Have America’s newspaper sleuths got oat of hand?

Press, 15 August 1988, Page 20

Have America’s newspaper sleuths got oat of hand?

Ian Ball,

in New York for the “Daily Telegraph,”

on disquiet about “investigative reporting”

IN THE days of F.D.R., all the senior members of the White House press corps knew that the President had been unfaithful to Eleanor after a pretty, graceful, dark-haired social secretary named Lucy Mercer came on the scene. In later years, they were also aware how carefully presidential appearances had to be stage-managed to conceal Roosevelt’s paralysis. Journalists snickered among themselves about Lucy’s charms (and, with less documentation, about the intensity of Eleanor’s friendship with a tweedy woman reporter, Lorena Hickok, whose sapphire ring Eleanor wore to her death and whom she addressed in intimate letters as “Hick darling"). Members of the press were often in the room when F.D.R. was lifted from his wheelchair and “arranged” in a more presidential setting — a standard chair behind the Oval Office desk or an armchair for his famed radio “fireside chats.” Two Presidents later, the more alert members of a new generation of White House correspondents knew that John F. Kennedy had a roving eye for the ladies (and mysterious gaps in his daily schedule), before and after he occupied that same Oval Office. Both F.D.R. and J.F.K. were long dead before any of this lurid stuff got into newsprint or hardcover best-sellers. The era of Fourth Estate chivalry, old-boy-network solidarity and general distaste for peephole journalism lasted just one more presidency: L.B.J.’s Lyndon Johnson was a raunchy old Texan, and the tales — known but unpublished at the time — of his “R and R” on the ranch spread far beyond the banks of the Pedernales River. The dam was burst by Watergate, when two junior members of the Washington Post editorial staff, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly pursued a mysterious break-in at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters and ended by toppling a powerful President. Since Richard Nixon flew home in disgrace to California,

life hasn’t been the same for any American politician with big ambitions. Nor has it been the same for American newspapers. Every metropolitan daily now has its “special projects” team and writers whose business cards may read “Associate Editor (Investigations).” The brightest young hacks arrive at their desks with visions of sugarplum Pulitzer Prizes dancing in their heads. The television networks and independent stations have Japanese colour-TV cameras no bigger than felt-tip markers. Investigative editors and reporters now have their own professional organisation, which met in annual convention at Minneapolis this June to review tactics.

The media gumshoes are looking for rascality wherever it may lurk — City Hall corruption, bidrigging at the Pentagon, drug barons, Wall Street swindlers, and so on. All of which is part of the press’s basic function. But when a juicy personal story comes the investigative journalists’ way, they are not minded to spike it. Who knows whether this yummy Polaroid of Donna Rice on Senator Gary Hart’s lap aboard the funship Monkey Business is not also being hawked to the opposition? In the editorial ivory towers, the hunt may be spoken of in lofty phrases: a candidate’s "personal adult” is the term currently in vogue. But has it all got wildly out of hand? Have the standards been set so high that only squeaky-clean, mediocre puritans will seek high office in America? Is this why the November presidential contest is shaping up, in the words of a leading columnist, as a tussle between “a wimp and. a shrimp”? Do the great newspapers of the land have any right to submit formal questionaires to the candidates, seeking full disclosure

on such matters as personal health, wealth and educational record? Should reporters lurk in the bushes (as the "Miami Herald’s” four-man Gary Hart taskforce did last year) in the hope of catching a senator and his paramour? Must wives, like Caesar’s equally be above suspicion? And, taking the longer view, did F.D.R.’s dalliance with Lucy detract in any way from his greatness?

Mr Richard Sennett, a leading socialogist, has argued that if America insists on using personal behaviour as a prime electoral standard, “we end up judging how effective politicians are by measuring how blameless they are in. their private lives.” Last week, after a flurry of old, unproven rumours that Michael Dukakis sought psychiatric treatment for clinical depression in 1973 and 1978, the ...Massachusetts Governor found himself on the griddle. A passing reference to these rumours in a “Boston Globe” report seems to have rattled as well as angered the Dukakis camp. Unsolicited denials — “Governor Dukakis has never had any kind of professional therapy for mental illness of any kind, at any time” — went out to such newspapers as the “Los Angeles Times,” and "Detroit News” and the “Washington Times,” which weren’t even working on the story. Then came President Reagan’s clumsy gaffe when he was asked his views on whether Governor Dukakis, should release his medical records: “I’m not going to pick on an invalid.” Mr Reagan made a quick recovery, saying in a subsequent meeting with reporters: "I was kidding. I was just trying to be funny and it didn’t work ... I don’t think I should have said what I did.” The "invalid” was swift, with a

response that most Americans took as downright healthy, especially considering how tempers have been fraying in the most pitiless week of a heatwave summer. “No apology was really needed,” Dukakis told reporters in Boston. “We all occasionally mis-speak and I don’t think the President needed to apologise.” Which still, in a sense, magnanimity aside, left Governor Dukakis on the griddle. If there had been so much smoke about “clinical depression,” surely there must be a flicker of fire? Or so the tongues were wagging. As for potential consequences, it is salient to recall some of the V.I.P. flesh seared in recent years on the same media griddle. Wilbur Mill’s long career as a powerful Congressional chairman crashed when his night of carousing with exotic dancer Fanne Foxe ended in the Washington tidal basin, bringing reporters in hot pursuit. Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd became a target because of his alleged public inebriation.

On the White House front, George McGovern had to select another vice-presidential run-ning-mate after Senator Thomas Eagleton’s psychiatric problems and electro-shock treatment made the headlines ... And Senator Joseph Biden’s presidential aspirations collapsed overnight when the press discovered that he was both a fibber and a plagiarist (from Mr Neil Kinnock, of all people). In similar vein, Professor Douglas Ginsburg’s dream of sitting on the United States Supreme Court bench evaporated just as quickly when the newshounds found he liked to smoke a joint or two in college days and beyond. “Urine-test journalism” was the label which Professor Ralph Whitehead, of the Journalism Department at the University of

Massachusetts, applied to all this snooping.

A former presidential candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, preferred to liken the media to the Church — proclaiming infallibility, unfettered power and, on the lines of the sanctity of the confessional, protection for anonymous news sources. Former President Richard Nixon chose a different metaphor. The press, he said, was subjecting the private lives of public figures and those of their families “not just to a microscope but to a proctoscope." None of this criticism stopped the “New York Times," from going ahead with its form letters to all of this year’s presidential hopefuls. Among other things, the letter requested "a waiver of privacy rights to enable us to obtain any investigates files that might have been prepared by the F. 8.1. and other law enforcement agencies.” Senator Paul Simon replied that he was seeking the. presidency, not sainthood. “The public has every right to know whether a candidate’s health is good," he said later. “But what if a candidate 30 years ago had a social disease? What if 20 years ago, a candidate had haemorrhoids? Are these really things that the public should know and be discussing?

The electorate now knows that Governor George Bush has mild arthritis, had his tonsils out as a child and takes shots to control his bee-sting allergy; that Governor Michael Dukakis reported $U587,714 in income in 1986,finished seventy-first in a class of 468 at Harvard Law School, and got an A for a paper he did on The British Welfare State.

To some cynics, the only sign of incipient looniness in both these men is their readiness to submit themselves and their families to all manner of indignities by seeking the presidency. By this same standard, Senator Gary Hart is perhap a certified case. Only a few weeks before, his downfall, he had challenged the press to “put a tail on me and see how bored you’ll be.”