The Bush Cuddle; Those Pardon Brokeresses; Day of the Living Dead

Most of the mainstream press is giving the Bush White House as soft an embrace as anything we saw in the Reagan years. There are scores of examples, large and small. Take the scam pulled by the Knight Ridder news chain in the run-up to George Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 27. On the day before, Knight Ridder, which publishes the Miami Herald, put out a story by one of the chain's writers, Amy Driscoll, to the effect that "if Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris had let south Florida's counties complete manual recounts before certifying the results of November's election, George W. Bush likely would have won the presidency outright." This story duly allowed newspapers across the country running the Knight Ridder story to put up headlines such as the main front page banner used by the Bay Area's West County Times, "Recount: Bush still would win."

This came the day before Bush's address to Congress. Very convenient for the White House. The new occupant of the Oval Office (living refutation of Prof. Noam Chomsky's view that linguistic skills are deeply imprinted in the neuro-cerebral program of every human) could go before Congress to make his case for giving money to the rich and to the Pentagon, as a bona fide, democratically elected president.

But the next few paragraphs of Driscoll's story made it clear that Knight Ridder was playing a disingenuous game. The claim that Bush would have won Florida was reached by focusing narrowly on Miami-Dade and three other counties where Gore had asked for manual recounts. It ignored counts taken by other newspapers of other Florida counties, which showed that votes for Gore were consistently undercounted. And of course the Knight Ridder story also ignored the damning accounts of how blacks and Haitians were frightened or bullied out of voting, and how a private company hired by Jeb Bush's state government had struck many black voters with blameless pasts off the rolls on the grounds that they had criminal records.

Another example of the Bush Cuddle? It pertains to the same issue of racist gerrymandering. Take all those solemn news stories last week about the steely resolve of the new administration to battle racism in such forms as "driving-while-black" harassment by the cops. Contrast this supposed resolve with the enthusiastic Republican reaction to the disenfranchisement of the poor by the Census Bureau. I didn't read a single story putting the two issues together. The Bureau, which is part of the Dept. of Commerce, has decided not to use statistical sampling, a procedure of proven reliability, to adjust the notorious undercounting of the poor, particularly blacks and browns. One of the first acts of incoming Commerce Secretary Donald Evans was to transfer from the Census Bureau to himself the authority over whether to adjust the count. As things turned out, he did not have to use this clout since the Bureau's statistical panel chickened out on the issue.

Those Pardon Brokeresses

The fundamental mission of the press is to endorse the essential legitimacy of the American political system. In the current phase, Bush is being fulsomely endorsed as a cleansing force after the squalor of the Clinton years.

Of course the Clinton years were squalid. Many of the pardons were squalid, as they have often been in American history. You think this is new? You think Denise Rich, Beth Dozoretz and Hugh Rodham have no antecedents in American political history? Just to take the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, people known as "pardon brokers" swarmed across Washington seeking satisfaction first from Lincoln, then from his successor, Johnson. One of the most notorious was Mrs. L.L. Cobb, a handsome woman who boasted to friends of the ease with which she could reach President Andrew Johnson. Gen. LaFayette Baker, head of the National Protective Police (antecedent of the U.S. Secret Service), spends no fewer than 100 pages in his memoir Secret Service on a description of his efforts to repel the pardon brokeress from the White House, and how he set up a sting operation in which, with the use of marked bills, he caught Mrs. Cobb securing a pardon from Johnson for a fee of $300 and arrested her.

Baker issued warning after warning to President Johnson to shun Mrs. Cobb and another pardon brokeress called Mrs. Washington, disparaged by Baker as the indiscreet widow of a deceased enemy of the government. Baker set up a sting for Mrs. Washington too, with one of his agents giving the brokeress $100 as a retainer for the expected pardon. Then he sent an undercover man along to a party in which Mrs. Washington was entertaining a member of Johnson's cabinet, along with his private secretary and various other Washington notables. Baker's man was exposed and "was unceremoniously enjoined to leave." The third time Baker secured an audience with Johnson to admonish him about the pardon brokeresses, the President answered vaguely that it was impossible for him to "know the character of the females visiting his house" but that "if he could be convinced that the character of these women was bad, he would certainly not tolerate their presence at the Executive mansion a moment."

Baker was evidently unable to make sufficiently persuasive a case and Johnson continued to delight in the visits of Mrs. Cobb, even as Clinton delighted in the importuning of the ample Mrs. Rich. Finally, Baker set a detective at the main entrance to the White House to keep La Cobb out, but she got to Johnson anyway, through the kitchen. After reaching the President she vigorously protested Baker's harassment; the besotted Johnson summoned Baker and lectured him roundly on sticking his nose into matters that were not his province. Baker duly resigned and subsequently got yet another thrashing from Mrs. Cobb in the courts, where she successfully sued him for false arrest after the $300 sting.

Day of the Living Dead

Here it comes: the first of what will no doubt be several thousand stories over the next couple of years describing Al Gore's preparations to run again in 2004. Monday's New York Times carried a report by Richard Berke on a dinner at which Gore thanked two dozen of the biggest donors to his campaign. Denise Rich was not in attendance. Berke described the party as "the most direct sign thus far" that Gore "is actively positioning himself for another try, should he decide to run."

I'm all for another bid by the former vice president, because any renewed sign of life in his political corpse will revive the understandably flagging fortunes of that brilliant work, Al Gore: A User's Manual, by myself and Jeffrey St. Clair. Last time I looked, the book was being discounted to around $6 by amazon.com, steep, not quite as dramatic a decline in value as Amazon's own stock.

So we have to brace ourselves for month after month, year after year of Al's Alive items, like the ones about his session up at Columbia last week with Rupert Murdoch. Instead of fawning on him, those journalism school students should press him on his disgusting conduct as a journalist when he worked on The Tennessean back in the 1970s. In later years Gore used to boast that as a journalist he'd written a series of exposes that had "put a few people in jail," which was entirely untrue. The most famous episode in Gore's journalistic career shows him in an extremely poor light. To save those Columbia students the drudgery of looking up the affair in that superlative work, the above-mentioned User's Manual, here is what happened:

In 1974, while working at The Tennessean as an investigative reporter, Gore was called by Gilbert Cohen, a developer/contractor putting up a large office tower in downtown Nashville. Cohen needed Metro Council permission to take an alley out of commission. He told Gore that he was having a tough time getting the city's approval and thought he was running into roadblocks as part of an extortion scheme run by a black councilman, Maurice Haddox. Gore talked the story over with The Tennessean's editor, John Siegenthaler, and then, bizarrely, instead of pushing forward with the story, they contacted the district attorney, Tom Shriver, who had formerly worked on The Tennessean. The three began to concoct a sting operation. The way they set it up, The Tennessean gave Cohen money to offer Haddox in return for a Metro Council okay to close the alley. The rendezvous spot for the transfer was visible from the office of The Tennessean's lawyer, and photographers deployed there used telephoto lenses to snap pictures of the money being handed over.

Cohen was wired by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and Gore was able to monitor the conversation. After Cohen had given Haddox a preliminary payment of $300, Haddox introduced a bill to close the alley, and the Metro Council agreed. Later that day Gore transcribed the tape in the D.A.'s office and, before he published any story, testified before a secret grand jury. Immediately following his testimony, the grand jury voted to indict Haddox.

Collusion between the D.A., The Tennessean and the police didn't stop there. Later on in the day of the indictment, Haddox was holding a public session of the Metro Council's ethics committee. The police entered the council chambers and arrested Haddox before the cameras of The Tennessean, which ran Gore's big story the next day. Across the next few weeks Gore continued to milk the story.

All of this leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Certainly a journalistic probe of Haddox was legitimate, but collusion with the D.A. and the police, not to mention testimony before a grand jury by a reporter actively engaged in a story, would be deemed outrageous by most editors and reporters then and now. There was much indignation in Nashville, particularly in the black community, which thought Haddox had been set up?as indeed he had. Two juries deciding Haddox's fate took the same view. After listening to testimony, including that of reporter Gore, the first jury was hung and the second voted to acquit.

Haddox was ably represented. Addressing the jury, William Wilson called the sting "a prearranged plan born in the office of the Nashville Tennessean... Thank God the day has arrived when a black man can hold his head high and be elected to public office in this community. Thank God the day has arrived when the word nigger has disappeared from this language."

Gore was crushed. In the agony of disappointment he did not pause to question his own conduct or that of his newspaper, but immediately called into question the probity of the courts and the integrity of the law. No longer did he feel that journalism could accomplish the high civic goals he envisaged. He put away his reporter's notebook and headed off to his mother's alma mater, Vanderbilt Law School. Looking back on Haddox's trials, he told The Washington Post years later, "It was an outcome that amazed me. I felt intensely frustrated about policies and decisions I was writing about because I felt they were often dead wrong. But as a journalist I could do nothing about them."