No doubting Thomas

Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant takes himself out of the game with his over-the-top defense of Bill Clinton

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

Tom Oliphant is a believer, and Lord knows it can't be easy. When you're cheerleading for a presidency that has produced a seemingly endless stream of wronged women, corrupt Cabinet secretaries, Third World fundraising scandals, sleazy real estate deals, misappropriated personnel files, and so much more, there are days when it's got to be a strain to keep the faith.

So it must have been especially difficult on January 21, when the Washington Post broke the news that Bill Clinton may have conducted a sexual affair with a 21-year-old intern named Monica Lewinsky. In the White House. Next to the Oval Office.

But Oliphant, 52, the Boston Globe's Washington-based political columnist, sucked it up and went to work, doing what he does best -- defending the president come hell, high water, or bimbo eruption. Monica Lewinsky? "Lewinsky's words on tape . . . contain too many falsehoods to make them worthwhile." Kathleen Willey? "Pretty good TV. Lousy story." Paula Jones? A "politically hyped civil lawsuit." Gennifer Flowers -- even after it turned out that Clinton admitted under oath to having had sex with her? "His 1992 denial of her tabloid-purchased, edited-tape account of a 12-year affair stands, as press secretary Mike McCurry said it did more than a week ago." Now coming up the outside track: Cristy Zercher, the flight attendant who, in a trash-for-cash interview with the Star, claims that candidate Clinton pawed her and talked dirty to her during the 1992 campaign, and Elizabeth Ward Gracen, a former Miss America who says they did it and she liked it. Bet on Oliphant's not believing them, either.

"You can get so many things into play in today's media culture without any factual support," says Oliphant, hammering at one of his favorite themes: the declining standards of journalism. "Belief means not very much to me where something like guilt is concerned. The idea that we speculate about guilt is part of what disturbs me about the journalism racket. And I wish it disturbed you more."

But Oliphant's faith in the president ("Clinton has denied it all, and I believe him," he wrote on February 8) is an extraordinary point of view, held by extraordinarily few of his colleagues.

"I think there are maybe a dozen journalists in Washington who genuinely believe Bill Clinton's denials that he did not have an improper relationship with any of these women," says Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, whose latest book, Spin Cycle: Inside the Propaganda Machine (Simon & Schuster), is the definitive word on the DC press corps. Adds Slate's Jacob Weisberg, "I don't know anybody who believes Clinton. I know people who think it is a serious possibility that he's telling the truth. But obviously most people are extremely skeptical."

Of course, Oliphant, as an op-ed columnist, is entitled to defend Clinton as he sees fit. And Clinton's tormentor, independent counsel Ken Starr, is an inviting target. Despite spending $40 million for his years-long investigation, he's come up with damned little of value, unless you think the Republic is safer with Susan MacDougal behind bars, Jim Guy Tucker out of the Arkansas governor's mansion, and Monica Lewinsky's reading list in the hands of Starr's staff.

But Oliphant's opinion-mongering isn't just outside the mainstream of media groupthink. It's suffused with an unquestioning, over-the-top quality, expressed in a circuitous-yet-staccato writing style punctuated by frequent references to "the Great American Scandal Machine" and to Emily Litella, the Gilda Radner character famous for saying "Never mind!" whenever one of her conspiracy theories evaporated. At its most extreme, Oliphant's style can be hilariously offensive. After a 1992 debate at which then-candidate Jerry Brown had the temerity to accuse Clinton of steering state business to his wife's law firm, Oliphant's response was to label Brown "the biggest fraud since Lyndon LaRouche" and "a slime merchant who would make David Duke blush" -- and to suggest that Brown be banned from future debates.

Christopher Lydon, host of WBUR Radio's The Connection, took a poke at Oliphant's pro-Clinton proclivities in the Columbia Journalism Review that year. He finds Oliphant's current rash of Clintonphilia to be especially distasteful. "He makes Sid Blumenthal and early Joe Klein look discreet and restrained," says Lydon, who's worked for both the Globe and the New York Times. "There have always been people like this. [Political columnist] William White did it for Lyndon Johnson. L'Osservatore romano does it for the pope. But it's faintly ridiculous."

Indeed, Oliphant's increasingly emphatic defense of Clinton has prompted media insiders of a variety of ideological stripes, both in Washington and Boston, to question Oliphant's relevance. On the left, the Nation's Washington editor, David Corn, says: "I think to take the president at his word, as a journalist who's supposed to be serving the truth and informing the public, is not a responsible position. These are the days that call for radical agnosticism." On the right, University of Virginia government professor Larry Sabato says, "It's hard to believe that anyone as intelligent as Oliphant could actually swallow this horse manure, and that's what it is."

And in the center, Newsweek columnist and media critic Jonathan Alter, while paying lip service to "the importance of having some diversity of opinion in Washington," points to a serious flaw in Oliphant's I-believe-the-president mindset: "The problem with that view is that it's not even believed by a lot of the president's closest friends and aides."

Inside the Globe, none dares speak against Oliphant on the record. Knowledgeable sources say that Washington

bureau chief David Shribman is unhappy with Oliphant's Clinton columns, but Shribman himself won't comment. Oliphant's boss -- editorial-page editor David Greenway, who's questioned Clinton's veracity in several editorials -- says simply, "Tom has a strong point of view, and he's expressing it. And I'm not aware that he's gotten anything factually wrong."

But Oliphant, by casting his lot with the Ann Lewises and the Paul Begalas and the James Carvilles, has all but taken himself out of the national conversation. Yes, he pops up on some of the talking-head shows, and yes, as CNN's Bill Schneider says, he's widely considered a go-to guy when it comes to the Kennedys. Virtually no one in the capital, though, is talking about his pro-Clinton screeds. "I haven't heard anyone in Washington mention Tom Oliphant's name in about five years," says one of the biggest of Washington's bigfoot journalists. And it's not just because Oliphant writes for a regional paper, this source adds: "People sometimes talk about what David Shribman writes, or what's in the Chicago Tribune or the LA Times, or other papers that aren't at the top of the Beltway food chain. I just think maybe Oliphant is viewed as predictable, and therefore doesn't generate much buzz."

Not that Oliphant himself seems to care about buzz. Indeed, by positing himself as an outsider amid the media feeding frenzy, Oliphant is able both to express contempt for his colleagues and to congratulate himself for refusing to go along with the crowd.

"My ideology is that of the ACLU liberal -- presumption of innocence," he says during a testy, hourlong interview. "Direct charge required. Where a presidency is involved, the highest standards of evidence must apply. You can't insinuate what you don't have the balls to directly allege. And, finally, presidents should get thrown out of office only in the face of clear, irrefutable, and overwhelming evidence that can stand the test of history. That's my ideology."

To his credit, Oliphant can point to some cross-ideological consistency. Though far harsher on former senator Bob Packwood than he's been on Clinton (there was more and better evidence against Packwood, Oliphant retorts), he lashed out at the Senate in 1989 for allowing former senator John Tower, George Bush's nominee for secretary of defense, to be sunk on the basis of raw FBI files that suggested he was a drunken womanizer. And Oliphant is certainly right when he insists that there's nowhere near the kind of evidence against Clinton that there was against Richard Nixon a quarter-century ago.

A working-class, opera-singing kid who grew up in Manhattan and La Jolla, California, Oliphant joined the Globe shortly after graduating from Harvard, in 1967. A protégé of retired editor Tom Winship and retired executive editor Bob Healy, Oliphant was brought to Washington in 1969 by then-bureau chief Marty Nolan, and helped negotiate a deal for the Globe to get a copy of the Pentagon Papers. "I would say he has an instinct approaching genius for economic stories, complicated government stories," says Nolan, now the Globe's San Francisco correspondent. Oliphant has also covered every presidential campaign for the Globe since 1968, including 1972, when he and fellow Globe reporter Curtis Wilkie (not to mention Chris Lydon) played cameo roles in Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus. Oliphant, who's married to CBS's Susan Spencer, describes himself as a Kennedy liberal -- liberal, that is, but also enamored of the empowerment ideology of Robert Kennedy, echoed today in political approaches as diverse as Ted Kennedy's and Clinton's and Jack Kemp's.

As with several other Globe reporters, Oliphant was thought by some Republican critics to be too soft on Michael Dukakis and too hard on George Bush in the 1988 campaign. But any hurt feelings left over from that election are mild compared to a controversy he landed in four years ago. That's when then-congressman Peter Torkildsen claimed on C-SPAN that White House aide Susan Brophy had promised to lobby Oliphant for a favorable mention if Torkildsen would vote yes on Clinton's crime bill. (Torkildsen voted no, and Oliphant whacked him in print.) Brophy denied having made such an offer, and Oliphant denied ever talking with her or any other White House official about the crime bill. Tensions escalated to the point where Oliphant and Torkildsen got into a shouting match on Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr's radio show, with Oliphant denouncing Torkildsen as a "liar." ("His story to me was not very believable, but I think he presented it as well as he could," Carr says of Oliphant. "So I'd give him about a C-minus on content and about a B-plus on delivery.") Of course, only Torkildsen and Brophy know the truth; Oliphant says he called Torkildsen a liar because he found Brophy to be more credible.

Credibility is a rare and precious commodity in Washington these days. As one of the few who think Clinton's got it, Oliphant offers an interpretation that, whatever its merits, is certainly unique. "There was no phone sex; no heavy phone conversation of any kind; no dress with semen stains on it; no dress at all, in fact; no awareness by Lewinsky's lawyer of any withholding of her Paula Jones case affidavit until a New York job offer was official," Oliphant wrote on February 3. "There is also no inculpatory information about a good man, Vernon Jordan; no Lewinsky-furnished necktie at last year's State of the Union; no `private meeting' with the president on December 28, a day when Clinton secretary and Lewinsky befriender Betty Currie was also at the White House. And the informed belief of Lewinsky's lawyer is that the infamous Linda Tripp was not privy to or present for any phone call to his client from the president."

If Oliphant's right, then Clinton's the victim of a grotesque smear job. But few of his peers are counting on it. A Globe colleague puts it this way: "This guy will be visiting the Clintons in prison and coming back with outraged columns about how innocent people are serving time."

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

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

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

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