HILLARY’S BRAIN

It was a curious posture for a journalist: leaping to defend the White House by taking pot shots at fellow reporters. But Blumenthal was no ordinary journalist. He had — then as now — the ear of the first lady, whom he has known since the late 1980s and who shares many of his views. She suspects large segments of the press are out to get her and the president; Blumenthal confirms her suspicions and fills in the names, faces, and personal agendas of supposed adversaries in the media. His connection to Mrs. Clinton gave Blumenthal influence inside the White House even before he went to work there in August 1997.

But it also earned him enmity from journalists. His colleagues’ main complaint was that he was advising the White House — including on how to handle unflattering press. Two reports produced in the shop of then-White House special counsel Mark Fabiani were clearly Blumenthal-inspired. The first, later ridiculed by the press, was an overview of anti-Clinton press coverage that ran to hundreds of pages, with copies of articles attached. Entitled somewhat ludicrously “The Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” this document, produced by Fabiani and his deputy, Chris Lehane, was superficial but not kooky. The aim was to steer mainstream reporters away from leads of the Vince Foster-is-alive-and-living-in-Argentina variety.

The second report was not so innocent. Dreamed up by Blumenthal, it was a detailed critique of reporter Susan Schmidt’s aggressive Whitewater coverage in the Washington Post. Blumenthal floated the project with Mrs. Clinton, members of her staff, and the White House counsel’s office. Howard Kurtz, media critic of the Post, recounts the episode in his soon-to-be published book on the Clinton White House and the press, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine. Blumenthal was “still writing for the New Yorker but increasingly whispering political advice to Hillary,” writes Kurtz. Blumenthal told Fabiani the White House should exploit a book on Whitewater by James Stewart that he, Blumenthal, expected to be favorable to the Clintons. Use it “to go after the Post,” Blumenthal said, according to Kurtz. “You ought to prepare a document outlining the differences between the Post and other papers.” Blumenthal wanted the White House to present the critique of Schmidt’s reporting to her editor, Leonard Downie Jr., then release it “to show up the Post before the rest of the media.”

Fabiani ignored Blumenthal’s suggestion, “but he quickly learned that Blumenthal had Hillary’s ear,” Kurtz writes. “A week or so after he and Blumenthal had talked, she would reel off a list of ideas and, almost word for word, they would be Blumenthal’s ideas.” As it turned out, the report on Schmidt was never made public. White House press secretary Mike McCurry called it “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my life” and ordered it killed. Kurtz adds, “All copies of the report were carefully collected.”

So when Blumenthal joined the White House last summer, his reputation had preceded him. Top Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel was sufficiently skeptical of all the conspiracy talk that he nicknamed Blumenthal “G. K.” — short for “grassy knoll.” But Emanuel, like others in the White House, has become newly respectful in the weeks since Mrs. Clinton’s Today performance. “I’m the first to roll my eyes at some of this, but Sid has been proven more right than wrong on the ‘right-wing conspiracy,'” Emanuel told me. “There is a partisan effort against us — more than meets the eye.” Paul Begala, the 1992 campaign mechanic who has returned to the Clintons’ side after a brief exile in Texas, joined the White House staff the same day as Blumenthal. “Everybody predicted he wouldn’t work out,” says Begala. “Everybody was wrong.”

Before the Monica Lewinsky story broke, it wasn’t clear just how badly the White House would need Blumenthal’s particular skills. A cerebral Brandeis graduate, now 49, he has written four well-received books, a play, and hundreds of high-toned political pieces for influential publications. But whatever his other talents, Sidney Blumenthal is a man who sees hidden agendas and sinister machinations behind nearly every Kenneth Starr subpoena and every Washington Post or New York Times scoop. And he is not shy about taking on reporters. With the White House now embattled, the Clintons — especially the first lady — have found in Blumenthal the ideal courtier.

After Blumenthal joined the White House, coverage of him was sparse, partly because he wouldn’t speak on the record. He was brought in at a high level and given coveted “drop-in” privileges in the White House, meaning he doesn’t always need to go through channels to talk to the president or first lady. This apparently aroused envy. Among his new colleagues, two reactions to Blumenthal kept cropping up: They weren’t quite sure what actual work he was performing; and they circulated the subtle and always unattributed putdown that Sid was basically “harmless.”

Neither characterization now seems apt. Blumenthal has a lot of substantive assignments. And his strategy for responding to the Monica Lewinsky scandal — unless the president is telling the whole truth — could turn out to be very damaging indeed.

In just eight months in the White House, Blumenthal has accomplished the following:

* Helped plan and manage the visit of British prime minister Tony Blair, from coaching the Labourites on how to deflect Monica questions to setting up a seminar on policy issues of interest to the Clinton and Blair administrations.

* Taken the lead, with Mrs. Clinton, in planning the administration’s activities marking the new millennium. These are not just celebrations. “He’s written a couple of long, thoughtful memos on the new economy,” says White House communications director Ann F. Lewis. “He’s also helped on Medicare and child care.”

* Encouraged Al Gore and his staff to explain why they believe the vice president’s phone calls from the White House in which he solicited large campaign contributions didn’t violate the Pendleton Act. “Sid said: ‘Look, you guys believe this was legal, right? Well, let’s make the case,'” recalls Gore chief of staff Ron Klain. “We have plenty of political people — I’m one of ’em — whose instinct was to come up with a bumper-sticker slogan. Sid’s was: What are the facts we have to support us? He has confidence we can make a complex argument in the media. Sid is actually a perfect fit here. He has a journalist’s eye and an advocate’s heart.”

* Midwifed a January 7 meeting of intellectuals and academics at the White House attended by the president, vice president, and first lady.

* Assisted in crafting Clinton’s recent State of the Union address. (A picture of Blumenthal coaching Clinton during debate prep even ran in the New York Times.)

* Taken the lead, during a recent presidential trip to Argentina, in getting the president to address the sensitive issue of freedom of the press in Latin America. “We wouldn’t have had the right tone without Sidney, and we wouldn’t have put the emphasis on it,” says White House counselor Thomas F. ” Mack” McLarty. “He brings a level of understanding and sophistication about the press and the media that is unique in the second term. He enjoys the full confidence of the president and the first lady, so his views are listened to and supported.”

But his area of greatest expertise, say his colleagues, is press relations. He helps the White House reward friendly media outlets and commentators — and do battle with those they see as hostile.

“Who do you call in the different [news] organizations? Who is the decision-maker up the line from the reporter? Who’s up and who’s down? Who has an agenda? He knew it all,” says Fabiani’s successor, former White House associate counsel Lanny J. Davis. “What Sid knows is the internal dynamics and personalities of the different news organizations.”

Some of those on the receiving end of this expertise believe Blumenthal’s press strategy borders on the Nixonesque. Investigative reporters covering Whitewater keep hearing that they are on a Blumenthal “enemies” list. Susan Schmidt, who has produced scoops on the Whitewater beat since 1993, says of Blumenthal, “I’ve never heard of anyone who purports to be a journalist giving the White House advice on how to undermine the credibility of other news organizations.”

For his part, Blumenthal dismisses the enemies-list story as apocryphal, along with the claim that he had a diagram of the right-wing conspiracy on his office wall. But he doesn’t conceal his antipathy for Starr, or his disgust with large segments of the press. Nor does he hide the fact that he has spoon-fed unfavorable items on Starr’s investigation to columnists he thinks sympathetic — or that he cooperates with media critics who argue that the press has been too hot in its pursuit of scandal. Indeed, Blumenthal has been opening doors for David Brock, the writer who long ago broke the Troopergate story in the American Spectator. At the time, Blumenthal derided Brock as “a younger right-wing writer — I hesitate to call him a journalist.” Now, Brock has left the Spectator and started to attack his former allies — and Blumenthal apparently has shed his reservations.

Blumenthal won’t expound publicly on where he believes the right-wing conspiracy starts and stops, and he won’t go near the question of how much of the Clintons’ trouble they have brought on themselves. In fact, he won’t say much of anything for publication these days. In a long, friendly, but off-the- record interview, he indicates that being quoted widely is not the best way for him to help the Clintons’ cause. All he’ll say is that he “loves” his current job. “It’s great to be seeing things from the inside that, as a journalist, I only saw from the outside,” he adds. “Working in the White House has given me a much deeper understanding of what goes on.”

When Blumenthal joined the White House last summer, there was much joking in press circles to the effect that he was owed several years’ back pay.

He was known for his high opinion of his own intellect, his deftness as a political writer, his high-level contacts in liberal circles on both sides of the Atlantic — and, mainly, his relentlessness as a defender of the Clintons.

As a national political writer for the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker in the 1980s and ’90s, Blumenthal displayed a decidedly left-of-center outlook and openly rooted for Democratic candidates and causes. Moreover, he was identified with a specific faction of the Democratic party, the group that argued that if the Democrats wanted to recapture the White House, they needed “new ideas” with appeal beyond the party’s traditional base of blacks, liberals, and labor. The first national candidate who fit the bill was Gary Hart — and Blumenthal fell for him hard.

He wrote glowing dispatches on Hart that were circulated by the campaign. He also privately dispensed advice to both Hart and his campaign aides, and, on at least one occasion, according to top advisers in that campaign, he made material contributions to a Hart campaign speech.

By 1992, another candidate was promising to be a “new kind of Democrat,” and Blumenthal chose sides again. He wrote glowing pieces about Bill Clinton and was tough on the other Democrats seeking the nomination. In the general election, he was vicious toward Ross Perot and George Bush. Perot, Blumenthal assured New Republic readers, was an anti-Semite, a conclusion based on a single anonymous quote. The Bush hit was, if anything, less grounded in fact: At a time when Clinton’s confusing draft record was being aired, Blumenthal recycled an old beef from one of George Bush’s fellow World War II Navy aviators, who wondered whether Bush had bailed out of his crippled torpedo bomber too quickly.

After the election, Blumenthal became Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. His contacts in the Clinton camp, it was thought, would give the magazine a leg up. But Blumenthal didn’t use his access to break stories, and he was plainly bored by anything that might spell scandal. He refused to write about Whitewater, actually lauded Harry Thomason for ridding the White House of its seven career travel-office employees, and dismissed Paula Jones as not only a tramp and a liar, but — what else? — a dupe of the right wing.

“She has left a trail of bent branches that winds through the reaches of the far right,” Blumenthal wrote. “Territory occupied by abortion-clinic blockaders, television evangelists, professional media bashers, and profiteers in the martyr business.”

Eventually the New Yorker recruited Michael Kelly, a former Baltimore Sun and New York Times reporter, to provide some balance. As a condition of accepting the job, Kelly stipulated that Blumenthal would not be allowed to come into the office. “Too many people at the magazine believed he was sabotaging them,” says Kelly, adding that Blumenthal had already applied for a job in the White House while covering the place. “He seemed to be in regular communication with the first lady as a sort of confidant. It was just not something I wanted around me.”

Blumenthal is aware that many mainstream reporters believe he consistently crossed the line when he was a journalist. His response has been that he never pretended to be an ink-stained wretch working his way up from the police beat, following the star of objectivity. His models have been the towering columnists of yore, such as Joseph Alsop, who received a visit from JFK late on inauguration night; writers who were players in politics, not just impartial observers. “I’m not a reporter,” Blumenthal once explained. “I don’t believe that the accumulation of isolated fact upon fact yields some sort of pure truth, capital T.”

Much of what Blumenthal wrote for the New Yorker was predictable, given his ideology and pro-Clinton sympathies: Al D’Amato is a brute, Pat Buchanan a menace, and the central feature of Bob Dole’s character is not perseverance or irony, but cynicism. Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein is a gem, the Republican party lost its way when it alienated Planned Parenthood, and the answer to who killed Vince Foster is easy: Washington. Blumenthal almost never used the word “conservative”; it was “right-wing” this and “far-right” that. And, oh yes, Richard Nixon was responsible for the Vietnam War.

On the other hand, not all his White House coverage was shallow or wrongheaded. Blumenthal certainly understood before most people how potent Tony Blair’s “New Labour” appeal would be — and how strong the bonds would be between Blair and Clinton. Blumenthal also pointed out, early in the Clinton administration when the wise guys in both the Democratic party and the press were clamoring for Clinton to bring some graybeards into the White House, that the younger aides, George Stephanopoulos and his crowd, were the seasoned political warriors. It was their elders, such as McLarty, Foster, and Bernard Nussbaum, who were the novices.

Today, Blumenthal is the White House novice, but so far, both friends and critics believe he is well suited to the Clinton team. They see him as a natural political warrior who was trapped for almost three decades in the body of a journalist. “He must have had a severe identity crisis when he was a reporter,” says White House press secretary Mike McCurry. “He didn’t want to be in that profession.”

The novice, moreover, is rising fast. It’s no longer just Sid and Hillary who talk of conspiracies. Paul Begala went on the network talk shows last week and echoed Blumenthal’s private view of Ken Starr: a “corrupt” man leading a “witch hunt.”

The disquieting aspect of this strategy is that in an effort to keep the president’s job-performance rating high, the Clintonites are risking damage to the country. The same surveys that show Clinton’s job approval around 70 percent also show the public evenly divided on whether a shadowy conspiracy is attempting to destroy the Clinton presidency. This cannot be good for the nation. A few years ago, after Oliver Stone’s JFK was released, I ran into a maitre d’ I knew at my favorite racetrack restaurant, and nobody’s fool. He had just seen the Stone movie. “That really shook me up,” he said. ” I’m so ashamed my government would do that.”

There is something about an expensively produced Hollywood movie — or a smiling appearance on Today by a bright first lady — that gives it instant credibility with many Americans. Sidney Blumenthal understands both how the media work and how to take advantage of the American people’s at least momentary susceptibility to conspiracy theories. The Clintons have benefited from Blumenthal’s insight and are following his strategy. For now, it seems to be working, but sooner or later — and probably sooner — conspiracy theories wear thin and “the accumulation of fact upon fact” does yield the truth.

Carl M. Cannon covers the White House for the Baltimore Sun.