Eric Alterman

The Woodward team, which includes almost all of semi-official Washington, has been rejoicing over the past few weeks over what looked like the bad boy’s comeuppance. Working furiously on his big exposi of the Kennedy clan, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” Hersh thought he had happened upon a previously buried treasure-trove of documents proving all kinds of previously unsubstantiated allegations. Newsweek reported that a series of signed agreements dated between March 1960 and Jan. 1962 allegedly proved that Kennedy paid Marilyn Monroe more than $1 million for her silence — not just about her long-rumored sexual affair with John Kennedy, but about JFK’s purported relationship with mobster Sam Giancana and other “underworld figures.” According to one quoted source, the papers suggest that Kennedy asked J. Edgar Hoover to arrange Monroe’s murder. Hersh told his publisher, Little, Brown, that the documents were “too good to be true,” and they were.

As everyone now knows, a long and complicated process designed to authenticate the documents in question finally determined they were indeed forgeries. ABC News, which is still tentatively planning to air a special on Hersh’s findings, confronted the man who has been peddling them, Lex Cusack, a New York paralegal whose father, Lawrence, represented the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and was alleged to have worked for Joseph Kennedy Sr. Cusack denied that the documents were forgeries, but no one believes him. Hersh says it’s too bad he wasted so much time on a false lead, but the stuff he still has is “equally good.” Hersh, however, is not talking about what these might be and neither is his editor, the estimable Jim Silberman. While a number of the articles on the controversy have claimed to know what the book contains, none of these claims appear to be based on reliable sources. Little, Brown is still committed to a massive 350,000-copy first printing and ABC, says Hersh, is not pulling its plans to run the two-hour documentary.

The proof, as always, will be in the pudding. But Hersh has rarely disappointed in the past, so it is surprising to see the glee with which his erstwhile colleagues — none of whom has seen a single word Hersh put to paper — have pounced on the prize-winning investigative reporter. Official Washington may yet be eating its words.

The New York Times, Hersh’s former employer, carried a story in which an NBC news executive implies that Hersh deliberately tried to cover up his own doubts about the documents before the two parted company; according to the story, Hersh then did the same to ABC. Hersh calls these charges “outrageous slander,” and says if they were true, “The New York Times should have investigated it and buried me.” The Washington Post ran a catty front-page style-section story. Newsweek assigned three of its top investigative reporters to write up the story and Time treated it as top news as well.

Hersh’s biggest hit, however, comes in the November Vanity Fair. Robert Sam Anson paints him as a nearly maniacal figure, who terrorizes sources, plays fast and loose with the facts, cheated his ex-partner and is given to frequent violent fits of temper. Though the story does treat Hersh with a kind of affection and occasionally, admiration, it quite understandably infuriated its subject. Hersh insists Anson deliberately ignored evidence that he knew would undercut his story and relied on sources of decidedly questionable credibility. “I mean, crawling on the street for four blocks, throwing typewriters through glass windows — where did he get this crap?” he demands.

Anson’s piece poses two key, incendiary questions: Did Hersh wait too long to admit that his documents were forgeries in order to milk more money out of NBC and ABC, and did he then allow the sale of the documents to other unsuspecting investors, a group that allegedly includes Steve Forbes? Second, did Hersh cheat his one-time collaborator on the Kennedy project, Michael Ewing, a former researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the son-in-law of former Iowa Sen. Harold Hughes?

In the first matter, Hersh explains that “The whole goal, for over a year, was to try to find empirical evidence that would back up the documents’ claims. We were looking for a trust fund. We wanted evidence. It took a lot longer than people realize; getting a forensic analysis takes months. By January of 1997 there were serious doubts, but it took us six months to substantiate them.” Why was Hersh so slow to admit the documents were fake? “Suppose we were wrong. What would we do then? There are real legal problems if we were not certain. We tell people we’re out of the deal, and they could sue us. Our belief had to be verified and sustained. It is not as easy as people think. Usually, it is simply my expert against your expert.”

Regarding his treatment of Ewing, who clearly provided Anson with much of his material and comes off in the piece as the unjustly aggrieved hero, Hersh is reluctant to pick on his former partner. He notes, for the record, that he has not spoken to Ewing in over 19 months. While he found his work to be unworthy of the project, he did not demand any of the $300,000 advance that Ewing received to be returned. “There’s nothing to say about my ex-partner. Someone who was once in business with me is no longer in business with me. You have to draw your own conclusions. It’s a question of what Anson knew and what he didn’t write.”

In truth, Hersh set himself up for a piece like Anson’s. Hersh is not a nice man in the Washington sense; he does not know how to make small talk, flatter his bosses, spin his defeats and conceal his fierce competitiveness. He is simply the best investigative reporter alive and expects his work to speak for itself. Bob Woodward, the man who is alleged to hold that title, managed to write a book about CIA Director Casey without discovering that the man was up to his nose-hair in Iran-Contra crime. It could have happened to anyone — except Sy Hersh.

Perhaps more importantly, box sets give devoted fans plenty to argue about. Should the new Impulse! Coltrane box have been chronological according to recording schedules or release schedules? Does Herbie Hancock sound more proficient on his own Blue Note box, or more inspired by the Miles Davis Quintet on Columbia Legacy, which was recorded more or less simultaneously? And why oh why did Bruce Springsteen leave out “The Fever,” his greatest bluesy moan, once again?

Needless to say, such high-quality arguments don’t come cheap. Every year I worry that the old mines will finally give out, but this year’s yield demonstrates an impressive array of precious musical ore. For the generous stocking stuffer, here’s a list of the year’s best.

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Country and Western

Oxford University Press’ new Encyclopedia of Country Music credits Hank Williams with “almost single-handedly … setting the agenda for contemporary country songcraft.” Williams is country music’s Louis Armstrong. He took something that was private and regional — indecipherable to the larger culture — and made it part of our national language. During his career, Williams’ talent for self-destruction and drunken antics often threatened to overshadow his uncontrollable talents as a writer and singer. An unreliable singer, he was playing beer-hall dances in East Texas while charting the No. 1 song in the country with “Jambalaya.” This wonderful 10-CD collection, a limited edition of just 10,000, contains multiple editions of all the great Williams compositions, as well as considerable evidence of the great man’s decline and occasional debasement through kitschy self-promotion. In this regard, it resembles the ne plus ultra of box sets, Verve’s 10-CD Billie Holiday collection, which, in its original form, is almost impossible to find today. The same goes for Mercury’s 10-CD “Complete Hank Williams.” Sure, it’s pricey, but if you have any feeling for country music at all, it’s priceless as well.

Ray Charles’ country albums are honored with another thoughtful bit of Rhino repackaging, “Ray Charles: The Complete Country & Western Recordings, 1959-1986.” If Michael Jordan were a better baseball player, he would be the Ray Charles of sports. Here, the man who practically invented modern R&B brings his unique talents for gospel, jazz and soul singing to various country classics. Charles’ Hank Williams covers are particularly illuminating, and, even after all these years, it’s hard to resist the emotional wallop of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”

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Blues

Columbia Legacy has done a fine, unpretentious job of summing up Taj Mahal’s inventive career in the three-CD “Taj Mahal: In Progress & In Motion, 1965-98.” This set contains a marvelously eloquent autobiographical essay by Mahal, whose country blues talents turn out to have been honed in the Delta country of Springfield, Mass. If you think Mahal’s gift for pleasing audiences cuts into his claims to be an authentic musical son to the likes of Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson, listen to these discs and you’ll find that such nonsense ain’t nobody’s business but your own.

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Jazz

Impulse! Offers up an eight-CD “John Coltrane: The Classic Quartet.” These beautifully remastered discs catch the great sax man just as his inspiration is moving from melody to spirit, between 1962 and 1965. (Last year’s standout box, Coltrane’s four-CD “Complete Village Vanguard Recordings,” preceded these recordings by a year.) Featuring McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass, the early discs cover Coltrane’s “pretty” period, while in the middle he starts moving toward — though never fully reaches — outer space. It’s therefore a good cross section of his entire career, including, as it does, the entire “A Love Supreme” suite, along with a final disc of previously unreleased material. Because Coltrane’s incredible creative energies took him to many different labels in many different guises, however, many of your favorites, including “My Favorite Things,” “Afro-Blue Impressions” and “Blue Train,” along with the wonderful
Johnny Hartman and Duke Ellington sessions, must be found elsewhere.

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The big news from Columbia Legacy’s vaults this year was spelled “Miles.” In what may be the most dedicated mining of any one artist’s archives, the label released two boxes this year. The first and more ambitious is a re-creation of the magic Miles Davis Quintet, with everything the all-star band (featuring Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Ron Carter) recorded between 1965 and 1968. This is one of the most influential (and democratic) groups in jazz history. No other band leader ever made such great use of the creative talents of a small combo. Beginning in 1964, Davis and the band’s co-composers, Shorter, Hancock and the 19-year-old Williams, began to write music that flowed inexorably like a mighty untamed river with uncountable tributaries. The songs had no noticeable bridges, complete turnarounds or simple demarcations. This breakthrough was all the more amazing because at the same time it was making this melodic break with the past, the band was also writing the proverbial book on jazz standards with its magnificent live appearances, captured on the magisterial, eight-CD, “The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, 1965,” released in 1995. The new studio collection, spanning more than 12 official album releases, will take any serious listener at least a year to imbibe; just enough time to prepare for the release of the great Miles/Coltrane quintet years, which preceded these.

“The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, 1969-1970,” while featuring an incredibly diverse lineup, is a more iffy proposition. For many it’s an inspiration, a door opening to previously uncharted musical vistas. For others, it’s the moment where jazz lost its bearings and veered disastrously toward the siren song of fusion and funk, robbing bebop of the talents of not only Davis, but Hancock and Shorter as well. When Hancock was not anchoring Miles’ band during this period, he was
recording his own version of the band. It featured Carter, Shorter, Williams and some great session men and guest soloists as well, most notably Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson. These sessions, which provide a more melodic complement to the Davis studio sessions, have been collected on the six-CD “Complete Blue Note Sixties Sessions of Herbie Hancock.” Like Miles, Hancock is both loved and hated by Jazz purists. He is loved because of the music on this set. Like Miles, young Herbie found a groove that was both hot and cool at the same time. The clear highlights are the “Maiden Voyage” sessions from 1965. The booklet also features each album’s original liner notes. Some of the tunes here are so wonderful it makes you want to grab Herbie by the lapels and demand “Headhunters! What were you thinking?!”

Two of the most ambitious boxes of the year come from the old jazz war horse Verve, which continues to mine its catalog with a degree of dedication and attention to scope and detail that both inspires and amazes. Boxed in its own little wooden house, the 10-CD, “The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve, 1944-1949,” is a kind of movable feast of jazz at mid-century. The JATP concerts were labors of love for energetic producer Norman Granz, and featured everyone from Charlie Parker to Dizzy Gillespie, Nat “King” Cole, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet and many, many others. The box is a veritable embarrassment of riches bringing together these historic performances under one roof. Much of it was previously unreleased. Some of it was available only
on 78-rpm records, and some appeared only on Armed Forces Radio. Nevertheless, no one who calls himself a jazz fan could possibly be less than delighted with this box. The sound quality is not always stellar, but the performances — in which the musicians goaded one another before uniquely integrated concert audiences — reach for the moon.

Verve has also brought out an elegantly packaged eight-CD “The Ella
Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington Cote D’Azur on Verve.” The music is pretty straightforward; you either love it enough to want eight CDs of it or you don’t. More than 80 percent of this music will be new even to fanatics, and there’s a bonus CD with an Ellington rehearsal on it. While few would contend that the mid-’60s were the best years of the great man’s orchestra, it is nevertheless driven by a powerful second wind, largely inspired by the amazing playing of Paul Gonsalves on tenor. The band is also joined by some its most illustrious alumni, including the immortal Ben Webster. Ella, however, never sounded better, before or since. Goofing on one song after another with Duke’s orchestra, her singing on this set is a happiness drug.

A final elegiac note: the now-defunct Smithsonian Records division put together another one of those boxes that only it could have done — crossing, as it does, not only genres but labels, egos and all kinds of legal hassles. “The Jazz Singers,” is a five-CD history and introduction to virtually all of the greats. Snap it up for the budding jazz fan if you can find it, but don’t go looking for any follow up.

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Rock

For intelligent rock fans, the first and last word this year is “Bruce.” After 25 years of storing more finished material than he released, Springsteen finally cleaned up some old tapes, added a few overdubs and dumped more than four hours of new music — 66 songs in all — on the world. Much of it has never even been bootlegged. (Springsteen gives the Dead a run as the most bootlegged artist of all time.) The box, issued by Columbia and titled
“Tracks,” is similar in conception to Bob Dylan’s “bootleg” series. Probably no other rock musician could dare to present an entirely alternative career in one shot without destroying the one he first created. The Bruce Springsteen represented in “Tracks” is a bit more light-hearted than the one we knew, though each of his many musical personas is amply represented. Springsteen failed to release these songs not because they were inferior to the ones he chose, but because he considers his albums to be musical novels of a sort. All of these songs, for one reason or another, would in his incredibly hyper-cautious mind risk upsetting either the theme or the flow of the larger work he originally had in mind. Like the Dylan bootlegs, the release of “Tracks” gives musicologists plenty to worry about. What if Bruce had released the stark, acoustic version of “Born in the USA” on “Nebraska” instead of waiting and releasing the rebel-rousing version that so confused Reaganite America? What if the uncertain gender relationship in “Blood Brothers” had confused Springsteen’s hardcore heterosexual audience before he released “Streets of Philadelphia”? And where the hell are “The Fever” and “The Promise,” for God’s sake? Why is it that after the release of a four-CD box set of historic material, rock’s greatest performer continues to remain its greatest tease?

While Springsteen’s box is a four-hour cornucopia, Capitol’s four-CD John Lennon anthology, “Wonsaponatime,” turns out to be hard work. While Paul McCartney has, rightly, been given a hard time for the slight nature of his post-Beatles career, Lennon has been given a free ride. His first two albums were pure genius. (But McCartney has two good albums to his name as well.) The rest have been entirely forgettable. Most of what’s on the box set is stuff that Lennon was correct to leave off albums that weren’t so great in the first place.

God’s gift to box-set collectors are the nuts out at Rhino Records, who excel at creating needs we never knew we had. This year’s greats include the wonderfully awful nine-CD ’70s collection, “Have a Nice Decade” and the two-CD “Bar-b-que Soul-A-Bration” (recipes included).

More serious are recent collections of the music of Randy Newman (four CDs “Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman”) Burt Bacharach (three CDs: “The Look of Love”) and ’60s psychedelic garage band music (four CDs: “Nuggets: Original Artifacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68″). Each one is, to a considerable degree, a matter of taste, but the renaissance collector in your life will want all three. Newman is probably the most intelligent composer in rock without even the pretensions of a profitable career. (I recently saw him at a television taping pleading with the audience to buy tickets for his real show the same week.) The box draws on most of the highlights of his wonderfully nasty career, and features one CD of new/old stuff and one of the artist’s film songs. The liner notes from his latter career (“Toy Story,” “James and the Giant”) suggest the sardonic Newman’s inability to take his compositions seriously. About “Going Home” Newman explains, “I didn’t listen to it.” For “Interiors,” he tells us that he thought “Woody Allen’s ‘Interiors’ was his funniest picture.” For “Yellow Man,” Newman explains, “I like the idea of relegating 5,000 years of Chinese history to a component of our culture.”

The Bacharach box is kind of a goof. A little bit of Dionne Warwick, I think, goes an awfully long way. There’s some great stuff on this thing, and no martini/Twister party should be without it. But three CDs in a row has pretty much the same effect as does failing to pick your tracks carefully when listening to “Have a Nice Decade.” Do not, I repeat, do not, listen to Herb Alpert singing “This Guy’s in Love With You” while lifting heavy machinery.

The “Nuggets” box, on the other hand, makes me wonder how I ever lived without it. The only place I’ve ever found the Swinging Medallions perfect single, “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love,” this stuff was probably considered worthless by the people who were making it. Instead, it speaks to the sprit of its times — and the timelessness of rock as rebellion/party music — with a power that died just around the time people started drawing smiley faces instead of dotting their i’s. Virtually none of the bands on this collection have a single CD in print anymore, so all of this wonderfully nutty music would have died without Rhino’s diligence. The packaging, for better or worse, preserves the ugliness of the original, and I suppose is intended to put one in mind of a bad acid trip. But this is not acid rock. This music kicks acid rock’s ass. The fact that it was recorded at the same cultural moment as the Miles Davis Quintet is enough to make one wonder if San Francisco and New York were on the same planet at the time, much less in the same country.

Still, I love the thing. It’s the soundtrack to my entire, awful adolescence.
There was a time when, chemically aided, I really wondered what it would be
like to be a horse with no name. I pondered the injustice of ghetto life upon
learning that “Freddie” was dead. I imagined doing things I could yet imagine
to Maria Muldaur as the clock struck midnight at the oasis, and we sent our
camels to bed. Rhino has taken yuppie America’s twin obsessions with nostalgia
and commodification and given us an excuse to drop $100 under the guise of
cultural preservation. (“I have a baby daughter. She will want to know
what music her parents grew up listening to.”)

Of course, I can come up with a reason to buy just about any box set, but Rhino’s
are almost always the most fun. It’s as if the guys who worked there all
stepped out of Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity,” grasping instinctively the
psychic load that pop music carries in the lives of not entirely grown-up men.
Take “Bar-b-que Soul-A-Bration,” a two-CD collection of semi-obscure soul
songs about food. It comes in a three-ring binder, complete with recipes for
Cowboy Church Sunday School Ribs and buttermilk cornbread. There’s enough
cholesterol in one meal to clog the arteries of the entire NBA. But the
mood is just right. The package is actually a cookbook for a great party,
complete with dance-step instructions and a hip invitation you can fill out and send to your friends. But you don’t need to send the invites and cook up
the cornbread to enjoy the fantasy of it — in fact, at 38, I’d be
embarrassed even to show up at such a party. But in the privacy of your living
room, you can still reminisce about the innocence of the days when this music
was recorded and you might consider playing “Catfish Net” (rules included), a
game that seems designed to give you license to grope your better-looking
guests as you play the net to their catfish. And at this imaginary party, no
doubt some geek would have grabbed the lyrics to “Soul Man” and the dance
instructions to the funky chicken (both are thoughtfully provided) and tried
to get everyone to “join in.” Yech! This is what Rhino understands about this
music — it was a simpler time in our nostalgic minds, when we designed party
games for maximum body contact and sang blatantly sexist lyrics with — ahem — soulful sincerity, and ate “righteous coleslaw” and “juke shop banana
cake” without a thought for our waistlines. Or wished we did. Or wish we
had.

Even better is last year’s Grammy-winning six-CD “Beg, Scream & Shout:
The Big Ol’ Box of ’60s Soul.” The music itself hardly required justification
beyond the exquisite sensitivity and inspired inventiveness of its choices –
mostly one-hit wonders or songs you’ve never heard by people you have. Still,
the packaging — the part that makes these things irresistible even if you have
most of the songs already or hated a lot of them in the first place — proved an
endless toy. Created to resemble a lunch-box carrying case of old 45s with
baseball cards identifying the singers and the songs, the box is itself a
recipe for wasting hours and hours amassing completely useless trivia. (Did
you know that Billy Stewart, aka Fat Boy, recorded his two biggest hits,
“I Do Love You” and “Sitting in the Park,” on the same day in December 1964,
both with future Earth, Wind and Fire founder Maurice White on drums?) Those
were the days when we thought we could get somewhere with chicks by knowing
all the lyrics to “Dock of the Bay.”

Rhino has captured something essential about the goofy lightheartedness of
unpretentious rock ‘n’ roll. I would never have bought this stuff on late-night
TV, where it used to live and had loser written all over it. Somehow, crappy
music can be ennobled by innovative and intelligent packaging, the way second-rate literature can be improved by creating a new critical context. Remember
the stuff that Stiff Records put out in the late ’70s (“If It Ain’t
Stiff, It Ain’t Worth a Fuck”)? Some of it was pretty good — the Nick Lowe, early
Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, and the now forgotten “Any Trouble” — but most of it
was worthless. Put it all together in a fancy box, however, and you
learn something about working-class English maleness that cannot be gleaned
from any other medium.

Of course, box sets are hardly limited to music of questionable lasting value.
The phenomenon has done as much to elevate the status of jazz as any
university program or foundation grant during the past decade. By going back
to the original tapes, cleaning them up and putting them out in chronological
form, jazz archivists have been able to demonstrate — rather than argue — the
progression of jazz as an increasingly complex art form that builds on the
advances of its elders, while remaining true to certain essential elements.
The companies have proven surprisingly generous in their willingness to serve
the collector whose goal is completeness, rather than just the stuff that will
sell.

When the music needs no apology, the packaging doesn’t matter so much. The big
fight among aficionados is just how the rediscovered and remastered music
should be sequenced. For instance, Rhino’s seven-CD “The Heavyweight Champion:
The Complete Atlantic Recordings” hews pretty closely to the original order of the albums, with only a few
alternate takes repeated immediately, thereby almost freeing the listener from
the tyranny of whatever the rehearsal
schedule might have been, and demonstrating respect for the artistic
intentions of whoever produced the album in the first place. Mike Lang, who is
in charge of the rerelease of archival material for Verve, however, believes
that box sets should “hew to a chronological line because a box set collector
is savvy enough to program the CD player” to re-create the original order. I
disagree, but it’s hard to argue with the man who put together what is widely
recognized as the ne plus ultra of jazz box sets — the 10-CD Verve Billie
Holiday box. Lang also feels strongly that labels need to agree to release
their box sets before they release the remastered original CDs individually.
Otherwise, the two or three new cuts that have been discovered in the vault
during the interim can end up costing the completist collector hundreds of
bucks, since he likely has been buying up each rerelease as it becomes
available, only to find that he is missing two tracks once the box comes out.
Of course, he gets all the cool packaging too …

The punditocracy shares a nearly universal belief that when Clinton and Hussein stood “eyeball-to-eyeball,” Clinton blinked. There is a word for Clinton’s response to Iraq’s machinations last week, thundered Charles Krauthammer: “Appeasement — lacking, of course, the scale of the ignominy at Munich, but matching nicely the style.” New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal also found the Chamberlain sellout analogy to his liking, writing that the controversy was resolved “in the sense that the ‘controversy’ caused by Hitler’s appetite for Czechoslovakia was ‘resolved’ at Munich in 1938.” His colleague William Safire added, “In a meeting reminiscent of Molotov and von Ribbentrop, Primakov and Tariq Aziz agreed to ‘more effective’ inspection.”

“As president of the United States,” former Newt Gingrich mouthpiece Tony Blankley harrumphed on CNN’s “Late Edition,” Clinton “didn’t feel he was potentially powerful enough to exercise” American power. Al Hunt told CNN “Capital Gang” viewers that Hussein is now “better off.” This view was echoed by Steve Roberts on “Late Edition,” by Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot on Jim Lehrer’s “Newshour” and John McLaughlin on his show, “Clowntime,” aka “The McLaughlin Group.” The punditocracy had wanted war, and they were pissed when Clinton took it away from them.

A week before the compromise was reached, Morton Kondracke was demanding that the U.S. “form as big a posse as we can.” “Clearly, we’ve got to strike the head,” intoned Sam Donaldson on “This Week.” “[Saddam] must go,” chimed in Margaret Carlson on “Capital Gang.” And on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the ever-thoughtful Rush Limbaugh considered Hussein’s wholly predictable aggression against the U.S. and posed the following question: Should we “wait until he does it, or preempt it?”

Now rewind six years to 1991, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. At that point, the very same pundits were lavishing great praise upon their new hero, George Bush, who, in their estimation, had ensured we would never have this problem again. Fred Barnes, speaking on “McLaughlin,” called Bush’s performance “flawless, daring, bold and fantastic,” indicative of what he termed to be “the greatest presidential leadership ever.” On the same show, Kondracke praised the president’s “vision, guts and grace,” terming the U.S. ground war “an act of mercy.” Evans and Novak reached the highest purple heights, professing to detect a “fearsome, transcendent America emerging from Bush’s flawless conquest of Saddam Hussein,” coupled with “something … intangible and mystical in the new relationship that now appears to bind the president and his country.”

However costly the victory may have been, argued Krauthammer two months after the war ended, “the primary gains of the war — the liberation of Kuwait and the destruction of Iraq’s potential for aggression — remain.” Oh reeeeeaaaaaally?

Curiously, the current debate also repeats the theme of Russian
perfidy. Last time it was Mikhail Gorbachev doing the evil deeds; this time it was Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov. Rosenthal fulminated that Gorbachev was trying to “retain his old pal, Saddam Hussein,” because “the Moscow-Baghdad alliance was never dissolved.” Safire accused Gorbachev of “perfidy” at a “cost of thousands of American and allied lives.” Kondracke, the alleged reporter among the group, went so far as to insist that Gorbachev already was “re-arming Hussein,” though of course he neglected to include any evidence. Now listen to Rosenthal, six years later, heartsick over “Yevgeny Primakov, the most influential foreign ‘diplomat’ in the Mideast, the same Yevgeny who was such a passionate admirer of Iraq when he was a big man in the KGB. He still is, now that he is also Russian foreign minister.” He is joined by Safire, who calls Primakov “the world’s most experienced spymaster,” who, beast that he is, “worked frantically in Moscow and Baghdad to prevent the U.S. intervention.”

Not one of the armchair generals calling for cruise missiles and bombing attacks has explained why force is any more likely to remove Hussein’s secret weapons caches than the 88,000 tons of explosives we dropped last time. Nor do they mention just why Hussein is likely to be hurt by the further imposition of starvation on his citizens. Kondracke worries that “easing the suffering of the Iraqi people also reduces political pressure on Saddam.” How’s that again? All of a sudden the guy’s a humanitarian? Alone among the weekend warriors, William Kristol had the honesty to point out that “getting” Hussein would require ground troops, and hence, a real war that reached all the way into Baghdad. Unfortunately, neither Norman Schwartzkopf nor Colin Powell, nor any of our allies, were willing to risk those kinds of casualties last time around, much less this one.

“The peace,” George Will complained this time around, “is not nearly as much fun as the war was.”

Term limits for talking heads, anyone?

Here’s what happened at the Spectator: Brock, and the magazine’s recently deposed publisher, Ronald Burr, both ran afoul of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded wing of the far right. Brock did it with his unexpected love letter to Hillary, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.” Burr fell from favor by apparently looking too closely into the moneys that the Spectator (which is headed by R. Emmett Tyrrell) receives from various Scaife foundations. A lot of this money was apparently disbursed to persons of less than stellar character — people, for example, who have been wandering around Arkansas looking for drug smugglers, murderers and hookers who say they can pin something on the president. Much of what they claim to have discovered has appeared in the Spectator — some of it under Brock’s byline, some under Tyrrell’s. Almost none of it seemed likely to survive a professional audit of the type that Burr was demanding, however, and so he is now out of a job.

Brock had already made a virtue of necessity by attempting to mainstream himself by dumping on his ex-comrades. So far, only Esquire has bitten. Tyrrell’s decision to cut Burr loose, however, has angered many on the magazine’s masthead, including P.J. O’Rourke, who told the Washington Post, “The tendency of the magazine to do this Clinton-obsessive stuff, I don’t get. It seems strange and somewhat embarrassing.” Coming from a Clinton-obsessive himself, those are strong words indeed.

In addition to bankrolling Tyrrell and company, Scaife, who once called Nation Senior Editor Karen Rothmyer a “Communist cunt,” is also the prime benefactor of such illustrious journalistic institutions as the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Accuracy in Media, the Heritage Foundation, GOPAC, the National Taxpayers Union, the Western Journalism Center and the collected works of one Christopher Ruddy. Just about the only Whitewater nut who is not sucking on the Scaife money-tit is The New York Observer’s Phillip Weiss. You can bet that each one of the journalists swimming in Scaife dough will stick to the Whitewater story, particularly given the cautionary tales told by the treatment of Brock and Burr.

The John (son of Norman) Podhoretz story, while considerably less dramatic, illustrates another truth about contemporary right-wing journalism. All of the writers who worship at the shrine of the free market would be lost if any of them were ever forced to earn their living working in it. The new editorial page editor has spent virtually his entire life supping at the table of strange right-winger foreigners seeking to buy their way into respectability by courting the American right. Podhoretz’s first patron was that distinguished theologian and jailbird Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who hired John and his college roommate, Todd Linberg, to provide a Nice-Jewish-Boy front for his nefarious activities. At both Insight and the Washington Times, young Podhoretz distinguished himself with prose that makes one yearn for the sparkling models of clarity and fine writing that appear under Abe Rosenthal’s name on the Times op-ed page. According to Charlotte Hays, who was also employed by the Moonies during Podhoretz’s tenure, John was known around the office as “John P. Normanson” because that was they way his editor introduced him to visitors. Writing in The New Republic, Hays reported that Podhoretz’s self-infatuated prose was often read aloud “to the accompaniment of gales of laughter.” Charlotte Allen even coined the term “podenfreude” to describe the enjoyable sensation one experiences while reading terrible writing.

Podhoretz briefly worked at U.S. News, which is owned by Mortimer Zuckerman, but is edited by real journalists. He published next to nothing and was summarily sent back to the Moonies, where he labored in continued obscurity before he was rescued by comrades in the Reagan/Bush speech writing office. This job turned into a kiss-and-tell memoir that garnered accolades so deep and moving that Podhoretz managed to land the prestigious perch of television critic for the New York Post. Rupert Murdoch, another foreigner anxious to use his media holdings as a way of ingratiating himself with right-wing political power, puts an estimated $10-to-15 million into the trashy tabloid in an attempt to tilt local political decision-making in his direction. In late 1994, Murdoch decided that he was insufficiently appreciated in Washington. So he tried to give Newt Gingrich more than $6 million for a book worth less than a fifth of that, and gave young Podhoretz and Republican power broker William Kristol another fistful of cash to found the Weekly Standard. (Kristol is the son of Neocon godfather Irving Kristol, who in turn is the chief beneficiary of the William E. Simon-directed largesse at the right-wing Olin Foundation. Podhoretz’s father is the former editor of Commentary and also the beneficiary of oodles of Murdoch money. Both Kristols are considerably more talented, to say nothing of feared/admired, than both Podhoretzes.)

While the Standard does serve as a kind of tribal drum for congressional Republicans, it has been no more popular with the larger political class than Gingrich’s awful money-losing book. The magazine’s circulation for the past six months barely topped 60,000, compared to 96,000 for the New Republic and just under 104,000 for the Nation. While the Weekly may serve its purpose by giving Kristol a larger forum for his sharp tactical political advice, it has failed in its central mission, namely to reshape the political discourse of the punditocracy. So Podhoretz is moving back to New York to take over the Post’s editorial pages, where he will try to fill the shoes of the infamous Eric Breindel, another Murdoch/Norman Podhoretz protigi.

If all of these connections sound a little confusing, they should. Contemporary right-wing journalism is a vast web of connections and feuds that, fortunately for the rest of us, keeps right-wingers primarily occupied with phony murders, internecine fights and lots of preaching to the converted. This may not be fundamentally different from the current state of contemporary left-wing journalism, but it certainly wastes a great deal more money.

What could I conclude but that this woman was more full of shit than just about anyone I had ever met? She was clearly off her rocker when it came to international politics. Worse, the comments about CBS seemed to indicate she was desperate to impress. I had heard rumors that she was being considered to replace Klein there, but frankly, I dismissed them out of hand. Klein was obnoxious, but at least he had a track record. Who the hell did this ignorant pixie think she was? Well, Laura Ingraham understands the media better than I do. She has something more important than knowledge or experience — and she knows it. She has star quality.

Laura was hired by CBS to replace Klein, and together with Bill Bradley offers regular commentary on the Evening News. She also worked as a regular pundit on MSNBC, thereby becoming the only person in history, as far as I know, to negotiate simultaneous contracts with both NBC and CBS news. Neither one could live without her. She also turns up regularly on Imus, “The McLaughlin Group,” “Politically Incorrect,” in Vanity Fair and on the New York Post’s Page Six. One day she is flying on Robert DeNiro’s plane, the next she is dining with Dustin Hoffman. Laura look-alikes have begun sprouting up all over the media, spouting right-wing anti-feminist politics as they brush their peroxide blond locks back and straighten out their leopard miniskirts on camera. Who cares that, to most women, Laura and her acolytes’ right-wing Republican politics have about as much appeal as a stag party in a strip joint.

Laura recently left MSNBC, presumably for greener pastures, and so I can write about her without any professional conflicts of interest. I admit to liking her and missing her around the station. Unless the subject was law or a Clinton-related scandal, Laura rarely seemed to know much about the subject at hand, but she never evinced any ambivalence about where the real issue lay. She once destroyed me in a debate about the upcoming election when I tried to argue that the great unaddressed issue between Clinton and Bob Dole was the ravaging effect global capitalism has had on peoples’ lives and communities. She just laughed. We were, after all, on television. Just how did I expect to explain to soccer moms that their problems lay not with taxes or family values but with highly mobile capital markets? Laura looked and sounded great and responded with some snappy Republican campaign slogan. I was toast.

More than anyone else alive, I fear, Laura Ingraham speaks to the Zeitgeist of the contemporary American media. She is young, sexy and ambitious. She argues politics the way lawyers argue cases, as if there can be no possible interpretation other than her own, and what can possibly be the matter with her pathetically out-to-lunch opponent? She is a class-A schmoozer who understands her considerable gifts and exploits them to the fullest. If there’s someone at a party or a lunch or even in a TV studio Laura wants to talk to, she’s there, and suddenly the guy is an old friend.

What Laura is not, however, is a careful thinker or knowledgeable analyst. Her professional training is pretty much limited to a bomb-throwing stint at the Dartmouth Review, three years of law school, a clerkship for Clarence Thomas and a sexy appearance on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. I understand why she was hired by MSNBC, which puts a premium on youth and hence is willing to cut workers slack in the experience and reasoned thought department; and a beautiful right-wing blond on “The McLaughlin Group” requires no explanation whatever. But CBS News? Opposite Bill Bradley? This is not a morning show, where Molinari-esque perkiness comes with the coffee. This is the flagship news program of what once was “the Tiffany network.” Are great looks and superficial debating abilities so valuable on television that a Laura Ingraham is equivalent to a former senator who rewrote the tax code and has provided the country with some of its toughest political speeches on race for the past two decades?

Well, yes. CBS’s ratings may be in the toilet, but no one is blaming Laura. The network is most often criticized for sticking to stodgy old formulas that emphasize “real news” at the expense of the feel-good, tabloidy stuff that is eating up the business the way Godzilla swallowed Tokyo. We have reached the point, it seems, where exactly the same qualities that make someone a likable sitcom star can also land them a job where Bill Moyers and Eric Severeid once sat. What I don’t understand is why Laura is satisfied with just politics. Diane Sawyer once worked for Nixon but, as glamorous agent for our celebrity yearnings, she can now buy and sell small countries. Ditto for the apolitical non-journalist Barbara Walters. Laura Ingraham has catapulted herself atop the greasy pole of political commentary in a period when most aspiring TV personalities are still peddling their wares in Peoria. Can it be long before she’s showing Queens Diane and Barbara the door as well? They are showing a few wrinkles, after all.