Losing the Edge: How the Democrats Dropped the Tape

WASHINGTON —  The controversy surrounding House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) raises weighty substantive issues, but this is also a moment of purely technical excitement for scandal mavens. We may actually be viewing something new under the scandal sun.

Recent political scandals have tended to fall into the same dreary pattern: Shocking accusation. Class B humiliation. Pathetic attempt at cover-up. Cover-up discovered. Class A humiliation. Almost invariably it is the accused who, unhinged by stress, panics and does crazy, self-destructive things.

But in the recent leak of a pirated tape of a Gingrich phone conversation, it is the accusers, the House Democrats, who have acted so irrationally that they may well scuttle their enterprise.

The story began with John and Alice Martin--”Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen,” their lawyer called them. On the day the House ethics committee was to present its charges against Gingrich, the Martins were in their car, cruising down a Florida highway. Using their police scanner, one apparently modified to pick up cellular phone calls, they stumbled on a strategy session being conducted via a telephone conference call among Gingrich, his lawyer and Republican leaders.

“I was so excited to think I had actually heard a real politician’s voice,” Mrs. Martin recalled. She said she wanted to play the historic conversation for her grandson, as yet in utero. So the Martins taped the discussion, using the tape recorder they happened to keep in the car for this purpose.

But then Mr. Martin realized, as he later told the press, that the conversation he had heard--with its evidence that Gingrich had broken his word to the ethics committee--was akin to “the president or some other high-ranking official discussing an issue of national security with a foreign enemy.” He had to turn the thing in.

The Martins asked their congresswoman what to do. She asked the staff of Rep. David E. Bonior (D-Mich.), Gingrich’s chief nemesis. Staffers told her, as Bonior later said, that the Martins should give the tape to “appropriate law-enforcement agencies or officials.” According to Bonior, that included the ranking Democrat on the House ethics committee, Rep. James McDermott (D-Wash.).

The Martins were in Washington by this time, for the swearing-in of a Democratic congressman (Mrs. Martin must have been excited to hear his voice). They got McDermott out of an ethics committee meeting and gave him the tape, with a cover letter. “We understand that we will be granted immunity,” it said.

Two days later, the taped conversation was in the papers. It turned out to be open to two interpretations--one being that Gingrich broke his word, the other being he didn’t. The FBI opened an investigation of the lawbreaking involved. McDermott resigned from the Gingrich investigation. Nobody was talking about the speaker’s tax problems any more.

How could this happen? There was one jaw-dropping miscalculation after another. First, did anyone listen to the tape? Everyone in this food chain somehow convinced himself that the conversation was a “smoking gun.” It would cook Gingrich’s goose; it was important enough to justify risks associated with trafficking in it. There hasn’t been such a serious misreading since H.R. (Bob) Haldeman told Richard M. Nixon that the Watergate tapes were exculpatory.

Rule No. 1 of scandal hunting is that you must not put an obviously partisan spin on things. Instead you should maintain the posture of a fair-minded observer, hoping against hope (for the sake of the system) that the worst is not true, but compelled by the evidence to conclude it is. The Democrats on the Senate Watergate committee were terrific at this. Those on the current ethics committee are not.

Also, didn’t these folks understand that it is almost certainly illegal to record and spread phone conversations like this? It is not exactly arcane knowledge. Five years ago, four people pled guilty to felonies for having recorded and disseminated a phone conversation of Gov. Douglas Wilder of Virginia. With the Gingrich tape, somebody knew enough about the legal problems to promise the Martins immunity, either fraudulently or foolishly. But the awareness didn’t extend far.

Finally, why did anyone think there was the slightest hope of the leaker’s not getting caught? The Martins, told to give their tape to McDermott, did so in public, in full view of witnesses. The couple said they gave the tape only to him. Yet he spent the weekend of the tape’s release insisting to the press that he didn’t know anything about it. He accomplished nothing except to make a bunch of journalists feel lied to--which they were, and which is a very unhealthy thing to do.

There are more effective ways to leak a document. Remember Anita F. Hill, whose statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee was leaked to huge effect. At the time, no one could point to the leaker. Even later, there was strong suspicion but never proof.

Leaking to a special-interest group, which can release information with great flourish, is not a bad way to do it. But if you want to leak something, you must take at least elementary precautions to cover your trail. This truth was mystifyingly overlooked here.

So where is the wicked manipulations in the Gingrich case? Where is the elegance? Gone, in the heat of a passion as debilitating as the panic that so often distorts the actions of accused politicians.

The Democrats have showed the same hasty overreaching in other ways.

Democrats and Republicans on the ethics committee worked out a schedule for finishing the Gingrich matter. Yet afterward, the Democrats held a press conference and complained about how the schedule prevented full consideration of the issues and was part of the GOP’s attempt to sweep everything under the rug. To which Republicans responded by saying, in effect, “You don’t like that schedule? OK, it’s scrapped. Here’s another one. Take it or leave it.”

Indeed, at some point in the Gingrich affair, Republicans understood that they could count on Democratic hyperbole to provide them with opportunities. In the famous taped phone conversation, we hear the Republicans saying that, though they aren’t allowed to attack the ethics committee’s report, they can count on the fact that as as soon as it is released, Bonior will hold a press conference misrepresenting it in an inflammatory way--providing the occasion for a counterattack. It did, as predicted.

So it now appears that the hounds can damage themselves as haplessly as the fox. Maybe this realization will be chastening; maybe a greater appreciation of the risks of scandalizing will be a step toward a general quieting down. We should be so lucky.*