Politico—particularly Allen—is prone to trafficking suggestive notions in the spirit of “driving the conversation.” The conversation then gets picked up on cable and blogs (“I’m hearing talk about . . .”), and then Politico will report on “something that is getting a lot of buzz” to a point that merits coverage as a viable possibility, something that’s “out there.”
“Good Saturday morning,” Mikey wrote in April 2010 as President Obama was looking for a Supreme Court justice to replace the retiring John Paul Stevens. “For brunch convo: Why isn’t Secretary Clinton on the media short lists for the Court?” By Monday, the convo had moved from the brunch table to MSNBC’s Morning Joe (where the host, Joe Scarborough, advocated for Clinton) and Today (where the Republican senator Orrin Hatch mentioned her too). Later that day, Ben Smith, then writing for Politico, quoted a State Department spokesman who “threw some coolish water on the Clinton-for-Scotus buzz in an e-mail.” By then the cable, blog, and Twitter chatter was fully blown. The White House issued an unusual statement that Secretary Clinton would not be nominated. Politico then sent out a “breaking news” alert, and Smith reported that the White House had “hurriedly punctured the trial balloon.” End of convo.
For what it’s worth, Philippe Reines, a Clinton adviser, says that he told another Politico reporter the previous Friday that the chances of his boss’s being nominated were “less than none” and added, “Something being a sexy media story shouldn’t be confused with truth.”
But, of course, it is categorically confused all the time in today’s D.C. Fact and speculation swirl in the same blizzard. As long as something is circulating “out there”—getting page views, generating buzz, driving convo—it can have impact, ephemeral or otherwise. The thrown-off nature of Twitter has turned phrases like “Hearing that,” “Word on the street is,” and “I get the feeling that” into acceptable attribution units.
Bob Woodward, the best-known investigative reporter in history, suggested in a pundit capacity on CNN that Obama might dump Biden for Hillary on the 2012 ticket (“It’s on the table”). Conservative oracle William Kristol wrote a column suggesting the same thing. New York magazine’s John Heilemann, coauthor of Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, wrote an October 2010 cover story on “President Palin” (“How Sarah Barracuda Becomes President”), which set in motion the Playbook community as well as the televised breakfast nook of Morning Joe, where Heilemann is a regular talker, along with Woodward and Allen.
Morning Joe innkeeper Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from the Florida Panhandle, has himself become a key impresario of the conversation. He is also a topic.
Scarborough was “discussed” as a possible candidate for president in 2012, or maybe a vice presidential candidate on an independent ticket led by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Whether either one was ever an actual possibility is beside the point—because it was out there, thus meriting journalistic notice, generating “buzz.” Howard Fineman, a former Newsweek writer and veteran cable pundit who joined HuffPost in October 2010, heard about “the discussion.” And got a great ride out of a story he wrote about a Bloomberg–Scarborough ticket, or “the Independent Odd Couple,” as Huff-Po played it big on its website.
Scarborough confirmed speculation that discussion about the speculation had taken place, or so he speculated in a discussion with Fineman about the speculation.
“We haven’t discussed it directly,” Scarborough told Fineman, adding, “Have people discussed it in his sphere and in my sphere? I think so.”
Mikey then quoted this in Playbook, igniting more discussion in the Playbook community, which overlaps considerably with Scarborough’s and Bloomberg’s “spheres.”
When I later asked Fineman about his “Independent Odd Couple” story and the blather that ensued, he maintained that Scarborough was and is serious about the possibility of an independent candidacy. He also acknowledged that the whole episode was “probably the ultimate example of the political-media complex flying up its own asshole.”
• • •
One of my last meetings with Mike Allen was over breakfast at D.C.’s Mayflower Renaissance Hotel. Like many reporters, Allen would much rather ask the questions than answer them. He led off with one: “What’s the most surprising thing you learned about me?”
It was what I learned about his father, I told him. Gary Allen was an icon of the far right in the 1960s and 1970s. He was affiliated with the John Birch Society and railed against the “big lies” that led to the United States’ involvement in World Wars I and II. He denounced the evils of the Trilateral Commission and “Red” teachers. Rock ’n’ roll was a “Pavlovian Communist mind-control plot.” He wrote speeches for George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. He wrote mail-order books and pamphlets distributed through a John Birch mailing list.
None of Mike Allen’s friends knew any of this about his father (or they were diverting me with other monikers, like “football coach,” which he indeed was; Gary Allen coached a Pop Warner team that included Mike, who played center—badly). In an earlier phone interview, Allen said his dad was a “writer” and “speaker.” After I mentioned his father at breakfast, Allen flashed a smile that remained frozen as I spoke. He had described his upbringing to me as nonpolitical. He said he never read anything his father wrote.
I did not want to overreach for a Rosebud. “Life isn’t binary,” Allen said a few times at breakfast. But I could not help being struck by the contrast between father and son.
Gary Allen’s writings conveyed great distrust of the established order. He saw conspiracies in both parties, despising Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for their internationalism and the “establishment media” for enabling the “communist conspiracy.” Mike Allen traverses politics with a boyish and almost starstruck quality toward the assumed order. He is diligent in addressing leaders by proper titles, ranks, “Madam Speaker,” and “Mr. President.” Friends said he seemed particularly enthralled to be covering the White House during the Bush years and was spotted at all hours around the briefing room and press area.
When Allen was preparing to leave a job at the metro section of the New York Times to cover the White House for the Washington Post, his boss, Jonathan Landman, tried to convince him to stay. “I gave him the usual reasons,” Landman recalled, which included the standard New York metro editor’s take on the White House beat (herd journalism, etc.). Allen had an unforgettable comeback: “I want to be present at great moments in history,” he said.
And at the end of our discussion about his father, Mikey made a point of ending on a sweet and orderly data point. After Gary Allen died, at fifty, many of his former Pop Warner players filled the church in tribute. Allen said he recalled no talk of his father’s political work at the memorial, but he will never forget one detail: a giant blue and gold floral arrangement in the shape of a football was placed onstage, a gift from the kids on Gary Allen’s team, the Phantoms.
As I was finishing the story about Allen, I was meeting with Politico’s John Harris in his office, when Mikey himself walked in. He welcomed me, thanked me for coming, and returned to his desk. I visited his cubicle later but Allen was gone. To the left of his desktop was a picture of Allen standing upright and asking President Obama a question at a White House news conference. His work area was notable for its lack of clutter: there were a few small stacks of magazines and newspapers and a tray of mint Girl Scout cookies on the top of his terminal.
In the days leading up to a photo shoot for the article, Allen’s work area became spotless, surfaces shining. I kept asking Politico’s then executive vice president, Kim Kingsley, “Who cleaned up Mikey’s room?” but neither she nor Allen would say. All great questions come from small questions. And some just hang there until they vanish.
6
“Thank You for Your Service�
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The most consequential political story of 2010—maybe all of Obama’s first term—was written by a troublemaker, Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone. His June profile of General Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General,” included a host of unflattering statements from the general’s staff about civilian government officials such as Vice President Biden, National Security Adviser James L. Jones, and ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry, among others. McChrystal apologized as soon as the story was posted, and was summoned to Washington by the commander in chief. His staff (and, by implication, McChrystal himself) had clearly spoken out of school, or “off message”—or candidly. Gaffe! The idea that speaking the truth as you see it should be a virtue is nothing but a Pollyannaish and naive notion within the great unfurling process story of life.
Bottom line: McChrystal and his aides were “ill-advised” and showed “bad judgment” by participating in the Rolling Stone profile. So went the logic of the almighty narrative. The substance and merit of the remarks were beside the point. Because McChrystal was playing the game wrong. He made a dumb PR move. He was not cautious. He forgot that, in the words of media writer Michael Wolff, everyone in government must behave like “a thwarted, deracinated, ever-second guessing him- or her-self, mutated individual.” He forgot what Robert Gibbs forgot that summer when he was pilloried (by Nancy Pelosi, among others) for admitting on Meet the Press that Republicans might win back Congress that November—the possibility really existed, imagine that!
Within minutes of the Rolling Stone story’s publication, the conversation was completely given over to a classic Washington “Will he or won’t he?” cliff-hanger. As in: Will McChrystal keep his job or won’t he? Anticipation built over his fateful White House meeting with Obama. This Town loves a deathwatch.
McChrystal was swiftly fired. But in the finest D.C. tradition of failing upward, technically Obama accepted McChrystal’s resignation “with extreme regret,” and the general then set off to launch “The McChrystal Group,” the requisite lucrative postgovernment consultancy offering “leadership solutions for complex problems.” Bob Barnett hooked him up with a nice book deal, JetBlue and Navistar brought McChrystal onto their boards of directors, and he was hired to teach a graduate seminar in modern leadership at Yale. He was getting $60,000 a pop for speaking gigs.
And The Club turned its attention to the troublemaker. After Hastings’s story was published in Rolling Stone, the writer was accused of violating an implied agreement not to reveal the general’s unguarded comments. Also, the military officials had apparently been drinking—the implication being that maybe Hastings should have cut them some slack. And there were rumblings within the military and among journalists that Hastings had violated an off-the-record understanding with McChrystal and company. Some members of McChrystal’s staff said as much in Army Times and the Washington Post. But the charges, made anonymously, received little traction, McChrystal made a fulsome apology, and Hastings denied violating any ground rules.
The military’s biggest mistake was to let Hastings in to begin with, Mikey pointed out, under the cautionary headline of “Failure to Google.”
“A quick search would have showed McChrystal that caution was warranted around the irreverent reporter,” Allen wrote in Playbook. He pointed out that Hastings, a former Iraq correspondent who had previously worked for Newsweek, had written an article for GQ in 2008 titled “Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter”: “There was no small amount of hypocrisy when it came to journalists discussing the sex lives of the people they cover, since fidelity wasn’t exactly a prized virtue among reporters on the campaign trail,” Hastings wrote. “For my part, I watched a lot of porn. . . . It occurred to me . . . [that enjoying pornography] in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting.”
In other words, “troublemaker” should have been tattooed on the “irreverent reporter’s” forehead.
Hastings was quizzed on CNN’s Reliable Sources, the Sunday-morning show about the media hosted by longtime Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. Kurtz, known within the pack as “Howie,” mentioned that “it’s been widely commented upon that there was some drinking going on.” To which Hastings replied, “Yes. There was drinking going on.”
David Brooks wrote in the New York Times that McChrystal had been victimized by the “culture of exposure” that has prevailed in journalism since the Vietnam War. He called out Hastings—a “product of the culture of exposure”—for making McChrystal’s “kvetching” the centerpiece of his story, though certainly the comments would have caused a storm whether Hastings had made them the centerpiece or not.
But the harshest criticism came from inside the pack. CBS’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan was brutal, saying that Hastings had violated an “unspoken agreement” between reporters and military officials. It is understood, she said, that journalists should not embarrass troops “by reporting insults and banter.” She implied that Hastings had disingenuously gained the trust of his subjects and even that Hastings made up the offending material—or at the very least burned the military leaders on an off-the-record agreement. “I know these people,” Logan told Kurtz on Reliable Sources. “They never let their guard down like that. To me, something doesn’t add up here.” She went on to say that there are many good beat reporters in the field. “And to be fair to the military, if they believe that a piece is balanced, they will let you back,” she said. It went without saying that Hastings would not be “let back.”
The criticism of Hastings from the pack had a circling-the-wagons quality. Even though his was the most talked-about story in Washington for several days and led to the ouster of a decorated war commander, Hastings was treated as a suspicious interloper. He had few defenders. His most passionate was Rolling Stone colleague Matt Taibbi, a wicked screed artist and one of the few legitimate heirs to Hunter S. Thompson in a blog-inspired generation of gonzo wannabes. “If there’s a lower form of life on the planet earth than a ‘reputable’ journalist protecting his territory, I haven’t seen it,” Taibbi wrote in a blog post titled “Lara Logan, You Suck.” “If I’m hearing Logan correctly, what Hastings is supposed to have done in that situation is interrupt these drunken assholes and say, ‘Excuse me, fellas, I know we’re all having fun and all, but you’re saying things that may not be in your best interest!’”
Taibbi’s broader point is that everyone is obsessed with being “reputable” and desperate to be “part of The Club so so badly.” By “Club” he meant it not like Tim Crouse would delineate between the “pack” and the “nonpack,” “troublemakers” or “non-troublemakers.” Rather, “reputable” in terms of being a made man in the “Club” that allows for a TV deal and a Bob Barnett imprimatur and an invite to Tammy’s garden party. Someone properly in The Club who would never say—as Hastings did to Kurtz—that he used his charm and friendliness to build a rapport with his subjects so that they felt comfortable saying things to him. This is what journalists do but are not supposed to say—what Janet Malcolm wrote so famously/infamously of in the opening of “The Journalist and the Murderer”: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
The bigger point in this case concerns the place of the “reputable journalist” in the Washington Club—or lifetime banishment from it. Hastings trashed The Club. He was a skunk at the garden party. He made the other guests look bad. “Most of these reporters just want to be inside the ropeline so badly,” Taibbi concluded.
“God forbid some important person think you’re not playing for the right team!”
• • •
The McChrystal story provided a useful context for what had become a defining characteristic of life “inside” in the new century. Starting in Iraq, reporters began doing something known as “embedding” with U.S. combat units. While embedding brings a
n increased risk of a reporter’s losing independence and perspective, the practice certainly carries a practical benefit on the battlefield—to say nothing of a safety benefit. To some degree, embedding was a formalized version of the bunker relationships that arose organically in previous wars like Vietnam: journalists and soldiers enjoying a mutual reliance.
But around 2004, the notion of embedding had spread beyond war zones and into far less hazardous environs of domestic reporting, like presidential campaigns. Networks began designating reporters to embed with campaigns. Their charge was to provide minute-to-minute coverage of what was happening “inside” it, or at least inside the campaign bubble, which was markedly different from looking inside the actual substance of the campaign. Regardless, embedding promised readers a real-time sense of what it was like “inside” the campaigns, even if it came at the expense of the whimsy and creative and less filtered impressions a nonembedded reporter could provide away from the bubble. “The chroniclers of political and cultural debates increasingly move in a caravan with one side or another,” David Ignatius wrote in a May 2, 2010, Washington Post column on the dangers of “embedded journalism.”
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