Media secrets on Dole surface after election

NOW that the election is over the "secrets" are coming out as to how the media handled the Bob Dole "affair".

As the campaign got going in earnest in September, Dole supporters wondered why he was not going after the Bill Clinton "character" issue with the gloves off. The reason we now know is that Dole was living in his own character "glass house".

After the Washington Post ran a story in August about Dole's "emergency" procedure divorce in 1972 from his first wife, Phyllis, and her distress at the time, there was a tip off that he had been having an affair for several years before the marriage broke up. Both the Post and Time found and interviewed the 63 year old woman concerned, who is now working in Washington.

She told the reporters that she had no "rancour" towards Dole but wanted those who wrote about him to know that "he is" not the great moral figure he is portraying himself to be".

The Dole campaign got wind of it and sent its own lawyer to interview her and find out what evidence she had of an affair which went back almost 30 years. But the Dole camp was petrified when it found out that the legendary Bob Woodward of the Post, who helped bring down Nixon over Watergate, was now hot on the trail.

Senior Dole staffers pleaded with the Post not to run the story. Elizabeth Dole called the paper's publisher, Donald Graham, who passed on the call to the executive editor, Leonard Downie. The following weeks were agony for Dole and his team as they waited for the story to break.

Dole was afraid to give interviews to high profile news programmes lest he be asked about the affair, which, he confided to an aide, had not been "that intense". It was like a "sword of Damocles" over him and a mortal threat" to the campaign according to some aides.

Woodward and others at the Post argued strongly for publication. Adultery by presidential candidates and how the media handled it had become a major issue in the campaigns of Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. Was Dole to get different treatment?

Dole had told the New York Times at the time of the Gary Hart affair that "once you declare you're a candidate, all bets are off. Everything up to that point is fair game.

In the end the Post decided not to publish and accepted that there is a legitimate distinction between public trust and private actions. Interestingly enough, Dole himself when he did belatedly start to attack Clinton on "character" issues made the same distinction and concentrated mainly on abuses in the White House over FBI files and fund raising, although some of his campaign attack advertisements revived the Clinton "smoked but did not inhale" marijuana episode.

Eventually the Dole affair did get into print in the muck raking National Enquirer but was still largely ignored by the mainstream media. The Post buried a reference to it in a routine campaign story, remarking offhandedly that it had checked the story and found it correct.

With the election out of the way, Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker and the Post have come back to the story in their special editions on the campaign. The accounts reopen the debate on whether extra marital affairs by presidential candidates should be made public or not.

The editor of the Enquirer, Steve Coz, naturally defends his decision to publish the paper had first offered the woman $50,000 for her version but she had refused. Coz told the Post media correspondent. "It's news, period. This is a guy who's got a family values campaign, who's constantly pointing a finger at Bill Clinton on ethics issues. He says I keep my word. What about his marriage vows?"

Leonard Downie of the Post defended his decision not to go with the story. He referred to his longtime standard that to be newsworthy, an instance of private behaviour must involve the politician's conduct in office. "The fact that it was 28 years ago ... played a role, and also it did not involve in any way his use of public office," he told his paper's media correspondent.

The woman has told the Boston Globe that she was dismayed to see the Enquirer break the story after she had talked on a confidential basis with reporters from Time and the Post.

"I am appalled at how the lines of distinction between the tabloid and mainstream press get blurred and how they use innocent people as pawns. She had shown "ridiculous naivete" in dealing with reporters, she said.

She can say that again.