Anything Goes

by Larry King

  “You ever read the newspaper Ben works for?”

  “Every morning. It’s delivered to my door. The Washington Post.” I had no idea where this was going.

  “Okay, at the top of every page in the newspaper that you read today what did it say?”

  “It says the Washington Post and it tells me the date.”

  “And you’re gonna tell me—”

  “The logo—”

  “This is something new because TV does it?”

  He had me.

  “Larry, I gotta go.” And Herb was gone. And all I could think about was what had happened to my logo theory. I looked at some of the others in the restaurant that day having lunch. Over to my right (don’t start the symbolism thing) was Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff, Bill Kristol, who was a regular when a Sunday talk show needed a conservative pundit. And straight ahead, Bob Beckel was having lunch with someone whose back was to me. Beckel had run Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign against Ronald Reagan and, well, let’s say Beckel was now making a good living as a pundit on the left and leave it at that. Both were talented guys (Beckel came up with the “where’s the beef?” line for Mondale during a debate with Gary Hart) who were plugged into their party’s message and agenda and, maybe most important of all, could present the views with plain talk. For just a moment I thought about the television screen and pictured both Beckel and Kristol on Larry King Live with a graphic identifying who each was, their background, and then their percentage of accuracy in making predictions about particular issues. They could be debating, for instance, Clinton’s foreign aid budget and we’d see a graphic next to each giving the number of times they have been right about a congressional subcommittee approving Administration spending plans.

  Look at it this way, no pun intended, baseball and football do it all the time. You get Sammy Sosa’s number of times at bat, his percentage against a particular team, his percentage getting home runs in the bottom of the seventh as compared to any other time, the number of bases he can get to if he fails to hit it out of the park, the number of times he gets a hit when Clinton is out of the country, and all the other statistics one needs to enjoy the game. My concern was one can know too much and not be able to understand what’s taking place on the screen or the field with all the statistics getting in the way. The scary thought was, someday a Larry King Live viewer could see such a graphic on their screen displaying the number of times Larry has used the phrase “we have a lot of bases to cover” or the number of times he has talked to Mel Brooks or the last date he wore that particular pair of braces. The comforting thought was my prediction statistics probably would remain consistent.

  All of this hit me while watching O.J. because, since he had taken over afternoons on the East Coast, stations were using split screens and news crawls to let the viewer know the world hadn’t stopped and that other issues, like the temperature, were still occurring on a regular basis. The times made O.J. an industry. Court TV and CNBC and, of course, CNN had attorneys ready to go on camera whenever there was a break in the trial. CNN hired trial lawyer Greta Van Susteren and former prosecutor Roger Cossack on a per diem basis to explain what the viewers had just seen and help everyone understand where each side was trying to go. There was no difference between having Greta and Roger on camera to describe the events in the courtroom and that of O.J. on camera telling Bob Costas what had just happened on the football field.

  ———

  Long before there was talk of a Trial of the Century, there was a 1996 campaign for president of the United States. Before O.J. even went to trial, there were White House meetings to set in place a run for the second term. And there were numerous meetings outside the White House to discuss a run against the guy who was going to go for a second term. Bob Dole was one such person and, with his Washington experience, had the nomination to lose. And from the get-go, it was clear the people around Bob Dole had learned from the events of four years earlier. After the CNN show one night I picked up the remote control and saw David Letter-man interviewing Dole. He didn’t say he was a candidate but he said he was going to run.

  Two thoughts smacked me in the head: (1) Isn’t it insane we can mince words in such a way so that we can say we are going to do something, but yet that still doesn’t put us in the category of someone who is going to do something? Now, I’m aware Dole can’t say he’s a candidate because then he falls under the equal time rule for broadcast networks and anything he says will be viewed by editors as a campaign issue rather than as something important to his job as Senate majority leader. Still, you could have just landed from Pluto and not be able to speak English and still know Dole is a candidate and is going to run. It’s a stupid game played by all of us and it makes me put the clicker to work whenever I watch the C-SPAN academics wringing their hands as to reasons there are disenfranchised Americans who don’t go to the polls (and that’s where I had been before going to Letterman. My evening is worldly: ESPN, C-SPAN, CNN, Letterman, and then repeat the routine ten times in an hour). (2) Bob Dole was playing to the Letterman audience to let them know he could be their president and he was willing to come to them rather than expect them to go to him. And it was a variation on a theme played by both Bill Clinton and Ross Perot—going outside of what had once been the usual way of getting a message to people who might pay attention. If nothing else, Bob Dole had learned from George Bush.

  With the New Hampshire primary just a year away, producers at Larry King Live started having conversations with candidates ready to be the next president. Though he couldn’t say he was running, Dole came on to talk about why he wanted to run. He was going to be seventy-three and refused to state he would only serve one term if elected. I thought that made a lot of sense. What if he had a great presidency? What if the country surged ahead? Would he then say “sorry, but I made a promise”? And what would that do to others who are the same age? It was a nonissue. But this was a time when nonissues abounded. Still, Dole was a candidate, even though he couldn’t say he was a candidate. And that got me going:

  KING: You go on Letterman and you announce. You crushed us.

  DOLE: No, that was an informal announcement.

  KING: Because you can informally announce here again, right?

  DOLE: Well, we’re going to really announce on April 10.

  KING: How are you going to do it? Where are you going to be?

  DOLE: We’re going to start in Topeka and then go to Des Moines and then Concord, New Hampshire; end up that night in New York City, and then we’re going to be around for a while. Then I end up in my hometown of Russell, Kansas.

  KING: And then here again?

  DOLE: And then back here.

  He wasn’t gonna do a Perot and I never expected him to do it. Dole had an organized campaign in the works and to say what everyone knew he was going to say before April 10 didn’t make any sense. But, indeed, Indiana senator Richard Lugar came on to say he was in, Dan Quayle came on to say he wasn’t. Pat Buchanan and California congress-man Robert Dornan both came on within a day of each other saying they were candidates. It was a routine I enjoyed. And, more important, having these intelligent people in a studio answering questions from viewers was as good for the voter as it was for the candidate. And maybe it was good for the nonvoter as well? It made me wonder why we hadn’t been doing it all along.

  It being a new campaign, I had to ask Bob Dole the Veep Question. My opinion hadn’t changed one iota as to the chances he would answer it, but one just never knows. In fact, after asking the question to everyone during campaigns since 6 B.C., my feeling that I would get an answer about a vice president from Dole when he wouldn’t even officially say he was a candidate was slimmer than ever. There is something to be said for a gut feeling:

  KING: Are you going to name a vice president early?

  DOLE: I don’t think so.

  KING: I thought you were going to.

  DOLE: Well, I think it’s an option just like the one-term thing, you kno
w. It may happen but I think it’s too early to tell.

  KING: Rumors that Colin Powell has told friends that he’d like to run with you. Would that be a given? If Colin Powell called tomorrow and said, “I’d like to be your running mate,” would you announce that tomorrow?

  DOLE: Well, I don’t think that will happen. I’m not trying to duck the question and I don’t think he said that.

  KING: It’s a hypothetical.

  DOLE: I know it’s a hypothetical but you know, Pete Wilson [governor of delegate-rich California] might call. I might have two on the line at the same time, or maybe Carroll Campbell [former South Carolina governor].

  KING: Can we say Colin would be high on the list?

  DOLE: He’d be very high on a very fairly short list.

  I decided after that interview with Bob Dole that I would continue to ask the Veep Question because (1) anyone thinking about running for the job has got to be thinking about who might have to take over should something go wrong and because (2), very simply, how can you not ask it?

  Just before the Contract With America was going to hit the Hundred Day Mark, Newt Gingrich came on to talk about life as speaker of the House. The Contract had eight of the ten elements approved by House Republicans and it was pretty clear they were going to lose on the term limits issue. I asked him other things; like how the end of the Cold War, and the fact there was no enemy, made it difficult for Republicans to define themselves? Newt said it wasn’t just Republicans with that problem.

  KING: There is no world villain though, is there?

  GINGRICH: No.

  KING: I mean there is the Husseins—

  GINGRICH: No. We’re in a different world.

  KING: There’s no Stalin.

  GINGRICH: No. We’re in a world that’s a mess, but it’s not a menace, if I can make that distinction.

  KING: So what change is that bringing us? We don’t have a universal person to hate.

  GINGRICH: Yeah, I’ll tell you what we’ve got to think through, and this is a real challenge to us as a people. I believe we have a duty to lead because nobody else can.

  We went to a commercial break and Newt leaned over to talk about coverage. He made the point the press never mentioned Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, adding that as a result many in the country never knew. He was right. And he was right about another point he made during the commercial: that wouldn’t be happening today. We know more and there’s not a darn thing anyone can do about it.

  The upcoming election, and in 1995 “upcoming” meant nineteen months away, interfered with President Clinton’s attempt to have a prime-time news conference about welfare reform in April. He’d only had four of them since getting to the White House and I had been making the point that this in itself was news, so it ought to be carried. CNN, of course, carried it, as did CBS, but NBC chose to stay with Frasier and ABC went with Home Improvement. This wasn’t the first time a president had been turned down on news conference coverage. George Bush announced he would answer questions in June 1992 and nobody carried it, citing this was a campaign event rather than a matter requiring public awareness of a presidential decision or issue. I could understand the networks wanting to keep the revenue for ads on prime-time shows rather than losing it to coverage of questionable news. The issue, then, was whether the Clinton White House had properly explained the newsworthiness in the president’s appearance before reporters. The answer was nope. There wasn’t any news to offer. At least the O.J. trial, which sometimes actually had news, provided opportunities for commercial breaks when Judge Ito called a court recess.

  But there was a larger issue going on that day and it continues to this moment. And it came to my attention in a conversation I had with presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. In these days of five hundred channels on television and five hundred special interest magazines for specific segments of the public and the fact that newspapers, by their nature, can’t reach the public until the day after an event, a president is going to have one hell of a time trying to capture the attention of America. Because the audience is so fragmented, a presidential news conference reaches only a specific group while missing many others. Roosevelt used to have a fireside chat and everyone tuned in to hear his words. A big problem for the White House too was keeping the president from being overexposed. That’s why the news conferences were infrequent. Wacko as it seems, in the multi-channel universe it’s tougher for Bill Clinton to reach a broad swath of America now than it was for Roosevelt with only radio.

  I’d had the same discussion with media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and asked him if we might someday look back at these times and say it was a transition period. His answer was yes. “We have clearly left the old black-and-white days behind when there were three networks and everyone watched Ed Sullivan,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ve quite arrived at the brave new world of the future.” In a way, it was comforting to know we are still learning how to do this and, similarly, the White House was probably learning as well. And yet, in another way, it was frustrating because I knew there was a way for a president to be able to reach the national community if an issue required him or her to do so. But I hadn’t a clue as to where the way was to be found.

  The way was found on April 19 at 9:02 A.M. Central Time in Oklahoma City when the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was leveled by a bomb. Within hours, everyone knew what had happened, and as the day went on, more and more people tuned in CNN or each of the networks as newsrooms launched into a familiar routine: non-stop coverage. Twelve hours after it happened I was talking to Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, who stood in front of the disaster scene. As I spoke to him, it became clear the public’s attention can be found if the voice seeking it is loud enough. Oklahoma City was such a voice:

  You know, we come together as one people when things like this happen. President Clinton is of an opposite political party than I but he is very sincere and outraged and angry about what occurred here, because this was an attack on defenseless people, on children. I just can’t imagine something like this happening in a civilized society.

  Had you told me earlier that I’d be talking to the governor of Oklahoma in the first segment of the show that evening I’d have asked what Keating had to do with O.J. Simpson. Twenty-four hours later, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that a $2 million reward was being offered for information leading to the arrest of those responsible. Suddenly, the show was being used as a version of America’s Most Wanted and it was happening because everyone was paying attention. I asked former FBI and CIA director William Webster about it on the second evening:

  You want the immediate attention of the American people before these people can disappear in the woodwork. They may have a different name. They may be recognized under a different set of facts that could be plugged into the computers and more quickly identify who they are and where they’re apt to be located.

  Within a week of the bombing, one suspect, Timothy McVeigh, was arrested. Investigators were still looking for “John Doe No. 2” and the television show put a police sketch of him on to assist in the search. In a way, we were the post office bulletin board as well as the back fence. Both had been around for years, which was proof, again, that everything I was doing every night on television really was nothing new. We were taking the human need to be connected and using technology. Same game, just different toys.

  ———

  President Clinton and Vice President Gore made an appearance on a special Sunday night edition of Larry King Live (by this time we were way off the every-six-months routine) and it was the first time the two most powerful people in the country had ever appeared together for a live interview program.

  We were now seventeen months away from the 1996 election, so one of the first questions was similar to my earlier interview with Bob Dole, and with a similar answer.

  KING: And are you two definitely running again as a ticket?

  GORE: We’re not ready to make any an
nouncement.

  KING: Oh come on, make it. Everyone makes it here.

  CLINTON: I haven’t asked him yet but, if he’s willing, that would be my intention.

  KING: Okay, your intention is to run and ask him to serve again?

  CLINTON: Absolutely.

  KING: And would you serve again if asked?

  GORE: Well, I enjoy this job a great deal—

  This is where my eyes probably glazed over. I’m sitting there with the president and the vice president of the United States and we’re on international television, and what is foremost in my mind? I’m thinking to myself, “Al, stop with the bullshit already.” Brando was right. We are all actors.

  —And I count it as a privilege to have this learning experience and to be able to work for and with President Clinton. And you shouldn’t have any doubt about that. But we’re waiting on any formal announcements.

  I understood what Vice President Gore was doing and with an answer like that I wished I hadn’t even asked the question because there were hundreds of issues I wanted to get into with them, but this was a legitimate question and, unfortunately, a legitimate answer. We covered terrorism and attempts to determine if more than two men were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton wanted to cut the eight years it takes to exhaust appeals in death penalty cases and find a way to make it a single appeal. The suspects, if convicted in the bombing, faced capital punishment. We covered Dole’s recent attack on Hollywood for putting out too many violent films and Clinton said he agreed with a lot of what the now official candidate for the Republican presidential nomination was saying but added, there is a role for the media and the community and churches and business, and the issue should be handled in a way that brings sides together rather than dividing them further. It was a variation on a theme I was getting used to hearing and it began back in the ’92 campaign, “I’m in the party of inclusion, not exclusion.”