Or, what Dartmouth has to do with the Lewinsky scandal.
A BRONZE CAST of Daniel Webster, class of 1801, stands at the intersection of Rhode Island and Massachusetts Avenue NW, in Washington, D.C., just across from the Australian embassy and only blocks away from the White House. As the muck of scandal rose, ensnaring not just President Clinton and independent counsel Kenneth Starr but the media and the entire political system, it seemed worth wondering what Dartmouth's favorite son must have been thinking of his alumnal progeny. Lord knows there are enough of us buzzing around this rather distasteful national crisis. It's not tough to imagine Mr. Webster pondering just what the devil's gotten into us all.
Not that Webster didn't muss his hands with politics. In fact, Webster's Massachusetts Avenue statue stares angrily at a larger, more celebrated statue of General Winfield Scott, who in 1852 beat Webster for the Whig Party's Presidential nomination. Nor is Dartmouth participation in scandals new: During President Andrew Johnson's 1868 impeachment hearing, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Stephen Chase, member of the class of 1826, presided over the Senate impeachment trial, in which Johnson escaped conviction by one vote. H. William Shure '61 was assistant minority counsel during the Watergate hearings. And lest we forget, there are those stories of how and where former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller '30 is rumored to have passed on, a smile no doubt plastered on his face.
"Life in the capital may resemble a soap opera," wrote Boston Globe bureau chief David Shribman '76, "but this is a soap opera with federal investigations targeted at a man who only 14 months ago won re-election and who today possesses the line-item veto, nuclear weapons, and a position of trust and responsibility with no equal in our society. The implications for war and for peace, for civil discourse, for the shape of our political system, and for the mid-term and Presidential elections that approach in November and in the year 2000 cannot be overestimated."
Inside the besieged house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue toils Nicole Rabner '93, associate director for domestic policy, working mainly for the First Lady on issues affecting women, children, and families. Since all other White House alums with granite in their brains have left Clinton's employ namely, chief of staff Erskine Bowles's special assistant for policy and planning Angus King '93; assistant press secretary Jon Murchinson '91; special assistant to the President for media affairs Keith Boykin '87; and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich '68 Rabner finds herself singing "Dartmouth Undying" solo at the White House barbeques.
"It's been weird," says Rabner, who was with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the days that Hillary defended her hubbie on the Today Show (they were in NYC to visit an after-school special program in Harlem) and on the Friday when the Starr Report hit the fan (they were in Maryland at a conference on foster care). "Guess which one got the headlines," Rabner quips.
Rabner and her bosses continue to suffer slings and arrows heaved by her fellow alums. In July Judge Laurence Silberman '57 was one of nine appellate judges who dissed the Administration's argument that Secret Service agents should be shielded from testifying because of security fears. "The notion...that the newly minted Secret Service protection privilege is being asserted by the Treasury Department, independent of the President, seems to me to be a constitutional absurdity," Silberman wrote. Immediately Silberman came under fire as a partisan right-winger. When asked about Judge Silberman's opinion during a recent press conference, Mr. Clinton said that we should "consider the source." The liberal online 'zine Salon penned a piece called "Silberman: The Attack Judge."
Salon and Clinton would probably agree that former salutatorian Alex Azar '88 was more a questionable source than Silberman Azar, a former Supreme Court clerk forjudge Scalia, served on Ken Starr's staff. An associate independent counsel with Starr from '94 until '96, Azar, reached at his law firm, politely refused to comment on anything having to do with his last job. "It's nasty out there," he said. Had Azar hung on a little longer, he might have found himself quoting fellow alum Morton Kondracke '60, executive editor of Capitol Hill's twice-weekly newspaper Roll Call and co-host of Fox News Channel's The Beltway Boys. Kondracke enjoys the distinct honor of lodging something of a bunk in the Starr Report. At first it was a hot scoop Kondracke and another Roll Call editor secured an interview with the beleaguered Prez for Roll Call's January 22, 1998, hot-off-the-presses edition. (The interview had been arranged long before Zippergate broke, as a State of the Union special, and it continued as scheduled.) But within eight months, Kondracke's scoop became Starr's evidence of Clinton lying, though Mor-tone was not mentioned by name: "XIV. Jan. 17, 1998-Present; The Deposition and Afterward; 3) Initial Denials to the American Public." The President also gave an interview to Roll Call that day. As stated in the Starr Report, Clinton told Roll Call: "[T]he relationship was not improper, and I think
that's important enough to say.... But let me answer it is not an improper relationship and I know what the word means.... The relationship was not sexual. And I know what you mean, and the answer is 'No.'" Finally the President vowed: "I'm going to cooperate with this investigation...and I'll cooperate."
(In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably mention that an article I wrote garnered a mention in Starr's supporting documents. Grab your copy which I'm certain you have on hand and thumb to pages 4,602-4,605, where you'll find a piece I wrote for the Washington City Paper describing an innocent date I went on with Lewinsky pre-scandal. But I digress.)
Needless to say, all sorts of alums have been commenting on this crisis, including former Daily D editor Paul Gigot '77, author of the Friday "Potomac Watch" column in The Wall Street Journal and a regular commentator on NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. "I feel like I'm covering a Democratic Warren G. Harding," Gigot says. "Not always elevating, but rarely dull."
John Donvan '77, former ABC White House correspondent now with Nightline, has also punched the clock on Zippergate duty. Donvan's "Taking the Pulse" segments for Ted Koppel in which he ventures to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to see how common folk feel about the scandal have been some of the most interesting features on the whole mess. (Not an easy task when you consider how lame "Common Joe in the Street" interviews usually go.) Agence France-Presse Asian Affairs correspondent Sarah Jackson-Han '88 "keeps getting yanked off my beat" to cover Zippergate for the global news agency. "Worldwide opinion leaders think we've just taken leave of our senses," she says.
Laura Ingraham '85 is one of the more ubiquitous talking faces you're likely to see these days on the tube waxing Republican, offering legal points of view (though she's never tried a case to a verdict). Ingraham, a former Dartmouth Reviewer, pundicizes on NBC, earning the scorn of liberal media critics. She also turns up regularly on Imus, The McLaughlin Group, Politically Incorrect, in Vanity Fair, and on the New York Post's Page Six. Ingraham has, in fact, proven so able a comentator that she's since scored her own MSNBC show, Watch It! One day she is flying on Robert DeNiro's plane, the next she is dining with Dustin Hoffman. One liberal Ingraham-basher wrote, "Laura look-alikes have begun sprouting up all over the media, spouting right-wing anti-feminist politics as they brush their peroxide blond locks back and straighten out their leopard miniskirts on camera." Meow.
Timothy Burger '88 was one of those reporters caught in the spin wars between Ken Starr and Clinton. Burger who worked under Kondracke at Roll Call had the September 16 front-page scoop for The New York Daily News, revealing that "President Clinton exploded in anger during his August 17 grand jury testimony when asked about using a cigar as a sex prop and it's all on a video that could become public this week, sources said yesterday." Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony ended up revealing many shades of mood explosions of anger not really being the lasting impression and I suspect that Burger was fed the dirt by a "source" with Starr's office who wanted to guarantee at least a day or so of mekids dia-stink about Clinton, anger, and cigars, 100 percent true or not. In their rush to beat the competition, many reporters have been criticized for serving as mere transcribers for the rather leaky Starr.
"I became a reporter in Washington to write about policy and politics," says New York Times general assignment scribe David Rosenbaum '63, in the Washington bureau for the Old Gray Lady more-or-less since 1968. "This is just messy stuff, and I find it an unpleasant topic." Nonetheless, on Friday, October 2, Rosenbaum found himself under the gun the transcripts of worst-friend-in-Washington-history Linda Tripp's recorded conversations with Miss Lewinsky had just been released, and Rosenbaum was busy writing them up for the paper of record. That Sunday the Times also ran an opinion piece of Rosenbaum's on impeachment, which deftly concluded, "Many Americans, the opinion polls show, are sick of this scandal and would like it just to go away. But Congress is already out on a limb. As unpleasant as the choices may be, just going away is not an alternative."
Jennifer Avellino '89, senior producer of CNN's Reliable Sources, one of the foremost outlets for media criticism, says, "It's been fascinating to be able to critique the media. There's been a lot to criticize. Frankly, it would be very hard to cover this as a straight reporter it would have been difficult to be immersed in the story in a different way, standing there at the stake-outs. But as many mistakes as the media has made, I think it's been overly criticized."
Avellino points out that the media first crossed that line, asking Gary Hart if he'd ever committed adultery, back at the Hanover Inn. "I don't think that anyone in May of 1987 would have ever predicted that we would come to this level of detail. All we knew about Gary Hart and Donna Rice was that they went out for a weekend on the Monkey Business. I don't think anyone could have predicted that we would be sitting here reading more than 4,000 pages of intimate details of the President's sex life. Nor am I glad that we've gotten to this point."
"This point" is, as of press time, in the hands of Congress. During the scandal- dal-focused 105th Congress, four alums sat in Congress, foremost among them being low-key, respected, behind-the-scenes powerhouse Senator Slade Gorton'49 (R-WA). Three U.S. representatives give the proverbial rouse: Contractwith-America stalwart/class of '94 Democrat-slayer Rick White '75 (R-WA); consummate Washington insider Rob Portman '79 (R-OH), a member of Gingrich's inner circle; and governor's grandson/moderate Charlie Bass '75 (R-NH), the latter of whom represents Hanover in New Hampshire's second district.
Zippergate is at least partially responsible for felling one of these men, however... on Election Day Rick White got trounced by Democrat Jay lnslee—51 percent to 43 percent—in a race that Inslee turned into a referendum on Congress' lust to bring down the President. There were other factors as well, of course, for Washington state's notoriously fickle first district: the League of Conservation Voters put White on its "Dirty Dozen" list of the most pollution-tolerant congressman. Still, as Seattle Times editorialists observed, "Inslee's campaign made pointed use of ads that said it was time to do other things in Congress besides focus on President Clinton. Exit polls across the nation found that a winning theme."
As of press time, not one of the four had called for Clinton's resignation, though N.H. Senator Judd Gregg—a former Dartmouth Trustee—had. His legislative director, Vas Alexopoulos '91, a Nashua native, says, "Obviously we've gotten a lot of constituent mail on this. People in New Hampshire are more inclined to agree with Senator Gregg since we're from a conservative state. Our e-mail systems have been bombarded—we've gotten like 5,000 in three days. It jammed up our lines."
When and if this all blows over, one wonders if future scandals will bring similar Big Green participation. Scott Cameron '77 is an environment/energy lobbyist for California Governor Pete Wilson's D.C. office. (Cameron adds that he thinks he may have roomed with ABC's Donvan in North Fayerwether.) Joyce Campbell '91 continues to serve as spokesman for '96 Presidential candidate Bob Dole.
Then there are those Big Green Washingtonians who have remained out of the fray, and as of yet untouched by the slime, including I. Michael Heyman '51, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; lobbyist/former Maine governor/Senate spouse Jock McKernan '70;Bloomberg Business News transportation reporter Jennifer Thomas '91; highpowered lobbyist David Dawley'63; News Hour with fim Lehrer health correspondent and Dartmouth Trustee SusanDentzer '77; local thespian Chris Walker' 92; and tons o' others space regrettably does not permit me to name. November's election results, carrying with them the fall of Newt and the senior GOP shake-up, were largely perceived as a resounding slap in Congress's face to stop trifling with such silliness. Somerville, Mass., Mayor Michael Capuano'73 was elected to succeed Joseph P. Kennedy II in the state's 8th district congressional seat. It was a brutal, highly contested primary in which Capuano felled former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. The election, however, was a Cakewalk for Capuano—not so for Illinois State Senator Peter Fitzgerald '82, now U.S. Senator Fitzgerald, who defeated beleaguered Illinois Democratic Senator Carol Mosley-Braun in another nasty, nasty race. I hope their experiences with the 106th U.S. Congress will prove more constructive and rewarding than their senior counterparts. If not, they may look back on their campaign days as far more pleasant times.
Daniel Webster1801 surveysthe swamp.
Keith Boy kin '87 and RobertReich '68 got out of town.
A scoop by editor Mort Kondracke '60became a Starr witness.
CommentatorPaul Gigot '77on the scandal:"Not elevating.Rarely dull."
High~profile punditLaura Ingraham '85gives the view fromthe right wing.
Remember Gary Hart at the HanoverInn, says CNN's Jennifer Avellino '89.
The Smithsonian'sI. Michael Heyman'51 remained above the fray.
JAKE TAPPER '91 is senior writer for Washington City Paper, as well as anoccasional contributor to The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, and the on-line humor 'zine suck.com.
