Playing Softball: The Public Trial of Geraldine Ferraro
Fossedal, Gregory A.
Gregory A. Fossedal PLAYING SOFTBALL: THE PUBLIC TRIAL OF GERALDINE FERRARO The First Woman's taming of the shrewd. I t was about a week after Geraldine Ferraro's triumphant Kennedy...
...Ferraro's trials, as carried out in the press in August and September, is in order...
...Now there was a "news peg," a real investigation, and no way to get a favorable verdict before election day...
...To be sure, some members of the bigname newspapers joined in...
...One event at which Mrs...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 21...
...Ferraro received no applause whatever took place the day before her conference, at a Monday morning briefing that was to feature her accountants, Arthur Young and Co...
...b) force the mainstream media to cover it...
...Ten minutes after the press conference, they were off to jet to Mrs...
...Well, you know how Italian men are about cameras," one said...
...The Post's next day front-page stories were written by Rick Atkinson and Charles Babcock...
...As usual, what was not said was even more important...
...or in Albany, looking into the corporate history of P. Zaccaro, Inc...
...But as a tradeoff, the press has had to fall on its own sword, trading in its cherished credential as guardian of the people's right to know...
...All of a sudden, Newsweek found Jeane Kirkpatrick's comments "pathbreaki n g . . , intriguing," printing a long transcript of her assessment that "we are making the conditions of public life so tough that nobody will be willing [to serve] . . . . I think that is what is happening to Geraldine Ferraro now...
...Ferraro, to put off their investigation until after the election...
...Disclosing almost nothing, and having already admitted to several offenses that might have landed most Republicans in prison, Geraldine was nevertheless surfing along on a wave of acquiescence, even sympathy...
...And that's a felony...
...If anyone need worry about this, it isn't Accuracy in Media but the New York Times...
...But we can appreciate why she made the effort...
...When Mrs...
...by contrast, were at the Monday release of documents, but on The Ferraro scandal was the conservative press's Panama Canal: They built it, they paid for it, they're going to keep it...
...Others shouted to Mrs...
...In the weeks that followed, that prediction was more or less borne out...
...That was my impression, too...
...That is why a growing number of advisers feel she should ask for a special prosecutor to investigate all the charges--and quickly...
...Others moaned and booed...
...What else but a scandal involving the First Woman could have prompted a major Time magazine piece on "Reforming the Reforms--Should the postWatergate campaign laws be changed...
...She'll be on the ticket, but the stories will keep trickling out, a little bit at a time, drip, drip, drip...
...Part of the answer is that it was not exactly the same crowd...
...No one noticed, for example, that the Ferraros are Rich, and thus were able to Get Off by hiring High Priced Lawyers...
...She'll never get away with this," said another...
...Here we must distinguish between journalists who might be called posers and those who are diggers...
...Ferraro able to pull o f f such a smooth triumph before the same crowd just a few hours later...
...Ferraro has shown conservatives once and for all that there is a way to fight fire: with fire...
...Geraldine Ferraro, to her credit, toughed it out and managed to survive politically...
...indeed, today, the CBS "60 Minutes" Brigade finds itself on the other end of the magnifying glass, under investigation following its shameless slandering of Gen...
...Mondale did against the greatest politician since FDR, Ronald Reagan...
...Babcock wrote only three stories on the Ferraro finances in the weeks following the press conference, and all three were about the public trial over John Zaccaro's illegal loan from the widow's trust account...
...Joe Sobran continued scrutinizing Ferraro's financial disclosures and discovered several inconsistencies just by closely reading the information that was disclosed...
...The usual sprinkling of "alleged" and "said to have" phrases are deleted here because these actions were all reported publicly...
...The diggers...
...A next day Chicago SunTimes headline said that "no new" scandals had emerged from the release...
...So did the Washington Legal Foundation, which wondered why a $60,000 capital gain Mrs...
...their presentation was to begin, all cameras were ordered out of the room...
...2 Reporting on other forthcoming rulings, such as a complaint lodged with the Federal Election Commission by a liberal Washington law professor, was equally sparse...
...Consider the reporters assigned to cover Ferraro's Tuesday press conference for the New York Times and Washington Post...
...Actually, the mainstream press didn't begin its half-hearted, five-day chase until weeks after Human Events, the New York Tribune, Washington Times, and Accuracy in Media took off after her...
...It took Woodward and Bernstein, a pair of Washington Post metro reporters, months to demonstrate painstakingly the intricate web of connections and lies that became Watergate...
...This group included the top TV and wire service reporters who follow Mrs...
...Blumenthal managed only five pieces mentioning Ferraro: two summary re-writes of already published material, and three pieces covering Zaccaro's problem with the widow...
...Once upon a time, the diggers and ferreters were people like Mike Wallace and Harrison Salisbury, Ralph Nader and Geraldo Rivera...
...The right wing press proved on Mrs...
...These reporters--by and large--are the ones who were recognized at the press conference and who filed the reports exonerating Mrs...
...Ferraro, you and your campaign staff continue to claim that yours was the "most complete" disclosure in history...
...Meanwhile, the diggers were not at the press conference, and even if they had been they were not going to find some grand new scandal in the roughly twelve hours between the time 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 her disclosure forms were released (after 9 p.m., Monday, August 20) and when the press conference with her accountants began (the next morning, 10 a.m., Tuesday, August 21...
...Meanwhile, the public rapidly lost interest, not because it sympathized with Geraldine, but because people had already concluded that there was something crooked about her and her husband and their real estate dealings...
...Despite all that has happened, there is little serious talk in Washington of repealing the ethics-ingovernment act or the campaign financing laws that limit spending and contributions...
...The applause seemed mainly aimed at drowning out the reporters who still had something to say...
...Today, they are Claire Sterling and Reader's Digest, pursuing the Soviet plot to kill the Pope...
...The man whom Times national editor Paul Delaney described to me as covering the Ferraro finances, Ralph Blumenthal, aidn't even have a front page story the day after the conference...
...Bush than Mr...
...She also (no wonder) forgot to claim the sale as a capital gain on her taxes...
...She bet on a friendly press and got it...
...Throughout a long, hot afternoon, reporters forced to sit around the Holiday Inn near Mondale headquarters vented their frustration on Mrs...
...You know that's a lie...
...She's going to get away with it," sighed columnist Joe Sobran, who had already written several excellent articles on the Ferraro fiasco, conveniently ignored by the mainstream media...
...Tip O'Neill suggested that the postWatergate finance laws had been "drafted wrongly" and "ought to be rewritten...
...But she has lost a pint of blood a week, maybe a gallon...
...Second, Mrs...
...Ferraro's next campaign stop...
...One could not help noticing, for example, that the heat on Ed Meese died down substantially when it was revealed that Sen...
...i THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 19 What is interesting, then, is not that the press failed to hunt for the smoking gun with the same zeal applied to Ed Meese, Bert Lance, Richard Allen, Billy Carter, ad nauseam...
...That bit--," one TV newsman confided...
...Stokes off the hook, but compounded the agony for Mrs...
...get in another question...
...Ferraro before both the House Ethics Committee and the FEC...
...You keep saying we'll get the forms in a few minutes," she said, after tlae third announced delay...
...Since the major wire services never picked up on these developments, however, it can truly be said that any public knowledge of these facts was being generated by the likes of National Review and Human Events...
...It was largely the posers who attended Mrs...
...slum tenants including a leading pornography dealer in New York City as well as others raided for gambling...
...There was a clear expectation that Mrs...
...Ferraro began (skillfully, one must admit) playing my question against that of a previous reporter, saying, "you interrupted his question...
...Ferraro during the conference...
...In other words, she actually fared more poorly against Mr...
...Zaccaro's long-time tenants...
...She certified for several years running that she had separated herself from her husband's finances, but she hadn't...
...Ferraro must still face the House Ethics Committee, as well as the FEC and perhaps the Justice Department...
...From all appearances, they had not looked into Mrs...
...Ferraro's repeated failure to focus on my question.' A look back at the tape reveals that there were no boos until Mrs...
...Ferraro survived because her demise simply could not be allowed...
...Of course, finding a successful tactic is not the same thing as winning the battle or the war...
...There'll be a new scandal every few days...
...Yet that is precisely what the coverage managed to do...
...On the other hand, one could not help noticing that the applause picked up steam just as some reporters were leaping to their feet to 'My question, a good one in my opinion, was in essence this: Mrs...
...It seemed the accountants were television-shy, so just before daily stories about her campaign...
...Polls on every issue from arms control (96.8 percent say the Soviets are cheating) to the federal budget (more than half want another tax cut, not Mondalenomics) to foreign policy (76 percent want to aid dissident groups behind the Iron Curtain) suggest that somehow, somewhere, people are getting the facts...
...It is also a source of future leaks...
...That was true too...
...The point is, the national reporters chasing after Mrs...
...In this same vein, consider the cheers f o r Mrs, Ferraro at the end of the press conference...
...what the profession calls "a news hook...
...Ferraro had released all...
...The point is, one article attacking Metzenbaum was worth ten defending Meese...
...One of these was George Archibald of the Washington Times, who had been spurned repeatedly by Mrs...
...Jonathan Kwitny, a Wall Street Journal reporter, published an extensive article documenting what appears to be a long history of connections between the Zaccaro family and organized crime...
...But my "answer i t " volley was only the last of several interruptions that followed Mrs...
...Ferraro's Tuesday press conference...
...Yet many people were stunned, and legitimately s o . For all their bias, the media have pursued the private finances of public figures with bipartisan nympholepsy...
...Perhaps the problem with the Ferraro finances was that there was, in a sense, too much stuff--so many good angles to pursue, so much yet to be reported, that the few journalists interested in the story hardly knew where to start...
...To some, this has been a source of frustration, but I find it cause for celebration...
...For every.Agnew of recent years, one could name an Eagleton, for every Watergate a Billygate...
...an unusual number of building code violations...
...Robert Bartley and William Kucewicz at the Wall Street Journal uncovering the horrors of yellow rain...
...Ferraro was at Kennedy, they were in Washington, reading over her past FEC statements...
...it was booing a reporter who interrupted another reporter...
...When the Stokes panel surprised everyone and voted to investigate, it was major news, and all three networks ran the item as either their lead or second lead story...
...Indeed, they were all admitted to by Mrs...
...All part of establishing the conclusion that "well, we gave it our best shot but the broad's clean...
...First, Mrs...
...That the Stokes committee staffers will not be able to report back before the election let Mr...
...Not only wasn't this true--the Zaccaros had just revealed that they owed more than $50,000 in back taxes...
...This is a valuable lesson, and its application to the Ferraro case was not lost...
...Meese's chief Senate anGregory A. Fossedal is an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal and co-author of A Defense that Defends (Devin-Adair...
...By now you know the basics...
...Yet from August 22 to September 12, the day that Congressman Louis Stokes's House ethics panel announced it was going to investigate Ferraro's finances, not a single major news outlet carried a story on the coming vote...
...tagonist, had received $275,000 for making two phone calls to sell a friend's hotel...
...Everyone knew, moreover, that complaints had been filed against Mrs...
...A good illustration is the "answer i t " incident at Kennedy Airport, involving a reporter--me--who was booed for excessively interrupting Mrs...
...In fact, Democratic tracking polls showed she was a net drag on Walter Mondale's ticket in all 45 states outside the New York regi,-~ T h a t the press would lie down on this one was in many ways predictable...
...and c) revive it even after the press was sure it had driven a stake through the story's heart...
...Howard Metzenbaum, Mr...
...Only after repeated announcements and pleadings were the cameras removed...
...What about the 420 or so congressmen who each year disclose their spouse's holdings and income, including the sources of that income, in legally required forms...
...or down on Mulberry Street, checking into some of Mr...
...Ferraro on the wrist--conservatives simply went about the business of applying the Meese standard to Ferraro herself...
...You know that isn't true...
...Back to you, Dan...
...Ferraro would be subject to the same scrutiny...
...I t was about a week after Geraldine Ferraro's triumphant Kennedy Airport press conference, and as the media kudos piled up, some people were getting mad...
...My own column on the Stokes panel appeared on September l0 in the Wall Street Journal, which Nexis does not carry...
...Ferraro may well prove the beginning o f the end o f Washington's ethics mania...
...And because the scandal lingered, it produced two effects of lasting benefit to the Republic...
...Indeed, a USA Today poll taken after Geraldine's press conference triumph showed her running 25 points behind George Bush, carrying a 41 percent negative rating...
...Her husband has: connections to at least five organized crime figures, some of whom gave money to Gerry's campaign...
...And despite all that was learned about Mrs...
...Instead of intoning that "the remaining questions will take weeks to resolve," there was a phony surprise that nothing else turned up...
...William Westmoreland in "The Uncounted Enemy...
...This did not sit well, needless to say...
...By deliberately ignoring the forthcoming events of the Ferraro controversy, the press managed to create the impression that all questions had been answered, that nothing further was likely to happen now that Mrs...
...Fertaro...
...Several aggressive photographers refused to budge...
...Ferraro around to file Tuesday were still scrutinizing those forms and developing what would, weeks later, be a second wave of stories...
...Archibald, along with Niles Latham at the New York Post, focused attention on the activities of Stokes committee staffers who sought, by deliberately mis-shuffling the complaint against Mrs...
...Most reports suggested that the booing was in response to my final interruption of Mrs...
...Ferraro's finances for ten minutes before leaping in front of the camera to deliver their questions...
...Clearly a dissection of Mrs...
...In the weeks following the conference, Mr...
...Many of us have been wondering for years whether Washington's ethics obsession hasn't gone too far, but only when it was applied to Geraldine did Newsweek comment that America may be "Making The Price Too High" for talented people to serve in government...
...but then, that is what happens at press conferences, as reporters try to guess when the politician is finished with one answer and it is time to leap up and shout another...
...The Philadelphia Inquirer continued to dispatch reports of Mrs...
...Ferraro's campaign finances, which have been similarly linked...
...The best way to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Washington's ethics chases was not to talk about hypocrisy, but about Geraldine's financesl When Mrs...
...Geraldine Ferraro took illegal campaign loans worth more than $100,000, later "repaying" them by selling property, through her husband, that she can't prove she bought or paid a fair price for, to another person who paid triple what she did and who then resold it to her husband, who had promised to buy it back at the inflated selling price before he sold it in the first place...
...Of course, the biggest myth established was that the media had "hotly pursued" Mrs...
...Ferraro to begin with, as Time put it, combing through her past "days after" her nomination, according to the New York Times...
...the clear (he did disclose that whopping sale on his congressional disclosure forms...
...Atkinson spent most o f the summer traveling with Ferraro...
...John was about to go on trial for the trust fund loan--it was also ridiculous...
...What startles, rather, is that the press actually found fifteen or twenty smoking guns, wrote about them for days--and then, after a two hour news conference, wrote pompous editorials proclaiming that there were no smoking guns...
...and, finally, a guilty plea to sneaking money from a little old lady's cookie jar, raiding her trust fund to loan money to himself at a 12 percent rate that no real estate man could have arranged for himself through a bank...
...That she was not can be attributed partly to ideology, but obviously there were some other forces at work as well...
...Ferraro were hardly going to find something in her tax reports that had not been located in weeks of scrubbing by skilled accountants...
...To think that Jack Smith of ABC, or any other journalist who had done a grand total of a few minutes of reporting, was going to stand up and reduce Geraldine Ferraro to tears in a few minutes was to establish a kind of ludicrous, Perry Mason standard to the whole affair...
...How was Mrs...
...Rather than writing commentaries bemoaning the press's double standard--grilling Meese while slapping Mrs...
...Ferraro that it could a) get the news...
...These were widely reported as a spontaneous outburst in tribute to her marvelous stylistic performance, and no doubt there was some of that...
...The point, as an Associated Press reporter who did a story on the incident told me, is th!~t the press was not booing a reporter who rudely interrupted a politician...
...Repeat: not one...
...Sarah McClendon, famous for her own confrontations with press secretaries and politicians, engaged Ferraro press aides in a running shouting match...
...The Ferraro case, it seems to me, is but the latest affirmation that organs like the AIM Report and indeed this journal may have a lot more clout than even they realize...
...It was this same crowd that kept the story alive after the Kennedy Airport whitewash...
...It does not matter that the offenses are not exactly comparable or even that Metzenbaum was legally in...
...Ferraro that she was breaking her promise to stay until all questions about her finances had been answered...
...In any case, the press conference originally scheduled for that morning was progressively pushed back, an hour at a time, until finally the question-and-answer session with the accountants was canceled and the release of documents reset for 9:30 p.m...
...The press thus deprived itself of ~The Nexis news search machine, a computer program which can locate every story on a given issue run by AP, UPI, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, and several hundred other publications, finds only five mentions of the Stokes panel, all occurring before Mrs...
...Even in this, however, the press may have proved too clever by half...
...Both before and after Kennedy Airport, the prestige press trailed along half-heartedly, all the while pretending to be playing the bloodhound...
...The Ferraro scandal was the conservative press's Panama Canal: They built it, they paid for it, they're going to keep it...
...Maybe so," came my reply, "but she is still going to lose a pint of blood a week...
...Ferraro's press conference...
...Ferraro was then let off the hook for offenses that would have slaughtered most other politicians, it was clear to everyone what was going on...
...Ferraro enjoyed never showed up in her congressional disclosure forms, adding this datum to its already extensive complaint to the Stokes committee...
...Ferraro's family finances, she remained on Walter Mondale's ticket...
...A crucial element in these inquisitions is to have some kind of concrete, official investigation going...
...I don't know anything about this financial stuff," said one reporter who showed up at the press conference Tuesday not having read the Monday release...
...This acts, first, as a legitimizing reference point--"But Mrs...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
