Exposed in Spokane

摘要

Battling colon cancer two years ago, Washington State's senate major-ity leader James West, who was at the time also a mayoral candidate, granted an interview to the Spokane Spokesman-Review in which he confided that his illness had brought him closer to his maker. He had come to believe that his supporters' prayers had helped drive back the malignancy. West joked that he imagined God, inundated with requests for his recovery, was barking, "Get me an angel. I need to know who this Jim West guy is." What he apparently hadn't imagined was that the Spokesman-Review's editors wanted to know too. Prompted by rumors of West's homosexuality (a five-year marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1990s) and a tip about his alleged predilection for boys, the paper had months earlier begun investigating his personal life.