My Redacted Life: Chapter Eight: (Cont._4)

Life wasn’t turning out like I had expected. How could I have known that I would be the chief target of the editorial page of the Pine Bluff Commercial for weeks shortly after the birthing of my career? I was a mere lad in 1971 and Paul Greenberg was making literary mincemeat of me.

It went like this. A young reporter named James something or other would report on something. He wasn’t a bad fellow, but desirous, I suppose, of keeping his boss happy. The next day, Greenberg would take a line or two from the news piece, twist it, or completely fabricate something about it, and light in on me.

That’s something to look forward to every day. And it was all because I didn’t think the city of Pine Bluff should render a person’s entire property useless in order to satisfy a public desire to preserve a greenbelt adjacent to the city.

Greenberg’s MIT source said it didn’t matter. What he thought was proper came first. The editor was also in a liberal state of mind back then. The individual could just give way to the public. He would change positions like a call-girl on a “role-play” assignment later, when he signed on with a conservative newspaper. But that was in the future. Now was now, back then, and it was dreadful.

I’ll wind the tale up here. We stood our ground, and the company would serve as a favorite Greenberg target for years. Herbert Hoover once said that “nobody hates like Bobby Kennedy,” but all I can say is that Herbert Hoover may have never met Paul Greenberg.

We finished the plan. The city adopted it. Much later the city repealed the greenbelt ordinance. I don’t think they ever replaced it and I’ve always thought they would have when we worked on the plan, had such controversy not erupted. Be the time of repeal, Greenberg was off on another kick, pissing and moaning because the government didn’t declare a “VV-Day,” complete with parades, when we finally pulled our troops out of Vietnam.

I tried to turn the experience into an educational “lemonade.” I learned to make friends with journalists and to always tell them the truth, maybe not all at once, but as time passed, and at the critical points. I learned not to charge up a hill with a big sword in my hand unless my client was ahead of me leading the assault.

For everything I’ve written or produced since that time, I have put myself in the mindset that Paul Greenberg and the ghost of his MIT man would read it, analyze it for weaknesses, and use their collective brilliance to editorialize against it. That has helped a great deal in my career.

Finally, I learned that it isn’t enough just to be brilliant in this world, or even a genius. One must temper that intelligence with a consideration of what impact its efforts will have on the public at large.

In short, I lived through the ordeal, albeit with some degree of resentment that I’ve been unable to shed, as the reader may have noticed.

Oh, and here’s a tidbit. The Supreme Court of the United States, by 1992, had fully established that ordinances such as the hallowed greenbelt ordinance of Pine Bluff violated Amendment Five of the United States Constitution. You just can’t regulate away the complete use of a person’s property without just compensation.

To paraphrase a law school article, regulations that eliminate all economically beneficial uses of a property are considered a “regulatory taking.” In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003, the Supreme Court held that when property is rendered worthless by a regulation, such a taking has occurred, regardless of the fact that a legitimate governmental objective led to the regulation.

Odd … I was right and Mr. Pulitzer Prize and Mr. MIT grad were wrong, all along, and I a pitiful product of Arkansas public schools. Go figure. Actually, I’m pretty smart myself.           

To this day, Paul Greenberg has never apologized to me.

Still waiting.