My Experiences up Close with the People Who Bombed a 700-Year-Old Civilization into Dust

Continued from previous page

All gathered around Pop Buell, trying to placate him. And then one had a brilliant idea. We would all sign a petition to go to the American embassy denouncing the errant three! I strongly objected, and had a bruiser from a British newspaper shaking a fist in my face threatening to punch my lights out.

The Real Key to Understanding Executive-Media Collusion

But even this information trading for mutual career-building is not the key to understanding how the mass media has become a conduit for executive branch power.

My deepest understanding of how executive branch power affects even decent human beings and journalists has come from observing the career of  Time magazine columnist Joe Klein. I first met Joe in 1975 when he came to California to write a long story for  Rolling Stone on the primary race between John Tunney and Tom Hayden, with whom I was working as director of research. Joe and I were on the same wavelength. I found him smart, decent and fun, and we agreed on everything from the Vietnam war, to the phoniness of liberals like Tunney, to the evils of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. We spent hours together, enjoying each other's company, and I was not surprised to learn he was an admirer of Woody Guthrie, about whom he later wrote a biography. We kept in touch off and on after that, a kind of "Washington friendship," always hitting it off whenever we met.

And then Joe Klein wrote  Primary Colors. After America spent months guessing who its "Anonymous" author was, he became famous, prosperous and a columnist for  Time magazine. Although he remained mildly liberal on domestic issues, I was struck by how he suddenly began reflecting executive branch views on foreign policy. He bragged of his close friendship with the State Department's Richard Holbrooke, reporting that Holbrooke had given Joe's son his first job at the U.N., and then mentored his son’s career at the State Department. Joe, the journalist, was proud of his friendship with executive branch official Holbrooke, "an extraordinary mentor and an even better friend," and praised him to the sky in his columns.

And then there was Joe's reporting on David Petraeus, a government artiste on a par with Kissinger who became not only a valued source but a "friend" to the major journalists who covered him. As I was writing about how Petraeus had savagely and pointlessly escalated the war in Afghanistan, I came across a Joe Klein column titled "David Petraeus' Brilliant Career," in which his readers learned that "the general's most important legacy may lie in the role he has played in transforming the Army from a blunt instrument into a 'learning institution.'"

But of all the columns Joe Klein wrote, the one that struck me the most occurred after the Wikileaks revelations. "Greetings from Afghanistan. I am tremendously concerned about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange," Joe wrote. "If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in 'freedom' stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail."

Not a word of concern about the "Collateral Damage" video, the revelations that U.S. soldiers had been knowingly turning over captured suspects to be tortured and killed by the Iraqi police, no interest in or concern about the revelations of war crimes. Thousands of actual U.S.-caused deaths ignored, outrage at one imagined death of a U.S. ally.

Knowing Joe as I did, I felt it was clear what had happened. His writings for the  Boston Phoenix and Rolling Stone and book on Woody Guthrie grew out of his originally decent value system and concern for the non-powerful. But then he became famous and rich, got a commentator gig on CNN, was invited to fancy conferences, became an ornament of the dinner tables of the famous and powerful. And slowly, bit by bit, without even fully realizing it, he began to see things as they did, just as in  Animal Farm. The Joe Klein I knew in 1975 would have automatically identified with Julian Assange. The Joe Klein of today calls for his arrest.