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11. Washington Garbage
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Sometime after midnight on Tuesday, July 1, 1975, National Enquirer reporter Jay Gourley stopped his car in front of Henry Kissinger’s house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and started loading in five green trash bags awaiting the morning’s pickup. The Secret Service agent standing on the nearby porch was unsure how to react, but he pulled himself together and told Gourley to desist. Gourley stood his ground. Talking into a mike in his left sleeve, the agent summoned his supervisor, and the choice was soon given to Gourley: put the trash bags back or go to jail. “All right then, jail it is,” said Gourley. “But first you really ought to check with your superiors.”1 It wouldn’t be apparent to an uninformed onlooker, but Gourley had the upper hand in this little chess game being played out on the sidewalks of Washington’s most elite neighborhood. From this point he couldn’t go wrong. Going to jail for picking trash might even be a better story, since up to this point Gourley had no idea what treasures Kissinger’s garbage contained. Getting interrogated by the Secret Service would be a double plus. Incredibly, Gourley had White House press credentials, as the growing assembly of heat—more Secret Service agents, Washington metropolitan police, and a young intelligence officer—discovered. So it was decided Gourley could 134 WASHINGTONGARBAGE ELEVEN WASHINGTON GARBAGE 135 leave with the bags, though security, law enforcement, and intelligence weren’t happy about the trump card Gourley had played. Nevertheless, they had made the right judgment. Gourley’s press credentials functioned like a Monopoly getout -of-jail-free card; without press credentials and a powerful publication behind him, Gourley would surely have gone home empty-handed, or to jail. Gourley took home the bags—which had been instantly transformed from refuse to hotly contested property—sifted through them, and wrote a story. For a week after the Enquirer was published, Gourley’s lively tabloid inventory of the secretary of state’s garbage obsessed the nation’s press, which took the paradoxical position that Kissinger’s garbage was not interesting. In the process the nation’s press almost deconstructed itself with the absurd self-contradictions the situation aroused, as Gourley would point out later in an article for Washington Monthly. Among other things the story was a perfect example of how Pope continued to traffic in the abject even after he cleaned up his paper for the supermarkets , for what could be more classically abject than garbage? Among the objects Gourley discovered were Maalox, aspirin, and barbiturate packages—suggestive of serious stress in the Kissinger household—as well as a memo indicating that Kissinger’s Secret Service detail had accidentally left a shotgun in the Virgin Islands. A shopping list included a case of Jack Daniel’s and a case of Ezra Brooks, “the poor man’s Jack Daniel’s.” Gourley speculated that either Kissinger had two standards of bourbon, for A- and B-list guests, or he was filling the Jack Daniels bottles with Ezra Brooks. Gourley also found unused and unopened food: sticks of margarine, English muffins, cans of soup, jars of applesauce—for which he never found a “vaguely plausible” explanation. He also found discarded copies of Kissinger’s old itineraries and daily schedules, which Gourley found of twofold interest: [18.217.194.39] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:14 GMT) THE GODFATHER OF TABLOID 136 “First, along with the memo about the misplaced gun, they indicated that in the current long lull between assassinations the Secret Service is getting sloppy again. Anyone wanting information about the daily behavior patterns of any terrorist’s most desirable potential victim [Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977] merely had to pick it up on Dumbarton Street.”2 The itineraries and schedules also yielded privileged information: “For example, that on one day this summer Kissinger met with David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, followed shortly by Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board,” Gourley wrote. “Those who read the schedule put up by the State Department, or the articles written by reporters who relied on that schedule, were not so well informed.”3 Nearly every major newspaper in the country prominently listed the contents of Kissinger’s totally uninteresting garbage, often on page 1. The story led the trendy Style section of the Washington Post, which also ran an editorial headlined “Trash,” comparing...