Watching and reading the intense, Unabomber-inspired dissection of the culture, mores and denizens of Montana, a mild irony arose from the journalistic haze.
“You’re absolutely right,” said Ron Kessler. “Montana is where they once banished FBI agents to.”
For some reason, I remembered the claim that the FBI office in Butte was once the gulag for J. Edgar Hoover’s dispossessed.
It prompted a call to Kessler, a premier FBI watcher whose research on a 1993 book, “The FBI, ” ultimately prompted President Clinton to bounce Director William Sessions for using FBI planes for personal reasons and for allowing his wife undue influence.
“Yes, during the Hoover years, punishment for embarrassing the bureau was to be sent to Butte. He chose it as purgatory for wayward agents.”
But the former Washington Post reporter conceded Hoover’s moves tended to backfire for a simple reason: If you liked hunting, fishing and a slower pace, Montana was idyllic.
“The truth is that agents ended up liking it. It may seem like the end of the Earth to some, but for fishermen and hunters, it was wonderful,” said Kessler.
As for the Butte field office, Sessions closed it in 1989 and replaced it with a processing center for FBI records.
Regarding the Unabomber case, Kessler believes a successful resolution would “bring the FBI back to high public esteem” after many setbacks, including the mess at Ruby Ridge in neighboring Idaho. Montana, once associated with ignominy, now may prove an emblem of grand achievement.
“It may turn out to be one of the most important cases in U.S. history because of the terror it created. But the FBI success was incremental. They didn’t at first realize it was a serial killer, thinking they were unrelated incidents.”
“Then they realized they were related, and they were a terrorist act with a political motive, not just a straight criminal act, with the manifesto the clear evidence. It became an all-consuming priority for the bureau, but something almost impossible to solve.”
“Anybody, of course, could drop something in a mail box.”
1040, over and outback
Get your taxes done?
Monday is The Day, prompting my Friday attempt to contact Margaret Milner Richardson, an FOH (Friend of Hillary), who is a Vassar-educated lawyer and head of the Internal Revenue Service.
She was, as one would expect, in a remote fishing village in western Alaska.
Well, not quite. When I got in touch with her, she had just arrived in Anchorage from the remote village, Togiak. She met with Alaska natives concerned with commercial fishing (the area is the world’s most productive salmon locale) and compliance with tax laws.
Richardson has the classic thankless task, running a big, cumbersome, tradition-bound organization that most citizens detest. She has done things to try to make it more customer-friendly, including pushing it into the world of the Internet, but people still detest it.
“Going back through recorded history, people who collected taxes weren’t popular. One thing we have to come to grips with is that we are one agency of government that touches the lives of everyone and are surrogate for people’s frustration with all levels of government.”
The IRS and taxes were mentioned often in the Republican primaries, primarily thanks to Steve Forbes. When Congress returns from Easter recess Monday, taxes will be a prime topic, if one of misunderstanding.
“Seventy percent of people take a standard deduction,” she noted. “The system couldn’t get much simpler for them.” And for most who itemized, it’s really not that complicated, either, as they take the home interest, state and local tax and charitable contribution deductions.
The group for whom the system can be a drag, she concedes, are small business owners, with the same burdens of huge companies but fewer resources, and individuals with complicated economic lives, including journalists and politicians who blast the system.
Another Montana story, but from Richardson.
“I met with small business owners in Helena last year, and a man stood up and said, `You have to understand, we folks out here don’t like big government. We like small government.’ “
He then begged her to keep open the local IRS office, which he saw as “small government.”
Must be something in the mountain air.
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Hold your tongue
A Whitewater food fight involves independent counsel Kenneth Starr, law professor Samuel Dash, the Wall Street Journal and New York journalist Joe Conason.
Conason, executive editor of the political-literary weekly New York Observer, has been bashing Starr for conflicts of interest. He also embarrassed Dash, who serves as Starr’s $3,200-a-week ethics counsel (nice gig), via an interview in which Dash, former counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, downplayed the significance of Whitewater.
Starr and Dash erupted with claims that Dash had been misquoted. Dash produced a rebuttal which, no surprise, was published Friday in the Journal, handmaiden to Clinton-bashing, Whitewater conspiracy buffs.
Fact: Conason faxed to Dash’s home the final article after going over the piece with him. He approved. It was not until publicity about the piece came that Dash changed his tune.
Indeed, Conason played me a voice mail message (“Mr. Conason, it’s Sam Dash . . .”), which did indicate chagrin with wording of an Observer press release about the interview. But his message was quite clear, “One of your assistants did call me as to some of my quotes, and they were all accurate.”
Dash’s is a tried-and-true practice: Covering one’s butt.
The Matalin file
A classic Washington tale of no interest to the sane:
It involves Mary Matalin, the South Side Chicagoan who’s become a celebrity by being, well, Mary Matalin. She’s the Republican wife of Democrat James Carville, who has become a celebrity by being, well, the wise-cracking political consultant married to Mary Matalin. They’ve successfully marketed their merger in books and speeches.
Recent reports indicated that GOP types were aghast that Matalin, who had some sort of job in the 1992 Bush campaign, will now have some sort of job in the 1996 Dole campaign. Bush is seen as a loser, Dole a potential winner, so why hire her, grouse the grousers.
Matalin, member of the Washington politico-turned-sort-of-journalist species, announced she would have to quit her CNBC show, “Equal Time,” on which she is the co-host with former White House flack Dee Dee Myers,
She will, however, keep her CBS Radio syndicated show, which prompted a no-nonsense colleague to enter my lair and declare, “You have to write about that!”
What he meant was that a shill for the Dole campaign would now continue to be paid by one of the traditionally most-esteemed broadcast organizations.
Outrageous, right?
Well, I was listening to the sainted Charles Osgood Friday morning and was reminded that radio always has been an ethical cesspool.
Osgood, of course, does the commercials on his successful “The Osgood File.” He was hawking carpets Friday.
Thus, midway through a commentary on the 7-year-old girl whose plane crashed, he switched to commercial mode. “It’s as beautiful as it is durable,” he intoned about some firm’s product.
May the same be one day said about the Matalin-Dole pairing.