For the News Leak, a Long if Not Honorable History
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 6, 2003; Page C01
After President Bush passed him over for attorney general, Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating said he was "appalled" by the leaking of confidential financial information he had given the Bush campaign.
Newsweek reported that Keating had taken about $250,000 in cash gifts for his children from a wealthy fundraiser, sparking a political controversy that forced the governor to return the money. "I would like to know how that was revealed," said Keating, who complained to the campaign and got an apologetic phone call from Bush.
In a news-obsessed city in which information is power, leaks are a time-honored way for a presidential administration to discredit its critics. And long before columnist Robert Novak published information from two "senior administration officials" that the wife of Bush critic Joseph Wilson worked for the CIA, journalists were acting as conduits for whispered information from 1600 Pennsylvania.
Every president denounces unwelcome leaks, but his intermediaries try to give the boss what the CIA calls "deniability" when they are the ones disseminating dirt.
"This is what these White Houses do," says historian Robert Dallek, author most recently of the JFK biography "An Unfinished Life." "This is part of the Washington political game; they all do it, and people in the press know it."
During the Cuban missile crisis, according to Michael Beschloss's book "The Crisis Years," John F. Kennedy was not happy with the performance of his U.N. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy had been in touch with a friend co-authoring a Saturday Evening Post article, which contained the following quote from an unnamed official, suggesting that Stevenson had favored a surrender: "Adlai wanted a Munich." Stevenson almost quit.
Lyndon Johnson had the FBI wiretap the hotel room of Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1964 Democratic convention. An FBI operative once mailed King a package with audiotaped excerpts from his extramarital affairs and a note threatening that "your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self" might be "bared to the nation."
Johnson once told a top aide, Joe Califano, to leak to a friendly reporter that Sen. John McClellan was holding up a budget bill because he wanted the government to build a dam on land he owned. When Califano asked whether that was true, according to his book, LBJ told the tale of an old Texas congressman who once falsely accused an opponent of sleeping with sheep, just to make the man deny it. The bogus McClellan leak became unnecessary.
In Richard Nixon's administration, operatives broke into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in an effort to discredit the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Nixon also had the FBI wiretap 17 aides and journalists in an effort to stop leaks.
In 1992, aides to George H.W. Bush searched candidate Bill Clinton's passport file -- amid rumors that he had renounced his American citizenship abroad during the Vietnam War era -- in a move that a prosecutor later called "stupid, dumb and partisan" but not illegal.
During the Monica Lewinsky investigation, Clinton told then-aide Sidney Blumenthal that the White House intern had been stalking him, a description that found its way into the press.
When Kathleen Willey claimed that Clinton had groped her near the Oval Office, the White House put out 15 friendly letters she had written him after the alleged incident. And Clinton aides were famous for leaking bad news about the president before prosecutors or GOP lawmakers could get it out.
Not all not-for-attribution comments involve grave matters of state. In April, the New York Times quoted an unnamed Bush associate as calling John Edwards a "Breck girl" and a Bush adviser saying John Kerry "looks French." Both anonymous insults stuck.
Targeting Journalists?
Some news organizations received a chilling letter from the FBI last month telling them to preserve their notes, files, e-mails and photographs involving one Adrian Lamo. "Failure to comply with this request may subject you to criminal penalties," the letter said.
Lamo is a 22-year-old charged with hacking into the New York Times computer system; he has acknowledged this in interviews, including one with the Web site SecurityFocus.com. And even journalists who have merely written about the case, but never interviewed Lamo, have received such requests.
A Justice Department official says the FBI agent "acted out of turn" by not seeking approval from the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan and Attorney General John Ashcroft's press office. "The agent did not follow standard procedures," the official says. "We're just not going to pursue it. It is the policy of the Justice Department to exhaust all other means before seeking information from members of the media."
Double Standard?
The executive editor of the Detroit Free Press admits she killed a review of a new book by star columnist Mitch Albom because it panned the book.
In fact, says Carole Leigh Hutton, her "knee-jerk reaction" was that, "my God, we have to run it." But then she decided against allowing a freelance reviewer to "trash my employee in the newspaper. It also felt hypocritical. This is someone whose work I put on Page 1 quite a bit and whose celebrity we trade off. It felt really wrong."
Albom, an ESPN commentator and author of the monster bestseller "Tuesdays With Morrie," has written a novel called "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." Hutton says she certainly knew of the book because the paper's charity profited from a promotional event for Albom's new work.
Didn't Hutton betray readers by spiking an already assigned review? "I blew it," she says. "I failed to get in front of this." Nor does she argue that the review by critic Carlo Wolff was unfair. The incident was first disclosed by Albom's old paper, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
A Free Press copy editor brought the review to Hutton's attention. Had it been positive, she says, "I probably wouldn't have known about it."
Feeding the Flock
Pentagon reporters got riled up last week when they lost their access to the Early Bird, a department compilation of the day's military news from around the country.
Some defense officials have talked about eliminating media access to the invaluable news summary, so it seemed a covert strike when the operation was moved to a new Web site. "The reason some journalists did not have access to the Early Bird was due to a technological upgrade, but that has been resolved," said a spokesman, Col. Jay deFrank.
Just Wondering
How is it that most papers Tuesday had a front-page picture of Laura Bush looking perfectly pleasant while Jacques Chirac kissed her hand, yet the New York Post had one of her scowling -- above the headline "Laura Braves Weasel Kiss"?
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