Wrong. You have a preoccupation with promoting lies or just being uninformed, hence your affinity for the Dems.
September 1, 1998
All the Presidents?
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Seven and a half months is a long time to hear about how all the presidents
have done it, about the great threat Ken Starr poses to our rights and our
legal system, about $40 million, about the right to privacy (in the Oval
Office) and consensual sex, how this is all about adultery, a problem
common to most marriages--a long time to hear about how the American
people just plain don't want to hear about this story, whose details so many
of them are tuning in to listen to every night.
For a while there, indeed, it looked as though we might become so
accustomed to the various extraordinary arguments offered up on Mr.
Clinton's behalf by all the president's men and women that in time none of
them would elicit so much as a blink. A false assumption. Even today--after
the world-famous map room speech--it is impossible to turn on the TV set
without hearing new, head-spinning versions of the aforementioned
arguments.
We aren't speaking here of the sort of moment--otherworldly though it
was--in which the newly ubiquitous John Dean, former counsel to Richard
Nixon, summed up for us the difference between Watergate, with its cancer
on the presidency, and the skein of lies and charges in which the current
administration is now enmeshed. The difference, Mr. Dean told a TV
audience , is that the offenses committed during Watergate grew out of
hatred and enmity--but in the current case, the offenses were committed
"out of love." Swell news--though it may come as something of a surprise to
the loved one to whom the president had referred, in another famous
speech, as "that woman, Miss Lewinsky."
What is extraordinary--though not so extraordinary as the unremitting
campaign to demonize Kenneth Starr--are the efforts, which can be heard
every day, to portray this president as a victim singled out for behavior no
different from his predecessors'. On talk shows, we have heard former
White House counsel Lanny Davis inveighing at the unfairness of it all. After
all, Mr. Davis a few weeks ago resentfully declared, before America and
the world, no "criminal charges" were ever brought against Dwight
Eisenhower for his behavior.
This assertion, so tripping from the tongue, went unchallenged, as did Mr.
Davis's similar plaint about Franklin Roosevelt. As, indeed, have nearly all
the now routine arguments by Mr. Clinton's defenders, that other presidents
had committed adultery--as though adultery were the central issue in the
charges against the current resident of the White House. Diversionary
prattlings of this kind have of course had their effect--as is evident from all
the TV debates and town meetings and daytime talk shows, now mired in
discussions about infidelity, as exemplified by the problems of the Clintons:
the pain of couples trying to overcome, the need for family healing, etc. etc.
Meanwhile, television's anointed presidential historians bob up here and
there, on public television and elsewhere, providing chatter and amiable
anecdotes, and evidently undisposed to offer a straight answer to the fog of
nonsense about former presidents, being thrown up on Mr. Clinton's behalf.
Yes, Franklin Roosevelt had a serious involvement with a woman not his
wife toward the end of World War I, many years before his election; his
daughter arranged for FDR to visit with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd as his life
was drawing toward his its close; and his devoted assistant, Missy, may
have loved him--a love there is no evidence he returned.
To equate any of this with what is known about Mr. Clinton's behavior and
character is laughable, in its dark way. Or would be, if this and similar talk
about all the other presidents--and not just Warren Harding, JFK and LBJ,
the three presidents in this century who were in fact womanizers--had not
proved such successful propaganda. The president's Monica problem
became front-page news in January. By February, citizens across the
country had, at the ready, the mantra that "they all did it."
As for Dwight Eisenhower, whose alleged offenses and escape from
criminal investigation Lanny Davis so casually invoked, the facts are these.
Rumors notwithstanding about a wartime affair Gen. Eisenhower was
supposed to have had with his driver, and clear though it was that he
enjoyed the companionship of the lively Kay Summersby, no historian has
ever been able to discover any evidence of such an affair.
Summersby's second memoir, "Past Forgetting," published posthumously in
1976, refers to an unconsummated romance. Just before had come "Plain
Speaking," Merle Miller's interviews with Harry S Truman--in which
Truman claims that a horrified Gen. George Marshall had, in June 1945,
received a letter from Eisenhower announcing that he wished to divorce
Mrs. Eisenhower and marry Kay. Both he and Marshall, Truman alleged,
had sternly warned Eisenhower not to do so.
References to this matter were excised from later editions of "Plain
Speaking," and for good reason. According to Forrest C. Pogue, author of
the definitive biography of Marshall, the Marshall papers held no evidence
of any such correspondence. Indeed, the Eisenhower divorce story was, as
historian Stephen Ambrose points out, entirely untrue. What Eisenhower in
fact sent Marshall was a letter pleading for permission to have Mamie join
him in Europe. More to the point, even if Eisenhower had contemplated
divorce and engaged in a wartime affair--could such matters merit any
comparisons with the bottomless squalor Mr. Clinton & Co. have brought
to the presidency?
Not everywhere, it should be said, did the they-all-did-it line pass
unremarked. For Chris Matthews, host of CNBC's "Hardball," it all
became too much last week when a guest--U.S. News & World Report
writer Matt Miller--recited his list of other presidents' infidelities.
"What presidents did you just smear then, Matt?" Mr. Matthews inquired.
He hadn't smeared anyone, Mr. Miller answered, startled--and not
surprisingly. Deliverers of this litany have not been accustomed, these 71/2
months, to objections. Much less anything like the long, richly assaultive
rejoinder Mr. Matthews now went on to offer, ending with the suggestion
that Mr. Miller try reading some history.
That would seem to be the end of that--but not quite. Following a break,
the guest--evidently impelled by a sense of mission--went on to offer the
name of another leader, someone, he assured the host, he would not
dispute. "How about Martin Luther King?" Mr. Miller put in, hopefully.
Stop trying to change the subject, Mr. Matthews snapped. Then, his voice
taking on an icy edge, Mr. Matthews delivered an impressive broadside
about people who would "dig up Eisenhower's grave on this show to defend
Bill Clinton."
Still, 71/2 months of a war on the independent counsel, months of Mr.
Davis, James Carville and assorted allies arguing they-all-did-it--not to
mention it's-all-about-sex--have failed to derail the investigation of this
president. On "Larry King Live," a hard-eyed Roger Clinton ominously
declared last week that politicians--"the people in the glass houses"--should
"be careful, very careful." This dark warning from the first
brother--delivered with all the subtlety of a cut-rate mob boss--could not
have been clearer. No one could miss the startling transformation in this
heretofore genial guest, as he sent a message to congressmen, suggesting
what could happen to any of them with, say, an affair in their past. Nor
would anyone have failed to note, either, the raw thrust of this open warning
aired on prime time--a message the Clinton camp has up to now transmitted
in less public ways.
Here we were then, last week with the president lecturing citizens on school
crime, his brother issuing televised threats to Congress. All the while, the
train of this saga moves along, powered by a press that knows a story when
it sees one, to a destiny now beyond the control of spinners and even,
possibly, of cowed congressmen.
interactive.wsj.com
Media Critic says Conason's tactics are "Bush"-league
Columbia Journalism Review, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1992
Jon Swan, Columbia Journalism Review senior editor
JENNIFER
(or, as the New York Post might put it, HEADLESS STORY HAS GREAT LEGS
-LNS)
If the Bush-alleged-philandering story had nothing else, it certainly had legs. As Joe
Conason wrote in the coverstory of the July/August Spy magazine: "Whispers about the
extramarital dalliances, real and merely alleged, dateback at least as far as his first
campaign for the presidency, in 1980." Whispers turned to print in 1988, less than
a month before the presidential election, when an aide to Michael Dukakis resigned
"after calling on Bush to 'fessup' about whether he has carried on an extramarital
relationship," in the words of a page-one October 21 BostonGlobe account.
At about the same time, L.A. Weekly ran a piece titled "The Mistress Question." The
article, by Richard Ryan,asserted that "two impeccable sources are offering much
harder information" about what had previously been"common gossip" in Washington
circles -- namely, "Bush's long-running affair with his appointment secretary, Jennifer
Fitzgerald." Both sources -- "people of stature in their respective fields" -- insisted on
anonymity. The piece ended with paired quotes. Asked why he had never assigned a
reporter to look into Bush's private life,Evan Thomas, Newsweek's Washington bureau
chief, replied, "Newsweek has no desire to break a story on the topic." William Greider
of Rolling Stone, for his part, said he'd heard "a lot of gossip over the years" and had
asked journalists, "Why aren't you covering this? Why aren't you publishing this?"
One answer was provided this summer by Washington Post media writer Howard
Kurtz, who pointed out that "several news organizations, including the Washington Post
and Los Angeles Times, have investigated the rumor but found no evidence to
substantiate it." Evan Thomas, again sought out for comment, supplied another reason.
"It's very hard to look into the story," he told Joe Conason. "How do you do it without
someone stepping forward like Gennifer Flowers?"
How? Well, Conason found a way, a sly Spy way -- by putting together a lot of
detailed circumstantial evidence, including intriguing quotes from a "Ms. X, a former
journalist...who apparently had an affair
with Bush while he was running for President in 1980." Stories built on anonymous
sources may firm up conviction among the convinced, but on undecideds that judicious
adverb "apparently" can have a deflating effect.
So here was Spy with a boldly billed cover story ("He Cheats On His Wife") written by
a respected journalist (Conason was named executive editor of The New York
Observer in mid-August), and now the question was: There it is -- again -- the story
with those really great legs. Anyone going to admit to having looked?
The Chicago Tribune found a way of looking without seeming to stare. In a June 21
"Media Watch" column (SEEKING A MIDDLE GROUND: SPY MAGAZINE'S
BUSH-WHACKING PART OF A BROADER EFFORT TO SURVIVE), James
Warren used Conason's article as "a window on a magazine" trying to expand beyond
New York. First, though, he summarized its findings, along the way introducing details
that lent weight to Conason's reporting. Among other papers that took note of Spy's
revelations were the New York Post, The New York Observer, the Philadelphia Daily
News, the Fort Wayne, Indiana, News-Sentinel, and the National Enquirer. As for
New York's Good Gray Lady of record, she prudently averted her eyes.
Even the times was compelled to cast a sideways glance at the mistress story, however,
when on August 11, the New York Post yelled at the top of its tabloid lungs THE
BUSH AFFAIR. Flanking the fat type were photos of Bush and Ms. Fitzgerald, whose
resemblance to Mrs. Bush was almost eerie.
The Post "exclusive" was what might be called a blown-up footnote to a footnote to a
footnote, being based on a tidbit of research tucked into a footnote to a just-published
book called "The Power House," by Susan B. Trento. The book was about Washington
lobbyist and p.r. executive Robert Gray, whom Trento describes as a participant in an
effort to help cover up "Bush's sexual indiscretions.if he ever hoped to be president." A
footnote to this episode contained evidence suggesting that Louis Fields, an ambassador
to the nuclear disarmament talks in Geneva, had arranged for Bush and Ms. Fitzgerald
to share a guest house in Switzerland. In Post-ese: NEW BOOK: BUSH HAD SWISS
TRYST. Picking up choice bits from the Trento footnote, the
Post quoted Fields as saying, "It became clear to me that the vice-president and Ms.
Fitzgerald were romantically involved. It made me very uncomfortable."
Now the entire multiheaded media monster swiveled, gawked, and ran stories about
Bush's response, which among other things was to say, "It's a lie." BUSH ERUPTS!
boasted the Post. Among the folks Bush erupted on were correspondents who had the
audacity to seek comment on an allegation heard around the world. "I'm not going to
take any sleazy questions like that from CNN," Bush snapped at Mary Tillotson, who
Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater later said, "will never work around the White House
again." Stone Phillips of NBC also took
heat for venturing to ask Bush if he ever had an affair. To ask a question "in the Oval
Office" struck Bush as very bad manners.
While Bush was in an eruptive mode, Ms. Fitzgerald wasn't talking. That left former
ambassador Fields, but he was dead. True, some of his comments about the alleged
relationship had been taped, but Newsweek - which seemingly alone took the trouble to
listen to the tape - found the comments ambiguous.
Thus, after a flashy two-day cancan staged by Alexander Hamilton's favorite tab, a
curtain came down on the story. There was no denying that it had great legs, but it was
hard not to notice that it lacked a
journalistic essential - a visible, living talking head.
-------------------------------------------
I remember losing all respect that I had for Stone Phillips when he asked Bush about the
rumors in the Oval Office. Jane Pauley (Trudeau), the co-host, asked him if he had
difficulty asking the question, and Phillips said something about how putting the adultery
inquiry to Bush "leveled the playing field".
I was incensed. After all, Gennifer Flowers came forward armed with incriminating
audiotape. The only supposed party to the Fitzgerald affair was a DEAD MAN who
wasn't even an eyewitness; he had only speculated about the closeness of Fitzgerald and
Bush, and filled in the blanks with the worst possible scenario. No taped conversations,
no photographs, no love letters, no quid pro quo, but if Clinton had to answer whether
or not he was an adulterer, they had to find someone who was supposed to have been
Bush's mistress "to level the playing
field."
For all of you who think that Joe Conason is a stellar journalist, remember this article,
not written by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Robert Novak, or David Horowitz, but by the senior
editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Think about it when you see anonymous
sources referred to in his stuff. Then ask yourself if he has earned the benefit of the
doubt.
freerepublic.com
There is also no reliable evidence that Nixon had a Chinese mistress. Why must you resort to defaming the dead to support your corrupt leader? It defines you as much as it does Clinton.
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