Newswatch Thomas Griffith: Taking His Case to the Network Torquemadas

There’s something very disquieting about the way the Richard V. Allen affair has been handled—by him, by the White House, by the press. As Allen spent a much publicized week, dangling in the wind and calling attention to himself, the public could never be certain what it was being asked to decide, and why it should be the one left to decide.

Much of the blame for this barbarous practice—of making controversial public figures clear themselves with public opinion before being restored to favor—goes back to Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon’s was the first such trial by television, which took place 20 years earlier than Nixon’s greater trials in Watergate. In 1952 he saved himself from being dropped as Ike’s running mate by making his maudlin Checkers speech. Nixon had one decided advantage over Allen. He persuaded the Republican Party to buy half an hour of prime television time, where he could make his pitch uninterrupted by hectoring reporters. For Allen to plead his case before the big audiences he wanted, he had to choose among the three networks’ powerful courts of inquisition and had in return to face their male and female Torquemadas. Adroit in the arts of publicity, Allen chose NBC’s Meet the Press—because the questioners are at the other end of the studio and the questioning is orderly and by turns. He brought them a scoop: he was taking an administrative leave from his job because “it’s time that this case be aired in a responsible forum.” Such a forum no half-hour television program could possibly be. Some of the asperity in the ensuing questions, particularly by NBC’S Andrea Mitchell, probably came from the press’s sense that it was being used as a conduit to serve Allen’s ends. Questioners rummaged once again through the familiar story of the unreported $1,000 Japanese tip and all the evasions and revisions since then. Marvin Kalb, coolly and skillfully closed the program with two prescient questions: “Do you feel that you have been wronged by anyone in this Administration?” “No.” “By the press?” “. . . Terribly irresponsible things have happened. At our house, which has been staked out every morning beginning at 5:30 by media people, trees have been climbed to look in bedroom windows. An attempt was made to interview my six-year-old daughter on the way to school. I stepped into a box of food garbage left by reporters one night . . .”

Of course, no one should defend the tree climbing, the pestering of the child or the food garbage. But anyone who had watched Allen’s frequent cameos on camera the previous week might have concluded that Allen enjoyed parrying with reporters and fancied himself clever at it. Now, just as cleverly, he was shifting his real problem—the investigation by the FBI, the reluctance of his colleagues and superiors to support him—to the press, which was reporting it. The invasion of his privacy by the press was regrettable, but not the source of his difficulties.

Like a karate expert, Allen sought to use the resources of the press to upend it. In a media blitz, he made the morning talk shows (a CBS limo waited outside NBC’s Today show to take him on to CBS). He seemed to do best with television interviewers who knew the least about the facts. His blitz even extended to an appearance on one of those l-to-5 a.m. radio call-in programs, the Larry King show. Perhaps his toughest questioning came after Monday Night Football, where he appeared on an extended ABC Nightline that was on until 1:25 a.m. He faced Sam Donaldson, who filled in for Ted Koppel. On Nightline, the camera watches over the interviewer’s shoulder, while the target appears on a large screen, as if coming from somewhere a long way off. In this case it was a gimmick. Donaldson was in a below-ground studio in ABC’s Washington headquarters; Allen was in another studio upstairs in the same building.

On the big screen, Allen’s face was impassive while he was bombarded by tough questions. If he showed none of the furtive, guilty-looking expressions of a Nixon, he also evidenced none of the normal human embarrassment or resentment one might have expected. He presented an opaque public face. Addressed as “Mr. Allen” throughout the interview, in arm’s length prosecutorial style, he first-named back (“. . . it was unknown to me at that point, Sam”) like a prisoner hoping to curry favor with his captor. The effect was self-demeaning. There were those who admired his dogged imperturbability. Afterward, ABC got a number of calls criticizing Donaldson, who had done his job professionally.

Always articulate, Allen should have been more convincing, but he lost sympathy by answers that were at times slippery and disingenuous. He acknowledged a few “lapses in memory,” the kind anyone might have made about long-ago events. These he had corrected “after being peppered with questions by you and your colleagues”—again blaming his troubles on his coverage. But, as Donaldson rejoined, why should Allen’s memory need jogging when the FBI had been questioning him about these same events for nearly two months before the press even knew of them?

“It sounds to many old Washington hands that the way is being paved to just ease you out permanently,” said Donaldson. “I just wonder if you were worried about that?” But Allen had not let himself be drawn into commenting on superiors who would not support him, and had thus forfeited any impression of complete candor; nor would he criticize a President who remarked, “We’ll have to wait and see.” The decision would be the President’s once the “facts” were in, said Allen, and “neither you, nor I nor anyone else should prejudge it.” If this was the case, why was the public being subjected to Allen’s media blitz?

And how was the public to judge? Was it theater, with the public as critics to assess the sincerity of his performance? Was it a confessional, with the public providing absolution? Or was it a trial? If so, the unruly court of public opinion was being asked to judge from conflicting testimony and insufficient evidence.

As always in such cases, the press added its excesses to the event, such as the New York Post’s quickness to drone on about “Allengate,” in an unimaginative recall of Watergate, Koreagate, Lancegate and Billygate. But the press and the public remain outside parties in Allen’s case. As his “usefulness” as National Security Adviser diminished with every day of this, his real problem was with an Administration that was reluctant to condemn him or clear him and seemed to be waiting for him to take a hint.