Guilty (20 page)

LIBERALS' BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH SCOTT MCCLELLAN, GIVEN the way these transactions are generally handled, was how Hollywood doyennes were going to get this butterball laid. Their second-biggest problem was how they were going to treat McClellan like he was Diogenes' One Honest Man after spending years mercilessly (and accurately) ridiculing him as an idiot when he was Bush's press secretary. One imagines washed-up Republican functionaries like McClellan showing up in a basement office at NBC and announcing they want to be rewarded for snitching on a Republican.

The media accuse Republicans of playing dirty pool, but they turn to the retarded press secretary for an attack on his former boss. Liberals control the rewards because they control the media. Journalists love to flagellate themselves for how brutal they were to President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal in order to scoff at the “myth” of a liberal media. They neglect to mention that these Clinton bootlickers had to be dragged kicking and screaming by the Drudge Report to cover that rather humongous story.

Before reviewing the history of presidential kiss-and-tell books, let's take a peek at these guardians of our liberties in the fourth estate— back before the alternative media started scooping them all the time. This will be a preview of the aggressive watchdog media approach to the Obama administration.

The reason it took thirty years to begin learning the truth about
President John F. Kennedy is that a slavish press corps covered up his failings, rewriting history even as it happened. Prominent White House journalists of the day, such as
Newsweek
Washington Bureau chief Ben Bradlee and
Chattanooga Times
Washington Bureau chief Charles Bartlett sent their articles to Kennedy for his approval before publication.
⁷
Bartlett and Stewart Alsop, a columnist with the
Saturday Evening Post,
allowed Kennedy to edit their story on one of the biggest disasters of Kennedy's presidency, the Cuban missile crisis. Try to imagine, say,
New York Times
correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller extending such a privilege to President Bush. Okay, now stop or you'll have to start hitting your head against a wall.

Another complete fiasco of Kennedy's short presidency willfully covered up by the press was his calamitous meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961—a meeting that led to “the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age,” as a 2008 op-ed in the
New York Times
put it.
⁸
For two days, Khrushchev used Kennedy as a punching bag, leaving Kennedy's own advisers white-faced and nauseated. By contrast, Khrushchev was ecstatic to discover that the U.S. president was “weak”
⁹
and that he seemed to be leading a country that was “too liberal to fight.”
¹⁰
The meeting was so traumatic for Kennedy, there are rumors he swore off prostitutes for a full week.

But at the time, obsequious reporters helped Kennedy prevent the public from finding out about the disastrous meeting.
New York Times
reporter James Reston had an exclusive interview with a shaken Kennedy immediately after he had been shredded to pieces by Khrushchev. Although Kennedy did not hide his mortification from Reston, all that
Times
readers would learn about the meeting was that it was “more cordial than had been expected” and that there were “no ultimatums and few bitter or menacing exchanges.”
¹¹

It was exactly the opposite of the truth—which I believe at the time was the above-the-masthead motto of the
New York Times.
Reston's account of the Kennedy/Khrushchev meeting was so at odds with reality that Reston was seriously considered for a Pulitzer Prize. Even when every Washington journalist was offering to perform exotic fetishes on
Kennedy, we were told he was the victim of an unforgiving press corps. In September 1962, Reston ruefully remarked that Kennedy was more popular in the rest of America than he was in Washington.
¹²

Reston was there to cover up another Kennedy family misadventure seven years later. If you've ever wondered how it is that, in a country with an open press, Mary Jo Kopechne's death at Chappaquiddick could remain a mystery, here's your answer! Vacationing in Martha's Vineyard when Senator Teddy Kennedy drove Mary Jo Kopechne off the Chappaquiddick bridge, Reston dictated his story over the phone to the
Times
offices in New York. His first sentence was: “Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family.” He finally got around to mentioning the name of the dead girl in the fourth paragraph. Even the
Times's
editors recognized that the “tragedy” might have been a little greater for the Kopechne family than the Kennedy family and rewrote Reston's story. A different reporter was immediately dispatched to cover the incident. That evening, Reston announced to the new reporter: “The story is over.”
¹³

Throughout John F. Kennedy's presidency and beyond, reporters notoriously hid the fact that JFK was a venereal-disease-ridden sexual profligate and drug addict.
¹⁴
The courtier press was too busy manufacturing a nonsense image of “Camelot,” with rugged Kennedy men in an idealized American family out of
Town & Country
magazine playing touch football.

If the hard work of Kennedy-besotted journalists wasn't enough to clean up the Kennedy presidency, there was always the Hollywood whitewashing in movies such as
Thirteen Days.
The producers must have missed the part of Khrushchev's memoirs where he said: “It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba—for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable. We ended up getting exactly what we'D wanted all along, security for Fidel Castro's regime and American missiles removed from Turkey.”
¹⁵
Good work, JFK! Way to show Obama how it's done!

When Seymour Hersh asked Associated Press reporter James Bacon why he never breathed a word of Kennedy's well-known affair with Marilyn Monroe, Bacon explained that “before Watergate, reporters just didn't go into that sort of thing.” Unself-consciously, he added, “There was no pact. It was just a matter of judgment on the
part of the reporters.” I've never understood why it should be comforting that there is no “pact” when a uniformly liberal press uses its “judgment” to manipulate coverage of politicians for partisan purposes— held individually!—by each and every practicing journalist.

If, as AP reporter Bacon told Hersh, it was “just a matter of judgment on the part of the reporters” whether to report on the president's torrid affair with Marilyn Monroe, his near-daily use of prostitutes, and his “daunting” list of drugs, as the
New York Times
finally admitted, including but not limited to hydrocortisone, testosterone, codeine, methadone, Ritalin, antihistamines, anti-anxiety drugs, barbiturates, and Procaine injections
¹⁶
—in whose judgment were those stories uninteresting? Can I meet that person?

Bacon claimed it was the shocking facts of “Watergate” that nudged the press into a more adversarial role: “Before Watergate, reporters just didn't go into that sort of thing.” This gets rather circular. There would never have been a “Watergate” if the press hadn't been a teensy bit rougher on President Nixon than it was on President Kennedy. Reporters are compelled by the facts of the stories they report to report them, but they are not compelled to report the stories they don't report because the public remains unaware of the facts of the unreported stories.

In fact, Watergate was a boring story. The sort of skulduggery for which Nixon was crucified was standard practice in modern politics. Presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson had used the FBI and Justice Department to harass their enemies and tap their phones—often with the gleeful connivance of the media.
¹⁷
NBC bugged Democratic headquarters in 1968. President Lyndon B. Johnson openly committed voter fraud to win elections in Texas, and he bugged Barry Goldwater in 1964. JFK's arm's-length attorney general Bobby Kennedy asked the FBI for files on steel company executives and sent agents to their homes to harass them.
¹⁸
LBJ assistant Bill Moyers, now of PBS News, monitored the FBI's bugs on Martin Luther King's hotel room, distributing the tapes to select members of the Johnson administration as well as the press. Moyers also ordered the FBI to gather information about the sexual proclivities of Goldwater's staff.
¹⁹
A decade later, President Jimmy Carter wanted to make Moyers director of the CIA.
²⁰
I guess it was just
the press's “judgment” to flip from toadies to a howling lynch mob when Nixon became president.