Trashy Journalism

"Who steals my purse steals trash," said Shakespeare, but who steals my trash--ah, that can be a treasure of sorts, at least for the imaginatively trashy National Enquirer. Under orders from his editors, Reporter Jay Gourley, 27, lifted five green plastic bags of refuse from in front of the Georgetown home of Nancy and Henry Kissinger and put them in the trunk of his 1968 Buick. Alert Secret Service agents and police promptly swooped down on him, and it took 21/2 hours of argument before Gourley convinced them that the trash by law constituted abandoned property and was there for the taking.

Gourley later sorted his haul and deduced that Henry or Nancy or both 1) smoke Marlboros, 2) use patent medicines, and 3) sometimes throw away the New York Times unopened. He is saving other weighty conclusions for a treatise the Enquirer is doing this week. Says Gourley, "There are things in Kissinger's trash that I think he would rather people didn't know about."

Government agents daily carry off sensitive material from the Secretary's Georgetown jetsam before it reaches the curb. The State Department, however, announced that Nancy was "anguished" and the Secretary "really revolted." The home-town Washington Post decried Gourley's trash-can investigation as "indefensible--both as journalistic-practice and as civilized behavior." Later in the week a Palm Beach, Fla., Post reporter pawed through garbage bins at the National Enquirer's headquarters in nearby Lantana and came up with a revealing two-year-old memo from Publisher Generoso Pope Jr. exhorting his troops: "Prod, push and probe the main characters in the story. Help them frame their answers. Ask leading questions like 'Do you ever go into the corner and cry?' "

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