The Last Debate by Jim Lehrer

cheering, or other noise to deal with. The only people in the auditorium with the candidates and the panelists would be the television-camera people and other technicians needed to get it on the air.
    Mike Howley went through the details. The four panelists rotated asking questions. Candidate A got two minutes to answer, Candidate B a minute to respond or rebut. Then came the next question to Candidate B for a two-minute answer, Candidate A for a one-minute rebuttal, and on and on in precise rotation for some eighty-two minutes. Then each candidate had two minutes for a closing statement directly to camera. The order of everything would be determined by a drawing.
    “What if one of them says something outrageous—namely Meredith—and Greene wants to jump and slap him back?” Barbara asked.
    “Can’t happen,” Mike responded.
    “We can’t ask follow-ups?” Henry asked.
    “Nope. One of you could follow up another’s question in the next round, but that is it.”
    There was a moment of annoyance.
    “Well, this is a stupid way to do things,” Henry said. “I do not like these rules at all.”
    “I don’t either,” Barbara said, looking right at Mike Howley. “Let’s just ignore ’em. What if we go out there tomorrow night and you say to those two candidates, ‘Mr. Meredith … Mr. Greene, we are going to get out of your way. For the next ninety minutes you can talk spontaneously about the issues confronting this country today and how you differ in your approaches to them. You can do it in any way and under any rules or guidelines you like. The four of us on this distinguished panel, us distinguished New Arrogants, are going to just sit back with the rest of the American people and just watch and listen.’ ”
    “Great idea, but no way,” Joan said.
    Henry said: “Good, no way. I came here to ask some questions. I want to ask some questions.”
    Barbara said: “I guess Meredith would just start talking and preening and lying, and the governor would be made to look like a stupid ass again, as always.”
    Howley said: “Some might argue also that there’s an issue of credibility and integrity here for
us.
We all are here as invited guests, as professionals willing to contribute our services on behalf of voter education and edification. We accepted the terms, the rules of the debate, when we accepted the invitation. It would be professionally irresponsible to pull a stunt like that.”
    Then he said: “How about we look at the menus and order some dinner?”
    There was an immediate consensus in favor of doing so.

    I came to my Williamsburg reporting assignment in a four-door Toyota Corolla rented from Avis at the Newport News–Williamsburg International Airport. So what? you (and Howley in the Appendix ) might say. Undernormal circumstances I would agree that this kind of I-was-there information from a reporter is irrelevant. The problem is that as much as I abhor it, my movements and methods became a minor story within the so-called Media Critics’ world in the course of my reporting. Some unfair and nasty charges were leveled at me and they began with that rent-a-car.
    The New American Tatler
magazine paid for the car. I have my Nations Bank, USAir, Visa, and other receipts—including the frequent-flyer-miles credit form—to prove it. The charge that I was brought into Williamsburg on a private jet by some sinister person or group of sinister persons and then chauffeured around in the company of armed security people affiliated with the private security firm working for Meredith is absurd, ridiculous, a lie. The snide fantasy suggestions, for instance, that appeared in
Fortune
, a once reputable publication, that I was part of a “still shadowy and unknown conspiracy” or “possibly the journalistic front man for an effort to subvert democratic systems” would be laughable if not so potentially damaging to me and my career.
Fortune
refused to print a correction and I still am not sure where