CLINTON’S COURTIER PRESS

Maybe so. Yet the truly pro-Clinton press we will always have with us, a band of journalists who defend the president at practically every turn, who disparage virtually his every accuser, and who treat almost any criticism of his administration as a threat to enlightened government. We might say that these journalists are indistinguishable from official White House spokesmen — except that the officials seldom go so far. Margaret Carlson of Time, Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, Lars- Erik Nelson of the Daily News, Joe Conason of the New York Observer — these are the ones who will stand by Clinton until (as the president himself likes to say) “the last dog dies.” They are, indeed, the courtier press.

Prominent in Clinton’s court is Carlson’s employer, Time magazine. Its editors have apparently decided that, whereas their chief rival, Newsweek, will lead the journalistic investigation of Clinton, they will lead the counter-investigation. Even before Lewinsky became a household name, Time was friendly to White House spin, lamenting, for example, that Clinton was forced to “set aside the noble task of searching for his place in history — part of his preparations for the State of the Union address — in order to answer questions” from Paula Jones’s lawyers. But at the end of what we now know to have been a traumatizing deposition, “Clinton departed in what sources close to him say was an ecstatic mood.” The president, you see, “felt that the deposition had gone smashingly for him.” A “person close to the President said, ‘Everyone is going to sleep well tonight.'”

At the front of Time’s first post-Monica issue, senior editor Nancy Gibbs wrote, “Last week even [Clinton’s] apologists didn’t know where to begin.” Carlson, however, had no trouble over on page 49. She identified the villain of the piece as Kenneth Starr. “No one should lie” about sexual dalliances and their consequences, she avowed, but “Big Brother [that would be Starr] shouldn’t ask.” According to Carlson, all of us, no matter what our view of Clinton, should perceive that the “convergence of Jones, Starr and the FBI is not right.” If the case against the president were ever taken up by Congress, the result would be “a show so repulsive it might even shame Ken Starr.”

The magazine, though, was just warming up. In its next issue, it featured the independent counsel on its cover in a menacing pose, along with the legend, “Starr at War.” Inside, there were additional scary photos of the prosecutor and his assistants, including one wrought in thuggish black and white, with shadows creeping about the walls. Nancy Gibbs seemed relieved that Clinton’s poll numbers were strong, observing, “Americans are less puritanical and more forgiving than the cartoon version suggests, and this President is never better than in his worst moments.” Gibbs also wrote that, after Clinton delivered his State of the Union address, “the White House did a very wise thing: it went silent” (not something normally applauded by a journalist).

Elsewhere in the issue, an article dissected Monica Lewinsky, another took an earnest look at the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” alleged by Hillary Clinton, and Carlson went to work on Linda Tripp. “Nothing in this mess,” Carlson stated, “is more inexplicable than” Tripp’s behavior. Tripp had not put her tapes “in a vault to be used defensively,” but had “voluntarily played them for Ken Starr.” And, really, “no one likes a snitch, especially one with so much to gain.” Tripp “certainly can play the bitter secretary in the sure-to-come Lifetime movie.”

But Carlson was saving herself for her peroration. Tripp had been secretary to Vince Foster, who, “in his last conversation with colleagues,” said “he couldn’t understand how so much of what he did or said found its way into the press.” And it was Linda Tripp who “sat just outside his office — delivered him his last meal, in fact.” Carlson’s conclusion? “Perhaps, like Lewinsky, Foster was too close to the wrong person.”

A week later, Time had its cover declare that Clinton was facing “Trial by Leaks.” Nancy Gibbs sighed that, at a state dinner for Britain’s Tony Blair, “the capital’s obsession melted away,” if only for “one brief shining moment.” Carlson, for her part, likened Tripp to Iago, “full of malice,” and noted that, while Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie, had been “a victim of his carelessness,” she had “also been the recipient of a hundred kindnesses.” In that same issue, the magazine opened its pages to Monica Lewinsky’s attorneys, William Ginsburg and his D.C. sidekick, Nathaniel Speights (who were afforded a most flattering photo). The lawyers claimed to be helping “a client who has told the truth, the complete truth, to the authorities.” The problem was that Starr (again) “seems to think it’s O.K. to break the law to enforce the law.”

The next week, Carlson thundered against the independent counsel’s questioning of Marcia Lewis, but what else could you expect in “Ken Starr’s America”? Later, in its March 9 issue, Time told its readers that Starr had gone “subpoena crazy,” and two weeks after that, the magazine seemed disturbed that Kathleen Willey had been “cozily escorted by FBI agents working for Ken Starr.” (Linda Tripp, though, was no longer being permitted to work at home — “she’ll just have to tape her friends at her desk.”)

In the middle of March, Kathleen Willey gave her celebrated interview to 60 Minutes, after spending many hours in conversation with reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. Time, though, milked a source of its own, Julie Steele, who offered a wealth of derogatory information about her former friend Willey. The magazine reported in near-gleeful tones that Willey had ” not been above baroque acts of deception,” which included lying to a boyfriend about being pregnant and asking Steele to mislead Isikoff about what had occurred off the Oval Office. Time did not say, however, that Steele, according to Isikoff, kept changing her story or that she had been paid $ 7,000 by a tabloid for a photo of Willey with Clinton. Time also saw fit to publicize the most personal details of Willey’s life — that, when a teenager, she had given up a child for adoption; that her husband had left certain items for her along with his suicide note. These and other morsels appear to have come from Willey’s one-time confidante, Steele. Yet the magazine issued no denunciations of betrayal, and no one was called “snitch.”

One of the few in Margaret Carlson’s league is Eleanor Clift, famed for her impassioned defenses of the Clintons and her scorn of anything right of center. Clift, though still associated with Newsweek, has become primarily a television performer, and she plays her role to the hilt. On Day One of Monica-mania, she pointed out that Lewinsky was “still of age” and that, given our past presidents, “libido and leadership are linked” (one of the more memorable phrases to come out of the scandal). Two days later, she warned that, in Lewinsky’s discussions with Tripp, “there may be a delusional quality involved.” Thereafter, she concentrated her fire on Starr and his ” witch hunt,” charging that the independent counsel has “flaunted his right- wing connections” and turned “law enforcement into snoops.” As for Willey, her credibility had been, not called into question, but “destroyed.” Clift remembered a happier time, when, if “people lied about sex in private matters, we called it chivalry.”

Al Hunt is more restrained than Carlson and Clift, and he labors in his Wall Street Journal columns and television outings to project an air of detachment. (“There are no heroes in this,” runs a typical remark.) But his disdain for conservatives always manages to carry the day. He has been particularly harsh in his assessment of Starr, labeling him a “tainted prosecutor” who employs “storm-trooper tactics.” Starr, according to Hunt, suffers from an “obsession with Clinton” and is “out to get him at any cost.” Furthermore, Starr “wanted to use this post as a stepping stone, and that was his desire in the very beginning and I think that is why he was a bad appointment” (notwithstanding Starr’s obvious longing to retreat to the relative obscurity of Pepperdine University). Hunt, like Carlson and Clift, holds Starr responsible for “most of the leaks” and quips that “for Ken Starr to say he’s going to investigate the leaks is as believable as O. J. Simpson looking for the real killer.”

Of Tripp and the literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, Hunt is utterly dismissive. They are “people with absolutely no credibility,” he declares. ” We can’t trust what they say.” We can trust Vernon Jordan, however. On the first Nightline of the scandal, Hunt vouched for his friend of ” almost 20 years”: “I respect [Jordan] a great deal, and it would stun me if that allegation is true. He’s too smart. He’s too good a lawyer. He’s too careful. . . . That’s not something Vernon Jordan would have done. . . . Would he have told Monica Lewinsky to commit perjury? I just find that impossible to believe.”

Lars-Erik Nelson is a slasher in the Carlson and Clift mode — even fiercer. He states forthrightly, “I despise Starr.” He is also, like Hunt, partial to Third Reich analogies, sprinkling them throughout his columns in the New York Daily News. He described one conservative lawyer as “a graduate of the Gestapo School of Interrogation” and assailed “Kenneth Starr’s snoopers, otherwise known as the Night Ambush Squad,” for their “police state tactics.” Yet he is also capable of variation, recalling at one point “a KGB that used tactics much like Starr’s.”

Nelson has a personal reason to loathe Starr (or “Big Brother,” as he calls him). Sidney Blumenthal, who was once Clinton’s most reliable supporter in the press and now does his work inside the White House, “handed my name over to Starr and then was called before a grand jury to be questioned about his efforts to plant hostile stories about Starr in the press.” In Nelson’s view, “Starr’s operation fits no known definition of justice,” as “this man is a threat to American liberties.” Nor does Nelson believe that Clinton is guilty of a sexual relationship with an intern: “Clinton denies it, Lewinsky denies it; the only person who says it happened is the snitch, Linda Tripp; and the most visible figure in America who believes any and all sex gossip is” Starr. Nelson may be the most combustible polemicist in the country at the moment.

But it is the New York Observer’s Joe Conason who is regarded in journalistic circles as “the new Sid” Blumenthal — the reporter most heedful of the administration’s needs. In 1992, he chided the press for its indifference to a rumor about George Bush: “The issue that remains too hot to handle is whether Poppy has been faithful to Bar.” But six years later, when Matt Drudge introduced Monica Lewinsky to the world on his Internet site, Conason ridiculed Drudge for a “form of premature ejaculation, causing him to emit poorly sourced stories about the President, the First Lady and various Clinton aides.” In Washington, wrote Conason, “it doesn’t matter that Mr. Drudge’s ‘reporting’ is on a par with his D- average in high school.”

Conason is reluctant to acknowledge that the Clintons may have committed even the slightest infraction. Asked on TV to confront a growing body of circumstantial evidence, Conason held firm, responding, “How would you know whether [Clinton] did any of those things?” Well, are Monica Lewinsky’s 37 visits to the White House, after she ceased to work there, significant? Answered Conason, “I don’t know anything about any visits. I don’t see any evidence of any visits.” After a few more minutes of this, one of his exasperated interlocutors said, “One quick question, Joe: Does Monica Lewinsky exist?” Conason allowed that she did, adding, “I believe she may have been caught up in a right-wing conspiracy.”

And that conspiracy is one thing in which Conason very definitely believes. Appearing February 15 on Meet the Press, he said that “the country needs to know that . . . there has been a long-term, long-running, very costly effort by people on the right to undo the results of the last two presidential elections” — almost exactly the language that Hillary Clinton had used three weeks before. Wherever the anti-Clinton side is vulnerable, Conason homes in: He mused about whether Starr had instigated Tripp’s taping; he sniffed along the trail of Richard Scaife’s money; he depicted Kathleen Willey as a mendacious wreck; he speculated that one of Starr’s deputies was motivated by vengeance; and he propagated the canard that Starr, while representing General Motors, had conspired in a cover-up (“Is it worse to commit perjury about sex with an intern, or about the cause of automobile fuel-tank fires that have killed hundreds of men, women and children?”). Even in a rough world, the Conason style is exceptional.

These, then, are the journalists at the heart of the courtier press. Their themes tend to be alike, expressed with a remarkable uniformity: “failed Arkansas land deal,” “out of control,” “trial by leaks,” “obsession with sex.” Over and over, they assert that “character” goes far beyond marital fidelity (Conason: “I consider feeding the poor and hungry a moral issue”). And they take immense pleasure from Clinton’s poll numbers, marveling at the (newly manifested) maturity of the American people (Hunt: “They think this has been a good president; they don’t want to hear any more about the particulars of l’Affaire Lewinsky, and they certainly don’t want him driven out of office on this”). A few have even come to appreciate Billy Graham, for his easy ” forgiveness” of Clinton (Carlson: “Billy Graham is in contact with the American people”).

Of course, the pro-Clinton press is not entirely without legitimate purposes: Muck should be raked on all sides, and accusers should be scrutinized as closely as the accused. But Clinton’s courtiers are a particularly adamant breed. For them, Clinton can hardly do wrong, and if, by chance, he is forced to go, they will be with him, wiping away tears as he choppers off the White House lawn. And as he arches out of sight, they will salute him — no doubt muttering curses about conspiracy.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.