The Last Debate by Jim Lehrer Page A

all of that came from and why. But I am sure of my movements and actions in those hours leading up to the debate itself.
    I came to Virginia from Bloomington, Indiana, where I had gone in pursuit of a story we at the
Tatler
had preslugged “The Violence Teachers.” I had gone into it already incensed and appalled by the emotional cripples who coach big-time college basketball, the grown men who throw towels and chairs and vulgarisms at referees, fans, opposition coaches, and even their own players and members of their own families. My blood was now at a full boil over what I had found out about those foul-mouthed bully showoffs and the school administrators and alumni who tolerated and encouraged them. I hated to interrupt my boil, but I also had my obligations to my editor, Jonathan Angel, and the magazine. And the idea of going behind the scenes of a presidential debate was intriguing. The call from Jonathan about Williamsburg was a last-minute affair. He had other writers on the presidential campaign itself, but he wanted me—“somebody with your touch for irony and the personal” is the flattering way he put it, frankly—to go with an idea of doing a “behind-the-faces-and-the-postures” piece about this important event. Another rationalization for me was that a brief respite from my anger at the imbecile coachesand what they were doing to encourage and foster violence and disrespect among the young people of this country might be good for my blood pressure—and thus my health.
    The Newport News—Williamsburg airport was a pleasant surprise. It turned out to be a small architectural jewel of a place with a feel and ambience that was more like that of a museum of modern art than of an airport. There were Windsor-style chairs in the phone booths and an atrium in the center that brought the sun down on the waiting-room area filled with wooden garden benches. Across the ceiling in the main ticketing hallway hung eight-feet-tall colored banners with the arty, shadowed portraits and signatures of great Americans/Virginians of history—George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Wythe, George Mason, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and even Pocahontas, among others. The building itself—a brick base with silver support beams and glass halfway up and across the top—bore the mark of a famous architect. I did not take the time to check, but it would not surprise me to find that it was the work of a Pei, Johnson, Jacobsen, Venturi, or one of the other great ones. The only things lacking were customers and flights. United, American, and USAir each had only a handful of small-plane commuter flights from the three Washington airports and places like Philadelphia and Raleigh-Durham.
    I came in from Pittsburgh on a USAir 737, one of the few big-plane flights into Newport News–Williamsburg. I arrived just after five P.M. on Saturday. (Yes, I plead guilty to having flown first-class, which was in my contract with the
Tatler.
It is business-class for foreign flights.) I rented the Toyota and drove less than ten minutes east on Interstate 64 to the Omni–Newport News Hotel, where the Meredith campaign was headquartered. The Greene campaign entourage was only a few blocks away on the other side of the interstate in a Ramada Inn. The plan was for the candidates to come to Williamsburg, less than thirty minutes west, on Sunday evening shortly before the debate.
    A postdebate story in
The Washington Morning News
(Howley’s paper, please remember) claimed I was taken immediately “like royalty” to Meredith’s suite at the Omni, where I was “massaged and messaged” and otherwise set up to do a flattering piece about Meredith, a rarity thus far in the entire national press coverage of the campaign. Not true. I wentto the ninth-floor suite of Jack Turpin, a man I had never met before, and asked permission to be present when Meredith rehearsed for the debate that evening. I had been told there was going