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Welcome Message from the President
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An Absence of Malice
In 1981, an award winning movie starring Paul Newman and Sally Fields told the story of a Miami business man falsely accused by a newspaper of complicity in a murder. The movie was entitled “Absence of Malice." The screen play was written by Kurt Luedtke.
Mr. Luedtke is from Grand Rapids, Michigan. After graduation from Brown University, he worked for a while at the Grand Rapids Press before migrating to Detroit where he was employed as a reporter at the Detroit Free Press. In 1972, when he was not yet 34 years of age, Mr. Luedtke became the executive editor of the Free Press.
In June of 1973, Dean Donald Gordon of the Wayne State University Law School and Dean Theodore St. Antoine of the University of Michigan Law School contacted the Detroit Free Press. I don’t know if they spoke directly to Mr. Luedtke, but they did talk to Remer Tyson, a reporter on Kurt Luedtke’s staff.
The two deans convinced the Free Press that I had done a bad thing by starting Cooley Law School. They told Remer Tyson that they had met with the chief justice and talked to other members of the supreme court in an effort to get the court to require me to drop the law school project, but the court had neglected or refused to do anything about it. I suspect they either told him, or at least gave him the false impression that Cooley was a proprietary enterprise. They persuaded the Detroit Free Press that only public pressure would convince the court to act.
And so the decision was made, -- and I assume the executive editor either made the decision or acquiesced in it – to embark upon a series of investigative stories, designed to discredit me and destroy the law school I had started. I hesitate to call them ‘news’ stories. The were printed in sections of the paper that carried news, to be sure, but they were patently intended to be what is sometimes called ‘advocacy journalism.’
In short, Mr. Tyson was assigned to do a hatchet job on me. And I must confess, he was up to the task.
My relationship with the fourth estate, from the time first ran for public office in 1952, had always been characterized by openness and candor. I often told reporters that I never spoke off the record; they could quote me on anything I said. Perhaps naively, I assumed that journalists are professionals and that they know when a statement is newsworthy and when it isn’t.
When Remer Tyson called me, I was delighted. He wanted to talk about Cooley Law School. So did I. I was extremely proud of what we had done and what we were doing. I wanted the world to know about it. Every time there was a story in the paper about Cooley, there would be another surge of applications.
We agreed to meet in downtown Detroit at the Savoyard Club in the Buhl Building. Bruce Donaldson, a member of our board, was a member there, and he hosted the lunch. Jim Ryan, another board member, then a Wayne County Circuit Judge joined us, as did two students from the original Cooley Class.
Tyson was candid enough to tell us that he had serious reservations about Cooley. I told him that I would answer any questions he might have. He did not tell me that his newspaper had already decided to do whatever it could to bring me down and put Cooley out of business. After all, if he had told me that, I might not have been so forthcoming.
As it was, I gave him all the ammunition he needed to write damning stories. I invited him to come to Lansing, and when he did, I showed him our books of account. I told him how much everyone who worked for the school was making. I took him over to the Masonic Temple Building, which we were then in the process of buying, walked him through it and shared all of my plans for remodeling it into a law school. I showed him my office at 507 South Grand; told him how much time I was spending at the school; told him that I was receiving an expense allowance from the school of $10,000 per year.
I felt I had nothing to hide. After all, I had filed copies of my federal income tax returns in the office of the county clerk for anyone to inspect for every year that I was in public office. I suspect I am the only public official to do so before or since. I was accustomed to living in a glass house.
Tyson was cordial. He gave no indication of hostility or animosity. I foolishly thought that I had shown him what a noble thing we were doing, and that whatever he would write about us would, on balance, be favorable. How wrong I was.
In his acceptance speech when receiving the William Rogers alumni Award at Brown University recently, Kurt Luedtke told the audience, “I was for 15 years a journalist, a vocation in which you’d think you would learn a lot. I learned three things: The accused you’ve never met is more guilty than the one you’ve talked to. Truth and accuracy are not the same. Things are never, ever, as they appear to be.”
I only wish Mr. Luedtke had learned those lessons a little earlier in his career.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004