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An
alley in Murray Hill. 7:30 PM. Photo: JH.
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There’s
a bitch-slap going on on the Internet these days, one-sided though it might be, because the other half is in jail.
It’s about power and ambition, and national security and
involves two feline champions who’ve long played at the great
game of getting up to the mountaintop beyond fame, fortune and
the cover of People Magazine.
I’m talking about the coverage by Arianna Huffington on her
new web site The Huffington Post and her reporting (and irresistible
commentary) on the New York Times reporter Judy Miller who’s
been jailed for contempt of court over a matter having to do with
the investigation by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
Ms. Miller, as the world knows, is in jail for refusing to break
a promise of confidentiality to a source presumably having to do
with the outing (to columnist Robert Novak, who then wrote about
it) of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent. What that “confidentiality” involved
and who that “source” is, remains unclear (at least
to me) although a lot of people think they have a pretty good idea,
and that idea leads directly to Karl Rove and a man with the Hardy
Boys/white shoe name of Scooter Libby, both of whom, as the world
knows, work in the White House for President Bush.
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Ahmet
Ertegun and Judy Miller at Literacy Partners' 20th
annual Readings Gala. 4/4/05.
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Huffington didn’t exactly wrassle Ms. Miller to the mat,
but she’s certainly doing a pretty good job of keeping her
down, and maybe even for the count. The irony for me is that these
two girls, while not exactly out of the same mold, have a lot in
common in the social/political ambition department and even, for
all I know, are acquainted.
Ms. Miller is a well known personage here in New York and
although she’d probably be loathe to ever be considered “social,” she
and her husband Jason Epstein, whom she married in 1993, and who
is twenty years her senior, often dine at some of the better tables
and better decorated salons both here and in the Hamptons (and
maybe even the world for that matter) where they have a house in
Sag Harbor.
The Miller/Epsteins have long lived in a world where they are taken
very seriously and even reverentially and at times have provided
fodder for the talkers whose specialty is marriage-type love and
its ancillary interests. I’m being coy only to indicate that
the couple, no longer younger than springtime, are far from fuddy
duddy in anybody’s book.
Mr. Epstein is one of the most distinguished members of the literary
and publishing world. He is one of the greatest book editors of
the past half century, having worked with many well-known authors
including Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, E.L. Doctorow,
Philip Roth and Gore Vidal. In the early
50s, he created Anchor Books which “launched the paperback revolution.” In
the early 60s he was a founder of the New York Review of Books which for
the past forty-odd years has remained a consistent force in literary
and political discourse and influence in the United States.
Ms. Miller was born in New York and grew up in Los Angeles where
she graduated from Hollywood High School. She then got a Bachelor’s
from Barnard and a Masters from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs. She is a Pulitzer Prize
winning correspondent for the New York Times which she joined in
1977.
I met her for the first and only time several months ago at a dinner
party here in Manhattan where we were seated next to each other.
This was before the Plame case hit the headlines and after her
purported existence of WMD had been cast in doubt. She seemed,
as so many Times reporters, indeed, even a lot of journalists can
seem, quietly serious, in a studious sort of way. Although she
was not without humor or interest in things outside her sphere
of reporting interests. She knew about the NYSD, for example, or
claimed to, which surprised me and, which is always flattering.
She is a small woman and has a gentle, demure quality – soft-spoken,
almost diffident, and yet direct and bright in conversation, and
quick to smile on meeting. Unlike a lot of people whom I meet in
her position of prominence, she was engagingly curious and accessible.
She also seemed like a woman who although may not ever be preoccupied
by her looks, takes care and interest in her appearance in a way
that reflected the feminine wiles that are capable of seducing.
This is always, to my way of thinking, an attractive characteristic
to most men, especially when it is understated and appears to be
simply interest in another (i.e., the man).
That is to say I liked her, and her manner. And although I wouldn’t
describe her as a charmer, I enjoyed our conversation and her interest.
I came away reflecting on the magnitude of her reputation and influence,
this little girl who went to Hollywood High, this bookish reporter
who seemed to define pure modesty. A reader might think, and maybe
rightly so, that it was, indeed, the result of charm on her part.
And maybe so. Mega-charm.
However.
Her area of expertise has been national security issues, with special
emphasis on terrorism, the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction.
Her reportage on the latter supported the early claims of the Bush
Administration that Saddam Hussein indeed had WMD along with weapons
of germ warfare.
Although her reporting about Iraq’s alleged WMD has since
been regarded as mistaken at best and untrue at worst, there are
still many on both sides of the aisle who believe her, or want
to believe her, partly because her reputation has long preceded
her reports, in no small way due to her books.
In 1990 she co-authored “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in
the Gulf.” That same year she published “One, By One,
By One,” an account of how people in six nations distorted
the memory of the Holocaust. “God has Ninety-Nine Names,” which
was published in 1996, explored the spread of Islamic extremism
in 10 Middle Eastern countries.
Most recently, in 2001 she co-wrote Germs: Biological
Weapons and America’s Secret War with Stephen
Engelberg and
William Broad. That year she was also part of
a team that won a Pulitzer for “explanatory journalism” for
their series on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. She won an Emmy the following
year for her work on the Nova/New York Times documentary based
on the book.
With prizes everywhere, that portfolio would seem to provide an
excellent argument to rebut the accusations that Ms. Miller sullied
the facts in order to support the Bush Administration’s policies
in Iraq. But the matter of WMD and now, with the outing of Valerie
Plame, Judy Miller’s jailing has instead opened a Pandora’s
Box and the veritable can of worms with accusations against her
of “disinformation” going back almost twenty years.
Mrs. Huffington has taken the lead in the whole business of what
she terms her “Judy File” on her daily web site and
seems to be calling the spade with which she is digging, a spade.
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Arianna
Huffington pictured at the launch of Patrick McMullan's SO80S at
Bergdorf Goodman.
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I don’t know if Arianna Huffington has ever met
Judy Miller,
although it wouldn’t surprise me if she has, or even if they’d
dined at the same table numerous times.
Arianna Huffington came on the scene about thirty years ago as
Arianna Stassinopoulos, born in Greece, daughter of a journalist
and management consultant who at 16 moved to England where she
later attended Girton College at Cambridge University from which
she graduated with a Masters in Economics when she was 22.
After university, she moved to London where she got work as a columnist
and a critic and appeared on TV shows. Her move into the media
world was quick, comparatively speaking and it was while she served
on a TV panel for a show called “Face the Music” that
she met the distinguished journalist and critic Bernard
Levin,
a man more than 20 years her senior, with whom she began a relationship
that she described after his death last year as “The big
love of my life.”
Her field of interest, while not exactly germ warfare or weapons
of mass destruction, was nevertheless formidable from a sociological
point of view and demonstrated an intense interest in power and
acquisition thereof. In 1973, she published her first book – “The
Female Woman.” Five years later, in 1978, she published “After
Reason.”
In 1980, when she was 30, she moved to New York, later claiming
this was because Levin refused to marry her. Perhaps not so lucky
in love, her arrival in New York wasn’t just some poor little
Greek girl coming to the big town. She had already forged many
social connections in London and therefore New York, and had been
wisely advised by people in the know to cultivate not the men,
but the women in New York society in order to make her way.
And make her way she did. Soon she was a “name” in
the society columns and escorted by some of the most eligible (and
rich) bachelors in town. In 1983, Jesse Kornbluth writing for New
York magazine did a piece on her meteoric
social ascent, making it clear that the tall leggy auburn haired
intellectual girl who was considered a champion debater at Cambridge,
was looking for a man. A rich man. Women’s Wear Daily,
following these goings-on wryly observed her masses of social publicity
and
sudden prominence by dubbing her “Arianna Stass-enuf-a-that.” |
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I
met her once, in passing, around 1981 in Los
Angeles where she had briefly taken a house in Brentwood.
I was taken there one night by my friend Sarah Churchill,
to a cocktail party. I’d never heard of her, knew nothing
about her social ambitions or aspirations or background (until
I later read the piece in New York), except that
Sarah described her as very interesting and “very smart.”
The house she’d rented was modest and the cocktail party was unremarkable
except for the fact that for the few minutes we were there, Arianna spoke face
to face with Sarah and ignored me, standing no more than a foot away from her,
shoulder to shoulder with Sarah. Totally and entirely.
The initial impression she made, obviously, was not favorable. Whatever charmed
the rich and the eligible bachelors, or the social ladies of Manhattan, or even
my friend Sarah, was in no way evident to me from the moment I walked into her
house until the moment I left. Although perhaps she should be given credit for
having the antennae to discern that I was neither rich, nor, in a manner of speaking,
eligible. But the experience is not remarkable in the faster lanes of calculated
ambition.
Sarah, on the other hand, for example, was Lady Sarah, sister of the Duke
of Marlborough, and a very engaging and charming woman, it should be
added; now there was someone maybe worth knowing.
First impressions are powerful, especially if one is ignored. If I met her again
after that first encounter, I have no memory of it.
In 1986, it
seemed that she had achieved her objective: she was married in
a highly publicized and glamorous wedding here in New York, to
a Texas oil heir named Michael Huffington. The
wedding, it was said at the time, was hosted and paid for by her
friend Anne Getty, wife of another oil heir, Gordon
Getty. It was the roaring 80s, which were then tantamount
to the roaring 20s (of course we hadn’t seen nothing yet)
and the Stassinopoulos-Huffington marriage seemed made in heaven.
Or Fort Knox.
The marriage did not smoulder the woman’s drive and ambitions which turned
more seriously literary and political. In 2000 she launched the “Shadow
Conventions” at both the Republican and Democratic conventions. A backer
of Newt Gingrich, her “Conventions” addressed the subjects of campaign
finance reform, drug law reform, fighting causes of poverty, reducing corporate
influence in the political process.
She was establishing herself in the Conservative political forums with laudable
subjects. In 1993 she published her third book, The Gods of Greece.
The same year she published a fourth, a biography of Maria Callas.
This was followed t he next year by The Fourth Instinct, and two years
after that came what at first was assumed to be a scholarly biography of Pablo
Picasso, Picasso, Creator and Destroyer. The work was roundly
dismissed by critics. John Richardson the Picasso expert who
is now working on his third (of four) volume of the Master referred to it as “dim-witted
as it is mean-spirited.” In 1998 she published Greetings from the Lincoln
Bedroom, and followed in 2000 with How to Overthrow the Government. Three
years after that came Pigs at the Trough, and the following year Fanatics
and Fools.
Her last three books focus on her transition and her evident political transmogrification.
In the meantime, her Huffington husband, with whom she had two daughters, ran
a successful campaign for Congress which established her, albeit briefly as a
Washington hostess and pundit. Mr. Huffington then ran for Senate against Dianne
Feinstein, which after spending tens of millions of his own fortune
ended up in a disastrous loss. This was followed by a divorce and Mr. Huffington’s
revelation that he was gay.
When she moved to Los Angeles about that time, a friend of mine,
telling me about
her move, said that she was about to become a “liberal.” Why? “Because
she wants to know David Geffen.” Whether that was true
or not, the new Mrs. Huffington, now single, grew no moss under her feet. She
continued writing, speaking, meeting, connecting and forging a place for herself
among national opinion makers.
In 2003 she even ran for Governor of California during the recall of Gray
Davis. Losing to Mr. Schwarzenegger, she remained unbowed
and in the spring of this year she launched herself on the internet with The
Huffington Post, a direct competitor, partisan-wise of the very successful Drudge
Report, as well as a web log for herself and for many others including – as
it was first heralded – Hollywood stars and celebrities, like ... David
Geffen! … and Kelly Preston, and Diane Keaton,
as well as a number of pundits, politicians and media figures.
Despite its Hollywood glitz factor, and the abundance and variety of weblogs
on the site, the influence of its founder, despite her various reputations, was
immediately commendable. Reading Arianna, one cannot deny the intelligence of
the woman, or her thinking or her talent as a writer. Not for nothing was she
considered a great debater at Cambridge. And industrious barely describes her
productivity as a writer and activist.
The launch of the web site (which now seems to be referring to
itself as “HuffPo”)
was dismissed by many, mainly because of her glaring record of opportunism and
social ambitions, but then in the first week of July, Dame Opportunity presented
herself once again at the intrepid Greek girl’s door: Judy Miller went
to jail.
The understandable confusion in the media reports and
accounts about Judy Miller’s jailing was swept away on July
27 when Arianna, in her daily posting on the HuffPo asked: Do
We Want to Know Everything Or Don’t We? The question
was presented to the Editors and publisher of the New York
Times.
“Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to
Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a
heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.
But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls -- one in which Miller
doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House because she
was the source. In this scenario, Miller certainly isn’t an innocent writer
caught up in the whirl of history. She has a starring role in it.”
“The more I’m reading about … her actions leading up to and
during the …. the war, and ….. the unfolding Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card
scandal, the more I’m struck by the special access ….. she enjoyed
with many of the key players ….. (which, at the end of the day, is really
what Plamegate is all about).”
Huffington’s insider access, that bonus reaped from all the years she cultivated
her myriad friendships and acquaintances, has materialized into a reporter’s
(and a reader’s) bonanza. The slings and arrows, those mountains of criticisms,
sniping and insults she’s had to ignore and/or steeled herself against,
have aided her ability to say it as she sees it, whether we agree or not.
The reverence for Judy Miller’s reporting, called into question by her
jailing but protected by her editors and media figures everywhere was finally
brought to a crashing reality by Huffington’s daily accounts which at times
read like a techno-version script of “The Women” (for more excerpts, click
here).
And so it goes, daily now, that readers can turn to Arianna Huffington’s
post and get a real insider’s view of the world of privilege and access
to power, as well as its influence on the lives and future of the rest of us.
It could be argued that her pursuit of Judy Miller and her ambitions and her
career as a journalist are unfair, especially because of her incarceration and
inability to defend herself. Arianna Huffington could also counter that Miller’s “authoritative” reportage
on the germ warfare of Saddam Hussein and his alleged possessions of weapons
of mass destruction, misled a nation to a willingness into a war that appears
to
be
a figment of one’s imagination. Whatever it is, the star that is rising
in the West is Huffington’s. |
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