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A mouthful of Waco's ashesBy Dick Reavis For one journalist, seeking the truth seemed to have one benefit: unemployment. During the past three months, newspapers have been filled with revisionist reports on the events at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco between Feb. 28 and April 19, 1993. We are now told that the FBI failed to disclose, or clearly disclose, that it used incendiary devices on April 19 in violation of orders from Attorney General Janet Reno. The FBI took explosive canisters into the field as well, although such weapons had no purpose in an operation with declared peaceful ends. Soldiers trained in urban warfare were present at Mount Carmel, we are now told, although their presence was an apparent violation of the idea behind the Posse Comitatus Act. Every time I read one of these stories, I think back to the heat of the summer of 1996, and to the day when I decided that I'd had enough. I went into the shed in my back yard, picked up a pair of gloves and threw them, along with a gimme cap, into my car. "What are you doing?," my wife asked me. "In the morning," I mumbled, "I'm going back to the labor hall." It wasn't as if I'd been doing day labor on a regular basis. Far from it. I had spent a month at day labor a few years earlier, as a journalistic assignment, writing about people who can't find work of a better-paying kind -- that was all. But now I felt that I was one of them. That was because -- this is a long story -- I had spent 18 months researching and writing a book about the David Koresh affair, 'The Ashes of Waco,' published by Simon & Schuster in 1995. Unemployment, as nearly as I could tell, was my reward for having penned that book. 'Ashes' hadn't claimed that the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms intended to massacre anybody at Mount Carmel, but it didn't laud those agencies as dragon-slayers, either. What it mainly said was that government spokesmen hadn't been completely honest and that (as I wrote) "journalists found that the news environment was so tightly controlled that they could not fulfill their investigative role." After Mount Carmel burned to the ground, I'd been able to fulfill a part of that role -- and the result was that I wasn't a journalist anymore. Maybe Congress or radio and television were to blame, I told myself back then. If it had not been for them, maybe potential employers wouldn't have heard of my book. But because the book had raised questions about the official version of events, and raised those questions in a reasoned and moderate way, I had been called to open the 1995 congressional hearings about the Waco affair. For about a month afterward, my telephone had rung incessantly with calls from radio and TV programmers. That month became a blur in my mind: If this is Wednesday morning, am I speaking to Toledo? Once the telephone quit ringing, I had concluded that the Mount Carmel story would linger as an element of "underground" lore until the day, far in the future, when someone -- Davidian or federal agent -- would make a deathbed confession, or until -- miracle of miracles -- Oliver Stone, perhaps from LA's Home for the Incurables, decided to make his last film. In any case, I had to resume my career. I had to keep on making a living. Besides that, by late 1995 I was whipped, beaten, blue in the face. Speaking and appearing on behalf of the book hadn't been a pleasant experience because most talk-show hosts and most of their callers -- people who knew little or nothing about the episode -- seemed sure that I was apologizing for child molesters, mass murderers and Nazis. I hadn't done anything of the kind. I had tried to point out, for example, that there was no basis for the ATF's claim that Mount Carmel was a den of drug-runners. I had quoted from manuals that chemists read, tomes that said that CS gas, "tear gas," in the form in which it was used at Mount Carmel poses a fire danger and a danger to the health of children. I had also tried, without success, to interest other journalists in 14,000 pages of telephone transcripts that, among other things, showed that whether or not helicopters 'had' fired on Mount Carmel, its residents sure thought that they had. None of my journalistic peers were interested. In late July, when the events of 1993 began filtering back into the news, my telephone began to ring again. For two or three weeks I appeared on television or spoke on radio every day, just as in 1995. An editor from 'The Wall Street Journal' called to ask if, in the bowels of my computer, I might still have a copy of a Waco-related piece that he had once solicited from me. It might now be publishable, he said. An essay in 'The New Republic' asserted that "the revival of concern about Waco . . . reflects poorly on the media establishment" and then quoted a line of my critique of the press, which was that even though it couldn't do its job at Mount Carmel, it claimed that what it "reported" was new. 'The New Republic' 's essayist billed me as "a mainstream author." Because I'm more than a bit eccentric, my friends guffawed when they read that part. But when I tried to laugh with them, it only hurt. Mainstream journalists have jobs, and for a long time after my book was published, I didn't. In order to do the research for my book, I had given up a job as a writer for a Dallas alternative weekly. Its publisher wouldn't rehire me after the book was published, although his editors and writers stood by me. For the first time in a somewhat distinguished career as a journalist, I had to look for a job. My resume, which I initially thought would help me, showed that I had been a writer at 'Texas Monthly' for nearly 10 years, that I had been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, that I had written two books about Mexico and had translated another one. I had been published in 'Reader's Digest' and 'The New York Times' . None of that helped -- and it may have hurt. Even small-town and suburban dailies were wary of me. I trimmed my salary requirements to half of what I'd earned before. That didn't help, either. After 'Ashes,' the word on the street was that I was a "groupie of the Davidians," and nobody seemed to notice that one can't really be a groupie to people who didn't smoke, drink or dance, and who slept with only David Koresh. I wrote letters, filled out job applications and interviewed for positions for which, prospective employers told me, I was "overqualified." As time went on, I began to think that "overqualified" usually meant "too old." I was 50 -- a lot of people my age are "overqualified." * The problems that I faced, as I came to understand them, involved questions of management and truth. An entrepreneur knows when his ideas are "right" or "wrong" in the simplest and clearest way: His balance sheet tells him whether he is making money or losing it. Journalism has no such clear standard, because its business is truth, and truth is ordinarily measured by consensus, not numbers. One whose findings are not in accord with the prevailing wisdom -- even half-baked "wisdom" -- is presumably wrong, and if he insists on his points, he is wrongheaded to boot. I was "wrong" and also wrongheaded about Waco. Beyond that, any reporter who is more experienced than his editors -- who has written books, for example -- is presumed to be reluctant to accept direction from those who haven't. Journalism does make mistakes, everyone in the business agrees. But when business managers, for example, lose money, they are often fired or demoted. When newsrooms fail to get a story, as most failed with Waco, demotions don't follow -- and in the interval, while "wrong" and "right" are slowly changing places, promotions continue. Some of the people upon whom I had to rely in my job search were people whose coverage of Mount Carmel was "right" during the time when my findings were "wrong." They did not want to hire anyone who could, or might, point a finger at their failure to get the story. * The financial pages said that the service economy was booming, and so when I realized that journalism was closed to me, I turned toward new lines of work. I billed myself as an investigator-detective and as an advertising copywriter. There were no takers. I took tests to become a temporary worker in offices, but I flunked because my typing skills were minimal. Ultimately, I found two steady options: substitute teaching in public junior high schools (which I tried -- the kids drove me crazy) and day labor. The pay was about the same. That's why I tossed the gloves into my car. But my wife, and then my mother, wouldn't hear of it. "You can't do that," my wife said. "You are a writer." To make ends meet, she began working more, and to make use of my time, I went back to college for a master's degree. Two years later, having graduated with the usual layer of student debt, I found work at a wildlife and nature magazine in Austin. For 15 months I saw my family only on weekends. Not until four years after my book went into print did I return to salaried journalism. When I did, my wizened father, now 80 and 20 years retired from the newspaper business, gave me a single bit of advice: "Forget about Waco." But I ignored him for the same reasons that I wrote the book. Journalism is a calling that tries to discover and expose the truth. As far as I'm concerned, those who don't do their part don't deserve the name of the trade. Now that Waco is back in the news, and I'm back on the TV circuit, people think that I must be getting rich. Nothing could be further from the truth. The rules of the electronic media are simple and clear: Someone, usually an independent researcher or a print journalist, must do the hard and costly work that TV and radio turn into opinion or chat, for free. ('Thanks for being on our show, Mr. Reavis.' ) It is true that in 1998 my book was published in paperback by Syracuse University Press, and after some 40,000 copies had been sold in both hardcover and paperback editions, I did receive a royalty check. It was for $27. Neither the government nor the press has yet agreed that my criticisms were fair, although the day seems to be drawing near. A civil suit brought by the families of those who died at Mount Carmel, a new round of congressional findings and a report from former Missouri Sen. John Danforth will, I hope, establish both me and my book as thorough, accurate, modest and sincere. Although I am anxious for an exoneration, in the meantime I'm also busy, trying to earn a living and trying to figure out an answer for the caller on Line 4: "When will we get to the end of this?" For millions of Americans -- me included -- that day can't come too soon. The season's first northers are blowing in, and when it's cold outside, day labor doesn't appeal to me. Dick Reavis is a writer in the 'Star-Telegram features department.
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