Presswatch / Sex and Smoke

...The tobacco companies' suit against ABC had been around for eighteen months...

...By not using this on the air, ABC seemed to be enlisting in the anti-smoking crusade, even if it had to suppress information to do so...

...Gingrich, he wrote, wasn't "borked"—he was "brocked...

...The Speaker and the President showed up differently on the character issue, but Rich was insisting on a moral equivalence between them...

...Gingrich, as well as everyone in his family, talked to Sheehy...

...However, Mother Jones says that it had already published the most damaging allegation she uncovered about Gingrich—in a 1984 profile by David Osborne—and that Sheehy ought to have acknowledged this in her piece...

...M eanwhile, there was Frank Rich of the New York Times...

...And why should the FDA be allowed to regulate tobacco advertising...

...The Sheehy piece was right up his alley, and naturally he praised it, but only by performing permutations...

...Meanwhile, bunk science, particularly on second-hand smoke, is everywhere reported as fact, and David Kessler of the Food and Drug Administration has been turned into a poster boy...

...A headline inside the Post said, "Magazine portrays speaker as sex-crazed in the '70s," which it did not, while a news story characterized the Vanity Fair article as "savage...

...it does not demand to be taken in larger and larger amounts to achieve its desired effect...

...Also, no one has ever accused Gingrich of using state employees to fetch his women, while he demonstrated signs of compulsive, and perhaps uncontrollable, sexual behavior...

...W hen ABC News capitulated in the suit filed against it by Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, it touched off the predictable grumbling, as well as warnings about the capitulation having a "chilling effect...

...He also claims to have seen Gingrich in a parked car, "with one of the guys' wives with her head in his lap going up and down...

...Billy Goat was carrying on up to, and possibly during, the time he was president...

...The last peccadillo was eighteen years ago...

...but her real interest in writing it, and Vanity Fair's in publishing it, and liberal columnists in citing it, was sex...

...Well, maybe, but "I have done 70 interviews" is awkward phrasing, and if you read it quickly, which Sheehy and Vanity Fair expect you to do, it seems to say, "I have interviewed 70 people...

...The Post, though, is not always serious, and even the people who read it admit it lacks gravitas...

...But the tobacco companies, even if reluctant to admit it, really are hoping for a "chilling effect...

...It was unlikely that any of this meant much to the average smoker...

...Earlier this year Kessler was the subject of an admiring profile on "60 Minutes...

...Whatever it was, he was foolish enough to sit still for an interview with Gail Sheehy...

...At halftime during a "Monday Night Football" game, an announcer read a statement that said, in part, "We now agree that we should not have reported that Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds add significant amounts of nicotine from outside sources...

...In one outtake, a former executive at Reynolds denied that the company had ever spiked cigarettes...

...Sheehy occasionally tries to sound like a political insider, but she can't pull it off, and the actual political process would probably bore her...

...The self-righteous Kessler has been getting a free ride, and in its constant yearning to be on the high moral side, the press wants to go along with him...

...The treasurer of his first congressional race, in 1974, says Gingrich had an affair with one of the volunteers...

...He noted that "in Vanity Fair, Mr...

...Sheehy, of course, is best known for her books on pop psychology—her New Passages is second to Gingrich's To Renew America on the best-seller list John Corry, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...

...A reasonable guess would be that she spoke to, say, thirty people, some of them over the phone, and that out of the thirty, only three or four came up with any good stuff...

...ABC named him "Person of the Week...

...Murdoch may hold the title of editor-in-chief, but he spends most of his time now running around the world making deals, and he seldom plays around with front pages...

...After all, he is supposed to be big on family values, and any evidence of hanky-panky could be used as a weapon against him...

...Margaret Carlson of Time, however, is surely a heavyweight, and in an angry column she repeated Sheehy's allegations, while adding some of her own...

...That was the allegation Mother Jones said it reported first...

...And that was it—a thin collection of incidents, the last of which took place eighteen years ago...

...171 The American Spectator October 1995 53...

...How, for example, can he say nicotine is a dangerous addictive drug...

...But Sheehy had done no such thing, and the sentence was worded the way it was only to lend weight to her musings...

...Bill Kovach, curator of the Neiman Foundation at Harvard, said he was worried about the effect on "aggressive reporting...

...According to Rich, Brock brought journalism to such a low nasty level that anyone now was fair game...

...And no one in the Gingrich camphas ever had to organize a "bimbo patrol" for fear a new mopsy might emerge from his past...

...Lawrence Grossman, a former president of NBC News, told the Washington Post that ABC was "smart to say it was wrong...

...Indeed, Sheehy seemed puz7led about this herself...

...The companies are feeling abused...

...David Brock...

...Gingrich's wife Marianne is quoted in a way that suggests she knows that her husband is fooling around, although it is obvious the quote has been wrenched out of context...

...He was also displaying once again his obsession with Brock, whom he now mentions in his column almost routinely...

...But the portrayal, according to Carlson, was bogus: the warm, fuzzy view of family life was not real, and Gingrich, of all people, must know it...

...Carlson said that Gingrich's real 52 The American Spectator October 1995 father deserted him just after he was born, that his stepfather "comes across as cold and silent," and that his mother admits to being a manic-depressive...

...She also insinuated that his marriage was on the rocks...

...Gingrich, she wrote, "celebrates family life as it was portrayed in the pages of Reader's Digest and the Saturday Evening Post" in the 1950s...

...Worse, Sheehyalso tries to embarrass Marianne Gingrich by declaring that she had an affair with a married man before she met Newt...

...Sheehy hints at other things happening since then, but she is not persuasive when she does, and sometimes she plays very dirty...

...When he wrote the Troopergate article in The American Spectator, Brock "recounted Bill Clinton's alleged sexual past with anecdotes almost indistinguishable from those Ms...

...A chilling effect on that might be a good thing...

...In response, Sheehy says she uncovered fresh details about the allegation...

...One problem with all the folks in the news is they've got a glass jaw—they can dish it out but they can't take it...

...Early on in her piece about him in Vanity Fair, she wrote that she had been after Gingrich for months, and that when he finally agreed to see her it was only because "he knows I have done 70 interviews with his family, friends and political operatives...

...Sheehy uses to describe contemporaneous peccadilloes of Mr...

...and her 12,000-word article, as might be expected, is heavily freighted with psychobabble...

...She wants to exorcise Gingrich, although she lacks the wit of Maureen Dowd, say, or the stylish petulance of Mary McGrory, and so she tends to sound ponderous...

...According to the New York Times, some ABC employees were worried, too...

...The Clinton camp tried to bully or bribe anyone who might be a source for Brock...

...it does not lead to terrible withdrawal symptoms when it is withheld...

...Vanity Fair, the epitome of glossy Manhattan journalism, would like that...

...Rich, though, was only warming up...

...If the suit against ABC had gone to trial, its news division would have been compelled to release some of its outtakes—video it shot but never used...

...Brock's "anecdotes" were nothing at all like Sheehy's, and Sheehy was not describing "contemporaneous peccadilloes...

...Treacherously then, he splashed them all over the Post's front page...

...They feared that the settlement meant that ABC "might no longer be vigilant in protecting the news...

...Her column left a bad taste in your mouth...

...Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School called the ABC surrender "disgraceful," and said that "anybody with half a brain" would have told ABC that if it had hung in there, it would have won...

...Nonetheless, it did raise an interesting journalistic question: How, if at all, would the rest of the media deal with the allegations about Gingrich's sexual indiscretions...

...Gingrich is being brought down on the basis of his sex life," and while this might distress his admirers, they had no one to blame but...

...This implied that Gingrich either was worried about what Sheehy had discovered, and wanted to put his own spin on it, or that he was so impressed by her industry that he decided to give her a break...

...Hooray for Larry Grossman...

...It is not mood-altering...

...Actually, that was unlikely...

...The Federal Trade Commission is supposed to do that...

...Murdoch, Rich wrote, holds the title of editor-in-chief of the Post, and his "expert journalistic eye" had picked out the passages in Sheehy's article on Gingrich's "alleged sex life...

...This is cheesy, and since most of Sheehy's psychological insights are trite, and only one of her anecdotes looks new—Gingrich got squeamish when he tried to kill a hog—the piece, called "The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich," does not have much to recommend it...

...Nonetheless, there was at least one dissenting journalistic voice...

...Her article is really only payback because the Republicans won the congressional elections...

...Putnam's Sons...

...A s hard as Sheehy might have tried, however, she could not come up with very much...

...In August, after Clinton announced his campaign to stop young people from smoking—even though all fifty states already have laws intended to do that—Kessler turned up everywhere again, and seldom was he asked a hard question...

...Sheehy's other great source is a woman named Anne Manning, who, Sheehy writes, says she is speaking out now because she "fears that Newt might become president someday...

...Yes, Brock...

...So much for Rupert Murdoch's loyalty to Newt Gingrich," he wrote at the top of his column, a permutation right there...

...Philip Morris, later joined by Reynolds, filed it after ABC's "Day One" had charged that it "spiked" cigarettes by adding nicotine to them in the manufacturing process...

...He wassaying what everyone in newsrooms knows to be true, even if he had to leave NBC News to say it...

...What did Newt do, and to whom did he do it, and how often and where...

...We'd have won in 1974," the former treasurer says, "if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her on the desk...

...Rich was doing a liberal somersault...

...In Carlson's curious view, this proved that Gingrich was a hypocrite...

...And anyway, she now says, she did 105 interviews...

...In the past Rich always had indicated that Gingrich's loyalty was to Murdoch, although now he seemed to be saying it was the other way around...

...Three nights later, another announcer read the same statement on "Day One...

...Several millions of dollars in legal fees later, ABC admitted it was wrong...

...First out of the box was Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post, with a big and somewhat dopey page-one headline: "Who's A Newty Boy...

...Mike Wallace of CBS said he was "utterly bewildered" as to why ABC had settled...

...Just what went on between them is unclear, although Manning says that in 1977 she and Gingrich had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Washington, and that afterwards they had sex in her hotel room...

...For this column he even invented a word...