Presswatch: Rotten to the Core
Corry, John
"Presswatch: Rotten to the Core" Or was Johnny Apple's outburst out of character?...
...when the Clinton White House admitted that it had collected FBI reports on 338 Bush and Reagan officials, it barely made the evening news...
...Louis Freeh may have been upset, but it was not...
...It is now the subject of many accusations, and must counter them as best it can...
...ing that the documents had been removed or destroyed...
...Clinton regularly is...
...No one in the White House wants that...
...Stephanopoulos knew what he was asking: Dole should become an unindicted coconspirator...
...The disturbing thing is how the administration is excused by people who should know better...
...Troopergate and all that it stands for is submerged in the murky, amorphous "character issue...
...It was a "tool of right-wing extremists," "a piece of garbage," and so on...
...He said that Clinton could be saved by the excesses of his opponents...
...Indeed, it may even have been a hand-out...
...According to the London Spectator: R. W. Apple...
...Aldrich wrote, among other things, that Clinton sneaked out of the White House at night, crouched under a blanket in the back of a car, and was driven to hotel trysts by Bruce Lindsey...
...It said: "Senior White House officials said tonight that they have discovered new facts about a White House request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for information about a fired employee, showing that the request was an honest mistake...
...He pointed out on CBS's "This Morning" that Gingrich had not gone to Brown's funeral...
...Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff, called it "tragic," and slyly suggested it was racist as well...
...But television news is not serious...
...The White House equivocates, and when that fails it lies...
...Anchor Brian Williams said that Bob Dole wanted to make the FBI files a campaign issue...
...he just did not want it to be reported...
...Brown, after all, was under criminal investigation by an independent counsel when he died...
...The press buys much of this, and excuses or ignores even more...
...It characterized the sexual charges in Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House only as a "series of unflattering allegations...
...and found that only 35 percent of the respondents were confident...
...The "cancer" that grew on the Nixon administration was an attempt to conceal a burglary...
...Michael Kinsley, in a recent Time magazine essay, wondered why Clinton's "character" should be questioned...
...If the White House has to answer on this, the character issue would be out in the open and even Johnny Apple would have to pay attention...
...Newt Gingrich, the New York Post reported, mentioned the Spectator item at a closed-door meeting of Republican officials...
...It is dominated by performers and not reporters, and their connection to journalism is tenuous...
...His source for this, he wrote, was a "welltrained, experienced investigator...
...Kinsley was drifting in cyberspace, and taking Time with him...
...This raised the suspicion of a posthumous cover-up...
...He said he wanted Dole to join in the denunciations...
...Alert listeners, however, may have noticed what was missing here...
...On the other hand, it almost certainly pleased the White House...
...Its headline asked, "Why is Clinton's character such a liability when he is no worse than other pols...
...As White House scandals go, this may not have amounted to much, but it did have its points of interest...
...47 The American Spectator - August 1996...
...In the Clinton administration, the two complement one another nicely...
...almost chokes with fury at the mere question as to whether the liberal press has been tardy at following up the sexual and financial allegations against Mr...
...Apple could not deny anything reported in the Spectator...
...As hard-hitting, or even slightly skeptical, reporting that wasn't much...
...That same week, columnist Jim Hoagland, also writing in the Washington Post, harrumphed about the Republicans' "slashing, multi-front campaign to brand the Clintons as ethically impaired and unfit for office...
...They also removed from the office two large brown cardboard file boxes filled with more documents...
...No one from the administration was actually deny...
...Do you want us to go round giving credibility to every piece of dirt thrown at the president like those assholes at the American Spectator?' This was the Ron Brown defense, much like Panetta used against Gingrich...
...The chosen defense against the charges in Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access is a modified, limited Ron Brown hang-out...
...It declined to even mention the considerably better sourced Partners in Power: The Clintons and TheirAmerica, by Roger Morris, in its news columns...
...The Nixon White House is still the benchmark for political depravity, and Clinton apologists do their best to keep it that way...
...The White House, he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece, was burdened by "inexperienced, arrogant and hyper-ambitious junior staffers...
...David Brock's old Troopergate story was about compulsive, uncontrollable behavior, the use of state employees as procurers, the abandonment of ethical and moral standards, and a good deal of lying...
...ABC, CBS and CNN did not, and NBC seemed to repent the next night...
...This seemed to mean that the Clinton staffers had not sunk to the level of the old Nixon staffers...
...more 46 August r996 • The American Spectator important, no one ever accused Nixon of practicing the kind of unbecoming conduct for which Clinton, by any reasonable standard, has long been convicted...
...Part of the answer, of course, is that the Times and like-minded news organizations will only hint at the whiffs and not describe the scandals...
...P R E S S W AT C H Rotten to the Core Or was Johnny Apple's outburst out of character...
...This, he warned, could make politics "very ugly...
...Columnist Al Hunt of the Journal's Washington bureau told the Clinton campaign to pay attention to this, but not to become undone...
...Originally it was the Spectator story in which four Arkansas troopers talked about Clinton's sexual misconduct, but now, like Watergate, it may be thought of as a generic name, too...
...It is the squalor charge-sex, drugs, and piggishness-that gets it...
...For starters," he wrote, "it's a travesty to call this Filegate or Travelgate or any other play on the set of high crimes generically called Watergate...
...Charles Colson did time in jail for possessing a single FBI file during the Nixon administration...
...The Times will suppress all hints of anything remotely like that...
...Besides, no one ever accused the Nixon White House of leaving FBI files around where snotty young staffers could read them...
...Hunt neglected to mention Troopergate...
...Its headline said merely, "Data on Travel Office Head Sought After His Ouster, Letter Shows...
...the reappearance of Rose law firm billing records was a mystery...
...63 percent were not...
...The Commerce Department spokeswoman said it was "as low as you can go...
...The Times's own standards on dirt are whimsical...
...Congress is taking the charge about the FBI seriously, and surely there will be an investigation...
...Nowhere in the press, though, is this kind of empty-headedness practiced more diligently than at the New York Times...
...While he was working on his own book last summer, he said, he had questioned Aldrich about vague rumors he had heard about the hotel trysts...
...But it is not a travesty, and Hunt was protesting too much...
...When it was disclosed that the White House had obtained the FBI file on Billy Dale, the Times gave a great yawn...
...He meant David Brock, who, on reading Aldrich's book, recognized his own description, and immediately, and publicly, denied that he was a source...
...According to the item in the Spectator's On the Prowl column, the boxes had not been seen since, and the shredder was removed from Brown's office later that day...
...Exactly what he said was unclear, but the administration responded immediately...
...George Stephanopoulos insisted on "This Week With David Brinkley" that it was also "a character test for Bob Dole...
...To be sure, this has its comic side...
...n its June issue, The American Specta tor reported that shortly after the Com merce Department learned that Ron Brown's plane had disappeared, some ninety minutes before the White House officially announced it, two of Brown's secretaries entered his office, and shredded some documents that Brown had kept in a safe...
...But not to worry, he continued, the report by the Senate Whitewater committee may have been harsh, "but there was no smoking gun-the Clintons were not personally linked to major scandal...
...The Times has never acknowledged any of this, and is not likely to do so now...
...Who do you think broke the goddamn story in the first place?' he yells down the phone...
...The White House, however, can always handle that...
...Stephanopoulos, it seems, is a culprit...
...A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll asked, "How confident are you in Bill Clinton's honesty and truthfulness...
...no one knows who hired a clown as White House security chief...
...Nixon, however, was never abetted by the press...
...The London Spectator (which is no relation to us) recently called Johnny Apple, chief of the Times Washington bureau, and asked him why the Times now seemed "reluctant to follow up leads which discredit the President...
...The slipperiness of the White House was one, and the complaisance of the press was another...
...By any reasonable reckoning," he wrote, "his professional and personal failings average out to a level of moral compromise" typical of other presidents...
...Then when the White House admitted that it had obtained the 338 FBI files on the Reagan and Bush officials, the Times, like the networks, almost managed to ignore it...
...The White House answers what it can, attacks motives where possible, and hopes everyone will ignore anything left over...
...It buried the story on an inside page, and used a lead that read like a Mike McCurry hand-out...
...Hoagland did allow, though, that "White House staffers using the FBI for political purposes-in a third-rate imitation of Watergate -is disturbing...
...Unlimited Access says the White House used the FBI for political purposes, and that it was infected by a general squalor...
...Now it could denounce the whole book...
...the cancer growing now on the Clinton administration is the attempt to conceal, minimize, or otherwise ignore Clinton's aberrant behavior...
...Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with the Travel Office firings...
...Michael McCurry, the White House press secretary, said Gingrich had made "an outrageous suggestion...
...Nonetheless it is hard to keep this kind of pretense up, and it may be the strain is now showing...
...JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...Obstruction of justice is obstruction of justice no matter which administration does it...
...Norman by John Corry Omstein of the American Enterprise Institute agreed...
...NBC mentioned it...
...Therefore, nothing he might say about Brown would be acceptable now...
...The Sunday story sanitized and shrank Clinton's amoral sexual life into a single reference: He is the subject of "a sexual harassment suit by a former state employee in Arkansas...
...Meg Greenfield, writing in Newsweek, seemed to suggest that the FBI files had turned up in the White House only because some "selfimportant, imperious junior show-offs" had over-reached themselves...
...Aldrich then turned his questions into facts, which embarrassed Brock, but delighted the White House...
...They were only saying that it was bad form or inappropriate to say that they were...
...The Wall Street journal editorial page recently reprinted excerpts from the complaint Paula Corbin Jones filed in federal court, and thereby reminded its readers that the president of the United States likes to drop his pants and expose himself...
...Clinton...
...Meanwhile, a story in the Sunday Times "News of the Week in Review" wondered why, "as more and more whiffs of scandal have swirled around President Clinton, he has invariably emerged unscathed in the polls...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
