Presswatch: Slobo and Joe
Corry, John
PRESSWATCH by John Corry Slobo and Joe There's looking good, and then there's looking back. T i he press was barely visible when the war began, and then it disappeared almost entirely. Some...
...The killing in Kosovo, however, has little to do with primitive urges...
...His were more imaginative than hers—he saw nude pinups of her on the walls, while she only feared she was hatless—but the problem for both was that the Big He had captured their psyches...
...One of the few who did, though, was columnist Charles Krauthammer...
...Clinton also mentioned genocide in a speech before members of a public employees' union just hours before he sent in the JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...When Mr...
...The only one anyone seemed There was no media culture to confuse things...
...Monica Lewinsky was on the cover of Time and George Stephanopoulos was on the cover of Newsweek the same week as his death...
...C-SPAN carried the speech in its entirety, although the networks showed only brief excerpts, and they should have shown much more...
...This is "what Kosovo is all about," he told the union members...
...makeup by Tatijana Suljic-Shoan...
...Or, rather, he had too many reasons, and it was as if he had decided to try them all out before he spoke to the nation over television the next night...
...Mrs...
...Marilyn Monroe visited Korea, and on her return she told DiMaggio, "You wouldn't believe it...
...Stephanopoulos said Clinton had been "the dominant figure in my life...
...Many columnists and commentators, though, were willing to offer guidance...
...He took pride in what he did, and they understood that...
...For incoherence and simple-mindedness, for disorganization and sheer intellectual laziness it is unmatched in recent American history...
...Kosovo is a province of Serbia, or, if you prefer, Yugoslavia, and the Serbs want to keep it that way, but the Kosovo Liberation Army demands independence...
...There was no media culture to confuse things...
...Thousands of people were cheering just for me...
...Likening Milosevic to Hitler (and presumably himself to Churchill) was bizarre, but Clinton seemed to be speaking without a script, and for all one knew he meant it...
...In 1941, when DiMaggio had his 56-game streak, Yankee games were on the radio only sporadically, and it was not until September 1951, one month before DiMaggio retired from baseball, that television was able to do nationwide broadcasts...
...Rather may not have been an instrument of White House policy, but he was at least a mindlessly supportive voice...
...They had paid a price for getting mixed up with a president, and as children of the media culture they wanted the world to know it...
...It began: Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon Going to the candidates' debate Laugh about it, shout about it When you've got to choose Every way you look at it you lose Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio...
...Stephanopoulos said Clinton had "personal magnetism...
...Lewinsky told Time she had bad dreams...
...You've never seen anything like it in your life...
...In fact, there was hardly any media...
...But there was no hint of this in the speech, and if Clinton had any understanding of the Balkans, none of it was apparent...
...The speech made clear that Clinton had no real reason for going to war...
...bombers and missiles...
...A nation turns its lonely eyes to you," from Paul Simon's "Mrs...
...Drugs and over-eating did in Presley, while Diana died in a car crash, and a crazy man shot Lennon...
...Nonetheless Americans knew everything about DiMaggio that was important...
...As CBS correspondent Mark Phillips told Dan Rather, the Serbs had "lashed out" at the media...
...they thought "we journalists were instruments of foreign policy...
...Genocide, however, is an attempt to exterminate an entire people...
...Robinson...
...Lewinsky said she lay "awake at night crying...
...Robinson," which, he seemed to think, explained "the larger significance of DiMaggio's death...
...Simon was pontificating with no purpose other than to tell us it's lonely at the top...
...Senator Joseph Biden was not challenged when he visited the talk shows the Sunday before the bombing began, and repeatedly mentioned genocide as a rationale for NATO action...
...Obviously Phillips did not think that himself and neither did Rather, even though Rather had insisted just moments before that "Milosevic's genocide offensive is only getting worse...
...Krauthammer also pointed out that men going to war deserved a better explanation than they were getting from their commander-in-chief about the purpose of the war...
...He said we must arm the Kosovar Albanians, and also deploy "significant military forces" to Macedonia and Albania to keep the war in Kosovo from spreading...
...Some print reporters were able to stay on in Belgrade, but in Kosovo almost everyone was ousted...
...But it must also be noted that the day Rosenthal's column appeared, CBS reported that "Clinton personally reviewed the targets, and, according to the White House, he told his generals, `That looks good.'" • • • j oe DiMaggio's death did not inspire grief—after all, he was 84—but there was a feeling of loss...
...Its whiny, mixed-up, let-it-all-hang-out voices must have grated...
...and as appalling as the speech was, few in the press seemed to notice...
...Then he quoted the full verse from "Mrs...
...He also said "our children" deserved a peaceful Europe, and that our economy depended on a Europe "wealthy enough to buy our products...
...DiMaggio's obituaries were notable for their absence of old quotes...
...Safire also favored bombing...
...He was a private man, and they understood that, too...
...oit4 The American Spectator May 1999 43...
...And DiMaggio said, "Yes, I have...
...Much of the rest of the press was that way, too...
...Robinson" was an anthem for the self-centered, self-pitying sixties, and the manly old ballplayer, who never complained, at least not publicly, not even when he played in great pain, and who always seemed to be wearing a dark suit, white shirt and tie when he was not in Yankee pinstripes, could not have liked the decade very much...
...Stephanopoulos said that when he first learned Clinton was perfidious he was "hit by a wave of nausea, doubt, embarrassment and anger...
...The lyrics were about feeling sorry for yourself because you thought politicians had let you down, and that had nothing to do with DiMaggio, either in life or death...
...When other Americans say the war against Yugoslavia is moral," he also wrote, "I am moved to think hard...
...We deify," he wrote, "though we know that deification often kills, as in the cases of Elvis Presley, Princess Diana and John Lennon...
...So it is depressing to report that similar voices were still being heard when he died...
...The great DiMaggio, a figure from another time, hardly spoke even to the sportswriters...
...The credit for the one cover said, "Hair by Harry King...
...It was "not a slam dunk," and certainly there were risks, but "what if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier...
...But then, happily, there was A. M. Rosenthal, 42 May 1999 The American Spectator only one day after Safire...
...A New York Times editorial under the headline "The DiMaggio Mystique" quoted them, too, while in the same issue the Times had a self-conscious piece by Simon on its op-ed page...
...Meanwhile, William Safire of the New York Times weighed in...
...It was more sure of itself, and better able to distinguish between what was important and what was not...
...In fact, there was hardly any media...
...Lewinsky said they had "a bond" and "a special connection...
...For some reason he identified himself with Woodrow Wilson, and said Wilson was ahead of his time...
...Rosenthal, who actually spent time in Eastern Europe as a reporter, wrote that the Serbs think of Kosovo as the "spiritual, historic and religious center of all Serbia," and that they ought not die for that...
...Many people saw DiMaggio play, of course, but most people knew about him by reading about him, or by hearing someone talk about him...
...Two days after Clinton's speech to the union members, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told a news conference that Milosevic "must embrace the framework of Rambouillet...
...At the same time he kept a polite distance between himself and the sportswriters, and the sportswriters did not mind...
...Clinton talks about it, I am moved to nausea...
...Lewinsky said "sexual energy kind of comes over his eyes...
...The tell-all, quasi-psychoanalytic, my-lifeand-hard-times interview had not yet reached the sports pages, and the sportswriters did not probe...
...Certainly that was true, but no one in the administration seemed able to supply one...
...In the excerpt Newsweek used from his book, All Too Human: A Political Education, Stephanopoulos said he had bad dreams, too...
...Presumably he was serious...
...Then, the day after his piece appeared, the Journal had one by Zalmay Khalizad, the director of strategic studies at the Rand Corporation...
...A muddled administration had reduced questions of life and death to talking points...
...Which, of course, was more tripe, although this time it was political as well as personal...
...That night Secretary of Defense William Cohen also told Jim Lehrer, Larry King, and Ted Koppel that Milosevic "must embrace the framework of Rambouillet...
...Eventually both had to see therapists...
...And as for Kosovo itself, the violence there apparently had come about because "people are still killing each other out of primitive urges...
...DiMaggio reminded us of a different America...
...But that was tripe...
...Lewinsky and Stephanopoulos shared so much that who did their hair was irrelevant...
...He wrote about how hard it was to be famous...
...styling by Wendy Goodman," and the credit for the other said, "Grooming by Shawnelle Prestidge for Workgroup S.F.," and it scarcely mattered which one was which...
...The genocide rationale was inexcusable, but the administration wanted a reason to act...
...The Germans tried to do it to Europe's Jews, and the Hutus to Rwanda's Tutsis, and whatever the outrages the Serbs were committing against the Kosovar Albanians they fell far short of that...
...to remember was taken from a 1960's Esquire profile of DiMaggio by Gay Talese, and even that had to have a preface...
...Virtually every obit, however, did quote the lines "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio...
...The speech, he wrote, "has to be read to be believed...
...Kosovo is the scene of a civil war, and the killing is about land and who will control it...
...Critical faculties were suspended...
...No one was famous merely for being famous, but everyone recognized that a man who had hit safely in 56 straight games had really done something...
...But while the Serb offensive was brutal it was hardly genocidal...
...Zbigniew Brzezinski, once Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that we must bomb and bomb and then bomb again...
Vol. 32 • May 1999 • No. 5
