Make It Deadpan, Make It Factual

(2 of 2)

Reporter Joe Harvey, a lawyer who covers Boston courts for the Globe, went painstakingly to work on every document dealing with Morrissey—from his birth certificate through his Kennedy jobs to his listings in the city directories —to help ascertain when he had and had not been present in Boston.* Statute books of Georgia and Massachusetts were studied to find what regulations applied to Morrissey at the time of his bar exam.

Harvey's lengthy report appeared in early October, with the first hint that Morrissey's membership in the Georgia Bar had been obtained through the endorsement of a questionable, two-man law college. Only twelve days later, Political Editor Bob Healy revealed the seeming conflict between Morrissey's 1934 stay in Georgia and the one-year residency requirement for his 1934 candidacy in a race for state representative in Massachusetts.

Healy kept at it, discovered that despite the story that Morrissey had studied law at Boston College, the school had no record of him, except briefly as a nonlaw night student. Last week, as the walls tumbled in on Frank Morrissey, the Globe was still diligently checking every aspect of his career—from his civil service job as a social worker to his graduation from Suffolk University Law School, and his seven years as municipal court judge.

No Opinions. Winship hotly refutes the contention that the Globe's zeal is due to anti-Kennedy feelings. "We've been damn good to the Kennedys," says he. "This was not an anti-Ted effort. I can't think of a thing we haven't supported him on except Morrissey." It was the Globe, to be sure, that first broke the story about Ted's expulsion from Harvard for cheating. But, as Winship points out, the story had full Kennedy cooperation, was printed only after the editor told one of J.F.K.'s presidential aides: "I'm sick of all these rumors. Let's bring it out in the open."

"We're in this purely as a matter of principle," says Winship. "The community's been starved for a paper that didn't necessarily say popular things all the time. We decided to join the community, and it's been good for us."