Three Little Words

At the beginning of my reporting career, I covered a federal judge hearing a civil suit against National Guardsmen several years after the Kent State killings.

The judge refused to allow transcripts of grand jury testimony from earlier criminal proceedings into evidence. Grand juries are supposed to be secret, he ruled, and allowing their deliberations into the record would mean they’d become public. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on one’s perspective — I had gotten my hands on the transcripts from sources I won’t identify to this day.

Each evening, as a local TV reporter, I’d do live shots about the material that his honor had suppressed that day, and then read on the air what was relevant in the text. It infuriated the judge. I know that because I was summoned to his chambers: “I need for you to tell me where you got these transcripts. From whom?”

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