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Freebies, parties, access:
Ah, it's familiar territory!
of TheColumnists.com
Let me tell you
what Scootergate is all about.
Free lunches. Fancy balls. Access.
Been there. Done that.
The free lunches are still going on after writing about sports
for nearly half a century. The balls sometimes aren’t dances
in black tie with begowned women. They may be simply autographed
baseballs with the scribbled names of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays
or Roger Clemens. Everybody wants one.
The access is the returned phone call, maybe in the middle of
the night, from Joe Torre, Ozzie Guillen or even George Steinbrenner.
Just change the names to Irving Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the indicted
aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, house man Karl Rove for President
George Bush, chief of staff Andrew Card, special counsel Patrick
Fitzgerald, gunslinger Donald Rumsfeld and assorted, befuddled
White House go-fers.
Mix in an ambitious female New York Times reporter named Judith
Miller, recently retired, and a hot, outed CIA babe named Valerie
Plame and you have Scootergate, the best damn show in DC since
Monica Lewinsky bowed down before President Bill Clinton.
Here’s why I know what Scootergate is all about.
It has been going on since the first Egyptian scribbled hieroglyphics
on the cave wall.
Call that the birth of journalism.
In sports, it is all about the free lunches, the fancy balls
and the access. So it is in Washington political journalism.
I won’t suggest that I know if Libby lied and why. I will
suggest that Miller was using Libby for a hot story and Libby
was using Miller for a hotter end, a planted idea (weapons of
mass destruction) in the paper of record.
On the sports side, which I know a little about after half a
century, contacts and access make for a career. Same in Washington.
You use the source for a story. The source uses you for fame
or fortune.
In sports, it begins with the free lunches. When I started out
it was a cold hot dog for free in the press box and a warm cold
beer. How can you knock the team you are covering when the free
lunch saved you three bucks when three bucks mattered?
George Weiss was the general manager of the New York Yankees
when I started covering the team in the late 1950s. He had it
faster than everyone.
“You can own any of them with a steak,” Weiss once
said.
That meant when the Yankees took us sportswriters out to dinner
in a fancy restaurant in New York or Kansas City or Oakland or
Chicago that we could never afford on our own, tough reporting
on the team and sharp criticism was muted.
How many political writers in Washington, who have dined at the
White House with the President or sat for tea with Irving (that’s
his real first name before his parents changed it to Scooter)
will rip them in print for deceiving the country on the WMDs?
Certainly not Judith Miller, a governmental spokesperson when
she was supposed to be an impartial Times reporter.
Miller told the Grand Jury she couldn’t remember how she
first heard the name Valerie Plame. When I get called by the
Grand Jury on Steinbrennergate I’ll tell them I don’t
remember when I first met George. It was January 3, 1973 when
he bought the Yankees and held his first press conference in
New York’s fancy “21” club. Free lunch and fancy
waiters.
Then came the sweet letters when I wrote something Steinbrenner
liked. Imagine how hard it is to be mean after those letters.
Scooter wrote a mash note to Miller while she served time in
jail. “Come back to work- and life,” Libby wrote, as
quoted in the New Yorker.
There were exclusive interviews in the luxury of Steinbrenner’s
office through the years, the congratulatory phone call on some
honor I might have won, the bobble head dolls offered up in the
press box on Mariano Rivera day, the sumptuous dinner in a fashionable
eatery for all of us and the endless Christmas gifts of Yankee
logo-ed shirts, radios, ash trays, suitcases and caps.
In Washington it is an invitation to a fancy ball with the king
of Transylvania, a seat on Air Force 1, a private interview with
POTUS (President of the United States in Secret Service terms),
a front row spot when Charles and Camilla are shown off or an
extra helping of salmon at the state dinner in honor of Paul
Newman.
I made the White House twice. In 1969 baseball celebrated its
100th anniversary and President Richard Nixon invited all of
the All Star players in Washington and the press for an east
room soiree. Nixon bragged about his knowledge of baseball and
announced, “If I had my life to live over I would have been
a sportswriter.”
No kidding. He said that.
It was the heat of the Vietnam War and when we were paraded through
for a handshake and photo op with POTUS, I bellowed, “I
wish you had gotten your dream.” Baseball Commissioner Bowie
Kuhn turned colors and Nixon simply smirked.
I was back in 1986 after the Mets won the World Series and Boston
didn’t. Ronald Reagan, in a white suit and wavy hair, greeted
the team and the press. He reminded us he actually had been a
sports broadcaster. I didn’t have any smart remarks for
the Gipper.
So Scootergate is all about the contacts, the status, the thrills
of name dropping, the free meals and the returned phone calls.
Oh yes, one last thing. Would any of this have made the press
if the CIA’s Valerie Plame was not one hot babe?
©2005 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's
Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael,
CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted on Nov. 14, 2005.
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