SACRILEGE IN OUR TIME

And indeed this is what Imus, for 25 years a famous New York radio entertainer, has committed. When he took the stage at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner on March 21, and made “inappropriate jokes” before the president and First Lady, and forced his hosts to issue a general apology, and led White House press secretary Mike McCurry to ask C-SPAN not to rebroadcast his remarks, and caused soul-searching and brow-knitting among the worrywart community, Imus violated carefully tended standards and upended precious Washington rituals. For which he deserves a good deal of credit.

Like so many Washington controversies, the Imus affair was almost inevitable and yet utterly unexpected. Spring carries with it to Washington a round of press dinners — the Gridiron Dinner, the White House Correspondents Dinner, the National Press Club Foundation Dinner, the White House Photographers Dinner, the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, and still more. These events follow a ritual as stylized as a Kabuki or a High Mass, with fewer laughs.

The ritual unfolds like so. Members of the Washington press corps, or some elite segment of it, gather in the ballroom of a downtown hotel to shower one another with praise: Awards are bestowed for obscure accomplishments, tributes recited, fallen comrades recalled. In this the press corps is like any other professional organization — say, the Council Bluffs chapter of the American Association of Pre-owned Carpet Salespersons. The difference is that the salesmen have the modesty and circumspection to keep the event within the fraternity; they do not, for example, force invitations upon the people to whom they have sold used carpet, under the presumption that anyone would enjoy watching Paulie Luzzano accept his award for High Volume Man of the Year.

The Washington press corps, of course, knows no such modesty. For their annual fetes, the newsfolk invite the people they wrangle with and write about every day. They invite politicians. And expect them to come. The politicians oblige, almost without fail. And here is the essence of the ritual. Like a mass, a press dinner is a reenactment, and as with a mass its purpose is to reaffirm fundamental beliefs about the way the world works. A religious ritual conjures from chaos the proof that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world. A Washington press dinner shows who’s boss.

There shouldn’t be any question about how the Washington hierarchy is stacked. The president can strike down legislation, order men into battle, and annihilate whole cities with the push of a button. Yet it is with trembling fingers and gnawing gut that he reaches each morning for the handiwork of the Washington press corps. No, politicians understand as well as anyone who carries the real power in Washington, and the press dinner merely reifies the arrangement, acts it out and drives it home.

So invariably at press dinners the president is invited, and usually comes, and is made to grovel before his many-headed master. The preferred euphemism for “groveling” is “self-deprecation.” By tradition, the president (or some surrogate — a vice president, a majority or minority leader) must show “he can laugh at himself.” That is, the president must take the caricature of himself created by the press and use it as a template for his jokes: Thus President Reagan joked at press dinners about his absent-mindedness, his naps, his trigger-happy foreign policy; President Bush joked about being out of touch and to the manor born; Mrs. Reagan, in a performance that still brings hums of delight from pressfolk, humiliated herself by taking the stage at the Gridiron dressed in rags and warbling a parody of her high-flown tastes. A press don once said to me, “The Gipper may have been an idiot, but at least he and Nancy could laugh at themselves”

Self-deprecatory jokes can be very funny, but selfdepreciation, when scripted by someone other than oneself, is simply eerie. When the president takes the podium, it is understood that he has had to haul in special talent to write the jokes — most administrations, in fact, keep a handful of professional joke writers on retainer for just this purpose — and this barely concealed fillip deepens the pleasure the audience derives from his humiliation. It is one thing for President Clinton to tell a joke about his large appetite; quite another when you realize the joke was concocted by a moonlighting Leno writer who has been paid to sit and think about how fat the president is.

To be satisfactory, the politician’s homily should contain two other elements. He must take a few mild jabs at his adversaries; and he must, in closing, lapse into sentimentality. As for the jabs, the essential word is ” mild.” Jokes at the expense of the press or Congress encourage the illusion of reciprocity: This president can give as good as he gets, by God. Of course, he cannot. If he did, the Washington Post Style section — which certifies these ceremonies the following morning — wouldpoint out that many of the politician’s jokes were “barbed,” or “crossed the line,” or were “mean- spirited.”

Consider the experience of Dan Quayle. Shortly after taking office, he stood in for President Bush at the White House Correspondents” Dinner. John Tower’s nomination as defense secretary had just been rejected by the Senate – – and, of course, by the press — owing to his alleged boozing and womanizing. Quayle’s first joke was: “Watching your conduct throughout the evening, I realized that most of you do not aspire to be secretary of defense.”

“This was greeted by loud boos,” the Post reported. Quayle’s jokes, the paper stressed, were “barbed.” They elicited groans from the press. “It gets better,” Quayle told the crowd. The Post disagreed: “It didn’t get much better.”

Days later, Quayle appeared at the Gridiron. His opening joke, to everyone’s relief, showed he had learned his lesson. Quayle said he had recently asked President Bush to make some public gesture that would demonstrate Bush’s faith in his new vice president. The president, according to Quayle, put his arm around him and asked: “Do you want a puppy?” The joke was a big hit. Quayle was a big hit.

After the self-deprecation and the mild jabs, the politician caps his remarks with what sitcom writers call the “moment of shit,” the syrupy summing up in which all that has gone before is cheerfully resolved. A free press has served us pretty darn well for 200 years. . . . Sure we have our differences, but we have the same goal in view, we share the same love of . . . and so on. The First Amendment survives, the politician has subjugated himself, God’s in His heaven, and all’s right with the world.

But the press is not yet through with its politician guest. The final segment of the ritual is “the entertainment,” a monologue from a semi-famous, second-tier stand-up comic, preferably one who is recognizable from TV: Paula Poundstone, Bill Maher, Al Franken, Conan O’Brien, Dennis Miller, and suchlike. The comic too is expected to humiliate the politician-guest, as well as throw in a safe gag or two about the press (Sam Donaldson’s loud mouth, Irving R. Levine’s bow ties). But because he will have gained his fame on network TV he can be expected to joke comfortably within the boundaries of taste set by delicate Washington sensibilities: no sex jokes, no jokes about bodily processes, and so on. For the most part the comics have complied.

And then somebody invited Imus.

As a 1990s disc jockey, Imus specializes in jokes about sex and other bodily processes. But he is also famous for his political satire, much of it remarkably sophisticated, the rest less so, but almost all of it funny. This has led dozens of journalists to appear regularly on his show — Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Dan Rather, and many more — notwithstanding that the political satire often overlaps with the sex and fiatulence jokes. Here is Imus at the outer edge, from a song parody:

She won’t do housework, ’cause it makes her sick.

Doesn’t bake cookies like the rest of those chicks.

The ace in her hole is a Willie that’s slick That’s why the First Lady is a tramp.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that Imus’s monologue at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner was similarly tasteless. The surprise was how tasteless he wasn’t. By acclamation, the most offensive of his jokes concerned the president’s infidelity: “When Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s conseculative-games record, the president was at Camden Yards . . . and we all heard the president holler, “Go, Baby.” And I remember commenting at the time, “I bet that’s not the first time he’s said that.” Remember the Astroturf in the pickup?”

Many observers have blamed the dinner’s organizers for inviting Imus, but in fact they were moving in uncharted territory. The rules of the ritual are getting confused. Imus makes remarkably crude jokes about the president and First Lady on his radio show; then James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, Bob Bennett, Dee Dee Myers, and the president himself appear on it. Show-biz humor, including political jokes, has coincidentally been debased just as the office of the presidency follows a similar trajectory. Nowadays a man who wants to be president might confess his infidelity on 60 Minutes. A man who is president might make jokes about his sex life and the seductive properties of Astroturf in a public speech. He even might joke about his underwear before a televised audience of teenagers. It becomes harder and harder, therefore, for a press dinner to fulfill its assigned purpose of humiliation. The confluence of these trends led inevitably to Imus’s performance at the podium of the correspondents” dinner.

Where Imus most seriously departed from the ritual, however, was in training his fire on the press itself. As noted, custom demands a few press jokes, the lamer the better. Imus told jokes that were funny and mean, and true: unforgivable. He recommended that Peter Jennings, a notorious ladies’ man, have a V-chip in his shorts. He joked about the old charges of plagiarism that hover around Nina Totenberg, and Dan Rather’s obviously tenuous mental health, and ABC News’s devotion to the Clinton White House, and Ed Bradley’s ludicrous earring (“Ed, you’re a newsman, not a pirate”). At the High Mass of a press dinner, this isn’t the stuff you’re supposed to find in the missal. “If there was any real courage in that Washington press corps,” said Scripps Howard’s Martin Schramm, reflecting widespread indignation, ” they would have walked out on Don Imus en masse.” And damn the terrific vanilla bombe dessert.

Will the Imus affair do long-lasting damage to the press’s favorite ritual? The irony is that the president himself won’t let it. McCurry says the president looks forward to attending the dinner next year, assuming he’s reelected. And indeed he is probably wise to make the promise.

It has taken many years for the press dinner to evolve to this point. Incredibly, years ago, dinner organizers would choose the entertainment because the president might like it. President Eisenhower usually declined to attend the dinners; only the promise of a performance by the Lennon Sisters, fresh from the Lawrence Welk show, lured him out in his final year in offce. Barbra Streisand, a Kennedy favorite, was invited to sing for JFK, and the torch singer Julie London was used as LBJ bait.

The nature of the entertainment changed as the press grew more adversarial, until the evening blossomed into the full-blown unpleasantness that the press enjoys today. Presidents balk, but they pay a price. Jimmy Carter may have fainted while jogging and joked about diarrhea during state visits, but he had enough understanding of the presidency’s inherent dignity to hate press dinners. He skipped more than he attended — further evidence, reporters said, that “he didn’t like the press.” (To which the only answer is: “What’s to like?”) And a former staffer recalls coaching President Bush before his performance at a press dinner. “I don’t want to do this,” Bush finally said. ” I will not do this.”

“You have to do it,” the staffer replied.

“But I’m president of the United States!” Bush said. “I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to.”

“Mr. President,” the staffer said, “you have to do it because you’re president of the United States.”

It is the final irony — which any president will ignore at great peril. After one particularly humiliating press dinner in 1971, Richard Nixon composed a remarkable memo to H. R. Haldeman. “Let me give you a hard-nosed appraisal of the White House Correspondents” Dinner,” he began.

The reporters receiving the awards were way-out left wingers. . . . I had to sit there for 20 minutes while the drunken audience laughed in derision as the award citations were read. I’m not a bit thin-skinned [sic!I, but I do have the responsibility to protect the offce of the Presidency from such insulting incidents. I’m sure that [White House staffers] approved this charade because it would demonstrate that the President was a “good sport.” I don’t have to demonstrate that. . . . Under absolutely no circumstances will I attend any more dinners of this type in the future.

With a single exception two years later, Nixon kept to his vow. And look what happened to him.

By Andrew Ferguson