Don’t Disguise Political Invective as Psychology

After New Mexico Gov. Toney Anaya’s Thanksgiving Eve commutation of the sentences of all five prisoners on the state’s Death Row, a good many citizens expressed outrage, some expressed support, and one New Mexican I spoke with agreed with the decision but said he thought that the governor was wacko and a lot worse.

We all use language like that about politicians, and politicians, in what used to be the privacy of barrooms or bedrooms, sometimes use such language about the voters. I’m all for it (I’m from Chicago), and I think it’s awful that libel laws have ruined the quality of our public invective.

Safire’s Political Dictionary cites a choice example of the classic style from turn-of-the-century California, when Gov. Hiram Johnson said of Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times: “He sits there in senile dementia with a gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent . . . .”

Fair enough. What’s not fair is the sort of thing that the magazine Albuquerque Living did to Anaya. The magazine taped an interview with the governor, whose term ends this month, and submitted the transcript for evaluation to three psychologists who were quoted in the resulting article.

Never mind what they said. What is disgusting is that the magazine solicited their comments in the first place, that the psychologists said anything at all and that the magazine printed what they said. (They have since apologized to the governor, claiming that “the tone and content of the article is not what we had intended.”)

Mental-health professionals ought not to comment on the mental health of living persons who are not their clients or patients, especially persons they have never met. And any editor who wants to say that the ayatollah or the President is a madman ought to say so on his own responsibility, without the pretense of pseudo scientific authority.

I don’t mean to suggest that a journalist is limited to clearly hyperbolic invective like that employed by Hiram Johnson. Garry Wills, for instance, in his 1978 book, “Nixon Agonistes,” did a brilliant job of interpreting Richard M. Nixon’s character, long before Watergate. But Wills didn’t pretend that he was presenting a clinical evaluation. He was a political writer examining a political subject, and he got a lot deeper into Nixon than the trio of psychologists got into Toney Anaya.

The only libel case by a public official that I’ve ever sympathized with was the one brought 20 years ago by Sen. Barry Goldwater against Ralph Ginzburg’s now-defunct magazine, Fact. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Ginzburg did a mail survey of psychiatrists, tallied the results and wrote an article concluding that Goldwater suffered from mental illness. The courts ruled in Goldwater’s favor, deciding that Ginzburg had bent the evidence to support a pre-determined conclusion.

But even if he had presented only statistical tabulations, Ginzburg’s article would have been a gross transgression against decency. Merely by responding to the questionnaire, the psychiatrists violated their oaths as physicians to “do no harm.”

It was fair but rough play for Lyndon B. Johnson’s TV ads to suggest that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for nuking little girls picking daisies. It was fair but rough play for Paul Krassner’s scabrous magazine, the Realist, to depict Lyndon Johnson doing obscene things to the corpse of President John F. Kennedy.

It was not fair for Ginzburg to pretend to put Goldwater under a microscope when all that he had at his disposal was a telescope. And it was unfair for Albuquerque Living to do it to Toney Anaya.