GEORGE CRILE'S TIME OF TRIAL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150053-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 13, 2010
• Sequence Number: 53
• Publication Date: February 9, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2010/08/13: CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150053-5
ARTln1E APPEARED
ON PA"EC-, _ L
rye
Piles
ime
Trial
The Accused CBS Producer
And His Unyielding Ways
By Eleanor Randolph'
Washington Poet Staff Writer
NEW YORK-It was clearly the social event of
the season-a subdued mingling of blue bloods in the
turbulent autumn of 1968. i
While the headlines rang in news of battles on
the streets and war in Vietnam, the society pages
fairly chimed with items.about 18-year-old Anne Pat-
ten, a descendant of John Jay;'8taughter of Susan Mary
Alsop and stepdaughter of Joseph Alsop. She had mar-
ried a young man from a prominent Cleveland family,
George Crile 111. ,
And although it was still a time when such wed-
dings were news, down to the pink peau de soie A-line
bridesmaids' dresses,- it is the congregation at this
event that strikes one as ironic or even odd in retro-
spect.
Among those The New York Times described as
"figures prominent in society and politics" were Rob-
ert S. McNamara, by then president of the World
Bank; Paul H. Nitze, deputy defense secretary; and
Walt W. Rostow, Lyndon Johnson's national security
adviser.
These m^n, who came in September 1968 to
toast the bride, would rally 16 years later to testify
against the groom. They have taken the stand for re-
tired general William C. Westmoreland in his
$120 million libel action against CBS Inc. They have
also stood firmly against codefendant George Crile.
WASHINGTON POST
9 February 1985
Now 39, divorced from Anne and remarried to
film producer Susan Lyne, Cnie sits in Room 318 of
Manhattan's federal court watching the line of old
connections-people he talked with easily, who
played killer tennis with him in Maine and Washing-
ton. These still famous men have joined a long list of
other leaders of the Vietnam era to shake their heads
in collective dismay over "The Uncounted Enemy: A
Vietnam Deception," the CBS documentary that ac-
cused Westmoreland of being part of a conspiracy to
withhold crucial intelligence on the enemy in Vietnam
from his superiors, including LBJ.
And as the trial draws to its close in the next few
weeks, it is clear that no matter who wins, the biggest
personal loss may well be George Crile's. His connec-
tions gone, his journalism scrutinized, his soaring am-
bitions aborted in midlife flight, Crile's name now
means trouble in the news business.
"I've tended to choose stories where there are dif-
ficult choices, when no matter what you do people are
going to be upset," Crile said yesterday after testify-
ing.
"When you go into highly charged
areas and move that far into those
areas, you are unquestionably going to
have strong reactions ... I tend to
like the impulse that leads me into
those stories, the difficult stories."
Since he graduated from Trinity
College in Connecticut, Crile's path
has been littered with people who
praise him as a brave and brilliant
journalist-and others who think he is
an arrogant and wrongheaded zealot.
His work has produced awards and
lawsuits, establishment praise and
institutional criticism. And if there is a
persistent question, about this metic-
ulously groomed man whose full head
of hair seems to be manicured rather
than barbered, it is this: Why has this
golden boy dawn so much tarnish?
Says a friend, who asked not to be
quoted by name, "He is a very odd
combination of being quite patrician
a but also has a chip on his shoulder.
Somewhere in his 'background in
a Cleveland are the keys to George's
personality."
From the lofty view of his West
Side penthouse, Crile recently talked
about his youth in an extraordinary
family, which John S. Wilbur Jr., a
childhood friend, describes as full of i
money, power and "immense amounts
His grandfather, George Washing-
ton Crile, was a pioneer in surgery
who started what is now the Cleve-
land Clinic-a medical center that has
Approved For Release 2010/08/13: CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150053-5
 Approved For Release 2010/08/13: CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150053-5
2.
drawn patients from around the
world. His father, Dr. George (Bar-
ney) Crile Jr., was censured by the
Cleveland Medical Association for
having told women there might be
other choices than the disfiguring rad-
ical mastectomy.
"I always consider him the savior of
the American breast," Crile says now.
Sipping tea in his apartment, he
says, "My grandfather was the pio-
neer in medical techniques and to a
certain extent my father has made his
reputation challenging the surgical
establishment."
There were hard times, too, espe-
cially when George's mother, Jane
Halle Crile, died of a progression of
cancers that began in the breast.
"He didn't treat her at the time,"
Crile says of his father. "But she was
treated basically in the same fashion
[his father favored]."
He recalls that several years later,
when he was doing a story for his first
paper the Gary Post-Tribune, he was
introduced through the fog of a steam
room to several local doctors.
' i hey picked up my name and they
just started having this wild argument
about my father," he remembers.
"One said, 'There's something to what
he's saying.' The other said, 'It's ir-
responsible-women are dying be-
cause of it,' and another said, 'Well,
you know what happened to his
wife.'
Adds Crile, "It was a very surreal
experience." Telling the story, relat-
ing the details almost monochromat-
ically, Crile lives up to his reputation
as a man who carefully metes out any,
display of emotion.
The Criles' apartment is dominated
by books, overstuffed furniture and
large antique animal heads, their taxi-
dermy showing signs of age. His wife,
a handsome blond woman who is
pregnant with their first child, his
third, helps find books authored by the
Crile family on everything from scuba
diving to a comparison of how govern-
ments and human beings prepare for
war. -
Friends say a meal at Crile's boy-
hood home in Cleveland was some-
thing like a raucous day in Hyde Park.
The large family always ate together,
and Barney Crile would often bring
horny visitors who quickly learned the
price of dinner.
yly father liked to debate," says
Crile. 'If he brought home a lawyer,
my father would start the conversa-
tion, 'Lawyers are the major problem
in this country.'
"There was always provocative'
conversation," he adds. "I learned to
duck, but I. also learned to debate."
The Criles specialized in vacations
that George still calls "genuine adven-
tures." "As a family, we were a little
like a documentary unit," Crile says,
smiling over one family book that
shows the entire clan dressed in div-
ing gear, including faces painted on
their bottoms "to scare off sharks and
barracuda " - x
'It's a tribe, the Crile family. When
you marry a Crile, you marry a tribe,"
says Anne Crile, who is planning to
marry a businessman soon and move
to Salt Lake City. "It is a very com-
petitive, exciting group of people
where there is no snobbism. You are
judged on your accomplishments."
Faced with such judgments, George
decided early to forsake the family
profession of medicine and to become
a journalist. After meeting publishing
executive Walter Ridder at the Wash-
ington home of Crile's aunt, Kay
Halle, Crile asked for a job on the
Gary Post-Tribune.
The results of that union, both Crile
and Ridder say now, were disastrous.
Crile's voice is soft, lisping over the
sibilants as he talks with little visible
emotion about his past.
At the Gary newspaper, Ridder, the
publisher, virtually anointed the young
Crile, who often skirted the working
editors to take his copy directly to
Ridder. As Crile acknowledges now,
with a small laugh, "They were furious
at me. They didn't like people like me
coming in and telling them they were
troglodytes."
He recalls, "I came in and discov-
ered evil in Gary, Indiana, and was
horrified by it." Mainly, he wrote a
massive piece on the tax assessor in
Gary, accusing him of taking bribes
and bullying anybody who challenged
him. A friend called him St. George,
out to slay the dragons of Gary. "I
turned this in to Walter Ridder, and
no one would look at it-they
wouldn't even talk about it," Crile
says.
Promoted to the Pentagon beat in
Washington, Crile continued pushing
the Gary tax assessor story until one
of Ralph Nader's lawyers leaked it
elsewhere. "With that, Walter Ridder,
in effect, fired me," Crile says.
"There were always problems with
George," says Ridder, who is now re-
tired and living in McLean, Va. "He
acted as if he were beyond the pale
because of his relationship with me."
Ridder says he would often do the
research and checking for Crile's sto-
ries before they were published.
"I wouldn't publish a thing he pro-
duced without triple-checking it," Rid-
der says. "He drove me crazy because
he would. come up with stories that
were so fantastic, and he was so stub-
born. If you didn't believe him or
agree with him, he got angry," Ridder
recalls.
Ridder's wife Marie, also a journal-
ist, says Crile's failure in Gary was "in
some ways sad . If George had
been more accurate or careful with
his figures, he would have done so
much better. He was not too far off
the track," she says.
Indeed, the tax assessor later went
to jail after Gary reporter Bob
McClure followed Crile's leads and
found new sources willing to talk to
the Post-Tribune. If the Ridders
sound embittered, it is understand-
able. After they parted ways with
young Crile, he wrote the story of the
tax assessor for Harper's Magazine.
He included a vigorous indictment of
the Gary paper, accusing them of
refusing to run the article because it
did not serve their own best interests.
Crile said the Ridders were enjoying
their own tax breaks from the man he
wanted to expose.
"He knew perfectly well that was
not so," steams Marie Ridder.
The tax assessor sued Harper's for
$5 million, and after five years and
around a half million dollars in legal
fees for the stuggling Harper's oper-
ation, a court of appeals dismissed the
case, ruling that, as then Harper's
editor Robert Shnayerson put it, "al-
though we might have been wrong
here and there, we were not mali-
cious.
"It cost a lot of blood and money,"
Shnayerson said of the case. "How-
ever, I felt good about. defending
George to the hilt because he had
picked his enemies so well ...."
Crile now says of the Gary article
that it was one that "pitted reformers
against the old-time system, blacks
against whites, outsiders against in-
siders. It was a very intense moment
Approved For Release 2010/08/13: CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150053-5
 Approved For Release 2010/08/13: CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150053-5
3
and the article was uncompromising.
The wise thing, of course, would have
been to just let it go."
To be uncompromising, however, is
a high and difficult calling for the real
world. And when Crile went to CBS,
this inability to ease off a story, to
"give it a little breathing room," as
some journalists say, stirred the con-
troversies he enjoyed covering.
Two divergent views on George
Crile:
^ Susan Mary Alsop, describing her-
self as still "devoted to George," says
of her ex-son-in-law: "He's accident-
prone, for one thing, but he's also the
most unsubtle man imaginable. Not
that I mean he's not intelligent. He is,
but he is incredibly trusting and naive.
That has been his undoing, if undoing
it is."
^ Says Shnayerson: "He should have
been a missionary. He has a martyr
inclination; he is determined that he is
so abstractly right and everyone else
is wrong. It's a very religious kind of
zealotry ... a puritan mentality-
which I mean in the original sense, the
quest to purify, to be pure."
Insiders at CBS say Crile's methods
have been maddening. He has been
accused of wearing blinders when he
worked on a story, failing to notice
evidence at odds with his own views
and being tough on his colleagues.
His record at the network before
"The Uncounted Enemy" is one of
somebody reaching for the top and
sometimes missing. One documenta-
ry, "The Battle . for South Africa"
(1978), won a George Foster Peabody
Award and an Emmy. "The CIA's Se-
cret Army," which Crile heed pro
duce and which aired in June 1977,
won an American Film Festival Blue
Ribbon. "That is perhaps the report-
ing I am proudest of," he says now.
But there was also an April 1980
show called "Gay Power, Gay Poli-
tics," which accused the homosexual
community in San Francisco of trying
to exert political pressure on politi-
cians for its "special interest."
The show drew intense criticism
from gay groups that, as one San
Francisco politician put it, claimed the
program "tells the viewer that what
gay politics is about is hedonism," not
the normal efforts of any special-in-
terest group to gain power.
When they complained to the now-
defunct National News Council, the
watchdog group found that the gay
groups' criticism against Crile's show
was "warranted."
Then came "The Uncounted En-
emy," the first show Crile produced on
his own. For those in the courtroom,
who have watched the production at
least twice, it is still riveting.
Before Westmoreland sued, he held
an angry press conference denying
the thesis of the show and saying Crile
and narrator Mike Wallace had "rat-
tlesnaked" him in their interview. gut
after the first shot, the general did not
give up the battle. First came a TV
Guide article that called the show a
"smear." Then CBS' own ad hoc om-
budsman, Burton Benjamin, investi-
gated the broadcast, fording 11 in-
stances in which Crile either had bro-
ken network rules or had been unfair.
Most of Benjamin's report was not
allowed in this court case, but the jury
has heard Crile defending the ways he
edited the show, cropping quotes, ed-
iting out comments that tended to
suggest any hesitation or confusion
about the issue. When Westmore-
land's closing witness, film editor Ira
Klein, testified against Crile, he ac-
knowledged that he grew so unhappy
with Crile's ways that he talked. -fo
Don Kowet, coauthor of the -TV Gide
article.
"All these people`behind him were
smoldering about George," says one
associate. "When Westmoreland held
a press conference on this show, it
flushed them all out. Then he put him-
self in an almost Nixonian position,
admitting not the slightest mistake
and giving lectures about how he did
everything absolutely correctly. At
that point, everybody . just started
turning on poor George."
After it is over, Crile is not expect-
ed to be fired from CBS, several net-
work sources say. As long as
contends his program was true-and
network has recent y ed as
witnesses a number of military and
CIA officials to support the documen-
tary's esis- a will have a jo .
But he will always be watched. His
superiors at CBS will be like the main-
tenance crews on a DC10 after a
DC10 crash-even a double-check
will not be enough before takeoff.
"You want to be somewhere where
somebody wants you," Crile says, his
tone betraying no sadness, no yearn-
ing. "What'i would like to do is make
documentaries, but my sense is that I
can't think about that. You need a
patron."
He laughs as he listens to himself.
"I don't know whether it's possible."
Approved For Release 2010/08/13: CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150053-5