THE SMOKELESS GUN: BILLYGATE AND THE PRESS
Kaus, Robert M.
THE SMOKELESS GUN: BILLYGATE AND THE PRESS by Robert M. Kaus July 14, 1980. One o'clock in the afternoon. Robinson was having a late lunch at the courthouse with a fellow reporter, Allen Frank...
...Still, despite the best efforts of Pincus and Kaiser, Billygate seemed to be slowly dying on the front page—until, two days later, the genuine aroma of Watergate wafted faintly over Washington...
...In fact, presidents have the legal authority to declassify documents, and have frequently exercised it in an informal manner in the past...
...Well, when the press has been in the position of divulging materials, knowledge of the pervasive overclassification of government documents seemed to be nearly universal in the Fourth Estate...
...It was not until eighteen inches into the story, after Sawyer's charge had been dramatically recounted, that readers learned that the cables Lisker had shown Billy had been unclassified, that a White House official had labeled them "innocuous," and that "Presidents have routinely taken it upon themselves to declassify what they choose...
...Quinn's scoop appeared across the top of the Sunday, July 27 edition, under the headline "Billy Carter: Besieged and Beset...
...The statement revealed for the first time that Billy had, "at Brzezinski's request," arranged a meeting between Brzezinski and Libyan charge d'affaires Ali Houderi at the height of the Iranian hostage crisis in November, 1979...
...Perhaps reluctant to waste all its painstaking research on Belluomini's associates, the Times ran a separate 36-inch story, starting on page one...
...Robinson and Frank finished eating and took the elevator up to the file room on the first floor...
...Billy Carter replied "Good," adding: "This was a complete shock to me what you just said...
...Either way, the goal was met and surpassed...
...But significantly, even this genuine bit of deception was not related to covering up any particularly scandalous action—what was so terrible, after all, about the Attorney Generalenlisting Carter's aid in getting his brother to "turn himself in...
...It was almost 2 p.m...
...Robinson shuffled through the box and came upon one such card...
...And the Pope was coming...
...Has Had 54 Cases Like Billy's") and speculation on the course of the expected congressional hearings ("Dole Calls Carter Offer 'Premature': Objects to Speeding President's Testimony...
...The play the story was receiving in the Star was like an advertisement calculated to set Post reporters' competitive juices flowing...
...It said, in effect, "We think there's a big story here, and we're going to get it...
...The Rosalynn Revelation, Muscatine and Denniston announced portentously, "was a further indication that the White House had treated Billy Carter's relations with the Libyan government as a potentially significant factor in Middle Eastern politics...
...purchased the failing newspaper in March of 1978...
...When Lardner tracked down Billy's financial adviser, Jack McGregor, his scoop was subsumed under Jimmy Carter's revelation of his advice to Billy ("Tell All") in a single story near the bottom of page one...
...The investigation had not reached the grand jury stage, it was a Customs and not a Justice Department investigation, it concerned money-laundering and not drug-running, and it was focused on a friend of Belluomini's son rather than Sprague or Belluomini themselves...
...Well, you seem to know your way around, " said Lisker...
...Ties it all together, doesn't it...
...They're all the same thing," Billy was reported as saying, "Jimmy gave them to me...
...With Senator Byrd keeping his silence, the Star was also having problems keeping the story afloat, resorting to a page-one survey of foreign-agent prosecutions ("U.S...
...Since this purpose could have been just as easily accomplished by confronting Billy in a closed session out of the range of cameras, it's difficult to believe that the senators weren't looking for something else...
...Robert M. Kaus is an editor o/The Washington Monthly...
...In the session, senators were told that two of Billy Carter's associates Ronald Sprague and George Belluomini, were under investigation in a federal drug case on the West Coast...
...Then Tone suddenly announced to the hushed room that "we have been informed by the Department of Justice that Mr...
...If you don't know, don't say so...
...It was essential that the statement be consistent with anything that might surface...
...But the Post had an even better "white paper" story on the 24th, when it ran a fullpage banner headline reading "President Also Met with Libyan Envoy Here...
...Style" section reporter Sally Quinn was dispatched to Plains to interview Billy...
...They may cover foreign attitudes towards Americans, what to say at dinner, and what weather to expect...
...business entities could deal with Libya"—a far cry from the promise of becoming the exclusive conduit for "all" U.S.-Libya trade...
...There were other details, of course, that tended to make it less fascinating—and here the Star set the initial tone of the coverage as well...
...A "bullet" paragraph in Denniston's lead noted ominously that Billy Carter's "comings and goings in connection with his efforts on Libya's behalf are discussed in diplomatic cables, some sent directly to the desk outside the oval office, occupied by the president's personal secretary...
...Post assistant managing editor William Greider even assigned out a feature article describing the role of the media in building up the Billy Carter scandal...
...Admittedly, the briefings arranged for Billy came from three officials of the National Security Council, not the desk officer at the State Department...
...Clearly, if the Billy scandal was going to stay exciting, it was time for another big breakthrough—at least it's hard to escape the conclusion that some such perception played an important role in what happened next, the single most irresponsible press action of the whole affair...
...Quinn used Elkind's tip to win BillyTs sympathy and obtain an interview with Billy and Sybil, on the condition that it appear only as an interview with Sybil...
...The White House also issued a 13,000-word report, which it described as "not definitive or final...
...A few details in Frank's article gave a hint of the tone the Star would set for the next three weeks...
...This time the seed fell on more fertile ground...
...The Times did not show up so well...
...I wouldn't be surprised if he [Billy] furnished them to Libya " Late in the day, the White House released a statement that "The president's best recollection is that the only State Department cables he has ever discussed with Billy Carter are low classification cables from our embassy in Libya reporting on Billy Carter's first trip...
...Mary Thornton of the Star, for example, tracked down an attorney who was also a registered Libyan agent, and who had been forming an Arab-American vote-getting committee for the Carter- Mondale campaign...
...A later paragraph refers to the Justice Department's allegation that Billy "was held out by Libyan officials to the U.S...
...The Star was still losing money at a fast clip...
...Full-tilt Billy coverage would show that the Post could be tough on both sides...
...Billygate had, in the words of Post editor Sussman, "gone poof...
...In effect, the Watergate analogy came, consciously or unconsciously, to be employed as a sort of model, a universal scandal-uncovering technique that could be arbitrarily used on whatever cancer seemed to be gnawing at the Presidency...
...Reporters, by and large, are political junkies to whom even a dull national convention is like a good basketball game...
...With that final tremor Billygate appeared to fade out of sight, at least for a while, along with Peanutgate, the Comet Kahoutek, and other stories that were as much the product of the culture of the press as any doings in the real world...
...In the outer lobby of the judge's chamber, Robinson noticed a balding man with a briefcase leaning against a wall...
...We don't turn anybody away," an official told me...
...Brzezinski had said no, and had called in Cutler when he heard that Justice was involved...
...Follow That Star In his glass cubicle off the Post's vast fifth-floor newsroom, managing editor Howard Simons was angry...
...But if Billygate gnawed at the conscience, it seemed as if the press was going to have a hard time confessing its sins publicly...
...And the Star, true to form, played the story across the front page ("Billy Associate Tied to Drug Probe...
...But a "briefing" can also be a short phone call that transmits fairly basic, nonsecret information—and such "briefings" on foreign countries like Libya are routinely available on request to traveling dignitaries, businessmen, or ordinary tourists...
...queries to his paper's "ombudsman," George Beveridge, who declines comment...
...This time, even at the Times, there was a sense among the younger reporters that, as one of them put it, "this was our Watergate...
...Billygate" offered the last best hope of turning the upcoming Democratic meeting from a slumbrous ratification ceremony into a delicious donnybrook...
...The reasons for this were undoubtedly many and complex—but initially, at least, they had a lot to do with The Washington Star and Murray Gart...
...All in all, the committee had given a performance calculated to bring fear to the minds of even those most inured to loose charges of McCarthyism...
...The 'Full Disclosure' Game Haig did the talking...
...It wasn't until the bulk of the Post's national staff returned from Detroit and convened at its weekly editorial meeting on Monday morning that the decision to plunge headlong into "Billygate" was made...
...The article laid "Billygate" largely at the doorstep of the media, on the dynamic of one-upmanship, and, in part, on the fact that the Post had been competing with the Star's early lead in the coverage...
...During the week of the Republican convention, The Washington Post was curiously quiet on the Billy Carter affair...
...On Friday, Senator Bob Dole obligingly called for hearings into the matter...
...Although the White House document looked like an ordinary press release (Powell had said it was a "recounting of most of the pertinent details to the extent that we could determine them"), it was immediately branded a "white paper" by the two newspapers...
...Time had taken over the Star with predictions of a quick infusion of capital and a dramatic increase in circulation and revenues...
...As Nixon's chief of staff Alexander Haig had realized, any discrepancy that turned up after one of these reports tended to cast doubt on Nixon's entire story...
...Gart is reported to have set quotas of—depending on whom you talk to—one, two, or three stories a day...
...In April, he latched onto a story about the Export- Import Bank, a government body that had granted a large loan to Rupert Murdoch's airline shortly before Murdoch's paper, The New York Post, had endorsed Jimmy Carter in the New York primary...
...policy through the President's brother had been directly confronted by the White House, which offered the statement that "Billy does not tell the President how to run the country and the President doesn't tell Billy how to run his business...
...Many reporters, including some at the Post, were genuinely disgusted at the experience they had been through...
...Frank had questioned White House counsel Lloyd Cutter and obtained the information that Billy had met with Cutler briefly, informed him that he was being questioned by the Justice Department, and that Cutler had told him to get a lawyer and then recommended several to him...
...Quinn immediately saw Billy at the pay phone, right where Elkind had predicted...
...It would have to stand for all time...
...But since the press had been the beneficiary of those leaks it was perhaps less inclined to charge Johnson with security violations...
...The day after Billy Carter registered, the Star, The Washington Post, and the Times all ran page one stories...
...Was this the same Howard Simons I remembered reading about in "Woodstein's" book, the one who refused to hype the initial Watergate story because Woodward didn't have enough information...
...Others, like the Post's national editor Peter Osnos, offered up limp, if well-intentioned rationales: The Billy affair, said Osnos, had been "constructive" because "it spotlighted relations between the United States and Libya...
...Lisker," Robinson said...
...Both preferred to spend front page space speculating on Ronald Reagan's choice of a running mate in Detroit...
...responded Sussman, enunciating a principle I doubt is taught in journalism school and that I certainly don't recall him espousing in All the President's Men...
...Comparing Civiletti's confession with his earlier categorical denials on the subject, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he had lied...
...The Post had "only had the White House's say so" for the proposition that the cables were low-classification messages relating to Billy's trip...
...That's how it began, all right...
...On it was typed "U.S...
...And Billy had certainly done stupid things before...
...I've never come across an adequate formulation for that," he replied...
...Reporters wanted to oblige them ("I haven't had so much fun since Watergate," one Post writer confessed after putting the paper to bed the next evening...
...But the breakthrough came the next day, on June 16...
...Yet Simons still wasn't ready to play up the story...
...Reporters at the Star are forbidden to even answer press calls on the subject...
...Alison Muscatine and Denniston pointed to this glaring "omission from the white paper" in a page-one article, while Mary McGrory called for a Senate investigative committee to begin its questioning with why the White House "in its full disclosure' statement first said it was Brzezinski's idea...
...Most prominent among the legal heavyweights interviewed was Alan Dershowitz, who was identified as a "professor at Harvard Law School who teaches a course on legal ethics for criminal lawyers," but not as a long-time adviser to Edward Kennedy who had gone on two speaking tours for the Senator's 1980 presidential campaign...
...On August 1 Powell reported that, contrary to Carter's earlier recollection, he had in fact mailed a cable in October 1978 to his brother Billy with a brief note commending him on his performance under "dry circumstances...
...If not, many of them knew,the press would soon find out through one of the Republican senators on the committee who made a habit of passing out any anti-Carter tidbits...
...But despite the potential implications of the revelation, the timing was wrong...
...Half the Post staff was there...
...The next few days of headlines were generated by reporters attempting to uncover ways in which the newly-christened "white paper" failed to meet the Haig standard of definitiveness...
...business community as a commercial intermediarv through whom U.S...
...Why should reporters who are not foreign correspondents be expected to know this...
...Denniston solved the problem by putting Beard on a plane, "flying across the Atlantic when ,he learned of the planned trip...
...If you answered, "Well, that's his job, isn't it," you didn't read Pincusand Kaiser's second paragraph, which noted that "When the White House issued a 4vhite paper' Tuesday on its involvement in the Billy Carter- Libya flap, press secretary Jody Powell indicated that there had been more than one contact involving Brzezinski and Ali Houderi, but said nothing about President Carter personally meeting the Libyan diplomat...
...He also revealed that they had been declassified and in the possession of columnist Jack Anderson for over a year...
...The Star's editorial supplement featured a disquisition by psychojournalist Edwin Diamond on "Billy, Jimmy and the Roots of Resentment," which included an analysis of Billy's habit of "retromicturation"— of urinating on airport runways or simply "into the wind...
...Elkind had told her that Billy believed that his phones had been tapped, and now made all his phone calls from the motel in Americus...
...The story, by Schram and George Lardner, reported the "sharp dismay" in Congress over the disclosure before revealing, in the ninth paragraph, the probable topic of the cables...
...It had been two years since The Washington Star had been purchased by Time, Inc., and time, as it were, was running out...
...relations with Libya (and on one occasion a well-taken warning to Coleman to stay home...
...Robinson breathed a deep internal sigh of relief...
...He would resist for ten months Justice Department efforts to get him to do so, until he finally caved in last June...
...Robinson recognized them as Stephen Pollak and Henry Ruth...
...For the next week the Star maintained its torrid pace...
...The Post had the talent, it had the resources...
...The capital had come, but the revenues had not...
...The Post solved the news shortage by writing about personalities...
...Clough's picture was displayed in a frontpage box, along with an explanation that she had "fielded" the cables...
...Here, for example, is how Post editor Meg Greenfield put it on the paper's editorial page June 30, 1971: "But classified information— and in this the general public seems little better informed than the man from Mars—is a generic term for thousands upon millions of documents that can damaging to the national interest, let alone the national defense, upon their disclosure...
...The editors of the Times had other things to think about, and they ran the Billy Carter story on page B-5, in the Times's "Notes on People" section underneath another short item, "Aleksandr Ginsburg to Go on Lecture Circuit...
...There was also the disorienting fact, usually buried at the end of the Billy stories, that Charter Oil's allocation had actually been cut by the Libyans during the very period when Billy Carter was seeking to make millions by having it increased...
...In his second paragraph, for example, Frank alluded to "a promise of additional compensation...
...Unfortunately, Denniston had guessed his antecedents wrong...
...He picked up the phone and placed a call to the Star newsroom in Washington July 14, 1980 wasn't the first time anybody had speculated on Billy Carter's possible role as a publicist for Libya, of course...
...On Tuesday, July 22, the Carter White House issued a press release that attempted to explain why Billy Carter had called on Brzezinski at the White House...
...In a subdued Post newsroom the morning after the press conference, reporters slumped at their desks trading second thoughts...
...I kept reading it for some indication that the cables were significant," recalls one experienced Post reporter...
...He refers all...
...Kennedy wasn't even in the race yet...
...One of the documents, several House members said, recorded Billy's statements to Justice Department investigators who had showed him cables from the U.S...
...The other aspect of the classification system of which the Post and Times were aware went to Sawyer's charge that President Carter might have violated the law...
...What did the press know and when did it know it...
...Dershowitz, after deftly exposing the subtle dangers of conflict-of-interest, called for an "independent study group to clarify the relationship between the Attorney General and the White House...
...The Post went the Times one better, however...
...The man acknowledged his name...
...In the Star, however, accounts of Ronald Reagan's abortive mating dance with Gerald Ford were confined to a skinny column on the left hand side of the page by the banner headline atop Frank's article and the large two-tone box chronicling "Billy Carter's Libyan Connection" that held center page...
...Gart is a former chief of correspondents at Time magazine who was installed as editor of the Star when Time, Inc...
...Iran was in turmoil...
...The big news, of course, was that in his registration statement Billy had admitted receiving $220,000 from the Libyan government, which he characterized as a loan...
...Robinson explained that he had seen the card in the clerk's office and knew that foreign agent registration cases were often settled when the defendant agreed to sign a "consent judgment," which then had to be approved by a judge...
...The Star sent Roberta Hornig, and her story, documenting Byrd's controversial position ("I want the truth cleared up here," he was reported as saying) ran under the banner headline, '"Lay Out Facts,' Byrd Tells President...
...When I discussed how this story was covered with Post and Times employees afterwards, I was repeatedly cautioned against use of hindsight...
...Robinson asked if Lisker was filing a consent judgment in the Billy Carter case...
...Oh you poor baby, " said Quinn...
...At American embassies overseas, however, such classified cables are routinely read to inquiring reporters, or given to them (usually after the State Department logo and security classification have been snipped off...
...And no newspaper wanted to make the mistake the Times had made back then—concluding that there was nothing much to the story and pulling back from it...
...Billy Sunday Sally Quinn strolled into the Best Western Motel in Americas, Georgia...
...In those cases the clerks placed a single white index card in the box, giving the name of the case and the lawyers involved...
...By the end of the week of the Republican convention, the Star had succeeded in attracting considerable attention to itself and the Billy story...
...Problems with the plot...
...Quinn went so far as to spread the misinformation that "Billy is polite but firm...
...Goosed Cables As the 6:30 P. M. deadline approached, Howard Simons, the Post's managing editor, came into the city editor's office at the south side of the newsroom...
...Political campaigns are exciting events for the press, not only because of the story possibilities they offer...
...But nobody believed Watergate would be Watergate in the beginning either...
...The only exceptions were motions that required immediate action— injunctions, contempt proceedings, and the like...
...He knew Ruth from the days when the latter had been special prosecutor of the Watergate case...
...In this respect, the Tone incident was a sort of "test" of newspapers' lingering willingness to place form over substance in the Billy case...
...For a week he had been the highest-ranking Post editor who wasn't in Detroit...
...embassy in Libya concerning his trip...
...More important, the senators learned that The New York Times already had the story...
...Just then, two men emerged from Penn's chambers...
...What happened next was a carefully contrived drama...
...The Star had even more fun playing "white paper" that afternoon, when Powell finally dredged up and disclosed the fact that Rosalynn Carter had originally come up with the gobetween idea...
...The Post decided to raise the ante...
...The problem was that, aside from speculation and infighting with respect to the upcoming Democratic convention, there was very little news to offer...
...It could have been crazy Cubans,' he said " Of course, it's always possible that the entire Post hierarchy was swept away in the excitement of the moment—a point that they, at least, will not concede...
...The first is that "limited official use" or "confidential" cables rarely contain material of much significance...
...Anti-Carter Democrats would undoubtedly like to make much of the issue, and it seemed likely that the Republicans would try to do the same in the fall campaign...
...Harold S. Sawyer, was particularly vocal in his dismay at this revelation: "Either it's a gross violation of the communications statute by the president or Billy Carter is guilty of a felony [in lying to the government investigators...
...There is even a clear plot line, which moves along to an inevitable climax...
...But several facts stand out...
...THE SMOKELESS GUN: BILLYGATE AND THE PRESS by Robert M. Kaus July 14, 1980...
...Emphasis added.] Here was a 'modified limited hangout' for sure...
...Undoubtedly many factors played a role, but a few seemed to loom especially large...
...Toward the end of the week, Simons got mad...
...Others worried that the press reports might be unfair to Billy Carter—although it is hard to believe that they were in a majority, given what happened next...
...Indeed, if Lisker was showing the cables to Billy, knowing that he was a foreign agent, chances were that unless Lisker was a fool they were not state secrets that the Libyans would be eager to receive...
...Over the next ten days, 15 reporters—a third of the available national staff—were thrown into the Billy fray...
...Jerry Landauer, the veteran investigator for the Wall Street Journal, agrees: "To make a big to-do about sending some low-classification cables is...
...I checked back, and there it was on page 19: "A federal grand jury investigation had already been announced, but even so it was Simons's opinion that there were still too many unknown factors about the break-in to make it the lead story...
...Billy, it revealed, had also met with presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in July before he had gone to chat with Cutler...
...These details also came long after Myers had speculated whether the "information" imparted at the "briefings" might have been "sought by Libyan officiais...
...Carter turned ashen, as did Sprague, who was sitting near Carter's relatives in the audience...
...The Star came up with nine stories and one editorial for its Sunday edition, but hone of them were headline material (e.g...
...The one that least needed stating at the meeting was the challenge thrown down by The Washington Star...
...Robinson was having a late lunch at the courthouse with a fellow reporter, Allen Frank of The Washington Star...
...Drug Test On July 31 Jody Powell held a press conference at which he read and distributed the cables Carter had discussed with Billy...
...But it doesn't look as if the editors at Simon and Schuster will be fighting among themselves for the chance to finish up the novelization of how the Washington press corps cracked the Billy Carter case...
...Because in Billygate the story of the story had a lot more to tell us than the story itself...
...In Watergate, every word the White House uttered was properly suspect...
...He is not popular among Star reporters...
...Quinn unveiled the full-length 5,200- word version of her Sybil Carter interview living room, puffing on a Marlboro light...
...Somehow the headline "Carter Rebuked Libyan Envoy for Sacking of Embassy" would have lacked the nostalgic ring of scandal...
...From All the President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein The cables story began to break Wednesday morning, July 30, on Capitol Hill...
...It's been a real hassle...
...The scent of scandal might have been diluted, for example, if reporters had taken pains to dispel the notion that a registered "foreign agent" is typically a James Bondian figure who has sworn a blood oath to an enemy power, as opposed to a lobbyist on the order of Clark Clifford, William Fulbright, or Charles Goodell—to name a few respected figures whose names have turned up on the foreign agent rolls in recent years...
...Noting that Carter had previously denied receiving any payment for his Libyan activities, the story disclosed that he nevertheless had recently "asked for application forms required to register...
...Elkind reported from Americus on Billy's income tax problems, perhaps because his earlier report on the same subject had been hopelessly garbled by the Post's computerized typesetter...
...He said he didn't want to talk about anything else...
...It would be hard to get anything in the A-section, let alone the front page...
...There were persistent rumors that Time was growing impatient, even looking for a new buyer...
...Lyndon Johnson, in particular, made a habit out of showing journalists cables about Vietnam that supported his prosecution of the war...
...This promise was nothing less than "representing Libya in all its commercial dealings in the United States...
...But the regular reporter was on vacation and Robinson had been asked to fill in because he knew his way around...
...The second chapter, we may speculate, might begin like this: According to Gart Later the same day...
...By comparison, The New York Times was positively comatose, managing the following Monday to produce nothing more than a survey of legal ethics experts who, with a single exception, branded the Carter-Civiletti discussion an improper conflict of interest "when measured by the standards in effect since the Watergate scandal...
...The subject of possible payments was indirectly raised anew in the headline the Times chose for the story: "Billy Carter in Libya, May Be Planninga New Career...
...Billygate may not have looked like much on Monday July 21st—it was hard to believe, for example, that Jimmy Carter had been venal enough to alter American policy to enrich his brother, or stupid enough to fix his brother's case...
...Robinson asked...
...With a staff roughly half the size of his main competitor, The Washington Post, Gart exercises direct control over the Star's day-to-day coverage in a way that editors in the multiheaded Post and New York Times bureaucracies cannot...
...For example, one of the motors of the Watergate scandal had been the series of "full disclosure" statements—supposedly definitive official versions of events—that had been put out by the Nixon administration in the effort to lay the story to rest...
...What's up...
...He had agreed, but it didn't look like a very promising assignment...
...Schram went on to reveal that "some of those closest to the President are having doubts.for the first time.about whether this will be that final burden that costs their boss the presidency...
...Four other Billy-related stories filled the issue, including an exclusive dispatch from Star reporter Lance Gay, who had traveled to Americus, Georgia to learn from Billy that "It's extremely hard to get a job with anybody when you have a grand jury investigation in process...
...He spent almost an hour answering press questions, most of which focused on Billy...
...The Post and Star focused on neither of these aspects...
...A final and definitive statement that dealt with the major allegations, both direct and implied, should be drafted, he said...
...Why does it make a difference if it's in the lead as long as it's in the story...
...I don't concede anything absent information...
...The State Department's Middle East desk estimates that it gives out two such briefings a day to travelers going to Libya...
...But even ignoring all the non-official, circumstantial evidence from Lisker and Bradsher that would lead a reasonable man to have concluded that the cables in question were in fact probably the "innocuous" cables that had reported Billy's trip, why couldn't Lardner at least have included a paragraph explaining the lack of any evidence that important state secrets had been divulged...
...Although Denniston never revealed Beard's precise destination, his necessary means of communication with the White House on this journey was clear enough— Beard had "sent a cable to the president's personal secretary, [Susan] Clough, urging her to tell the president of Billy's trip...
...that could conceivably dwarf the $220,000 for which [Carter] has acknowledged receipt...
...The Shah chose the next day to shuffle off his mortal coil, and by Tuesday Billygate had been pushed entirely off the Post front page...
...But you had to read well beyond the front page to learn that the briefings took the form of short telephone conversations, mostly with Carter's sidekick Randy Coleman, or that they consisted of a general overview of U.S...
...A lucrative offer indeed—except that nowhere in the story is its existence supported...
...Luckily, Senator Robert Byrd has made a practice of holding Saturday press conferences in order to assist editors who have precisely this problem...
...The Justice Department had delivered a stack of records to the House Judiciary Committee...
...The ambiguous pronoun in the second half of this sentence became a problem for Star reporter Lyle Denniston four days later when he sat down with his clip file to crank out the 83-inch front-page recap of the Billy case that enabled the Star to meet its two-story "goal" for Monday, July 21...
...The mood in the Star's newsroom was feverish...
...In fact, if you look at it that way, "Billygate" is the true sequel to that other-gate...
...You should probably look at this...
...Others doubt this possibility as well, at least with respect to the cable story...
...Carter and Civiletti had rather made a major blunder in explaining their actions to the press...
...When I called the Post to inquire about the cables coverage, I got a quick lesson in the post-Billygate rules of scandal reporting...
...Billy had visited Brzezinski in July of 1980, the release stated, simply to ask him "if there was any national security reason why he could not disclose the prior meeting" to the Justice Department...
...George Belluomini and others are the subjects of an investigation concerning the importation of marijuana and cocaine into the United States, and that a federal grand jury has been opened in connection with that investigation...
...Her discovery fathered two more stories when campaign chairman Robert Strauss denied that the contact with the lawyer had been "authorized" by the campaign...
...In particular, when the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, the Nixon administration charged that the release of the classified cables contained therein threatened national security—but the editors of the Times and Post would have none of it...
...Then, on Monday, July 21, the Star came up with another scoop...
...And it had been a week in which the Post had been beaten badly by the Star on the Billy Carter story...
...Its headline stretched across the full page ("President Discussed Libya Cables With Billy...
...Gart winced...
...No evidence was ever offered that the cables were anything more important than what the White House said they were—innocent missives that mainly reported on Billy's good behavior...
...He was assisted in the research for this article by Alex Heard...
...In a prepared statement, Carter denied any impropriety in the affair...
...The Civiletti Confession opened the floodgates...
...In the Times story, topped by a three-column, three-decker headline, Terence Smith did report the likely topic of the cables, and their lowly classification, in the third paragraph...
...And at the Post, when the "story on the story" that Greider had assigned came in, the response from Simons was decidedly cool...
...Gart refuses to discuss his editorial decisions regarding the Billy Carter story...
...It was also the first day of the Republican National Convention in Detroit...
...The one thing Simonsfeared was complacency...
...It knew, for example, that Lisker, the Justice Department's top lawyer on the Billy case, had said that the cables he had shown Billy (the very ones Billy said Jimmy gave him) were not classified at all...
...From zero stories the previous Sunday the Post climbed steadily to seven stories and a feature article a week later...
...and indicating that the trip had gone well from the embassy's point of view...
...just outrageous...
...The public wanted to hear more about the Billy story...
...The only other name on it was that of one Joel S. Lisker...
...Billy put down the receiver...
...But look at what they did...
...Oh sure, maybe we ran one item too many," went the typical response...
...Three paragraphs deep in Margot Hornblower's calm story neatly punctured the drug balloon...
...The possibility had been broached ever since September 1978, when Billy took a highly-publicized expense-paid trip to the North African nation...
...Reporter Lardner had another lesson...
...Lyndon Johnson's brother, Sam, had been a lush...
...Instead, they gave the July 22 statement the Watergate treatment...
...On its face, the statement contained a revelation of dubious benefit to the administration— the use of what might be seen as an amateurish means of reaching the Libyans...
...Robinson immediately thought of Frank, and looked up at the clock...
...The subject of the Zbig-Billy conversation was not immediately revealed, but Dole immediately expanded his proposed hearing to include "interference" by Cutler and Brzezinski in the Justice Department investigation...
...For starters, the reporters at the Post and Times knew or should have known that there had been several unexciting cables from Libya concerning Billy Carter's good behavior on his Libyan trips...
...This Billy thing just might be his last chance...
...He could see the conventioneers milling about in the streets below...
...v. William A. "Billy" Carter...
...The Justice Department began an investigation in April 1979, and William Safire, the columnist for The New York Times, raised the issue at every available opportunity thereafter...
...No big cases were scheduled...
...So it is hard to view, without a healthy rush of cynicism, the spectacular coverage the Post and the Times gave the cables story on the morning of July 31...
...The Times ran a discreet two-column item "below the fold" on the front page...
...The Times story, it turned out, was also inaccurate...
...The Post (which had assigned the story to its Justice Department reporter, Thomas O'Toole, over courthouse reporter Robinson's initial protests) gave the news only slightly more prominence...
...In one box the court clerks routinely placed an extra "press copy" of every incoming document...
...And there were two things that the reporters and editors could reasonably be expected to know about low-classification cables in general...
...Underneath, in a box, was a second story under the byline of Elkind and "Style" writer Art Harris entitled "Billy Feels Bugged...
...One Michigan Republican, Rep...
...It was just like the Post in Watergate," remembers one reporter...
...Like publicity...
...Only time will tell...
...And Gart seemed to be'looking for a hot political scandal that might warm up his paper's reputation and circulation...
...In the era of Billygate, it seems, one could safely assume the opposite of what the White House said...
...Only one of the many journalists with whom I spoke, for example, was willing to admit that his paper had made substantial misjudgments in covering the story...
...In the all-purpose Watergate model of fact-finding, the story itself had become the story, and the process of confronting an aroused press a kind of stress-test (much like the supposed primary campaign "test") in which the target's performance under hostile press pressure becomes a sort of proxy for whether there is an underlying scandal or not...
...In the Star, on the other hand, Allen Frank's Billy Carter story ran as the lead, even though by the afternoon of the 15th, when the Star's main edition came out, the story was already a day old...
...Billy Carter resumed his place at the witness table, and Tone led him through a series of questions calculated to reveal his contacts with Belluomini and Sprague...
...Perhaps even more important than the Star, the Times had come out over the weekend with a front page story by Phillip Taubman that, citing unnamed sources, placed Billy's activities in the hard-edged context of a Libyan attempt to gain influence in the White House...
...So the Post should get to the bottom of the story—particularly since as a Democratic newspaper, the Post wanted to avoid any appearance of favoritism for the incumbent...
...The primaries were months away...
...Howard Simons disagrees...
...Well, OK, let's look...
...Look, we can't talk about it...
...Three weeks of spectacular headlines and pressure had produced no significant evidence that the President had either allowed himself to be influenced by his brother or that he had interfered with the Justice Department's various investigations...
...They are typically classified solely to avoid embarrassment to the official who wrote them or to the embassy—for example, to prevent anyone from walking around a foreign country waving an embassy economic analysis and saying "the State Department says such and such...
...Their growing doubts were dramatized by confessionals, like this one from a "senior adviser" who had "been aggressively confident" in the past: "We'll see...
...To readers far removed from the Star's newsroom this may have seemed less like a bombshell than a bad question on a legal ethics exam...
...Many of the characters are the same, holdovers from the earlier episode, as are some of the themes—although these have been given a subtle twist to maintain audience interest...
...Nor was it particularly easy to believe that President Carter had simply forgotten his conversation with Civiletti when he had allowed his staff to emphasize repeatedly that he had "not discussed this matter at all with the Attorney General...
...And Gart still hadn't come up with the big story that would put his paper in the same league with the Post and Times...
...Billy also admitted trying to obtain Libyan oil on commission for the Charter Oil Company of Jacksonville, Florida...
...It also offers a chance to make contacts, meet old friends, swap tales, or, on a less elevated level, to go to parties and get laid...
...This is not to say that all the excitement was over (or, I should add, that subsequent investigations wouldn't turn up some real dirt that last summer's explosion of press hysteria didn't...
...Presidential brothers had often gone astray, and the public had shown the ability to keep distinct siblings separated in its mind...
...She had already been prepped by Peter Elkind, the Post intern assigned to follow Billy in Georgia...
...Schram occupies a unique position on the Post.he is regarded as the paper's "mole" inside the White House, but he is a reporter without a beat in the sense that he is assigned no regular source of news...
...The possibility that Libya might have actually obtained influence over U.S...
...I asked editor Barry Sussman, whose role in producing the original Watergate stories is described in heroic terms by Woodward and Bernstein, why the story waited until the 28th paragraph to mention the routine presidential declassification of cables...
...Murray Gart paced back and forth in his suite at the Detroit Plaza Hotel in Detroit...
...Lisa Myers of the Star was the first to discover this angle, in a page one story on July 17 headlined "White House Asked NSC to Brief Billy: Carter Brother Given Information on Libya...
...Some members of the committee worried that the press accounts would make the committee look bad for not having uncovered the investigation itself...
...You must be Mr...
...But it also contained a plausible explanation of what previously had been the most suspicious aspect of the events on record—the meeting with Brzezinski...
...Deputy Press Secretary Ray Jenkins stated that the cables had probably been classified "limited official use" or "confidential"—the two weakest secrecy labels...
...But the story had petered out, even though Gart had kept it on the front pages for 11 days, long after there was anything left to reveal...
...They began looking through the various boxes lined up on the counter...
...But even Schram's gut-wrenching testimony from the inner circles of power would ultimately prove insufficient to keep the kettle boiling...
...But he gave little indication of the relatively harmless nature of low-classification cables in general, and no indication that these particular cables differed from the norm...
...The remaining leads—the Civiletti lie, the reported promise to Muammar Qaddaffi of a more "neutral" Middle East policy, the complicated and highly questionable stories of plots featuring Robert Vesco, and the possibility of other business deals involving Billy and Libya—all remained for reporters to play with, but the momentum was gone...
...And there remained one final convulsion, which occurred at the Senate's televised hearings on August 21...
...Different papers responded to the crisis in different ways...
...My source confirmed a two-a-day minimum, put later argued that this was a goal, not a quota...
...For the two days preceding the Monday meeting, the Star had featured five stories and two boxes on Billy...
...Pointing to the Star's coverage of the Billy saga, he told reporter George Lardner to go "report the hell out of it," according to observers...
...The days following Billy's registration brought forth a sober description of his proposed Charter Oil dealings and a routine back-page "reaction" story from the Libyans...
...Once again, the self-reinforcing relationship between the press and the politicians worked to inflate the story beyond its importance...
...Beard had never left the White House, and had therefore chosen to communicate with Clough by a written note rather than a diplomatic cable...
...Hey Allen," he said...
...Judge John Garrett Penn's chambers were on the sixth floor of the vast dimly lit building...
...Publicity, of course, is what they got...
...On the 24th, however, Kaiser and Walter Pincus claimed that "officials said the idea was Brzezinski's alone," noting suspiciously that "The White House explanation of who first suggested that Billy Carter set up a meeting changed yesterday," with Powell and aides saying they "just didn't know" who had the idea first...
...They are not documents relating exclusively to war plans or weapons design or code or intelligence or sensitive international relations...
...One Saturday, after Simons and Greider had talked, the article was quietly killed...
...On July 19, Henry S. Bradsher, in another front-page story, led off with the revelation that "The White House has obtained from the State Department its file on Billy Carter's two visits to Libya," thereby giving a sinister twist to what was basically an exculpatory story...
...On the evening of August 4th President Carter held a nationallytelevised press conference...
...The Post knew some other facts as well...
...Schram rose to the occasion this particular Sunday with a lengthy, breathless narrative that began: "Among the president's high command, the realization has slowly set in: they have taken what was a minor irritant and turned it into their own national nightmare...
...The Post also had the testimony of a "White House official" who had seen the cables and reported that they were "really quite innocuous...
...Unless, that is, you kept reading, 17 inches further into the story, past the summary of the entire scandal to date and halfway down page A-12, to the point at which Pincus and Kaiser found time to mention the purpose of the Carter-Houderi meeting, which was to rebuke Libya for the sacking of our embassy, not to obtain the hostages or to discuss any part of the "Billy Carter-Libya flap...
...That seemed to be the guiding principle of Post managing editor Simons as well: "You are saying that absent information [that the cables were significant] it's not important...
...it's a phony classification...
...A separate story by Bernard Gwertzman, buried on page B-14, let the diligent reader in on the secret that "although by regulation such cables are not supposed to be given to the general public, in practice they are routinely declassified by officials and made available...
...he will not talk to the press...
...It was," he says, "a hell of a story...
...Robinson was not the Post's regular courthouse correspondent anymore—he thought that was all behind him...
...According to Stanley Meisler, veteran foreign correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, "as a practical matter in the field 'limited official use' is information that a guy [in the embassy] would turn over to you pretty easily...
...Donald Nixon, for example, had received a nearly identical sum ($205,000) from Howard Hughes back in 1960—except that in 1960 Nixon's "loan" was worth a lot more than Billy's was now...
...Frank looked...
...Oh shit, " he said...
...On September 25, 1979, the Times had a scoop, or so it seemed, when an unnamed Justice Department official revealed that "Billy Carter was apparently preparing to register as a foreign agent...
...From The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein There was another factor influencing the coverage of the Billy story, of course— namely, memories...
...We were out there all by ourselves...
...I just don't know...
...Even this was not enough...
...Some prominent calls for Civiletti's resignation would have helped, but they never came...
...The "white paper" had simply stated that Brzezinski had requested that Billy arrange the particular been Brzezinski's, Billy's or anybody's— and Powell had stated under press questioning that "I can't give the answer of whose idea [it was...
...Post super-intern Peter Elkind was already on the spot, where he had learned that Billy, like many targets of criminal investigations with whom reporters come into contact, believed that his phones were bugged...
...The Post had had zero...
...But a close convention—as the reporters coming back from Detroit were painfully aware—is infinitely more fun (and has infinitely more news value) than a convention with a preordained outcome...
...Then there were the "briefing" stories...
...A second factor that did receive much discussion at the meeting was politics...
...On Friday, July 25, Benjamin Civiletti announced his recollection of a "brief in-concerning his brother Billy...
...That's a hell of a story," he told the city editor, Barry Sussman, and ordered it onto Sunday's front page...
...In the ensuing days, Pincus contributed a rehash of the "gaps and contradictions in the Billy Carter story," with heavy emphasis on the "white paper" omissions...
...It cited "Sybil Carter, in an interview with Washington Post staff writer Sally Quinn" in support of its thesis...
...Although the reporters probably would have denied it, a third motive may have been the most powerful of all—namely the natural human desire for entertainment...
...Bradsher had reported on them for the Star back on July 19—remember—and had quoted one of them ("no negative fallout") and summarized others...
...Look at what we knew at the time, I was told...
...A Mum Billy Resurfaces in Plains," "Billy Refused to End Role as Libya Agent...
...More commonly they are the passing international chit-chat of government...
...Rounding out the Post's five-story front-page attack was a "news analysis" by Martin Schram...
...Tone continued: "We are also informed that you are not a subject of that investigation, and that the government has no information that you were in any way involved...
...Only later did Bradsher mention that the White House had asked for the cables in order to respond to press inquiries...
...He knew it was virtually impossible to get a story into the evening edition of the Star after around 1:15...
...Details like Beard's transatlantic trip, however, helped make the developing scandal fascinating...
...Well, if the Star wanted competition, it would get it...
...Which is too bad...
...Billy Carter had just finished giving the first part of his defense, when committee chairman Birch Bayh announced that the committee would adjourn to executive session (which means that only the senators, with no staff except committee counsel Philip Tone, were present...
...Both CBS and NBC used the bogus drug angle to open their evening news shows...
...She put on her best pouty-sexy face and walked over...
...The big excitement among the stay-behinds at the Post that week was the publication of a story by Scott Armstrong detailing President Carter's efforts to plug leaks in the State and Defense Departments...
...If he is to fulfill the goal of every good daily journalist and get on the front page, Schram must take whatever controversy is swirling around the White House that week and make it sound like a sequel to The Final Days...
...Billy Carter was not planning to register as a foreign agent...
...It's just that the tone has changed, from one of high moral conflict to a mockdrama that smacks more than a bit of theater of the absurd...
...Bayh's office would later argue that the committee simply wanted to get the facts onto the record, and in the process to "test" Billy Carter to see if he registered genuine surprise when confronted...
...The amount of money involved alone was enough to spark some interest, and as far as any links to the White House were concerned, all the "briefings," meetings, and cables (real and imagined) contributed to the sense, as Denniston put it, that Billy's activities had "stirred considerable activity in and around the White House...
...It was too sloppy for someone not to have thought about it...
...The Post has other reporters who r'^:'.: „B„Y„… Carter: Bcueged and Beset y^hy.:J regularly cover press conferences and other White House events...
...Too bad, really, because the story is worth telling, especially if you ignore the minor characters—like Billy and Jimmy Carter, Robert Vesco and the various representatives of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya—and stick with the principals, namely the men and women who work for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Washington Star...
...Further along in his story, Bradsher noted that "White House staff member Thomas V. Beard learned that Billy Carter was going to Libya when he was already halfway across the Atlantic...
...Later, it would come out that Tone had his facts wrong...
...he said...
...Bradsher did describe the cables, which said there had been no "negative fallout" from Billy's visit...
...On July 23, Robert Kaiser and Edward Walsh of the Post managed to stir up some confusion over whether Zbig had called Billy or Billy Zbig by finding a State Department official who had heard that it was all Billy's idea...
...On the other hand, there wasn't much to indicate that the story presented a significant threat to Billy's brother...
...It was a test that showed the Post in its new, sober mood...
...Briefing," like "foreign agent," is a word that conjures up images that may not be precisely accurate— in this case, images of a closed-door session in which high-level officials point at charts and graphs and discuss secret intellligence reports...
Vol. 12 • October 1980 • No. 8
