“If we lived in an even vaguely humane public environment,” Newsweek columnist Joe Klein writes in that magazine’s September 9 issue, “Dick Morris’s private tragedy would be strictly off-limits?” But these days “trash that appears in Martians-stole-my-baby tabloids” quickly “moves up the media food chain,” he complains. Americans “live in a public sewer.”
Wow. Something about the Dick Morris story makes Joe Klein really indignant. What is it, we wonder?
Klein is certainly correct that Sherry Rowlands’s Star tabloid disclosures about Morris found their way into the mainstream press awfully fast. But that’s only because Morris chose not to deny them. And the reason Rowlands’s tale is still in the news is just as simple: All the details keep checking out. Including one, it turns out, about Klein.
Her February 20 diary entry, for instance. “Then [Morris] told me he’s in Newsweek,” Rowlands wrote, according to the September 17 edition of the Star. “The article is about how if Clinton [gets rid of] Dick he won’t win the presidency. He said the story was supposed to be a leak. Meanwhile, Dick is the one who really leaked the article. He said he told the reporter the story himself and that the story needed to knock Dick so it doesn’t look like he’s behind it.”
Here is the relevant Newsweek article, dated Feb. 26: Dick Morris is ” apparently shameless,” is “no hero,” and “has done some stupid things.” But Morris has also produced for Clinton “a political comeback that may eventually rival Harry Truman’s.” And if “Morris is sent packing” under internal attacks led by “an unreconstructed lib” like White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, it will represent another “irresponsible left turn” by the president.
The author: Joe Klein.
