Graham is too eccentric to be on a national ticket.
hillnews.com
Graham in a U-turn on his notebooks
By Sam Dealey
Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has done a U-turn and decided to keep the contents of thousands of controversial notebooks secret.
Having said the notebooks would be made available to public and press, his campaign staff now refuses to release copies.
The senator is “not going to make any more [notebooks] accessible to people,” said Paul Anderson, Graham’s chief spokesman.
Some journalists who reviewed the notebooks before the shutdown suggest that they reveal a striking eccentricity. The Washington Post recently wrote of the senator’s “bizarre habit of scribbling the dullest conceivable minutiae of his life.” The New York Times called them “obsessive.”
Anderson said: “After the senator did this interview with The New York Times, he basically said — and I think it’s the view of the campaign, as well — that it’s time to move on. He doesn’t want to keep talking about the notebooks. He feels the notebooks have been written about extensively … [and his] purposes for keeping [them] … have been fully explained.”
The pocket-sized notebooks begin in the late 1970s and exhaustively record Graham’s daily activities. There are now thousands of them, color-coded by season.
During an April 27 appearance on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Graham was asked whether he would make the notebooks public to dispel negative perceptions.
“I have placed all of my notebooks from the first 12 years in the University of Florida Library of Florida History [archive],” the candidate replied, and “I intend to do so with the balance of my notebooks at an appropriate time.”
James Cusick, curator of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University Florida, said: “As soon as we heard that, we figured people will want to look at them, so we better get them organized. But they’re not actually in the collection.”
Graham’s office said the mix-up was an innocent mistake. The notebooks the senator was referring to when he said they were in the library were those he had written as a law student.
“The kind of notebooks he now keeps he didn’t really start keeping until his campaign for governor, when he needed to keep track of names, phone numbers, correspondence — the kinds of things anybody keeps track of,” Anderson said.
Nevertheless, until last week, the campaign continued to say access would not be restricted. If journalists provided specific dates, the entries would be made available, said Anderson. “They’re available; they’re routinely available,” Anderson said. “There’s nothing secret here.”
The Hill requested entries for the dates of major U.S. foreign policy events, the Senate trial of President Bill Clinton, and other significant political milestones for Graham. Those requests have since been declined.
In July 2000, Time magazine obtained a notebook page from September 1994 and printed it in full. The article was widely viewed as damaging to Graham, who was then on the short-list of running-mate selections by Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee.
The Time entries record that Graham discussed Nicaragua, taped an ABC interview, and became a grandfather when his daughter gave birth. But they also contained careful notes on minor details.
From 12:05 to 12:10, for example, Graham visited his bedroom and bathroom and “change[d] to red shorts.” From 1:20 to 1:30, he replicated those visits but this time “dress[ed] in blue slacks.” Separate entries indicate he watched, rewound, and returned an Ace Ventura videocassette to the store. |
