• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1227 0

But regardless of whether Oprah was heeding her conscience or her producers, the next decision was surely hers. And that decision made her the poster girl for taking responsibility for a mistake and correcting it in a straight-talking, nonmealy-mouthed way. She brought Frey onto her show and started right off with an apology for her call to Larry King: “I regret that phone call,” she said to her audience. “I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe. I called in because I love the message of this book and—at the time, and every day I was reading e-mail after e-mail from so many people who have been inspired by it. And I have to say that I allowed that to cloud my judgment. And so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right.” 1

She turned to Frey and continued: “It is difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped….I have been really embarrassed, but now I feel that you conned us all.” Later in the show, she told Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist who had called Frey a liar and said of Oprah that she was “not only wrong, but deluded,” that she was impressed with what he said, because “sometimes criticism can be very helpful, so thank you very much. You were right, I was wrong.” You were right, I was wrong? How often have Americans heard that euphonious sentence from their spouses and parents, let alone from television personalities, pundits, and politicians? Cohen practically had to go lie down to recover. “The year is very new,” he told Oprah, “but I still name you Mensch of the Year, for standing up and saying you were wrong. [That] takes a lot of courage, all right? I’ve never done that.”

Throughout the show, Oprah did not let James Frey off the hook. Frey kept trying to justify his actions, saying, “I think I made a lot of mistakes in writing the book and, you know, promoting the book.” Oprah went ballistic. She was the one who made mistakes, she reminded him, by calling Larry King and “leaving the impression that the truth doesn’t matter”; but he lied. “Do you think you lied, or do you think you made a mistake?” she asked. Frey said, hesitantly, “I—I think probably both.”

Frey: I mean, I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to …

Winfrey: Lying.

Toward the end of the hour, the New York Times columnist Frank Rich appeared on the show to echo Richard Cohen, giving kudos to Oprah for speaking up, for taking a stand for books that do not distort the truth in order to sell. “The hardest thing to do is admit a mistake,” he said. Oprah told him she didn’t want praise. “It really wasn’t that hard,” she said.

***

Sometimes, as we have seen throughout this book, it really is that hard. It was for Linda Ross, the psychotherapist who had practiced recovered-memory therapy until she realized how misguided she had been; for Grace, whose false recovered memories tore her family apart for years; for Thomas Vanes, the district attorney who learned that a man he had convicted of rape, who had spent twenty years in prison, was innocent; for the couples and political leaders who manage to break free from the spirals of rage and retaliation. And it is hardest of all for those whose mistakes cost lives, especially the lives of friends and coworkers they know and care about.

Certainly, N. Wayne Hale Jr. knows what we mean. Hale had been launch integration manager at NASA in 2003, when seven astronauts died in the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. In a public e-mail to the space shuttle team, Hale took full responsibility for the disaster:

I had the opportunity and the information and I failed to make use of it. I don’t know what an inquest or a court of law would say, but I stand condemned in the court of my own conscience to be guilty of not preventing the Columbia disaster. We could discuss the particulars: inattention, incompetence, distraction, lack of conviction, lack of understanding, a lack of backbone,