Part 2, page 18

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

LA November 4, 1972

REAL D.B. COOPER?

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happened to be right, a fitting curtain-raiser for LA. It soon became apparent, however, that the newspaper would not be launched in time to have the story.

Another possibility arose. The best man at my wedding was a trusted old friend from the South, Charles Morgan Jr., a brilliant and courageous civil rights lawyer who had been a classmate of George Wallace at Alabama and later infuriated Wallace and other such prehensile hatemongers by legally representing blacks trying to get into white Alabama schools.

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When Morgan arrived, I explained the story to him. He had agreed to legally advise me. He said I should try to get the story into print as soon as possible, in order to prevent even the appearance that I was overstepping my Constitutional rights as a reporter by withholding information about a wanted criminal. As he saw it, I didn't have a legal obligation to turn Cooper in, only to print my story as quickly as possible, and then possibly turn over my information to the authorities.

Morgan said, and I agreed, that the story seemed a natural for a book. Mor-

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gan had recently represented Col. Anthony Herbert, the officer who spoke out on military scandal cover ups, had done a book with him. He suggested I contact Col. Herbert's agent, Gerard McCauley, in New York.

There were enormous problems ahead, complicating either publication of a magazine article or a book. There was a possibility, of course, that the whole story was a fraud, a la Clifford Irving. Cooper had readily and thoroughly answered every question I asked him, and I asked him some pretty tough ones over three days of intense interviewing, ques-

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tions I didn't believe anyone—say a con man—could have predicted. The details he spun on the performance of the crisis, and his motives for doing it, were endless.

He yielded up so much information, in fact, that I soon felt I knew a lot more than I wanted to know—details, I believed, that would result in his being captured if they were published. I urged him to turn himself in and take his chances with 12 fair-minded jurors who might be impressed with the story of why he said he did it—out of rage and out of a desire to prove he wasn't the used up old man Boeing implied he was when the company summarily fired him at age 49.

He said he'd think about it. He said, meantime, he wasn't worried that any details he'd given me would endanger him. He just said he didn't want to talk to me anymore until after the story was published.

Criminal At Large

Contemplating publication, I was in a dilemma. To print it would lead most certainly to Cooper's capture. For the law to catch Cooper would be fine, but for him to be caught on the basis of information I had gathered as a reporter, I didn't like it. Nonsense, Morgan urged, the man was [a] criminal; he knew what he was doing; so print the story and quit worrying about it. I couldn't. At one time, I strongly considered destroying all the [text continues on next page / cut off]