[Mb-hair] The New York Times June 12, 2005 Don't Follow the Money By FRANK RICH

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
June 12, 2005
Don't Follow the Money
By FRANK RICH

THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine
was as raspy as Hal Holbrook's. "I just want you to remember that I wrote
'Follow the money,' " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give
me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"

The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All
the President's Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if
on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to
The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line
of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line
was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate
reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention
of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and
"The Princess Bride."

This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article
would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat
coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money"
into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of
dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did
Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such
were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded
feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to
footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News
poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal
was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair
may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime
yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and
Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to
being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once
again being covered up.

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long
national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by
casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of
Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings
of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon
speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The
current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips
Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and
snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media
proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might
support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them
to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the
truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news
organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to
puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same
story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing
Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers
learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to
justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1.
Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was
the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the
White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To
foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a
ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action
against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes
and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old
establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging lynch
mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before
the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by
browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding as
a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White
House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to
question administration policies.

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that
Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment
on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually
run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to
heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show,
condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the
United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed
bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the
break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on
Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any
of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV
anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified
his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only
as a "former White House counsel."

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid
past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the
genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his
present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main
difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted
behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its
dirty work in plain sight.

In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated
Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant
Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any
American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These
neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom
said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek.
Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report
certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two
weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it
would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's
little-read papers.

At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to
punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that
his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of
putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an
outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news
organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they
cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President
Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was
supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of
1978.

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to
connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are
more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha"
journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist
got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of
incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that
now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps
unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It
occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on
Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day Rose
Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current
president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was
usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon
walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would
carry him into exile.

But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows
they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant
nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the
bait-and-switch.

    * Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Back to Top