Memory lapses in the White House
Cappy Gagnon
Cappy's Corner
Press accounts in the past few days have yielded yet another mention about the forgetfulness of the guys at 1600. The latest "oops" concerns Al Gore's e-mails. Despite having invented the Internet, it seems that Al is a klutz (color me shocked) when it comes to using e-mail. At least we are to believe that to explain why Al and Justice Department Investigators, can't recover six years of e-mails covering the period when there has been some question about fund raising improprieties at the White House.
Six years — and Richard Nixon got skewered for a 16 minute lapse on his secretary's transcription tape. I bet old Tricky Dick wished he had done the Gore maneuver on those White House tapes.
Gore is the same guy who gave an impassioned speech (his lip doesn't quiver quite as well as Bill's, when he's sharing your pain, but he's working on it) about how his sister died of lung cancer, because of cigarettes. This was a powerful personal message, which attracted a lot of media coverage — and public sympathy.
Unfortunately for Al, it attracted so much coverage, that someone was able to dredge up a televised and equally impassioned, speech Al had delivered, shortly after the death of his sister, telling voters in Tennessee "I have always been, and will always be, a tobacco farmer." When this discrepancy was pointed out, Al claimed that he had temporary amnesia because of his sister's death (I'm not making this us). Gore also forgot to remember that his visit to a Buddhist Temple was a fund-raiser, even though he came away with buckets of cash. He pointed out that there was no controlling legal authority in the Clinton Administration. Maybe I'm misquoting him a bit, but the idea is the same.
In Monday's papers (I'm not making this us), Gore said he did not remember his staff people talking about fund raising at the temple. He claimed that he was drinking a lot of iced tea that day, and he may have been in the bathroom at the time of the discussions about fund raising (Lipton won't want to put that in their commercials!).
During the recent primaries, Bill Bradley's folks unearthed some letters to constituents and Congressional votes showing that Al had once been a "believer" in the "right to life" position. Bradley pointed this out in an attempt to weaken Gore's popularity with the abortion crowd. Didn't work. Al can't remember.
If George W. can quit tripping over his feet in time to defeat Gore, I recommend Al consider a career in car sales, as Joe Isuzu, Jr.
Now where could Al have picked up this memory loss problem? How about from Bill and Hill?
I was thinking about the contrast between the President during my youth, Dwight Eisenhower, and the current occupant of the White House. Ike played football and boxed, at West Point; Clinton played footsie in his boxers in the West Wing. Eisenhower went to England to invade Europe to serve his country; Bill went to England to evade serving his country. Advantage: Ike.
If we had to depend on Bill to do some of the things Ike did, this essay would be filled with umlauts.
Bill seems to have also suffered memory loss while at Oxford, because he forgot to graduate, and couldn't remember if he ever got a draft notice. And, according to Monica Lewinski, Bill couldn't remember her name, while he was not having sex with her.
Bill also couldn't remember why one of his underlings (Craig Livingston) had 1,000 FBI files on Republicans. This pathetic, sacrificial underling himself couldn't remember who got him his White House job, even though it was a considerable step up from his other prior employment: ID Checker in a tavern. (Chuck Colson, an aid to President Nixon, served six months in Federal Prison for improperly having one FBI file, during the Watergate era.)
Some sources claimed that the First Lady was the person who put Livingston in his job. You can see why she couldn't remember, since she couldn't remember how she was able to earn $100,000 in her lone day of future's trading. Then she couldn't remember how her Rose Law Firm's billing records "turned up" one day, in a private sitting room, in the White House!
Bill Clinton promised "the most ethical administration in history." He delivered the most forgetful.
The past eight years have been very good for the economy and there have been no foreign enemies at our shores (unless you count the Chinese spies in our nuclear labs and the Clinton fund raisers who fled back to China), so the Clinton-Gore era deservedly should get some high marks in the history books, but when all the chapters are completed, we may learn that Ronald Reagan was not the only recent President with a memory malady.
Cappy Gagnon is a 1966 graduate of Notre Dame, where he sat alongside two future Pulitzer Prize winners in his journalism classes.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, March 30, 2000
