The bombing of six supposed terrorist sites in Afghanistan and the Sudan Thursday by U.S. forces may have given some Americans a sense of revenge — and temporarily diverted some public attention from President Clinton’s deepening sex scandal — but a number of foreign policy experts believe it will serve only to embolden Middle East radicals bent on further terrorist acts against the United States.
“We’re not doing much more than making ourselves feel good,” says Bernard Reich, professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “It could very well have the reverse effect, especially in Sudan, where there are plenty of wonderful people that want good relations with the United States.”
Thursday’s attacks were directed against targets associated with Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian who’s been financing terrorist attacks since the early 1980s. U.S. investigators have concluded that bin Laden was behind the recent bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. The air strikes carried out yesterday were direct retaliation, but they may have been futile.
“It doesn’t affect bin Laden unless he was killed,” says Scott Armstrong, a former Washington Post reporter who’s been in contact with bin Laden’s associates in researching a book about American policy in the Persian Gulf. “The U.S. military wanted to show great strength. It did. But the only real impact on bin Laden is that he might hamper him a bit in getting money from his family.”
Bin Laden, who moved his base of operations to Sudan in 1991, is reportedly worth $500 million. He’s driven by a fundamentalist, pan-Islamic belief that Western influences must be driven from Muslim holy places, according to Armstrong. It’s a passion that’s shared by some radical Muslims from Saudi Arabia and Tunisia to Bosnia and Chechnya.
Professor Reich says bin Laden represents a brand of terrorism that’s a departure from the state-sponsored terrorism prevalent during the 1980s, when Libya and Iran encouraged and financed terrorist operations. Bin Laden springs more from an ideological, romantic strain of terrorists, who are much more difficult to identify, target and control.
“Bin Laden may be of the romantic variety, but he is the functional equivalent of a state,” Reich says. “He’s worth a half a billion dollars in a part of the world where people will do things for very little money. He can provide cover, passports, transportation. He can do what Syria can do, what Libya did with Pan Am 103.”
Taliban leaders in Afghanistan reported that bin Laden was not killed in Thursday’s bombing raids. Reich says it’s just as well. “He would have become a martyr,” says the professor. “It could very well have had the opposite effect.”
Armstrong agrees that the bombings could backfire. “It could recruit huge numbers of people to his cause,” Armstrong says. “He has about 4,000 active members right now, and he could call on many thousands more. These raids will multiply that by a factor of 10.”
“You have to remember that bin Laden is revered by thousands of his followers,” a weary intelligence specialist said before heading back to another 13-hour shift at the counter-terrorism center in the Pentagon Thursday afternoon. “He’s revered as Daddy to them — Daddy Bucks.
“He’s got thousands of freedom-fighting veterans who went back to their countries, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, but also stretching into Asia. They’re certainly capable of doing all sorts of nasty things.”
And so are his relatives. Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Jamal Khalifah owns a rattan factory in the Philippines, for example, from which he’s bankrolled the Filipino Muslim terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf. In 1991 the organization recruited future World Trade Center bomber Yousef Ramzi.
In 1994 Khalifah was arrested in Morgan Hill, Calif., on a charge of providing false information on his visa application. Eventually he was deported to Jordan and is understood to be busily buttressing bin Laden’s terror campaigns.
The picture Americans have of bin Laden sitting cross-legged in his Afghan redoubt in brown robes, with a scraggly beard and sunken cheeks, meanwhile, may give a false impression of the Saudi’s business and professional acumen.
He is a professional engineer who has amassed a multibillion-dollar family fortune building roads and other construction projects in Sudan, where he lived with his four wives before being forced to move to Afghanistan.
One project was a new, 500-mile highway from Khartoum to Port Sudan, which replaced an old road that was nearly twice as long, cutting travel time by days. Only five years earlier, bin Laden was using the same equipment to blast tunnels through the mountains of Afghanistan for use by Muslim guerrillas in the jihad against the Soviet Red Army.
Intelligence analysts say bin Laden’s cousins manage the Sudan projects now — including the Khartoum pharmaceutical plant that was bombed by U.S. warplanes Thursday. U.S. officials have not said publicly that Laden’s family owned the plant, but “you can use your logic and come up with the most likely conclusion,” one analyst says.
The pharmaceutical plant, the analyst said, was capable of making at least mustard and VX gases for use against Western targets. Bin Laden’s family also has large holdings of land south of Khartoum that Western intelligence suspects have been used as military training camps for Islamic guerrillas, with the training at least partly supported by Iran. Other terrorist groups, such as Hamas and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, openly maintain offices in Khartoum.
In a confidential study for the secretary of defense last year, a group of retired military and intelligence officers concluded a terrorist gas attack on U.S. military bases, including the Pentagon itself, would not be difficult.
As for the likelihood of bin Laden’s retaliation, “The main groups he seems to be affiliated with are no doubt taking a look at contingency plans, if they’re not scrambling for their own little asses,” says the analyst. “It’s one thing to carry out an action and say, ‘Oh, America, you’re a paper tiger.’ It’s another thing to have a goddamn Tomahawk coming through your window.”
Assembling bombs like the ones that exploded in front of U.S. embassies in Africa last week, however, takes “about 20 minutes if you have the materials ready in a truck in a warehouse somewhere,” the analyst points out.
Meanwhile, Armstrong says the raid could start a domino effect in the Middle East if it increases bin Laden’s power and influence. Armstrong said there’s already a large group of clerics in Saudi Arabia who share bin Laden’s religious beliefs that Western influences must be swept from Mecca, Medina and other Islamic holy places. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan is with him. The Islamic government in Sudan is in the balance, but it’s already angry with the United States for supporting a Christian rebellion in the south. “Also,” Armstrong said, “this could certainly radicalize certain people in Pakistan to his cause.”
Says Professor Reich: “We have no conclusive evidence that raids of this sort will have any effect on terrorism. Yes, we can reach anywhere. We have an incredibly impressive arsenal. The question is do you stop groups who are doing terrorist acts?
“We have no solution to terrorism,” he says. “We can slow it down, we can divert it, but a determined terrorist can pull off a terrorist act with relative ease.”
In light of all this, were Thursday’s attacks more politically motivated than militarily? “This event does look like a wonderful confluence of international opportunity and domestic advantage for Mr. Clinton,” says James Morrow, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
“People say that the Lewinsky scandal is weakening the United States internationally, that it is encouraging states like Iraq and North Korea to challenge the United States,” adds Morrow. “I think that argument is absolutely wrong and it’s backwards. I think the temptation for the wounded leader to act is stronger in crisis, and therefore, if you’re a prospective opponent, you have to be aware of that. I think opponents are less likely to challenge a leader who is down, precisely because they know they are more likely to get a strong response.”
For politically wired religious factions, President Clinton’s
attempt to ‘fess up Monday night to his “improper relationship” with Monica
Lewinsky was a blessed event, a divine call to arms. Early Tuesday,
the armies of the right began to march.
Sen. John Ashcroft — the Missouri Republican, gospel singer and
lay preacher who would be president — called for Clinton to resign. “The
country cannot and should not be forced to engage issues with a discredited
president who cannot be completely trusted,” said the Christian right’s point man in the Senate.
Gary Bauer, head of the Family Research Council, berated Clinton
for “abuse of a White House intern, disregard for the dignity of his
office,” and suggested, “It is time for the president to finally act
honorably by leaving the stage.”
It might be tempting to dismiss these comments as predictable
rants from conservative extremists. But the fact is that the right wing has
been gaining political muscle on Capitol Hill and across the country, and
Clinton’s sexual infidelities and dissemblings are certain to give it new
strength. Wednesday morning, in fact, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay joined his voice with the right-wing chorus, calling for Clinton’s resignation, a call that was echoed for the first time by a Democrat, Rep. Paul McHale of Pennsylvania.
“The Clinton-haters will be emboldened, of course, but now the
moral outrage wing will make its presence felt,” says Cal Thomas, a
conservative columnist. “For years these people have been forced to accept
and tolerate things that gross them out. It’s payback time for them.”
The payback will come on two fronts: in Congress as it takes up
independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on his four-year investigation of
the Clintons, which could lead to impeachment hearings; and in this fall’s
midterm elections.
Even with Clinton’s popularity plummeting in the polls following
his admission that he had been lying for months about his affair with
former White House intern Lewinsky, there’s still a strong reluctance in
Congress to impeach Clinton based on Starr’s report, especially if its
strongest charges involve the president’s sex life. “You don’t impeach him
for a peccadillo,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde said right
after the Lewinsky scandal came to light in January.
“If it’s a weak report, then this thing’s over very, very fast,”
says a Democratic staff member. “It’s unlikely a majority would vote to
refer charges of impeachment for lying about a consensual sexual
relationship. Obstruction of justice — yes.”
“They’re [Congress] thrashing it out right now,” says Thomas. “Will they
do the principled thing and live by the letter of the law? Or will they do
the political thing and leave him twisting in the wind with his briefs tied
around his neck?”
Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values
Coalition, is profoundly interested in which course Congress takes. He
heads a Washington political action organization that seeks to turn
churches into electoral machines. The morning after Clinton testified
before the federal grand jury and later addressed the nation, Sheldon met
with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and came away feeling confident that
Clinton would face a harsh judgment.
“I believe Congress will act when they have the document in their
hands,” Sheldon says, implying that Gingrich anticipates enough
incriminating material from Starr to warrant impeachment hearings, at the
least.
But what if the House decides not to act in a way that satisfies
Sheldon and other devout Christian activists?
“We would need to use that to bring to Congress new members who are
committed to moral values and beliefs,” says Sheldon. “It would have an
immediate impact on upcoming Senate and House races.”
Take, for instance, California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer’s race to
protect her seat against a surprisingly strong challenge from Republican
Matthew Fong.
“Boxer hung her hat on Clinton,” Sheldon says. “How can she defend
him every time Fong brings Lewinsky up?”
Likewise, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, a liberal Democrat from
Illinois, “is going to have a problem,” Sheldon warns.
Sheldon’s warning may not be an empty threat.
The Traditional Values Coalition represents 40,000 churches across
the nation, according to Sheldon. He says they are wired to his national
headquarters by an online fax system that pumps out position papers and
exhortations on issues involving homosexuality, abortion and now the
Clinton investigation as it reaches Congress.
“We want our people to turn out to vote,” Sheldon says.
Sheldon is hardly a lone actor. He’s one of the leaders of the new
religious right that’s taking over where Jerry Falwell left off. Its
leaders include Gary Bauer and James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family,
a $112 million-a-year ministry in Colorado Springs, Colo. Dobson reaches from
3 million to 5 million listeners a day by radio. The new religious right
leaders make Falwell look like a benign country preacher.
Dobson’s burgeoning evangelical ministry is untested in electoral
politics, but his power is evident. Shortly after Dobson came to Washington
earlier this summer, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott called homosexuality
a sin and compared it to alcoholism. Then bills started moving through
Congress that would overturn Clinton’s executive order barring
discrimination against homosexuals in federal hiring; another would deny
federal funds to cities that require specific employer benefits to domestic
partners. Dobson has sent nine priorities to Congress that would strip
funding for Planned Parenthood, ban human cloning and fetal tissue research
and eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dobson wasn’t available for comment on Clinton’s infidelity confession, but months ago he stood
shoulder to shoulder with Bauer in lecturing Republicans for being slow to
draw moral lines against Clinton. Dobson, Bauer and Ashcroft have been
Clinton’s most harsh critics in the prolonged scandal, indicting him long
before he acknowledged his relationship with Lewinsky.
Now the forces they represent are in full-throated roar, and the religious battalions marching on Washington won’t be satisfied until they have Clinton’s head. “No man is above the law,” the Christian Coalition declared in a
statement following Clinton’s Monday night speech, “and it is the Christian Coalition’s fervent hope that Congress will apply this principle and meet their sworn obligation, should they be
called upon to do so.”
In other words, impeach Clinton or face the wrath of the right.
Just before the 1988 elections, Republican operative Lee Atwater began spreading a rumor that Democratic House Speaker Thomas Foley was gay. When the rumor reached Rep. Barney Frank, at the time the only openly homosexual member of Congress, Frank acted quickly and decisively. He informed Atwater that unless the rumors about Foley ceased immediately, he would personally out six gay Republicans on the floor of the House.
The GOP whisper campaign halted dead in its tracks.
A decade later, as Kenneth Starr moves to wrap up his investigation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and submit his final report to Congress on his four-year-long criminal probe of the president, the lessons of that confrontation have not been lost on some Clinton allies. While Republican and Democratic lawmakers, pundits and supporters urge the president to apologize for a sexual relation with Lewinsky to avoid impeachment, these die-hard Clinton loyalists are spreading the word that a long-ignored but fearsome tactic has now resurfaced as an element in the president’s survival strategy: The threat of exposing the sexual improprieties of Republican critics, both in Congress and beyond, should they demand impeachment hearings in the House.
“We’re talking about the Doomsday Machine here,” one close ally of the president told Salon, alluding to the unstoppable chain of retaliatory nuclear strikes in the movie, “Dr. Strangelove.” “Once the Doomsday Machine is set in motion, there will be no stopping it. The Republicans with skeletons in their closets must assume everything is known and will come out. So the question is: Do they really want to go there?”
The threat to out the president’s critics is not new. It first surfaced on Feb. 8, when former White House advisor George Stephanopoulos, analyzing the then-2-week-old Lewinsky scandal for ABC’s “This Week,” said White House allies were “starting to whisper about what I’ll call the ‘Ellen Rometsch’ strategy.” Stephanopoulos then went on to explain that Rometsch was an East German spy who had slept with President John Kennedy as well as many other congressmen and senators.
“Robert Kennedy was charged with getting her out of the country and also getting [FBI Director] John Edgar Hoover to go to the Congress and say, ‘Don’t you investigate this, because if you do, we’re going to open up everybody’s closets,” Stephanopoulos said. Returning to the Lewinsky scandal, he added: “I think that in the long run, they have a deterrent strategy” (of gathering embarrassing details about the private lives of Clinton’s congressional critics and threatening to leak them to the media).
As part of his defense in the Paula Jones sexual misconduct lawsuit, Clinton’s lawyers retained private investigator Terry Lenzner, whose company, Investigative Group International, conducted interviews and public record searches to gather information on Jones’ sexual history. Clinton’s critics now believe IGI, which employs lawyers, former FBI, CIA and DEA agents, ex-cops and former reporters, was also hired to dig up dirt on the president’s accusers in the Lewinsky scandal as well. Lenzner could not be reached for comment.
Sources in the Clinton camp say they are focusing their attention not only on issues of marital infidelity but also on issues of character. Among those under scrutiny, these sources say, are House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who asked his wife for a divorce while she lay in a hospital bed stricken with cancer; and House Majority Leader Richard Armey, who, according to an article in the Dallas Observer, pressured female students for dates when he was an economics professor at North Texas State University.
Another known target is Dan Burton, one of Clinton’s most outspoken Republican critics. “Burton’s political enemies are investigating his background, especially with regard to women,” says Harrison Ullman, editor of Nuvo, a newsweekly in Indianapolis. The Clinton camp’s hunt for dirt also could extend to Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the man who will be responsible for holding impeachment hearings, knowledgeable sources told Salon.
With the reemergence of the “Rometsch Strategy,” along with Lewinsky’s long-forgotten stained dress, the political stakes have increased significantly in these days before crucial grand jury testimony by Lewinksy and Clinton himself. Lewinsky, who received blanket immunity from prosecution last week, could testify as early as this week. Clinton is scheduled to testify from the White House via closed-circuit television on Aug. 17.
The theory behind this scorched-earth tactic is simple: Who among the congressmen is pure enough to pass judgment on the president’s private life? That question is now resonating around Capitol Hill, where a number of key lawmakers have pledged to forego impeachment proceedings if Clinton simply fesses up to an affair with Lewinsky. Left unspoken in those appeals, some members say, is a growing concern that impeachment hearings will result in an avalanche of leaks about sexual indiscretions by Republican congressmen that could expose their hypocrisy and destroy their political careers.
“That’s one reason why they don’t want to touch the Starr investigation,” says Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. “It’s too close for comfort.”
Congress may sit on a hill overlooking the White House, but Clinton’s allies are well aware that Congress doesn’t hold the moral high ground. It is a fact of Washington life that testosterone levels run high on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers, working long hours far away from their home districts and families, find themselves tempted by the scores of female aides working in the House and Senate. Five years ago, Sen. Robert Packwood resigned from the Senate after accusations that he groped, fondled and kissed scores of female aides. His diaries revealed that he had consensual sexual relations with several aides. Other notorious philanderers on Capitol Hill include former Rep. Wayne Hays, who supported his lover at the taxpayers’ expense by putting her on his staff as a secretary with minimal clerical duties, and former Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, who was discovered to be having an affair with a stripper.
Clinton allies say the president’s strategy is based on the certainty that once Starr has submitted his report to Congress, probably sometime this fall, Clinton’s ordeal will move from the precise legal realm of subpoenas and sworn testimony to the unpredictable arena of politics. After the House Judiciary Committee has studied Starr’s report, it will have to decide whether it is going to hold public impeachment hearings. The theory is that if Chairman Hyde and other Republicans on the committee know that, metaphorically speaking, their arms will be broken, they will be much less likely to raise them in a vote favoring impeachment hearings.
“This is a scorched earth strategy,” says Michael Zeldin, a former federal prosecutor who frequently comments on the legal aspects of the Lewinsky investigation for television news shows. “And it’s got people on the Hill very nervous because many of them are living in glass houses as well.”
But Zeldin notes that the strategy is also a risky one for Clinton. “Let’s say the Lewinsky dress comes back with sure-fire evidence of a sexual affair,” he says. “In that sense, Clinton may be no different from two-thirds of the members in Congress who have similar dalliances with interns or lobbyists or whomever. The difference, of course, is that none of them have been asked about it under oath. So you already have begun to hear members say that this is not about having an affair. It’s about lying under oath about an affair. So I’m not so sure about the vitality of that strategy.”
Another flaw in the president’s scorched earth strategy is that in the past, Congress,
when confronted with evidence of wrongdoing by its members, has been willing to judge its own, sometimes harshly. Packwood was censured for his sexual excesses, Gingrich received a reprimand and fine for ethical lapses. In short, the rules of Congress worked.
But in the event of total war, there are no rules and no way to prevent a frenzy of sexual tattling from hurting Democrats too. “On both sides of the aisle, no one wants to see it spin out of control,” says Rep. Joe Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who fell in love with a young staff member a few years ago, left his wife and annulled their marriage. “But anything could happen.”
Yet another political factor that could set the Doomsday scenario into motion is the influence of right-wing groups like the Family Research Council, headed by Gary Bauer, and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. These conservative organizations, which are now driving the social and family values agenda within the Republican Party, are not happy with Republican moderates like Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who have offered Clinton forgiveness in return for a mea culpa. For these groups, adultery and lying about it, under oath or not, are sins, period. Republicans could suffer in the midterm elections this fall if they don’t demonstrate their willingness to punish Clinton for his alleged indiscretions. Clinton’s threat, therefore, also means that some Republican lawmakers could suffer at the hands of these groups when the details of their own sins begin leaking out.
The result of all this is a capital facing the prospect of a sexual Götterdämerung, a spectacle in which reputations may be strewn about like body parts in “Saving Private Ryan.” The bottom line is that if anyone thought this scandal hit bottom with the reappearance of Lewinsky’s telltale dress, think again. This scandal could get a lot nastier before it’s over.
WASHINGTON – There’s a buck in Rock Creek Park. He’s a six-point male deer that I pass most mornings at dawn as I take my 10-mile bike ride in the national park that cuts through the capital’s northwest territory. And every morning, even during the approaching holiday of good will, I have the urge to blast Bambi, gut him out, sling him over my handlebars and take him home to feed the family.
It may be the season of jingle bells and sleigh rides, but in many parts of the country it’s also hunting season, and herds of white-tailed deer are exploding out of the forests, with bad tidings for deer and Homo sapiens alike. Suburban roads from coast to coast are littered with deer carcasses. Sometimes, humans are on the losing end of thousands of car wrecks involving our antlered friends.
Rather than joyously extolling the color and size of Rudolph’s nose, animal rights activists and hunters are at each others’ throats about the deer situation. The former advocate birth control; the latter, backed by local governments, are for shooting the buggers into January and February. Shocked by my own bloodthirsty instinct, I got home one morning last week, steadied myself with a bowl of high-fiber cereal, called the Humane Society and spoke to Dr. Allen Rutberg, the expert in charge of the national society’s birth control program for deer.
Rutberg tried to convince me that neutering was more humane than giving in to my base desire for fresh, wild meat. It’s called immunocontraception, and he explained how it’s done. First, you tranquilize a doe. Then you inject the contraceptive PZP, made from pig egg cells. Or you administer it with a blow dart. Then you tag the deer. And every year, during the fall mating season, you re-administer the contraceptive via a booster shot. Rutberg calls the program “experimental,” and admits it takes plenty of flack.
“The more we get,” he tells me, “the more we think we’re on to something.”
Now, we humans may be beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, but are we really ready to insinuate our birth control technology on wild animals? At Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco, it took a battalion of veterinarians and burly guys flown in by choppers to subdue the park’s exploding elk and inject them with birth control drugs, but at least that’s a controlled population where this kind of experimentation might make sense.
The deer population is anything but controlled. When “Bambi” hit movie screens in 1942 there were approximately 500,000 white-tailed deer in the United States. Now there are an estimated 27 million, more than when the Pilgrims landed in 1620. The four-legged varmints are plundering shrubbery, crowding out other wild creatures and causing traffic accidents with increasing frequency. Last year deer and cars collided nearly 500,000 times, and 100 people were killed as a result. With more malls and suburbs crowding into prime deer habitat, too-close encounters between us and them are bound to increase. So, is Norplant for deer the answer? “How else would you deal with deer populations in the middle of a town?” responds Rutberg.
“Shoot them,” says Tom Natelli, a developer who’s trying to build houses on 383 acres in Gaithersburg, Md., a bedroom community 20 miles north of Washington. It’s one of the first cities in the nation to require developers to submit a plan to handle the deer problem. Natelli wants to take care of it with sharpshooters and donate the meat to food banks.
Up the road from Natelli’s planned community sits the federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, on a 575-acre campus of fenced meadow and woodlands. It has a small, controlled deer population. It is here that Rutberg and the Humane Society are carrying out their latest birth control experiments.
Leaving aside the logistics of trying to tag and dart and then re-inoculate millions of deer, let’s check dollars and cents. Developer Natelli has contracted with White Buffalo Inc., a Connecticut wildlife management agency that would cull his 200 deer for about $150 a pop. A Rutberg-style vaccination program could cost more than $500 per doe per year. It could take three to 15 years before birth control methods bring down a deer population. Hunting is quick.
So far, the tide is with the hunters. Counties overrun by deer on Long Island are allowing hunters to cull the herds this January. Maryland will permit hunts on public lands early next year. For the first time, supervisors in Fairfax, Va., a wealthy suburb near Washington, just approved a deer hunt that will extend from late January into February in county parks along the Potomac River.
During this year’s deer season, a hunter hopped the fence at Rutberg’s institute and tried to bag a deer in the experimental population. He was caught and arrested. “It reinforces all the bad things we think about hunters,” says Rutberg.
But I feel the hunter’s instinct. Every time I see the buck in Rock Creek Park, I marvel at his proud natural beauty, and as I appreciate his wildness, I feel the urge to take him. President Clinton, who lives just six miles down the road, might think ill of me. But maybe not. Three white-tailed deer jumped the White House fence last spring to munch on the manicured presidential grass.
Where’s Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?
In the high-stakes game of capital journalism, Brian Duffy’s sudden departure from the Washington Post was widely read as yet another sign that the enterprising daily that led the media through the Watergate scandal to the dethroning of Richard Nixon in 1974 is in decline.
Sure, the Post remains a great newspaper by any measure. On a daily basis it breaks stories and covers the process of government well. Its cultural critics are consistently pungent, especially Stephen Hunter, the film critic recently plucked from the Baltimore Sun. But at the leading edge of journalism in the capital, in the arena of national politics and the eternal search for corruption, the Post is dropping back in the pack. The loss of Duffy, who begins work at the Wall Street Journal this week, is another setback.
An award-winning reporter and author, Duffy had been at U.S. News & World Report for years when the Post grabbed him and made him an editor in charge of investigative reporting. Duffy soon felt constrained by the desk job, however, and began to report and break stories, which upset reporters and other editors. Duffy let it be known he was once again up for grabs. He entertained calls from U.S. News publisher Mort Zuckerman, then the Wall Street Journal offered Duffy a job running its investigative coverage. He gave notice and walked out of the newsroom.
“This was a case of hierarchy, bureaucracy and process overlooking the obvious,” says another talented former Postie. “Brian Duffy is a damn good reporter, and the Post’s best bet in the breaking stories. He’ll punish them in print for this.”
Duffy joins a string of stars who were either ejected from the Post or who rejected offers from its editors. Mike Isikoff left in a lather three years ago after the Post hesitated to publish his groundbreaking stories on President Clinton’s interlude with Paula Corbin Jones; Isikoff now beats up the Post from Newsweek. Michael Weisskopf escaped the Post for Time, where he exposed the existence of Clinton’s fund-raising videotapes. Richard Berke, the New York Times’ political ace, twice spurned offers from the Post. Adam Nagourney chose the Times over the Post when he left USA Today last year. And in this last game of musical desks, the Post made a play for Jill Abramson when she was a top investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Abramson brushed off the Post, then went to the Times. Duffy will take Abramson’s spot at the Journal.
An investigative reporter sleuthing out reasons for the Post’s loss of luster in the 25 years since Watergate wouldn’t have to look far. The answer is at the top. Publisher Don Graham is a tall, lean, ruddy-faced WASP in his mid-50s. He’s a very nice man who seems to be uncomfortable in his skin. Despite his vast wealth and power as chairman of the Washington Post Company, a true media conglomerate, Graham tries hard to be a common man. He shuns the trappings of power. He rides the subway when he could buy it. A dynamic leader he ain’t. So when prospective reporters get the hard sell from Graham, they often come away underwhelmed.
Graham’s style is especially pallid compared to the way his mother, Katharine Graham, ran the paper as publisher during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate days. Kay Graham hung out with Jack Kennedy and LBJ. She partied with Truman Capote. She stared down Dick Nixon. She still throws the most important dinner parties in the capital. An invitation to Kay’s is as coveted as one to a White House state dinner.
In an interview before the publication of her memoir, “Personal History,” I asked Kay Graham why her son seemed to be such a loner. “I enjoy people and mixing around,” she said. “Don does it his way.”
Kay Graham’s editor was the legendary swashbuckler Ben Bradlee, of Watergate fame. But Don Graham, being a regular guy, chose an executive editor in his own image: Leonard Downie Jr. A great reporter and proven journalist, Downie has never worked anywhere but the Post, so his frame of reference is circumscribed by the newsroom. Great reporters don’t always make great leaders. Inside the newsroom Downie is known as a stiff, bureaucratic drone, hardly the inspirational leader who can drive troops, keep hot reporters or bring in new ones. Likewise, Downie’s second-in-command, managing editor Bob Kaiser, was a respected reporter and writer, but he’s a bust as a leader, widely disliked inside the newsroom.
Where Bradlee lived for “holy shit” stories, Downie is consumed by circulation rates. This may seem odd for a monopoly paper that has the highest penetration rate of any big-city daily and whose Sunday circulation is more than 1 million papers. It’s not unusual when you consider the pressures on newspapers from Los Angeles to New York where editors, at the behest of publishers and Wall Street analysts, are chasing dollars rather than stories. When, for example, I asked Downie why he had broken with tradition and asked a local cable channel to bring cameras into the newsroom to broadcast interviews with reporters, he said, “To reach potential readers.”
Graham, Downie and Kaiser also seem to be obsessed by race, a concern that colors the paper’s coverage of the news and its drive for diversity within the newsroom. Unfortunately, the Post is losing some of its best black reporters. Despite a personal plea from Graham, Pierre Thomas, a standout covering the Justice Department, was lured away by CNN. Sports writer J.A. Adande split for the Los Angeles Times. Others are looking for escape routes.
Bob Woodward is one bright light who never wanted to escape. The famed Watergate reporter is still digging for news, pounding out stories and scooping the competition. He doesn’t seem to miss his partner, Carl Bernstein. But he had begun to share a byline with Brian Duffy.
“I wish I had wrapped my arms around him while we were reporting,” Woodward told me. “I fault myself for that. We should have found a way to make it work.”
THWACK! That’s the sweet sound President Bill Clinton loved to hear as he whacked golf balls during his extended vacation in tony Martha’s Vineyard.
Silence.
That’s what the president would have heard if he had walked into the empty public school buildings in Washington, D.C. While bright-eyed children all across the nation began a new school year after Labor Day, here in Bill Clinton’s ‘hood, the capital city of the most powerful nation in the world, 78,000 public school students are barred from their schools because the buildings are unsafe.
Kids are disappointed. Parents, including myself, eat their rage and scramble to home-school their children. The pols play the blame game.
“Not my fault,” said House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who fingered the city government for holding back funds that Congress had made available. Julius Becton, the retired Army general appointed to run the schools, blamed the judge who ruled that school roofs had to be fixed before students arrived. Mayor Marion Barry, our very own two-bit despot, tried to play the local hero by keeping city pools open while blaming Becton for taking so long to repair the roofs.
Barry has earned his reputation as a villain in the sickening decline of Washington, from calm capital when he arrived to murder capital with its unschooled children of today. He began his political rise as school board president in 1971, but rather than fixing schools, he started building his future political base. As mayor for 15 years, he’s steered school contracts to his cronies, who then delivered lousy food and left trash piling up around schools.
But Barry can legitimately argue that he’s not directly responsible for public education, since it had been under the jurisdiction of the school board rather than the mayor, and now it’s controlled by presidential appointees. The villain of the piece now is Bill Clinton.
Clinton — maybe he doesn’t know this — is responsible for running the District of Columbia’s schools. Over the past two years, Congress, the courts and the White House have gradually taken control of all important city functions, from trash collection to law enforcement. Clinton appointed Dr. Andrew Brimmer to chair the federal control board that essentially governs the city, over the mayor and the city council. Brimmer ousted the elected school board and appointed retired Gen. Becton to run the schools. So the man who failed the students is Clinton’s creation.
The Constitution gave Congress and the president ultimate control of the federal city. Other presidents have used that power to improve the city. John F. Kennedy put in motion a plan to renovate Pennsylvania Avenue. Lyndon Johnson gave the district its first appointed mayor and city council and put it on the path toward home rule. Richard Nixon beefed up the police force and signed the 1973 Home Rule Charter. To give Clinton his due, he did come up with a recently passed bill to take pressure off the district’s budget. That same law, however, took more power from elected officials and put it in the hands of the president’s handpicked appointees, like Brimmer and Becton.
Which brings us back to the president and the unschooled students. The message heard ’round the world is that Washington, which can airlift half a million soldiers and tanks and planes and missiles halfway around the globe in one week to do battle in Iraq, cannot educate its own students.
The message to the students is that they cannot depend on officials — from Barry to the appointees to Bill Clinton — to give them a decent education. What does that say about a president who talks big about national education standards and wiring all public schools to the Internet and building a bridge to the 21st Century when the students in his backyard need real roofs, not rhetorical bridges?
In many ways the district’s public school system is a Rorschach test for urban public education across the nation. The problems here are no different than in East St. Louis or Dallas or Oakland. Except for one thing: D.C.’s school population — at 78,000 — is relatively small, making it easier to attack the basic problems of no-account bureaucrats, lousy teachers and crumbling school buildings.
Bill Clinton’s golf game may have gotten better in the cool New England autumn; here in the vacant schools, he’s failing the little kids. His big talk about being the “education president” is falling on silent walls.
