Jeff Koopersmith

A Challenge on the Clinton Years
Will Bill Keller, the new Executive Editor of the New York Times, be able to clean up the mess?
By Jeff Koopersmith

July 15, 2003 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- It was not that big a surprise that Bill Keller was handed the New York Times' executive editor's mace yesterday.

He is one its finest writers, and he is wise in the ways of the world, with special analytical prominence in international relations, weapons, and war. He wrote one of the best sketches of George W. Bush I've yet read -- although it was wide-eyed in some sections.

I am anxious to see how he will do, and wish him Godspeed in this new and fearsome undertaking.

After all, only yesterday the Times had to print yet another few-thousand-word retraction of a story that grossly misreported some business dealings of -- and all but defamed -- Steven Gottlieb, founder and president of TVT Records.

But that's not my beat.

Here's Keller's curriculum vitae in brief. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his work on the Soviet Union. He joined the Times as a reporter in its Washington bureau in 1984, was a correspondent in Moscow from 1986 to 1991, and became the newspaper's bureau chief there in 1989. He then worked as bureau chief in South Africa from 1992 to 1995 when Joseph Lelyveld, Howell Raines's predecessor (and temporary successor), appointed him foreign editor.

He is also an interesting and eclectic manager, it seems -- appointing a driver to handle the finances of his team. Unlike his predecessor, he is not arrogant, and certainly not full of himself.

It's what he thinks and what he writes that will have consequences for me, and, even more imperative, what he allows to be published. Hopefully, he will look into some of the more atrocious posturing and prevarication that the Times engaged in under Mr. Raines' watch -- with particular attention to coverage of Clintons. Mr. Keller should call in Sidney Blumenthal to vet the Times' coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton from 1989 on -- and place the proper analyses of same in the "Corrections" section of the New York Times -- which prefers that term over "Retractions."

That aside for the moment, I spent this morning reading things Bill Keller wrote. I thought I'd share some of them with you today.

On War on National Defense: Bush is strong on offense, weak on defense
Monday, April 21, 2003

I don't think President Bush is going to war with Syria anytime soon, but I can understand why he might be tempted. Not just because it's another terrorist-coddling, weapons-hoarding, dissident-torturing, neighbor-molesting, America-hating despotism. Not because Bush peaked too soon in Iraq and needs another victory to carry him into 2004, or because he hopes to distract us from the con artistry of his economic policy. No, the biggest attraction of continued war, I suspect, is that in the war on terror, offense is just a lot more exciting than defense. The military triumph in Iraq, despite some mishaps and heartbreak, was a romp compared with the long slog to secure our own shores. Protecting our ports, securing vulnerable chemical plants, tracking foreign visa holders, fixing our dysfunctional intelligence community, getting emergency equipment to firefighters and hospitals -- there are no cakewalks on the home front.

From this paragraph I glean that Keller believes that:
(1) Syria is hell for Americans. (2) He views Iraq as a political foray inasmuch as he believes President Bush "peaked" too early with his invasion, but not enough to invade Syria to give him a bump. (3) Bush economic policy is a con.
(4) The war, offensive war, is exciting -- at least to Bush, and the deaths of our boys and girls is both a "romp" and a heartbreak, compared to fortifying us at home -- the defense.

Of course, Mr. Keller is often carried away by his wonderful pursuit of the beauty of language -- perhaps forgetting the beauty of reality. His comparison of the lure of offense against the boredom of defense is artful, almost poetic, as when he wrote "Every day without a terrorist attack is not a victory, merely a reprieve."

Mr. Keller also focuses us on the largely unreported -- for instance, the fact that President Bush was generally opposed to building Tom Ridge's shop. He writes, "Well, President Bush wasn't very enthusiastic about creating a Homeland Security Department in the first place."

And Keller is correct, but how many of us -- including me -- bothered to write about the President's opposition here?

Kudos to him for that.

Yet Keller can go too far. He writes in one piece:

There are still those deluded souls who discount George W. Bush as a slacker and a tool of his political handlers. Some people never learn. It should be evident by now that he is a man of self-confidence, iron discipline, and radical ambitions. But he picks his fights, and he has not put the personal muscle into the harder aspects of domestic security that he has put into waging war or cutting taxes. Back when Bush ran a baseball team rather than the entire free world, he was famously an offense guy. He built the Texas Rangers a new ballpark with short distances to the fences, heaven for sluggers. He assembled high-scoring, crowd-thrilling teams. Boy, did those guys pound the baseball. They just didn't win championships because when the playoffs came in October -- they had no defense. The pitching and fielding that win games in bigger stadiums had atrophied in a park built for offense. Maybe there's a metaphor here."

The truth is that people who believe Mr. Bush is a slacker and a tool of his political handlers are at least as correct in their analysis as is Mr. Keller.

Certainly being "a man with self-confidence, iron discipline, and radical ambitions" does not prevent him from being a slacker and a political tool. All these traits can exist simultaneously in one man, in one president -- and they do in Mr. Bush.

To insinuate that writers and academics who believe President Bush has these faults are "deluded" is insulting and smacks of "Rainesianism."

Hopefully Mr. Keller will be more careful in the future.

In another piece -- this time on Trent Lott and his woes from being a racist -- Mr. Keller almost gloats as Lott's discomfort:

I was thoroughly enjoying the amazing crescendo of contrition, such a fitting end to a year in which there was so much worth apologizing for. I loved watching Sen. Lott clamber up the remorse curve, from clueless (if you're so thin-skinned that you found my innocent remarks insulting, I feel sorry for you) to defensive (I'm sorry I gave you the erroneous impression that I'm a racist) to abject (I am one sorry bigot). I loved the way he went on what he probably thinks of as the television network all the black folks watch, and declared he would make up for his sinful past.

Naturally I might tend to applaud this revel, but then again his offhanded and almost snide remarks in the same piece were off-putting: "I wish he'd been allowed to stay around long enough to show us what exactly that would entail." Does Keller mean cutting a record of Kwanzaa songs? Adopting an African child? Most likely, Lott being Lott, his restitution would consist of funneling a few hundred million dollars to the Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard to build a superfluous destroyer and naming it in honor of Martin Luther King.

Keller redeems himself, at least nostalgically with this line:

Truly, Trent Lott is the Sisyphus of Sorry.

And then backpedals:

Before his apparent relapse, though, Lott was on to something. He had entered into a stage of contrition that few American politicians ever reach -- active penitence.

Yet Keller always surprises us. The piece I quote was in fact about American's penchant for apology and contrition. The smile? Well, here's how Keller delivered it:

I've been thinking we might start, for the sake of symmetry, with Sen. Bill Frist, Lott's successor as Republican leader. A review of his record offers some possibilities, should he choose to get off on the contrite foot. The oddest blot was probably his practice, while a medical student, of adopting cats from animal shelters to be killed during research experiments. (There goes the PETA vote.) But that is an ancient sin, one he himself confessed as "heinous," and surely scrubbed away by his yearly travels to Africa to work as a medical missionary. Here's an item of more immediate interest. In the twilight of the congressional session, some legislator anonymously arranged for a provision to be slipped into the Homeland Security bill protecting vaccine makers (mainly Eli Lilly) from lawsuits filed by the parents of autistic children. Hundreds of parents are pressing a claim that the mercury in a measles vaccine contributed to their children's disorder. For all I know, the suit may be baseless, but surely that's for a court to decide. This is a glaring example of legislative malfeasance. And strong evidence points to Frist as its author. He is cozy with Lilly and he drafted identical legislative language earlier. But he refuses to own up to it. Penance, anyone?

You gotta love that.

In his column, "Digging Up The Dead" Keller makes the case that the United States should consider courts, made up from other nations judges, to try Iraqi war criminals. He writes:

What the administration misses, in its breathtaking self-satisfaction, is the importance of conferring upon this whole process the legitimacy of the world, beyond our little troupe of compliant allies.

He is accurate and correct of course, but how does this equate with what seems, at least, to be his love affair with Bush?

You might remember Bill Keller's long piece in the New York Times Magazine -- "Reagan's Son" -- in which he posits that Bush is dazzling simply because the media is not criticizing him widely for such things as runaway unemployment, the worst economy in twenty years, his failure to stop Al Qaeda, his failure to locate Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, and so many other shortrcomings and failures.

In fact, Keller wrote,

Bush's approval ratings held firm and high. Nothing stuck. Any more than a year of corporate scandals, some involving White House friends, had stuck. Any more than the recurring reminders of al Qaeda's unimpeded reach -- in Bali, in Kenya -- had stuck.

Keller does not explain the Teflon phenomenon he posits, and simply claims it is further evidence of President Bush's Reaganesque talent. Of course, Keller may have felt humiliated shortly thereafter, as on the very day his piece was published, the President's approval ratings began to tank.

The American people, without the aid of the press, were beginning to see the weaknesses or the Administration. I read his piece. It was masterful, and the stuff of journalistic history -- despite being invalid because of its failure to recognize that Bush only enjoyed his popularity because much of the press is owned and controlled by the neoconservative right. That was an outstanding and disturbing miss on the facts -- if indeed it was a "miss" -- or was Mr. Keller also fearful of being harassed by the right?

Keller had become just another Bush "enabler" for whatever reason.

Editors such as Keller have failed, one after another, to bring attention to the problem of journalists and colleague editors who allow this President to get away with actions that would not be tolerated were it not for their fear of reprisal from conservatives who will attack them mercilessly for being "liberal" and therefore "untrustworthy" perhaps ruining their careers.

You cannot blame them, but you can blame news room executives -- and now Keller is the chief among them.

Unless Keller attacks this kind of Bush facilitation, Americans will remain unprotected from the excesses of this or any following Administration with powerful friends willing to brutally lynch the opposition.

I suggest Bill Keller begin by cleaning house.

The first to go should be the venerable but wholly-owned-by-the-right William Safire -- if only for his vicious, nearly totally unfounded, and inexcusable attacks on the Clinton Administration, the Clinton family, and the Gore families. Safire has served this nation well -- yet he is seemingly now so caught up in hatred for the left that he has lost integrity almost completely.

Next, Mr. Keller should, during the weekends perhaps, begin to read the articles written by Jeff Gerth and others at the Times -- articles which contained one lie after another about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This sloppy and malicious journalism at The New York Times should go unrewarded -- no matter that the Times might have to print a fifty page "Correction" when his review is complete.

Let's see what stuff Bill Keller's made of.

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."