Presswatch/Spikes and Inouyendoes
Ledeen, Michael
PRESSWATCH SPIKES AND INOUYENDOES C ometimes it's the small acts of nastiness that tell us the most about a person. Eight years ago, when I was interviewing people for a book I co-wrote about...
...Bigger and Better Spikes These little spikelets show the sort of reflexes that journalists and editors develop when they work for the Post, something that will not surprise those who have followed the coverage of the Iran-contra hearings...
...It's simply an assertion that something else will come along...
...As the morning was North's, the afternoon belonged to Arthur Liman, the litigator from New York who is chief counsel of the Senate select committee...
...Remember drugs...
...of the House select committee...
...Haynes Johnson...
...he should complain to UPI...
...The day concluded with a stern catalog of North's actions in participating in lies to Congress and the public from chief counsel John W. Nields Jr...
...And the story said precisely what the headline said...
...He THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 31...
...Then it changed...
...The top one was headlined "Iran Probers Say 3 Didn't Tell Full Truth...
...Shall we tell him...
...Nields's failure was so manifest that within 24 hours even members of the committees were criticizing him...
...Colonel, at Hearings, Has Not Said That President Was to Be Kept in the Dark About the Project...
...I do not . . . believe you have accurately conveyed in your public references to me what I actually said about leaks...
...He kissed her goodbye as she left for the airport, and when she went to board the Concorde for the return flight, the customs agent removed the jewel...
...North's repeated assertions of absolute assurance and of always acting for a higher cause clearly began to wear on the committees...
...Liman so antagonized the public that he received some of the most vicious hate mail (and calls) in recent memory...
...Undeterred by this blow to his mystic powers, he has now given us a new forecast, this time in the field of American public opinion...
...Girls were flown in by chartered Concorde for the occasions, and at one of these affairs the Shah had given a lovely Parisian woman a spectacular emerald, which she wore for the entire weekend...
...He had intended to tell me something about the Shah (and he had), but he also told me a great deal about himself...
...On June 19, the Post ran two stories—one on top of the other—that related to Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams...
...Johnson was seeing what he wished to see, not what had transpired...
...It was his day in court...
...The Inouye Misdirection Senator Daniel Inouye came to the hearings with a remarkable reputation...
...In what must be the biggest voluntary correction in the history of modern publishing, Fox Butterfield wrote an enormous, two-column front-page article on July 13 ("A Correction: Times Was in Error On North's Secret Fund Testimony...
...Eight years ago, when I was interviewing people for a book I co-wrote about Carter and the fall of the Shah of Iran, I spent some time with a European businessman who had been one of the lucky guests at the Shah's orgies...
...Of the questioning of North by John W. Nields, Jr...
...the assured Marine suddenly seemed very alone...
...They had neatly snipped a one-sentence paragraph from the UPI original that read: "Abrams appeared before two congressional panels Wednesday, his first congressional appearances since his testimony to the Iran-Contra panel...
...This time, to its credit, the Washington Post gave full and accurate coverage to the challenges to Inouye's remarks about the residuals (although it of course neglected to report the scoop by its mortal enemy, the Washington Times).has been predicting a new Great Depression for six years, even as the stock market establishes record after record, and refuses to budge from his now clearly erroneous economic visions...
...That's just as it should be...
...So it is with the Washington Post, a newspaper that in recent months has given up all pretense of being respectable, and has instead revealed itself as a vulgar political sheet...
...In this five-paragraph tale we learn that Abrams sent a deputy to George Crockett's House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere AfMichael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C...
...The next day, July 9, North was questioned by Arthur Liman, and Johnson's "analysis" was strikingly similar to his evaluation of the preceding day: The morning was all his, and Oliver L. North knew it...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 Yet between July 10 and July 12, he made two outrageously misleading statements...
...Will this be a onetime event, or is there hope for American journalism after all...
...So, it seems, did the country...
...Testimony of Secord, Abrams, Hall Faulted...
...fairs, and the UPI story pointed out that Abrams "would have been put under oath by a Democratic Chairman Who questions his veracity...
...So you say now...
...Remember nuclear war...
...And North, although admitting shredding, lying, and otherwise deceiving scores of people around the world, had effectively made his case...
...At times the Post's "reportage" was so bad that one had to wonder if there weren't actually two separate events broadcast, so different was the coverage from what one saw on television...
...on Wednesday, July 8, Johnson wrote: Oliver L. North was on the offensive yesterday, and for much of the extraordinarily emotional Iran-contra hearing day proved to be the best lawyer in his own defense...
...But the drama was hardly "distracting": it was the main event...
...I expect that years from now people will look back at the spring and summer of 1987 as the beginning of the end for this publication, which once inspired an entire generation of American journalists...
...And it turned out that Poindexter's memorandum had no reference to "residuals" or excess funds from the weapons sale to the Iranians...
...As recently as 1983, nuclear war threatened thefuture of all human life...
...Writing in early July, Kinsley consults his tea leaves and pronounces: A year from now, no one will be talking much about AIDS anymore...
...Abrams didn't care for that, and he complained to the Post's ombudsman, Joe Laitin, who replied dryly that it wasn't the Post's fault...
...I salute Fox Butterfield and the Times, especially because, so far as I can establish, the error was discovered by the newspaper's own editors, and was not pointed out by critics, lawyers, or 011ie North...
...The answer, Michael, is as follows: Something that actually kills is a lot worse than something (the nuclear deterrent) that keeps the peace...
...And even when it was over, Haynes Johnson wanted to pretend that the result would be other than what it clearly was...
...Fair enough...
...It is the usual Post special by two experts in innuendo (Dan Morgan and Walter Pincus): a totally undocumented claim, citing unnamed sources...
...But instead of recognizing that North's testimony had fundamentally changed the nature of the hearings, and threatened to provoke a backlash against the more outspoken members of the committees, Johnson wrote: The drama was distracting, as Sen William S. Cohen (R-Maine) suggested...
...What's worse than that...
...But, unique in a world where people and institutions downplay their errors (when they are admitted at all), the Times was willing to go to great lengths to correct its mistakes...
...Although Abrams had a perfectly good excuse (a meeting with Oscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica), the clear implication was that Abrams didn't want to testify...
...That's not a prediction about the course of the disease...
...But Cohen added: "Long after the sheer force of your personality has faded from this room . . . I think the American people are going to be left to deal with the policy implications of what has occurred and what's been said in this room...
...Why not...
...Laitin probably didn't realize that the Post's spikers had been at work...
...On Bastille Day, July 14, Johnson finally admitted that North's impact on American public opinion was the greatest any military leader had made since General MacArthur's great performance in 1951...
...Just underneath this bit of fluff we find a UPI story with a little headline: "Abrams Misses Hill Appearance, Cites Schedule...
...After three hours answering Liman's questions, North's demeanor was transformed...
...But as the day wore on, the tone of the hearings shifted...
...A World War II hero, widely considered a highly moral and fair-minded man, he seemed to be the perfect chairman of the Senate Select Committee...
...Take, for example, the descriptions of two successive days of questioning of 011ie North provided by the Post's main "news analyst" of the hearings, Mr...
...In the morning, he was combative and indignant as he sought to disprove charges that he had profited personally from Iran-contra deals...
...Nields played the bad cop, Liman the good cop, but neither stratagem succeeded...
...Our culture is incapable of maintaining the current level of hysteria about any one thing much longer...
...But let's remember to send Michael a Safe Sex kit next Bastille Day...
...Even as North continued his strong self-defense of his Iran-contra role, a room in the Senate Russell Office Building was filling with flowers . . . and citizen supporters were literally [?] offering checks for his defense to Capitol guards...
...As polls would show a few days later, he had done what Ronald Reagan had not: rallied public support for the contras...
...On both days, the counsels for the joint by Michael Ledeen committee had set out to destroy North, and on both days they failed...
...Then, on a weekend talk show, he suggested that "there is an important document in which [Poindexter] says, 'I briefed the President, the President agrees on the use of these residuals [from the sale of weapons to Iran] . . . for other purposes.' " Both statements turned out to be false...
...Last and Least . . . the Prophet Kinsley Michael Kinsley, who edits the New Republic, must go down as one of the worst prophets in modern times...
...The Washington Times produced a world scoop by publishing a letter from Odom to Inouye in which Odom sharply remarked that during the committee hearings "there have been .. . references to intercepts which call attention to existence of SIGINT and, therefore, trouble me about potential for future leaks...
...Medal of Honor to the New York Times The New York Times has made lots of mistakes in its coverage of the Iran-contra affair...
...The bravado had become hesitancy...
...So whatever else one wanted to say about the event, it was clearly wrong to leave the implication that Abrams was reluctant to testify before Congress...
...First, he claimed that he had been informed by General William Odom of the NSA that the joint committees had not leaked any classified information...
...Oh, AIDS is worse...
...But the Post wanted that implication to remain, and hence removed the offending words...
...To get an accurate picture of North's effectiveness, one had to read the analyses of the Post's television columnists...
...It's not the announcement of a cure or a prediction that something even worse will come along...
...My European laughed heartily as he told me the story...
Vol. 20 • September 1987 • No. 9
