Aide de scamp

A fan letter for Sidney Blumenthal

Personally by Mark Zanger

Some people who once knew Sid Blumenthal think he sold out by becoming an aide to President Clinton. Some even sneer, pointing out that this one-time political agitator became part of the Clinton laundromat just as it went into spin cycle. Blumenthal should have known better, they say, or at least had better timing: he should have remained a journalist, and he should have been less pro-Clinton when he was one.

And now, they say, he should be indicted for telling Chistopher Hitchens that Monica Lewinsky was a stalker, or perhaps for telling the grand jury that he didn't leak such stories to the media. (See "Don't Quote Me.")

They say. Not I.

I say, if the president of the United States wants your advice, it is your patriotic duty to give it to him. As Abbie Hoffman once said of the CIA, "This country needs all the intelligence it can get." And the more one disagrees with the president, the more one should wish him the very best of advisers. If Nixon, let's say, had sought advice from Sid Blumenthal instead of from Henry Kissinger or Charles Colson, maybe his dirty tricks wouldn't have been so dangerous.

Nixon: "You know, Sid, because of the way I grew up, I'm always trying to help people; it's a weakness of mine. Like these poor guys that got caught breaking into Democratic headquarters. I feel I have to try to raise some money to help them."

Blumenthal: "I've got a better idea, Mr. President. Why don't I go to lunch with Christopher Hitchens and tell him that Gordon Liddy is a stalker?"

Nixon: "Golly by gosh, Sid, that's something! Do you think if you said that Tom Hayden was a stalker, we wouldn't have to shoot any more student protesters?"

Well, that never happened.

But now Blumenthal's in the White House, and when's the last time President Clinton had to shoot a student protester or raise hush money for his party's break-in squad? And the more President Clinton vexes me -- by raising the military budget while ignoring human rights in China, surrendering national health insurance, abandoning environmental concerns, and advancing the globalization of capital without protecting the rights of labor and consumers -- well, the happier I am that Clinton has to listen to Blumenthal tell him why that's wrong.

I think critics are confused about what Blumenthal does best. The word journalist now covers such a multitude of media that people are apt to confuse him with one of those people in trench coats who explain what just happened. But a reporter is something he never has been. The man was born to write not stories or columns or speeches but deep, thoughtful books about the changing relationships of power, money, media, and politics -- and being President Clinton's left-hand man can only broaden the insights of his next one. For this purpose, it really doesn't matter if the president is doing well or badly or -- as in the present instance -- much of anything at all.

Here's a sample of what I mean, from a speech Blumenthal gave last year at the Kennedy School:

The governing idea of the Clinton presidency is the idea of the nation: not who we imagine we were, but who we might become. The goal is to create a new social contract for a global economy. It must be one in which opportunity is widened; in which fiscal discipline fosters confidence in a government able to invest in education, the environment, child care, and health care; in which civil society, social harmony, and public safety are restored; in which a multicultural people can forge a common identity. If there is a name for the Clinton approach, it is this: one-nation politics. And the cynosure of the new social contract is the 1997 balanced-budget agreement, which included new health coverage for five million children and created, for the first time, tuition tax credits for everyone to attend college. For the first time in more than a generation, we now have the means to meet our ends, the capabilities to realize our purposes.

As you can see, this is not headline-making stuff. The talk was covered solely for its Ken Starr remarks (other than by the Phoenix, which reprinted the more thoughtful parts of the address, including the above -- you can catch up here.)

And you still may think that calling Clinton's micro-initiatives "a new social contract for a global economy" is a bunch of fertilizer, but you'd look for rebuttal to lofty intellects like William Grieder, Gary Wills, or Kevin Phillips, not to the trench-coat wits or the TV scud studs. Blumenthal is in a league with the serious writers, and serious readers account Clinton's gain as no mortal loss to those who call themselves the "journalism community."

So when you hear slurs on Sid from anyone who can say "journalism community" without waving two fingers of each hand to mime sarcastic quotation marks, remember that anyone like that harbors two major dreams, both of which Blumenthal has achieved. Number One, he has sued someone else (Matt Drudge) for libel. Number Two, he has been able to tell the world's most powerful person what to do without having to get it past a copy editor first. To do both those things in one lifetime, anyone who's ever worn the trench coat would sell his camera, microphone, or laptop to the Devil in a Beltway minute.

I must add that I placed myself in the permanent record on the subject of Blumenthal the journalist in the fall of 1980, when I fired him from a freelance arrangement with the Real Paper. This was not mainly because he was regularly talking to Ronald Reagan's political consultants, and thus filling up our alternative weekly with boring and irrelevant dispatches about how the national election was being won. No, my problem was that my predecessors at the paper had so valued such material that they were paying Sid too much money. If I kept him on, a provision in our union contract would have granted him a kind of tenure. And then I never would have been able to hire the younger and lower-paid writers who kept us going for another 10 months.

So I can't stand here today and argue that Blumenthal was too valuable a journalist to become a White House aide. I felt he wasn't worth 1.4 gonzo feature writers in 1980, and I'll have to stand on that, just as Blumenthal will have to stand on his 1980 reportage that Reagan would win because his advisers had the best sense of how to use tracking polls and scripted appearances.

Still, I really hope Blumenthal doesn't get indicted. Not only because he started here at the Phoenix for pennies a word. Not because he has elected officials from Southern states imitating his Chicago locutions on international TV, thrilling and hilarious as that is. Not even because none of the other good writers I fired have been indicted yet, and I would like to keep my record clean.

In fact, I do not even base my argument on the facts. Did Hitchens go home and write a column for the Nation or Vanity Fair about how Lewinsky was a stalker? Did this undermine Starr's investigation? Would it have? It ought to be obvious that Blumenthal was enjoying the display of some inside information, not planting a story with someone unlikely to report it, and unlikely to report it anywhere very useful if he did.

No, I hope Blumenthal doesn't get indicted because we've already had one major constitutional change in the past year: our tripartite form of government is now one of rule by the opinion of 60 percent of those polled. It will be decades before we absorb the full meaning of that change. How can we now be expected to adjust to a political system in which people in government can't repeat hearsay to journalists over lunch?

Mark Zanger is a former editor of the Real Paper.