Almost immediately after the New York Times posted its controversial story about John McCain’s relationship with telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman, there was talk that the paper had been pushed into it by a soon-to-be-published piece in The New Republic.
Mark Salter, a top McCain aide, told reporters in Ohio last night, “They did this because The New Republic was going to run a story that looked back at the infighting there, the Judy Miller-type power struggles — they decided that they would rather smear McCain than suffer a story that made The New York Times newsroom look bad.”
So, what did TNR have? The magazine posted its own “Behind the Bombshell” piece this afternoon, by Gabriel Sherman, and it’s quite interesting. I don’t know if or when it might be available to non-subscribers, but the story fills in some gaps about what led up to the NYT’s decision to publish.
The McCain investigation began in November, after Rutenberg, who covers the political media and advertising beat, got a tip. Within a few days, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet assigned Thompson and Labaton to join the project and, later, conservative beat reporter David Kirkpatrick to chip in as well. Labaton brought his expertise with regulatory issues to the team, and Thompson had done investigative work: At The Washington Post in the 1990s she had edited Michael Isikoff’s reporting on the Paula Jones scandal, and in 2003 she broke the story that Strom Thurmond had secretly fathered a child with his family’s black maid. Having four reporters thrown on the story showed just what a potential blockbuster the paper believed it might have.
From the outset, the Times reporters encountered stiff resistance from the McCain camp. After working on the story for several weeks, Thompson learned that McCain had personally retained Bill Clinton’s former attorney Bob Bennett to defend himself against the Times’ questioning. At the same time, two McCain campaign advisers, Mark Salter and Charlie Black, vigorously pressed the Times reporters to drop the matter. And in early December, McCain himself called Keller to deny the allegations on the record.
Reporters spoke with Bennett directly in December, and shortly thereafter, Drudge ran his now-famous report. This, apparently, slowed the Times down. “The paper gets constipated on these things,” a veteran former Times staffer said.
In late December, according to Times sources, Keller told the reporters and the story’s editor, Rebecca Corbett, that he was holding the piece in part because they could not secure documentary proof of the alleged affair beyond anecdotal evidence. Keller felt that given the on-the-record-denials by McCain and Iseman, the reporters needed more than the circumstantial evidence they had assembled to prove the case. The reporters felt they had the goods. […]
In mid-January, Keller told the reporters to significantly recast the piece after several drafts had circulated among editors in Washington and New York. After three different versions, the piece ended up not as a stand-alone investigation but as an entry in the paper’s “The Long Run” series looking at presidential candidates’ career histories.
This apparently contributed to one of the four reporters working on the McCain investigation, Marilyn Thompson, to quit the NYT.
It’s hard to do the whole behind-the-scenes story justice through excerpts, but I’d just add this — the TNR article shows some internal disputes at the Times, and raises questions about whether today’s McCain article was, in fact, “ready to roll,” but I kind of doubt the threat of the TNR piece was so powerful, it led the NYT to publish a story it wasn’t going to publish anyway.
Update: Re-reading this post, I realize that my analysis left something to be desired. I’m a little hazy from the medication.
Kevin Drum, who, presumably, is not heavily medicated right now, responded far more coherently: “If anything, this makes the whole episode even more puzzling. The four reporters on this piece thought they had ‘nailed it’? Reasonable people can differ on whether they had enough to hang a story on, but there’s no way that they ‘nailed’ anything. And what made Keller change his mind? Adding a couple thousand words about the lobbying aspect of this episode did exactly nothing to take attention away from the bombshell innuendo that McCain was having an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with Vicki Iseman — and the reporting on that central assertion doesn’t seem to have changed much since late December.”
I think that’s right, though it also seems possible to me that the four reporters thought they’d “nailed it” with details that, for whatever reason, the NYT omitted from the story this morning.