The Weekly Standard  |  July 31, 2006

Déjà Vu, All Over Again
The New York Times and its wars against John Bolton and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

by Scott Johnson

One of the many fronts of the war on the Bush administration is the war on John Bolton. The New York Times's latest contribution to this assault is Warren Hoge's July 23 page-one story "Praise at home for envoy, but scorn at UN."

Hoge is the Times's U.N. bureau chief and a voice of the foreign policy establishment. No less an authority than Sen. John Kerry has testified to the Hogean Weltanschauung when he confided in an interview with the Times in the course of the 2004 campaign that:

I believe that if you talk with Warren Hoge or you talk to David Sanger, you talk to other people around the world, they will confirm to you, I believe, that it may well take a new president to restore America's credibility . . .

In this latest piece, Hoge pursues the thesis that Bolton has "alienate[d] traditional allies" as a result of his combative leadership and unmannerly style. He illustrates his thesis essentially with one tendentious anecdote larded with anonymous negative quotes.

For readers with a long memory, the Times's opposition to Bolton may recall the paper's equally misguided opposition to Daniel Patrick Moynihan 30 years ago. In his brilliant memoir A Dangerous Place (written with Suzanne Weaver Garment), Moynihan devoted a chapter to his nomination to serve as ambassador to the United Nations in the spring of 1975. In a scene with a remarkably contemporary feel, Moynihan described the failure of the secretary of State's shuttle diplomacy to bring about a ceasefire in the Middle East. "For two weeks [Henry Kissinger] had moved back and forth between Middle Eastern capitals seeking a disengagement of forces." Despite Kissinger's string of negotiating successes, Moynihan wrote, in that fateful spring Kissinger's "luck ran out."

In March 1975 Commentary had published Moynihan's article "The United States in Opposition," proposing that the United States speak up for itself in opposition to the Soviet Union and third-world tyrannies calling the shots in the United Nations. The article prompted Kissinger to call on Moynihan to represent the United States as the American ambassador to the United Nations: "Kissinger said we had to stand up for ourselves, that I understood how to do this, that the Commentary article had pointed the way."

On April 12, 1975, Moynihan met with President Ford and agreed to serve. "A decent man, he inspired decency in others," Moynihan wrote of Ford. The following week the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, asked Moynihan to lunch. "I came away realizing I was once again at the mercy of the editor of the Times editorial page," Moynihan wrote, referring to John Oakes. Since Oakes's assumption of dominion over the editorial page in 1961, the Times had "commenced to intervene extensively, as it were, in national and international affairs."

Moynihan was not impressed: "Oakes's chief characteristic was that he was almost entirely predictable." Moynihan was of course a famous student of American ethnic groups, and he analyzed the tilt of the Times editorial page under Oakes in ethnic terms: "Its universalist, even deracinated air was its most distinctive ethnic characteristic, the mark of German reform Judaism of that particular branch that so flourished in, and has so influenced, the City of New York."

Moynihan lamented the resulting animus of Oakes and the Times editorial page against him personally, particularly on the subject of race: "In 1970, Oakes had the intelligence to see that my argument on reducing the prominence of racial issues was directed against him, and the likes of him on all sides. Unfortunately he did not have the character to represent what I said fairly and accurately."

Moynihan also noted the tilt of coverage on the news pages of the Times. "[S]omething of Oakes's editorial page opinions eventually seeped into the news reporting," Moynihan observed. Rather than covering the press conference called to announce his Commentary article on the United Nations, the Times sent a reporter to interview Moynihan. The U.N. Human Rights Commission had just passed a resolution censuring Israel for "torturing Arabs," and Moynihan was not amused by the spectacle of moral instruction issuing from dictatorships whose jails were filled with their own people: "We should rip the hides off everybody who presumes to talk about prisoners--shame them, hurt them, yell at them . . . There is scarcely a member in the United Nations that is not guilty of far more discreditable situations and yet it would be unthinkable for us to make such charges against third-world countries although they do so routinely against us." The Times headline over the interview with Moynihan read: "Moynihan Calls on U.S. to Start 'Raising Hell' in U.N."

Warren Hoge's warmed-over hit piece on Bolton is a distant echo of the Times's editorial disapproval of Moynihan's nomination to serve as America's ambassador to the United Nations. In its May 3, 1975 editorial on Moynihan's nomination ("New Man at Turtle Bay"), the Times opined:

As Washington must have anticipated, the prospect of Mr. Moynihan at Turtle Bay has aroused among some friends of the United Nations genuine doubts about United States policy toward the world organization, and especially toward third-world countries, which [Moynihan] recently castigated in pungent language: "Shame them, hurt them, shout at them." In short, does Washington still view the United Nations as an essential if limited arena for constructive, collective diplomacy, or -- wounded by unfair criticism and a cascade of Assembly defeats through the "tyranny of the majority" -- is the United States now out simply to respond in kind?

In his memoir, Moynihan dryly commented on the editorial:

There was no integrity in this. I had not proposed that we go about shaming and hurting other countries. Just the opposite: I had said that we should defend the Jews against defamation, and vigorously if need be. But Oakes chose not to understand. It would go on this way.

Indeed it would.

Original article here.