Monday

Jeff "Man Date" Gannon

The Jeff Gannon/James Guckert scandal has been all but ignored by the conservative news media. Why? He may participated in a felony by being shown details of the Valerie Plame case. Two reporters are already in jail for this breach of security (though not Bob Novak, which is suspicious by itself). People who call themselves "reporters" sat next to this guy for at least two years. What happened to real journalism?

The following is a true story about my mother and father, slightly modified with updated links for this essay. The original essay is at Ethel's Dubious Achievement Award on my website.

Washington DC, April, 1973. American Society of Newspaper Editors conference.

The ASNE annual conference is a Big Deal. Newspaper editors and publishers gather from all over the country, all over the world, and meet to listen to and interview the newsmakers; learn more about the issues of the moment from the powers that define the issues, exchange news, study other's techniques, look at new hardware, and gossip. My father was editor of The Times-Herald Record in Middletown, NY, and always brought my mother; I had been to a few of them.

Three years out of four ASNE is held in Washington DC. When it's held in DC, the adult attendees go the White House. The conference ends with a speech by the President of the United States.

In 1973, Richard Nixon was president. He had just won a second term in office by a landslide. In retrospect, this was after the events of Watergate, but before the story broke. Later, we were to learn that during this period, he had become extremely hyper sensitive to all criticism.

He had just expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia. This turned out to be disastrous, not only for the Cambodians, for whom Nixon's actions were to destabilize the country and lead to Pol Pot and the Killing Fields, but for Americans, who died needlessly in a losing effort.

The war was never very popular, and the bombing caused a huge outpouring of protest, which evidently came as a surprise to Nixon. He waved around all the telegrams he'd received in support of his moves, but it later turned out that he had orchestrated the telegram-sending binge (paid for by Ross Perot).

The night before Nixon was to speak at the ASNE conference, the cabinet members met with the editors, and the wives of the cabinet members met with the wives of the editors. On the receiving line was a grade school teacher in front of my mother. The teacher said to editors' wives and to the various wives as she moved through the line that her pupils had asked her to tell the President to stop the bombing. My mother heard those remarks and said, "Many people here feel the same way."

At the end of the event in elevator going down, one of the cabinet wives offered to drop off my mother at the hotel. During the ride, mother said, "Maybe Nixon doesn't know how unpopular the war in Cambodia is. If people at the receiving line tomorrow were to say to him, 'Mr. Nixon, please stop the bombing' as they shook his hand, perhaps he would understand." And then she went merrily on to a party at the hotel.

The next day, Ethel and Al Romm waited in the long line to shake the President's hand. A Secret Service Agent politely tapped her on the shoulder and pulled them out of the line. "Could you tell me what you plan to say to the President?"

"M-m-m?" said my mother, puzzled.

"Well," said the Secret Service Agent, "we can't have everyone having long conversations with the President. It would hold up the line and..."

At this point, my father leaps in, "C'mon, Ethel, we're leaving."

The Secret Service man said, helpfully, "I'll get you a cab."

You don't pull a stunt like that in a city full of reporters and get away with it. The next day, the story was on the front page of almost every newspaper in the US. (Not, of course, on the front page of the Record. There, it was on page 8.)

(Mom adds: If daddy had not been so huffy, and if the Secret Service man had not gone to this trouble, which seemed later like more coercion, it would not have been a news story.)

Esquire gave my mother a 1973 Dubious Achievement Award for being so naive as to think if you say anything to a president, it means anything.

The parallels between Nixon's itchy cover-up of the disastrous bombing of Cambodia and Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq are evident, with one major exception: In 1973, You don't pull a stunt like that in a city full of reporters and get away with it. In 2003, 2004 and 2005, there are no real reporters and you can get away with it.

What else is the White House "Press Corps" missing? Are there any other stories that are happening literally under their noses? What Jeff Gannon said to the president during Shrub's infrequent press conferences wasn't journalism, it was pillow talk. Who else, masquerading as a reporter, is in bed with the president?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Meanwhile... I also have a family connection to another person in the news. It seems my father was the first person to fire Hunter S. Thompson. The following is from my brother Joe, who wrote his recollection for this column at my request:

When I lived in Aspen working with Amory Lovins in the early 1990s, I did go to the bar where HST was known to hold court. He looked as he apparently always does like he was in an alcohol-and drug-induced haze, although part of that maybe simply his way of being able to ignore or put off the countless people who come up to him and say hello (although if he didn't want to meet them why would he hang out in public?).

When I first offered my hand to him he shook it quickly, and continued his conversation with other people, until I mentioned that I was Al Romm's son, and that my father had said he was first person to fire HST from a real newspaper job (which set him on the path that ultimately made him famous). At that point he seemed to sober up in the glaze went off his eyes. He smiled and made some remark that I wish I had written down like, "That is just perfect. Everything has come full circle." That is probably not what he actually said but in this age of Rathergate and Stephen Glass and Matt Drudge and even Bob Woodward making up dialogue for conversations that he certainly never witnessed, I can safely say that there is no one alive today who can dispute my recollection.

Yes, he was fired by my Dad into one of his earliest assignments as a journalist. The Times Herald-Record often got budding journalists sent to them because they were near New York City, had a first rate editor, and where the first coldpress offset daily newspaper in the world. The circumstances for the firing were apparently the destruction of a vending machine that did not provide the desired product after being fed coins -- might as well say it was a cigarette machine, since that would be nice foreshadowing. I do believe that was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.

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