Toobin, Too Bad
Tell, David
Toobin, Too Bad The charmed career in journalism of an inferior legal analyst. BY DAVID TELL In January 1987, fresh out of Harvard Law School, Jeffrey Toobin hired up as the junior-most attorney...
...And that is not the worst that can be said about it...
...All of which is unnecessary and irresponsible...
...The White House travel office was only a "so-called" scandal in which integrity-minded West Wing staff, "alerted to possible improprieties in that office, . . . moved swiftly to replace the career officials who worked there...
...Isikoff only reported things he knew to be true...
...Isikoff is also the one central actor in that story who could never be explained away as a wide-eyed, right-wing kook—but who nonetheless reached highly unflattering conclusions about Bill Clinton's behavior...
...Here, Toobin is careful to jape at any number of obvious cult-of-Clinton targets...
...Yes, the president was a "humiliated middle-aged husband who lied when he was caught having an affair with a young woman from the office...
...And she also reminded Godoff about a peculiar historical incident: "Toobin invited Mike to work with him on a book shortly after the scandal broke, but Isikoff declined...
...And what of the book's main subject: the process by which Paula Jones became Monica Lewinsky became Kenneth Starr became the first impeachment of an elected president in American history...
...But even with that, Toobin is lazy...
...Which half-honest answer brings us finally to A Vast Conspiracy's greatest piece of cynicism...
...Opening Arguments sold respectably well...
...So the question arises: How exactly could anyone be persuaded to buy this book...
...Isikoff is a reporter, first for the Washington Post and later for Newsweek, who did manage to "tell the story" of Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, earlier and more authoritatively than Toobin, and with far fewer "grimy details...
...Which continues now, in much the same fashion, with a new book on the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs...
...Toobin is a "superlative journalist known for the skillfulness of his investigating," A Vast Conspiracy's dust-jacket copy reminds us...
...Clinton's adultery and dishonesty had "no bearing on his record as a public man...
...The real-life Michael Isikoff, in other words, is a standing rebuke to Toobin and his book...
...The real conspiracy behind the president's misfortunes, he explains, has been "a conspiracy within the legal system to take over the political system of the United States...
...It would have made for a very different and better book...
...Whitewater was only a failed land deal in long-ago Arkansas, he says...
...Clinton started, aren't we...
...Isikoff was going to print what they told him...
...Maybe...
...Thus was born New Yorker staff writer and ABC "legal analyst" Jeffrey Toobin's curiously charmed career in American journalism...
...Toobin passes it on...
...All this stuff quickly became the draft of Opening Arguments, a book Toobin's Viking Press publicity agents promised would deliver "previously undisclosed revelations...
...The bad guys, on the other hand, whom Toobin almost invariably calls the "right wing," were "willing to trample all standards of fairness—not to mention the Constitution—in their effort to drive him from office...
...One month later, in March 1991, three highly irritated federal judges of the Second Circuit summarily dismissed Toobin's lawsuit, vacated his lower-court victory, and upbraided him for his "dubious behavior...
...Impatient, Toobin sued Walsh and won a preliminary right to publish—on the basis of a federal trial judge's otherwise inconvenient find David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...What's more, Toobin clucks, Isikoff was all along unethically "stoking the story" so that he might "profit from it" in a later book deal— while never disclosing that plan to his sources or readers...
...And "scarcely anyone could even articulate any criminal offense the president might have committed" while his party was flouting the campaign finance laws in 1996...
...A Vast Conspiracy is awful...
...He derides Sidney Blumenthal as a "pretentious" and "unnerving" man who "saw the world in a broad sweep of ideological conflict between the Clintons and what he invariably called 'the right wing.'" Toobin's charge against Blumenthal is undeniably just...
...And yet Toobin makes dishonest use of it...
...Needless to say, both charges are almost freakishly hypocritical and false...
...A man who lives on Social Security payments for a mental disability tells Toobin that Jones slept with fifteen different guys before she was seventeen...
...So here one reads Paula Jones's legendary affidavit concerning the First Phallus of the United States—not just the part about the president's allegedly "distinguishing" port-side list, but also the "secret" paragraph in which Jones recounts her impression of the referenced appendage's precise length and width...
...Not something the author has "exposed" to boost his sales...
...Toobin is a man of the sophisticated upper-middle-media class...
...Unembarrassed, Toobin and Viking slyly re-advertised their volume of office gossip as a First Amendment "landmark" and shipped it to bookstores— without waiting for a scheduled appellate review of the matter...
...His had been a "pretty good" presidency and Clinton was "by comparison, the good guy" in the struggle over disposition of that presidency...
...It is "dubious at best" that any crime was committed during the White House's wholesale requisition of confidential FBI files on retired Republican political appointees...
...Except the claim is a laughable fraud, much the way Opening Arguments turned out not to contain any "previously undisclosed revelations" about Iran-Contra...
...Isikoff isn't the man who reported that the president's penis might have a circumference "the approximate size of a quarter...
...In his discussion of what now seem merely the peripheries of Clinton scan-dology, Toobin hardly even attempts to avoid this self-set trap...
...There is so much more bilge, in fact, that ABC's Ted Koppel—toward the end of an otherwise shameless half-hour of logrolling on Nightline—was recently moved to question his network's "legal analyst" about it...
...And we are right back where Mrs...
...About both the law and the facts, he commits a handful of truly groaner-scale mistakes and attempts an unseemly number of slippery evasions...
...BY DAVID TELL In January 1987, fresh out of Harvard Law School, Jeffrey Toobin hired up as the junior-most attorney on the staff of independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's Iran-Contra investigation...
...By which phrase he means to describe official Washington's twenty-five-year post-Watergate degeneration into a series of ideologically motivated, subpoena-powered witch hunts...
...In that letter, McDaniel protested Toobin's "egregiously unfair" and "malicious" depiction of Michael Isikoff...
...The theory he did choose is little more than Mrs...
...If, that is, he had produced some meaningful discovery or advanced some novel line of argument along the way...
...Toobin has no such scruples...
...scrutinized event in recent times...
...A vast, right-wing conspiracy...
...And—unlike, say, Toobin's unwitting "sources" in Lawrence Walsh's office—everyone Isikoff talked to in the course of his research knew precisely what was going to happen...
...He hasn't...
...Where proper summary judgment of that event is concerned, Toobin adds not a single piece of material evidence to the available record...
...A Vast Conspiracy gives no more than a sketchy sentence or two of consideration to the evidentiary foundation for any one of these controversies before dismissing them all as means by which "extremists of the political right...
...Imagine that...
...Random House is bragging that its author has acquired and reported a crucial passel of "secret documents" no one has seen before...
...Confronted with a years-long strain of metastatic and rarefied litigation, ABC's "legal analyst" finds hardly any need to analyze relevant legal precedent...
...And took his actual "work product" with him: a two-thousand-plus page archive of the investigation's internal operations, including twenty-two spiral notebooks in which Toobin had been recording snarky observations about the personalities and private conversations of his unsuspecting colleagues...
...He has merely borrowed them...
...And also how, sure, he hoped the filthy bits would help "promote the book...
...Right at the moment of greatest triumph for "sexual investigative reporting," Toobin was eager to collaborate with its "dean...
...It's just that some of those documents include fairly explicit and personal sexual details that no other journalist, believe it or not, has yet felt obliged or willing to reprint...
...Along with a great lot of similar dirt he's picked up here and there...
...There was nothing unethical about it...
...There is more of this bilge...
...And, alas, it is a bestseller...
...The normally smiley and unflappable Toobin seemed flustered by his colleague's predictable challenge, and managed only to stammer something about how "you can't tell the story" without "getting into the grimy details...
...But "it was far from clear that his conduct did fit the technical meaning of perjury," the least of the crimes alleged against him...
...Rather, something he has altogether invented in order to rationalize the book in the first place...
...He spent more than two years there, concentrating—so Walsh imagined—on a campaign to bring felony charges against assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams...
...that put Bill Clinton in the White House...
...Thanks largely to Democrats," who hurled the original stone...
...Clinton's conduct was "reprehensible...
...Toobin could have written just as blockheaded-ly one-sided a book—and still have rescued himself from total fatuousness...
...Enraged by the betrayal involved, Walsh invoked the confidentiality agreement his erstwhile employee had signed and began a painstaking review of the Opening Arguments manuscript, ostensibly for the purpose of excising still-sensitive grand jury information...
...Seeing Blumenthal and raising him a hundred, Toobin writes that the Jones lawsuit and its Lewinsky investigation monster-baby existed "only because of the efforts of Clinton's right-wing political enemies...
...And next, with a slight bit more ambition, Toobin has recast the First Lady's ontology of politics in the soothingly bipartisan light of a Systemwide Breakdown...
...Everything of substantive significance in A Vast Conspiracy's purportedly "secret documents" (Random House posted seven of them on the Internet two weeks ago) has been well known for months or even years...
...Independent counsel Starr "had long ago signed on with many of the people who wanted Bill Clinton destroyed...
...For if the president's problem is really a systemic problem, and the systemic problem is tissue-thin criminal charges leveled by factional enemies . . . well, then the president's problem is tissue-thin criminal charges leveled by his factional enemies...
...Had he thought it through in greater depth—Toobin develops the idea over just five breezy paragraphs of the book's prologue—he might have chosen a different theory with which to distinguish himself from the president's most perfervid defenders...
...Toobin calls this Isikoff Newsweek's "inhouse expert on Clinton's sex life," a purveyor of "tawdry voyeurism," the "dean" of American "sexual investigative reporting," someone who had been "hoping for years to catch Clinton in an adulterous affair...
...So this actual Isikoff makes no appearance in A Vast Conspiracy...
...And there was consequently "no need to make a federal case out of it," much less to mount an impeachment proceeding...
...They were other people's mistakes and evasions first...
...A Vast Conspiracy borrows its title, of course, from Hillary Clinton's remark that her husband's multiple scandals could be ascribed entirely to the machinations of his political opponents and were therefore best ignored...
...He offers not a single fresh interpretation of that record...
...ing that the book was harmless to the government: It did not, in fact, contain anything of substance about Iran-Contra that hadn't already appeared in the newspapers...
...Toobin and his publisher have settled on an answer...
...How is the nation served by it...
...All this is wrong...
...Scooping the entire world, A Vast Conspiracy reports that Monica Lewinsky, after her Vanity Fair fashion-spread shoot, had a casual romp with the photographer's assistant...
...It's a marketing hook perfectly calculated to appeal to the television talk shows that have lately been hosting Toobin's book tour...
...It is a red herring dragged across A Vast Conspiracy's pages in the vain hope that it might somehow conceal the scent of something fishier still: the author himself...
...Toobin is...
...He throws it all in...
...Then, in May 1989, Toobin quit...
...First, he has adopted the standard demurrers: "The president brought many of his problems on himself...
...In every important sense, A Vast Conspiracy is simply an in-my-own-words rehash of what was already the most obsessively chronicled and closely Toobin attacks Newsweeks Michael Isikofffor "tawdry voyeurism"—but neglects to mention that he once asked Isikoff to co-author his book...
...The real-life Michael Isikoff is a doubly awkward figure for Jeffrey Toobin...
...Clinton's Manichaeanism in a novelty-shop nose-and-mustache disguise...
...There was a delay...
...On January 14, Newsweek's Washington bureau chief, Ann McDaniel, did the professionally necessary and honorable thing...
...But they could do nothing to retrieve Walsh's "secrets...
...Most of which is completely unsourced and uncorroborated...
...How come you've "dumped" all this "really seamy stuff" on us, Koppel wondered...
...Instead, Toobin has created a character he calls "Isikoff," an anti-matter Isikoff, a stalking horse for his own worst sins, a creature of almost subhuman depravity...
...he would prefer not to be directly associated with such a "Manichaean outlook...
...After all these years, Jeffrey Toobin is still a dubious man leading a charmed career...
...A Vast Conspiracy is a familiar song much better sung before—by Robert Bennett and David Kendall in court, by Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler in the House, by Charles Ruff in the well of the Senate, and by Joe Conason and (even) Geraldo Rivera in the media...
...God knows whether it's true or not...
...tried to use the legal system to undo elections...
...She dispatched a stern letter to Ann Godoff, Toobin's editor at Random House...
...And every last one of the square-jawed men and perky blonde women who star on such programs have obediently endorsed the claim—with Toobin's mock-humble, nodding assent...
...So he has taken two precautionary measures...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 19
