Watergate Revisionism CREEPs Into Washington Post?

December 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, Frost/Nixon, Internet, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

It’s hard to resist capitalizing that that word when writing on this subject and this newspaper. That said, the reaction of Washington Post writers to the death of W. Mark Felt, who unveiled himself in 2005 as “Deep Throat,” has been, a little surprisingly, not completely a series of panegyrics.

It is true that the Post’s obit of Felt (the latest, much-expanded version, with Bob Woodward re-credited as a contributor rather than co-author, appears here) simply stuck to the basics of the DT story as Woodward has described it over the years.  And it’s true that the Post’s editorial on Felt’s passing stressed that, though his career was “ambiguous” when considered as a whole, where Watergate was concerned he had performed “an invaluable service” when he surreptitiously fed information from a criminal investigation to a reporter in an effort to undercut the position of FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray.

But yesterday, in Slate.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) Tim Noah, while arguing that Felt had done his nation good by leaking to Woodward, also said that the G-man’s motives in doing so were comparable to those of “Scooter” Libby when he was involved in the events that led to the leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, which is hardly seen as a patriotic act down at the Post building.

But Noah’s column might well have been topped for irreverence in the Post’s own pages this morning.  Hank Stuever, a reporter known for his insights into pop culture and his forays into questioning the conventional wisdom, devoted a column, somewhat deceptively headed “Appreciation,” to Felt and Deep Throat’s significance to what (Stuever hinted) may well be a dying era of investigative journalism.

In his column, Stuever quotes Carl Bernstein’s pious claim on CNN yesterday (but which he’s repeated, in one form or another, to hundreds or thousands of journalism students for a quarter-century) that Felt “had the guts to say: ‘Wait. The Constitution is more important in this situation than a president of the United States who breaks the law.’”  Stuever follows that with: “Cue trumpet solo,” and goes on to speak of the “swagger” of Woodward and Bernstein’s era of newspaper work.

He concludes by alluding to words Felt, famously, never spoke:

There is, in the end, plenty of money begging to be followed, the money we don’t know about and the money we do: stimulus money ($850 billion!); Madoff money ($50 billion!), automaker bailout money ($17 billion!).  The best way to appreciate Mark Felt is to work the phones, take notes and figure out how to get that which is off the record, on.

Am I wrong or is there just a hint that Stuever is aware that after January 20, there may well be as many questions about the direction of money as there were in the Clinton administration (especially its last years), and the Washington Times might just be a bit likelier than the Post to examine where it goes?

And in tomorrow’s Post the paper’s former executive editor Len Downie, who seems to have been the last person to be told the secret of DT’s identity before Felt’s family and John O’Connor approached Vanity Fair, has a long meditation about the question so often asked in recent years: Could there be another Deep Throat in the atmosphere of today’s Washington?

Downie says the big difference between 1972 and 2008 is that in those faraway days, the Post had the story to itself for many months; he argues that now, a similar scandal, if written about in one place, would instantly be taken up by bloggers, websites, and maybe even newspapers around the country within a matter of hours. “Of course,” he continues, “an administration under siege would also have more sophisticated resources for investigating leaks and marshaling counter-attacks in the news media and the blogosphere.”

But Downie also poses two other questions at the end of his article (and very significant ones, as TNN commenter Maarja Krusten observes):

In today’s cacophonous media world, in which news, rumor, opinion and infotainment from every kind of source are jumbled together and often presented indiscriminately, how would such an improbable-sounding story ever get verified?

As newsrooms rapidly shrink, will they still have the resources, steadily amassed by newspapers since Watergate, for investigative reporting that takes months and even years of sustained work?

Downie leaves these unanswered, signing off instead by describing the pride he felt when he watched Frank Langella (as RN in Frost/Nixon) calling reporters “sons of whores.”  But the questions are certainly worth thinking about while the Fourth Estate indulges itself in nostalgia about the good old days of underground garages and shifting flowerpots.

(And having mentioned John O’Connor I should also note that in today’s issue of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, he solemnly compares Felt to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.)

Another Side Of Mark Felt

December 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

As readers of his book about the 1950 Senate election in California (Tricky Dick And The Pink Lady) know, Editor & Publisher editor-in-chief Greg Mitchell is far from being a fan of the 37th President. But, as this article shows, he is aware, from personal experience, that some aspects of the late W. Mark Felt’s career, especially concerning the surveillance of fugitive radicals and their friends, didn’t quite jibe with the dedicated defender of the Constitution described by Carl Bernstein on CNN this morning.

Might This Also Apply To New York?

December 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Ethics, News media | Leave a Comment 

A Washington Post editorial this morning discusses the disinclination of the Democratic leadership of the Illinois legislature to fund a special election to select a replacement in the Senate for President-elect Obama (after initially favoring it) because of concerns that the voters might put a Republican in the seat. It concludes:

We aren’t fans of gubernatorial appointments to the Senate. They are undemocratic and subject to abuse. [Illinois Governor Rod] Blagojevich’s alleged actions show in vivid detail the danger of putting that power in the hands of one person. The decision on who should represent the people of Illinois should rest in their hands.

It Didn’t Start With Blagojevich

December 12, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Ethics, Obama administration, Presidents, Republican Party, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Today came word that John Harris, the chief of staff to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich who was arrested on Tuesday with his boss, has resigned his position.  His attorney, Jim Sotos, stated that his client was taking this action “because it was the right thing to do and that’s all I’m going to say.”

This can hardly be good news for the Beatle-coiffed Blagojevich, since it strongly suggests that Harris may be ready to cut a deal with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, much in the way that the chief of staff to “Blago’s” predecessor George Ryan, several years ago, provided the testimony that helped Ryan and several others to jail.

At this point, the Blagojevich affair is still unfolding, with more and more questions being raised about the relationship of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s sons to the embattled governor.  There’s also the matter of the officeholder’s ill-defined (at this point) contacts with some of President-elect Obama’s associates, though America has been repeatedly assured that the President-elect himself has not been tied to any wrongdoing….but let’s save that for my post next week, “Is Obama The New Truman?”

Here I’ll take a look at the highlights of Illinois gubernational wrongdoing in the last 40 or so years

Although William G. Stratton (who succeeded Adlai Stevenson in the governor’s mansion at Springfield) was tried for income-tax evasion several years after leaving office in 1961, he was acquitted.  Therefore, this story begins with Otto Kerner Jr.  Kerner, the son of Illinois’s attorney general of the 1930s (and also the son-in-law of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was slain in 1933 by a bullet intended for President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt), took office in 1961, and, during his term, was one of the more highly-regarded Democratic officeholders in the country – so much so that President Johnson hand-picked him to head a commission to determine the causes of violence in America.  (The report produced by the Kerner Commission figures prominently in Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland.)

In 1968, Kerner left the governorship after Johnson appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.  Not long after that, a Federal income-tax return filed by the owner of the Washington Park and Arlington Park racetracks outside Chicago surfaced, which, remarkably, listed payments made to the then-governor as regular business expenses.  In exchange for these payments, Kerner had arranged for two expressway exits to be constructed which facilitated traffic to and from the tracks.  Kerner was charged with bribery and, after a lengthy court battle, was convicted and resigned his judgeship before he could be impeached.  He went to jail but served only a brief term before being diagnosed with terminal cancer; he died in 1976.

In 1972, Democrat Dan Walker won the Illinois governor’s race after pledging, like many candidates before him, to clean up the statehouse.  His four years were distinguished by constant battles with Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and the latter’s acolytes that accomplished little in the way of a real cleanup of the Windy City’s politics.  After leaving office, Walker, who left office with little money but with some measure of prestige, entered into a series of ill-starred business ventures trading on his name, culminating in the First American Savings & Loan of Oak Brook, which Walker used to arrange fraudulent loans to himself.  When this was discovered he was prosecuted and served a sentence in Federal prison.  In Jan. 2001 he sought a pardon from President Clinton, but was unsuccessful.

In 1998, after Republicans James R. Thompson and Jim Edgar had governed the state for two decades, Republican George Ryan was elected.  Two years later he gained national attention for declaring a moratorium on executions in Illinois and, just before leaving office in Jan. 2003, commuted all death sentences in the state to life imprisonment.

This achievement earned him a nomination for the Nobel Prize for Peace after he departed office, but it did not spare him the attention of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who had arrived in Chicago in 2001 at the behest of then-Senator Peter Fitzgerald, no relation.  (Tonight on the Jim Lehrer News Hour, Mark Shields remarked that if anyone deserves credit for getting the process underway that led to Blagojevich’s arrest it is Peter Fitzgerald, who was inspired to lobby the Bush White House to have Patrick Fitzgerald sent to Chicago after reading Richard Norton Smith’s account of Col. Robert McCormick’s role in Elliot Ness’s fight against Al Capone in the book The Colonel.)  An investigation which started with the revelation that Ryan’s office had issued truck-driver’s licenses to unqualified individuals for bribes soon expanded into a comprehensive unveiling of systematic corruption in campaign contributions.  This led to Ryan’s being sent to Federal prison where he remains today.

With all that history, and all the pressure being exerted on him by Democrats both in Springfield and Washington, it’s remarkable that Rod Blagojevich is still at his office pretending that he can weather the storm.  One has to wonder what kind of deal he might cut with the U.S. Attorney’s office in exchange for an early departure and an easier sentence.

Happy Anti-Corruption Day

December 9, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics | Leave a Comment 

Oh why did Governor Blagoevich have to spoil it? At any rate it was created by the United Nations, and it’s celebrated every December 9. 

International Anti-Corruption Day is a time for political leaders, governments, legal bodies and lobby groups to work together against corruption work by promoting the day and the issues that surround this event. On this day anti-corruption advocates organize events to engage the general public to effectively fight against corruption and fraud in communities.

Other activities that promote the day include: musicals and plays to publicize the message of fighting against corruption; keynote speeches by those who were victims of corruption or fought against it; essay competitions on issues surrounding the topic of corruption; and the dissemination of posters, flyers and other material to increase awareness levels on corruption. Some organizations hold special recognition ceremonies to pay tribute to people and projects that provide assistance to nations and communities in the battle against corruption.

Hat Tip: Jonah Goldberg

Dan Quayle’s Vindication

November 3, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Ethics, Lifestyle, Media | 1 Comment 

When former Vice President Dan Quayle has been mentioned in the 2008 campaign, more often than not, it has been to compare the ridicule he suffered during the 1988 race and throughout his term in office to the mockery directed at Sarah Palin.  But this week comes news that a brouhaha which the media portrayed as a major gaffe at the time may have proven him to be far more prescient than anyone realized then.

On May 19, 1992, Quayle spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  His remarks decried the increased incidence of mothers choosing to bear children outside marriage.  In this context, he pointed to a storyline in the TV sitcom Murphy Brown in which the title character, portrayed by Candice Bergen, chose not to wed the father of her child-to-be, and said that this set an unfortunate example to younger viewers in particular.

Quayle’s speech attracted considerable controversy, and quite a number of printed and spoken words were devoted to ridiculing the idea that a mere TV show could have such an impact in real life. 

But, although the show itself made fun of Quayle’s argument, years later Ms. Bergen said she thought there was a point to what he said, and this week a study published in the estimable professional journal Pediatrics (which is already the subject of a Washington Post article and coverage in other newspapers) describes the results of a comprehensive survey of unwed and teenage mothers which appears to confirm the idea that adolescents are indeed encouraged to pursue promiscuity by what they see on television. 

So far none of the articles discussing the study have mentioned Quayle’s speech of 16 years ago.  But isn’t it time he got some credit for being right?

The Sacrifices Of Public Service

September 25, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Ethics | Leave a Comment 

The Wall Street Journal today reports that in addition to the already-revealed names of some public servants who received below-market sweetheart deals on mortgages from the VIP below-market sweetheart deals program set up by Countrywide Finance Angelo Mozilo (Christopher Dodd, Kent Conrad, Richard Holbrooke, Donna Shalala, and Fannie Mae Chairman Jim Johnson), two new names have just surfaced.

One is Daniel Mudd, erstwhile Fannie Mae Chairman who was recently dismissed when the government conservator took over the leeched-dry mortgage bemehoth. Mr. Mudd was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that the U.S. taxpayers may be balking at funding the multi-million dollar super duper diamond-encrusted gold-drenched platinum parachute to which he had undoubtedly been looking forward.

The other is Jamie Gorelick. Ms. Gorelick has an inspiring personal backstory and a brilliant academic record. Then she was the Clintons’ enforcer at Reno Justice (after Associate AG Hubbell was required to render his public service sacrifices in another place); a member of the 9/11 Commission; Fannie Mae’s Vice Chairman from 1997-2003; and, more recently, a partner at a Washington white shoe law firm.

For her service at Fannie Mae, Ms. Gorelick took away a reported $26 million in salary, bonuses, benefits, and stock options. Now it appears she was able to save at least some of that $26 million thanks to the special terms Mr. Mozilo was able to help her obtain on a $960,000 mortgage.

It is reassuring to know that both Mr. Mudd and Ms. Gorelick have denied that any favoritism was involved.

OK — My Bad — But I Get To Keep My Job

September 10, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Ethics, News media | 2 Comments 

“I really don’t believe making mistakes means you have to give up your career,” Representative Charles B. Rangel said at a news conference in Washington on Wednesday.

Already dealing with the backdraft from several other scandals, eternal Harlem Congressman and immensely powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel has now acknowledged that he failed to pay tax on rental income from a Dominican Republic resort condo (the acquisition of which is already under separate scrutiny). That’s a long sentence, I know, but it’s carrying a lot of information; just as the jaunty, dapper, gravelly-voiced Chairman appears to be carrying a lot of baggage.

The 19-term Congressman was first elected in 1970, replacing the legendary Adam Clayton Powell; his first assignment was to the Judiciary Committee, and in 1974 he was part of the Impeachment Inquiry.  He has been re-elected with scarcely even token opposition ever since.

The rental income-tax story is reported in today’s New York Times:

Representative Charles B. Rangel paid no interest for more than a decade on a mortgage extended to him to buy a villa at a beachfront resort in the Dominican Republic, according to Mr. Rangel’s lawyer and records from the resort.

The loan was given to him by the resort development company, in which Theodore Kheel, a prominent New York labor lawyer, was a principal investor. Mr. Kheel, who has given tens of thousands of dollars to Mr. Rangel’s campaigns over the past decade, had encouraged the congressman to be one of the initial investors in the project.

In fact, it was the New York Post that broke the story — and that has been on “Tricky Charlie’s” (as they style him) finances and living arrangements like a Weimaraner on a pork chop for the last several months.

Chairman Rangel is far and away the biggest recipient of contributions from lobbyists in the New York delegation (and that sets a very high standard indeed.)  In the first half of this year he took in almost three quarters of a million dollars in this manner.

The DNC returned a $100,000 check he gave from the money raised at his 77th birthday party  fundraiser.  (The party, held at The Tavern on the Green in August 2007, raised more than $1 million.)  The technicality was that it went against the Obama campaign’s decision not to accept any PAC-related money, but it was widely seen as a serious slap at the formerly sacrosanct Chairman.

Its namesake’s way of supporting the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York doesn’t, in the words of the Washington Post, “pass the smell test”.  The paper editorialized about “Rep. Rangel’s Tin Cup”:

In the corridors of money and power in New York City, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), is called simply “Mr. Chairman.” Everyone knows that he’s chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. With his sway over tax and trade policy, captains of industry around the country are eager to have his ear. So when a letter from Mr. Rangel, especially if it’s on his congressional stationary, arrives, the 19-term Harlem congressman receives close attention.

As Post staff writer Christopher Lee reported Tuesday, Mr. Rangel has been requesting meetings with business and philanthropic leaders since 2005 to discuss the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York. It’s a $30 million facility Mr. Rangel says is dedicated to ensuring that the next generation of public servants reflects America’s diversity and “will allow me to locate the inspirational aspects of my legacy in my home Harlem community.” So far, $12.2 million has been raised. That includes a $1.9 million earmark, $690,500 in grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $100,000 from the New York City Council, $7.1 million from foundations and $2.3 million from individuals. The largest single gift ($5 million) came from the C.V. Starr Foundation, which is chaired by Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg, a former head of insurance and financial services giant AIG. Mr. Rangel and college officials had a separate meeting with AIG this year, and another gift is under consideration.

Mr. Rangel’s actions raise a couple of red flags. First, House rules forbid solicitations on official letterhead, even for nonprofits. At a minimum, he should stop this practice. Next, Mr. Rangel says that congressional business never comes up at his meetings. We’ll take him at his word. But those with business before Mr. Rangel’s committee could try to curry favor with him by donating to the Rangel Center. The appearance problem here is huge.

Charlie Rangel is a colorful and engaging figure.  He’s the first to admit that “modesty is not really my best trait.” Before the 2004 he joked to voters that, if he became a powerful Committee Chair, “I don’t want to be treated differently than any other world leader.”  You can get an example of his winning ways on this interview given just as he was poised to assume his Chairmanship back in 2007.

Last July it was revealed —again by the New York Post— that Mr. Rangel, whose declared net worth was in the high six figures, was living in four apartments in Manhattan that were rent-stabilized in order to help low income tenants find decent housing.  I wrote about this story here at the time.

Even The Times’ usually restrained prose (especially where powerful Manhattan Democratic Committee Chairs are involved) showed some righteous indignation at the patent unfairness (and political foolhardiness) of Mr. Rangel’s living arrangements:

While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers.

The Olnick Organization and other real estate firms have been accused of overzealous tactics as they move to evict tenants from their rent-stabilized apartments and convert the units into market-rate housing.

The current market-rate rent for similar apartments in Mr. Rangel’s building would total $7,465 to $8,125 a month, according to the Web site of the owner, the Olnick Organization.

Mr. Rangel, the powerful Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence.

Mr. Rangel, who has a net worth of $566,000 to $1.2 million, according to Congressional disclosure records, paid a total rent of $3,894 monthly in 2007 for the four apartments at Lenox Terrace, a 1,700-unit luxury development of six towers, with doormen, that is described in real estate publications as Harlem’s most prestigious address.

It’s one thing to to have a sweetheart deal of a questionable nature.  It’s quite another thing to flaunt it in a lavish rich-and-famous lifestyles coffeetable book.  What could have been the thought processes behind inviting the photographer over for that gig?

Me?  I’m of two minds about all this.  At least I think I am; and, if I am, then it’s at least two.  As a New Yorker, I’m long-accustomed to Mr. Rangel’s colorful ways and means and have developed what amounts to an affection for him.  He can be bombastic and he can be outrageous.  He’s one of the last lions left over from the old days when outsize personalities were not uncommon; and, if you had the right stuff to back them up, they were widely admired.  He is known as a prodigiously hard worker; a good boss; an excellent constituent services provider; and as the kind of all around good guy that is sadly missing and sorely missed around Washington these days.

He is a heart-on-sleeve liberal partisan, many (if not most) of whose positions I couldn’t disagree with more.   But whether you agree with him or not, you know where he stands and you can depend on him to stand up for what he believes in.

Given the unbelievable extent to which all Congresspersons —much less senior Democrats and powerful Committee Chairmen— are isolated from the realities of ordinary daily life while their asses are kissed six ways til Sunday 24/7/365, he has remained refreshingly accessible and good-natured.  And, at least based on what has surfaced so far, he is probably still only in the mid single digits on a ten point run-of-the-mill congressional corruption scale.

He has a very compelling personal story that he set down in an autobiography published earlier this year: And I Haven’t Had A Bad Day Since.  It got such good reviews and word of mouth that I actually bought a copy.  Although I ended up skimming a lot of the political boilerplate towards the end, the earlier sections were vivid and candid.  They include the tales of a somewhat misspent youth, a spell in the Army in Korea where he won a Purple Heart (his reaction to that incident gave the book its title), and the beginnings of a hugely successful career in politics.

But what about his current arguments that he didn’t know about his tax obligations and that he thought his accountants and lawyers were handling everything.  I suppose they’re OK as far as they go.  The question is: how far do they go?   After all, the man is generally acknowledged to be brilliant; he’s a graduate of NYU’s School of Commerce and St. John’s Law School; and he’s surrounded by very large and capable staffs entirely devoted to his continuance in office.  And he hasn’t got to where he is by being inattentive to details.

This ignorance defense is very popular on Capitol Hill these days.  In the last few months it has been invoked by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad to explain the highly favorable non-competitive rates they got on mortgages for second homes from a lender who had business with their Committees.

What level of responsibility —and accountability— should attach to legislators who are in charge of regulating the nation’s banks and writing the nation’s tax laws and who claim ignorance as their defense when serious questions are raised about their financial and tax affairs?

The tide seems to be turning against Mr. Rangel these days.  Slowly now, to be sure; but perceptively gaining speed. His fund-raising prowess, formerly admired, is under investigation.  Ethics Committee involvement is under way.  His ardent support for Senator Clinton’s presidential bid has left him naked to his enemies at the Obamaized DNC.  And it can never be a good sign when you hire Lanny Davis as your defense attorney.

The admirable philosophy that has brought him so far for so long is about to be sorely tested: Charlie Rangel is about to have some very bad days.

UPDATE 9/13/08: In today’s Wall Street Journal, Eileen Norcross has an interesting column about rent control and stabilization in the New York City housing market.

Going Too Far

August 31, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, Internet, News media | 3 Comments 

Catching out the pompous in their pretension and ridiculing the hypocrisy of the sanctimonious are among life’s pleasures.   Howard Stern has managed to turn it a $100-million-a-year career.  Sasha Baron Cohen is developing his own cottage industry based on the formula.  Here in Washington we have Wonkette.  And, as far as I’m concerned, more power to all of them.

But there’s a surreptitious recording of an embarrassing conversation now racing its way around the internet that strikes me as something else entirely.  

Don Fowler was the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997.  Five-term congressman John Spratt is the Dean of the South Carolina delegation and Chairman of the Budget Committee.  They sat across the aisle from each other on a flight back home from the Democratic Convention in Denver and chatted in the idle and offhand way that old friends are wont to do.

For example, they made fun of Sarah Palin for several minutes, Fowler calling her “Dan Quayle” on steroids and Spratt creatively describing her as “just terrible.” They both agreed that, “Other than the simple fact that she’s a female,” she has nothing to offer.

Mr. Fowler, while doing some paperwork, observes that Hurricane Gustav is projected to hit New Orleans just as the Republican National Convention will be opening in the Twin Cities. In Mr. Fowler’s own now-infamousl words:

“The hurricane’s going to hit New Orleans about the time they start. [Chuckle] The timing is — at least it appears now that it’ll be there Monday. That just demonstrates that God’s on our side. [Laughter] Everything’s cool.”

 

Is it just me or does anyone else find this deeply disturbing?   Am I alone in being troubled by the notion that some creep in the next row, pretending to be puzzling over his Suduko, is actually Cecil B. DeMille with a cellphone?

Fun’s fun but fair’s fair and there is such a thing as going too far.

I wouldn’t have so much trouble with a report that began “Overheard speaking on a plane were…..”.   Like it or not, these days if you’re a public figure and you say or do something in public, you should either be mindful of your surroundings or consider it to be on the record.  It may not be nice and it may not be fair but if you can’t stand that kind of heat you shouldn’t be in this kind of kitchen.

At one point while we were working on the research for the President’s memoirs, John Mitchell came to San Clemente to visit with RN.  He brought his young daughter Martha (“Marty”) with him. That night Diane Sawyer and I joined the Mitchells at dinner at El Adobe in San Juan Capistrano, the Nixon family’s favorite restaurant.  

On Friday morning, a detailed account of portions of our dinner table conversation appeared in the political news column on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.  Only then did I realize that I had noticed —if only peripherally— that two men seated at an adjacent table had engaged in no conversation throughout their meal.  I had assumed it was either because they had nothing to say to each other or because they were struck by the unexpected proximity of General Mitchell; he had been out of the public eye for a couple of years, but the “Great Stone Face” was still very recognizable and very striking.  

I considered that conduct then —as I do now— unethical and lousy.  But realistically, I suppose it was just another example of Nixonians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk; we have few illusions about the media but we’re still surprised when they turn out to act the way we always said they would.  

But this in-air stealth cellphone video seems to me to ratchet things up to an entirely new and distasteful and maybe even dangerous level.

To come even close to justifying this kind of intrusion on individual privacy, the subject matter and the stakes would have to be very serious indeed.  If this conversation had involved something illegal, or if it had exposed really gross duplicity involving serious issues, there might be some justification for uploading it.

But the idea that either Mr. Fowler or Mr. Spratt are careless of, or cavalier about, the danger or suffering that might engulf New Orleans is ludicrous.  They are taking perfectly natural and understandable partisan pleasure in the notion that the Republican Convention might be thrown a bit off its stride; and I suspect there’s a subtext of relief because, had their own convention been a week later, they would have been facing the same problem.

To those whose response to all this is: morality schmorality……and to those who say it’s just Frank wearing his wimpy hat because it fits him so well……I say: some shoes fit both feet.  Today’s goose is tomorrow’s gander.  Turnabout is fair play.  Be careful what you wish for.  Because as far a tasteless joke can raise serious questions about a man’s judgment, anybody fashioning a dunce cap for Mr. Fowler better start sewing a hairshirt for Senator McCain.

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