MediaWatch: January 1994
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: January 1994
- Conscientious Objectors to Trooper Allegations Jumped on Tower
- NewsBites: Bryant Confesses
- Revolving Door: Talbott Promoted at State
- Friend of Bill Takes Over at ABC
- Fascists, Communists on "Right"
- Boxing Helen Thomas
- TV Truth Squads Take the Day Off
- Janet Cooke Award: Newsweek Celebrates 60th Anniversary with Mostly Liberal Historical Essay
Revolving Door: Talbott Promoted at State
Time's Number 2
As the year ended, the Clinton Administration nominated Strobe Talbott, Ambassador-at-Large to the former Soviet Republics, to the number two State Dept. slot. The new Deputy Secretary served as Time's diplomatic correspondent until becoming Washington Bureau Chief in 1985. Four years later he took the Editor-at-Large title.
Talbott's thinking matches the liberal world view. A January 1, 1990 essay carried this headline: "Gorbachev is helping the West by showing that the Soviet threat isn't what it used to be -- and what's more, that it never was."
On the September 21, 1991 Inside Washington, he asserted that Reagan made zero difference in the Cold War: "The difference from the Kremlin standpoint...between a conservative Republican administration and a liberal Democratic administration was not that great. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended almost overwhelmingly because of internal contradictions and pressures within the Soviet Union and the Soviet system itself. And even if Jimmy Carter had been reelected and been followed by Walter Mondale, something like what we have now seen probably would have happened."
Indeed, Talbott opposed Reagan's successful policies. In the May 21, 1984 Time, he insisted: "The Reagan Administration has made a bad situation worse in two ways: First, by convincing the Soviet leaders that the U.S. no longer accepts military parity as the basis for relations with Moscow; second, by challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, calling the USSR an `evil empire' doomed to fail."
Talbott even suggested there was little difference between the Gulf War and Soviet soldiers quashing the liberation of the Baltic states, writing in the January 28, 1991 edition: "There was a bizarre similarity between what Gorbachev and Bush felt compelled to do last week. Each was resorting to force in the name of law and order."
On the home front, Talbott's a true FOB. After the 1990 G-7 economic summit, he wrote: "The U.S. has the lowest tax level of any country among the seven represented in Houston last week. That is a distinction that should inspire neither pride nor optimism in America."
During the 1992 campaign Talbott used his position at Time to help his friend and Oxford roommate, Bill Clinton. In the April 6 edition, in the midst of Clinton's draft evasion scandal, Talbott declared the time had come for "full disclosure," and asserted Clinton came to London in the fall of 1969 unsure whether he'd be drafted. But days after the magazine came out, Cliff Jackson, a former Friend of Bill, produced a letter documenting how Clinton had received a draft induction notice in April of 1969, proving Talbott wrong.
In the fall of 1992, Jackson wrote a letter to Time Managing Editor Henry Muller: "I know that Strobe was one of the chief architects of Bill Clinton's scheme to avoid his draft notice." Jackson continued: "I have a crystal clear recollection of Strobe and Bill standing in my office door at Republican State headquarters in the summer of 1969 and discussing the plan, devised by Bill with the able assistance of friends, to kill his draft notice and secure a deferment." Muller refused to publish the letter, and the media have ignored Jackson's story.
