Inman Accuses Media of a New McCarthyism

The press coverage that Adm. Bobby Ray Inman said drove him to withdraw his nomination as defense secretary focused on setbacks in his business dealings, his failure to pay Social Security taxes on a domestic worker and his reputation as an inside-the-Beltway media operator.

A review of the coverage, however, shows that it was overwhelmingly positive, highlighting his substantial qualifications and the likelihood that he would be easily confirmed. These portrayals may have been helped by his friendship with many of the most powerful people in the press.

And at least one journalist whom Inman named said that Inman’s account of what happened is at variance with the truth.

In explaining his decision to withdraw, Inman accused the media of a new McCarthyism, in which the media feel the need to write “bad things” about public figures every day and in which powerful columnists can wage unchallenged campaigns against them.

He cited the few skeptical stories written about his nomination, and three critical columns--by William Safire and Anthony Lewis of the New York Times and Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe.

“Bobby Ray Inman seems to think that William Safire, Tony Lewis and I have been meeting in small offices plotting to ruin his daughter’s wedding,” an incredulous Goodman said Tuesday, in an allusion to Ross Perot’s explanation that he dropped out of the presidential race in 1992 because George Bush allegedly was going to ruin Perot’s daughter’s big day.

Inman said that he “began to get a good flavor of what was coming” about his nomination when he received a call one Sunday from a young New York Times reporter, Steve Labaton.

Labaton asked about Inman’s post-government business experience in the 1980s at Tracor Inc. in Austin, Tex., a company that eventually went bankrupt.

Inman said that he asked what else Labaton was going to cover. “Was he going to deal with the boards I had served on, all the rest of it? And he (Labaton) very quickly told me he was writing exactly the story that his editors wanted,” said Inman, who had gotten to know many prominent editors and producers when his job as the No. 2 official at the CIA involved offering to review news stories in advance to protect intelligence gathering methods.

In an interview afterward, Labaton said that Inman had tried to use his relationships with Labaton’s editors to pressure him to focus on the positive aspects of the nominee’s business record.

Labaton said that when he called Inman about Tracor, Inman told him: “ ‘I have spoken to an editor of yours, and that is not the story you are supposed to be writing. Do I have to call one of your editors?’ ”

Labaton said he responded: “You are more than free to call an editor. This is the story I have been assigned.”

Asked later Tuesday about Labaton’s account, Inman said simply it was “not what happened.”

A few days after Labaton’s story appeared in December, CBS News reported that Inman had not paid Social Security taxes for someone who worked in his home. Inman did not dispute those facts Tuesday, but argued that he was not in the wrong legally, and suggested that the real victim of these reports was his employee who had “only a seventh-grade education” and had never paid income taxes in her life.

But Inman saved the bulk of his wrath for Safire. The most serious charge was that Safire had cut a deal with Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) under which Dole would oppose Inman’s nomination if Safire would raise questions about President Clinton’s Whitewater real estate venture in Arkansas.

Inman said he did not know if the story was true, only that “his state of mind” was that he believed it.

Dole later called the allegation “fantasies.” Safire, declining comment, said he intends to deliver his answer in his column Thursday.

Safire wrote only a single column about Inman’s nomination, but it was a scorcher: “As an executive he’s a flop,” Safire wrote, citing Tracor. “As a judge of character, he is a naif,” he said, citing Inman’s membership on the “proxy board” of a defense contractor that sold weapons to Iraq and South Africa. “As a taxpayer, he is a cheat,” he wrote, citing the Social Security tax case, again.

A review of Safire columns over the last 13 years found that Safire mentioned Inman only five times, four only in passing, although always negatively.

New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said of Safire: “Certainly his opinions are strong--that’s what columnists do. Anyone who knows Bill knows he is a man of great decency, honor and integrity.” Of the other two columnists singled out, Lewis’ piece questioned Inman’s staunch support for “right wing” forces in El Salvador and called him the personification of “the status quo inside the Beltway.”

Goodman cited the same tax and business record as Safire and declared: “We know that Bob Inman slipped up on his housekeeping, but how’s he going to keep house at the Pentagon?”