SENATOR CHUCK HAGEL of Nebraska says he first got wind of the whisper campaign against John McCain while listening to columnist George Will on ABC’s This Week on November 7. Will cited Republican senators as remarking on McCain’s “personal pique” when opposed. It goes, said Will, “to the question about whether or not you are going to deal with all the people in [Washington] who disagree with you, even when you are president.” Then, Hagel says he heard rumors that a few senators were privately suggesting McCain, the Arizona senator, was traumatized as a POW in North Vietnam and now is too unstable to be president. Hagel concluded McCain was being viciously smeared.
A McCain pal and supporter, Hagel went on the warpath. He confronted senator Paul Coverdell of Georgia, the point man in the Senate for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Hagel also asked to meet with Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist. Through Coverdell, Bush denied spreading any stories about McCain’s fitness. Rove declined to meet with Hagel, but he, too, denied the Bush campaign was smearing McCain. Later, a number of pro-Bush senators insisted they hadn’t intimated that McCain is unstable.
All that, however, didn’t end what has become one of the oddest episodes in the GOP presidential struggle, and one that may wind up aiding McCain’s White House bid. If nothing else, McCain is a sympathetic victim. He was a hero in Vietnam, who refused early release by his Hanoi jailers. So using McCain’s Vietnam experience against him would indeed be a smear. But there’s reason to believe the smear never occurred.
The smear story broke in the press on November 19 with a column by Elizabeth Drew in the Washington Post, followed two days later by one in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd. Drew named four Republican senators as participants in “a smear campaign of the ugliest sort.” Dowd wrote about “whispered insinuations” by Republicans, including Bush backers, that McCain had been driven “cuckoo” in Vietnamese dungeons. And Dowd quoted Hagel as saying the anti-McCain talk is “an orchestrated effort, very subtle, very clever.” What started as complaints about McCain’s temper, Hagel said, turned into discussions of his temperament, then to suggestions of “instability.”
There’s a problem, however, with the notion of a smear campaign against McCain: No actual instances of smears have been reported, no examples of Sen. X talking to reporter Y about McCain and Vietnam. Neither Drew nor Dowd cited any, though Drew said on CNN she had the “most multiple and hardest confirmations” of smears. Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, searched for instances and couldn’t find any. McCain himself said on Face the Nation on November 21 that he didn’t know of any. Howard Opinsky, McCain’s campaign press secretary, told me, “I don’t have any evidence one way or the other, and we’re not saying any exists.” Even Hagel described the smears as “phantoms.”
But Hagel did say he heard that two “money men” from New York had asked two senators if they should back the McCain campaign and were told they shouldn’t because McCain is unstable. But Hagel doesn’t know the names of the senators. And every senator whose name has come up in connection with the alleged smear has reacted indignantly. Hagel says he talked to Senate GOP whip Don Nickles, who was named by Drew as a smearer, and believes his denial. Majority leader Trent Lott, also named by Drew, told reporters on November 19: “I don’t know what is wrong with Elizabeth Drew. . . . There is not one iota of truth to it. There is no whisper campaign.” Coverdell, in a letter to the Post, said the “accusations are reckless, without merit, and quite simply, poppycock.” Nickles, in a separate letter to the Post, called the charge he’d smeared McCain “absolutely false. . . . I have the greatest respect for him and I would not undermine him or his campaign in any way whatsoever.”
Perhaps these denials should be taken with a grain of salt. Drew wrote that denials should be expected. “Nobody is going to stand up in front of the world,” says Hagel, and assert that McCain is unfit to be president because of what happened in Vietnam. But denials aren’t proof that what’s being denied is true either. It is clear that a number of McCain’s Senate colleagues don’t say nice things about him. McCain has bucked the leadership on campaign finance reform and anti-tobacco legislation, and he prides himself on being a maverick. Lott and senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, an influential Republican, “have a problem with McCain,” Hagel says.
So do other Republicans. The flap over McCain’s temper began with an October 25 story by Richard Berke of the New York Times in which Arizona governor Jane Hull told of McCain’s “occasional eruptions at her.” The story also quoted Michigan governor John Engler questioning whether McCain is a team player. The McCain campaign — and McCain himself — took this as a shot across the bow from the Bush campaign. McCain suggested a memo must have gone out from Bush headquarters with orders to attack McCain’s temper. The Bush camp scoffed at this. A week later, McCain’s hometown paper in Phoenix, the Arizona Republic, said in an editorial that there’s “reason to seriously question whether McCain has the temperament, and the political approach and skills, we want in the next president of the United States.”
It’s possible that gripes about McCain’s temper were interpreted as tacitly alluding to the after-effects of his hideous treatment as a POW. George Will, for instance, didn’t mention Vietnam. I suspect we’ll never know for sure whether McCain was smeared. But lack of certainty didn’t stop Newsweek from giving Lott a down arrow for trashing McCain. And presidential hopefuls Gary Bauer and senator Orrin Hatch quickly blamed the Bush campaign for smearing McCain. Mike Murphy, McCain’s strategist, says the McCain campaign won the flap over his temper and Vietnam. Of that, there’s no doubt.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
