Al Giordano on Gary Webb's Untimely Death

Webb (left) and Giordano.

As is immediately evident in this piece, Giordano knew Webb very well, and in fact was ready to hand over the keys to Al's School of Authentic Journalism while Al took some much needed time off.

Al Giordano is explosive and in-your-face, but he is also honest to a fault and is not afraid to bear his soul to the entire world. This is exactly what he does in this anguished requiem for an extinguished fighter. It's not easy reading, but it definitely is necessary. We reproduce the first few paragraphs, the rest of which should be linked to and savored in its emotional totality.

LACANDON JUNGLE, CHIAPAS, MEXICO, DECEMBER 15, 2004: I keep imagining the last moments of Gary’s life. He is looking down the barrel of a gun. His eyes are puffy from the swell of too many tears. The moving van is coming to his house near Sacramento, a place he never wanted to be in the first place, to which he was exiled years ago for the crime of telling a powerful but uncomfortable truth. Everyone he has ever trusted or loved has abandoned him: By that I mean everyone, including you and me. What he is about to do requires the utmost in courage: to pull the trigger and plunge into the unknown, perhaps into nothingness, never to write or report or tell his truth to the post-human mortals who couldn’t handle his truth anyway.

The hand on the trigger at that moment – his – is not the first, nor is he acting alone. Gary had to wait in line and take a number behind all those who set his suicide in motion years ago. It was a miracle he didn’t do this back when San Jose Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos, now 58 and vice president of the Knight-Ridder news company, cocked the shotgun and pulled the trigger on the most authentic journalistic career of the late 20th Century. That was the day that the bullet flew out of the cartridge and, as if in very slow motion, took years to reach Gary’s head...

Gary never wrote with mere ink or pixels. Gary opened up a vein every time he sat down to tell us a new truth and he signed his byline, always, in blood. If you think that his suicide did not send as powerful a message as the stories he investigated and penned in life, think again: Gary was The Last North American Career Journalist. He presided over a transitional era and his death marks the end of that era. Fellow and sister journalists: The canary has died in the coal mine. Run out of that mine now, and seek alternate routes to truth-telling. There is no longer room for us inside the corporate machine.

All over the world he is mourned today. The compañeros here in Chiapas came to me last night. “You knew him. He worked for you. Did he ever come here? Did he know about us?” As they peppered me with questions I retreated far into myself. Time and space stopped, as it has before in this deep green tropical jungle. I could see it – the bullet (two bullets say the coroner: Gary was nothing if not thorough and persistent; imagine for a moment what strength it took to get off the second round) off in the distance somewhere over California, those bullets, the first one fired by that traitor-to-journalism-and-truth Jerry Ceppos in San Jose, those bullets that came out the other side of Gary’s cranium in Sacramento last week and took a southern turn toward me. And when they are done with me they will come for you. I could see and hear them heading my way last night and so today I type these words in a hurry so as to shoot back before my brains, too, are splattered on the page of history.

Al is taking at face value the report that Webb committed suicide and was not, instead, "suicided" for perceived wrongs against the CIA. And that's okay, because everything Al says about the bullets arriving in slow motion since his firing from the Mercury News is true.

To be an Authentic Journalist in 2004 is to be a soldier at war. When a hero dies in battle first we must drape the coffin, sound the slow, sad bugle song of Taps, and remember this great man who died fighting for all of us. Among the soldiers I have known in my foxhole, there were none finer, more effective in a firefight, than Gary. He was a god among insects, and a particularly important god among gods (shortly before his death, Gary told our colleague Bill Conroy that he had applied for a reporter’s job at the San Antonio Express-News and that the newspaper never even acknowledged his application: In the immortal words of Jonathan Swift, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”)

My best friend, also named Gary, committed suicide in 1986, a week after I moved three states away from him. There are simply no words to describe what goes through the mind and heart of family and loved ones of those who take this final, defiant exit from life. It's amazing how those feelings come flooding back as I read Al's words here.

May everyone who knew Gary Webb, whether in person or through his brave and dedicated work, find peace within the pain.