By Michael Miner
Not that “Ed Gold” was top secret. The actual writer even showed up at a Reader party wearing an “Ed Gold” name tag. Neil Steinberg’s problem was that he worked for the Sun-Times and merely freelanced Bobwatch. What his bosses didn’t know, or could pretend they didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt him. (Steinberg still contributes to the Reader, writing the True Books column as Ed Gold and other occasional features under his real name.)
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Steinberg made it clear he had plenty of affection for Petacque. But that affection brought him to his point. In language much more roundabout than any he’d assailed Greene with, he went on: “Art went by a different code….Perhaps his driven, no-matter-what approach to the news is something I and my namby-pamby college boy pals will never understand. I don’t want to judge. Yet how Art went about reporting seemed, at times, like a kind of mania, primal, like a salmon struggling up river to spawn. He, in a way, represented something outmoded and embarrassing about journalism. He was like those prehistoric fish occasionally discovered in the depths of the ocean, armored and beaked. Art would lie and cheat and steal to get a story, and while that might sound romantic and dashing, in the abstract, it could be shocking to be a young reporter and watch him do it, close up.”
Though Steinberg was artfully vague, Petacque’s next of kin could be forgiven for wadding up their newspapers and flinging them against the wall. There’s no way they could have appreciated the note of sensitive ambivalence Steinberg concluded with: “I always felt bad and good about this incident. Bad because Art was my Dutch uncle and I betrayed him. And good because I stuck up for an ideal that I thought, then and now, was important. We spoke again, eventually, though never about that last column–I like to think he would have waved the matter away with a chuckle. He was an open, generous man, and now that I am growing older myself, and see the grinning new crop of youngsters arriving daily, it scares me how much less I have to offer them than Art Petacque, flaws and all, had to offer me.”
But there is. Even though Steinberg’s actual subject wasn’t Petacque’s behavior but his own unease, he said enough about how Petacque behaved to entitle us to the rest. You don’t let just some of the chips fall where they may. So I asked Steinberg what happened, and he told me.
What about “Ed Gold”?
Steinberg poses an interesting question. Why don’t journalists, those implacable enemies of illusion, dish up the hard truths of a life when it ends? The best answer I can come up with is probably a lame one–it’s that a lot of the time journalists don’t feel like it. Out of grace or gutlessness, those hard truths often don’t look to them like the important truths. Steinberg wonders why the hard truths told in the new biography by Dick Ciccone weren’t raised when Mike Royko died four years ago. What can I say? Royko the SOB wasn’t the Royko the city was mourning back then, and even Ciccone’s biography pulls its punches. Royko with no tears at all might have to await a cocky young academic who didn’t know him and never read him in the papers.
