Clinton's legacy leaves some laughing
By April Davis
Special to freedomforum.org
04.26.01
NEW YORK — Almost everyone had an applause line during yesterday's lively First Amendment Breakfast discussion of the media outcry over President Bill Clinton's controversial departure from office.
The free-wheeling comments ranged from the idea of historical justice to the vengeance of an angry press. The tone was set by moderator Floyd Abrams' opening remarks:
"I have a feeling I've been wrong about everything political, legal and journalistically that matters this year, " the First Amendment attorney told the media panelists and audience at Pardons, Presents and Policy: The Clinton Legacy, which was held at the First Amendment Center.
"I was surprised by the degree of coverage, the intensity of coverage and even the bite in the coverage of the Clinton pardons," he added. "Then again, I didn't think the Supreme Court would take the Bush vs. Gore case, so it's been a clean sweep for me this year."
New York Daily News managing editor Michael Kramer, however, viewed the story as a no-brainer.
"We, the press, were eager for the next big thing, the next big story. We had an interesting run for a long time culminating in the election that wouldn't end. We had George Bush emerging victorious from the election, a kind of pallid, pale figure whose personality certainly didn't compare, better or worse, with Clinton's. And then, of course, we had Clinton himself," Kramer said.
The controversial pardons and the reportedly inappropriate gift-taking by the ex-president were "what Clinton does," Kramer added. "I think all of that combined to give the coverage so much not only texture and flavor, but so much size."
Newsweek's senior investigative correspondent, Michael Isikoff, also thought it was a "natural story," made more remarkable by how it played out.
"Sometimes if you want to understand how a story is covered, it is dictated a lot by how it unfolds," Isikoff said, recalling the Saturday in January when fugitive financier Marc Rich's name suddenly became a household word.
"I was sitting in the offices of Newsweek finishing up what we thought was going to be the last Clinton story we were going to write for some time," he said of an article wrapping up the president's final week and his deal with Independent Counsel Robert Ray.
"We were waiting for the pardons. What were the expectations? Was he going to pardon Susan McDougal? Was Michael Milkin going to get it? And we get the list and, oh yeah, Susan McDougal is on there and that's kind of interesting. Oh, Roger Clinton. He pardoned his brother. And that's kind of interesting. Milkin didn't make it.
"And then we come across the name 'Rich.' A name none of us were looking for. A name that hadn't been out there at all. 'Rich? Isn't he the guy in Switzerland, the fugitive? What the hell is that all about?' It's the sort of natural journalists' reaction."
Isikoff said that he called around and discovered that no one really knew what was going on — not even the Justice Department. Then they discovered that Rich's attorney was Jack Quinn.
"Jack Quinn? Clinton's former counsel is representing this guy? I mean it's starting to come together," Isikoff said.
Nexis searches then revealed Denise Rich and her campaign contributions to Clinton and the former first lady, Senator-elect Hillary Clinton.
"That sure looks weird," Isikoff continued. "Then a researcher had the list of the Clinton gifts that had come out the day before and there is $7,900 in gifts from Denise Rich. Wow ... it looks like there is a lot more to learn here. There is a total surprise, which is the definition of news."
"So I'm just saying that if you want to look at how a story is covered, it's those sort of twists that often govern it," Isikoff added.
No matter how natural the story may have seemed to Isikoff, New York Observer columnist Joe Conason thought it smacked of distortion and bias.
"The problem is ... lack of proportion. The difference between how missteps or questionable decisions by other presidents have been covered and the way Clinton is covered," Conason said.
"I suspect that unless you read my column … you don't know that two days before he left office, George Bush pardoned a Pakistani heroin trafficker, who had been serving a 55-year sentence, after serving six years in a North Carolina prison. No explanation. It appeared on page A16 of the Washington Post. No one was interested," he said as he compared that pardon to Clinton's pardon of convicted drug trafficker Carlos Vignali.
The difference in coverage, Conason said, was " because some people in the press were angry at Clinton for various reasons. Some were disappointed that he wasn't as a good a president as they thought he should be. Others were very angry that he became president at all and broke the Republican lock [on] the White House. Some were angry about his conduct in the [Monica] Lewinsky affair.
"There was a consensus in the Washington press corps … that this was somebody that was an open target and that no matter what had been done in coverage of past presidents or past presidencies, those rules did not necessarily apply to Bill and Hillary Clinton."
Abrams asked, "Is Clinton being judged by different standards?"
"News coverage is not governed by some sort of absolute sense of historical judgment," Isikoff replied. "It's governed by what's a good story, and all the elements of one helluva good story were there with the Clinton pardons."
And, he added, "We all had fun with it for about six weeks, which is about probably what it was worth."
Abrams turned to Robert George, associate editorial page editor of the New York Post. "Did you have fun for six weeks with it?" he asked.
"More than you can imagine. It's an honor to be here as we mark the first 100 days of Bill Clinton's post-presidency," George replied.
"The Clinton presidency has always been for many of us a bizarre cross between Richard Nixon's White House and "Peyton Place," he added, explaining why he thought both Clintons remained such a lightning rod for the press and the public.
"Conservatives always felt that Bill Clinton was somebody who never really took the office of the presidency with the seriousness we felt that it was due. To the extent that there was a fervor over wanting to 'get' Bill Clinton from the conservative side, I think that's what drove it," George said.
New York Observer columnist and author Anne Roiphe chafed at that characterization.
"When it comes to destroying the image of the presidency, I think a president sleeping in his Cabinet meetings is a very bad sign. And Ronald Reagan did it all the time and no one said he was a bad president," she said.
She also defended the pardon process. "I may be the only person on this panel who is in general for pardons, for pardoning almost everyone. I would hope that someone out there would pardon me!" she said.
"Someone said they were stunned by the pardon process," she added. " Look, we have a system which works in our culture by access. Access to places of power. ... I don't understand our press carrying on as if they've never heard of this before."
Kramer added a different thought.
"What resonated for me was the fact that people who deal with these issues all the time were shocked by it. It was their outsized indignation that drove much of our coverage, not anything that we brought to the party," he said.
So what of Clinton's legacy? After audience member Beverly Wettenstein asked about the impact of 24-hour cable news, George wryly summed up the connection:
"He turned out to be a perfect content provider for the 24-hour news cycle. Because of Bill Clinton, you had this orgiastic explosion of the whole best-and-brightest of the boomer generation — writers, authors and lawyers — all filling up slots on 24-hour news cable. And so I don't find it surprising that the minute Bill Clinton leaves office, you suddenly have all of these layoffs in the media and the economy goes into a tailspin."