Guilty (21 page)

Or, in Carl Bernstein's telling, Watergate resulted from two courageous reporters breaking from the docile, pro-Nixon pack. Bernstein told Tim Russert that he and Bob Woodward had a “great advantage” in that they “were not part of that national press corps that actually had been taken in by the new Nixon and was writing about the new, gentler, kinder Nixon.”
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The members of the liberal attack machine work in perfectly synchronous action, but individual members of the wolf pack all insist on being hailed for their unique vision. One editor, apparently unaware that he was being “taken in by the new Nixon,” was so enraged by Nixon's landslide victory in 1972 that he said, “There's got to be a bloodletting,” adding “We've got to make sure nobody even thinks of doing anything like this again.”
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If reporters like the president's politics, they will use their “judgment” to allow the president to put the entire country at risk with his whoremongering, amphetamine addiction, arrogance, naïveté, and on-the-job training as he manages a nuclear arms race with a godless empire. But if the media don't like the president's politics, they will use their “judgment” to call him a crook, even as he ends the Vietnam War, saves Israel from total destruction in the Yom Kippur War, and throws the Soviet empire back on its haunches.

Reporters will use their “judgment” to portray Ronald Reagan, who brought peace and prosperity and, incidentally, ended a half-century threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviets, as having brought about a “mess in Central America, neglect of the poor, corruption in government … and the worst legacy of all, the budget deficit, the impoverishment of our children”—as
U.S. News & World Report
editor Roger Rosenblatt put it.
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America's greatest president will be “judged” by expert Lesley Stahl to have presided over an era of the “largest deficits in history, largest debtor nation, can't afford to fix the housing emergency.”
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Even Reagan's reduction of unemployment to its lowest level in a decade will be “judged” a failure because, as Connie Chung put it, “this low unemployment rate is not entirely good news. Fewer people are looking for work.”
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And they called Reagan stupid.

The different treatment of these presidents is not a matter of changing mores in the pressrooms. Three decades after Kennedy's failed presidency, the media's “judgment” was still to fanatically censor any information suggesting that perhaps JFK had not been a smashing success. For revealing the truth about Kennedy long after the fact in his 1997 book
The Dark Side of Camelot,
Seymour Hersh, a liberal Democrat, was venomously attacked in the media. The national press corps was in a blind rage that anyone would print the truth about the only man born without original sin until Barack Obama. As Canadian journalist Andrew Cohen remarked of the vituperation against Hersh's book: “The attacks have been too personal, the denials too practiced, the vengeance too gleeful.” No, he said, “there is something else at work here.” Hersh's book “desecrates an icon, as it seeks to replace an old truth with a new one. In doing so, it threatens the mythology of a generation.”
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Absolutely true, but the myth being so ferociously defended is more than the myth of Camelot. It is the myth that there is no such thing as the liberal media, functioning as a protection racket for liberal politicians from JFK to B. Hussein Obama.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PRESIDENTIAL BIOGRAPHERS ILLUSTRATES which side really has the more fearsome attack machine.

John F. Kennedy's biographers were more blindly worshipful of him than Monica Lewinsky was of her presidential crush, but substantially less dignified than the chubby intern. Among the hagiographic biographies of JFK are
A Thousand Days
by Arthur Schlesinger,
Kennedy
by Theodore Sorensen,
Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
by Kenneth P. O'Donnell, and
Sweet Jesus, I Wish John F. Kennedy Were Having Sex with Me Right Now!
by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Such books were described by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Hersh as reflecting the authors' “devotion to the man whom each accepted unquestioningly as his leader.”
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Meanwhile, Kennedy's single greatest achievement between 1961 and 1963 was inviting photographers to the Oval Office to take his picture as he posed with his arms folded charismatically or leaning on a desk as if deep in thought.

John Dean wrote one of the first nearly contemporaneous books of a president, a scathing account of the Nixon White House called
Blind Ambition.
It was published in 1976—which would have been the last year of Nixon's presidency had he not been forced to resign by a press corps that hated Nixon even more than they hate seniors who don't separate their recyclables properly. Dean's book was widely excerpted, reviewed everywhere, and chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In short order, Dean's book was made into an eight-hour mini-series on NBC. This from the people who, according to Bernstein, “had been taken in by the new Nixon.”

Just as Scott McClellan claimed to have overheard Bush making the shocking admission that he might have done cocaine, Dean said that he once overheard Nixon saying, “The typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case.” This mind-boggling allegation would be proved a bald-faced lie about twenty years later.

The “Hiss case” referred to Alger Hiss, the top FDR adviser and accused Soviet spy, convicted of perjury for denying that he was a Soviet agent. As a young congressman Nixon had exposed Hiss by pursuing the testimony of Hiss's former fellow spy, Whittaker Chambers. The crucial evidence against Hiss consisted of some highly sensitive government documents that Chambers claimed he had received from Hiss when they were both spying for the Soviet Union. Chambers produced the documents from a hollowed-out pumpkin in response to a subpoena from Nixon's congressional committee. Though Hiss denied the documents had come from him, the Pumpkin Papers, as they came to be called, were proved to have been typed on the Hiss family typewriter.

Forced to explain the unexplainable, Hiss expressed amazement on the witness stand, saying he would always “wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.” The jury laughed out loud at Hiss's excuse—and then convicted him of perjury. But Dean's book purported to confirm Hiss's nutty conspiracy theory by claiming he overheard Nixon saying the “typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case.”

Unfortunately for Dean's shocking exposé, decrypted Soviet cables were declassified in 1995, proving that Hiss had been a Soviet spy—
even to the satisfaction of the
New York Times.
Twenty years later, the Dean version of history that had been avidly promoted by the media turned out to be another left-wing hoax.

There were no tell-all books by former employees of the Carter administration, which makes perfect sense, given Carter's masterful execution of his presidential duties.

But Ronald Reagan's administration yielded a bumper crop of kiss-and-tell books. In 1984, Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, wrote
Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy,
in which he described the Reagan White House as “ghost ship” where everyone but the president was in charge. Haig cited disagreements over foreign policy as the reason for his resignation. Reagan wrote in his diary that “the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the Sec. of State did.”

Perhaps the most prescient of the Reagan “insider” books was budget director David Stockman's 1986 book
The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed,
which beat his second-choice book idea:
The Internet Will Never Take Off.
Stockman warned that “the American economy and government have literally been taken hostage by the awesome stubbornness of the nation's 40th president,” making Stockman yet another writer who literally did not know the meaning of the word “literally.” Damn that Reagan! What a crafty, mildly retarded, evil-genius, yet senile bad guy he turned out to be!

After being fired as Reagan's chief of staff, Donald Regan published
For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,
in which he revealed—to the hilarity of the media—that Nancy consulted with astrologers before approving Reagan's schedule. This revelation proved endlessly amusing to reporters, most of whom worked for newspapers that carried a daily astrology column. It turned out that she did so only after Reagan was shot and that Reagan's schedulers viewed it as a harmless good-luck charm like Jimmy Carter's favorite sweater or Bill Clinton's lucky condom. The left-wing attack machine was not so forgiving. An op-ed in the
Chicago Tribune
called the revelations about Nancy's astrology hobby “plain scary.”
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The book was called “shocking,” “devastating,” “explosive,” “spicy,” “controversial,” and “deadly”—and naturally it became a
New York Times
bestseller.
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There were also some mostly admiring books by insiders during Reagan's presidency, such as Press Secretary Larry Speakes's
Speaking Out,
Michael Deaver's
Behind the Scenes,
and Martin Anderson's
Revolution.
The only contretemps to come out of these books was Speakes's admission that he had twice invented quotes and attributed them to the president. But even that confession inured to the president's benefit—frankly, it was a relief to know that Reagan had
not
said of his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, “I believe the world breathes a little easier because we are talking here together.”
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President George Herbert Walker Bush's administration (remember the good old days when you could mention a president's middle name?) was too acquiescent to liberals to incite the media's rage. One month before Bush betrayed conservatives on his tax pledge, the
New York Times
ran a major frontpage article declaring: “Grudging Public Thinks Tax Rise Now Must Come.” Not only did an overwhelming 68 percent of poll respondents expect Bush to raise taxes, so it was no big deal, anyway, but, according to the Times/CBS News poll, “8 of 10 people say they would accept increased levies on beer and liquor and on upper-income taxpayers.”
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The pressure was building for Bush to exercise “strong Presidential leadership” as a
Times
editorial hectored. His irresponsible “Read my lips' pledge had “softened to ‘no preconditions' ” and the
Times
said the “change is welcome.” Finally, Bush was facing up to the “unpleasant fact that real deficit reduction requires tax increases.”
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Having tricked him into raising taxes, thus breaking his famous “no new taxes” pledge, the media didn't need any insiders turning on Bush to help defeat him after one term.

The one administration that should have produced a cornucopia of kiss-and-tell books was Clinton's—assuming that intrigue, lies, sexual high jinks, and executive office crimes would be considered interesting reading. But there was only one true kiss-and-tell book on the Clinton administration, written by retired FBI agent Gary Aldrich, who had worked in the Clinton White House but was not a true “insider.” Among other tidbits, such as Hillary's cursing out Secret Service agents, Aldrich revealed that the government investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton would not have allowed them a security clearance had
they not been the president and first lady.
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The Aldrich book was dutifully squelched by the establishment media, but book buyers still made it a number-one
New York Times
bestseller.

Three other Clinton insiders wrote books during his administration, but none were kiss-and-tell books—at least if you don't count Monica Lewinsky, whose most interesting revelations had already been scooped by the Starr Report. The first insider account was a flattering 1997 book by pollster Dick Morris,
Behind the Oval Office.
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Morris called Clinton “a great President and a great man” in his book and even said that Hillary was “warm, decent, sincere and sensitive, a tireless crusader for children and an excellent wife and mother.” That's the sort of dirt Democratic presidents have to worry about being dug up on them. According to Clinton groupie Helen Thomas, Morris “was determined to keep his friendship with Clinton.” Apparently, it worked: Clinton acknowledged that he was reading the book.
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This was a long way from John Dean claiming he overheard Nixon admitting he faked the evidence against Alger Hiss or David Stockman writing that Reagan's administration was a failure.

Another insider report on the Clinton administration was
All Too Human,
by George Stephanopoulos.
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The book was expected to be “reverent” toward Clinton—in Thomas's words again. But while Stephanopoulos was writing the book, Clinton was impeached. By then, even the media had grown tired of his incessant lies. Consequently, Stephanopoulos played to the only attack machine that mattered and included in his book tepid acknowledgments of the obvious. At the exact moment the media were troubled by Clinton's behavior with the ladies, so was Stephanopoulos!

The shocking insider information in Stephanopoulos's book consisted of his admission that his first impression of Clinton was of “an overgrown boy.” He also revealed that Clinton's temper was “like a tornado.”
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Helen Thomas had already been bored by accounts of Clinton's temper in Morris's book two years earlier. Recall that Stephanopoulos was the man who had ruthlessly crushed Clinton's “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign. In the fawning documentary about that campaign,
The War Room,
Stephanopoulos can be
heard threatening a man about to go public with another Clinton sex scandal, calling him “scum” and warning that he would never work for a Democrat again. But for a $2.75 million book advance, Stephano-poulos finally came clean and revealed to the world that … Clinton had a temper! As one book reviewer put it, Stephanopoulos “does not dish much real dirt.”
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