Governing under the influence; Washington alcoholics: their aides protect them, the media shields them

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1988 by Steven Waldman

For a long time, such subtleties weren't a problem: reporters and editors didn't cover alcoholism at all. More startling than Drew Pearson's and Jack Anderson's scoop about Mendel Rivers was that none of the defense reporters who covered Rivers broke the story first. Even more remarkable, reporters covering Joe McCarthy knew he drank heavily but didn't report it until after his censure. "It was part of that response to ignore personal peccadillos," says Seth Kantor, a long time Capitol Hill correspondent, now with Cox newspapers.

One reason is that heavy drinking was common among journalists themselves and was often seen as a sign of bravado. In a recent column arguing that reporters who work in glass cubicles shouldn't throw stones, David Broder recalled that during the 1960 presidential campaign, if one journalist was too smashed to file, another reporter would cover for him, filing under the incapacitated journalist's byline, using chunks from other reporters' articles. Journalists, in turn, ignored the "private foibles" of the candidates. "It was a cozy, comfortable arrangement all around," Broder wrote.

In addition, reporters often knew of an official's drinking but refrained from putting it in print because they could point to no direct effect on job performance. Alan Cromley of the Daily Oklahoman, says he wrote about Carl Albert's traffic problems, but little more, even though he had heard about Albert occasionally being intoxicated at cocktail parties. "He could have made a real spectacle and it probably wouldn't have been written about," Cromley says. "We just never saw any evidence it affected his job."

Similarly, reporters covering Herman Talmadge got dramatically conflicting signals. They noted that despite his drinking the senator was always up jogging at 4:30 a.m. and at the office early. "Everybody knew he drank occasionally, but he had work habits that were so phenomenal that we ignored it," recalls Jim Stewart, who covered him for the Atlanta Constitution. Ironically, in his autobiography, Talmadge himself concedes: "I was spending too much time drunk or hungover to be the sort of senator I wanted to be."

Reporters held out for a blatant example of liquor altering public policy. Eileen Shanahan, who covered Russell Long for The New York Times, found it was nearly impossible to meet this standard. She knew Long had a drinking problem because she had seen him clearly intoxicated on a number of occasions. In 1967, she thought she finally had a chance to write about it.

Long was holding up an important tax bill as a way of killing an income tax checkoff for presidential candidates. "Each morning [Majority Leader Mike] Mansfield would talk him into letting the bill go," Shanahan says. "Then, in the afternoon, Long, full of booze, would harangue the Senate about how awful that provision was" and refuse to let the bill through. This went on for about a week.

Shanahan filed a story that said something to this effect: "Russell Long, clearly intoxicated, said such and such . . .." But her editors at The New York Times didn't think it was fit to print.