Part 3, page 5

Transcript

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

What he had done was execute the most daring and ingenious airline hold-up in history—doing it all alone and diving out of the plane with $200,000 booty—and to all appearances getting away with it. Half the FBI agents in the country were looking for him. Hundreds of military troops fanned out on foot to search the countryside around Lake Merwin, Wash., where it was believed he landed after parachuting. Northwest posted a $25,000 reward. So no matter how urgently Cooper might have wanted to talk, he would be laying extremely low.

Nevertheless, I brooded, if a reporter could somehow get to Cooper, what a story there was to be had. Not only was the crime daringly unique, but Cooper's letter suggested an extremely uncommon and thus potentially fascinating motive. If a reporter was good at his craft, he looked for this extra dimension in a story – a situation or an occurrence of an extraordinary nature that instantly crystalized some aspect of the human spectacle.

Given the intensity of the search for Cooper, however, what real hope was

Copyright© 1972 Platypus Publications

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[illegible top lines] and said 'Don't say a word more. Call me tomorrow night at 9 o'clock and I will have made arrangements for [illegible] to talk on a safe telephone. [illegible]

As is many a reporter who has been involved in 'hairy,' dangerous stories (I had covered Birmingham, Selma, Jackson, Watts, and four assassinations) I was careful almost to the point of paranoia about telephone tapping. Once down South, a reporter friend was dictating his integration story to his office by long-distance call when a voice, obviously white, probably cop, broke in and said 'You goddamned nigger-loving son-of-a-bitch.'

One learned to be careful about phones. By next morning, I had arranged an elaborate system involving four phones; my answering service was in-[text continues beyond page]

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KARL FLEMING was associated with Newsweek magazine as correspondent, Los Angeles bureau chief and contributing editor for 11 years before resigning April 15 to found LA. While with Newsweek, he covered virtually every significant civil rights story of the turbulent '60s, including Birmingham, Selma, Ole Miss, Little Rock and Watts. He covered the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert and those of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. He was assigned to Richard Nixon during the last Presidential campaign and has covered Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. He also reported on the Charles Manson and Jack Ruby trials for Newsweek and the trial of Pueblo spy ship captain Lloyd M. Bucker.