“Have you heard about Chuck Ashman?” Who? “The guy who wrote those Waldheim stories for us last year, then disappeared. Very interesting. Very mysterious. Apparently we hired a detective.”
Now an international commission of military historians is wrapping up its own investigation of Austria’s president. The great mystery might be dispelled beyond reasonable doubt.
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Ashman, who writes out of New York, entered the pages of the Sun-Times last September identified as the paper’s UN correspondent. He’s Bob Page’s man, a curious staff was given to understand, and executive editor Ken Towers tried to drum up enthusiasm. He failed. To a lot of people Ashman’s copy seemed hyperbolic, selective in its facts. And why wasn’t Ashman in the union? The Newspaper Guild filed a grievance.
Meanwhile, the Austrian government had also reacted to the Ashman articles. It had compiled a dossier on the author. The dossier’s facts were sketchy, but Austria corralled enough of them to make its point. Mr. Ashman, as the local consul general informed us, is “not without specks on his credentials.”
Most tellingly, the paper examined his past. At the age of 21, when an aide to Senator George Smathers, he’d been named the Miami Beach Jaycees’ outstanding young man of the year. But in 1964, seven years later, he was convicted of three counts of passing fraudulent checks. He avoided prison by pleading insanity and undergoing two years’ confinement in a Florida state mental hospital.
Ashman has demonstrated an astonishing ability to talk himself into high-powered jobs that he doesn’t keep long. He’s been executive vice-president of Polygram Pictures, president of 20th Century-Fox’s licensing and merchandising division; he’s run the licensing division of the McGregor/Faberge Corporation . . .
Henry Macrory, news editor of the London Sunday Express, doesn’t see where a touch of the manic presents a problem, not in Ashman’s present trade: investigative journalism. And claiming to be vaguely aware of it, Macrory dismisses Ashman’s past. “Plenty of people have skeletons in their closets and this does sound like it happened a long time ago.”
