Why Republic never ran ‘Arizona Project’
It was a work of journalism, inspired by the death of an Arizona Republic reporter, that was called both “groundbreaking” and “soft as cake.”
Journalists from around the country, including some from The Republic, dedicated themselves to continuing the investigative reporting of Don Bolles, who was the victim of a car bombing on June 2, 1976.
Yet, the result of that effort — later dubbed the Arizona Project — was met with mixed reviews and continues to have a complex legacy.
The Republic refused to publish it, a fact that has haunted the newspaper.
The accepted lore was that the paper was too scared of power brokers to dare print it.
But The Republic wasn’t alone in deciding not to run the project. Editors at other major newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, also elected not to publish it.
Bill Shover, then the community relations man at The Republic, remembered editors getting the series days before publication. After review, the consensus, he said, was that “it’s not good stuff. It’s kind of weak.”
The Republic was kinder in a note to readers that appeared on the front page of its edition on Sunday, March 13, 1977, which explained why readers in Phoenix would not see the stories that were scheduled to run in other papers.
Some of the material, the note said, had been published previously in The Republic. And some of the new information had not been adequately factchecked. “To publish information which we cannot document to our own satisfaction as truthful and accurate would be a violation of (our) creed,” the note said.
News that The Republic would not print the Arizona Project stories hit hard with those who had labored from October 1976 through March 1977 to complete it.
“We were just stunned,” said George Weisz, a University of Arizona graduate student who worked on the project. Years later, as an investigator in the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, Weisz would help bring charges against two of the three men implicated in the Bolles bombing.
Weisz said the shock of The Republic's refusal to print the stories came not just because Republic reporters and a researcher worked on the project, but also because he said the newspaper’s lawyer had looked through the stories.
“None of it made any sense,” Weisz said.
With The Republic declining to publish the stories, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson printed the bulk of the 23-day project and trucked extra copies to sell in Phoenix. A radio station, KOY-AM, had a host read each day’s story over the air.
Republic readers did get a taste of the stories. The newspaper’s archives show at least five instances of The Republic printing Associated Press rewrites of some stories. The newspaper also ran a story about then-Attorney General Bruce Babbitt vowing to investigate two allegations in the series.
One involved possible bid rigging for office space for the state’s Economic Security office. The other involved missing tape recordings that might have proved shenanigans between a state trooper and a prostitute. A search of Republic archives doesn’t show evidence either probe resulted in charges being filed.
Ultimately, the project would be remembered more for the idea behind it, than the results it produced.
It was formed at the first convention of the Investigative Reporters and Editors. Bolles himself had planned on attending the gathering, planned for June 1976 in Indianapolis.
As it happened, it was Bolles’ absence that would weigh heavily on attendees.
One of them, Bob Greene, a Pulitizer Prize-winning reporter at New York Newsday, had the idea to assemble a team of reporters to delve into the underworld and hidden secrets of Phoenix. Those reporters would continue doing the kind of work Bolles did.
Reporters set themselves up on the top floor of the Adams Hotel in downtown Phoenix, now known as the Renaissance. Most used vacation time and worked two weeks at a time. Some, like Weisz, stayed on for most of the months.
“It was one of the greatest honors of my life to be working alongside some of the best people ever in journalism who put their egos aside to work together on a common goal,” Weisz said.
Weisz was one of the last members of the team to remain in Phoenix. He said he slept in a room with the reporters’ files and would research last-minute questions that reporters and editors had as the stories were readied for publication.
But the highly-anticipated work did not deliver the goods, according to some editors.
The Chicago Tribune’s media critic mocked the first paragraph of the first story in the series. Instead of hard-hitting paragraphs that named names, the lead described Arizona’s “pastel sunsets” and “salubrious climate.”
The story said that beneath that beauty lay organized crime, corrupt political systems and courts “crippled by every known evil ranging from cronyism to flat-out dishonesty.”
Cronyism was among the worst sins found, the Tribune story wrote. Not scintillating stuff.
The Tribune article quoted an unnamed editor who declared that “the damned thing is soft as cake.”
The series had some major allegations. But some of those were criticized as poorly sourced.
The Washington Post, in an article, noted one that alleged that Harry Rosenzweig, a close friend of then-U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, was a mob associate who had ties to prostitution. The source was an unnamed police informant who reported overhearing a conversation at a restaurant of someone saying that.
The Post’s executive editor Ben Bradlee said in the article, “Here you have an anonymous police officer quoting an unnamed informant who overheard an unspecified complaint in a restaurant by a crook. You can’t get away with that.”
Don Devereux, who took part in reporting on the project, defended the stories’ veracity, calling them “relatively accurate.”
But, he said, the response to the material was muted, partly because onethird to one-half of it had been reported in some way or another elsewhere.
“It didn’t have the effect I would have preferred,” he said.
But Weisz, the graduate student who worked on the project, said the stories’ success should not be measured by their results, but by the message they sent.
Weisz said the goal was to “produce an insurance policy for reporters.”
The message was that if a reporter were killed, it would not silence their work, he said. An army of dozens of others would come take their place. “It’s going to continue,” he said. “It’s not going to stop (it) in any way or form.
“I think that was the goal, really, of what we were doing.”