Entertainment, Books - Army Times

A newsman trades fact for fiction

WASHINGTON — Leonard Downie Jr. has spent most of his life in the newsroom of “The Washington Post.” Forty-four years to be exact. He rose from summer intern to investigative reporter to managing editor and finally executive editor before retiring last September. During his 17 years as top editor, the newspaper won 25 Pulitzer Prizes.

Now, at 66 and the author of four non-fiction books, he is venturing into fiction. The setting is a place he knows something about: a newsroom in Washington, D.C.

“The Rules of the Game” (Knopf, 336 pp., $25.95) is a thriller with all the usual suspects — a young and aggressive investigative reporter, shady Washington insiders who don’t like where the reporter is snooping, and an editor who isn’t always sure what’s going on in the reporter’s life. Is this gal sleeping with her sources?

There’s also a newly elected, elderly president who happens to die early on and is replaced by his young, attractive vice president. A woman.

“It was kind of eerie when these things started to happen,” Downie says over lunch, referring to John McCain’s campaign and his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate last year.

But Downie says he was ahead of history, long before anyone had ever heard of Palin. He was even ahead of Hillary Clinton’s drive for the White House. He began thinking about his novel in 2000.

“I wrote a memo to myself and put it in a file drawer. A woman as president. I thought I could do something with her,” he says.

Downie, married and father of four but an acknowledged loner, wrote the novel over the next few years. A weekend hobby, he says. Sometimes he wrote in 48-hour bursts of creativity.

But anyone who was ever been edited by Downie can take some solace in knowing he had to write four drafts before it finally was accepted.

“I’m an editor, not a natural writer,” he confesses, although he says he’s “surprisingly pleased” with the final outcome, which is already being shopped around as a potential movie.

As for the “Post” staff’s reaction to his debut novel, Downie smiles.

“There’s a bit of a buzz that I wrote sex scenes,” he says. “I’m kind of a father figure to them.”

On a scale of 1 to 10, Downie says, his novel is an 8.5 to a 9 when it comes to realism. He says there might not be quite as much violence against reporters as there is in the novel, but he has often been called at 4 a.m. by mysterious people who told him to lay off a story. That happened in the 1980s during the Iran-Contra scandal.

And yes, there really was a sex-party house in suburban Virginia in the ‘70s, a house visited by some famous names.

Downie has also had to deal with reporters who have gotten “a bit too close” to their sources. “Even some really good reporters have weaknesses,” he says.

Followers of “The Washington Post” will see a figure resembling legendary editor Ben Bradlee in the novel’s pages, and Downie says Susan Cameron, his first female president, has the same strengths as the late “Post” publisher Katharine Graham, who also was thrust into a male-dominated world that was skeptical of her.

So who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this thriller?

Hard to tell, which is the way Downie says it should be.

“I’m fascinated by the ambiguity of the relationships in Washington,” he says. “Most everyone breaks the rules now and then.”