“Of course I’ll run the piece,” I said. “You get the facts right, and I’ll run it.”

The kid reporter was still squinting at me. He had heard promises like this before, and he wasn’t sure he believed me. He must have heard the rumors. I was the guy who’d gotten too close to the CIA. I had been corrupted. How could he trust me to protect him from this auto dealer, and all the other people who wanted to manipulate newspapers. “What if the publisher says you can’t run it?” he asked. “That’s what happened the last time, when I wrote a story about the supermarkets. The publisher said it was irresponsible, and full of innuendo, and the News-Herald wouldn’t run it. Suppose he says that again. What will you do then?”

I thought a moment, but no more than that. They were watching me, waiting to see what the rules would be. These kids didn’t have any money. They needed their jobs. But they were willing to put themselves at risk for the power of an idea, which was that a serious newspaper fights for its independence. It doesn’t let other people push it around. And they needed an answer from their new editor.

I turned to my staff and smiled, a smile less of confidence than of simple experience. “What’s the worst thing the publisher can do?” I said. “Fire me?”

They all laughed, even the cocky kid. That’s the wonderful thing about being fired. It gives you a kind of immunity. You don’t have to be afraid of the things that frighten most people. They’ve already happened to you.

“So what should I do?” persisted the kid reporter. He was so hungry, so needy, so pumped with ambition, just as I once had been. What to tell him, to temper his fear and arrogance just enough to do the job?

“Suck it up!” I said. It was a phrase Weiss had often used to rouse the troops. I had never been sure what it meant. Did it mean suck up your gut? Or suck up your breath? Or perhaps, suck up your courage? I’m not sure Weiss himself knew what it meant. It was just one of the things he said to get us all juiced up, but in that moment the meaning of the phrase suddenly seemed obvious. It meant: Suck up life. Take it in whole, taste it, experience it, make sense of it. Tell the truth about it. That was the only lasting satisfaction in our business. The rest was the ordinary part, the news.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments