Personal Problem Compartment
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Personal Problem Compartment On Saturday evening, January 17, after his six-hour deposition in the Paula Jones case, President Clinton canceled plans to...
...Author Theodore H. White interviewed him at the height of the Watergate coverup and came away totally unaware of the extent of the trouble Nixon was in...
...A leak of ATF agents' plans to enter the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993 alerted David Koresh and resulted in the death of four Federal agents...
...On a single day foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the New York Times, "I knew he was a charming rogue with an appealing agenda, but I didn't think he was a reckless idiot with an appealing agenda...
...As for Hillary Rodham Clinton, defender of her husband, she has seemed comfortable with her role and with herself...
...Then she added that "photographers slinking through the bushes" made it difficult for someone like herself and her husband "to be the kind of people they always were before they were in public life...
...But these days multilateral sanctions, such as those against Iraq and Myanmar (Burma), are few, and unilateral U.S...
...Sinking Sanctions The "embargo," from the Spanish word embargar—to hinder or restrain—has probably seen its best days as a weapon of coercion...
...The leak to CBS of FBI plans to raid the Unabomber's shack in Montana could have alerted him to escape if CBS had not acceded to an urgent FBI request to delay breaking the story...
...One wonders what he thinks about as he pursues his daily tasks, whether his mind wanders sometimes from bringing down Iraq's Saddam Hussein to bringing down Independent Counsel Kenneth W.Starr...
...But they were persuaded that in the United States —unlike France, where the late President François Mitterrand's mistress and their child were generally loved—it could happen...
...One can only surmise the tension Mrs...
...In 1954 the UN, on America's recommendation, declared an embargo on North Korea and China...
...It is a crime to leak grand jury information...
...When the second story broke, Mrs...
...Clinton was in Baltimore for a speech...
...Unlike Cuba, which represents no significant threat, Iraq is a real potential threat, at least regionally...
...Unplanned leaks tend to enrage the keepers of secrets because they undermine their sense of control...
...In his January 10 State of the World address Pope John Paul called sanctions against Iraq "pitiless...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton is protected as well—by husband-wife privilege— but it is questionable how completely he thought he could confide in her...
...Perhaps the most effective sanctions of the modern era were enforced against South Africa, spurred by almost universal outrage over apartheid and supported even by many in South Africa who suffered from their effects...
...Leaks from the Top The leak is approximately as old as the secret...
...The leak that Richard Jewell was a suspect in the Atlanta Olympics bombing damaged his reputation—he turned out to be innocent—and led to libel suits...
...Clinton has lived through since her husband's deposition in the Paula Jones case—and especially since the ensuing explosion of an alleged affair with a young intern in the White House...
...George Melloan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "It is the American Presidency, not Bill Clinton, that the world looks to for leadership...
...What a woman...
...It may or may not be a coincidence that most recent leaks—right, wrong and somewhere in between—tend to put pressure on the President and on Monica Lewinsky...
...forces, including nuclear forces, to warn the Soviets away from military involvement in the Middle East...
...People who control secrets hate leaks, except when they create them...
...Clinton is by nature a crowd-pleaser and an almost compulsive talker...
...Only afterward did it emerge that Clinton also telephoned his secretary, Betty Currie, that evening and requested her to come in Sunday...
...Possibly the most extreme sanctions yet undertaken are mandated by the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton after Fidel Castro's Air Force shot down two Cuban-American planes...
...This concerns material in unevaluated form that may hinder an investigation and damage an innocent person...
...In 1973, Watergate Judge John J. Sirica threatened reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with sanctions if they did not stop trying to contact grand jury members...
...President Nixon was tempted into sponsoring a self-destructive break-in of a psychiatrist's office out of rage against Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers...
...He then asked her to check her recollection against his testimony, especially about young White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and whether they had been alone together...
...Clinton, in fact, operated with measured firmness right up to the agreement worked out by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in Baghdad over the February 21 weekend, but the perception remained...
...Imagine what it must be like to know your best friends, your aides, your secretary, and the Secret Service agents who protect you may end up before the grand jury, obliged to reveal the most intimate details of what they have seen and heard...
...It was painful, she went on, to see "someone you love subjected to such relentless accusations...
...But because the economic embargo indiscriminately punishes guilty tyrants and innocent people, it appears to be faced with waning international support in the absence of a rallying standard like the Communist "Evil Empire...
...Nixon after Watergate, Jimmy Carter after the Teheran hostage crisis, and Reagan after the Iran-Confra scandal all complained about losing effectiveness because of the perception of being ineffective...
...It was only a matter of perception...
...David Maraniss of the Washington Post, Clinton's biographer, say s that something in him has changed since the allegations of sex scandal and perjury, that a sense of distance now separates him from the rest of humanity...
...Reagan had to contend, too, with the suspicion that he invaded Grenada to change the subject from the bombing of the Marines in Beirut...
...Vice President Spiro Agnew's lawyers actually got a judge to issue subpoenas forjournalists who had reported his sealed indictment on tax evasion charges, but his plea bargain made the issue moot...
...The most authentic Watergate leak enabled CBS to reveal that the grand jury, told it couldn't indict President Nixon, had named him an unindicted co-conspirator...
...I cite this as one example of how the President has been striving to compartmentalize his personal problems, and how that has led to the increasing isolation of a normally gregarious man...
...Helping to persuade the international community that the President could be terminally paralyzed were a host of American commentators...
...If once the grand jury leak was an occasional happening, lately it has been an almost daily occurrence, a weapon in the deadly competition between President Clinton's adversaries and his defenders...
...He had "a long day," an aide explained...
...A special subsection of leaks is the socalled grand jury leak—so-called because it rarely comes from the grand jury itself...
...They were right...
...That's why it is said that the ship of state is the only kind of ship that leaks from the top...
...Former Soviet Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin wrote in his memoirs that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger telephoned him to apologize for an alert dictated by domestic considerations and promised it would be called off the next day...
...Although it is not a crime for a reporter to receive such information, theoretically he or she could be called as a witness to a crime...
...Clinton later said they "watched a movie and then had a good time that evening...
...And while visiting Cuba he criticized the embargo on that country, saying, "The people should not be made to suffer.' The idea of an economic stranglehold lacks today what it had during the Cold War—an organizing principle with widespread public support...
...This not only punishes third countries that pursue economic ties with Cuba, it prevents any future President from lifting the boycott without Congressional approval...
...We have levied restrictions against various countries 61 times between 1993 and 1996 alone...
...Leaks from law enforcement agencies can be quite harmful...
...sanctions, like those against Iran and Cuba, are many...
...When it was suggested that she had posed for the picture of her dancing with the President on a beach in the Virgin Islands, she said, "Name me any 50-yearold woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit, especially with her back pointed toward the camera...
...You can't let them interfere with your private life and your duties...
...She told reporters she was "absolutely" sure the latest charges were false...
...And how does a wife live with accusations that bring her whole relationship with her spouse into question...
...By mid-February he could vent his feelings mainly to lawyers who are protected by privilege from having to testify against him...
...President Ronald Reagan once complained that he was "up to my keister" in leaks...
...President Richard M. Nixon, as revealed in his tapes and memoirs, similarly kept a lot of his problems locked up within himself and dissembled to his aides under the pressure of investigation...
...In the best of times, though, Nixon was essentially a loner who confided little...
...A quarter-century later, as the national security apparatus planned a bombing campaign against Iraq, the issue of a connection between defensiveness at home and offensiveness abroad arose again...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Personal Problem Compartment On Saturday evening, January 17, after his six-hour deposition in the Paula Jones case, President Clinton canceled plans to go out to dinner with friends...
...A Matter of Perception Some of the older hands around Washington remember October 25,1973, when we awoke to the news that President Nixon had ordered a worldwide alert of U.S...
...George F. Will wrote in the Washington Post, "His Presidency is beyond resuscitation...
...In Europe, a NATO arm called the Coordinating Committee, or CoCom, rode herd on exports of strategic materials and technology to the Communist world...
...So not all of Saturday evening was devoted to a movie and a good time...
...Now he is alone beyond the cliché of loneliness at the top...
...In the current situation, European newspapers that never did understand how Watergate brought down a President were having even more trouble understanding how a purported sexual affair might bring down a President...
...Because this was five days after the "Saturday Night Massacre"—the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox that raised the first serious talk of impeachment— many suspected a diversionary tactic...
...You just box it off," she says...
Vol. 81 • February 1998 • No. 3
