It’s not easy being outed.
No, no, I don’t mean being revealed to prefer clothes from Donna Karan.
Instead, I refer to being revealed as part of a White House conspiracy to tear down Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Usually, big legal tussles involving government and media deal with reporters refusing to identify sources. Most reporters would go to jail if it meant maintaining certain principles–assuming we got color television and the company still picked up our health benefits.
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Welcome to the matter of Kenneth Starr versus Sidney Blumenthal, where the sources give up the reporters.
An unlikely and clearly joyful martyr, Blumenthal is the Chicago native and presidential assistant beckoned to appear last week before one of Starr’s grand juries. It’s the panel whose focus ranges from real estate in the Ozarks to sex acts in or near the Oval Office.
Starr appears to be upset at a White House counterattack that might include spreading those awful and deadly rhetorical missiles–rumor and innuendo–about him and his loyal troops.
So he hauled in Blumenthal, a man known to some as G.K. (grassy knoll) for his penchant for conspiracy theories. Blumenthal apparently disclosed organizations and reporters with whom he broached the subject of Starr (though, one assumes, not the substance of those chats).
According to The Washington Post, “Sources declined to identify the reporters cited in Blumenthal’s testimony but said the news organizations he identified included The Washington Post, New York Times, New York Daily News, Boston Globe, baiduhai, New York Observer, Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, CBS and CNN.”
Starr and the grand jury can herewith save themselves some energy: I’m guilty of taking Blumenthal calls. For sure, if my editors knew how little had come of the chats so far, they’d reassign me to covering a previously unknown subdivision in Saline County, Ill.
But we have discussed Starr in much the same way “sources close to Starr and his investigation” have discussed the likes of President Clinton and Blumenthal with me. A lack of charity by each for each has been undisguised.
Given the way Washington works, people in power tell reporters fibs all the time. Because even being told a fib by such folks is seen as a sign of stature, I must take solace in being somewhere on White House call sheets.
At the same time, Starr’s frustration with Blumenthal says something about the relative gravity of this controversy, especially when compared with the town’s most famous constitutional contretemps, Watergate.
For starters, if Blumenthal, who was a longtime journalist, is seen by Starr as this scandal’s Donald “Dirty Trickster” Segretti or G. Gordon Liddy, we’re in trouble.
The graduate of Sullivan High School in Chicago is not the sort who would consider as “reasonable” being killed for botching a burglary, as Liddy did. Blumenthal might break out in hives at the mere thought. If Hulk Hogan approached him, I’d wager Blumenthal would get sweaty palms and start scampering for the lobby of the New Republic magazine, where he once worked.
Come to think of it, if we were comparing the separate casts of Watergate and Monicagate, we might find some unseemly juxtapositions:
– Media seer: Walter Cronkite versus Matt Drudge, the cyberspace gossip columnist whose darting eyes tend to suggest a guy worried about some vice cops three blocks away. Lord help us.
– Diehard loyalist: H.R. Haldeman versus Rahm Emanuel. Do you figure Haldeman ever took ballet?
– Journalistic chroniclers: Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein versus Geraldo Rivera and Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff. No contest, especially because Newsweek’s Monica Lewinsky expert gained his initial renown because of a story that didn’t run.
– Loyal secretary: Rosemary Woods versus Waukegan’s Betty Currie. This is a tossup, with the 18 1/2-minute gap on President Richard Nixon’s tape potentially being matched by Currie’s fetching from Monica her boss’ presents.
– Soulmate: Henry Kissinger, who kneeled and prayed with a beleaguered Nixon, faces off with Jesse Jackson, who has prayed with Clinton in these troubling times. The difference here is one suspects Jackson took 45 more minutes.
– Top law enforcer: John Mitchell, Nixon’s crooked chum and attorney general, gives way to Janet Reno. Mitchell was a better dresser.
– Deep Throat: This is too given to double-entendres, so forget about it.
– Top leaker: Daniel Ellsberg versus Linda Tripp. Somehow Tripp’s sneaky Monica tapes fall short of the Pentagon Papers, even if Clinton and Nixon considered the disclosure of each the equivalent of treason.
– Friend in need: It’s Bebe Rebozo, the rich banker whose home in Key Biscayne, Fla., was a Nixon retreat in times of distress, versus Harry Thomasson, the producer (“Designing Women”), whose California oceanside home does likewise for Clinton. The difference is that Rebozo, who secretly managed huge sums for Howard Hughes, never met Delta Burke.
Of course, one can’t make too light of what’s going on. It is possible that Starr indicts Blumenthal for, say, calling Time but not Newsweek or the Tribune but not the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights.
If this happens and he’s convicted and goes to prison, I hereby promise him free Sunday home delivery and my pager number.
GOP fails to walk the reform talk
“A noble failure? Absolutely not,” said Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) after his vigorous effort to change our awful campaign-finance laws went down the tubes last week.
The same Republicans who pilloried the Clinton administration during last summer’s campaign-finance hearings sabotaged changes that seemed incumbent during those sessions.
“The most surprising thing to me was the unwillingness of our opposition to talk about any alternative, to negotiate and talk about what they were concerned about. They shifted from one phony argument to another,” Feingold said Friday on his way to the airport and home.
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Feingold had a majority of 52 votes but not the needed 60 to fend off a filibuster. “I never felt we had the 60 votes,” he said, “but I thought it was possible to grow to that point.”
While he really seems convinced he will prevail, the Harvard University populist knows “this is a Washington issue. It is something about what goes on in Washington, rather than what goes on in people’s daily lives.”
As integral to the political process as the issue is, especially in a democracy, “people tend to think more about how clean their water is or if they will get clunked on the head at the end of the street.”
Cokie watch
Don’t blame me for this:
One of the big gatherings where reporters and sources make nice to one another, the National Press Foundation Dinner, took place last week. It’s a good cause, and it always fetes big shots who have done good deeds.
The stars were Michael Bloomberg, founder of the Bloomberg financial news empire, and ABC’s Sam Donaldson. Each spoke, with Bloomberg declaring that journalistic ethics will be more important, given consumers’ instant access to many sources of information.
“People are going to know even more about you (reporters) and about your axes to grind. So you better get your own house in order before you criticize someone else.”
I was watching at home on C-SPAN, whose director chose that very moment to focus on ABC’s Cokie Roberts.