Presswatch: Hear Her Roar
Corry, John
PRES SWATCH by John Corry Hear Her Roar W ho is Madeleine? What is she? An inspired choice as secretary of state, according to the president; a very feminine woman, but one with cojones,...
...46 February 1997 - The American Spectator New Republic found common ground there —was any real analysis of Albright's foreign-policy beliefs...
...The policy directive was forgotten after the Somalia debacle, but the impulses behind it still linger, and it is likely that one way or another the White House will now revive it...
...a seat on the committee that makes recommendations on finances...
...But in every one of those cases we had a clear goal and had matched our military commitment to the goal ....I told Ambassador Albright that the U.S...
...Nothing would be left over for soup kitchens or police stations...
...It was also widely noted that the West's "appeasement" of Hitler at Munich had influenced her foreign-policy beliefs...
...The Times may bea long way from recognizing it, but there is a contradiction in that, too...
...Columnists noted how she had stood up to Colin Powell...
...The Army could do this now only if it deployed all its active divisions in the United States, Europe, and Korea...
...What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it...
...A panel of experts on the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" all agreed, solemnly and repetitiously, that she would be articulate in explaining foreign policy, and that she would do well on Capitol Hill...
...Soldiers were dispatched to Bosnia, with the promise they would be home by Christmas...
...As a member of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, she supported a nuclear freeze, opposed the Gulf War, and advocated deep cuts in defense spending...
...Albright's hawkishness is a media invention...
...The most visible one may be seen on "This Week" on Sunday mornings...
...T he collapse of ABC News shows itself in different ways...
...headline said —but it also raised a question...
...But the money must be good, and presumably that's why he stays...
...Moreover, afflicted with one-world vapors in her first two years at the U.N., she helped to inspire the White House policy directive that called for "assertive multilateralism" and "nation building...
...It said Stephanopoulos would 48 February 1997 ?The American Spectator only analyze the news, and not report it...
...Albright should rethink her positions, and her allies in the press should join in...
...Meanwhile, Time said she had cuddled a grandchild while she "sorted out the future of Bosnia," and Newsweek said she had cuddled him while she spoke on the phone with Boutros Boutros-Ghali...
...York wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal pointing out that Stephanopoulos was involved in any number of White House scandals, and that this raised a question about ABC's journalistic ethics...
...For one thing, it lost Brit Hume, while it hired George Stephanopoulos...
...Less noted, though, if ever it was noted at all, was Powell's response to Albright's tantrum...
...Once it was "This Week With David Brinkley," but now Brinkley appears only in cute filmed commentary, and no longer moderates the end-of-the-program discussion...
...The former was never defined, but it seemed to mean that American troops might serve under foreign officers while they went on U.N...
...a very feminine woman, but one with cojones, according to the media...
...As indications for future U.S...
...it may not use them to safeguard the Mideast oil supply, or to turn back Saddam Hussein...
...Hume was always different from other correspondents, and intelligent viewers knew he was a conservative before he publicly acknowledged it...
...Bering-Jensen wrote that "it is certainly pleasant to see Clinton hoist on his own quota-loving petard," but that Albright deserved better than that...
...The New York Times editorial that praised the selection of Albright also warned William Cohen...
...The videotaped outtakes, however, were more damning...
...Newsweek would not have used a picture like that if Clinton had chosen, say, Dick Lugar...
...A military that honors the rights the Times has in mind will not maintain combat readiness...
...she asked him when he was reluctant to commit troops to Bosnia...
...Stephanopoulos, however, is a bad joke...
...Albright was born in Czechoslovakia, and it was widely noted that as a child, she and her family had been forced to flee first Hitler and then Stalin...
...Seven Army divisions and the combat brigades of two other divisions fought in the Gulf War...
...Republicans liked the outspoken way she worked to block Boutros-Ghali from a second term as U.N...
...and as a newly minted hawk, she is sure to flaunt American military power...
...policy under Albright, this is not reassuring...
...Stephanopoulos, in turn, told the Washington Post that he saw in the criticism "a very aggressive campaign by the right wing to delegitimize anything but an attack mentality" against Bill Clinton...
...Will, who seldom managed any more than a thin smile anyway, now looks increasingly dour, as if he were embarrassed to still be on the program...
...Why indeed, and the answer, of course, is that Albright is hardly a hawk...
...In the picture in Time, Albright wore the same black dress she wore for Newsweek, but she sat in a chair, with her chin in her hand, and presumably thought about History...
...spending habits, and applauded Albright for attacking Boutros-Ghali, will now find that the U.S...
...Albright is something of a media invention herself...
...For as Time announced in the first sentence of its story: "Madeleine Albright has never been the type to sit by her phone knitting, waiting for guys to call, unless the guy is the president and the date is with History...
...I thought I would have an The American Spectator ?February 1997 47 aneurysm," he wrote in his memoirs...
...Helle Bering-Jensen argued that some liberals were holding "Albright to the same dismissive standard they had used on Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court: She could only have been chosen because of her sex...
...soldiers remain there still...
...is now disarming...
...ABC has a void where it is supposed to have ethics, and its only defense might be that it no longer practices journalism...
...Eagleburger was grumpy, while Carter was windy, and Smeal was ingenuous and earnest...
...member states knew self-promotion when they saw it, and resentment toward the U.S., never absent even in the best of times, grew...
...Hume, who was ABC's White House correspondent, has gone to Fox News...
...In part it did this to retaliate against Albright's high-handedness...
...Albright appears to be a woman for our time in a way that Jeane Kirkpatrick or even Margaret Thatcher was not...
...And because she has been a leading figure in that particular establishment, there ought to have been more reservations expressed amidst all the gushing...
...missions...
...I patiently explained that we had used our armed forces more than two dozen times in the preceding three years for war, peacekeeping, disaster relief, and humanitarian assistance...
...E xactly...
...The asymmetry here is stunning...
...It seems she represents the best of both genders...
...They were assisted by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which provided them with fake references...
...may use troops to return Aristide to power in Haiti, or to separate clans in Somalia...
...backbenchers...
...As secretary of state, Albright will now bring what the press calls her "muscular instincts" and "combativeness" to a larger stage than the U.N...
...The latter meant that their principal mission would be to run soup kitchens and police stations in the third world...
...The union did this because it had tried, and failed, to organize Food Lion...
...then she told another producer to videotape them...
...As the new secretary of defense, it said, he must insist that the military services "honor the rights of women and minorities as they maintain combat readiness...
...The problem, though, is that the U.S...
...ABC denies, of course, that it was staging the news, and insists it was observing high journalistic standards...
...a full-page picture that looked like it had been taken for a fashion shoot: Albright all in black against a black background, with only her face, neck, clasped hands, and red, white, and blue American eagle pin showing...
...An irony here is that Republicans who have criticized U.N...
...You knew that when you saw the picture in the New York Times Sunday magazine of Hillary Clinton and her striding through downtown Prague in their pantsuits...
...The Democratic foreign-policy establishment to which she belongs has believed this...
...it will find itself equipped only to run the soup kitchens...
...A feckless administration apparently believes there will be war no more...
...Lost in the general gushing—even Jesse Helms and the Is there more to Madeleine Albright than her gender...
...This was interpreted to mean she was a tough-minded practitioner of Realpolitik ?The Lady is a Hawk," the Newsweek44 She supported a nuclear freeze, opposed the Gulf War, and advocated deep cuts in defense spending...
...Their tanks are dug in, while their combat skills grow stale...
...Newsweek asked admiringly at the top of a story, and accompanied it with JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...Albright, and if she's such a hawk," he wrote, "why—unlike nearly all other refugees from Eastern Europe—did she throw in her political lot with America's doves...
...military would carry out any mission it was handed, but my advice would be that the tough political goals had to be set first...
...But U.N...
...Now it would join with ABC in an attempt to destroy it...
...These are only cosmetic problems, and the ABC collapse goes much deeper...
...It has adopted a policy where even minimal standards of professionalism have fled...
...Powell does not record Albright's response, although she and like-minded White House colleagues prevailed in the end...
...has less control over the spending habits than before...
...Except for George Will, they also laugh more loudly than before...
...Stephanopoulos still sounded like a drudge, and there is no reason to think he will ever sound like anything else...
...The legal issue centered on the ABC producers' lying to Food Lion when theygot their jobs...
...And why not...
...He did not slant the news, though...
...She was establishing herself as a feisty defender of American interests...
...On the other hand, Bosnia's future is cloudy, and Albright's relations with Boutros-Ghali were a mess...
...Indeed, she must flaunt it, or else her tough-talking will have no meaning...
...Subsequently Ted Koppel called together Lawrence Eagleburger, Hodding Carter, and Eleanor Smeal to talk about Albright on "Nightline...
...She runs an elegant salon, and also cooks, knits, sticks pencils in her hair, and lets her makeup run...
...Meanwhile, the mission is ambiguous, and the tough political goals that Powell called for have never been set...
...Stephanopoulos becomes an ABC political analyst...
...One showed an ABC producer taking chickens whose "sell-by" dates had expired and putting them up for sale...
...That suggestion and others like it provoked a rebuttal in the Weekly Standard...
...Albright was wrapped in the historicity of her appointment—the first female secretary of state after sixty-three men—and apparently that was enough...
...Another outtake showed a producer ignoring instructions from legitimate employees on how to handle food...
...There is a contradiction between realistic defense needs and the urge to move soldiers around on some sort of global gameboard...
...It said she was "a temperamental, haughty and abusive woman...
...can risk its blood and treasure only for causes other than its own...
...Besides, she showed her toughness by surviving a painful divorce, and she talks back to men on their own terms...
...Petulance, however, is not diplomacy, and Albright appeared to be conducting a personal vendetta...
...Meanwhile, one piece of videotape that did air showed a dirty meat slicer, even though it was the producer's job to clean it...
...Albright, a kind of Georgetown tomboy, proves that a woman can have it all...
...The U.S...
...secretary-general...
...The promise was broken, of course—it is unlikely the administration ever intended to keep it—and U.S...
...Most of the press had suspended its critical faculties, however, and Richard Grenier of the Washington Times was one of the few who asked it...
...The former head of the National Organization for Women said that Albright would be good on "women's issues," particularly those of "third-world women...
...If the cowardly Western surrender at Munich made such an impression on Mrs...
...Meanwhile, there is Albright's reputation for saying what's on her mind...
...This is not true, and ABC should no longer pretend to be in the news business.Then it might even find some small justification for hiring Stephanopoulos...
...Consequently all discipline has been lost, and the celebrity journalists who do their thing there sound more vacuous than before...
...News stories recalled how she termed Cuba's downing of two Livilian planes "cowardice, not cojones...
...At first ABC said he would now be a correspondent himself, as well as a news analyst, but then Byron York of this magazine called, and ABC backed down, even if ever so slightly...
...National security is not their strong point, either...
...The General Assembly has voted, for the first time, to deny the U.S...
...A moral foreign policy means that the U.S...
...F or one thing, it is hard to reconcile her positions as Bosnia hawk and Gulf War dove, unless she believes it is appropriate to commit U.S...
...Thus, along with Stephanopoulos there was this: A federal jury found that ABC's "PrimeTime Live" had committed fraud and trespassing in its undercover investigation of the Food Lion supermarket chain...
...even other correspondents admitted that he presented it straight, but the contrast between his reporting and theirs proved that there really was such a thing as liberal bias...
...Two ABC producers had lied about their professional backgrounds, and gotten jobs as food handlers at a Food Lion store...
...What makes Madeleine Albright so tough...
...She also said that Clinton had been "elected by a gender gap," and she suggested that when he chose Albright he was paying a political debt...
...After all, she wrote, "She has been a leading figure in the Democratic party's foreign-policy establishment for 20 years...
...American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global gameboard...
...PrimeTime Live" then reported that Food Lion sold tainted meat...
...One of his jobs as a White House drudge was to stop correspondents from inquiring into high crimes and misdemeanors...
...But no one seemed to know, or even much care about, just what she would be explaining...
...Grant now that the Iranian daily Resaalat is a hostile source, but it did sum up a general feeling about Albright among the U.N...
...She shatters a glass ceiling, and also goes antiquing with Barbra Streisand...
...troops only on humanitarian or peacekeeping missions, but not to protect the national interest...
...On the other hand, it may not matter much in the long run that Sam Donaldson refers to Cokie Roberts as "the Cokester," or that Cokie can't stop laughing...
...Much of the press —Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, as well as the Times editorial page, immediately come to mind—has believed it, too...
...Worse, she did it in public, while she kept her eyes on the political and media bleachers...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
