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description of Freddie were "brash" and "dogged." (Whether "dogged" had flashed through Justin Boyd's mind before assigning him to the Wambli affair is uncertain.)
    Freddie, at 22, was too young to remember Watergate, but as a teenager back in Columbus, Ohio, he had seen a video of
All the
President
'
s Men
and decided, then and there, as some youngsters make the career choice to become firemen when they see the flashing hook and ladder go by, that he would be an investigative journalist.
    His practical father, an architect, pointed out that outlets for reporters were shrinking in number and that hundreds of young folk had already followed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into a crowded field. Freddie was undeterred and finally a bargain was struck: he would go to college and then could do whatever he wanted.
    He was accepted at Harvard and his parents paid the not inconsiderable tuition without complaint. In Cambridge he immediately became immersed in the affairs of
The Crimson,
the campus daily. As a general rule, freshman candidates on the
Crime
were meant to be seen but not heard; Freddie was both, although henever really blew the lid off a major scandal. He was best remembered for an exposé of blurbs, those quotes designed to sell books, for works by members of the faculty. He discovered, for example, that the warmest encomium for a certain law professor's tome was from the woman he was living with and about to marry (as soon as his divorce was final), while praise for a volume of history came from the author's college roommate, and so on. It was all good fun (except for those he had fingered), the faculty loved it and Rice became a minor campus legend.
    Unfortunately what befitted a legend most did not include serious attention to studies—reporting really had become an obsession with him—and at the end of his sophomore year, he flunked out.
    Unlike at least 85 percent of his classmates, Freddie did not have a desire to go to Los Angeles and write screenplays, so he headed instead for New York. His father, feeling that the bargain he had made had been broken, cut off his allowance, so it was imperative that he find work. Most of the alternatives seemed distasteful: an apprenticeship at
The Times
seemed daunting, the rewards uncertain and in any event a long stretch away. He studied the newsmagazines intently and decided that they were not really any longer purveying news. Reporting on a starlet's struggle at the Betty Ford Clinic or the man in the street's reaction to the latest serial killing; covering for one journal what other publications were doing; writing about the least debilitating laxative—these were not the sort of assignments he had in mind. And the thought of working at
The Post-News
was just too laughable to contemplate.
    On pure spec, he wrote a letter to Justin Boyd. Called in for an interview, the Harvard reject impressed Boyd with his brashness, and the baby Bernstein was hired.
    Boyd counseled him to "hang out," to make friends at police headquarters and City Hall and the journalists' watering holes around town. "I'm new here myself, I'm feeling my way," the editor explained. "So are you, so I suggest you do the same. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth pretty much shut and the stories will come."
    At once Freddie started going to Elaine's, the uptown saloon where journalists and writers of all sorts nested. He made friends there fast, even though the old-timers laughed at his high-energy eagerness and, behind his back, started calling him "Scoop."
    One of Elaine's regulars, a well-known criminal defense lawyer, gave Scoop his first break. He leaked to him sordid details of early incestuous child abuse to build sympathy for a client, a brutal murderer of his actress-fiancée. Rice was not much taken with the headline Boyd put on his story, "Aunts in His Pants," but the bold front-page byline—"By FREDERICK P. RICE"—he thought looked quite nice.
    Then Rice came up with