When They’re Playing Hardball, You Gotta Watch Out for the Curve

When the courtroom’s legal twisting gets too complicated, I fall back on the lessons of my real and simpler trade, political reporting.

Political reporters--the boys and girls on the bus--are a cynical crew. When we made it onto the campaign bus, we were welcomed aboard by veterans who had spent many years reporting on the difference between image and reality in public life.

The instinct of political reporters is to be intensely skeptical, even disbelieving about what they hear and see.

So when I saw the O.J. Simpson defense team on Wednesday apologize to prosecutors for failing to provide the names and statements of more than a dozen witnesses who could potentially undercut the case against Simpson, I saw it as a dirty trick, a last-minute ploy. It reminded me of a candidate unloading a bunch of charges on an opponent the day before the election.

I’m embarrassed to say that I even had doubts when I heard that Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman had been hospitalized with chest pains.

Hodgman’s assistant, Norm Shapiro, said the boss had been working seven days a week since the case began, without a vacation. But I couldn’t stop myself from remembering that Hodgman’s illness prevented Simpson attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. from resuming his powerful opening statement in the morning--a statement the prosecution had sought to delay on Wednesday. Hodgman’s absence also gave the prosecution more time to probe the backgrounds of the defense’s surprise witnesses.

I was reminded of the chief clerk of the Assembly, who was suddenly hospitalized after making a ruling that temporarily cost his patron, Willie Brown, the speakership. With the clerk still recovering, Brown took charge and made the rulings that permitted him to regain the post.

And I saw a spin artist, not an outraged attorney, when Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Darden rose in the courtroom Thursday and denounced defense witnesses as “heroin addicts, thieves, felons and . . . the only person I have known to be a court-certified pathological liar.”

Darden’s sound bite was delivered in time for the West Coast noon TV and radio news. It landed on the East Coast in midafternoon, when the dinner hour television news shows are written. He then held the floor throughout the afternoon. By late in the day Los Angeles time, early evening in the East, Cochran had had no chance to reply.

It was, as they say in politics, a great hit, an event that lets a lawyer or a campaign control news coverage.

*

I wondered whether I was getting too cynical.

During the noon break, I headed back to the office to sound out some of my political writing colleagues.

They said there’s a good reason for cynicism: Those of us who write politics for a living know that the people we cover have based their actions on polling and other forms of public opinion sampling, rather than their beliefs. And they don’t stick with what they say.

Read my lips, said George Bush, no new taxes. Bill Clinton promised welfare reform, then dropped it until last November’s Democratic defeat.

Candidates portray themselves as family-loving straight arrows, hiding personal lives messy enough to get them on Oprah. When people tell the truth, what happens? Walter Mondale said he would ask for a tax increase in his 1984 presidential campaign--and lost in a landslide.

I also talked to a former boss who has guided me over many years, Ed Guthman, former Times national editor who is a USC journalism professor. Guthman covered trials and politics in his career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

More important for this column, he was a target of some of the most cynical media manipulators in recent American history--the Richard Nixon team, who put him on the “enemies list.” Alums of this select list have a reason to be cynical about the political process, having been made targets of harassment for just doing their jobs.

I confessed what I had thought when I heard of Hodgman’s hospitalization.

“I’ve always rejected cynicism and the reason I have rejected it is when I was starting out in the city rooms of the Seattle Star and the Seattle Times, the cynical reporters were the ones who had given up,” Guthman said. “So I have looked at things with the hard edge of skepticism, not cynicism.

“This doesn’t mean you would kiss off the idea of tricks or that Hodgman went to the hospital as a ploy. I wouldn’t exclude it, but I wouldn’t jump to it. That’s what the cynic does.”

Guthman gave me some advice. “You have to put aside your political persona,” he said. “You have to look at it differently. I would look at it straight as hell, so when the verdict comes in, you will understand it. . . . I would caution you or anyone else that you are in for a long haul and you have to be very observant about what happens inside the courtroom.”

Another friend, retired trial reporter Theo Wilson, formerly of the New York Daily News, has been telling me the same thing: Stick to what happens inside the courtroom. This is not, she said, like the political campaigns I’ve covered.

*

Unfortunately, this may not hold true for the trial of O.J. Simpson.

There has never been a trial where the participants are so enthralled with the media. Judge and lawyers are all publicity hounds. All of them are masters of getting on TV.

That’s why it’s necessary to have maybe a hint of cynicism when covering them.