties that’s like to raise the ambient temperature of the Esopus enough to kill the entire trout population. Let me get to that, will you? You’re wasting me on some ancient hippie history.”
    It was not a good choice of words. For one thing, my editor promptly made a mental note—at least I believe he did—to assign the J schoolgraduate to write on the ambient temperature of the Esopus, which he’d known nothing about till I mentioned it. For another, however, my editor, at fifty-five, defined himself precisely by the time that I had called “ancient history,” in particular by the reporting he’d done in Saigon when his father edited the
Times.
And, like a lot of people around Albany at the time, in 1996 Harmon was already looking toward Kathy Boudin’s 2001 parole date, and planned to use every chance he got to keep the Weather Underground in the negative glare of publicity.
    But lastly, and most importantly, Rick knew something that I, as it turned out, was too young to know: that an important portion of the paper’s demographic—forty-five to sixty—would read anything connected to the antiwar movement, which, for or against, had played a central role in their lives, and that stories of the last radical fugitives always sold issues. So and therefore, in the face of my disagreement, Rick let a moment of thought play behind his gray eyes, and then inquired politely whether or not I actually wanted my job, because if I didn’t, there were plenty of others who did. To my shock and embarrassment, he used not one, but two four-letter expletives in this sentence, both beginning with an
f.
Nonetheless, I took the man at his word, and seriously entertained the issue, to no small effect. For in fact, a few moments later, it emerged from our conversation that yes, I did want the job, at least enough to sit there quietly, agreeing with a man whose sole qualification to do his job was having inherited the goddamn business from his father, who was also an idiot. In brief, having enthusiastically agreed to research the Sharon Solarz story, I left my editor’s office and returned to my desk, vowing to go to business school, build up a multinational communications empire, buy the paper, and fire his ass.
    But only briefly. Some of Harmon’s sources were so old that I couldn’t even get them on Nexis, and I had to go for the first time in my career to find actual printed sources in the document morgue. By the time I returned, sneezing, the question that most bothered me was how I was going to stay awake through the research.
    But in the event, this particular history I was learning that night, it turned out not to leave much room for sleep at all.
    For one thing, it didn’t seem at all like it would be on the final, you know? I mean, I know how they teach this stuff in American schools: aweek on civil rights, a week on Vietnam, then wham! it’s Watergate, and everything’s alright again. Jowly old Nixon humiliated on a global scale, the system has “self-corrected,” and democracy is safe. Never mind that there’s not a damn thing Nixon did that everyone else hadn’t done before, and hasn’t done since—in which, oddly enough, his story and