Back in 2012, I suggested that the Senate use Leon Panetta’s confirmation hearing for CIA director to clear up one of Washington’s more interesting media mysteries—who leaked Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s authorship of controversial memo that used the phrase “benign neglect” in reference to the black community. Moynihan was previously author of a controversial report, “The Black Family: Then and Now.” In a nutshell, Moynihan was pilloried by the liberal intelligensia for a supposedly insensitive and misguided approach to racial issues, but decades later it turns out even liberals acknowledge he was quite prescient in many ways. Nonetheless, the leak was quite damaging to the late senator’s reputation and the Nixon White House in 1970. Leon Panetta was fingered for the leak in The New Republic shortly afterward, though it’s never been proven he was the source. (For more background, see my older post on this matter.)
Obviously, establishing whether or not Panetta can keep his mouth shut would be an important qualification for CIA director, but congress didn’t bother asking him about his role in significant political flap four decades prior. When Leon Panetta exited the CIA post, he did so by thumbing his nose at classified information protocols to make sure his $3 million book deal went off without a hitch. Once again, Leon Panetta seems to have no compunction about sensitive leaks that further his career. In fact, in that same memoir he jokingly alludes to his leaky nature, saying that the New York Time’s Elizabeth Bumiller called him “‘another species entirely’ from my more taciturn predecessor. Guilty. As I told the press, I’m Italian, and that’s the way I am.”
