Melville House Books

“After any suicide, survivors feel guilty,” writes Scott Herhold in a San Jose Mercury News commentary on the late Gary Webb. Herhold, Webb’s one-time editor, says, “I’m convinced that part of what made him great destroyed him. He was an immensely talented reporter, a good writer and a sometimes-difficult human being. In many ways, he represented the best of our craft — its compassion, its obligation to speak truth to power. His flaw was the flip side of his virtue. Once convinced he was right, Webb didn’t budge.” But Marc Cooper, in a searing commentary for his website and the LA Weekly, takes apart such defensive and critical obituaries of Webb—particularly the one that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (see Tuesday’s MobyLives digest). First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb¹s career,” Cooper writes. “Then, eight years later . . . the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the long, inglorious saga of a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out&3150;of&3150;town reporter who embarrassed it.” Cooper notes internal CIA and Justice Department investigations “proved that the core of what Webb alleged was, indeed, true and accurate.” Cooper also notes how the Mercury News “editors cowardly recanted his stories (which they had vetted) . . . .” Cooper suggests Webb’s own comments in a recent interview were a more suitable obituary: “The reason I¹d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn¹t been, as I¹d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job . . . The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn¹t written anything important enough to suppress.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.