Jewel

寒假惊奇地发现老家丽水居然还有Richard Jewell的排片，立马就去看了。 之前只看过东木老爷子的《百万美元宝贝》，对他不甚了解。但单从这部和《百》来看，着实可以看出他的过人之处：不用很多的技巧修饰，利用故事本身来打动观众。在我来看，他是一个具有“内力”的导演；可能也是因为将近耄耋的高龄，他的作品因而显得精准有力。 现实题材与写实主义的风格无疑最大程度体现了他这种“内力”；同时，同等程度地，将演员的演技无限的放大。山姆洛克威尔、乔恩哈姆等人贡献了优秀的表演；保罗沃尔特豪泽（终于不需要演类似于《黑色党徒》《我，托尼娅》里面的胖傻叉了！），本片的男主，堪称完美的人选；而最最让我感动与惊讶的是男主母亲，扮演者凯西贝茨的表演（爆奶今年奥提！）。那段发言的表演过于真实，丝毫没有修饰的痕迹。我看过很多的哭戏，几乎没有一个像这样富有层次与感染力，既内敛同时有张力。就像影片中所说的那样，她的表演完美的诠释了truth而不是fact。 很庆幸能在家乡看了如此动人的新年第一部。可笑的是，家乡当地仅有的三家艺术影院之中，作为丽水地区电影院的“霸主”、本应该引领地区的某两影院，却如同吝啬鬼一般的不给真正的CINIMA一次上映的机会，而给某些辣鸡“视频”（恕我直言）以大量场次。而相比之下一个几乎无人问津的小资影厅，却拥有相当的职业的当担与操守。其实不只是我家乡，全国各地情况都是如此，例如同样加入艺联的著名的某达影院，也几乎没有《朱》与《别》的排片。 我大学不修经济，仅以高中知识，我不是特别清楚这里面供求关系。但我确切地意识到，如果市场只单方面提供娱乐向的“游乐园式”的电影而忽略了这些艺术电影，也行将来的观众们会认为电影只是用来娱乐的，马丁的预言或将实现。我相信这就是艺术电影联盟为艺术电影奋斗的原因，特别是为了中国电影事业的未来。而那部分唯利是图的商人，自以为在经济上为中国电影事业尽一份力，实则可能真的荼毒了万千的观众，断送中国电影的未来。 我看的那个场次，到场的观众寥寥无几；也许都是电影爱好者，出现片尾CAST的时候，许久，大家都没有动弹。在寥寥无几的观众里，我惊讶地发现了两个十多岁的小朋友。在幽暗的影厅里，在他们眼神中，我似乎看到了灼烈的焰火。我没有老到可以感慨岁月流逝白驹过隙、时间的不易，但我看到他们时，我可以说，我看见了电影的某种未来，一种我期待的未来。 有时我会想，这些电影真的就那么“艺术”吗？难道真的就那么无聊、枯燥以至于大家都不想看吗？中国电影票房真的只能靠“话题“流量”来支持吗？我以我亲身体会来看：非也。仅以这部而言，观影的门槛很低，懂电影的人也许能看到更多，不大懂的人也能感受它的魅力。连小孩子都来看，为什么成年人不行呢？更何况最近佳片稀少，《朱》与《别》理应加大排片量。 其实，更重要的，不是供应不足，而是需求不够，是很多人没有做出尝试。横向比较于类似的艺术形式，书的普及应该算是很成功的了。既然书能够做到，为什么电影不能呢？我一直认为电影的商业形式是双向性的，就像没去过海边不知道海有多宽广一样，没多看佳片的人是不知道电影的艺术有多美。我由衷希望未来有更多的人能像从小学习看书、绘画、声乐一样，学会看电影、欣赏电影；把它当做一门艺术，而不是娱乐大众的道具。 以上只是一位初级电影爱好者浅薄的感想。其实自高考以后，我就再也不想写文章了；但是今天今夜，我感受到了信仰的召唤。

在我的观影序列里，这应该是老头百万美元宝贝以后最好的一部作品，也是可以提前排进我今年个人观影十佳的电影。

毫无疑问离90周岁还差1年4个月的伊斯特伍德依然有着旺盛的创作欲，而创作于最直接的来源便是他的愤怒，愤怒来源就是他老右棍的政治立场。在好莱坞整体左倾的现实情况下，右翼电影越来越被压制，像约翰韦恩那种说不好就干的演员也在好莱坞销声匿迹。政治正确成为好莱坞自我审查的最大门槛，过了这道门槛电影的上映才有可能。

在拍《被拯救的姜戈》时候，小李子因为说不出“尼格”这个词，电影整体进度被拖慢，吉米福克斯和塞缪尔杰克逊轮流劝，小李子也表示对黑兄弟说不出这个词。最后在昆汀的授意下塞缪尔对小李子说：“你特么说了也没关系，我和你也特么不是朋友。”以后，小李子才勉为其难的完成影片拍摄。

好莱坞整体左转的同时也让文化在肤色表达上越来越多彩，但在立场表达上越来越单一。2019年在艺术上有卓越表达并且重新定义了特写镜头的《小丑》拿下了威尼斯，但是在左轨道奔跑的好莱坞里，可以看到《小丑》基本上与奥斯卡最佳导演和最佳影片无缘了。

话说回来，在好莱坞压抑了那么久的老爷子拍完《骡子》以后总算逮到了一个机会拍了《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》，千载难逢的机会老头的红脖子能不亮一亮么，压了那么久的恶气能不吐一吐么。

无论是什么电影，基底都应该是对人道主义的体现，对良知的赞美、对真相的挖掘和对丑恶的咒骂，而应不是立场的左右，《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》首先表达的第一层就是电影的基底。

电影中的初始事件就是朱维尔的善举，因为一次英勇的拯救才导致了后续诬陷构害的发生，而组成构害朱维尔网的主要有三个节点，一个节点是查尔斯格林饰演的克里尔博士，另一个节点是王尔德饰演的斯克鲁格斯，最后一个节点是乔恩哈姆饰演的肖探员，而他也是整个织网的中心，肖探员从得到朱维尔可能是凶手的信息之后与高级知识分子苟合，到放出消息与新闻媒体互为苟合。三点构成大网一点点的覆盖在理查德朱维尔的身上，而保护理查德朱维尔并且最终破局的尖刀则是山姆洛克威尔饰演的沃森律师，不断挖掘真相，信任朱维尔并引导他建立起自我成长的弧光。

抛开影片里所体现出人的良知，另一个层面上电影表现的也是高知加媒体加体制所联立的精英阶层对于普通红脖子的迫害。

红脖子是最初南方开垦美国的普通农民们，他们在烈日下勤作、山野中拓荒，是着构建美国最基础的价值观之一。红脖子最不能忍受便是对自我领地的侵犯，是对个人尊严的折辱。在决斗之风盛行的19世纪，因为一个眼神不对，红脖子们都会拉开场地干一架，当时有记者曾经说过“在南方找不到一个没有决斗过的议员”。

而电影中FBI不仅侵犯了朱维尔的土地也折辱了他的尊严。在朱维尔一次又一次配合调查，家中的器物一件被一件搬出的时候，沃森律师才会发火大吼：“你不能被侵犯尊严。”这一句嘶吼也是最直接体现导演自我表达的台词。而种种屈辱的积压之后，朱维尔才在联邦调查局的办公室里里对肖探员绝地反击。

跳脱出电影来看好莱坞现况，引领好莱坞向左跑的正是编剧所代表的高级知识分子精英阶层，而社会中白左们的主要口舌也正是各大新闻报纸媒体们，并且这一切都是体制默许甚至主导的。所以老爷子要在电影里特别讽刺的出现一个蠢蛋克里尔博士，要在剧中特别政治不正确构建一个与探员性交易的女记者，要在反派中塑造一个特别狠毒主导迫害行为的联邦探员。

从《百万美元宝贝》阴险的“来自东德的妓女”到《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》里“我们（苏联）的政府认为这个人是有罪的，那么他就是清白的。”伊斯特伍德在电影里表现自己的立场也是时时刻刻，作为2019年末一部老右政治不正确电影，《朱维尔》的表现堪称优秀。

《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》是老爷子的一击勾拳，90岁的老人依然如此愤怒、如此发声，对比之下某些导演年纪轻轻就开始喝养生茶、佛系表达了，实在令人可惜。

后记：

1，对于这片子的喜爱与打分是特别出自私人感情的，爱吃甜甜圈的胖子不就是我么，不拒绝任何美食不也是我么。从电影中朱维尔蠢蠢的跑来跑去让大家疏散开始，自己的眼泪就止不住的流，到最后朱维尔吃着甜甜圈泣不成声的时候，自己的情绪也随着崩溃了。感谢伊斯特伍德，在新年开始就让我看到了那么好的电影。

2，凯西贝茨看的时候就感觉肯定可以拿个表演奖，回来一看果然拿了个金球奖提名，还中了一个评论协会奖。所以说演员的表演一部分看自己一部分看导演，表演效果比美国恐怖故事高到不知道哪里去了。

彩蛋：

1999年6月，披露朱厄尔是作案者的两名记者斯克鲁格斯(Kathy Scruggs)和马茨(Ron Martz)因拒绝透露消息来源而被起诉。

年届九十的东木导演最近十年里的作品基本上都是人物传记题材，从总统到飞机师，从狙击手到毒贩，再到这部新作里的平民英雄。他总能在真实人物的生平故事里提炼出最震撼的闪光点，从而提升整部传记片的表现层次，以及凸显出发人深省的现实诉求，这部新作自然也不例外。一位平民英雄对抗政府与媒体的事件可以有不少表现角度，而导演采用最平铺直叙的方式依然散发出扣人心弦的魅力。滴水不漏的叙事手法令观众看得屏息静气，爆炸案发生的场景段落拍出了希区柯克式的胆战心惊气氛，群像速写与镜头捕捉，以及精准的场面调度让人惊叹。除了深厚的导演功力外，自然还少不了一众演技出色的演员支撑起这个剧本。尽管人物塑造局限于真实性而有脸谱化的嫌疑，比如像女记者和联邦探员，却仍能在某几场关键的段落中传达出发人深省的意味。奥斯卡女主角凯西·贝茨扮演的母亲角色最为真挚感人，她的绝望、愤怒、伤感情绪都表现得丝丝入扣，尤其是在记者会上的讲话令人忍不住泪流满面。

回到影片主题上，这部新片跟《萨利机长》有不少共通之处，借助这位平民英雄为自己平反冤屈的事件过程中不断质疑政府权力的正义与合理性。一个清白无辜的平民百姓可以被怀疑是十恶不赦的罪犯，还被用尽各种手段（诱骗、骚扰与监听）来套取证据以便定罪控告。与其说这是司法部门工作中的漏洞，倒不如说是公权力对人民的蔑视，用影片中角色的一句台词来概括：我害怕政府更甚于恐怖分子。主人公一直在为这种权力辩护，甚至主动配合，深信自身清白便能脱身，直至最后才明白要主动出击对抗蛮横的权力才能平反正名。

除了公权力之外，剧中主人公还要面对追求关注度的媒体，他和家人的生活逐渐陷于媒体曝光和骚扰的漩涡里。剧本透过刻画女记者这个具有反派意味的角色，导演不留情面地对编造不实消息新闻的媒体予以强力抨击。在互联网信息泛滥的时代，越来越多的媒体不惜编造新闻博取读者眼球和点击量，甚至虚构故事而对新闻当事人造成不可估量的打击和影响。发生在20多年前的这个事件却早已透露出如此远见，足可令人反思新闻媒体的本质。

好莱坞属于自由进步派的重灾区，两部近年来罕见的佳作在奥斯卡颗粒无收：《佛罗里达乐园》（2017）挑战儿童保护的政治正确，《巴斯特·斯克鲁格斯的歌谣》 (2018)不仅没有土著拯救白人的鸡汤，还涉嫌丑化土著和“身体受到挑战者”，政治严重不正确！

因此，《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》仅获得一项奥斯卡安慰性质的女配提名，也就完全可以理解了。

1996年7月27日晚，作为亚特兰大奥运会庆祝活动的中心，百年奥林匹克公园人山人海，保安理查德·朱维尔发现一个背包里藏有三枚炸弹，马上通知警方，并开始疏散人群。片刻，炸弹爆炸，炸死两人，100多人受伤。

朱维尔的果断行动避免了更大的伤亡，一个无名小卒至少拯救了上百人的生命，成为令亲朋自豪的英雄。然而，仅过三天，朱维尔的噩梦降临，从英雄变成恐怖分子嫌疑人。在FBI的策划下，朋友来他家吃饭都藏着窃听器。

在自由进步派的眼中，朱维尔是一个不合时宜的想当英雄的可笑的牛仔，吹毛求疵，爱出风头，“试图以轻微违法写出史诗般的警察报告”。

玩枪战游戏，朱维尔得分很高，他本身就是一个神枪手，职业理想是做FBI特工，保护他的国家和人民，这让他的律师朋友都觉得古怪和肉麻，瞬间让人想起伊斯特伍德《美国狙击手》引发笑场的台词：“保卫地球上最伟大的国家。”在自由进步派看来，不让政府伤害祖国才是唯一正确的爱国方式。

FBI向《亚特兰大宪法报》透露朱维尔有重大嫌疑，24小时监控，乖乖，这下可了不得，媒体如获至宝，捕风捉影的报道和犯罪心理侧写铺天盖地：朱维尔人生失败，一心想搞大新闻、逞英雄！

朱维尔是自由派媒体最厌恶的那种保守派青年，肥胖、妈宝男，家中的武器足以装备一个排。FBI将他家搜了个底朝天，一次不够就两次，连他母亲的保鲜盒都不放过。

客观而言，严密监控和搜查嫌疑人都是FBI的职责所在，但他们千不该万不该在没有切实证据的情况下就故意泄露怀疑对象，记者蜂拥而至，给朱维尔母子带来极大的困扰和痛苦。

媒体的长枪短炮锁定了朱维尔家的前门后院，NBC在直播中为朱维尔安上莫须有的罪名：“有人猜测，FBI即将提出指控，他们现在可能逮捕他，也许足以起诉他。”

面对媒体审判，母亲哭了：“我无法保护你。”朱维尔也在流泪：“对不起，妈妈，应该是我来保护你。”在律师的建议下，他顺利通过了测谎仪最高等级的的检测。

1996年10月，朱维尔总算洗清了罪名，开始起诉那些诽谤自己的媒体。1997年7月，美国司法部长公开表示，FBI不该泄露案件信息给《亚特兰大宪法报》，应当向朱维尔表示歉意。

2001年，朱维尔被授予印第安纳州卡梅尔独立日游行大元帅的称号，成为“无名英雄”的象征。2003年5月31日，制造了百年奥林匹克公园等多起爆炸案的恐怖分子鲁道夫被捕。

2006年，佐治亚州州长桑尼向朱维尔表示敬意，感谢他在爆炸案中的救援行动。2007年，朱维尔因病去世，年仅44岁。母亲认为，儿子之所以英年早逝，与媒体审判带来的身心伤害密切相关。

《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》不仅是朱维尔的英雄泪，也是克林特·伊斯特伍德对进步派、多元化的强烈抗议：欧美媒体和大学、政治精英，塑造了一种弱即正义的社会氛围。

以艺术品质而言，《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》不算伊斯特伍德最好的作品，但在政治正确的氛围中为真正的弱者呐喊，对自由进步派嗤之以鼻，这是一个老牛仔最后的倔强。

做好人是一种任性，这句话，是我在7年前的知乎日报app上看到的一篇文章的标题，大概就是说，为什么生活中存在像男主角理查德这样的人，明明知道做好人很有可能是没有好报的，还是要执意做一个好人呢？大概是任性吧。

看这部电影的时候，我感到很气愤，总会在主人公的身上看到自己的影子，虽然主人公在很大程度上比我更加社会化，更加有自己的坚持，他极富有正义感，警察技能熟练，会在晚上学习法律，很喜欢军事射击，简直就是一位天生成为好警察的料，可惜现实生活中的他，离开副警官的职位之后，多次的保安就职经历都不太顺利，以解雇作为终点。好吧，在我看来，他做保安也是屈才了。

想起了主人公说了一句话，我曾经把成为一名FBI的警察作为自己的职业梦想，但是我现在发现，你们不去抓捕真正的爆炸案罪犯，反而在这里不断地臆想理查德是罪犯，我一点也不想成为FBI警察了。

理查德虽然是一位看上去“完美”的嫌犯，失意的白人，前警察背景，懂得炸药知识，还是第一个发现爆炸的人，之前还有大学院长说，他做保安的时候，是一个喜欢表现自己的人。其实，他只是，一个善良的富有正义感的保安，他只是在履行自己的职能，尽管他当天可以请病假的，就像他说的，没有人愿意做尽职的保安了，只要看到可疑的包裹跑就好了，这大概就是职场中，多做多错，少做不错的同样场景的还原。说到尽职，戏中的警察、记者大概是称不上了。

虽然，主人公在发现家中装置了窃听设备之后，和律师大吵了一架，说我就是没有办法变成你这样啊，我就是我啊，我很生气，但是我没有表露出来啊。为什么选择你作为我的律师，因为，你是唯一不把我当作5岁小孩字的人。

在我看来，在某种象征层面上来说，主人公和律师是人生的不同阶段的象征，终究要反击，要保持愤怒，要变强大。这大概是最近这段时间自己的生活感悟把。

On July 30, 1996, the media identified Richard Jewell as the F.B.I.'s prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing. For the first time, the 34-year-old security guard tells his extraordinary story, to MARIE BRENNER: his brief moment as a national hero, his hounding by the Feds and the press, and his eccentric friendship with the unknown southern lawyer who helped him through his public torment.

FEBRUARY 1997 MARIE BRENNER DAN WINTERS The search warrant was short and succinct, dated August 3, 9:41 A.M. F.B.I. special agent Diader Rosario was instructed to produce "hair samples (twenty-five pulled and twenty-five combed hairs from the head)" of Richard Allensworth Jewell. That Saturday, Atlanta was humid; the temperature would rise to 85 degrees. There were 34 Olympic events scheduled, including women's team handball, but Richard Jewell was in his mother's apartment playing Defender on a computer set up in the spare bedroom. Jewell hadn't slept at all the night before, or the night before that. He could hear the noise from the throng of reporters massed on the hill outside the small apartment in the suburbs. All morning long, he had been focused on the screen, trying to score off "the little guy who goes back and forth shooting the aliens," but at 12:30 the sound of the telephone disturbed his concentration. Very few people had his new number, by necessity unlisted. Since the F.B.I. had singled him out as the Olympic Park bombing suspect three days earlier, Jewell had received approximately 1,000 calls a day—someone had posted his mother's home number on the Internet. "I'll be right over," his lawyer Watson Bryant told him. "They want your hair, they want your palm prints, and they want something called a voice exemplar—the goddamn bastards." The curtains were drawn in the pastel apartment filled with his mother's crafts and samplers; A HOME WITHOUT A DOG IS JUST A HOUSE, one read. By this time Bryant had a system. He would call Jewell from his car phone so that the door could be unlatched and Bryant could avoid the questions from the phalanx of reporters on the hill. Turning into the parking lot in a white Explorer, Bryant could see sound trucks parked up and down Buford Highway. The middle-class neighborhood of apartment complexes and shopping centers was near the DeKalb Peachtree Airport, where local millionaires kept their private planes. The moment Bryant got out of his car, the reporters began to shout: "Hey, Watson, do they have the murderer?" "Are they arresting Jewell?" Bryant moved quickly toward the staircase to the Jewells' apartment. He wore a baseball cap, khaki shorts, and a frayed Brooks Brothers polo shirt. He was 45 years old, with strong features and thinning hair, a southern preppy from a country-club family. Bryant had a stern demeanor lightened by a contrarian's sense of the absurd. He was often distracted—from time to time he would miss his exits on the highway—and he had the regional tendency of defining himself by explaining what he was not. "I am not a Democrat, because they want your money. I am not a Republican, because they take your rights away," he told me soon after I met him. Bryant can talk your ear off about the Bill of Rights, ending with a flourish: "I think everyone ought to have the right to be stupid. I am a Libertarian." At the time Richard Jewell was named as a suspect by the F.B.I., Watson Bryant made a modest living by doing real-estate closings in the suburbs, but Jewell and his lawyer had formed an unusual friendship a decade earlier, when Jewell worked as a mailroom clerk at a federal disaster-relief agency where Bryant practiced law. Jewell was then a stocky kid without a father, who had trained as an auto mechanic but dreamed of being a policeman; Bryant had always had a soft spot for oddballs and strays, a personality quirk which annoyed his then wife no end. The serendipity of this friendship, an alliance particularly southern in its eccentricity, would bring Watson Bryant to the immense task of attempting to save Richard Jewell from the murky quagmire of a national terrorism case. The simple fact was that Bryant had no qualifications for the job. He had no legal staff except for his assistant, Nadya Light, no contacts in the press, and no history in Washington. He was the opposite of media-savvy; he rarely read the papers and never watched the nightly news, preferring the Discovery Channel's shows on dog psychology. Now that Richard Jewell was his client, he had entered a zone of worldwide media hysteria fraught with potential peril. Jewell suspected that his pickup truck had been flown in a C-130 transport plane to the F.B.I. unit at Quantico in Virginia, and Bryant worried that his friend would be arrested any minute. Worse, Bryant knew that he had nothing going for him, no levers anywhere. His only asset was his personality; he had the bravado and profane hyperbole of a southern rich boy, but he was in way over his head. For hours that Saturday, Bryant and Jewell sat and waited for the F.B.I. From time to time Jewell would put binoculars under the drawn curtain in his mother's bedroom to peer at the reporters on the hill. Bryant was nervous that Jewell's mother, Bobi, would return from baby-sitting and see her son having hairs pulled out of his head. Bryant stalked around the apartment complaining about the F.B.I. "The sons of bitches did not show up until three P.M.," he later recalled, and when they did, there were five of them. The F.B.I. medic was tall and muscular and wore rubber gloves. He asked Jewell to sit at a small round table in the living room, where his mother puts her holiday-theme displays. Bryant stood by the sofa next to a portrait of Jewell in his Habersham County deputy's uniform. He watched the F.B.I. procedure carefully. The medic, who had huge hands, used tiny drugstore tweezers. "He eyeballed his scalp and took his hair in sections. First he ran a comb through it, and then he took these hairs and plucked them out one by one." Jewell "went stone-cold," but Bryant could not contain his temper. "I am his lawyer. I know you can have this, I know you have a search warrant, but I tell you this: If you were doing this to me, you would have to fight me. You would have to beat the shit out of me," Bryant recalled telling the case agent Ed Bazar. Bazar, Bryant later said, was apologetic. "He seemed almost embarrassed to be there." As he counted out the hairs, he placed them in an envelope. The irony of the situation was not lost on Bryant. He was a lawyer, an officer of the court, but he had a disdain for authority, and he was representing a former deputy who read the Georgia law code for fun in his spare time. It took 10 minutes to pluck Jewell's thick auburn hair. Then the F.B.I. agents led him into the kitchen and took his palm prints on the table. "That took 30 minutes, and they got ink all over the table," Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, "There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes." That was the message given by the 911 caller on the night of the bombing. He was to repeat the message 12 times. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his client's going to jail. "I said, 'I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can't, but you are not doing this today.'" All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, "they must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair. ... I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two." He felt "violated and humiliated," he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryant's outburst. He thought of the bombing victims— Alice Hawthorne, the 44-year-old mother from Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter; Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack; the more than 100 people taken to area hospitals, some of whom were his friends. "I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair." I met Richard Jewell three months later, on October 28, a few hours before a press conference called by his lawyers to allow Jewell to speak publicly for the first time since the F.B.I. had cleared him. Jewell's lawyers also intended to announce that they would file damage suits against NBC and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was a Monday, and that weekend the local U.S. attorney had delivered a letter to one of the lawyers stating Jewell was no longer a suspect. "Goddamn it," Bryant had told me on the phone, "the sons of bitches did not even have the decency to address it to Richard Jewell." I had been instructed to come early to the offices of Wood & Grant, the flashy plaintiff lawyers Bryant had pulled in to help him with Jewell's civil suits. When I arrived, I was alone in the office with Sharon Anderson, the redheaded assistant answering the phones. "Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant"—the calls overwhelmed her. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant were rushing from CNN to the local NBC and ABC affiliates, working the shows. "Everyone has theories of who the real bomber is," Sharon said. "I just write it all down and give it to the boys." When Lin Wood arrived, he was still in full makeup. Movie-star handsome with green eyes and styled hair, Wood has the heated oratory of a trial lawyer. "It's a war! Why in this bevy of stories does not anyone point out the fact that Richard was a hero one day and a demon the next? They have destroyed this man's life!" Watson Bryant had worked with Wood and Grant years before in a local law firm. He admired Wayne Grant for his methodical sense of detail; Grant, a New Yorker, had once forced the city of Atlanta to pay large damages to a man injured while illegally digging for antique bottles in a park. But Lin Wood's suppressed rage was a marvel to Bryant. "He is so tough he could make people cry in depositions when we were kids," Bryant told me. Wood possessed the smooth style of a member of the Atlanta establishment, but he had a hardscrabble past. He was a boy from "the wrong side of the tracks" in Macon who at age 17 discovered his mother's body after his father had murdered her. His father went to jail, and Wood wound up as a lawyer. He went through college and law school on scholarships and with part-time jobs. I could hear Wood on Sharon's telephone: "He's more than innocent. He's a goddamn hero. . . . Everyone is going to pay who wronged Richard Jewell. Besides NBC and The A.J.C., we are going to look into suing CNN and Jay Leno." Through the large picture window, I had a clear view of the remains of the Centennial Olympic Park, where the bomb had exploded on the night of July 26. Where the sound-and-light tower had once been, there was now a flattened dirt field. It was possible to see the Greek commemorative sculpture that Richard Jewell used to describe for tourists at the AT&T pavilion, where he worked as a security guard. Suddenly, Jewell was in the room. "Hi. I'm Richard. I'm a little late. I don't want you to think I am rude. I am not like that." He had an open face, a bland pleasantness, an eagerness to please. "Can I get you a Coke?" he asked me. "How about some coffee?" Jewell wore a blue-and-white striped shirt and chinos. He occupied physical space like a teenager; he sprawled, he lumbered, he pawed through Sharon's candy bowl. On TV his face had a porcine blankness; he appeared suspicious. In person, Jewell has a hard time disguising his emotions. We were alone in the conference room; I noticed that Jewell avoided looking out the window toward the park. He shifted his glance nervously away from the view. He often awakens in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, thinking of the events in the park in the early morning hours of July 27. "It took me days before I could even come in here," he said anxiously. The newsroom atmosphere resembled that at F.B.I. headquarters; there was a frenzy to be first. When Jewell noticed a local ABC reporter outside near Sharon's desk, his face darkened. "I don't want to be around reporters right now. I guess I am a little nervous. What is he doing here?" The atmosphere was now filled with tension; the reporter was escorted out. Moments later, we gathered in the hallway. Wood was steely: "We are going in two cars. Richard, you drive with me. Your mother will go with Wayne. As we walk down the hall right now, if the ABC people are outside, I will tap you on the shoulder and I will say, 'How are you doing?' You will say, 'Fine.' Is that understood?" "O.K., Lin. I understand," Jewell said quietly, head bowed. As Jewell walked down the hall, an ABC cameraman photographed him looking grim. Seconds after the elevator doors closed, Jewell exploded: "What are they doing here, Lin? Did you invite them? They are animals. Why didn't you get them out of here?" "ABC has been good to you. How do I get them out of the office on the day of your press conference?" "That is what security is for!" Jewell said, quivering with rage. "Where is Watson?" he asked in the garage. "I told you: he's at a real-estate closing. He will meet you at the press conference," Wood said. Jewell moved to his mother's side, as solicitous as a child. "Are you all right, Mother?" he asked. "It is all I am going to be able to do not to do something!" she said angrily. When we arrived at the Marriott hotel on 1-75, there was another discussion in the parking lot, about who would walk with whom in front of the cameras. Jewell turned to his close friend Dave Dutchess: "Are you all right, man?" Dutchess, a truckdriver who worked with Jewell years ago, has long hair and a tattoo of a panther on his forearm. "Richard and I are like brothers," he told me. "I would die for him." As the cameras closed in on them, the group fled to a private room in the Marriott. The auditorium was filled with reporters. "Showtime! Showtime!" the cameramen yelled when Jewell, his mother, and all the lawyers took the stage. "I hope and pray that no one else is ever subjected to the pain and the ordeal that I have gone through," Jewell said, his voice breaking. "The authorities should keep in mind the rights of the citizens. I thank God it is ended and that you now know what I have known all along: I am an innocent man." After the press conference, Bobi and Richard Jewell remained in a private room. The bookers from Good Morning America and the Today show pressed Jewell to step before their cameras, and when Watson Bryant told them no, Monica, the G.M.A. booker, began to cry, "I'll lose my job." Then Yael, the Today-show booker, cornered Nadya Light: "Is Richard doing something with G.M.A.?' Upstairs, Jewell and his mother were being filmed by a CBS camera crew for a 60 Minutes news update. "Well, Bobi, did you get your Tupperware back?" Mike Wallace asked by phone from New York. "Richard, you need to lose some more weight." Despite Wallace's festive spirit, the atmosphere was curiously flat. Bryant urged Jewell to talk to a USA Today reporter. Jewell balked: "They can all go suck wind." In the car on the way back to Wood & Grant, Bobi was angry. All of her possessions had come back from the F.B.I. marked up with ink. "Every piece of Tupperware I own is ruined, thank you very much. They wrote numbers all over it, and I have tried everything to clean it—Comet and Brillo—but nothing works." Back at the office, she sat on the sofa and listened as Bryant negotiated with Yael for a flight to New York— Delta, first-class, 9:30 P.M. Jewell was scheduled to appear on three shows in New York, visit the American Museum of Natural History, and then fly to Washington, D.C., for Larry King Live. "I would like to go home, put on my outfit, and walk in the woods," Bobi said. "Richard, we are leaving." "Yes, ma'am," Richard said. One hour later, a telephone call came in to the offices of Wood & Grant. The lawyers had the call on speaker, and it blared through the room. "Goddamn it, Lin. When will this be over?" In the background, you could hear Bobi sobbing. "What in the world?" Wood asked. Jewell explained that a sound truck from ABC had been waiting in the parking lot when the Jewells got home. There had been words and threats, and Dave Dutchess had taken his stun gun off his motorcycle and waved it at the ABC van. The cameraman yelled: Stop harassing us! Dave yelled back: You are harassing us! Now get your ass out of here! Wood shouted into the speakerphone: "Do not meddle! You cannot jeopardize where you have gotten to and what you want to do! All you have to do is put up with this for one more day and the damn thing is over. Bobi, there is nothing you can do about it; you have to stay cool." Bobi cried back, "They are going to destroy me!" The moment they hung up, Wood turned to Bryant. "New York is canceled. No Katie Couric. No Good Morning America. They are losing it. You better call Yael." "No," Bryant said, "they have lost it. All of the above: their patience, their temper and heart." That evening a very testy Katie Couric tracked Bryant down at Nadya Light's apartment, where we had gone to watch the news. "I want you to know that I canceled interviewing Barbra Streisand in L.A. for Richard Jewell. Don't think he is always going to be a news story. No one will care about him in three days," she said, according to Bryant. "Look, Katie, I am sorry. But Richard is in no condition to talk to the press. He is worn out," Bryant told her. Later, Jewell would tell me that that day, which should have been one of his most satisfying, was actually his worst. His notoriety had tainted the triumph; everything positive had become negative. "I was in despair," he said. As he had for most of the previous 88 days, he spent the night confined in the Buford Highway apartment, a prisoner of his circumstances, with his mother, Dave Dutchess, and Dave's fiancee, Beatty, eating Domino's Pizza and watching himself lead the newscasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC. "This case has everything—the F.B.I., the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights from the First to the Sixth Amendment." 'This case has everything— the F.B.I., the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights, from the First to the Sixth Amendment," Watson Bryant told me in one of our first conversations. It has become common to characterize the F.B.I.'s investigation of Richard Jewell as the epitome of false accusation. The phrase "the Jewell syndrome," a rush to judgment, has entered the language of newsrooms and First Amendment forums. On the night of Jewell's press conference, a commentator on CNN's Crossfire compared Jewell's situation to "Kafka in Prague." The case became an investigative catastrophe, which laid bare long-simmering resentments of many F.B.I. career professionals regarding the micromanagement style and imperious attitude of Louis Freeh and his inner circle of former New York prosecutors, who have worked together since their days at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District. Within the bureau, the beleaguered director now has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children. Like Freeh, those near him have also acquired a nickname: Louie's yes-men. Two of Freeh's closest associates, F.B.I. general counsel Howard Shapiro and former deputy director Larry Potts, have been severely criticized, respectively, for advising the White House of confidential F.B.I. material and for an alleged cover-up of the mishandling of the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, where F.B.I. agents killed the wife and son of Randy Weaver, a white supremacist. In November and December, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducted an exhaustive investigation into the Jewell affair. Responding to an attempt by headquarters and certain officials to distance themselves, according to F.B.I. sources, several agents, including a senior F.B.I. supervisor in Atlanta, have provided the O.P.R. with signed statements insisting that Freeh himself was responsible for "oversight" during the crisis. These agents "shocked the investigators" because they reiterated, when asked who was in charge of the overall command of the investigation, that it was the director himself. What happened to Richard Jewell raises an important question central to Freeh's future tenure: in the midst of a media frenzy, does the F.B.I. have any responsibility to protect the privacy of an innocent man? Over the last year, this concept was broached with Bob Bucknam, Louis Freeh's chief of staff. During the long Pizza Connection trial in the 1980s, it was Bucknam who handed Freeh files at the prosecutor's table. According to highly placed sources in the bureau, Bucknam's answer was immediate: the F.B.I. has no responsibility to correct information in the public domain. Richard Jewell had a reverence for authority that blinded him to the paradox of his situation. He idealized the investigative skills of the F.B.I. and could not understand that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy. Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter has invited Jewell to Washington to testify at congressional hearings on the F.B.I.'s conduct in the Atlanta bombing. Ironically, the bungling of the investigation might lead to the reshuffling of personalities at the top of the bureau and threaten Freeh's reputation. In October, according to The Washington Post, Freeh sent an unusual memo to all 25,000 F.B.I. personnel: He would not be abandoning his post amid reports of problems with the Jewell case and Filegate, and of a growing dissatisfaction inside the bureau. "I am proud to be the F.B.I. director," Freeh wrote. From the beginning, Jewell was perceived in the public imagination as a hapless dummy, a plodding misfit, a Forrest Gump. On one of the first days he worked as a security guard at the AT&T pavilion, he noticed that his co-workers were covering the steps inside the sound tower with graffiti. On one step Jewell scrawled with a flourish two bromides: IF YOU DIDN'T GO PAST ME, YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE and LIFE IS TOUGH. TOUGHER WHEN YOU ARE STUPID. Soon after he was targeted as a suspect in the Olympics bombing, the F.B.I. confiscated the step. Analysts appeared to believe that the graffiti contained a clue to his character. "They told the lawyers the statement was an obvious taunt," Jewell said. In fact, the second line was an expression he had cribbed from one of his favorite actors, John Wayne. Within the F.B.I., the beleaguered director has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children. "To understand Richard Jewell, you have to be aware that he is a cop. He talks like a cop and thinks like a cop," his criminal lawyer, Jack Martin, told me. The tone of Jewell's voice drops noticeably when he says the word "officer," and his conversation is filled with observations about traffic patterns, security devices, and car wrecks. Even the vocabulary he uses to describe the 88 days he was a suspect is out of the lexicon of police work, and he continues to talk about his situation then in the present tense: "This is an out-and-out ambush, and I am a hostage." Jewell has a need to accommodate. He can be startlingly opaque. On the afternoon of July 30, Jewell answered the door of his mother's apartment to Don Johnson and Diader Rosario from the F.B.I. "We need your help making a training film," they told him. "I never questioned it," he told me. The next day Rosario appeared again with a search warrant. "The weird thing was that when they were searching my apartment I was, like, 'Take everything. Take the carpet. I am law enforcement. I am just like you. Guys, take whatever you are going to take, because it is going to prove that I didn't do anything.' And a couple of them were looking at me like I was crazy." Leaving the apartment on one occasion, he told the agents, "I am wearing a bright shirt so y'all can see me easier." He recalled feeling anger when he read descriptions of himself as a child-man, a mama's boy, and "a wannabe policeman," but he said, "If I was in the place of everybody else and I saw a 34-year-old guy living with his mother, I would have reservations about that, too. I would think, Why is he doing that?" The December issue of Atlanta magazine reported that there was no record of a Jewell family in Danville, Virginia, where Richard Jewell was born. Atlanta referred to an article in the Danville Register & Bee which asked, "Did Richard Jewell ever sleep here?" "This is a part of my life Richard and I do not like to speak about," Bobi Jewell told me one night at dinner. Richard was born in Danville, but his name was Richard White; his father was Bobi's first husband, Robert Earl White, who worked for Chevrolet. According to Bobi, Richard's father, who died recently, was "irresponsible and a ladies' man." When Richard was four, the marriage broke up. Bobi found work as an insurance-agency claims coordinator and soon met John Jewell, an executive in the same business. Shortly after John Jewell married Bobi, he adopted Richard. From the time Richard was a child, he and his mother were a unit. Bobi, a woman of intelligence and disciplined work habits, is both tender and tough on the subject of her son. She still calls Richard "my boy," but she has a peppery disposition. Richard was brought up in a strict Baptist home. "If I didn't say 'Yes, ma'am' or 'No, ma'am' and get it out quick enough, I would be on the ground," he said. When he was six, the family moved to Atlanta. Richard was the boy who helped the teachers and worked as a school crossing guard, but he had few friends in high school. "I was a wannabe athlete, but I wasn't good enough," he said. He ran the movie projector in the library. A military-history buff, he liked to talk about Napoleon and the Vietnam War and read books on both World Wars. Jewell's ambition was to work on cars, so he enrolled in a technical school in southern Georgia. On his third day there, Bobi discovered that her husband had packed a suitcase. "He left a note saying that he was a failure and no good for us," Jewell said. Almost immediately, Richard moved back home and took a job repairing cars. "My mom and I tried to take care of each other," he said. "I think I handled it pretty much better than she did." Richard took the brunt of his father's abandonment; Bobi pulled even closer to her son. "She hated all men for about three years after that, and she became overly protective of me. She looked at it that I was going to do the same thing that my dad did. I was 18 or 19. I was working. She never liked my dates, but I never held that against her. We have always been able to lean on each other." Richard managed a local TCBY yogurt shop and once stopped a burglary in progress. At the age of 22, he was hired as a clerk at the Small Business Administration, and he impressed Watson Bryant and the other lawyers in the office with his personable nature. They called him Radar because of his efficiency. "You could say, 'I'm hungry,' and suddenly this kid would be by your side with a Snickers bar," Bryant recalled. When Jewell's contract with the S.B.A. ran out, he moved on to be a Marriott house detective. In 1990 he was hired as a jailer in the Habersham County Sheriff's Office, and in 1991 he became a deputy. As part of his training, he was sent to the Northeast Georgia Police Academy, where he finished in the upper 25 percent of his class. He finally had an identity; he was a law-enforcement officer. Jewell was unlucky in love. He presented one woman with an engagement ring, and later, in Habersham County, he would give another a large wooden key with a sign that read, THIS IS THE KEY TO UNLOCK YOUR HEART, but both relationships came apart. In northern Georgia, Jewell worked nights and became wedded to his job. By his own description, he was methodical. "I am the kind of person who plans everything. I like to go from A to B to C to D. This going from A to D and arguing over everything—I say no." Habersham County, a scenic part of the piney woods in Georgia's Bible Belt, was for Jewell like "leaving the 1990s and going into the 1970s in terms of law enforcement." Many rich Atlantans have country houses in the mountains, but the small towns of Demorest and Charlottesville are relatively undeveloped, reminding one of Jewell's lawyers of the scenery in the movie Deliverance. "If you get lost up there, you might find a guy with a bow and arrow," the lawyer said. Recently, Jewell and I took the 90-minute drive from Atlanta to Habersham County, which has acres of apple orchards. The leaves were turning, and the roads were mostly deserted. In the towns, however, were stores, apple stands, and even a good Chinese restaurant. As Jewell's blue pickup truck turned into the parking lot of a shopping center, several people came out to greet him. Jewell had lived in a small yellow house up a steep rocky driveway. On the day we visited, the current resident's Halloween decorations were still up, as were faded white satin ribbons hanging from many trees, remnants of a campaign to clear Richard Jewell organized by area friends. Jewell had lived 50 yards from the Chattahoochee River near a kayak-and-canoe tourist concession on a main road—not in a "cabin in the woods," as several reports stated after the bombing. He worked the night shift, and when he would arrive home at dawn, he told me, he could look up and "see a sky filled with stars." He was not a loner; he made friends with several local families. He would often leave a box of Dunkin' Donuts on friends' porches at four A.M. During the O. J. Simpson trial, he and the other deputies would meet in the turnaround on Highway 985 in the middle of the night and review the day's events and the bungling by the Los Angeles Police Department. Jewell would later be annoyed that the F.B.I. confiscated his copy of former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's account of the trial. Jewell dated a local girl, Sheree Chastain, and had a close relationship with her family. Jewell had a complex history working at the Habersham County Sheriff's Office. When he was still a jailer, he arrested a couple making too much noise in a hot tub at an apartment building where he did part-time security work. He was arrested for impersonating an officer and, after pleading guilty to a lesser charge, was placed on probation on the condition that he seek psychological counseling. By his own estimation, Jewell's strength as a cop was "working car wrecks." He had his mother's diligence; he worked 14 hours a day and organized a safety fair. Later in 1995 he wrecked his patrol car and was demoted to working in the jail. Rick Moore, a local deputy, advised him to accept the job, but Jewell despised the jailhouse atmosphere. He told me, "It was a small room filled with cigarette smoke. I couldn't take it." He resigned, and in a short time he moved to a police job at Piedmont College, a liberal-arts school with approximately 1,000 students on the main road in Demorest. The college police had jurisdiction only on campus and in an area extending out 500 feet. Jewell chased cars speeding down the highway and had arguments over turf with other officers. He was instrumental in several arrests, including that of a suspected burglar he discovered hiding at the top of a tree. For his work on a volunteer rescue squad, he was named a citizen of the year. According to Brad Mattear, a former resident director, Piedmont was a school of "P.K.'s"—preachers' kids. It was 80 percent Baptist with a strict no-drinking rule. The college had many rebellious students, according to Mattear, kids who were "away from home for the first time and wanted to party and drink." Mattear knew Jewell well and recalled his good manners and playful nature. "It was always 'Yes, sir' and 'Yes, ma'am.'" Jewell would tell students, "I know y'all are going to drink. Don't do it on campus." Jewell felt confined by his boundaries and could be heavy-handed when it came to writing out reports on minor infractions. Once when we were driving by the campus, he pointed to a small brick dormitory. "That was where all the partying would go on," he told me. Jewell would raid dorm rooms and report drinking violations. "I did not hesitate to tell the parents—in no uncertain terms—what their kids were up to," he said. He soon made enemies at the school. "Three or four times a week," Mattear said, Piedmont students were in the office of Ray Cleere, the president of the college, complaining about Jewell and other Piedmont police. After Jewell was admonished for a number of controversial arrests, he resigned. Jewell had an out: his mother was going to have an operation on her foot. He would go home to Atlanta for the Olympics and look for a new job. He called his mother: "Is it all right with you if I stay with you while you have your surgery?" He hoped he might get a job with the Atlanta police or, failing that, work security at the Olympics. "I thought, Working at the Centennial Olympic Park will look really good on my resume." At the age of 33, back in his mother's apartment, he was at first treated like a wayward teenager. Bobi was sharp with him about his slovenly habits, his weight, and his driving. Bobi had carved out a life for herself; she arrived at work by eight A.M. each morning and had many friends. Trim, with short-cropped hair, Bobi Jewell is the kind of woman who labels her clothes and spices and spends much of her spare time baking cakes and babysitting for extra money. She carries on telephone friendships with claim adjusters at other companies. It was somewhat unsettling for her, she told me, to have Richard at home after she had grown used to living with only her dog, Brandi, and her cat, Boots. Bobi was annoyed that he had wrecked a patrol car, and worried about his safety. "Every time he leaves the apartment, I'll say, 'Richard . . . ' And he'll say, 'Yes, ma'am. I know. The person that I am going to see will be there when I get there,'" she said. On one occasion Bobi talked about Richard's return to Atlanta. "What is wrong with trying to revamp your life?" she asked me. Her eyes filled with tears. "Why does everyone in the media think it is so strange?" On Friday, July 26, Bobi Jewell was home waiting for her niece to arrive from Virginia for the Olympic softball competition the following week. In preparation, she had stocked her apartment with food. It was a clear Georgia evening, not as hot as had been expected. As usual, Richard left for the park at 4:45 P.M. and arrived at the AT&T pavilion about 5:30. His stomach was bothering him; he was convinced that he had eaten a bad hamburger the day before. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant had arranged to take their children to Centennial Park that night. The park, in downtown Atlanta, stretches over 21 acres. There were air-conditioned tents, concerts on the stage, and hot-dog and souvenir stands. Downtown Atlanta was usually deserted in the oppressively hot, humid summer, but this year thousands of tourists filled the sidewalks, or sat on benches in the shade of some crape-myrtle trees, or cooled off by a fountain. Tour buses clogged the main arteries, and everyone complained that it took hours to get anywhere; stories were traded about athletes' getting to their competitions late because of the poor planning of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. As always, Jewell was working the 12-hour night shift near the sound-and-light tower by the stage. He was pleased because one of his favorite groups—Jack Mack and the Heart Attack—was going to perform at 12:45. Jewell had a routine: he would check in and fill the ice chest he kept by a bench at his station. Jewell liked to offer water and Cokes to pregnant women or policemen who stopped to rest. After he arrived at the park, his stomach cramps grew worse and he had a bout of diarrhea. At approximately 10 P.M. he took a break to go to the bathroom. The closest one was by the stage, but the security staff was not allowed to use it. "I really have to go," Jewell says he told the stage manager. "And he said, 'Well, O.K. this time.'" When Jewell came out, he noticed that it was "real calm" and there wasn't much wind blowing. At that time of night, the crowd from Bud World became a little more raucous. Jewell was annoyed when he saw a group of drunks near his bench and beer cans littering the area beside the fence nearby. As he went to report the trash and the group that was carousing, he spotted a large olive-green military-style backpack, known as an Alice pack, under the bench. There had been a similar bag found the week before. Jewell later told an F.B.I. agent that he was annoyed that one of the drunks had tried to get into the lens of a camera crew. Jewell had told them to cut it out. "They were running off at the mouth," Jewell would later tell Larry Landers of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (G.B.I.). "I was light about the package at first," he told me, "kidding around with Tom Davis from the G.B.I.: 'Well, are you going to open it?' At that point, it was not a concern. I was thinking to myself, Well, I am sure one of these people left it on the ground. When Davis came back and said, 'Nobody said it was theirs,' that is when the little hairs on the back of my head began to stand up. I thought, Uh-oh. This is not good. "I never really had time to be frightened. My law-enforcement background paid off here. What went through my head was like a computer screen of this list I had to do. I had to call my supervisor. I have to tell people in the tower that something was going on. I have to be firm with them, stay calm, and be professional." Almost immediately, Jewell and Tom Davis cleared a 25-foot-square area around the backpack; Jewell made two trips into the tower to warn the technicians. "I want y'all out now. This is serious." Two blocks away on Marietta Street, approximately 300 editors, copywriters, and reporters from Cox newspapers around the country had taken over the extra desks in the new eighth-floor newsroom at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to prepare the special Olympics edition they put out each afternoon. The paper had gone "Olympics-crazy," according to one reporter. The editor, Ron Martin, and the managing editor, John Walter—"WalMart," as they were called—had let it be known that no expense would be spared. Ann Hardie, who normally covers science, had been sent around the world to master the fine points of beach volleyball; Bill Rankin, officially on the federal-court beat, was assigned table tennis. The paper intended to set new standards in its hometown during the games, but in addition there was a hint of redemption in the air. Since Cox newspaper executives had forced the resignation of the distinguished editor Bill Kovach in 1988, the paper had suffered a severe loss of reputation. "We all felt just kind of beaten down," one reporter said. Kovach had been brought to Atlanta from The New York Times to elevate The A.J.C. into being the definitive paper of the New South, but eventually he irritated the local powers. Atlanta was inbred, a city of deals, and he resigned in a blaze of press outrage. Kovach now ran the Nieman journalism-fellowship program at Harvard, and the movie rights to his turbulent years in Atlanta—reported in these pages by Peter J. Boyer—had been sold to Warner Bros. Within the profession, The A.J.C. had become something of a joke. More and more, its emphasis was on what John Walter called "chunklets"—short bits in a soft-news style known as eye-candy. The paper published features on couples massage and how mushrooms grow in the rain. Walter had fired off several terse memos to ensure that there would be no more jumps of news stories to back pages and no more unsourced news stories, except on rare occasions. "I don't see any reason why you can't report hard news in a short form," one editor told me. The A.J. C. style of reporting in declarative sentences had a name, too: the voice of God. It was omniscient, because it allowed no references to unattributed sources. Subjects such as AIDS, which often required confidentiality, could not be covered properly in the paper, in the opinion of several reporters. The A.J.C. picked up news stories with unnamed sources from The New York Times, however, and reporters groused about the hypocrisy of the double standard. On Saturday morning, July 27, Bob Johnson, the night metro editor, left the newsroom at one A.M. The sidewalks were still crowded; Johnson sat on a wall outside waiting for an A.J.C. shuttle bus to pick him up. About 1:25 he heard a strange noise. "It sounded like an aerial bomb at a fireworks show," he said. He recalled thinking, Damn, that is sort of foolish. Then he heard screams and saw people running. Johnson rushed back upstairs to the almost deserted sixth-floor newsroom. Lyda Longa, a night police reporter, was still there. Johnson sent her down to the park and turned on the news, but nothing had moved across the wires. Just after two A.M., Longa called from the park. She told Johnson that one person had been killed and dozens were down—it was absolute chaos. Johnson could hear the sirens and the screams through the telephone; he began to type into his computer. "We were trying to get a bullet into the street edition," Johnson recalled. In the crisis, it took only minutes for reporters to return to the newsroom; several had been at the park when the bomb went off. Rochelle Bozman, an Olympics editor, appeared and took over for Johnson. Soon John Walter was there, as was Bert Roughton, who would assist him in supervising the A.J.C. coverage of the bombing. At the park, Jewell spoke with the first F.B.I. agents to arrive on the scene. The smell and the noise, he remembered, were overwhelming, and sensations blurred together. "It was hard to describe the sound," he said. "It was like what you hear in the movies. It was, like, KABOOM. I had seen an explosion in police training. We had ear protection when it went off. It smelled like a flash-bang grenade. The sky was not filled with black smoke, but grayish-white. All the shrapnel that was inside the package kept flying around, and some of the people got hit from the bench and some with metal." Bobi Jewell had just gone to sleep when the telephone rang. It was Richard. "Mom, they had a bomb go off down here, but I am O.K. regardless of what the TV says." He could hardly speak; he seemed paralyzed. Jewell did not mention to his mother that he had found the backpack and alerted Tom Davis. Bobi was perplexed. "I thought, What does he mean?" All night long she stayed on the foldout sofa watching the news reports. She was frightened by the ambulances, the noise, the bodies in the park. Soon veteran homicide detectives in the Atlanta police arrived at the bomb site. One sergeant was trying to make his way through the crowd when an Olympics official stopped him. "Tell these cops to get the hell out of here," he said, according to a captain in the homicide division. "Well, you get the fuck out of here. Who are you?" the sergeant demanded. Agents from the Atlanta F.B.I. office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were in a shouting match over jurisdiction. "We are handling this!" one said. "No, this is ours!" an F.B.I. agent snapped. In the command center at F.B.I. headquarters in northeastern Atlanta, there was complete pandemonium. The Olympics were a national convention for law enforcement. Some 30,000 security personnel were on hand. Over the next few days, there would be an internal debate: Who was going to be in charge of the bombing investigation? In Atlanta at that time were three veteran investigators with executive experience: Tom Fuentes, who is credited with helping to bring John Gotti to heel; Barry Mawn, who has worked extensively in organized-crime probes; and Robin Montgomery, the head of the critical-incident unit at Quantico, who at Ruby Ridge in 1992 questioned the disastrous "rules of engagement" which led to tragedy. In the early-morning hours, F.B.I. agents picked up several suspects, including one referred to as "the drunk in the bar." According to F.B.I. sources, Louis Freeh himself got on the telephone to Barry Mawn. Freeh, a former F.B.I. agent, was personally monitoring the initial investigation by means of a series of conference calls from the command post at F.B.I. headquarters. He focused on "the drunk in the bar," who had been making threats the night before, and within hours the information was leaked that the F.B.I. had a suspect. From Atlanta, Barry Mawn contacted his superiors in Washington. "This suspect is not the bomber," he reportedly said, according to a former highlevel F.B.I. executive. Freeh allegedly lost his temper and belittled Mawn's professional abilities. He is said to have told Mawn that he "had handled this all wrong." The words one hears characterizing Freeh's telephone calls to the agents on duty in Atlanta are "abusive," "condescending," and "dismissive." A story went around the command center that Freeh was already saying, "We have our man," according to a source in the bureau. Watson Bryant was thinking, I cannot believe that I know anyone who throws pipe bombs into gopher holes. Freeh made a decision: however experienced Montgomery, Fuentes, and Mawn were, this investigation would be run by Division 5 of the F.B.I., the National Security Division, a former counterintelligence unit that has been looking for a purpose since the Cold War ended. Trained in observation, division members rarely made a criminal case—their strength was intimidation and manipulation rather than the deliberate gathering of evidence to be presented in court. The F.B.I. promptly declared the bombing a terrorism case and placed it under the authority of Bob Bryant, head of the division. David Tubbs of Division 5 was sent to Atlanta to be the spokesman and to augment Woody Johnson, the Atlanta special agent in charge (S.A.C.), who had been trained in hostage rescue and who was awkward in press briefings. Tubbs was not as experienced in criminal cases as Mawn or Montgomery, who returned to Newark and Quantico, respectively, "to get out of the line of fire," according to numerous F.B.I. sources. But Bryant and Freeh were reportedly micromanaging the S.A.C.'s and, later, the case agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario. 106107 VIEW ARTICLE PAGES On the morning of the bombing, Watson Bryant's alarm went off at six A.M. He was going to the Olympic kayak competition on the Ocoee River with Andy Currie, a friend from his Vanderbilt University days. He learned of the bombing on the radio as he was getting ready to go to Currie's house. "Whoever has done this should be skinned alive," he told Currie. He spent the day in the country, and on Sunday he went out to run errands. When he got home, there was a message on his answering machine: "Watson, this is Richard Jewell. You may have heard that I found the bomb and people are calling me a hero. Somebody told me I might get a book contract." It had been years since Bryant had spoken to Jewell, but he did not immediately return the call; he was busy finishing up some contracts so that he could take a few days off to enjoy the Olympics. In addition, Bryant was annoyed with Jewell. After Bryant had befriended him in their days at the Small Business Administration, Jewell had borrowed his new, $250 radar detector and never returned it. He had promised to pay him $100 for it, but he never had. In the meantime, Bryant's life had changed; he had set up an office as a solo practitioner. Bryant despised corporate politics and had no gift for them. His penchant for taking on pro-bono work for friends annoyed his wife, however. Bryant believed that Richard Jewell had attached himself to him years earlier because he lacked a father, but nevertheless Jewell could get on his nerves. By the summer of 1996, Bryant was preoccupied; his marriage had come apart two years earlier, and he was trying to sort out his life. When he finally returned Jewell's phone call, he said, "Well, damn it, where's my $100?" Jewell laughed uneasily and told him about discovering the green backpack that contained the bomb. "Didn't you see me on the news?" Bryant reminded him that he rarely watched TV. "I am proud of you, Richard," he said. "About this book contract, I think it's far-fetched, but don't sign anything unless I see it first." In the Newsweek cover story detailing the bombing, published Monday, July 29, there was no mention of Richard Jewell. It said only that "a security guard" had alerted Tom Davis of the G.B.I. that no one had claimed the backpack under his bench. By the time Newsweek was on the stands, however, Jewell had been interviewed on CNN. The AT&T publicity department had booked him on TV and told him to wear the shirt with the AT&T logo. Jewell reluctantly agreed. "The idea of going on TV made me nervous," he told me. "I was not the hero. There were so many others who saved lives." In Demorest, Ray Cleere, the president of Piedmont College, was home on Saturday, July 27, watching CNN. Cleere had at one time been Mississippi's commissioner of higher education, but he was now posted at the rural Baptist mountain school. He was said to feel that he had suffered a loss of status in the boondocks, where he was out of the academic mainstream. He called Dick Martin, his chief of campus police. Shouldn't they call the F.B.I. and tell them about Richard Jewell? he asked. Cleere had had a strong disagreement with Jewell when one of the students was caught smoking pot. Jewell wanted to arrest him; Cleere said no. Cleere, Brad Mattear recalled, "worried constantly about the image of the college." According to Mattear, "Cleere loved the limelight. He wanted public attention"—the very trait he reportedly ascribed to Richard Jewell. Dick Martin, who was fond of Jewell, suggested a compromise, according to Lin Wood: he would call a friend in the G.B.I. Cleere then called the F.B.I. hot line in Washington himself. Wood says Cleere later complained that no one had seemed to want to listen to what he had to say about Richard Jewell. But his telephone call would trigger a complex set of circumstances in Habersham County, where F.B.I. investigators fanned out over the hills, attempting to uncover evidence that could lead to Jewell's arrest. "The F.B.I. took his word, and what it actually did was get them both in a bunch of trouble," Mattear said. (Cleere has declined to comment.) For Richard Jewell, Tuesday, July 30, would become a haze in which his life was turned upside down. "The hours of the day ran so fast it is hard to remember what all happened," he told me. He started the day early at the Atlanta studio of the Today show. He was tired; the evening before he had had his friend Tim Attaway, a G.B.I. agent, for dinner. He had made lasagna and had drawn Attaway a diagram of the sound-and-light tower. Jewell had talked into the night about the bombing; only later would he learn that Attaway was wearing a wire. Despite the late evening, Jewell was excited at the thought of meeting Katie Couric and being interviewed about finding the Alice pack in the park. His mother asked him to try to get Tom Brokaw's autograph. "He was a man my mom respected a great deal," he said. When he got back to the apartment, he was surprised to see a cluster of reporters in the parking lot. "Do you think you are a suspect?" one asked. Jewell laughed. "I know they'll investigate anyone who was at the park that night," he said. "That includes you-all too." Jewell did not turn on the TV, but he noticed that the group outside the door continued to grow. At four that afternoon, Jewell received a phone call from Anthony Davis, the head of the security company Jewell worked for at AT&T. "Have you seen the news?" Davis asked. "They are saying you are a suspect." Jewell said, "They are talking to everybody." According to Jewell, Davis said, "They are zeroing in on you. To keep the publicity down, don't go to work." Within minutes, Don Johnson and Diader Rosario knocked on Jewell's door. They exuded sincerity, Jewell recalled. "They told me they wanted me to come with them to headquarters to help them make a training film to be used at Quantico," he said. Johnson played to Jewell's pride. Despite the reporters in the parking lot and the call from Anthony Davis, Jewell had no doubt that they were telling the truth. He drove the short distance to F.B.I. headquarters in Buckhead in his own truck, but he noticed that four cars were following him. "The press is on us," Jewell told Johnson when they arrived. "No, those are our guys," Johnson told him. This tactic would continue through the next 88 days and be severely criticized: Why would you have an armada of surveillance vehicles stacked up on a suspected bomber? It was then that Jewell started to wonder why he was at the F.B.I., but he followed Johnson and Rosario inside. Rosario was known for his skills as a negotiator; he had once helped calm a riot of Cuban prisoners in Atlanta. Johnson, however, had a reputation for overreaching. In Albany, New York, in 1987, he had pursued an investigation of then mayor Thomas Whalen. According to Whalen, the local U.S. attorney found no evidence to support Johnson's assertions and issued a letter to Whalen exonerating him completely, but Whalen believed it cost him an appointment as a federal judge. As Jewell sat in a small office, he wondered why the cameraman recording the interview was staring at him so intently. After an hour, Johnson was called out of the room. When he returned, he said to Jewell, "Let's pretend that none of this happened. You are going to come in and start over, and by the way, we want you to fill out this waiver of rights." "At that moment a million things were going through my head," Jewell told me. "You don't give anyone a waiver of rights unless they are being investigated. I said, 'I need to contact my attorney,' and then all of a sudden it was an instant change. 'What do you need to contact your attorney for? You didn't do anything. We thought you were a hero. Is there something you want to tell us about?'" Jewell grew increasingly apprehensive and later recalled thinking, These guys think I did this. When the agents took a break, Jewell asked to use the phone. "I called Watson four times. I called his brother. I told his parents that I had to get hold of Watson—it was urgent. I was, like, 'I have to speak to him right now.' What was going on was that Washington was on the phone with Atlanta. The people in Washington were giving them questions." Jewell said he knew this because the videotapes in the cameras were two hours long and "Johnson and Rosario would leave every 30 minutes, like they had to speak on the phone." The O.RR. report, however, would assert that no one at headquarters knew about the videotaping or the training-film ruse. Lying to get a statement out of a suspect is, in fact, not illegal, but clearly Johnson and Rosario were not making decisions on their own. Even the procedure of having a fleet of cars follow a suspect was an intimidation tactic used by the F.B.I. Later, according to Jewell, Johnson and Rosario would both tell him privately that they believed he was innocent, but that the investigation was being run by the "highest levels in Washington." Within the bureau, the belief is that during one of the telephone calls Freeh instructed Johnson and Rosario to read Jewell his Miranda rights. Freeh is said to have learned of Johnson's history from a member of his security detail, who had worked in Atlanta. He told Freeh that "Johnson had a reputation for being obnoxious and a problem." In addition, a week after Jewell's interview, Freeh reportedly received a call from Janet Reno, who had learned about the ruse from Kent Alexander, the local U.S. attorney, and Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. Freeh wondered aloud how it was that, of all the agents in Atlanta, Johnson had been selected to work on the Jewell case. Like Jewell, Johnson had wound up in Atlanta because of his overzealous behavior—according to an F.B.I. source, the Whalen episode had resulted in a "loss-of-effectiveness transfer," an F.B.I. euphemism. (Johnson declined to respond.) On that same Tuesday, Watson Bryant and Nadya Light closed the office early and went to Centennial Park. Light, 35, a pretty Russian immigrant, had never met Radar, Bryant's old friend, and wanted to buy him a celebratory meal. Killing time until Jewell came on duty, they went into the House of Blues and then bought some hot sauce. Walking toward his car, Bryant saw newsboys hawking the afternoon edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It was like out of a cartoon. They were all yelling!" he recalled. "I caught the headline out of the corner of my eye." The headline read: FBI SUSPECTS 'HERO' GUARD MAY HAVE PLANTED BOMB. Bryant borrowed 50 cents from Light to buy the paper and began to read: '"Richard Jewell, 33 . . . fits the profile of the lone bomber.' I could not believe it." At that moment, Bryant's brother, Bruce, who was on his way to the diving competition, got a call from Jewell. "Where is Watson?" As Bruce Bryant walked past a Speedo billboard with a TV screen, he saw Richard Jewell's face filling the screen. "Oh, my God," he said to his wife. At the same moment, Watson was in his car a block away on Northside Drive when he too noticed the Speedo screen. He could not get back to his house—the streets were blocked off for the cycling competition. From his car he called F.B.I. headquarters and demanded to speak to Jewell. "He is not here," the operator said. From his home phone, he picked up his messages and heard Jewell's low, urgent tones. "He didn't leave a number," Bryant told Light. "Call Star 69," she said. The number came back: 679-9000, the number for F.B.I. headquarters, which he had just dialed. Within minutes, Bryant had Jewell on the phone. Jewell told him he was making a training film. "You idiot! You are a suspect. Get your ass out of there now!" Bryant told him. Before The Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the story of Richard Jewell, there had been a debate in the newsroom over whether or not to name him. One block away, CNN's Art Harris and Henry Schuster had alerted the network's president that Jewell was targeted, but they held the story, because they understood its potential magnitude. At The A.J.C., Kathy Scruggs, a police reporter, who had allegedly gotten a tip from a close friend in the F.B.I., got a confirmation from someone in the Atlanta police. According to the managing editor, John Walter, the first edition of the paper that Tuesday had a brief profile of Jewell. It was dropped in later editions as Walter questioned whether the paper had enough facts to support the scoop. Because of the voice-of-God style, the paper ended up making a flat-out statement: "Richard Jewell . . . fits the profile of the lone bomber." When I asked John Walter about the lone-bomber sentence, he said, "I ultimately edited it. . . . One of the tests we put to the material is, is it a verifiable fact?" One editor added, "The whole story is voice-of-God. . . . Because we see this event taking place, the need to attribute it to sources—F.B.I. or law enforcement—is less than if there is no public acknowledgment." John Walter indicated that he had not seen a lone-bomber profile. I asked him, "Whose profile of a lone bomber does Richard Jewell fit? Where is the 'says who' in this sentence?" Walter said that he felt comfortable with the assertion. The page-one story had a double byline: Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz. Walter had told these two early on that they would be the reporters assigned to any Olympic catastrophe. Martz, who had covered the Gulf War, had been assigned the security beat for the Olympics; Scruggs routinely covered local crime. Scruggs had good contacts in the Atlanta police, and she was tough. She was characterized as "a police groupie" by one former staff member. "Kathy has a hard edge that some people find offensive," one of her editors told me, but he praised her skills. Police reporters are often "dictation pads" for local law enforcement; recently the American Journalism Review sharply criticized The A.J. C. for the scanty confirmation and lack of skepticism in its coverage of Jewell. The newsroom atmosphere resembled that at F.B.I. headquarters; there was a frenzy to be first. Kent Walker, a newsroom intern, published a story in the same edition, with a glaring mistake in the headline: BOMB SUSPECT HAD SOUGHT LIMELIGHT, PRESS INTERVIEWS. Since Ray Cleere's tip to the F.B.I., the "hero bomber" theory had been circulating among Atlanta law enforcement officers. Maria Elena Fernandez, a reporter, was sent to Habersham County on July 29. By coincidence, William Rathburn, the head of security for the Olympics, had been at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 when a fake bomb was found on a bus—left by a policeman who sought attention. On the surface, the story had an irresistible newsroom logic: Jewell was clearly looking for recognition. Bert Roughton, the city editor, had answered the telephone when a representative from AT&T called to ask if the paper would like a Jewell interview. According to Walter, Roughton himself typed a sentence in the Scruggs-and-Martz piece: "He [Jewell] also has approached newspapers, including The Atlanta JournalConstitution, seeking publicity for his actions." But he hadn't. Walter explained, "There was nothing wrong with that sentence. That's journalistically proper. It is not common practice, to my knowledge, to ask someone you are interviewing . . . 'Are you here of your own free will?'" Jewell had not contacted the paper—a fact which would have been easy enough to check. Walter became snappish when I described the sentence as "a mistake." "It was not a mistake," he said angrily. Scruggs and Martz quoted Piedmont College president Ray Cleere as backup. According to Cleere, Jewell had been "a little erratic" and "almost too excitable." There was no doubt raised by The A.J.