IT’S WORSE THAN SPIN

Now first, a show of hands. How many of you actually believe Mike McCurry when he says this?

Yes, yes, yes, I know all the possible caveats and qualifiers and objections. The word “distract” comes to us from the Latin distrahere, meaning to draw apart, itself a combination of the prefix dis– and the verb trahere, which in turn means “to draw.” The president does not, as part of his official duties, draw, or sketch with charcoals, or, for that matter, paint with watercolors. So, etymologically, McCurry’s statement is quite accurate. The scandal has not kept the president from any official role as Drawer-in-Chief. Let’s be clear: The president has no such official role. He wakes up every morning and goes to work doing the job the American people sent him here to do, and if you think for one minute that he’s going to be diverted by drawing pictures, for God’s sake, then you simply don’t understand this president. Why are we talking about drawing, anyway? What does drawing have to do with it? What about education and the environment and the issues that the American people . . . et cetera.

Fine. But let’s stick for the moment to ordinary understandings — to the language as ordinary people grasp it. Who actually believes that the Lewinsky scandal has not distracted the president?

No one? No one. Good. Now to the tricky part. Does the fact that McCurry’s statement, made in the course of his professional duties, is not true — that it is, as it were, a bald-faced, brazen, breathtaking lie — does this fact make Mike McCurry

(a) a professional liar;

(b) a fine man trapped in a difficult situation; or

(c) the best press secretary ever?

If you said (c), you win. It’s not the correct answer, of course, but in choosing it you have shown that you have a subtle and nuanced understanding of the “information flows” within the political culture and thereby share the sentiments of a large majority of the Washington press corps. More specifically, you agree with Wolf Blitzer, who is on record saying the same thing. Congratulations: For being as sophisticated as a Washington journalist, you win a year-long internship on Inside Politics and a date with either Wolf or Bobbie Batista. Your choice.

Blitzer’s opinion of McCurry is to be found in the new book by Howard Kurtz, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine. Kurtz is the Washington Post’s media critic, and is thus himself an important conduit of those fabled Beltway information flows. As a critic, Kurtz is thoroughly conventional. His earlier books, Hot Air and Media Circus, were full of Fred Friendly-like tut-tuttery about the erosion of standards in the tabloid culture and whatnot. As a media reporter, though, Kurtz is invaluable: brave and resourceful and lavishly productive. And it is the straightforward reporting that makes Spin Cycle the best book in many years on the Washington media. If there’s justice in the world, this will endure as one of the essential documents of the Clinton era. But that’s a big “if.”

Kurtz tagged along as the Clinton propaganda machine rumbled and smoked its way through the year 1997. It was a busy year for the spinmasters (but then aren’t they all?). The campaign-finance scandals blossomed spectacularly, while the Paula Jones lawsuit grew more menacing. By the look of it, Kurtz enjoyed generous access both to reporters and their opposite numbers in the White House press office, and he is careful to preserve his future access by casting just about everyone in the best possible light.

Most of the reporters come off as rigorous, non-ideological bird dogs — tough but fair, as they like to say — who grow increasingly frustrated with the White House’s lack of candor. For their part, the press spokesmen — particularly McCurry and White House deputy counsel Lanny Davis — come off as honorable men constantly pressing their superiors for full disclosure of the truth. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Kurtz’s own reporting suggests that none of this is true.

The star of the book is McCurry. He is by most accounts a charming fellow. Humor, says Kurtz, “was his saving grace.” He once opened a briefing wearing a paper bag over his head, identifying himself as an anonymous source, and his reputation as a fun-lover was secure ever after. In his early 40s, he is a contemporary of most White House reporters — he once had ambitions to be a reporter himself and cut from the same demographic cloth: upper middle class, well schooled, vaguely liberal but not overtly ideological. What truly endears him to the press, though, is the slight signals he gives off that he is not really taking himself, his job, or, more importantly, his boss completely seriously.

For presidential staff, the wink-and-a-nod strategy is wildly effective. It was perfected in the Reagan years, when staffers like David Gergen and James Baker would stand by their boss in public and then, off the record, let it be known that they knew, just as the reporters knew, that the old fellow was really rather dotty (and so right-wing!). Subordinates like George Stephanopoulos, on the other hand, who were as loyal off the record as on, become widely disliked by the press.

McCurry is widely liked. Spin Cycle’s most sensational anecdote has to do with a remark McCurry made after President Clinton’s famous yummy-mummy comment. Clinton, you’ll recall, once interrupted a dinner speech to note, bizarrely, that he would like to date a mummy recently discovered in Peru. McCurry told the president the remark was ill advised, and they had a spat. Riding home on the press plane that evening, McCurry told reporters, off the record: “Probably she does look good compared to the mummy he’s been f — .”

It is upon just such comments that a relationship of trust and affection is established in contemporary Washington. (He makes fun of his boss’s wife — calls her a mummy — says f — a lot — What a guy!) “He had a way of making each reporter think they had a special relationship,” Kurtz writes. “He would lower his voice and impart sensitive information.” Floating on this deep reservoir of goodwill, McCurry can then get down to his real job, which is to ensure that reporters discover as little as possible about what’s really going on. This is not, as some cynics might suggest, the normal role of a presidential press secretary. Press secretaries have always tried to keep some information from the press, of course: sensitive diplomatic efforts, matters of national security, the intimate details of presidential deliberations. But the spokesman-as-prevaricator is an innovation of the Clinton era, and for an obvious reason: There’s more to hide.

The campaign-finance scandals offered McCurry ample opportunity to do his job, and Kurtz shows us the spokesman’s techniques in full throttle. There is, first of all, the outright lie. We all remember the fund-raising coffees that McCurry said weren’t fund-raisers, but his lies could be applied to the most trivial items as well. To take one example among many: Rita Braver of CBS once discovered that Mark Middleton, a key player in the scandals and one of their many Fifth Amendment adepts, had been treating clients to meals in the White House mess after he’d left the administration — a highly unusual privilege, to say the least. McCurry said he couldn’t confirm Braver’s report, so she didn’t broadcast it. The next morning the Middleton story appeared in the Wall Street Journal, with White House confirmation. McCurry had planted it in the newspaper to keep it off the more damaging medium of television.

Often the lie is buttressed by bullying. When it was revealed that Dick Morris had an illegitimate daughter, reporters asked McCurry whether Clinton had known about it, and McCurry said no. When reporters pressed him, he badgered back. Why were reporters descending to the level of the tabloids? But of course Clinton had known, as McCurry eventually conceded after most reporters had lost interest. And when David Watkins, a former presidential confidant, told a reporter that Clinton was having an affair with a woman on the White House payroll, McCurry refused to answer the allegations, choosing to shame his reporters instead.

“I want to put news organizations in the position of having to exercise careful editorial judgment,” he said.

The press has an acute sense of its own virtue, its pious adherence to standards, so McCurry’s tactic of bullying invariably worked. It worked even when the story wasn’t “tabloid trash.” Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe published the first documented evidence that John Huang had demanded changes in administration policy in return for his munificent fund-raising efforts.

“The Boston Globe is just wrong,” McCurry said in the daily briefing, and then he took to the phones privately to tell other reporters that the story was “outrageous.” Indeed: It was also true. But the bullying did the trick. “Other than a CNN segment and a couple of wire-service reports,” Kurtz writes, “the story didn’t exist. They had killed it.”

When lying and bullying won’t kill a story, McCurry deflects it. He has compartmentalized his job and tells reporters that certain questions are beyond his range. This technique was perfected in the fund-raising scandals, and it is invaluable today, in the Lewinsky affair. If McCurry finds a question inconvenient, he tells a reporter that it should be directed to somebody’s counsel — John Huang’s, Mark Middleton’s, the president’s, and now Betty Currie’s or Vernon Jordan’s. And the lawyers won’t answer the question either, as McCurry knows. Someone other than McCurry gets to answer ” No comment,” and the question withers.

McCurry’s techniques, masterfully deployed though they are, couldn’t be sustained without the tacit compliance of the reporters themselves. Lying works only on the credulous, and bullying works only on wimps. Kurtz would never call his colleagues credulous wimps, of course — he’d never work in this town again — but he does show them to be, at a minimum, SNAGGs, or Sensitive New Age Guys and Gals. (He doesn’t use the specific term.) And they are a manipulable bunch. Kurtz’s most harrowing anecdote shows Lanny Davis, in a room outside the Thompson campaign-finance hearings, dictating quotes to the Associated Press reporter Larry Margasak. “He was injecting his verbiage directly into the wire story,” Kurtz writes, “the one that would set the tone for much of the day’s coverage.”

The manipulation also took subtler forms. One typical example: When White House flacks told the Post’s John Harris that Clinton would use his second term to be a national unifier, Harris’s Pavlovian response was a front- pager titled: “Clinton to Push Role as National Unifier.” On another occasion, the New York Times went after Bruce Lindsey for some bit of chicanery, and the White House called in the ever-reliable Margaret Carlson, who wrote dismissively in Time that the Times was in a “lather.”

Clinton himself would occasionally get involved — at great psychic sacrifice, apparently, for his hatred of the press approaches clinical paranoia. His efforts to charm reporters in off-the-record meetings proved successful, particularly with such grinning shoeshine boys as Jonathan Alter and Thomas Friedman. This was perfectly predictable. Kurtz, following McCurry, attributes the success to Clinton’s “charm.” But powerful people are always charming when they flatter you, and of Clinton’s many gifts his greatest is for flattery. Even more than most people, journalists will tend to mistake mere flattery for soulful discernment.

There is a final weapon in McCurry’s arsenal of spin: voluntary ignorance. Other press secretaries have been kept in the dark — poor Ron Ziegler, most notably. John Kennedy didn’t tell Pierre Salinger about the Bay of Pigs in order to protect his spokesman’s credibility: Salinger wouldn’t have to lie about what he didn’t know. But McCurry’s ingenious innovation is to keep himself in the dark — and to boast that there are subjects about which he will remain stubbornly ignorant. His recent admission that he will not ask Clinton the truth about Monica Lewinsky is only the latest example. “Why don’t you just go ask the president?” a reporter once asked McCurry, about some detail of one scandal or another. “Because I don’t want to,” McCurry snapped.

This dodge offers multiple benefits. It shuts up reporters, closes off entire avenues of inquiry, and can eventually kill a story. And in a strange inversion, it even makes McCurry seem somehow . . . principled. It seems to reinforce the idea that the press secretary just can’t force himself to tell a lie, and makes it easier to ignore the fact that he has, and does, almost daily. Gosh: Mike loves the truth so much, he doesn’t even want to know what it is.

What a press secretary. (What a president!) If you’re a reporter, there are many ways to respond to McCurry’s highly sophisticated obfuscation. But surely the most bizarre reaction is to confess your undying admiration and affection for him, as so many White House reporters do.

Kurtz, and the White House, dwell on the subject of how detached Washington journalists are from ordinary Americans. This is undoubtedly true, and nothing illustrates the detachment more than the sad manipulation of the press that Kurtz recounts. Reporters who cover the Clinton White House have become inured to an intensity of deceit that would appall anyone else, in any other walk of life. It would be nice to give a group of ordinary Americans their own copies of Spin Cycle, to read the sorry story for themselves, and then ask them to take the quiz at the beginning of this review. Surely they would know that the correct answer is (a). Wouldn’t they?

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.