Trippi and Enright are upset, for example, over a New York Times story by Rick Lyman last month on Dean flunking a military physical 33 years ago but later spending months on the Aspen slopes. When the first-edition story came out, Enright's deputy, Jay Carson -- using his cell phone while taking his cues from a staff conference call on his desk phone -- called Lyman to complain that the key quote had been taken out of context. The piece had Dean conceding that he probably could have served, saying: "I guess that's probably true. I mean, I was in no hurry to get into the military."
But the question that Lyman had asked was what would have happened if Dean had hidden his back problem from the military. The story was changed in later editions to say "he probably could have served had he not mentioned the condition."
Dean was more upset, though, that his mother, Andree Maitland Dean, was quoted as saying, "Yeah, that looks bad."
"My mother is going to wake up and feel as though she betrayed me," Enright recalls Dean saying. "How could you do that to an 85-year-old woman?"
Lyman says the quote from Dean's mother was "ambiguous" because an editing change, which he later fixed, did not make clear that she was referring to her son's lack of military service, not his skiing. He says that he took the campaign's complaints "very seriously" but that the article provided a "very fulsome explanation" of the draft controversy.
Times Washington Editor Richard Berke adds that Dean's mother "is fully capable of dealing with the press, and the campaign has made her available to reporters in the past."
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