It’s too bad that Babafemi Ojudu couldn’t make it to the recent 113th annual dinner of the Gridiron Club. Ojudu, 36, is a prominent Nigerian journalist who is managing editor of a magazine called The News in Lagos, Nigeria, and an editor of affiliated publications.
We’d met a year ago when he was here as a guest of the Freedom Forum, a wealthy foundation that promotes a free press and is known to some wags as the “Feed’em Forum” since it doesn’t skip on nice meals. That’s not hard when you have $1 billion in assets.
Ojudu came to Washington after exiting his homeland, now run by the military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, after incidents arising from tough stories he had written. He had been arrested and thrown in jail for 10 days and, after writing about Mrs. Abacha spending millions on a trek to Beijing, was arrested one more time, then stripped and tortured until he passed out.
I had not heard about him since, certainly not before the Gridiron. There a self-appointed elite of 60 print journalists put on their annual, generally sophomoric attempt at political satire as they fete the president, most of his Cabinet and an A-list of American media and business at a white-tie-and-tails gathering.
Donald Newhouse, the self-effacing head of the Newhouse media empire, was among attending titans, as well as publisher Steve Forbes, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, California Gov. Pete Wilson, lobbyist and Clinton pal Vernon Jordan, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, author Frank (“Angela’s Ashes”) McCourt and many senators and congressmen.
Tickets are a function of membership. If you’re a full-time member, you get a certain number, as well as participating in a lottery for the right to invite celebrity bigshots. And if you are that year’s Gridiron president, this is your night-of-nights.
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This time, it was syndicated columnist and CNN stalwart Robert Novak. Since his nominal newspaper affiliation is the Chicago Sun-Times, the newspaper’s owner, Canadian Conrad Black, sat next to President Clinton at the head table, with Sun-Times editor Nigel Wade seated between Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman.
The Sun-Times crew seemed somber, perhaps restrained by the grandeur of the moment, while Team Tribune was rather more animated, largely since ebullient icon Ann Landers was smack in the middle of a delegation including top news executives and a prime advertiser. And after several years of being relegated to an area just outside the kitchen, we were up against the dais, though staring at Glickman and Reno. Life has its tradeoffs.
The event began with the ballroom going dark and Novak welcoming one and all. He mentioned the club’s tradition to “singe but never burn” in the skits about the people its members cover.
The Marine band played the service anthems. Each year, fewer members of the ruling class stand up. A small minority has military experience, which surely puts Clinton at some ease.
Novak introduced members Helen Thomas of United Press International and columnist Mark Shields, the latter solicitously presenting the likes of Greenspan (a prime reason, Shields informed, for the “Clinton economic miracle”) and Jordan, a chum of many reporters.
Thomas, who covers the White House, was similarly benign in introducing presidential spokesman Mike McCurry but committed humor in indicating that Forbes “dares speak for a true minority, the angry affluent.”
The subsequent show was interspersed with staples including bon mots from the designated Republican speaker, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the designated Democrat, White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles.
Gingrich was lame. “Maybe shutting down the government was a little overkill,” he said, later ending on a characteristically maudlin note by pleading to work as hard as he could for the country and Clinton. Gag me with a spoon.
Bowles, a bespectacled, deadpan North Carolina millionaire, was better. “Workers of the White House, unite! We have nothing to lose but our capital gains,” he said. It is a further sign of the fall of communism that Karl Marx jokes work like a charm among the propertied class.
The Kiwanis Club air meant that the songs skirted the Monica Matter. It didn’t get much tougher than a fellow from the Buffalo News portraying George Stephanopoulos who counsels several White House interns (to the apparent tune of “People Will Say We’re in Love”):
Here is the gist, a practical list for new interns.
Don’t whisper in his ear,
Don’t whistle when he runs,
Don’t say you admire his buns,
People will say you’re in love.
Embattled Clinton was superior. “So, how was your week?” he began. He indicated that White House lawyers had circumscribed what he could discuss, leaving him with “critical infrastructure, the Africa trip, the Millennium.”
He was droll on the year 2000 computer mess, which could prompt screwups if computers think it is actually the year 1900.
We had to build a bridge to the 20th Century, he said, where 8-year-olds could churn butter, 12-year-olds work in coal mines and where the abacus can get more powerful.
“I will challenge America to send a man to the South Pole and bring him back safely,” he said.
During one break, Clinton moseyed our way and chatted with a boss of mine, who went to law school with Bill and Hillary. Any reticence allayed by alcohol, I bade hello to Clinton and mentioned a mutual friend and a new, generally uninspiring book about the White House press corps.
His brief responses were polite. He had the glazed look and frozen smile of a master pol who’d been up for 36 hours and, given ongoing domestic stresses, perhaps ducked a flying lamp shade or two.
(It behooves me to note that several Gridiron members, aghast that I had not only shown up again but chatted up the Big Guy, proclaimed their derision in e-mails to Matt Drudge, an odd duck who runs an Internet media gossip report. Idle Gridiron minds are the devil’s workshop).
As always, the evening concluded with everybody in the room holding hands and singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
By coincidence, the slight disjoint between the media scene here and other environs was underlined a few days later with the annual report on press freedom abuses worldwide.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists indicated at least 129 journalists were imprisoned in 24 nations by the end of 1997 and 24 were slain during the year.
I had attended last year’s press conference, where I met Ojudu. This time, he made the report, not the press conference. It turns out that six weeks after we met, he sneaked back into Nigeria to work clandestinely and see his wife and children (one of whom was born while he was hiding out in the U.S.).
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The committee knows that he attended a seminar on media issues in Kenya, then was arrested when he crossed back into Nigeria on Nov. 17.
“We know that he’s alive but in very bad state healthwise, having lost a lot of weight and with rashes all over his body,” said Kakuna Kerina, African program coordinator for the committee.
Kerina said Ojudu had been questioned just once and never formally charged. He is one of at least 17 journalists in Nigerian prisons.
The matter of press freedom is not one Clinton has confronted during his African trek. He hasn’t mentioned that Nigeria has a long tradition of a vibrant press that has effectively served as a political opposition.
So Ojudu sits in some jail. It’s what can happen in some places when one’s work burns rather than singes.