He seemed refreshing and disarming, until things got strange.
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson’s calm comfort with his apparent ignorance on Aleppo, foreign leaders and geography in general (because if you don't know much about the world, you'll start fewer wars) brought back a flood of memories for me. I covered Johnson when he was the governor of New Mexico. He was calling himself a Republican back then.
Johnson’s long blink caught on the “what is Aleppo” video, the shrug that seems to say, “I’m just a regular guy doing my best,” are gestures that were refreshing, even disarming, to reporters used to covering pompous, self-aggrandizing politicians in Santa Fe.
This was in the late 1990s. I was KUNM radio’s legislative reporter. On one particular February morning in 1997, the press room was buzzing about a TV station’s scoop. The station reported that a tunnel had been discovered at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. The source? The governor’s office.
The Penitentiary of New Mexico, just outside Santa Fe, had been the site of the second-deadliest prison riot in U.S. history in 1980; 33 people had died. On a scale of one to 10, a story about inmates tunneling out of the Penitentiary of New Mexico was an 11.
I worked for what many would consider a left-leaning radio station. But I was old-school, still believing that the best way to cover politics was to report objectively and let the listeners decide for themselves. I spent a lot of time building up source relationships in both parties. Hell, one election night, I was pulled into a prayer circle at a Republican victory party.
As I sat at my desk that morning, I asked myself how I had so failed at source relationships that the governor’s press secretary would not include me on such a major story. I grabbed my phone and started dialing. Somebody in the press room had a TV and as I waited on hold, I could see footage shot inside the tunnel. It wasn’t a small opening. It looked to be about three feet square. People could easily get inside.
Why would the administration leak this news? At that time, Johnson was locked in battle with the prison guards’ union. He wanted to privatize state prisons. Taking hundreds of guards off the state payroll would have been a quick way to show dramatic cuts in his drive to shrink state government.
There was a barrier to privatizing prisons in New Mexico, though. After that 1980 riot, the federal courts got involved in the administration of New Mexico’s prisons. Guard staffing levels and training could not be left to market forces. The Johnson administration wanted to end the federal court’s oversight. Perhaps trying to bring public opinion over to its side, state officials ran down the prison guards every chance they got.
When I finally got on the story, I remember being told the guards were so inept — or so corrupt — that the inmates had been able to set up a kitchen, complete with equipment to cook breakfast for themselves before they headed out the escape tunnel. Pans, milk, a ham, everything was ready and waiting. “The kitchen was evidence that inmates were pretty well in control of that area,” Johnson’s director of adult prisons told the Albuquerque Journal.
Pointing to the tunnel as proof that a riot and escape had been plotted, Johnson was able to get an emergency bill through the Democratic-controlled Legislature. It allocated half a million dollars to send New Mexican inmates to a private prison in Arizona to relieve overcrowding.
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A TV station also slighted by the governor got into the prison through sources in the guards’ union. The video they brought back gave a different picture. The tunnel was very well built with wood reinforcements. It did not go beyond the prison grounds. And it apparently had been there for a long time because there was rust on some of the nails. Termite trails were clearly visible in wood found in the tunnel.
Turns out the tunnel was a utility conduit, put in by maintenance workers, and it had been there for years. The makeshift kitchen was created and used by guards. "The crock pot filled with green chile stew should have been the dead giveaway," the Albuquerque Journal editorialized.
The Johnson administration said it had been tipped to a riot-and-escape plan by an informant at another prison, and a search turned up several weapons. But the governor's office could not come up with any evidence that the tunnel was part of an escape plan. I remember Johnson shrugging in his trademark affable way when asked if the escape plot scare was a hoax.
At a press conference, a spokesman for the prison guards’ union passed out buttons depicting Johnson as a gopher with the slogan “The Tunneling Governor.” I kept that button pinned to the bulletin board above my desk for years. Charming and disarming though he was, after that we referred to Gary Johnson as the man who put the goober back in gubernatorial.
Cindy Simmons teaches in the journalism program at Penn State. Read about her forthcoming book Wrong Kind of Paper at CindySimmons.org.
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