Shots in the Dark

The President has declared that he won’t release any memos of Harriet Miers’ advice to him, on the grounds that he must protect executive privilege.

This isn’t the first time Bush has made this case; the first related to Dick Cheney’s energy policy task force. The White House fought a successful legal battle to ensure that it did not have to release the names of the oil company/Halliburton executives from whom Cheney took his marching orders.

A couple of thoughts.

First, didn’t Bush think of this potential snag before he nominated Miers? Or was he expecting that the Senate would just roll over and confirm her, without asking for her White House paper trail?

Second, this feels like an exit strategy. Bush can withdraw the nomination and simultaneously take the high ground, saying that he’s fighting to preserve executive privilege for his successors.

Here’s a general rule that I believe about Washington: When you can imagine how a scandal will end, the very act of imagining a denouement hastens its realization.

In Orinda, California, a rampaging deer is attacking dogs. It’s gored one to death and wounded three others.

No word on whether the victims were lap dogs.

“We’re being held hostage by a rogue deer,” resident Lou Pimentel told the San Jose Mercury News. Pimentel has stopped walking his Jack Russell terrier since the attacks. “I like deer. It’s peaceful to know you live where deer can roam. But it’s very different when you worry about your dog being killed.”

Oh, yes. It is different when you worry about your dog being killed. Everything is different when you worry about your dog being killed.

State game wardens have dispatched local hunters on a search-and-deerstroy mission.

So Dick Cheney is the guy who told Scooter Libby about Valerie Plame’s job at the CIA. This does complicate the situation, doesn’t it?

I had a discussion with a friend not too long ago about why the Plame scandal matters. Was special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spending too much time, causing too much chaos, just for a little leak investigation?

My response is that this investigation matters not just because of the literal crimes that may have occurred, but because it’s about the lengths that this administration went to to justify the war in Iraq. The lies surrounding what Scooter Libby and Karl Rove may or may not have known and said may, in a narrow context, be small lies. But they go to the heart of the matter: That this White House was trying to sell a war for illegitimate reasons, and it was willing to break the law and smear its critics to do so.

And now we know that the vice-president is involved. The chickens are coming home to roost.

I don’t think there can be any question that this investigation matters. Who knows, now, where it will take us? I, for one, can’t wait for Robert Sam Anson’s biography of Dick Cheney….

Over the weekend, by the way, the Times ran a fascinating piece by financial columnist Joseph Nocera on the departure of Harvard money manager Jack Meyer and the arrival of replacement Mohamed El-Erian. For Harvard alums, this should be required reading; it raises serious issues about the management of the university.

After establishing Meyer’s success as manager of Harvard’s billions, Nocera posits this thesis: “To talk to people in both the Harvard and the Meyer camps, you come away with the feeling that Harvard is not all that terribly sorry to see him go—and that Mr. Meyer had come to feel that, if he wasn’t exactly being pushed out the door, he was certainly not getting the deference or leeway he was used to.”

Nocera cites two phenomena to explain the changing relationship between Meyer and Harvard. The first is the departure of some of his money managers, under the pressure of bad publicity over their salaries; the men subsequently created their own hedge funds and Meyer invested with them, which meant essentially that their salaries were no longer public and that the staff expertise at Harvard Management Corporation was diminished.

The second change was Larry Summers. To quote Nocera: “One of the raps on Mr. Summers is that he always has to be the smartest guy in any room, tossing off questions he means to be provocative, but which often have the effect of alienating the people he’s questioning. And so…Mr. Summers began questioning Mr. Meyers about everything from the positions in the portfolio to its level of risk.”

Equally interesting, Nocera throws Bob Rubin into the mix, saying that he too started “meddling” (as Meyer appeared to consider it) with Meyer’s decisions.

Soon enough, Meyer got fed up…and now Mr. El-Erian has very large shoes to fill, with many doubts about whether he will be able to do that.

The plot thickens, eh?

I’ve long argued that the key to Summers’ viability at Harvard is money: Are alumni giving it? Is Harvard making it?

Seem from this perspective, Summers may actually be in more trouble than he was last spring. FAS has just announced a $50 million or so annual deficit. (Could be more, could be less.) The long-awaited capital campaign is still awaited. It’ll be a miracle if the performance of Harvard’s endowment continues at the pace it did under Meyer.

And meanwhile, Allston is out there, waiting to suck down every available dollar Harvard throws at it….

Many people at Harvard would like to think that their, and the world’s, image of the university is primarily linked to its intellectual achievements. I think it’s more complicated. In recent decades, many people have formed their high estimation of Harvard, whether they realize it or not, because of the fact that it is not just smart but rich, the richest university in the world by about ten billion dollars, so rich that they’ve come to take this relatively modern phenomenon for granted. What many Harvard alums and the general public really cherish about Harvard is its power, and these days, the source of that power is as much financial as it is intellectual.

So what happens if, under Larry Summers, Harvard’s wealth starts to flatline, or even decrease? And what happens if the departure of Jack Meyer is seen as a watershed in that development?
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P.S. Harvard alums who want to better understand their president should know that Summers almost certainly spoke at some length—on background—for Nocera’s story. (I’d bet ten percent of my personal wealth versus .o1 percent of Harvard’s endowment on it.) How do I know this? First, he’s quoted in a sort of oblique way saying “Jack Meyer did a great job for Harvard.” Short, succinct soundbite.

But later in the piece, when Nocera discusses a new compensation strategy Summers put in place at HMC, Nocera writes, “I don’t believe that Mr. Summers imposed the new system as a means of getting rid of Mr. Meyer—he simply thought it made more sense for a university endowment—but that was the inevitable result.”

How does Nocera know what Summers “simply thought”? In all likelihood, because Summers told him—but in a way he hoped would obscure the extent of his cooperation with the Times reporter.

SOP in Washington: Give the complimentary soundbite on the record, then go on background to deliver the real dish. It’s only less than obvious if you labor under the idealistic assumption that a university president wouldn’t employ such media strategies.

Former Harvard dean (and current professor) Harry Lewis states his case against Harvard’s new, if selective, policy of matching donations to victims of natural disasters.

Writes Lewis: “Harvard really has no money of its own. It is merely the trustee for money given or paid to it for education and research, and funds resulting from reinvestment of such gifts and payments—funds which should themselves be invested in education and research at Harvard. “

I think this argument can safely be called the traditionalist, or purist, view of Harvard’s role in the world, whereas Larry Summers’ decision to implement this policy reflects his expansionist perspective: Harvard as international geopolitical player, led by Summers, who used other people’s money in similar ways while at the World Bank and the Treasury Department….

A tax lawyer friend of mine raises the question of whether it’s even legal for a non-profit to redirect contributions in such a manner….. There’s a real case to be made that it is not.

Boy, does she ever—in this e-mail to public editor Byron Calame. Pretty hot stuff. For one thing, Miller clarifies the murky issue of what editor she discussed pursuing the Valerie Wilson story with: Jill Abramson. This, even though Abramson has denied that any such conversation ever took place. Is Abramson lying?

I know I shouldn’t put it this way, but the catfight is turning into a three-way…..or even a foursome, if you include the interview Miller gives to the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser….

Miller also clarifies her controversial decision to call Scooter Libby a “former Hill staffer,” saying that “ I agreed to that attribution only to hear the information. As I also stressed, Scooter Libby has never been identified in any of my stories as anything other than a ‘senior Administration official.’”

If true, then Miller has a legitimate beef: the Times’ tick-tock and Calame’s column clearly left the impression that the wording “former Hill staffer” had gotten into the paper.

Finally, Miller accuses Calame of not giving her equal time: “While you posted Bill Keller’s sanitized, post-lawyered version of the ugly, inaccurate memo to the staff he circulated Friday, which accused me of ‘misleading’ an editor and being ‘entangle’ with I. Lewis Libby, you declined to post the answers I sent you to six questions that we touched on during our interview Thursday. Had you done so, readers could have made their own assessment of my conduct in what you headlined as “the Miller mess.”

Again, I think Miller has a point. If Miller answered his questions, why not post her answers? That’s what the web is for, baby. Full disclosure. As they say in Washington, do an information dump. If the public editor won’t level with readers, who will?

Miller also has a right to be outraged by Bill Keller’s use of the term “entangled,” which clearly suggests that she was sleeping with Scooter Libby. If Miller wasn’t, then Keller not only chose his word poorly, he chose it sleazily.

Bill Keller inspires less and less confidence.

…last night’s blown call by an ump who thought that White Sox player Jermaine Dye was hit by a pitch, though it actually hit his bat. Even the player later admitted that the call was wrong.

This is the third egregiously bad call by an umpire in the post-season, all of which wound up playing crucial roles in the outcomes of games.

What could be the downside of allowing instant replay review during the post-season?

After all, it’s not like football, where such interruptions really disrupt the flow of the game. In baseball, taking a few moments to chat is a valued part of the game—a manager’s visit to the mound, for example.

It’d be kind of fun for baseball fans to have more time during the game to review and argue about disputed calls…and no important game should be lost because of an ump’s clearly mistaken call.

On Sunday, Maureen Dowd used her column to flay Judy Miller (after first going out out of her way to note that she’s “always liked Judy Miller”).

(Insert standard TimesSelect lack-of-link explanation here.)

Dowd cites the usual reasons, but adds one delicious detail: that as recently as last April, Miller sent her an e-mail defending Ahmad Chalabi, perhaps the world’s most unreliable source. For this act of lunatic judgment alone, Miller should be fired.

Clearly, I have no desire to defend Judith Miller. But having said that, I think it’s bizarre and probably inappropriate to allow one Times columnist to write a column attacking a Times reporter. (Much as I love to read a “catfight,” as the New York Post put it.)

In the process, Dowd can draw on her knowledge of the paper’s internal workings, and, because she’s a columnist, never has to give Miller a chance to respond. It doesn’t feel right. The Times should offer Judy Miller space on the editorial page to answer Dowd. But of course, then the whole thing starts to get silly…which is why the Times shouldn’t have allowed Dowd to write about Miller in the first place.

Moreover, while I’m sure that Dowd genuinely believes what she wrote, and that she would never, ever be opportunistic and use the moment of Miller’s weakness to pile on, let us not give her points for journalistic courage here.

Real guts would have been writing this column a year ago. Or two years ago. After all, Dowd writes that in the run-up to war, she “worried that [Miller] was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber” of warmongers and their publicists. Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t recall her breaking with Miller at the time.

It doesn’t take much guts to come out now and say that you always thought Judy Miller was a bad reporter. What’d you do when it counted, Maureen? When you might actually have to pay an internal price at the paper in order to run a column?

A few posters on this blog have mentioned that they don’t believe Judith Miller should be given the opportunity to write a book. I think this kind of criticism merits a response, and I’d like to see it addressed in the book that Miller will surely write. Can you imagine how entertaining it would be if she really decides to dish on the internal goings-on at the Times?

Which perhaps puts Dowd’s column in another light. Perhaps it’s nothing more than a shot across the bow….

Today’s column by beat-the-drum-slowly-and-repetitively Times columnist Bob Herbert has this ominous title: “How Scary Is This?”

(You know the drill by now: I’d link to it, but, blah-blah-blah, TimesSelect.)

Here’s how the column is described online: “If nothing is done about the current state of affairs and the incompetence of the government, things are going to get much worse.”

I think that Bob Herbert, in a burst of delightfully self-deprecatory self-parody, must have written that sentence himself. Because, after all, it’s pretty much the theme of every Bob Herbert column. Or does some web editor just keep around that dummy copy to publish whenever it’s Bob Herbert’s time to appear in the paper?

I challenge readers to come up with their own Bob Herbert ledes….

Times public editor Byron Calame weighs in with his thoughts on the Judith Miller fiasco.

They are more or less as follows:
1) The Times was slow to fault its, and particularly Miller’s, reporting on Iraq before the war began, largely because of the Jason Blair fiascos. (Lots of fiascos going around the Times these days.)
2) Judy Miller takes “journalistic shortcuts.”
3) Times editors treated Miller with kid gloves, treatment which only made the fiasco worse.
4) “The problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.”

I’m underwhelmed by Calame’s column, which essentially repeats everything we already knew and doesn’t dig very deep.

For example, it takes Bill Keller’s words about “lancing the WMD boil earlier” at face value. But as readers of the blogosphere well know, the Times did a remarkably poor job of evaluating its reportage strongly suggesting that Iraq had or was about to acquire WMDs. On a story of immense importance—whether there was reason for this country to go to war—the Times not only got the story wrong, but got it wrong in such a way that promoted war. The reporter most responsible for this was Judy Miller—and the Times’ WMD mea culpa failed to address her role.

Calame also neglects to address the news, broken by Andrea Peyser in Sunday’s New York Post, that Milller was allowed to read last week’s tick-tock of, for lack of a cuter phrase, “Miller Time”—before publication.

Since when does the Times allow the subjects of its articles pre-publication review?

And, while this is a touchy situation, Calame lets Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., off the hook. He notes that Sulzberger strongly defended Miller. But he doesn’t push the question of why, and that is something of a mystery. Folks outside the Times have known for years that Miller was trouble. And it sounds like some folks inside the Times have also known that.

So why did Pinch Sulzberger put the credibility of his newspaper at risk to stick up for a reporter whose dubious history waved more red flags than a bullfighters’ school?

(Sorry.)

And here’s a question I have: Judy Miller once again refused to name the editor she claims she asked for permission to pursue a story about Valerie Wilson, and who allegedly said no. Who is this mysterious editor? Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson says it wasn’t she. Was it Bill Keller?

In any event, how can a newspaper possibly continue to pay a reporter who won’t disclose her own discussions with the paper’s editors?

To rebuild its credibility, the Times should do more than just let Judy Miller sneak away and write a book. It needs to fire her.