Presswatch/Top Secrets

...The basic theme of the article was that Terry Dolan had been a homosexual to the day he died, and the tone of the article was one of sympathy for homosexuals afflicted with the fatal disease...

...So the question of authorization is totally independent of the military authorities...

...PRESSWATCH TOP SECRETS by Michael Ledeen C ome years ago, I knew a person who had spent his professional lifetime on Capitol Hill, mostly as a senior staff member of committees investigating hostile foreign intelligence operations in the United States...

...Being a reflective person, he pondered the significance of his experiences, and issued a new definition of "Top Secret": something the press will not report...

...He had died of AIDS, and nearly six months after his death (on May 11), the Post ran a long article in its "Style" section: "The Cautious Closet of the Gay Conservative...

...Finally, not only did the Dolan family wish to comment on the matter, but no less than three senior editors of the Post, including Ben Bradlee himself, had promised Tony Dolan that the story would not be published without their comments...

...There was no direct comment in the article from other members of the Dolan family...

...The guards are autonomous of the military, and report to the Prime Minister and the Ayatollah...

...But I was almost certainly wrong about that, because it turns out that Loren Jenkins, ace Middle East investigative journalist of the Washington Post, gave the Iranians credit for accidentally attacking a Soviet freighter a month before...

...Well, at least the Post editors had the decency to put it on page 27...

...This is a forgotten story, wrapped in the most effective form of secrecy: silence from the press...

...Thus the Post's prime source turns out to be questionable...

...This allegedly catalyzed Hart's decision to withdraw from the presidential campaign...

...Do they think France and Britain are dictatorships, governed by tyrants...

...And hooray for them, the AFL, and the American government...

...they contributed cheerfully to save democracy...

...According to Dolan, Ben Bradlee believes that "there might be a sizable number of gays in his newsroom and held out the possibility they might have had something to do with this story...

...In case you've forgotten it, shortly after the Miami Herald's stakeout of the Hart residence in Washington produced the Donna Rice story, the Post informed Hart, and the world, that Post journalists had known for months that Hart was having yet another affair, in Washington, with the wife of a senator...

...1-1 his would be bad enough, but Tony Dolan's indictment of the Post goes even further...

...It is indeed a real problem, for readers are entitled to know if reporters have strong biases about the stories they are covering...

...a Freedom of Information Act request for documents concerning the foreign travel of leaders of the anti Vietnam war movement over the course of the previous decade...

...I don't know what he expected to find, but he was astonished at the enormous volume of reports that he received...

...Tony Dolan's article pointed to a variety of factual errors, some of which, in Dolan's strongly worded opinion, indicated grievous faults in the Post's handling of the story...

...As interesting as the story itself is the story of its treatment by the major media: silence...

...To take just one example: shortly after the Second World War, when West European trade unions needed money to fight Communism, the AFL—with the knowledge and approval of the executive branch—raised a considerable amount of money from distinguished American families like the Harrimans, and used it to buy printing presses, mimeograph machines, and other weapons in the ideological struggle for their European friends...

...I'm sure the Harrimans and the others who contributed to the program didn't think they were being "dunned...

...Terry had of course been a major political actor, since NCPAC had been one of the primary sources of funding Michael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C...

...Not only were Post readers never informed of these activities (and hence the likelihood of bias in Blumenthal's stories), but when a book appeared that reported Blumenthal's activities on the Hart campaign, the Post never mentioned that, either...

...Do they not know that every democratic legislature in the world save ours is lied to with monotonous regularity, and rather expects it...

...One might have thought that the Post would have replied in some form to Tony Dolan's indictment of its practices, but nothing of the sort took place...

...It's hard to check this sort of thing, but if the "diplomats here" are the ones who told Jenkins that the Revolutionary Guards often operate outside thechain of command, they aren't particularly profound observers of the Persian scene...

...Tyrants, not elected public servants, decide which laws apply to them...

...It's quite all right, because the attack was unauthorized...

...On this basis, there was a fascinating Top Secret two-page advertisement in the Washington Times on May 22, written by one of Washington's better-known personalities: Anthony R. (Tony) Dolan, Ronald Reagan's top speechwriter...

...Aside from the histrionic language, is it possible that the gentlemen and ladies who write these things up there in New York are as ignorant of the real world as one would conclude from the paragraph above...

...Toward the end of his career—we are talking about the late seventies—he decided to investigate something on his own, and filed...

...Dolan continues: The question is, what are the problems with letting homosexual partisans or ideologues, who have a deep commitment to their way of life, work on stories about these issues, especially stories accusing others of being part of the gay community...

...The subject was the coverage the Post had given to the death of Tony's brother Terry, who had been the chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC...

...Tony Dolan bought the space because the Times was unwilling to give him so much space on the op-ed page, and the advertisement was entitled "What the Washington Post doesn't tell its readers...

...The Inside Poop on the Gulf War You may have been bemused, as I was, by the Administration's reaction to the Iraqi attack against an American warship in the Persian Gulf...

...Why was the story not run...

...indeed Terry, having undergone a religious conversion that led him to abandon and denounce homosexuality, asked for a different priest...

...It does seem odd, after all, that after Iraq attacks our Navy, we respond by threatening . . . Iran...

...Just as the unethical behavior of Sidney Blumenthal was never reported, so Tony Dolan's charges went unmentioned and unchallenged by Washington's leading newspaper...

...An AP story went out on the wire, and was carried here and there in local papers...

...Do they not know that wealthy individuals have frequently made funds available to their governments for worthy objectives...

...A handful of journalists showed up, listened for a while, and left...

...What about the Soviet diplomats taken hostage in Lebanon, one of whom was murdered...

...At a minimum, it needs a bit of balance, for if excessive secrecy is damaging to any administration's desire to conduct policy, lack of secrecy can be every bit as damaging...

...Have they not heard the stories about the behavior of MI5 in England, which apparently even spied on Prime Minister Wilson...

...But it is surprising, and grounds for grave concern, that not one other major newspaper in America took a hard look at the matter, or otherwise called the Post to account...

...Do they not remember the French attack against the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand...

...The three promises turned out to be worthless...

...Given the Post's decision to write a long piece on Terry Dolan, one marvels at its decision to "spike" a story on Gary Hart's sexuality...

...That the Times's editorialists are pretty far out on their rhetorical limb is demonstrated by the paragraph that follows the Hamilton quotations: Dictators, not democrats, create private governments, develop private budgets by dunning the wealthy, traffic with profiteers and lie to legislatures...

...And how does Mr...

...Finally, a good deal of the story rested on the word of a Catholic priest, who, according to the Post, had been Terry's confessor and spiritual adviser through the final months of his life...

...This impressed him, and so he called a press conference to share his discoveries with the protectors of "the public's right to know...

...for Reagan's presidential campaigns, and for those of dozens of conservative candidates for lesser offices...

...indeed the Post article stated that the family did not wish to comment on the matter...

...He heard it from "diplomats here" in Tehran...

...And do they not know that every democracy save ours believes that raison d'etat is superior to abstract morality, and hence that democratically elected rulers are entitled, from time to time, to act illegally in the name of the national interest...

...Instead, according to diplomats here, the attack seems to have been an intemperate—and probably unauthorized—action by a group of Revolutionary Guards operating, as they often do, outside the military chain of command...

...There you see...

...thousands of pages documenting hundreds of trips to such places as Havana, Prague, Sofia, and Moscow...

...On May 14, Jenkins wrote from Tehran: A Soviet freighter, the Ivan Koroteyev, was attacked a week ago and severely damaged by "unknown" forces—believed to be an Iranian gunboat—as it sailed through the gulf toward Kuwait...

...As he points out, the Post has decided that the sexuality of public figures is legitimate fodder for the reading public, and homosexuality in particular seems to have stirred the interest of several Post journalists...

...Do they not know that ours is the only democracy in the world where the chief executive does not have a secret (and I mean secret) private fund for secret programs...

...Not a single story appeared...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 33...

...Or did the Post intend to sit on its story until such a time that it would have the maximum impact on the political campaign...

...Does the same perhaps apply to the 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 mysterious spiking of the Gary Hart story...

...But the assault was not believed here to have been the result of an official decision to move against the Russians for the first time [sic...

...Furthermore, Terry's rejection of homosexuality—not reported by the Post—undermines the basic theme of the story...

...Tony Dolan writes that the story it ran about [Terry Dolan] and the Post's refusal to hear out the facts that refuted it, proved the Post values its role as an ideological and political power-center with a pro-gay, anti-conservative agenda more than it does its responsibilities as a newspaper...

...The priest in question was not Terry Dolan's spiritual adviser...

...Jenkins know all this...

...I also wondered at our eagerness to accept the claims from Iraq that the attack was an accident, and at first I thought, well, here we have the pro-Arab characters in the State Department doing it to us once again...

...Sidney Blumenthal, chief assassin on the anti-conservative hit squad, used to write about Gary Hart for the New Republic while he was working on Hart's speeches, and he wrote a long, loving essay on the ultra-left Institute for Policy Studies for the Post without informing readers that he used to work for one of the institute's publications...

...The Philosophy of the New York Times The editorialists of the New York Times are enraged about the Reagan Administration again, and so be it...

...This is perhaps not surprising...

...They say (June 14), quoting Congressman Lee Hamilton (chairman of the House Select Committee on the Iran/ contra investigation), that the American government "cannot function cloaked in secrecy . . . cannot function unless officials tell the truth . ." I agree with the second contention, but the first is considerably overstated...

...This general problem is not a new one for Ben Bradlee or the journalists of the Washington Post...