Presswatch: Dropping the Big One
Corry, John
by John Corry Dropping the Big One F or once the White House was right: There had been a rush to judgment; everyone wanted to get in on the act, Dan Rather was in Havana, talking about the Pope's...
...What, if anything, should the press report about it...
...Indeed the Times never caught up, and the day Clinton gave his deposition on the Jones case in January, the Times neglected to even mention it...
...first...
...How did Clinton keep appeared...
...When White House hack Paul Begala turned up on "This Week With Sam and Cokie" (and, yes, it is a silly name for a news program), Cokie Roberts grew visibly angry...
...Drudge thus could, and did, claim that he had reported it first...
...The dread word impeachment is now being heard...
...Presumably he was orchestrating all the Clintons' public appearances, although the lectern-thumping performance got only mixed reviews...
...When Clinton finished speaking, and strode purposefully away, after saying he had "to go back to work for the American people," Mrs...
...Clinton had broken the rules, and the disgust some correspondents felt was apparent...
...Anomalies arise...
...She wanted Begala to at least denounce the kind of behavior Clinton was being accused of, but he repeatedly declined to do so...
...Jones's lawyers, hoping to prove a pattern of harassment, asked Clinton, under oath, if he had ever had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky...
...The Los Angeles Times piece getting away with it...
...Stories about Clinton's proclivities will only diminish it...
...Duty had called, he explained on "Night-line...
...Lewinsky had said on the tapes that she engaged in oral sex with the president...
...P.O...
...In other words, Mrs...
...The press called what had happened an "affair," when it wasn't that at all...
...President"— calling on Clinton to be more forthcoming about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and when it did it cited CNN and Newsweek, and not its own news columns, for having raised the questions he should be more forthcoming about...
...The Washington Times reported that "at least 14 women have been named in published accounts of extramarital affairs conducted by Mr...
...I never told anybody to lie...
...Not to put Lewinsky story broke, it seemed the Big too fine a point on it, but the story is trash," One had finally arrived...
...I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky...
...The choreography showed...
...Donating your excess inventory earns a generous tax write-off for your company...
...A Mitterrand taking a mistress, however, is not the same as a Clinton feeding his appetite, and a moral squalor has settled in on the White House...
...That was appalling, but who knows...
...We don't want to report on the candidates' sex lives...
...Clinton, meanwhile, was nodding her head, and tightening her lips, just as she had done in the "6o Minutes" interview five years before, when Clinton denied, or seemed to deny, that he ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers...
...S till, the Times paid no attention when the Arkansas troopers spoke out, or when Paula Jones filed her suit charging harassment...
...On the other hand, haven't Clinton's proclivities diminished it already...
...Meanwhile our news organizations report that European sophisticates deride American Puritanism, and praise their own insouciance...
...Ted Koppel, however, left first...
...Therefore he had to go elsewhere for satisfaction...
...The media, Dole asked, and even a complaisant press though, had recoiled when the stories wondered, too...
...It was an eerie, self-conscious performance...
...fine a point on it, but he portrayed ClinAny knowledgeable Washington reporter ton as a charming, amoral pig...
...I am ashamed for my profession," he said...
...Clinton did not mind...
...NEED AN INVENTORY SOLUTION...
...Clinton was a lesbian, and the president had been turned away, at least sometimes, from his own marriage bed...
...For iiic hies...
...When the Post story appeared, however, Newsweek went immediately to its America Online page...
...The Times and most other big news organizations did not want to touch either...
...Both the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek reported that Ms...
...Bob pulsive, sexual behavior...
...A presidency is founded on the idea of trust, and now the trust has been squandered...
...NBC was the only major network to mention her allegations, and the New York Times reported on her with only a few paragraphs at the bottom of an inside page...
...Box 3021 Glen Ellyn, IL 60138-3021 58 March /998 • The American Spectator...
...Clinton is a liberal Democrat, and the troopers and Jones appeared to have a conservative provenance...
...As many earnest, and not a few fatuous, critics would soon note, the "feeding frenzy" had begun...
...When other newspapers showed more interest than that, Max Frankel, the Times executive editor, was genuinely distressed...
...This may be the tell-all Oprah age, rapidly degrading into the freak-show Jerry Springer age, but the presidency is supposed to be a majestic office...
...Clinton followed, staying a respectful distance behind him, and all the while clapping her hands...
...It did not think it important, although what happened that day would lead to our crisis...
...Head nodding and lip tightening are now de rigueur in the administration...
...Possibly he was anticipating the rationale that Dick Morris would offer two days later in a radio interview in San Francisco...
...Let's assume that some of the allegations that Hillary—sometimes not being into regular sex with men—might be true...
...EAL can convert your donation of inventory into financial aid...
...Brock—Am...
...Klein, who had covdeny, deny, but a judgment had been ered Clinton as a reporter, made clear made: Of course he had been having sex that what was inadmissible as journalism with Monica Lewinsky...
...Not to put too There was, after all, his past history...
...Bill Clinton would go on to deny, hypocrisy about it...
...Recently the Los Angeles Times reported that two Arkansas troopers, neither of whom it identified, said Clinton had told them that, too...
...Moreover, it was being done by someone not much older than Chelsea...
...Call (630) 690-0010 Fax (630) 690-0565 Email scholar@eduassist.org Educational Assistance Ltd...
...Then Klein went on to write Primary Colors, which had more than a whiff of ident...
...He is, and has been since he took office, a source of late-night humor...
...Morris was slandering Mrs...
...In 1992, however, when Gennifer Flowers first said she had had an affair with Clinton, the big news organizations virtually ignored her...
...0 ne way or another, it seems, oral sex is very much on Clinton's mind, and apparently quite often, as well...
...Request a free guide to learn more...
...On the other hand, five days before that, Internet gossip Matt Drudge had disclosed that Newsweek was going to go with the Lewin-sky story, but then had spiked it...
...Meanwhile columnist Maureen Dowd got the first reference to Clinton and oral sex in the Times by quoting Ted Koppel...
...Never...
...011 Preidclit check www.spectatormr...
...The president's sometime strategist and confidante said this: None of what I'm about to say is necessarily a fact...
...The chickens had come home to roost, so to speak, and as Dan Rather said the next night, while posting himself in front of the White House, "It's stand-and-deliver-time for the PresJOHN CoRRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...The subject may seem repulsive, but actu ally it is bizarre...
...The Paula Jones suit was finally reported on in a major publication, the Washington Post, three months after it was filed...
...An affair implies a relationship, but the president was only being serviced...
...And certainly it had, although much of what provoked it would remain unspoken...
...The Washington Post later reported that the Hollywood producer Harry Thomason "had brought his eye for stage-craft to bear, coaching Clinton" before he made his "forceful, jaw-clenched, finger-wagging, lectern-thumping statement...
...It has never known quite what to do about it, and while it has been aware of sex in the abstract, the sweaty parts have often defeated it...
...the artifice was too apparent...
...Clinton, and there have been whispers of trysts with dozens of others whose names have not yet surfaced...
...Not a single time...
...Sexual fastidiousness and politics joined...
...Clinton...
...WE HAVE ONE...
...The Pope and Fidel were important, but another "story has already metastasized...
...Spectator 'journalist' swallows any pond scum that fits his right-wing agenda...
...Donaldson was alluding to oral sex, and the possibility that Clinton believes it is somehow divorced from sexual relations...
...ual relationship with Hillary is not all it's supposed to be...
...56 March 1998 • The American Spectator the story," ABC declared in a dubious piece of self-promotion, and showed quick pictures of Peter, Sam, Cokie and all the gang...
...could be used in a novel...
...Mrs...
...Four years before, The eanwhile there were other scanAmerican Spectator and the Los Angeles dals — Travelgate, Filegate, Times had published stories that showed Mrs...
...He denied it, and has been denying it ever since, but no one really believes him...
...It was Clinton-style media politics, and it may be that Mrs...
...ABC apparently was taking credit for a scoop on the basis of an ABC Radio report, although at the time of the report the story was already in the early edition of the next day's Washington Post...
...Newsweek also provided a quote from the tapes: "There was no penetration...
...But let's assume, OK, that his sex44 It wasn't an 'affair' at all: An affair implies a relationship, but the president was only being serviced...
...These allegations are false...
...A certain delicacy was in order...
...The Post also reported that Thomason, once a figure in the Travel Office embarrassment, had been summoned to Washington by Mrs...
...A GREAT SOLUTION...
...In fact, sex, one way or another, has always been a problem for the Times...
...Where's the outrage...
...The humor has grown increasingly raunchy, and most of it springs from the news...
...Four years ago, The American Spectator quoted Larry Patterson, an Arkansas state trooper, who said Clinton had told him "that he had researched the subject in the Bible and oral sex isn't consid4oNlIk 41,11, , a 1 %pm The American Spectator • March /998 57 ered adultery...
...everyone wanted to get in on the act, Dan Rather was in Havana, talking about the Pope's visit as a "history-making event," but then he decamped, and so did Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings...
...Four years before columnist Joe Klein wrote in Newsweek, the press had been in denial...
...this time while the magazine's Conventional Wis- there was a dispute over who had the story dom Watch offered this: "D...
...I'm going to say this again...
...Clinton's big score on a pattern of deviancy...
...But Times reticence, of course, has its good side...
...even George Stephanopoulos has used it...
...The troopers might have warned us, and it is a shame the press failed to listen...
...John F. Kennedy also behaved badly, but he was protected by press and other politicians, and though he was the subject of rumors, he was never the butt of sex jokes...
...Clinton suffered commodities, and "James Riady sent me," not merely from reckless, but clearly corn- among them...
...The Times ran a stiff editorial—"Tell the Truth, Mr...
...As Sam Donaldson almost gleefully pointed out, "Everything rests on that word 'relations.'" What did Clinton mean when he said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman...
...It did not want to be beaten on the Big One, and Michael Isikoff wrote a detailed piece: Linda Tripp's seventeen audio tapes, Clinton's denial under oath that he ever had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the intervention of Vernon Jordan, and the memorandum Lewinsky gave to Tripp on "points to make in affidavit" to contradict the assertion by Kathleen Willey that Clinton had made unwanted advances on her in 1993...
...These are the people who broke Four years it took to confirm what we already knew...
...The media drown in sex and sexual topics, and the Times tries to uphold old standards...
...And creates college scholarships for needy students...
...Al Gore kept doing it during the State of the Union...
...Clinton, and had been barely out of the White House since his arrival...
...Surely that had to was ignored, and the Spectator story was end some time, and when the Monica denounced as partisan raving...
...had to know Clinton was an accident waiting to happen...
...The day before Morris spoke, she had stood at her husband's side when he thumped a lectern with his finger and said, "I want you to listen to me...
...Obviously it is different with Bill Clinton...
...Indeed a metastasis was long overdue, and Koppel and everyone else knew it...
Vol. 31 • March 1998 • No. 3
