You either help to stop the bashing or you don’t help. If you don’t help, you have the decency to shut up about it, rather than try to justify your behavior while the carnage is still going on. If you do try to help but finally can’t succeed without risking more than you think you should, you also have the decency to take responsibility for your decision and not try to pretend it is anything other than the obvious, unfortunate, practical choice it is.
In other words, this is what you don’t do. You don’t just stand there observing the scene and say any of the following things: (1) Well, you know the head bashing is pretty awful, but he’s not perfect either and in his way he asked for it. (2) Hey, bully boys, if you don’t stop that right now, I’m going to make you stop … hey, guys, only kidding … (3) This is very interesting; it raises fascinating questions of what my role should be in a world in which there are many terrible street fights; the issue, as I see it, is how can I establish a proper policy that will enable me to help prevent such street fights in the future. And what are my interests and how can I best handle them with the resources I have? And on and on.
All three of the above formulations, maybe a little more elegantly put, have been uttered by all too many in the past few weeks, including not a few in government. There is the policy, which is one thing, and we can argue about that. But there is also the gloss put on it, the reversals and burbles and self-justifications and efforts to claim a moral high ground that has been, in reality, deliberately yielded for pragmatic purposes. This is just one sector of activity in which many in the Clinton administration have yet to learn the virtues of discretion and restraint.
As it is against the laws of nature for a journalist to wish the government or any other entity to remain silent, I quickly add that silence is not at all my wish for them. Sense is; an understanding that everything a government official says has consequences and needs to be thought out and weighed and that trying to win every argument and take every point leads inevitably to saying things that are stupid, dangerous and hurtful. I don’t much like the Bosnia-policy history myself, but I think that as in so many other areas of administration activity, some of the talk has made it worse. Again, the problem, to be clear, is not that they are talking but what they are saying.
And this is not just a foreign-policy problem. Far from it. The White House harbors various staff members who have yet to absorb some of the most elementary principles governing their discourse as agents and representatives of the president. One can sympathize with the horrendous discovery made by people who had no idea that being part of the presidency would bring such merciless and unremitting scrutiny of their every remark. But that’s the way it is, folks, and it’s not something to blame the press for, either. The attention comes with the authority of the office. It’s a sign of how seriously what a president does is taken, just as what is done in his name by others is taken seriously. If it is made to look makeshift, self-promoting or unserious the price can be enormously high.
One of the things you lose when you get high office or when you work and speak for one who serves-is the freedom to kid around with abandon. “Only kidding” has no place in the official vocabulary or shouldn’t anyway. There are wise-guy responses you may think of that are only funny until they are said. There are arguments you can only win (temporarily) with a quick and ultimately selfdamaging comeback. There was a lot of political tension and high-strung feeling in the air the day that Lani Guinier was to get the word from President Clinton that he intended to withdraw her nomination to be an assistant attorney general. In the midst of a White House briefing she was giving, his spokesperson Dee Dee Meyers made a joke about how maybe the White House instead of giving Lani Guinier the Justice Department appointment might put her on the Supreme Court-ha ha ha. Yes, it was in a badgering, bantering exchange with reporters, and no, we don’t want to drain all humor from our public officials. But while a crack like that might make your immediate audience laugh, it struck me as incredible for a White House official to be playing around with an appointee who was about to be junked and whose friends and supporters believed she was already being treated with unwarranted disrespect.
_B_Count to three:b We’re talking ingenuous here, not malign. But the point is that there are some witty opportunities that need to be forgone and some arguments that need to be ceded if the associated cost of winning them is high and the victory is not, in any event, essential. Attempts at self-justification by aides, not to mention exercises in self-importance, fall into this category as well. The self-justifiers are currently busy explaining how it was not they but the people in the next office (or building) who did the dumb thing that got the president in trouble. You can read yards of this stuff in the papers these days. It does not usually do the person spouting it any good at all, tending instead to make him look weak and desperate, and it cannot help making others look awful as well, both those who get blamed by the self-justifier and the president who can’t seem to keep order in the classroom.
I suppose you could say there is something positive in all this and even admirable, if you read the undisciplined talking to mean that those doing it have too little awareness of their own importance, that they don’t realize the reach and weight of their words. But a little of this goes a long way. Everything a president says and everything those around him say matters. It makes things happen. It can do needless harm. It can ruin. I’m not saying that they should all count to 10 before they speak every time to consider all the implications of ‘what they say. That would be extreme. But it wouldn’t hurt to count to three.
