WASHINGTON HILTON, MARCH 18, 1999
A person should never turn down an invitation to speak to a group of journalists—how else to set them straight?—and in the spring of 1999, there was plenty to talk about. The impeachment of President Clinton had died a natural death a month before when he was acquitted by the Senate, Mrs. Clinton was said to be interested in running for the Senate from New York, and Jesse (The Body) Ventura had been elected governor of Minnesota. An embarrassment of riches.
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, Members of the White House Radio-TV Correspondents Association, Distinguished Guests, Ordinary Average Guests:
It’s a pleasure to be here in Washington. I was here for your winter, which was on Tuesday, and it’s good to be back for spring. And to come and speak at an occasion whose purpose is civility, where people who distrust each other, and for good reason, will nevertheless sit down and break bread together. Of course, the same happens at any Republican prayer breakfast.
I have always been in favor of civility—kindness to people who you have reason to dislike. Americans believe in the power of friendship to overcome all barriers of race and gender and religion. We believe that the really bitter animosities are between women who are related to each other.
We are in need of civility, especially this year, with people suffering the premillennial jitters. What’s going to happen on New Year’s Eve? People are already in a dither over it. Of course it was worse two thousand years ago for the Romans—every year, the date got smaller—it was 20 B.C. and then suddenly it was 1 B.C. and what would happen next? Would you go to zero? Start counting up? Switch to the Jewish calendar? Nobody knew.
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My hero when it comes to civility was Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a great Minnesotan, who died two weeks ago at the age of ninety, who served twenty-four years on the Supreme Court, starting at the age of sixty-one, and distinguished himself as the shy person’s justice. Somehow he found a right to privacy in the Constitution, and based on that, he wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, a decision that got him more hate mail than you or I could ever imagine. He read a good deal of it himself, and the violence of it didn’t affect him except to make him compassionate for the writers. He didn’t feel anger toward them. What got Justice Blackmun riled was that the company that sold him his homeowners’ insurance, after a sniper fired a bullet through the window of his living room and into the back of a wingback chair, would only pay to re-cover that chair and not the matching one, though after the first chair had been re-covered, they didn’t match anymore because the covering was so old. He was a true Minnesotan.
Civility is the acknowledgment of our own humanity. And it’s practical. It is based on the fact that, loathsome as those sons of bitches are, you may someday need to borrow money from them. Don’t lord it over people: the podium will not be yours indefinitely. Nor the limo. So you should keep a decent tongue and if you are a journalist, you should strive to be fair. It will diminish the impact of your work, but do it anyway.
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I am pleased that the president has joined us tonight. He is at the point in his presidency where ordinarily a man enjoys foreign travel and being driven through throngs of people waving tiny flags, who are delighted to see you, a wonderful prospect compared to eating chicken at the Washington Hilton with a roomful of people who would regard your downfall as a professional opportunity.
This is a durable president. He has already gone four hundred days beyond when he was expected to resign. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but he didn’t know Mr. Clinton. He’s had two already, and in a couple of years, he may have yet another as a candidate’s spouse. It’s interesting to imagine Mr. Clinton sitting on a platform and looking pleasant and engaged through the candidate’s speech, smiling at the happy parts and grimacing at the serious parts. And then come back to Washington as a member of a group of older women married to senators, who gather for tea and to hear about literacy programs.
I’m not sure the First Lady is getting good advice on this idea of running for the Senate from New York. The numbers look good—in this morning’s Times, she’s leading Mayor Giuliani 48 to 39 percent.
But running for office in New York is about two-thirds ritual and one-third fund-raising. As a candidate for the Senate, you’re expected to pay ceremonial visits to a long series of grand poobahs and there is ring-kissing to be done, and you’ve got to march in ethnic parades and be photographed eating ethnic food such as knishes—I’m not sure if you’ve ever eaten a knish, Mrs. Clinton. A knish is a potato sandwich. You bite one end, it oozes at the other. People take a bite of a knish and they look around to see if there’s a dog in the vicinity.
Mrs. Clinton, there is a Republican seat coming up in Minnesota next year and I think you ought to consider it. Minnesota is a state of polite and modest people. They’d be happy to see you. The fact that you had passed up New York to run in Minnesota would be enough to elect you going away. And you would provide employment for many of these fine journalists in the audience, who are in need of new material, now that the impeachment is over.
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The impeachment created a news industry with tremendous production capacity, but now raw materials have dwindled. For two years, White House correspondents have stood on the White House lawn every day and said to a camera that it isn’t clear what will happen next but that something probably will, but now it hasn’t, and in recent weeks, we’ve seen famous news anchors reading stories about the salmon shortage and the dangers of halogen lamps and new varieties of streptococcus—this is not why you went to J-school, to talk about streptococcus—there even was a story on the evening news recently, “Are you getting enough sleep?” If you watch the news, you are.
But there is hope on the horizon and it’s in Minnesota. There’s a new survey that says that one-third of the American people would consider voting for Jesse (The Body) Ventura for president of the United States.
Of course, it’s hard to say what “consider voting for” means exactly. It’s sort of like asking, “Have you ever considered eating squirrel?”—yes, considered it, and decided against it both times.
If he should run, however, it’s going to be a big boost for the news business.
Jesse (The Body) Ventura is a new venture, combining entertainment and politics in one package, who sneers and swaggers better than almost anyone. He is a man of fixed opinions who doesn’t look or sound like anybody else, the first governor who used to earn his living throwing large men out of the ring and then hitting them with folding chairs, which has given him a limited view of the world. He got elected saying that he could only promise to do his best and I would have to say that he’s kept his word. He also said that he was no politician and I think he was right about that, too. A couple of weeks ago, he came out and accused Minnesotans of having no sense of humor, which is an odd thing to say about the people who elected him.
On a slow news day, Governor Ventura is a gift, and these are slow news days. The other day, there was a story about agriculture on the front page of The New York Times. I remember it because it identified the Secretary of Agriculture as a man named Dan Glickman. After the past year, I’d forgotten there was a secretary of agriculture.
Washington is a city of ten thousand journalists, all of whom are terrified that they may be assigned to cover the farm crisis. A Washington journalist would rather go to Afghanistan and sleep on the ground and get fleas and eat rancid yogurt than have to go to Kansas or North Dakota to interview large taciturn people, and stay in cinder-block motels, the kind that put the shampoo in little plastic packs, not bottles, and it’s not the shampoo with aloe in it, it’s got bad chemicals in it that do weird things to your hair and also cause depression. A Washington journalist’s fear is that he might file a story about the farm crisis that sounds intelligent and gets him reassigned to the Chicago bureau. And then you go to work for Iowa Power and Light, writing press releases about conserving electricity.
I love CBS Sunday Morning, which epitomizes civility in journalism. It has never said anything nasty about anybody. It’s Mr. Rogers without puppets. They do about five different stories and keep doing them over and over—the Indomitable Geezer story, and the Man on a Quest to Revive a Long-Lost Art story, and the Community-Pitching-in-to-Help-a-Stranger story, and the Joys-of-Living-in-a-Backwater story, and the Great-Artist-as-a-Regular-Person-Just-Like-You-and-Me-Not-Weird-Whatsoever story, and at the end, as the credits roll, there is a long sequence of a quiet pond and geese landing on it—CBS Sunday Morning is like going to church.
The journalist in our family was my aunt Flo, who went to the Bon Marche Beauty Salon every Saturday morning and came up to visit us afterward. It was for news that she went there, it certainly was not for beauty. They did only one style at the Bon Marche, and that was helmet hair, a combination of styling and engineering that keeps a woman looking fifty-three years old from the age of twenty-one until the day you die and then Luanne comes up to the funeral home and gives you your eternal permanent.
Aunt Flo would sit down by my mother and she’d give us the dirt that the local paper couldn’t report. We enjoyed hearing these things. We were good Christian people and we believed in forgiveness but meanwhile we liked to know exactly what it was we were forgiving them for.
When you grow up listening to gossip, you develop an ear for it and you can hear that faint tone of pleasure that this story wasn’t about us or anyone related to us but about a family we disliked—the sense of pride that we, our people, are not capable of this sort of behavior. But this pride gets in your way. You can’t tell a story decently unless you can imagine yourself in the place of the main characters, and this is true whether it’s news or fiction. This is the standard of civility in journalism.
And one summer night she came over and told us about the tornado that struck north of us and hit our cousin Joe’s house. A quiet summer day, and then the sky turned black, and a cloud like a snake came slithering across the countryside and tore the roof off his house and left his neighbor’s house untouched, his neighbor who was a drunk and beat his wife. The tornado tore off Joe’s roof and destroyed furniture and impaled blades of grass in a bedroom vanity mirror and carried some dishes into the neighbor’s pasture and set them down undamaged and drove seed corn into Joe’s linoleum floor and for years afterward every spring they had to sponge-mop with a herbicide, but they made it into the basement just as the roof went. And right then my aunt Flo started to cry. She’d told the story so well that she scared herself to death and she could imagine it happening to her.
That’s what I call real reporting.