The single tell-tale word in that explosive acrostic is "blackmailing." In the language of casual cursing, it is an unlikely choice. Whoever pinned it on Garrison had to be choosing it deliberately. Rathom's career had been publicly flamboyant but it had its private unlit corners. It is not impossible that Garrison, who did know his way around and had, after all, worked for Rathom at the Journal for three years, had something on his ex-boss. If Garrison was blackmailing someone, though, it is most unlikely that the someone was Rathom. There is nothing in any account of Rathom's imperious demeanor to suggest that he would ever pay a farthing in hush money.
Be all that as it may, the hoax hit Garrison where it hurt. III rage and embarrassment very obviously had the upper hand when he sat down to write his response for the next day's Listening Post It was neither a surgically precise bloodletting nor a free-swinging attack with an oil-soaked two-by-four. He fumed, sputtered, gagged and choked but all that emerged were verbal spitballs. The heaviest ordnance he lobbed at his adversary was to call him a "blackguard."
"Putting over acrostics and playing other tricks on newspapers," Garrison harrumphed, "has always been easy sport for ingenious practical jokers, and when it is done in good humor it affords some fun. The big laugh on The Listening Post yesterday would have been much bigger if the skillful person in ambush had not been a blackguard, without wit enough to keep from defiling
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himself? The marked literary ability of the author was so apparent that no one
who read his lines thought of looking for any well-screened sentence against
which editors and proofreaders usually go armed and vigilant."
After that feeble opening, Garrison rambled on about hoaxes that had Inca pulled
on other newspapers, none of them characterized by quite the same razor-sharp
malice that had punctured him. And the column staggered to an end with a couple
of unrelated filler items.
Rathom, if he was the culprit, clearly had the better of the encounter. But
whatever the outcome, one speculation seems safe-for a long time after May 3,
1920, all copy arriving unsolicited at the Journal and Newt was examined for
booby-traps-right side up, sideways and especially upside down-before it got
into print.
Garrison returned to New York soon after but came back to Rhode Island briefly
in 199.4 to head the state campaign of Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin
for President on the Progressive Party ticket.
Garrison may have taken some small satisfaction in knowing that he outlived
Rathom, who died in 1923 at the age of 56. In its obituary, the New York Tina
said Rathom was "a vivid and rugged character'' By way of contrast when
Garrison died in New York in 1929, the Providenoe News ignored his passing but
the Journal ran a half-column obit with a picture. No mention was made of the On
Ile Pan episode.
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