Iron Mike

Barnicle shows some heart -- and some leg -- in his big TV comeback

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

Mike Barnicle chose to play the martyr rather than the penitent in his big made-for-television special on WCVB-TV (Channel 5) this past Monday. In a half-hour feature on Chronicle, the former Boston Globe columnist took viewers on a travelogue of his recent quintuple-bypass surgery -- and made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, the slings and arrows of his tormentors were at least partly responsible for his near-death experience.

"The stress of basically being fired by the Boston Globe, the stress of all that, did something to me internally," said Barnicle, who even enlisted his doctor to explain how stress can actually cause the blood to thicken. Later, Barnicle opined that the depression he suffered after losing his job had inoculated him against the post-surgery depression his doctor had warned him about: "I had just lost a job I loved that I had been doing for 25 years. I was being vilified by people who talked about me as if I were some ax murderer. I, for four or five weeks, struggled every day to get up and swim through a wave of depression. So I instantly knew that there was going to be no depression here."

Not exactly an act of contrition. But pretty good television nevertheless. Viewers apparently thought so. Chronicle's executive producer, Mark Mills, says the show drew a 9.4 rating and a 15 share, up from Chronicle's normal 8.5 rating and 14 share. (The "rating" is the percentage of all Greater Boston households watching a particular program, whereas the "share" is based only on those households that actually had the TV on.)

In terms of re-establishing some sort of rapport with the public, the Chronicle special was a rousing success for Barnicle. He came off as sympathetic, likable, grateful for a second chance at life. And though he's never going to admit to more than a tiny fraction of the fabrications and plagiarism incidents that cost him his job as Boston's best-known columnist, a viewer couldn't help but come away impressed with the way he's responded to adversity.

Indeed, it would appear that the very qualities that make it impossible for him to fess up also enable him to fight back when others might crumble. Within weeks of leaving the Globe, he was back doing commentaries on Imus in the Morning. He wrote a lengthy profile of his buddy Bill Parcells, the Patriots coach-turned-Jets coach, for ESPN The Magazine. And then, in January, Channel 5 president Paul La Camera announced that Barnicle would be returning to Chronicle -- though not to the newscast, where the station's more-serious journalists were complaining that Barnicle's presence would cast a shadow on their own credibility (see "Don't Quote Me," News, January 22). Barnicle made several brief appearances on Chronicle before Monday's extravaganza. All this and open-heart surgery, too.

Even more impressive, the Chronicle piece was just half of a big one-two punch this month from Barnicle. The current issue of George magazine (run by John Kennedy, whose family Barnicle has long fawned over) features a lengthy piece on Bill and Whitey Bulger by investigative reporter Peter Maas and Barnicle. It's a good read, even if it is shot through with Barnicle's indefensible admiration of the corrupt alliance the Boston FBI made with Whitey Bulger's crime organization. And it's nice to see Barnicle hasn't lost his touch: former Whitey associate Kevin Weeks yelped almost immediately to the Herald that Barnicle had misquoted him. The piece also claims, wrongly, that former state treasurer Joe Malone, in his unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign last year, demanded that Bill Bulger be removed as president of UMass "simply because of his brother." (In fact, Malone took the unremarkable position that Bill Bulger should be removed if allegations that he had found state jobs for associates of his gangster brother were proven true.)

Barnicle's pugnacious refusal to go away calls to mind Patricia Smith, the other Globe columnist who was forced out last year for making it up. Within just a few months, Smith, a talented poet and performance artist, was giving a defiant one-woman show on her downfall. Then, too, the Smith and Barnicle stories have already become a part of this city's charged, ongoing narrative about race. When Smith, an African-American, lost her job, Barnicle's critics accused the Globe of having a double standard that benefited well-connected white men. And when Barnicle followed Smith out the door, his defenders accused the Globe of having an excess of political correctness. Certainly Barnicle's continued public prominence -- and Smith's invisibility, except on the poetry scene -- shows that pugnacity continues to pay off better for white men than it does for black women.

But those battles seemed of another time and place Monday evening when Barnicle talked about his father's switching from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes after his first heart attack (and dying five years later), and about his older brother, Robert, dying of heart disease several years ago. He showed off the scar on his chest and another on his leg, where veins were removed for transplantation into his heart. Especially moving was his description of looking in on his sleeping children on the morning of his surgery, not wanting to wake them up and scare them about what could go wrong.

"I'm a lucky guy, believe me," Barnicle said at the end of the program, walking along a country road by a lake. "I have a whole new outlook on this whole deal."

Ah, what the hell. Welcome back, Mike. Just don't expect us to be fooled again.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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