I felt empty as I walked away from Weiss’s office—a kind of emotional vertigo. I wanted to get away from the Mirror as quickly as I could. A couple of my friends shouted my name as I crossed the newsroom, but I didn’t stop. No banter, no flirting with the copy aides. I wanted to be out of there. By the time I reached the elevators I was almost shaking. I thought at first that I was just worried, that I had blown it in going to see Weiss, that I had said too much, that I had made a career blunder. But that wasn’t it. That way of thinking was causing the empty feeling. By the time I hit the street and felt the cold February air in my lungs, I knew what was wrong.

I was ashamed of what had happened in Weiss’s office. I had lost my nerve. I had come on a mission to tell the truth, and I had let my ambition get in the way. The moment it became clear that Weiss didn’t believe that his friend Arthur Bowman could possibly have done anything wrong, I pretended I agreed with him. I backpedaled; I dissembled. Weiss had described me as a future leader of the newspaper, but I wasn’t a truth teller at all, I was a courtier. My reporting life had devoured the rest of me. All that was left was an observer, a flatterer, a passive chronicler, an ambitious young man.

I called Bob Marcus when I got back to Washington. It was a Friday afternoon. I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the office that day, but I figured I should at least check in. He’d already heard from Weiss. “I’m glad you’re staying at the Mirror,” he chirped. I mumbled something back. He asked how my reporting on the French-in-China story was going and I said I wasn’t sure, I was just getting started. “Stick with it,” he said. “It’s important!” Weiss must have told him to be nice to me.

Then I called Annie and asked if I could come over to see her that night. I was feeling so low. Maybe I thought that if I could understand what she had once loved in me, then I could isolate that part and act on it. She must have realized that I was in a bad way, because she just said to come by her place at 8:00. She’d fix something to eat.