Or how about this puff piece on a leftist who attacks Packwood and backs Clinton? Disgusting.
Graves digs deep
Tenacious yet genteel, the Needham-based journalist takes on D.C.'s elite
By Alison Bass, Globe Staff, 07/21/99
In the annals of the Kennedy School's ever-proper Institute of Politics, it could have been an embarrassing moment. The journalist Florence Graves was talking about her work in breaking the Packwood story, and when she got to the part where she said Senator Bob Packwood had reached under a female employee's skirt to grab her girdle, two Harvard freshmen in the front looked blank.
So Graves went over to the two young men and gently explained to them what a girdle was. ''She did it in such a demure, almost puritanical way,'' recalls Michael Gartner, the former NBC News president and institute fellow who had invited Graves to talk to his study group. ''It was done with charm.''
But don't let that charm fool you, as it may have Packwood, Alan Simpson, and Ken Starr,
to name a few of the power brokers scorched by Graves's reporting. Underneath the charming Southern accent and approachable demeanor beats the heart of an investigative tiger who broke one of the biggest political stories of the '90s and continues to best the Washington, D.C., media at their own game.
''An awful lot of people who have been covered by Florence misunderstood who she is,'' says Fred Wertheimer, who worked with Graves when he was president of Common Cause and she was editor of its award-winning national magazine. ''Yes, she is genteel. But she is also an old-fashioned reporter in the best sense of the word. She is relentless.''
Graves lives in a charming Victorian house, with gingerbread trim and white wicker furniture, in Needham. But she reports on the Washington power scene with tough-minded acuity.
When Graves was editor of Common Cause magazine in the early '80s, her reporting on financial abuses by Pentagon contractors prompted congressional reforms. In 1992, she broke the story of Packwood's abusive behavior toward women for The Washington Post, which set off a chain reaction leading to the Oregon senator's ouster. More recently, she raised alarms about independent counsel Starr's subpoenas to journalists in the Monica Lewinsky investigation.
Her latest project, published in May, was an opus in The Nation about Kathleen Willey, whose sexual accusations against President Clinton not only kept the Paula Jones case alive but ultimately led to the discovery of the Lewinsky affair.
In her 20-page piece for The Nation, Graves tore into Willey's credibility, arguing that the onetime flight attendant turned Democratic fund-raiser was excited to be involved with the president and welcomed his Oval Office advances. Graves also argued that Starr thought Willey was lying but gave her immunity anyway, instead indicting Julie Hiatt Steele, who had testified that Willey was not telling the truth about her encounter with Clinton.
Ten days after her piece appeared, jurors in the trial against Steele deadlocked, causing a federal judge to declare a mistrial. The jurors were banned from reading news accounts, such as Graves's article, but Nancy Luque, Steele's attorney, believes that
Graves's reporting did affect the trial. In her four-month investigation, Luque says, Graves uncovered evidence that Willey had lied to Starr's office about having a fling with a soccer coach.
''This resulted in us being able to impeach Kathleen Willey's credibility,'' says Luque in a telephone interview from Washington. ''Florence Graves is the only reporter who really dug into the Willey story, and I admire her greatly.''
Behind the belle
As she opens the door to her home, Graves, 53, looks like anything but a tough investigative reporter. She is tall and elegantly dressed, with teased blond hair and big blue eyes. The decor only amplifies the Southern-belle impression. Large impressionistic paintings in ornate frames adorn the living room, and a profusion of flowers blooms in the kitchen, competing for attention with the Chinese blue ceramic dishes mounted on the walls.
Only a visit to Graves's office, which is knee-deep in papers, documents, and barking terriers, gives one the sense that this is the same woman who helped hand Starr his hat on his only indictment in the Lewinsky case.
''I call this the Kathleen Willey room,'' Graves says, giggling. ''Do you know that Ken Starr considered Julie Hiatt Steele so important that he had an entire room devoted to this woman who was a seemingly minor player in the scandal? He so desperately wanted to be able to use Kathleen Willey to get Clinton that he was willing to ruin Julie Steele's life.''
Graves rubs her chin thoughtfully. ''I think that's one of the things that attracted me to the story,'' she says. ''I think a lot of my work has focused on abuses of power. Just like I saw Packwood's extraordinary behavior with women as a major abuse of power, I saw Ken Starr's pursuit of Julie Steele the same way.''
Journalists familiar with Graves often use the same words and phrases in describing her: fearless, principled, someone who doesn't run with the pack.
''It seems to me that to do what she does as a freelance investigative reporter, you have to be three times as good as someone on staff,'' says Gartner, who is now editor at The Tribune in Ames, Iowa. ''To overcome the hurdle of being an outsider, you have to be spectacular.''
The people in Graves's cross hairs, of course, may have quite a different view of her. But none of them (including Starr, Willey, and Simpson, the last of whom Graves roasted in an article on Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation) returned phone calls for this story.
The Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group, is not quite so recalcitrant, however.
An ax to grind?
''I'm not sure I read'' her piece in The Nation ''all the way through,'' says Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the center. ''But I'm familiar with The Nation's tub thumping for Clinton. Throughout all this they have been attacking Starr.
''I think she looks like someone who has an agenda,'' he adds. And the agenda is? Graham thinks a minute. ''To hurt Republicans and help Democrats.''
Graves, who's also a fellow at Radcliffe's Public Policy Institute and a resident scholar at Brandeis University, laughs when told of Graham's comment. ''At Common Cause, I did stories that nailed a number of Democrats on campaign finance and ethics issues,'' she says. ''And I've written about Brock Adams, who was a Democrat.'' (Adams, a US senator from Washington state, resigned in 1992 amid allegations of sexual misconduct.)
Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post's media reporter, has worked with Graves and says, ''There's sometimes grumbling that Florence might have something of a feminist agenda. But anyone who works with her will see that whatever her personal feelings, she's really interested in nailing down the facts.''
Kurtz says Graves ''sinks her teeth into somebody's leg and doesn't let go. She has a great passion about the mission she's on and the stories she's pursuing in a way that makes her stand out.''
Graves makes an unlikely Nelly Bly. The daughter of a real estate investor and a homemaker, Graves grew up comfortable in Waco, Texas, when football was king and marrying a Catholic was treated ''as if there was a death in the family.''
But as one of five siblings, Graves remembers, she was the child who was always asking why. ''In the 1950s in Texas there were drinking fountains for whites and coloreds, and I can remember as a child asking why that was so,'' Graves says. ''I never got an answer - there were no good answers - but I was profoundly affected by the disparities I saw between blacks and whites and rich and poor and, in that sense, I think living in Texas was a defining experience for me.''
Capital ideas
Graves married her college sweetheart and collected a master's degree in journalism from the University of Arizona. But it wasn't until she got to Washington that she got her first taste of the prevailing wisdom in politics and journalism.
She worked for the Washington Journalism Review (now the American Journalism Review) and freelanced. On becoming editor of Common Cause magazine, she, along with her staff, began investigating stories that the mainstream press was missing, about fraud at the Pentagon, and the Food and Drug Administration's lackadaisical vetting of new drugs.
Graves says the mainstream press wasn't writing about sexual harassment on Capitol Hill because that wasn't considered a story. ''Look at Packwood. Journalists knew what he was doing, but there was a shared narrative that this is what powerful men do,'' she says. ''That longstanding view wasn't challenged until the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings,'' which resulted in Thomas's confirmation to the high court on a close vote.
By then, Graves had left Common Cause to move with her husband, Sam Graves, to the Boston area, where he had accepted a job as professor in the School of Management at Boston College. After a short-lived stint as editor of New Age Journal - a mismatch of her investigative skills and the magazine's lighter purpose, according to one former employee - Graves returned her attention to Washington.
''After the [Thomas] hearings, I kept waiting for the major newspapers to follow up on the story, but the pack moved on,'' Graves says. ''It's funny. People have this perception that these large newspapers have all these resources in the world and that if there's a story to be done they'd be doing them. And that's just not true. The reality is that most news organizations are not devoting huge resources to investigative reporting.''
So at the behest of Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, Graves began looking at the intersection of politics and sex, and Packwood's name came up, again and again. But Graves says Vanity Fair canceled the assignment when she refused to sign the magazine's standard contract holding it legally blameless for anything she had written.
Saying no to VF
''It essentially said I promised there would be no legal action as a result of my work, and I said I can't sign that,'' Graves says. ''Their view was 'We're Vanity Fair and if you don't sign it, forget it.''' A Vanity Fair spokesperson agrees with her explanation.
It was a bad time for Graves, who as a freelancer is dependent on selling her work to publications that often don't pay enough to cover the great amount of time she puts into her pieces. (She tries to make up that difference by obtaining grants from foundations like the Fund for Investigative Journalism and by getting fellowships. She is a past recipient of the Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship.)
With the Packwood story, ''I would wake up screaming: 'I have this great story, why can't I work on it!''' she recalls. ''One month I had a $400 phone bill, which wakes you up. I went to talk to other news organizations - I'd rather not say who they are - and no one was interested.''
Finally, Graves approached The Washington Post, which agreed to team up with her to do the story. The Packwood series ran in November 1992, prompting the congressional hearings that led to the senator's resignation. Despite her work on this and other stories, Graves is not a household name inside or outside the Beltway. Even many journalists don't know who she is.
''Her name didn't resonate with the Packwood story, while [Newsweek reporter] Michael Isikoff 's name so resonated with Monica Lewinsky,'' muses Emily Rooney, who as host of WGBH-TV's ''Greater Boston'' has has had Graves on her show as a commentator. ''She reminds me in a way of Doris Kearns Goodwin. She has this great intellect, yet she's so down to earth. I feel she deserves more attention than she's gotten.''
Sitting demurely, legs crossed, on a high-legged kitchen chair, Graves doesn't appear bothered by the lack of name recognition, which she attributes to the fact that she works by herself and doesn't live in the capital.
''I tell people I can see much more clearly from Boston,'' she says. And then she smiles, and her smile is anything but sweet.
This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 07/21/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
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