The Media! (Watergate/Clinton)

In my essay entitled “Support Our Troops” I said, “Thank God for the Washington Post” for exposing the scandal at Walter Reed Hospital. But maybe the real story is how rarely the media exposed government scandals until Bush’s popularity began to fall. Even now the Washington Post exposé leaves questions unanswered. Members of Congress had been complaining to the Army's surgeon general, for more than three years. Why did it take the Post three years to pick up the story and where was the rest of the media? Finally when the story broke it was confined to Walter Reeld. Now it turns out such conditions are endemic throughout all the veterans’ hospitals. A few generals are made scapegoats and the media praises the Defense Secretary for swift action, but very little is said about the fact that the conditions were brought about by the Administration and it’s cohort in the Republican Congress cutting the budget for veterans care, firing many of it’s experienced staff and outsourcing the work to a subsidiary of Bechtel. Maybe Kudos to the Washington Post and certainly to the rest of the media has been overblown.

Let us take the NY Times! That paper broke the story of warrantless wiretapping. They have been subjected to all kinds of invective by the White House and Right wing publications and pundits. So is this a case of journalistic courage. But it turns out the paper sat on the story for more than a year before releasing it and refuses to say why it delayed letting the public know of this major violation of the U.S. Constitution. Better late than never, but is this the kind of journalism that informs as soon as it knows?

If these papers, the best of the best in the media field fail us, what is the story with regard to the rest of the media?

Let us go back to the Watergate scandal. The burglary of Democratic Headquarters occurred on June 17, 1972 reported by the Washington Post on that day. By June 19 Woodward and Bernstein were on the case and reported that a GOP security aide was among the Watergate burglars and that former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denies any link to the operation. From then on the two reporters filed one story after another reporting ever-clearer evidence that the Nixon reelection campaign was behind the burglary and that the F.B.I. had found a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage. Yet during this whole period leading up to the election no other paper reported on the story, causing the Post reporters to wonder why their spectacular story had no resonance with the rest of the media. Had the broad media picked up the story it may be that Nixon would not have been reelected. Within three month after the election former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted. From then on events moved to the impeachment and resignation of the President. But where was the media when the Post was reporting spectacular events prior to the election. There was a conspiracy of silence.

Contrast this to the media’s behavior during the campaign leading up to the election of Bill Clinton and throughout the Clinton Presidency. There was a crescendo of media allegations about sexual peccadilloes. Gennifer Flowers alleged a twelve year affair with Clinton, which received wide press coverage. Her revelation lead to her getting a nude centerfold in Penthouse magazine and the ownership of a cabaret in New Orleans. On the other hand an allegation, corroborated by many sources, that George Bush had an affair with one Jennifer Fitzgerald at least since 1974 and until at least the 1992 election received scant notice from the press.

Even more press coverage was given to the saga of Paula Jones who probably would never have come forward but for an article in the Right wing Spectator magazine written by David Brock. (Brock also wrote the slanderous book, “The Real Anita Hill” and later an article for the Spectator in which he called Anita Hill "a bit nutty and a bit slutty." Subsequently Brock apologized and said that everything he had written was a lie for which he had been well paid.) Brock had written, “On this particular evening after her encounter with Clinton, which lasted no more than an hour as the troopers stood by in the hall, the troopers said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton’s girlfriend if he so desired.” Paula who until then had never spoken of an encounter with Governor Clinton was outraged, and wanted a correction and an apology” But from this sprang Troopergate and the belated suit against Clinton which Paula wanted to settle, but by then had became a tool of the Right who paid her expenses, sponsored her appearance with the troopers (who also indicated they wanted payoffs) at the “Political Action Conference” and kept pushing on all fronts with the SUPPORT AND PUBLICITY OF THE MEDIA until pay dirt in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

But this wasn’t all! The Right took a minor investment of the Clinton’s with one Jim McDougal, in which the Clinton’s lost money, into the notorious Whitewater affair pursued by the partisan ideologue, Kenneth Starr, who in the end found no wrongdoing. If not for the baying of the media there would have been no independent counsel and no endless investigation.

When Vince Foster, suffering depression from the tensions in the White House took his own life, after he was attacked by the Wall Street Journal, the press questioned the suicide and suggested murder. A sensational story but with no basis in fact.

When the Clinton White House fired fourteen employees engaged in making travel arrangements for White House staff, a matter that could hardly be considered of National significance, it became TRAVELGATE and the media ran with it.

When Clinton stopped to get a haircut at an airport the cost of the haircut and the possibility of planes being delayed became grist for the media’s frenzy.

The favorite of the “neutral press” was their adaptation of the pejorative reference to the President as “Slick Willie.”

I can’t possibly do justice to the hatchet job done with the willing, enthusiastic collaboration of the press, which treated Hillary Clinton’s correct charge of a “Vast Right Wing conspiracy” with disdain. However, the facts bear her out. The Arkansas Project is known to have undertaken a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.

(As an aside it should be noted that between 1985 and 2001, the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation donated $15,860,000 to the Heritage Foundation; $7,333,000 to the Institute for Policy Analysis; $6,995,500 to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace; $6,693,000 to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); $4,411,000 to the American Enterprise Institute; $2,575,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; $1,855,000 to the George C. Marshall Institute; $1,808,000 to the Hudson Institute; and $1,697,000 to the Cato Institute.)

Next time, the media’s hatchet job on Al Gore and John Kerry, and its cheer leading the President’s march to war.

Gerald Ford

I feel that I should depart at this point from my discussion of the pitfalls and opportunities of the Democratic victory, to address the eulogies being delivered and printed on the death of Gerald Ford.

I know that is a custom to never speak ill of the departed and to laud them in the most exemplary terms, so as to almost turn them into instant saints. I have always deplored this custom for when it comes to prominent men it is important that we not indulge in revisionist history, and assess a life as it was. Ford did some good things, and one can find those in any of the eulogies written, so the reader must forgive me if I do not repeat them here.

But I do find myself at odds with much that has been said and written about our “accidental” President though he was not so much accidental as the creature of his disgraced predecessor.

First we need to put the ascendancy of Ford into context. It was caused not only by the crimes of Richard Nixon but also by the crimes of Nixon’s Vice-President. The corruption of the Republican Party of today may well be nothing more than a continuation of the corruption of that period and even before.

Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was “allegedly” guilty of both bribery and tax evasion, crimes, which he had committed before Nixon chose him to be his running mate. Yet Agnew, like Nixon was above the law. Instead of being impeached and prosecuted, he was allowed to escape prosecution in return for his resignation. It was this outrage which elevated Ford to the Vice-Presidency, and he was chosen for that post by a man who had committed even more serious crimes, Richard Nixon, and here I am talking not only of the Watergate crimes but of the manner by which Nixon was elected.

First Nixon was aided in his first election by the treachery of Henry Kissinger, who, at the time, was considered a trusted ally of Johnson emissary Averell Harriman, leader of the Paris talks. Kissinger used his contacts with the Johnson administration to tip-off the Nixon camp about an anticipated breakthrough in the Paris talks. Nixon set out to sabotage those talks by secretly offering the South Vietnamese “more” than they would get from the incumbent Democrats. The result was the negotiations floundered, Nixon was elected, the war went on for more than another four years with untold American, Vietnamese and Cambodian casualties, and was then concluded on the same terms, and conditions as had been on the table in the fall of 1968.

The decision to pardon Nixon won Ford a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, acknowledging he had criticized Ford at the time, called the pardon “an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was truly in the national interest.”

I respectfully disagree. Nixon’s pardon did not end the nightmare for the nation and certainly not for Nixon’s subordinates. For years thereafter, Nixon’s subordinates were tried, convicted and many went to jail. They paid the price while the head of the conspiracy escaped and even managed to be rehabilitated.

Was the pardon an act of courage or was Ford taking care of someone who had been a close friend before, who had brought him to the Presidency and who remained a friend thereafter? Nixon’s crimes never even disturbed Ford enough to interfere with their continued friendship.

But what of the claim that Ford was a healer, a non-partisan statesman? He vetoed 66 bills in his barely two years as President. Congress overturned 12 Ford vetoes, more than for any president since Andrew Johnson. Does that sound like a man working with the opposition party?

One of the bills he vetoed was the Freedom Of Information Act one of the cornerstones of our Democracy today. That was passed over Ford’s veto.

Even though Ford in an interview released posthumously, criticized the Iraq war, he has to bear some responsibility for that fiasco, for he launched the careers of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even Scalia.

Some give him credit for an Amnesty program for Vietnam War resisters but it should be noted that the program was widely regarded as a failure, even by the people who administered it. Only 21,800 of the 350,000 eligible persons were granted clemency. It was left to Carter to grant anything meaningful.

Ford may have been virtuous and moderate compared to the present Republican Party, or to the Nixon or McCarthy Republicans, but he was hardly the paragon of virtue, which is the image now being evoked.

May he rest in peace!