The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- October 30, 1998
Commentary
True and False
By Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal's editorial board
It's hard to recall, now, which feature of the Starr investigation brought the
most denunciations and warnings of a new dark age of oppression about
to descend. The subpoena issued to Sidney Blumenthal? Monica
Lewinsky's mother being called before the grand jury? Press reports about
a blue dress stained with semen?
It is hard, as well, to recall the full flavor of these tidal events, which
excited so much hair-tearing about an out-of-control press, so much
elocution about an out-of-control prosecutor--oratory amply studded with
references to Nazis and Grand Inquisitors, the burners of witches. Who
can forget Mr. Blumenthal's own oratory as he stood outside the
courthouse after his grand jury appearance, proclaiming shock at the
violations of his First Amendment rights he had allegedly just endured? He
had never imagined that "in America I would be hauled before a federal
grand jury to answer questions about my conversations with members of
the media."
All this comes to mind primarily because these events aren't easy to forget.
Also because we now have a report from an organization called the
Committee of Concerned Journalists, on the press's coverage of the
presidential crisis. As everyone knows, committees of the
concerned--especially committees concerned with the sins of
journalism--don't produce light reading, nor, for that matter, much that
resembles readable reading.
Still, we can work our way to the general point of this study, which is
focused on concerns like too much speculation, too little skepticism and
too many anonymous sources journalists used in pursuing this story. Last
Sunday various of the concerned journalists appeared on CNN's "Reliable
Sources," where, in answer to a question, the report's author opined that
where accuracy was concerned, the journalists covering this story rated a
grade of C-minus.
This grade will certainly come as a surprise to the press and the doubtless
large percentage of the public who must know by now--whatever they
may feel about it--that almost every significant feature of this scandal that
was reported early on proved to be true. To be sure, the truth about the
Blumenthal story did elude a good many journalists--though this failure of
skepticism was, clearly, far from the kind that the concerned journalists
had on their minds.
Following Mr. Blumenthal's grim pronouncements about the questioning he
had endured at the hands of the prosecutors--a declaration larded with
ringing assurances that he had emerged from the fires undaunted--Mr.
Starr & Co. came in for considerable criticism in the media. What right,
critics asked, did Mr. Starr's prosecutors have to ask Mr. Blumenthal
whom he talked to in the press? With time, and the release of the
transcripts, it became clear that Mr. Blumenthal's version of events
was--how to put it?--at odds with the truth. Those in a position to know
the truth did not fail to notice. Indeed, we now know that in a second visit
to the grand jury, whose members are not allowed to speak out publicly,
an evidently angry forewoman confronted Mr. Blumenthal over the false
representations he had made to the press regarding the questions put to
him at his first appearance.
With the transcripts available, correspondent Dave Marash of ABC's
"Nightline" instructed viewers in certain facts--a mordant commentary in
which he noted that the witness had visited with his lawyer outside the jury
room more often than a classroom of first-graders going to the bathroom.
Mr. Marash then quoted from Mr. Blumenthal's speech outside the
courthouse--in which the witness told of being "forced to answer
questions" about his conversations with the New York Times, CBS, CNN
and numerous other news organizations, and further described how the
prosecutors demanded to know what he had told reporters and what they
had told him.
There is, of course, nothing like a transcript for revelation--a fact that
seems to elude all sorts of people--and Mr. Marash had one. He now
proceeded to quote from its pages which--as he pointedly
observed--showed prosecutors "pressing Blumenthal not about his
contacts with the press" but rather those "about his contacts with the
president, the first lady, top White House politicos, and about the
messages they wanted Blumenthal to spin into the media."
The furor over Monica's mother, which exceeded the one over Mr.
Blumenthal, began when Marcia Lewis was called to testify before the
grand jury--an occasion that elicited enormous outrage over the
inconceivable cruelties the independent counsel had perpetrated by calling
a mother to testify against her daughter. This outrage was further propelled
by the television pictures showing a haggard Ms. Lewis leaving the
courthouse after she had broken down, sobbing, under questioning. This
only seemed to confirm what those opposed to the investigation and a
great many other people already were prone to believe--namely that a
mother was being forced, by a relentless prosecutor, to answer questions
about the most intimate sexual details of her daughter's encounters with a
man. A man who happened to be president of the United States. Everyone
could conjure up images--and they did, in opinion columns across the
land--of the torture inflicted on a mother being pressed for details about,
say, her daughter's performance of oral sex, and whether and where the
president had touched Monica, and perhaps vice-versa.
Torture indeed, if it had happened. What the transcript shows is that Ms.
Lewis endured no such thing, that the references to sex ran to questions
about whether she knew if her daughter had "a sexual relation of some
kind" with the president. To which questions Ms. Lewis responded with
evasive answers. She raced from the room in tears not because of intrusive
sexual queries. She left after the prosecutor asked about certain names she
and her daughter used when they talked about the first lady--after, that is,
she revealed that their name for Mrs. Clinton was "Babba," a name
members of Ms. Lewis's family had used for their grandmothers.
Of all the reports that proved true in this saga, none is likely to be
remembered longer than the case of the blue dress. ABC's Jackie Judd
got the story on Jan. 21 and reported it on air Jan. 23. From that day until
the day in August when Ms. Lewinsky finally turned the dress over, the
story was ridiculed as the quintessence of all the wild media allegations that
had driven this scandal. It was not only the president's allies that made this
charge about Ms. Judd's story of a blue dress; somber media critics cited
it as an exemplar of irresponsible reporting.
Finally it became clear to virtually everyone in the world that such a dress
in fact existed. Clear to everyone, that is, but Steven Brill, who got the
circulation rolling for his new media magazine via sensational charges about
leaks from Mr. Starr's office. Mr. Brill waxed stern, too, toward a number
of journalists covering the presidential crisis, among them, Ms. Judd.
Queried as to why he could not even now credit Ms. Judd for her report,
the eminently virtuous Mr. Brill explained that her sourcing was insufficient
and that just because the story turned out to be true didn't mean the
reporter had any right to air it.
Indeed, there are indications that Mr. Brill still has doubts about the
existence of the dress. If, dear reader, we by chance come, decades from
now, upon the figure of an editor wandering the streets murmuring that
there is no blue dress, we will know who it is.
In addition to complaints that a journalist got a story right prematurely--a
new journalistic offense--critics of the scandal coverage now cite, as a
discredited story, the report in this newspaper concerning Bayani Nelvis, a
White House steward. It is entirely clear now that Mr. Nelvis did express,
to two Secret Service officers, his distress at having to clean up soiled
tissues and other items after the president's meetings with Ms.
Lewinsky--a story the unhappy witness later denied to the grand jury. The
discrepancy in Mr. Nelvis's accounts, with implications of possible perjury,
may yet prove important to the future of the case.
Then there is the story, now dismissed as groundless allegation, that White
House aide Harold Ickes Jr. and a Secret Service officer had come upon
the president and Ms. Lewinsky in a compromising position in a room
adjacent to the Oval Office. What is interesting about this story isn't the
sexual detail--of which anyone would have had quite enough by now even
if it had involved adventures more varied than the ones favored by the
president. What is interesting is Mr. Ickes's responses to questions
regarding this supposedly unfounded media tale. Questioned before the
grand jury, Mr. Ickes repeatedly tells the prosecutor what he says he told
reporters who asked about it:
Mr. Ickes: "I told them that I had absolutely no memory of it and I was
confident it didn't happen. . . ."
Did this mean, the prosecutor asked, that it was possible he had found
Ms. Lewinsky and the president in a compromising position?
Mr. Ickes: "As I said before, anything is possible. I have no recollection
whatever of this. . . ." He was, Mr. Ickes added, confident it did not
happen.
Did he know for a fact, the prosecutor wanted to know, that it did not
happen?
Mr. Ickes: "I know very few things as a fact. I know my name and my
address and sometimes I even forget that, but I've testified to what I've
testified."
So the questioning went, with the witness claiming that he would remember
if he had seen anything like this but such was life he could not exclude any
possibility. There is something decidedly odd about this testimony from
Harold Ickes Jr.--a witness suddenly awash in existential
uncertainties--and even odder given this witness's precise and direct
answers to all other questions.
None of this is to say that the coverage of the presidential scandal didn't
spawn plentiful quantities of nonsense--particularly from pundits and from
the hordes of former prosecutors and other lawyers filling the screen
throughout the night. It is to say that a corps of reporters followed the
story where it led and they got it right notwithstanding an extraordinary
army of stonewallers, spinners and other dedicated liars. That is worth
more than a C-minus.
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