Presswatch: Klein Without Spine
Corry, John
"Presswatch: Klein Without Spine" by John Corry Klein Without Spine Anonymity pays, as Joe Klein's irate colleagues let...
...My credibility as a journalist," he said, "has never been questioned...
...Another editor said: "This is what people have been waiting for...
...The Bill Clinton character, Southern Gov...
...Smith had played a White House press secretary in the movie The American President, and Newsweek seemed to think this equipped her, at least for a while, to be its White House correspondent...
...Klein, he said, was "genuinely tortured...
...The media, or the pressthe two are one and the same these days, which is a large part of the problem-do not have much perspective...
...In addition to Klein, Newsweek editor Maynard Parker was also cast as a villain...
...He had known that Klein was the author of Primary Colors, but he had allowed the Periscope section of Newsweek to run an item that suggested candidates other than Klein for Anonymous...
...While Harold Evans, the president and publisher of Random House, fluttered at his side, an unrepentant Klein had told reporters to "lighten up...
...Klein admired Clinton, and wrote about him favorably...
...Newsweek, apparently, was taking the integrity question very seriously...
...Moreover, Klein carried his admiration with him when he went to Newsweek, and covered the presidential campaign the next year...
...But back again to Joe Klein...
...It seems the Newsweek columnist had violated a sacred trust when he lied about having been the author of Primary Colors...
...It declared that anyone who wanted to pre...
...It seems that this happened to Klein...
...on the other hand, its broad outline, if not all its details, rings true...
...Cannibalism or gunplay by a teen-age hooker are not appropriate subjects for children, and it would be nice if the British-born Evans was deported...
...Primary Colors may be fiction...
...certainly it suits Klein...
...But it does not always work out that way, and the reporter ends up spurned...
...There was a good deal of this in the Post story...
...The first book will be about the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski...
...But Klein had not seen things that way, and, according to the Times, he had invited everyone to think of his deception as "an amusing game with soap-opera overtones...
...Journalistic principles had been violated...
...Jack Stanton, is a man of great charm, intelligence and energy...
...Newsweek seemed to be holding a yuppie therapy session, with testimonies all around about anger, contrition, and sincerity, and the need to share everyone's pain...
...The unflattering portrayal of the Clintons, only thinly disguised, inspired a great guessing game about the author...
...But that was on a Tuesday...
...Klein, in fact, was dropped...
...Howard Kurtz, the estimable media reporter for the Washington Post, wrote about this in the Post's Style section...
...This generated, in turn, the publicity that led to the rising book sales and lucrative deals for foreign, paperback, and movie rights...
...Its success came about because nobody knew who wrote it...
...Another editor said that "much of the staff felt betrayed by Joe's action, and felt he had caused the integrity of the magazine to come under great question...
...In an article just a month before the Democratic convention, he praised Clinton for "a clean well-lighted mind, a virtuosity that seems almost bionic: there is no policy question he can't answer seamlessly...
...The two met in 1991, when Clinton was the longest of long shots for a presidential nomination, and Klein was a columnist at New York magazine...
...It could reach into it almost anywhere, and pull out something delicious: lies, deceit, and personal betrayal, journalistic ethics, literary license, political gossip...
...In interviews later, however, he said he did not believe in lying even for that...
...For the press, the Joe Klein-Anonymous scandal was a rich plum pudding of a story...
...copies, a sizable number to begin with, but paltry compared to what it would become: nineteen printings and 1.2 million copies...
...We wish the publishers luck in hell," the New Republic said sensibly, but this was a minority view...
...Clinton did not make Joe Klein his Scotty Reston, and he was not wined and dined at the White House...
...Live, on CBS, he told correspondent Martha Teichner, "It's not me - I didn't do it," even though he also appeared on CBS as a political analyst...
...Primary Colors was offered as a work of fiction, but clearly it was about the Clintons and their advisers, dogsbodies, and friends in the 1992 presidential campaign...
...More or less this may be excused...
...This seemed to be a reference to his televised press conference...
...This is a loathsome project, of course...
...53 TheAmerican Spectator . September r996...
...Perhaps it did-and so much for the integrity question...
...0 they matters, however, are more ambiguous...
...In a universe of lies, damn lies, and goddamn lies, he was operating in the first and not the two latter categories...
...and, as a Random House spokeswoman was to tell the New York Post, "If another Jeffrey Dahmer and Amy Fisher were to come along and make the news, that's precisely the type of crime that we would want to cover in these books...
...At the press conference, he had defended his behavior by likening it to "lying to protect a source"-in this case himself...
...He told the Washington Post, which supposedly had as many as six reporters working on the Anonymous story, "I'm telling you, I didn't write it...
...One 52 September r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator editor said, "It was extremely emotional and pretty wrenching to sit through...
...Actually, sensible people ask that question all the time, and it is really not very damaging...
...Klein, it seems, had not shown sufficient contrition for the deception...
...The conventional wisdom now in Washington is that Primary Colors is Klein's revenge...
...P R E S S W A T C H by John Corry Klein Without Spine Anonymity pays, as Joe Klein's irate colleagues let...
...Primary Colors had a first printing of 62,000 44 Primary Colors sanitizes the least attractive aspects of the Clinton administration by allowing everyone to regard them as fiction...
...It meant, as the New York Times said in one of those wonderfully pompous editorials that always miss the point, he had undermined his fellow journalists...
...The problem, the Times said, was that everyone who has become aware of, and was presumably shocked by, Klein's deception might be driven to ask the journalists "the most damaging of all questions: How do I know you are telling me the whole truth as best you can determine it this time...
...But he did write it...
...Klein is now supposed to make $6 million, and maybe more, but if he had told the truth, he would have made much less...
...And perhaps they had been...
...JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...Joe Klein was smitten with Bill Clinton...
...Then Klein, "with tears in his eyes and voice cracking," apologized for having dragged Newsweek into a controversy...
...Consequently, the week after the news conference, he met with some of the staffers...
...he is also an amoral, compulsive pig, who impregnates a 15-yearold girl, and then has a blood test faked so that no one can prove the child she carries is his...
...Without the conceit, though, editorial pages would go out of business, and that may be why the Times was so steamed...
...For an Arkansas governor who needed an introduction to the eastern media, this was important...
...One of the participants in the remarkable meeting apparently slipped Kurtz his notes...
...Nonetheless, many Newsweek staffers were still upset...
...The reporters should have lightened up, and media scandals ought to be kept in perspective...
...Editor-in-chief Smith, according to the Post, told some twenty senior Newsweek staff people that he wanted Klein "to hear the full force of your concerns, your confusion and your anger, if that's what you feel...
...He was at least partly right...
...and, the numbing argument about literary precedent by Joyce Carol Oates on the Times op-ed page aside, he lied about it because if he lied he could make a lot of money...
...For God's sake," he once told a Times reporter, "definitely, I didn't write it...
...The story is now out there, even if it's not...
...There is a kind of sleight of hand...
...He is not asked why, when he wrote about Clinton as a journalist, he never reported on the parts of his character, or the elements of his private life, that he now has explored as a novelist...
...everyone know-ignoring the real scandal...
...Editor Smith also announced that Klein would not write for the magazine for several weeks, but instead would "reflect on the whole affair and talk to you, individually or in small groups...
...It was even possible that people would no longer believe them...
...The press likes to do this more than almost anything, and carrying on about Klein and his crime was an opportunity for self-indulgence...
...This made Newsweek itself part of the deception, and it led the Philadelphia Inquirer to demand that the magazine fire Parker, as well as Klein...
...A reporter, or columnist, identifies with a politician...
...Truth, as opposed to fact, is fluid, relative, and elastic, and the idea that journalists can find it is a conceit...
...Maureen Dowd mentioned it in the Times: "Mr...
...On Wednesday, it was disclosed that Newsweek had given press credentials to the actress Anna Deavere Smith, and sent her off to California with Bill Clinton...
...Few in the media, though, were disturbed...
...Newsweek editor-in-chief and president Richard M. Smith said that he and Parker both were "resolved never to let anything like this happen again...
...serve the "core values of serious journalism" must view Klein's "actions and words as corrupt and - if they become an example to others-corrupting...
...No one really cares about the real reason he lied about being Anonymous...
...When he makes the rounds of the talk shows, he is not asked which parts of his book are true...
...He said he had committed no crime, and he had never lied in his Newsweek column...
...Clinton may not have impregnated a 15-year-old, but it is widely accepted by now that he could have done something more or less like that...
...It could also talk about itself...
...He only wanted to embarrass his former friend...
...They exist in a journalistic and moral muddle...
...Primary Colors, however, relieves the press of the burden of having to investigate or pay attention...
...There is a lot of slyness at work here...
...After Klein's authorship was exposed, Parker said he regretted having run the Periscope item...
...Primary Colors sanitizes the least attractive aspects of the Clinton administration by allowing everyone to regard them as fiction...
...Even as Klein spoke, and Evans fluttered, Random House was getting ready to release a series of quick tabloidtype crime books for children...
...This seems to suit nearly everyone...
...Their destinies, he comes to believe, are entwined...
...This kind of thing happens often...
...None of this piggishness, though, was evident when Klein wrote about Clinton as a journalist...
...Nonetheless, he had lied- consistently, vigorously, and imaginatively...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
