Gail Sheehy :: Gail on Politics

As a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, Sheehy has written character studies of dozens of national and world figures, including George Bush, Al Gore, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bob and Elizabeth Dole, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Anwar Sadat, Newt Gingrich, and Gary Hart.

"You are the enemy!" shrieks the drugged-out rock band member in the hit movie "Almost Famous" when looking into the eyes of a wannabe music journalist. He orders the kid to "Make us look cool."

I felt for the kid. I've been in his shoes. Political journalists covering presidential candidates are viewed as the enemy if they aren't satisfied with being camp followers who make a candidate "look cool" by recording slickly crafted photo ops and mantras mouthed by politicians who are under the strict control of their message-makers.

Fortunately, journalists in America can challenge our would-be leaders to answer questions they don't want to address, and do so without fear of prosecution. And there are still serious journalistic outlets willing to publish hard-hitting pieces that are the result of months of shoe-leather reporting and fact-checking. But today journalists also put themselves at the risk of ruthless personal attack..

The easiest way for a candidate's spin doctors to deflect attention from unassailable facts and thought-provoking revelations produced by a well-researched profile is to attack the writer's credibility, rather than address the issues. They use the same weapons they have perfected in maligning their opponents, doing quick and dirty "opposition research" and then planting toxic personal tidbits with comrades-in-arms who are once removed from the campaign.

But for "troublesome" journalists they have devised a newer technique: They will not address repeated requests to check facts that can only be verified by the candidate. The object is to trap the journalist and discredit the whole piece if there is anything in it the campaign doesn't like.

Presidential candidates have giant megaphones from which to start a smear campaign. An independent journalist can write a letter to the editor, but it's tantamount to using a beebee gun on a nuclear submarine.

I take pride in the fact that I have now been attacked personally

by both the Clinton White House and the Bush campaign for writing truths they don't like. Here are the details of my recent experiences with the White House, the Bush campaign, and a magazine deeply involved in political commentary.

***

In the three months of research for a Vanity Fair profile of Governor George W. Bush, I used my usual method of saturation reporting –85 interviews with 70 of Bush's friends, classmates, business associates, and top campaign aides. It was his chronic scrambling of spoken thoughts that continued to puzzle me. How could a man educated at some of America's finest educational institutions -- Andover, Yale, and Harvard—make so many mistakes? The press had assumed he was intellectually limited. But chatting with him on the campaign trail, I found him to be very bright, quick-witted, and possessed of a good memory, although often carelessly uninformed on issues outside of Texas.

Several speech experts in his home state, familiar with the Bush family history (his brother Neil is a diagnosed dyslexic), told me on the record that the mistakes Governor Bush makes are consistent with someone with dyslexia. When I raised the question with his campaign chairman, Don Evans, Evans became flustered and said, "What do you mean -- ask him, I don't know: I wasn't there in the 3rd grade:. I know he was in school patrol, he must have been a good student. I don't know-- ask him. " The next day, campaign spokeswoman Karen Hughes informed me curtly, "The governor will not be able to participate in your profile."

Before the story closed, I called Evans to check facts and told him of further evidence that dyslexic traits run in families and might possibly account for Bush's malapropisms as well as his extraordinary "people skills." He agreed with me that only the governor could properly respond and promised the campaign staff would get back to me. They never did.

After publication, the Bush camp falsely claimed that I had been told the governor was not dyslexic. They also charged that I had confused George W with his brother Neil when I reported that, as late as 8th grade, George was kept inside on Saturday mornings so his mother could drill him with flash cards. My source, Doug Hannah, was George's contemporary, not Neil's. In any case, I did not say George Bush is dyslexic. I simply raised the question.

The governor fumbled his own response when questioned by other reporters on his campaign plane on Sept 15: "The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her." He did acknowledge he has never been tested. (Neither, I assume, were the famous figures I mentioned who also have been "diagnosed at a distance" as probably having been dyslexic: Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill.) The more honest response from Bush would have been that he does not know whether or not he carries any dyslexic trait. Experts estimate that somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the population is dyslexic. But Bush and his aides have reacted as if being dyslexic is the same thing as being stupid. The candidate missed an opportunity to dispel that cruel stereotype. He could have empowered millions of children for whom he genuinely seems to feel compassion – those with learning disabilities who would benefit from his reading initiative. These are children who often think their learning difficulties are their fault. Maybe George Bush once thought so, too.

As the Presidential debate season begins, millions of Americans will have prolonged exposure to Bush's speech and thought patterns. He has been preparing for this contest for four months. Will he fill the suit, or flub the test?

Meanwhile, media attention has shifted to reporting by me and others on the shocking effects of Governor Bush's environmental policies in Texas. In my case, his campaign launched a broadside attack—not against any of the facts in my story, but against me personally: "She has a history of making dramatic, wild accusations about well-known public figures," Karen Hughes told the Odessa American.

When one plays with the big boys, of course, one must develop a thick skin. But, I am sorry to say, that today it isn't only politicians who will counterattack with vicious and unsupported personal assaults. Journalists, too, are increasingly willing to slime their own, by acting as instruments for the spinmeisters, hoping either to improve their access or simply advance their own careers by repeating accusations without checking facts. A 24-hour news cycle makes fact-checking all the more inconvenient for young reporters who tend to believe "research" means pulling up Lexis-Nexis.

***

On September 26, I learned that Franklin Foer was writing a piece for The New Republic assessing my entire writing career (35 years) and the controversies aroused by my work (thousands of articles and 13 books). He wanted to ask me a couple of questions. His sources, he said, were a few former fact-checkers from Vanity Fair, where I have been a contributing editor for 16 years. A day later I sent him a five-page response, which he apparently ignored. On Thursday, Vanity Fair was informed by Foer that he didn't need to talk to anyone there. After three days of minimal research, he told us his editors were ready to put his piece up on the New Republic;s website. .

It would seem particularly reckless of The New Republic to rush to publish a slapdash personal attack, having twice been exposed as printing complete fabrications by reporters Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit. Foer should be expected to research fully a public record of the controversies he mentioned. His article contains no fewer than 13 false statements. Here is a sampling:

"There were many reasons to pay the /Bush/ story no mind. For starters, there was the flimsy supporting evidence..." Foer then ignores the bulk of supporting evidence in my Bush profile.
"[Sheehy's 1990 biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, The Man Who Changed the World] …described organized crime as nonexistent in post-Soviet life—just as it was asserting itself as a dominant force." I devoted 16 pages to describing the Soviet mafia as the "virus that would one day be the invisible enemy threatening to strangle Gorbachev from within."
"A list of eminences came forward to claim that Sheehy had either invented quotes or twisted them out of context [in Hillary's Choice]. (A sampling: Garry Wills, Harold Ickes, Betsy Wright)." Garry Wills was not quoted in my book. The Ickes and Wright quotes were verified by transcripts of my interviews with them. Corrections appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Observer ; again, part of the public record ignored by Foer.

***

As Yogi Berra would say, this is "deja-vu all over again."

In 1992, I watched Hillary Clinton and her aides pioneer the War Room and mount instant counterattacks to save their bubble reputations, and I wrote about it in Vanity Fair. Subsequently, my own reputation was caught in the cannon's mouth of the Clinton White House spin-and-smear machine.

My biography of the First Lady, Hillary's Choice, was meant to explain the "whys" behind her political drive and her loyalty to a faithless husband. It was both critical and sympathetic. But politicians don't like journalists who look into "whys." I tried for three months prior to my book deadline to check facts with the White House and Hillary's Senate campaign. Her press secretary, Howard Wolfson, never returned a phone call from me or from the team of fact-checkers I had hired. He waited until I was scheduled to appear on Larry King Live to demand five minutes on the air – alone—following my appearance, and aggressively charged that I had "hung a theory" about Hillary's troubled relationship with her father on the sole basis that he was not seen at her graduation from Wellesley. He claimed her father was there.

Watching him from the Green Room, I was shaken. I hastily re-interviewed the Wellesley classmates and professors who were eyewitnesses at the commencement. They reiterated that they could not remember seeing Hugh Rodham there. If Hillary's father was there, he certainly wasn't seen hugging and congratulating his daughter after her history-making speech. The White House press office told Meet the Press that there are no photos of the family's attendance and NBC's Dateline was told that there was no dispute with my version.

Yet suddenly, personal attacks on my credibility began appearing in the New Yorker, the New York Observer, and Cynthia Cotts' "Press Clips" column in the Village Voice, using examples and language so consistent as to suggest a common source. The New York Daily News Washington bureau chief, Thomas M. DeFrank, reported, "The White House counterattack machine has combed Sheehy's book for mistakes and is encouraging such Clinton media stalwarts as Arkansas columnist Gene Lyons and the New York Observer's Joe Conason to write about the errors. They've also been feeding daily "Gail's Goofs" tidbits to the Washington Post's "Reliable Source" gossip column." I later learned that Hillary's surrogates in the White House had dredged up nearly every nasty review and unflattering profile of me from Lexis-Nexis, going back 30 years, and e-mailed them to Clinton-friendly columnists.

I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me; that is not the point. The point of this cautionary tale is that we all -–public figures and journalists alike—need some sort of nonlegal peer review mechanism to which we can appeal when we believe we have been maliciously maligned. If clarity were brought to such personal/political confrontations, the cloud cast over reputations might be dispelled-- or justified. And the community of journalists would come to recognize, and consequently ostracize, the true enemies within.

Gail Sheehy is a journalist and the author of books, most famously, Passages, and most recently, Hillary's Choice.