- "Baseless and groundless" or "groundless
and baseless"?
-
- By the close of business on Monday, Dec. 2, there seemed
almost perfect agreement between White House press secretary Ari Fleischer
and John DiIulio, the former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives. Both were advising everyone, in almost identical
wording, to pay no attention to the troubling tales about the Bush administration
that Mr. DiIulio had told writer Ron Suskind for the January issue of Esquire.
-
- The sequence of events during that day gave off an extraordinary
Orwellian odor, as if the loquacious Mr. DiIulio had been subjected to
a swift but thorough course of Republican thought-reform. The news cycle
began with a story in The New York Times previewing Mr. Suskind's long,
engrossing investigation of how Karl Rove and his minions grind out policy
sausage in the West Wing.
-
- The paper reported that Mr. DiIulio had nicknamed the
White House boss and his minions the "Mayberry Machiavellis."
He had given Mr. Suskind a vivid, detailed view of the political evisceration
of domestic policy; the intellectual vacuum on the President's staff; the
absolute authority of the fearsome Mr. Rove; the dominating influence of
the "religious right and libertarians"; and, in short, the Bush
administration's failure to achieve anything of significance on the home
front.
-
- That morning, Mr. DiIulio made matters slightly worse
when the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a professor of political
science, issued a brief statement on his behalf. He apologized for any
hurt feelings and quibbled with two minor errors, but affirmed the Esquire
story's substance.
-
- The White House quickly reasserted its will to control
the news. At his noon briefing, Mr. Fleischer crisply informed the press
corps that "any suggestion that the White House makes decisions that
are not based on sound policy reasons is baseless and groundless."
Although Helen Thomas tried to press the issue, the questioning instantly
reverted to Iraq, where Mr. Fleischer wanted it. He did reveal, however,
that Mr. DiIulio "has spoken with officials in the office--the faith-based
office, and talked with them."
-
- Within less than two hours, another release emerged from
the Penn press office: "John DiIulio agrees that his criticisms were
groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. He sincerely
apologizes and is deeply remorseful." He promised never again to discuss
or write about his frustrating experiences in the White House.
-
- Can we now put all this behind us and forget we glimpsed
that man behind the curtain? Not this time.
-
- When a former government official is interviewed, and
later retracts or denies what he or she said, that may create a reasonable
doubt about a story. Frustrated people sometimes speak in haste and say
things that may be inaccurate. Misunderstandings and misquotes happen too
often. That's what the White House claimed when Mr. Suskind's last Esquire
article appeared in July, with candid quotes from chief of staff Andrew
Card about his fear that the departure of Presidential counselor Karen
Hughes would mean unchecked power for Mr. Rove.
-
- But Mr. DiIulio did more than speak candidly with Mr.
Suskind over a period of months. In late October, after mulling over their
conversations, he sat down and wrote a seven-page, nearly 3,000-word letter
that began with the words "For/On the Record." (Its full text
can be found at www.Esquire.com.) The devastating remarks and anecdotes
faithfully quoted from that letter in the Suskind article were not ill-considered
quips delivered on a barstool. They were the written recollections and
reflections of a widely published and quite conservative academic.
-
- Nor is Mr. Suskind a writer "with a notorious reputation"--as
Robert Novak quickly said in attempting to discredit him--unless the 1995
Pulitzer Prize he won for feature writing at The Wall Street Journal lent
him a certain notoriety for skill, accuracy and polished prose. For all
its negative aspects, his portrait of the Bush White House is nuanced and
painstakingly fair. He quotes Mr. DiIulio at length on the finer qualities
of George W. Bush. And he opens with a charming sketch of Mr. Rove putting
up Christmas decorations with a group of children at the home of a former
Clinton aide.
-
- Consider for a moment how the national press corps would
have treated such a story from within the Clinton White House in December
1994. They habitually gave far more attention and credibility to material
of far less substance during the eight years of that administration. And
there is no way that Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart would have been able
to shut down questioning about an article like Mr. Suskind's as curtly
as Mr. Fleischer did.
-
- Then consider, after reading the Esquire article, which
will soon appear on newsstands, what the press apparently cannot report
(and probably doesn't know) about the inner machinations of the Bush White
House. The new occupants have changed the tone, indeed: It's either happy
talk or dead silence.
-
- You may reach Joe Conason via email at: jconason@observer.com.
http://www2.observer.com/observer/pages/conason.asp
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