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Virginia Beach where he often attended parties with a fast crowd of affluent developers and real estate speculators. In those days I was covering state politics and regularly fraternizing with fellow reporters. Everyone regarded Sen. Robb as somewhat of a “square” who was doing an excellent job as governor.
Only after he left office did rumors start floating about the parties where cocaine was used and about the indictments for cocaine-related crimes of some whom Sen. Robb considered personal friends.
Despite all the stories, there has been no indication Sen. Robb ever used the stuff himself or knew it was being used until well after the fact. There are probably many members of the media who have gone to parties where illegal substances were used without their knowledge. I don’t know that for a certainty, but given the culture of the 1980s and 1990s it is likely true.
When the Robb story started to break a few years after he’d left office, some observers started to question whether the Virginia political press had been asleep at the switch. Why hadn’t reporters tried to find out how the governor spent his offduty hours and who he had been consorting with?
There were implications the state media was less than aggressive when it came to examining aspects of lives of public figures that related to their friends and campaign contributors.
As a result, in my opinion, a much broader adversarial relationship between political reporters and the politicians they cover has grown up in the past four or five years.
(Editor’s note: John Goolrick, a former political reporter, is now an aide to U.S. Rep. D. French Slaughter Jr., R-Va. Opinions expressed are his oum.)
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