Cautious confessions of a cynical optimist

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 31, 1997 | by Jamie Dettmer

This is the confession of a cynical optimist. For nearly two decades now I've labored as a journalist. It is a job -- nay, a vocation -- I love. Every so often I'm invited by that excellent group, the National Young Leaders Conference, to talk to visiting high-schoolers from around the country about journalism. There they sit all bright-eyed and busty-tailed and I want to jump up and down and yell, "Yes this is the profession for you. What larks you'll have, what adventures!" I do, in fact, tell them but forgo acrobatics in case the organizers doubt my sanity.

In those get-togethers I accentuate the positive and not just because I'm eager to persuade. I genuinely am a cheery, optimistic sort. Well, you have to laugh or cry, don't you, and a chuckle is much more enjoyable. Being cynical and skeptical, though, is an essential quality for a journalist. I have both in abundance. "Question everything," I tell the high-schoolers. "Take nothing on trust." What I guard against, though, is becoming a depressing cynic -- a hard thing to do in this job when confronted by so many "lies, damned lies and statistics."

I still can recall my utter shock when I confronted for the first time in my career a public official deliberately and knowingly lying about a story I'd written. The scoop was a good one -- it was back in the early eighties in Britain. I'd gotten ahold of details of a warning the home secretary had given the Cabinet about the likelihood of a long, hot summer of inner-city riots The Sunday Telegraph lead on the story. Then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's press spokesman, the bluff Yorkshireman Bernard Ingham, contacted the rival Sunday Times, categorically denied the story and pressed-with implied promises of future favor-the political editor to run a big knockdown article in his paper's later editions. That night I was forced-fed the apple of knowledge.

A thousand whoppers later and three continents on and I thought I was inured. Not so. Here in Washington, in this "ever-bubbling spring of endless lies," I surprise myself by being surprised. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had a realistic point when he bleakly pronounced, "If you begin by saying, `Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action." Politicians aren't saints -- they shouldn't be, the world is a tough place. But there are limits, particularly in a democracy where public trust is essential.

At the height of Watergate, then-Sen. Sam Ervin remarked: "Our citizens do not know who to believe, and many of them have concluded that all the processes of government have become so compromised that honest government has been rendered impossible." The damage continues. This administration would appear to subscribe to the theory that if you keep the lies coming thick and fast there will be so many of them that no one will be able to keep up.

When Insight revealed last June the existence of the so-called Big Brother computer database, the White House insisted it was just a giant electronic rolodex to sort out who should be invited to events and who should be on the Clinton Christmas-card list. Nothing untoward, nothing sinister. Several months on and the picture looked different. The database, funded by taxpayers, appears to have been the electronic center for the skirting of campaign-finance laws by a money-hungry president. Christmas cards? At least one Democratic fund-raiser has admitted he used the database to reward donors and entice potential contributors with White House visits, nights in the Lincoln Bedroom and so on. Were Bill and Hillary Clinton behind the creation of Big Brother? Of course not, sputtered an outraged White House. "I would doubt that I was the person who ordered it," was Hillary Clinton's legalistic wiggle. But documents continue to drop showing that the Bonnie and Clyde of Democrat politics were indeed the prime movers.

Since the finance scandal broke Clinton, who has spent a great deal of his time in the White House waffling on about what is the "right thing to do," has insisted his campaign and the Democrat National Committee's campaign are completely separate. Of course he had never pimped himself; the White House or the Lincoln Bedroom to attract funds for the DNC. "The Lincoln Bedroom was never sold," he claimed at a press conference. Heavens, no! "That was one more I false story we have to endure," pronounced Clinton. That presidential lie was nailed with the disclosure on Feb. 25 of a memo he wrote to DNC finance chairman Terry McAuliffe. "Ready to start overnights right away," he bubbled.

The rot doesn't stop there. Mr. Integrity himself, the vice president, is looking as besmirched as his boss. As the 18th-century English satirist Jonathan Swift once wrote: "The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his word." Well, "Honest Al" kept his innocent countenance at his "I-did-nothing-wrong" press conference on March 3 as he ducked and dodged the question, "Had he solicited campaign funds from his office at the White House?" Gore chose to misinterpret the question as it was asked again and again.