Don't Quote Me

The Boston Phoenix
August 26 - September 2, 1999

[Don't Quote Me]

Between the lines

Now that the frenzy over the Bush cocaine story has abated, W. should say what he's done -- and what he intends to do about our phony 'war on drugs'

by Dan Kennedy
To be sure, it was a bad week for George W. Bush, dogged as he was by questions about his rumored cocaine use -- questions that were flung at him with new urgency following his ill-advised departure from his own "don't ask, don't tell" script.
But it was, if anything, an even worse week for Washington Post reporter Dan Balz, who wrote two panic-stricken front-page dispatches on Bush's wavering answers concerning the sanctity of the gubernatorial nasal passages. Bush's performance merely called into question his ability to think on his feet. The Post stories, by contrast, made you wonder whether Balz can think at all.
On Friday, August 20, Balz wrote that Bush was "struggling to contain the first crisis of his front-running presidential campaign." On Saturday, Balz went even further, opening with this piece of tripe: "A decade ago, the kind of turbulence that hit Texas Gov. George W. Bush's campaign this week might have threatened to knock a candidate out of the presidential race." The difference, he added, was that "President Clinton has changed the rules."
Please.
What happened last week was not a crisis but was, rather, one of those periodic media frenzies that blow over like a late-August thunderstorm. The cocaine question has been hanging around Bush for years. If anything, based on his answers last week, we now know he stopped using cocaine at a younger age (28) than we might have supposed from some of his earlier, more-ambiguous statements, which had left open the possibility that he was snorting lines in the men's rooms of fancy Dallas restaurants while Dad was vice-president.
It's pretty obvious that the public has no nose for this. A Time/CNN poll showed that 84 percent of those sampled believe an admission of cocaine use should not disqualify Bush from seeking the presidency. The same poll showed that 48 percent think candidates should be questioned about cocaine use, and 49 percent think they should not -- a marked dip from a finding of 60 percent grill 'em/38 percent leave 'em alone that was recorded just two months ago. Even the ready-fire-aim pundits of ABC's This Week were notably blasé about the coke question this past Sunday, August 22, with the partial exception of William Kristol. By the beginning of this week the storm had dissipated.
In contrast to the Post's hyperventilating, perspective-free coverage, the New York Times handled the Bush cocaine questions with world-weary aplomb. For one thing, the Times has yet to play the drug allegations on page one. For another, its coverage -- including R.W. Apple Jr.'s August 20 piece and Felicity Barringer's August 22 analysis -- has made it clear that the so-called crisis had a lot more to do with the media than with Bush. Apple's story, appropriately enough, was accompanied by a photo of Bush, back to the camera, facing an enormous throng of reporters. (Too bad the Times' August 20 editorial, brainlessly headlined MR. BUSH'S DRUG DODGES, sounded like propaganda from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.) With luck, the Times, and not the Post, will set the tone the next time this foolishness comes up.
"Unless he was shooting heroin, I just think it's really hard to think that we want to do this all over again," says Richard Parker of the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
"I sense a greater reluctance this time around," adds University of Virginia government professor Larry Sabato, the author of Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics (1991), the seminal work on the subject. "There are people in the media actually saying publicly, `Let's hope this is over soon. I can't believe we're doing this again.' This may die sooner than we think -- although it will be resurrected. It will be an episodic feeding frenzy."
Assuming we're between episodes, this is a good time to gain some perspective. Here are a few themes to keep in mind as the presidential campaign gets under way.

Politics drives scandal coverage. If the Clinton scandals should have taught us anything, it is that the media, by themselves, cannot drive a scandal. If there is no governmental or political impetus, the story either fails to catch on or dies out quickly. On the other hand, scandal coverage can reach a fever pitch when, say, a $50 million independent-counsel investigation is stoking the furnace.
The mainstream media didn't want to touch Gennifer Flowers until Clinton's Arkansas political enemies brought her to the Star, which staged a high-impact news conference, complete with audio tapes. Paula Jones's charge that then-governor Clinton once told her to "kiss it" was virtually ignored until it became entangled in Ken Starr's investigation. And the media's obsession with the Monica Lewinsky affair, lest we forget, pales when compared to the obsessive behavior shown by Starr and the Republican House, which impeached Clinton and nearly removed him from office. By contrast, Juanita Broaddrick's unsupported but credible-sounding allegation that Clinton raped her in the late '70s, though given prominent play by NBC's Dateline, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, quickly dropped off the media radar screen, since there was no official investigation to keep the story moving forward.
The same dynamic has been at work in the Bush cocaine story. Reporters have been asking him about cocaine since he first ran for public office in 1994. The Wall Street Journal investigated the rumors in May and found them to be unsupported. A number of Bush profiles have mentioned the rumors in passing, including Tucker Carlson's celebrated Talk magazine piece, which, after all, came out only a few weeks ago. But it wasn't until mid-August, when Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle challenged the press to pursue the story, that reporters began asking Bush every time he sticks his head up whether he's ever snorted coke. The story continues to be more about politics than about the media. The Steve Forbes campaign has been accused of spreading the coke rumor, other Republican candidates piously opine that it's a legitimate issue, and the insufferable former drug czar William Bennett demanded on August 23's Journal editorial page: ANSWER THE QUESTION.
But if the political culture deserves most of the blame, the press nevertheless is not covering itself with glory. The media open themselves up to being used by politicians, argues New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, because they have no theory or plan for what they want to accomplish in covering a political campaign. "Scandal is by now a way of doing politics," says Rosen, author of the forthcoming What Are Journalists For? (Yale University Press). "The question is, does the press want to accommodate itself to that dynamic in the political culture?" That doesn't mean drug use isn't a legitimate issue. It does mean that the media should treat it in context, as one of a whole range of issues.

The Woodward factor. Twenty-five years ago, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down a president and became heroes to the next generation of young journalists. Today, though, Woodward's legacy -- and Woodward himself -- all too often stand as an obstacle to intelligent, nuanced coverage of so-called scandals.
Earlier this month, two of the media's sharper cultural anthropologists, the New York Daily News' Lars-Erik Nelson and the New York Times' Frank Rich, went after Woodward from different but complementary directions.
Nelson's brief against Woodward -- in the guise of a review of Woodward's Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (Simon and Schuster) -- is narrow and specific. Writing in the August 12 issue of the New York Review of Books, Nelson argues that Woodward reveals himself to be a priggish moralizer, unwilling and perhaps unable to distinguish between Richard Nixon's crimes against the state and the relatively minor misdeeds of Jimmy Carter, George Bush (the elder), and Bill Clinton.
"The real lesson in Woodward's book," Nelson writes, "is that it has become ridiculously easy to gin up a scandal with a few sly questions and insinuations -- and then fire at the target as he or she squirms to answer an often unfair or unfounded accusation."
Rich, in the August 15 New York Times Magazine, argues that Shadow reveals a Woodward who has metamorphosed from investigative bulldog to guard dog for Beltway insiders. Rich finds himself astonished by Woodward's lack of proportionality -- Woodward goes so far as to criticize Gerald Ford for having more than an occasional martini, and Jimmy Carter for understandably trying to keep secret a covert arms deal with Jordan -- and notes, ominously, that Woodward recently told interviewers that George W.'s refusal to answer certain questions "just doesn't fly."
Writes Rich: "Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr may soon leave town, but the insular establishment they leave behind is still on the warpath. It's this establishment, not Watergate, that casts a shadow over future tenants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the new century arrives." Clinton's appalling behavior aside, the tut-tutting that Rich criticizes makes it difficult for anyone to run for president -- or to govern once elected.

Ask, but don't tell. One suspects that many of the baby-boom journalists questioning Bush have more than a passing acquaintance with cocaine themselves. Yet the suggestion that perhaps journalists should come clean before asking such questions is, to say the least, met with disdain.
"No manager's ever asked me that, and as a manager I've never asked anyone that. There are a lot of questions we ask people in the news that we don't ask of our colleagues," says Carl Lavin, a news editor in the New York Times' Washington bureau. Adds Richard Tofel, chief spokesman for the Wall Street Journal: "The issue, if there is an issue here, is about someone's fitness for the presidency. I don't think anyone could reasonably suggest that whether someone did cocaine a long time ago could affect their fitness today to be a reporter." Stuart Wilk, managing editor of the Dallas Morning News -- the paper whose ingeniously worded questions about White House security procedures persuaded Bush to depart from his previous no-comment stance -- says simply, "I look at that as not being an issue." (An inquiry to the Washington Post went unanswered.)
The argument against journalistic disclosure is that reporters, after all, aren't running for anything. If cocaine use is deemed to be a legitimate area of inquiry for presidential candidates, a reporter presumably should be able to ask the question even if she herself had been freebasing in a local crack house 30 minutes before the news conference. "I don't think that the background or even the character of the reporter except as far as he or she practices journalism should be an issue in this. There's ample grist for posturing by politicians and critics, but if you just reduce it to its essentials, I don't think it's relevant," says Boston Globe editor Matt Storin. Adds Boston Herald editor Andy Costello: "Reporters are not running for public office. They are not spending the taxpayers' money, they are not guaranteeing public safety, they are not making the kinds of decisions that government officials are elected to do. Government officials are held to a higher standard, no question about it. And for good reason."
To be fair, Lavin, Tofel, Wilk, Storin, and Costello are right. The problem, though, is that scandal coverage has degenerated from investigation into cheap, shouted questions at every photo op. As Larry Sabato says, it used to be that the investigation would come first. Now, someone like Bush has to endure questioning even though the rumors that he's done cocaine are just that -- rumors. At one time there was an informal rule in journalism that some sort of probable cause had to be established before you'd ask a potentially embarrassing question. Storin -- whose own paper has been restrained in its coverage -- notes that, in this case, it was the peculiar way Bush answered those questions that created the probable cause for still more questions.
Timothy Noah recently wrote a hilariously revealing piece for Slate in which he questioned a number of journalists as to whether they'd done cocaine -- and then attempted to guess at the likely truth based on their answers. (He closed by revealing that, yes, he had tried it.) Noah doesn't think journalists should disclose their own past drug use, but he says they shouldn't harangue politicians about it either.
"I feel perfectly comfortable as a reporter asking them questions that might expose their hypocrisy on the matter, and I feel perfectly comfortable drawing conclusions about any individual reporter's refusal to answer the question. But I engaged in this experiment not to get the whole world to go on Oprah and talk about their drug experiences. I did it to show that the whole issue is silly," says Noah, who wrote a piece in the New Republic earlier this year arguing that Bush has probably done cocaine, and that it doesn't matter.

But cocaine does matter. What Bush ultimately has to confront is not that he may or may not have been a coke-snorting twentysomething, but that the questions about his cocaine use are being asked within a wider cultural context. We've been having an ongoing nervous breakdown about drugs since the 1960s. What he or any other presidential candidate says and does about drugs matters. And what he thinks is bound to be informed by his own experiences.
You've got to hand it to that self-righteous dweeb Gary Bauer. It's hard to disagree completely when he says that candidates ought to be able to answer fully when asked if they've ever committed a felony. As governor of Texas, Bush has pushed for harsh measures against drug offenders -- measures that, possibly, might have landed him in prison in his youth. If Bush in fact did coke at one time in his life, then his hypocrisy underlines "the absurdity of the whole drug issue in America," says progressive media critic Danny Schechter.
According to federal statistics, something like 60,000 people were behind bars in 1997 (the most recent year for which statistics are available) for simple drug possession. Yes, we know today that cocaine is a lot more dangerous than we ever thought in the '70s (Timothy Noah traces current thinking to the death of basketball star Len Bias in 1986). But even though the penalties were at one time much less severe, politicians are increasingly comfortable talking about their past mistakes with the drug.
New Mexico governor Gary Johnson (like Bush, a Republican) has admitted to a youthful dalliance with cocaine. So has Lincoln Chafee, a Republican who's running for the US Senate seat from Rhode Island being vacated by his father, John Chafee. If you parse Bush's own statements, Clinton-style, then it becomes obvious that he almost certainly dabbled with cocaine in his early and/or mid 20s. Why not come out and say it -- not at a media gangbang, but at a time and a place of his own choosing?
"If it calls attention to the fact that some people should be given a second chance, and they shouldn't have their prospects limited by a youthful mistake, then that's very helpful," says Kyle O'Dowd, general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, an organization that helps the victims of politicians' anti-drug zealotry.

Silly as last week's feeding frenzy was, it could serve a useful purpose. If Bush has never done cocaine, then he should say so and be done with it. But if he has, he should say that, too -- not because the media and his political rivals demand it, but because it would be a useful contribution to the national conversation about our absurd drug laws.
The real issue isn't what George W. Bush put up his nose, but what he signed into law -- and what he may do as president. Nevertheless, his past is relevant. Before we put him in charge of our idiotic war on drugs, he should tell us not just where he stands, but what he's done in his own life.

Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here