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65 Chapter 7 The Dominion of the Editor-in-Chief The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. —Ida B. Wells-Barnett The multiline rotary phone on the editor’s desk, nearly hidden behind the clutter of newspapers and circulation reports, rang insistently. The initials on the blinking button read “ACE.” “Can you come up here?” asked Amon Carter Evans, owner and publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, the morning newspaper, and John Seigenthaler ’s only boss in the world. The editor-in-chief stood quickly, walked out the door of his third-floor office, and strode through the busy newsroom. Bypassing the slow elevator , he bounded up the dim stairwell to Evans’ suite on the floor above. He strode down the corridor to the opposite end of the building, smiled at the publisher’s secretary as he passed, and stepped into Evans’ private office. Governor Ray Blanton was sitting there, holding a glass in his hand. Seigenthaler remembers that Blanton appeared to be “slightly drunk” and unfocused on this mid-November afternoon. It was not unusual for Blanton to be in Evans’ office, though this was the first such visit in several months. He was, by traditional measures, a friend of the newspaper. But Seigenthaler, based on his own staff’s reporting, had grown to dislike the man as crude, venal, and possibly corrupt. “Hello, Governor,” Seigenthaler said. Blanton nodded, but he was visibly annoyed. Normally, people sitting in this particular room with the publisher and editor of the morning newspaper for an audience—and especially the occasional elected official—were supremely focused on any business or political topic that was at hand, usually solicitous of both the publisher and editor, eager to engage them in conversation. But not today. When the editor greeted him, Blanton did not rise from his chair. Evans spoke next. “Ray,” the publisher said, “tell John what you just told me.” 66 COUP “Well . . . I’ve decided I’m going to pardon Roger Humphreys after all,” the governor replied. “Amon and I were just talking about it.” Blanton added that he was scheduled to speak in Jackson the next day, that he would be flying there on state aircraft, and that he thought he would call a news conference for the time the plane would return him to the National Guard hangar in Nashville. Turning to Seigenthaler, Evans said: “Now, John. Tell Ray what you think about that.” The editor shook his head and then answered bluntly. “If you pardon him, they’ll impeach your ass before sundown.” This produced what Seigenthaler remembers as “this long silence”—Blanton remaining seated, his drink in his hand, looking back at Evans, waiting for him to say something. But Evans said nothing more. “Well, by God, I’m going to do it,” said the governor. Seigenthaler left the room. Under normal circumstances, in the middle of November of an election year, a governor might have been seated in that particular chair reflecting on his reelection victory. He might have been visiting with the publisher and editor thanking them for their newspaper endorsement and the nonthreatening campaign coverage. The glass in his hand might have been for the purpose of a toast. But Blanton’s life and his time as governor had not worked out in that normal way, and most certainly this had not been a normal year. He had not sought reelection, and he was now on a path to a very different future. By this time, he had all but stopped keeping office hours at the capitol, preferring to operate from the privacy of the governor’s official residence on Curtiswood Lane in South Nashville. By the second week of November, on the afternoon of this meeting with Evans and Seigenthaler, Blanton had already been through a full year of controversy , bordering on scandal, and with much of his grief coming from the FBI and the rest of it from the news media. It had not started out this way. In his early years in politics, Ray Blanton had been a friend of the newspaper . The Tennessean had supported his campaigns for Congress and governor . His positions on a few standard issues—opposing the death penalty, favoring a state income tax—were in alignment with the paper’s traditional editorial views and center-left politics. He had known Evans first but soon came to know others in the publisher ’s inner circle, including William R. Willis and his Nashville law...

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