Former newsman Leonard Downie Jr. turns from facts to fiction

WASHINGTON - One of America’s leading newspapermen steps aside from the captain’s chair of the Washington Post. After a life of writing the truth, he turns to fiction, as embodied in his first novel, “The Rules of the Game.”

These new directions - could they have anything to do with the twilight of newspapers? Leonard Downie Jr. says no.

Then he thinks again and says, in a way, yes.

“I was 66,” he says in his office at the Post, where he is vice president at large, having been executive editor from 1991 until September. He may be among the last newspaper people to have worked his way to the top, starting at the Post as a summer intern in 1964.

So why the novel? And why the change?

Downie says it wasn’t his age, and it wasn’t the perilous state of newspapers; it was convergence. Print and Web operations at the Post had been kept separate for many years.

“But now, everybody at the Post has gotten pretty Webby,” says Downie, “and we thought it was time for the two to merge.” Marcus Brauchli, who had come from the Wall Street Journal to take Downie’s former post, “has excellent experience in both print and the Web,” Downie says, and could supervise that merger.

But with “Rules of the Game” - never mind the title, which echoes the title of Jean Renoir’s 1939 classic film - why does a longtime investigative reporter and editor in Washington sit down and write a made-up story about corruption in Washington?

“I just felt there were things I wanted to say that I could better say in fiction,” says Downie. He started thinking about the book during the “long count” of the 2000 election season, and after a while his two major characters emerged - both women.

When President Monroe Capehart dies only a few months into his term, his vice president, former California Sen. Susan Cameron, becomes the country’s first female president. She is, in Downie’s words, “inexperienced, but telegenic, driven and idealistic.” She was conceived and written well before Sarah Palin stepped onto the national scene, but many reviewers have found an uncanny resemblance to Palin in Cameron’s bright toughness.

Her character has drawn some of the critical kudos for “Rules,” which Publishers Weekly called “a nicely executed newsroom procedural.” Michael Pakenham, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, called it “a rollicking good story with extraordinarily well-paced action.”

The second female lead is Sarah Page, reporter for the Washington Capital. Downie set out to make her female “because very little fiction features female journalists, and I thought it would be a challenge, and fun to write.”

Page, Downie hastens to say, “is not based on anyone at the Post.” Some characters and situations are composites taken from life, he says, but only one character is based on a single person: Lou Runyon, editor of the Capital, is modeled on Ben Bradlee, famed editor of the Post during the Watergate years.

Like many writers, Downie learned he had a great idea, but not yet a novel. He was told at first that it “was worth pursuing but needs a lot of work.” With exquisite luck, he came under the wing of one of the best editors remaining in publishing: Jonathan Segal, senior editor at Knopf, who squired him through at least four drafts of the novel.

“I learned I am a reporter but not a natural writer,” Downie says, “and Jonathan patiently guided me as I acquired the techniques, such as foreshadowing, interior monologue, cliff-hanger chapter endings.”

The last step was when Segal said, “OK, now we’ll publish it - but first you have to write an ending.” He predicted that Downie had 50 more pages to go. He turned out to be right - exactly.

Downie’s novel, like the Renoir film, is about rules, the need for rules, and the breaking of rules. The movie suggests that, if there are rules at all, people will find a way around them. “That’s true in Washington, and that’s true in newspapers,” says Downie. In Washington, politicians use ethics rules to ruin their enemies, not to guide their actions, and “almost everyone breaks the rules.”

Neither President Susan Cameron nor reporter Sarah Page can avoid this face-off with rules and the seeming imperative to break them. “This isn’t a novel that judges its characters,” Downie says. “I want to let the readers decide. At the same time, I want readers to be aware that this is what happens to anyone who gets anywhere in these two worlds.”

In the novel, Cameron’s idealism will be challenged by tough political realities, and Page will see just how dirty truth-telling can be. They get tangled in the underworld of politicians, intelligence workers, defense contractors, lobbyists, and hangers-on that is Washington.

Downie’s next project is not a novel, but a survey of the future of the news business itself. With University of California at San Diego professor Michael Schudson, he is doing a research project for Columbia University. They are cataloguing all the different forms the news business might take, now and in the near future, every business model from very small to very large, local to national. “We’re trying to catalogue and assess different possibilities for making news pay,” says Downie.

One thing both novel and project make clear: Downie is dedicated to news-gathering.

“We’ve just gone through a golden era in which a relatively few business models defined our work. That’s over now. But it’s important to maintain newsrooms, regardless of whether the platform is Web or print. Without people who can independently and professionally report the news, you can’t lead a fully free personal life, or have a fully free representative democracy.”