Understanding The Lessons Of The Pulitzer Prize Liar

WASHINGTON - In 1981, as a young African-American reporter who'd never met Janet Cooke, I identified with the young black woman whose Pulitzer Prize made her the toast of journalism. When she became its best-known liar, I felt embarrassed and outraged.

As a young black reporter who did know Cooke, Michel McQueen found it impossible to relate to her - but still felt used.

Now that Cooke is back - in recent national TV interviews and an article in the June GQ - there are lessons to be learned from her ironies. It has been 15 years since Cooke, then 26, became the first Pulitzer Prize winner forced to return journalism's highest honor. Not only had Cooke fabricated her winning story - "Jimmy's World," about a black, 8-year-old heroin addict - but her impressive resume also was largely a fabrication.

People of every color lie, some egregiously. So why does the Cooke scandal still smart?

Because Cooke's hoax made me and other black writers feel as awful as a stranger's act possibly could. When we first heard that she'd won the Pulitzer for feature writing - saw her face beaming from photos in the newspapers for which we worked - many of us felt pride and kinship.

Not McQueen. As a writer working with Cooke on The Washington Post's Weekly section, she knew better. "Janet spoke only to the people whom she believed to be important," recalls McQueen, now an ABC correspondent. "Nobody black fit that criterion. . . .

"So I found it hard to take pride in her achievement as a black person. She wasn't interested in black people, felt no fellowship to us."

So why did Cooke's hoax hurt McQueen?

For the same reasons that all journalists suffered from it. Cooke's fictions gave firepower to those who think all members of the media are hypocrites and liars. Most journalists, who work hard to refute such suspicions, found the scandal painful.

Black journalists - for whom the stakes feel as high as their numbers are low - found it excruciating.

So for 15 years, Cooke has lingered on the edge of our memories. We've wondered why she lied and what became of her.

Now we know. Or think we know. On ABC's "Nightline" and NBC's "Today" show, and in a 12,000-word GQ article by ex-Postie and former Cooke boyfriend Mike Sager, Janet Cooke finally resurfaced. She told Ted Koppel and Bryant Gumbel that she made "a terrible mistake." She apologized to the Post and its readers for betraying their trust. She said that after years of exile in Paris and months of surviving on a sales clerk's wages, she wants her career back.

She appears to have gotten more. On May 16, Cooke and her biographer, Sager, signed a $1.6 million deal with TriStar Pictures to make a feature film of her life.

"So now she's going to cash in," McQueen says. "Big surprise."

Some may be surprised by the bitterness Cooke still provokes - especially considering how high-profile liars named Nixon, Barry and North later prospered, and how black writers' subsequent successes have made Cooke's failure all but moot.

But talking to McQueen, I was struck by how much Cooke's skin color mattered. To us, and, by all appearances, to Cooke herself.

Race mattered so much to Cooke that she seems to have run screaming from it, telling GQ that she never had a black female friend - even in her all-black childhood neighborhood - or dated a black man. It mattered enough that when falsifying her resume, she created "Supernigger" - her term for a prize-winning, Ivy League-educated black reporter irresistible to white editors.

Although most of the frustration black journalists feel toward Cooke has nothing to do with color, McQueen says, it's hard to get past how "Janet adroitly manipulated racial-gender tensions. . . . She used the fact that there are people willing to believe black people are capable of any kind of barbarism."

And, she says, there's "the irony that those who suffered most . . . from her acts were black." Soon after the Cooke fiasco, McQueen recalls, a landlord asked to see her diploma from Harvard - as proof that McQueen hadn't lied about her education on an apartment application. "I heard of blacks whose editors began checking their sources, I read articles suggesting that her lying was the result of affirmative action and blacks being pushed too quickly," she says.

Still, I appreciate Cooke's late-breaking apology. By today's standards, 15 years is a long time to suffer. Or maybe I'm just grateful to Cooke for teaching me this: Those who feel linked to strangers' triumphs will feel linked to their defeats.

Today, I'm also with McQueen when she says: "Ultimately, I don't relate to Janet as a black woman. I see her as a . . . human being who exploited strains in our society to her benefit. Whether you're a right-wing politician, or a black scam artist, you should pay a price for that."

Even if you end up rich.

(Copyright, 1996, Washington Post Writers Group)

Donna Britt's column appears Thursday on editorial pages of The Times.