Dear Readers:
Dr. Ink had a lovely chat with Chicago journalist Bob Greene last spring at a National Writers Workshop in Hartford. Doc was a fan, and Greene was friendly and generous, eager to share tips about the craft.
Now Greene has been forced to resign as columnist for the Chicago Tribune. This sad moment came after the revelation that the married Greene had an affair with a teenage girl he had written about. From emerging details in the reporting, it seems as if Greene, now 55, was in his early forties when he engaged in sexual activity with the girl, who was about 18 at the time.
When the Doc read this news, two quick thoughts entered his mind. The first was that the Church sexual scandal, well covered in Chicago, had risen up and bitten a journalist in the asterisk. Many of the cases in the Church scandal were not pedophilic, strictly speaking, but involved older priests and teenage boys and girls. The scandal was not only about differences of age, but also of authority, power, and responsibility. Greene, as one of the “priests” of journalism, could not survive a sexual scandal so congruent with current affairs.
A second thought hit Doc like a shock wave, a vague memory from years ago. Dr. Ink rushed to his bookshelf for his copy of “Be True To Your School,” Bob Greene’s reconstructed high school diary of 1964. One of the high points of this memoir describes Greene’s sexual fling with an older woman named Bev. He is about 18, a high school journalism student looking for fun. She is 27, badly married, and a little wild.
Greene wrote this passage in 1987: “And of course I thought about the moral questions, too. Bev is twenty-seven years old and she’s married. I know it’s wrong to be with someone who is married… But it doesn’t seem wrong. It just doesn’t seem wrong. What it seems like is the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me, and all of my questions about why it was happening sort of faded away when I thought about the fact that it was happening. It was happening to me.”
Not long after he published this, the roles became reversed. Greene is the middle-aged married man who meets a star-struck high school journalism student. It’s easy to imagine, reading the passage above, the self-justifications that led to his fall from grace.
Doc predicts that Bob Greene will be back. He’ll probably wind up with a show on MSNBC, which was eager to provide a cushy landing spot to Mike Barnicle, after the former Boston Globe columnist got his feet muddy in fabrication and plagiarism scandals. Defrocked columnists never die. They just wind up on cable TV.
