Leaks and the lackluster lackeys who leak them

Is it my bitter fate to remain forever an obscure columnist for an obscure publication? What is it that the big guys have that I lack? On second thought, don't answer that question; you'll probably get it wrong. The right answer is that what I lack is leaks. I have plenty of shopworn ideas, and with practice I'm confident I could develop a bumptious prose style. But I badly need access to a decent leaker or two. That want alone keeps Fleming from being a household name like columnists Novak, Krugman or Safire, all of whom have in the last week either leaked or been leaked to new heights of journalistic celebrity.

Unless your batteries are entirely dead, you grasp my allusion to the story of liberal columnist and ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson. Who? Wilson is a controversial figure. According to the Wall Street Journal he is an enemy of the War on Terror. According to Paul Krugman, he is a noble patriot. One man's viand is another man's poisson, or what is multiculturalism for? Since doctors disagree, it is best to let Wilson speak for himself. His C.V. says that "he has been decorated as a Commander in the Order of the Equatorial Star by the Government of Gabon and as an Admiral in the El Paso Navy by the El Paso County Commissioners." Admiral Wilson was sent to discover whether folks in Niger were selling uranium to Saddam. Probably not, he concluded, gratuitously adding, some months later in a leaky newspaper column [July 6], that Team Bush probably exaggerated the evidence against Iraq. Conservative Columnist Robert Novak then wrote a column [July 14] about Wilson's column, casually leaking the fact supplied by "two high Administration officials" that Wilson's wife, upon whose advice he was supposedly sent to Niger, is a CIA agent.

It turns out to be against the law to out CIA agents — only the Russians are supposed to know who our CIA agents are — and after a few months of docility Wilson waxed wroth, naming Karl Rove as the leaker. (The Republicans have Saddam Hussein, the Democrats Karl Rove.) By now we're muttering Independent Counsel, so of course conservative columnist Novak has to write another column ("The CIA Leak" [Oct. 1]) in which he denies that there was any leak at all. He simply made explicit what everybody already intuited anyway, sort of. So that's two whole columns this guy Novak has gotten out of one little leak or non-leak, depending upon your point of view, and there are bound to be more in the pipeline. Columns, I mean, as well as leaks.

Not to be outdone, liberal columnist Paul Krugman plugs into a micro-leak about the macro-leak. There are now apparently some Americans inclined to take a dim view of outing a CIA agent in order to punish an admiral in the El Paso Navy for writing liberal columns about his failure to find uranium on its way from Bouza to Baghdad. A nameless "Republican staffer" had told The New York Times, off the record, that the Administration's strategy for counteracting any bad press attendant upon previous leaks or non-leaks will be to "Slime and Defend" [Oct. 3]. The English verb "slime" is rather rare and certainly ambiguous, since it can mean (a) to cover with slime, or (b) to progress in a slimy fashion. Its use in quotidian speech by a nameless Republican staffer evidences perhaps the rising board scores at Dartmouth, but as Washington news the leak itself ranks right up there with "Dog Bites Alpo." Mr. Krugman strives mightily to transform molehill into mountain; and his failure, as heroic as it is guiltless, attests to no lack of will but to an inadequacy of raw materials. For in fact this is not a molehill. It is mere mole fumet, and the largest construct possible with that material is a very small foothill about one column high.

There's more: Conservative columnist William Safire, in his role of linguist of leakage, now writes "Who's Shallow Throat?" [Oct. 6]. He doesn't actually have any leaks of his own, though he lets you know he's had a bathtub full in his time. He is concerned first with the nomenclature of leakage and next with the constitutionally sacral nature of leaks. If you write a paper full of undocumented claims, disguised sources, and unacknowledged quotations your professor will call it plagiarism or C+, depending upon momentary whim. What we might be inclined to regard as defamation by proxy journalists call high principle. If the first blessing of leaks is that they give you something to write about, the second blessing is that they relieve you of much responsibility for how you write about it. So please, dear reader, send me a leak. How eagerly I long to refuse to divulge to the committee the names of "a prominent member of the sophomore class" or "knowledgeable sources in the Macmillan Building." John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.