Waiting for Gigot
The Journal's new editorial page editor moves
slowly —
but patterns of change begin to emerge
Back in the summer of 1986 when I was transferring from Newsday's Washington bureau to run its editorial page, a colleague asked me which newspaper's editorial page I most admired.
I didn't hesitate to answer. "The Wall Street Journal," I said, much to his shock.
"I might disagree with most of their positions," I said (and in fact I do). "But it's a superbly written page, and it takes clear, provocative positions. There's no 'on the one hand this, on the other hand that,' with the Journal. You know where they are coming from.'"
I thought back to the conversation recently when CJR asked me to write a piece about what the change in editorial page editors at the Journal would mean. On September 17, Robert L. Bartley, who had run the page since 1972, was replaced by Paul A. Gigot, the well-known Journal Washington columnist, television commentator and editorial board member.
If anything my admiration of the Journal's editorial page has grown over the years. Bartley had made the Journal's page the most entertaining and influential in American journalism. It is the ideological lodestone of a political movement that has shoved the entire American political center to the right. He is the Ayatollah of the conservative movement and his editorials — the venerable Review & Outlook column (or Rando as it's termed at the Journal) — its Holy Grail.
How influential has Bartley been? Well, let's put it this way. His first great crusade was against arms control, especially the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. You might have noticed that President George W. Bush just said he's scrapping that treaty in order to build an anti-missile system.
Or take the crusade Bartley started in the late 1970s in favor of supply-side economics. It became the mantra of the Reagan administration and reverberates today in the Republicans' almost mystic belief in tax cuts.
And then there was Bartley's almost daily drumbeat of editorials — personal, incessant, even vicious (and some would say wacky) pummeling Bill and Hillary Clinton over what at first appeared to be a hard-to-follow, minor land deal gone bad called Whitewater.
Which brings us to Gigot. Will he bring a kinder and gentler tone to the Journal editorials as some have suggested? No one doubts his conservative credentials. No one believes he will make a dramatic break with what Bartley has created. But Bartley was sui generis and the question is just what difference will Gigot make over a period of time. In fact, some Journal news-side reporters said they were concerned that by doing this article I would be placing too much pressure on Gigot to demonstrate that he is going to keep faith with Bartley.
"Gigot, though very conservative, is a rigorous reporter whose analytic style is much more judicious than Bartley's, which is to shoot first and ask questions later, or possibly not ask them at all," wrote Timothy Noah, a former Journal staffer who now writes for Slate. Noah's evidence: Gigot didn't favor the ascendancy of super conservative brat Tom DeLay to become the next House majority leader.
Gigot's former partner on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, Mark Shields, put it this way: "Paul's an unflinching card-carrying conservative and, in the years I've known him, that guard never came down. But there was no malice there." Which, of course, suggests that Bartley did show malice.
The conservative columnist Robert Novak says that Gigot might
not be the bare-knuckle brawler that Bartley proved to be when
going after the Clintons, but he expected that Gigot would put
out a page as lively and vital as Bartley's.
"Gigot's great quality as a columnist was as a reporter. You learned things in his column. He worked his sources. You'll see an even greater quotient of reporting now in the editorial pages," said Novak.
To this, and all other speculation as to how he will "change" the Journal's editorial page, Gigot just gently laughs. "I'm not here to change the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal," Gigot said at the makeshift midtown Manhattan office in which his staff is now working, having had to abandon their World Financial Center offices adjacent to ground zero after September 11.
"Look, Bob Bartley and I do share the same values. I've
been writing editorials for the page for some time and my views
are quite comfortable with the page."
Peter R. Kann, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and chairman and ceo of Dow Jones & Company, agrees. "There is a contention going around that Paul Gigot is going to be Bush 1 to Reagan. Not so. There's nothing to that. Sure, they are different individuals who have different styles. But I don't believe you will see a change in the substance of the editorial page."
Gigot speaks softly, his manner easygoing and his laugh quick and full-throated. He's forty-six, taller than he appears on television (he's 6'1" and is looking for a regular basketball game in New York City) and very much the friendly midwesterner from Wisconsin.
One Gigot observer says there are really three different Gigots: the reasonable, analytical television personality that people saw on the NewsHour, the moderate conservative who wrote a well-reported, Pulitzer Prize-winning column which often surprised readers by the not-so-conservative positions it took. And the editorial writer who fit right in with Bartley's page, writing editorials blasting Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton's former law partner who was associate attorney general, and even one editorial on Vincent Foster, the White House counsel who committed suicide.
"There's only one Gigot," he says. "Too much of that has to do with people's perceptions."
Bartley retains the title of editor of the Journal until he officially retires at the end of the year. (The news side has always been run by the managing editor, currently Paul E. Steiger). Gigot's title is editorial page editor. He reports to Bartley who, along with Steiger, reports to publisher Kann. But that is for purposes of an orderly transition. Bartley, who writes a column himself, comes into the office only once or twice a week. He will occasionally write an editorial. But Gigot is running the page day to day.
"The philosophy of the page has always been free market and free men," Bartley said. "I was comfortable with that and Paul is comfortable with that. I don't see any radical change. Oh, on some social issues maybe. Paul is Catholic. But the change will be very subtle."
In fact, Gigot's approach to abortion is not unlike those of Catholic politicians such as former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and that liberal icon Mario Cuomo. He does not believe he should impose his personal view on the editorial page. The page is not against first-trimester abortions but opposes the so-called partial-birth abortion procedure. The page also cautiously supports stem-cell research, and is slightly more open to it than President Bush, and Gigot says he will not change those positions.
Bartley does say that Gigot has a more direct management style. Bartley was famous for never having formal editorial board meetings. Writers would gather informally around deputy editor Daniel Henninger's office and decide who would write what. It was very collegial and worked at least partly because everybody on the staff came from about the same philosophical position. Gigot, at the outset at least, is more prone to say specifically what he wants in an editorial.
Bartley does note that Gigot has made internal changes on the page. Henninger, who was in daily charge of the Review & Outlook column under Bartley and who many thought would be the next editor, retains the title of deputy but is now writing a weekly column and has new corporate responsibilities. Melanie Kirkpatrick is the associate editor with daily responsibility for the Rando column. And John Fund, one of the page's most acerbic and politically partisan writers, has taken a leave of absence to write a book. Those are just the type of staff changes — moving out the old guard — you would want to make if you planned to shape the page to your own sensibilities.
Bartley doesn't flinch from charges that his page was often over the top. He glories in it. He acknowledges that once or twice he received notes from the publisher indicating the page might have gone too far. But colleagues say he never, ever tempered the page's sharp voice. He always pushed his writers to be even sharper, more pointed, even more personal. The goal, he says, is to be read, to be interesting, to be provocative.
Some critics, most notably Trudy Lieberman in CJR (July/August 1996), say Bartley went further than provocative. His editorial page showed "a consistent pattern of incorrect facts, ignored or incomplete facts, missing facts, uncorroborated facts," she wrote. Bartley and Gigot both dispute the contention. [Lieberman, who has contributed to CJR for nine years, points out that the article was carefully fact-checked twice — once before and once after publication — and that it held up fine.*] Gigot says he rechecked Lieberman's charges concerning editorials he wrote and found them not accurate. Gigot acknowledges that many charge that Bartley was too quick on the trigger, that he didn't always wait to ask the questions before he shot.
"And he was probably right when he shot," says Gigot.
"The editorial page has to be solid and it's the editor's job to make certain it is," said Gigot. "And I am determined that we make current corrections when we are wrong, as we have been doing."
Gigot and Bartley also see nothing wrong with setting the agenda for the Republican party. Bartley did it through the sheer force of his intellect, supply-side economics being the best example. (Even if many mainstream economists believe that supply-side is, well, voodoo economics.)
Gigot, given his years in Washington as an insider, seems more interested in the hurly-burly of Washington politics. During our conversation he seemed most agitated by the charge that the page has become a branch of the Republican party.
"I resent it enormously when it's projected on us that we
are part of the Republican orthodoxy, that we follow a party line,"
he said. "Someone said the White House issued the attack
orders on Senate Democratic majority leader Tom Daschle and The
Wall Street Journal fell in line. Well, heck, they listen to us.
I wrote that 'President Daschle' edit three weeks before the White
House issued the attack order on Daschle. The whole point of the
editorial was that: 'He's eating your lunch, get with it. You're
dealing with a formidable adversary here and you think you can
play patty-cake bi-partisan politics with him and he's stealing
your clothes.' Finally they came around to saying 'I guess that's
right.'''
So is there a difference between
Bartley's page and Gigot's? My reading is that there is — but
it is subtle, a difference in tone. The best example is the manner
in which Gigot has handled the Enron scandal.
If the scandal had broken when the Democrats were in power and the friendships that existed between Enron and the Bush White House had been between Enron and the Clinton White House, I'm certain Bartley would have worked himself into a white froth calling for a second impeachment. But Gigot's page, while noting that a lot was rotten, seemed to talk around the subject for weeks before writing a definitive editorial on Friday, January 18.
"Look, Enron is not a Republican scandal," said Gigot, reacting to my charge. "Granted there is more of a Republican cast, a Bush cast, than others."
But just imagine what Bartley would have said if Clinton had tried to deflect attention from his culpability by claiming that the first President Bush had been involved with it as well — as the current Bush did by saying Enron money had been contributed to former Governor Ann Richards of Texas.
"That was Bush's one misstep," says Gigot. "But it was a minor thing."
But why did it take the Journal until January 18 to have a definitive editorial on Enron? Gigot himself wrote it, saying that Enron's managers had violated their public trust and deserved to be placed in public stocks. "I guess I felt we haven't had the complete facts about what was happening," said Gigot.
That, itself, is a revealing statement. It's in Gigot's nature, his background and training, to go with the facts — first. I suspect that if there is going to be a difference between his approach and Bartley's it is that Gigot will be more cautious, less aggressive, and will follow the facts. As Gigot said about his column: "The best commentary is fact-based."
But I was puzzled by a particularly acerbic Rando on the Enron situation earlier that week, on Monday January 14: The headline was "Another Whitewater? Yippee!!" It began by pointing out that the "the misstatement of Enron earnings goes back to 1997, and whatever regulatory depredations contributed to its stock run-up took place under a previous, Democratic administration." The editorial then proceeded to describe what would have to be revealed if Enron were to be a political scandal on a par with Whitewater.
"Laura Bush will launch a campaign suggesting that anyone
raising questions about Enron is a part of a 'vast pinko conspiracy,'"
read the editorial. "The first year's pattern of behavior
will persist, however, through a whole series of questionable
Presidential activities involving campaign fund-raising, women,
lies and political assaults on anyone raising issues of Presidential
responsibility."
And it concluded by saying: "the ultimate lesson may turn out to be that Enron was able to play fast and loose in a financial boom and Clintonian moral climate, and was called to account in a recession when the moral climate had turned Ashcroftian."
Now that's over the top. And, lo and behold, Gigot let it slip that the author of that editorial was none other than Bartley himself.
"We were just sitting around talking the other day and he mentioned he was thinking of a column along those lines but had something else he wanted to write about and I suggested he do it as an editorial," said Gigot.
Gigot finally formulated his Rando on Enron the next day after a long session with his board on all the ins and outs of the scandal. That editorial said:
"Above all, this looks like a case of corporate deceit. Whether or not Enron's actions violated any laws, they certainly violated the public trust essential for free markets to work. For that alone its managers deserve the public stocks."
Gigot pointedly praised the Bush administration for showing the right instincts by not helping Enron out of its predicament, but then added: "A Republican Administration, with its alleged sympathies for markets, has a special burden to police capitalists who abuse their freedom."
The difference between the Monday and Friday Randos indicate what the difference between the Bartley years and the Gigot years might be.
Admittedly, that is a reading of the tea leaves. Gigot clearly appreciates and understands what has been right about Bartley's pages: their liveliness, their intellectual muscle, their ability to carry on a direct conversation with their readers. And he's too politic to say whether he understands what was wrong with the pages, especially their excesses and tendency at times not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good opinion. He clearly prided himself on writing a column that was well-reported and often enough took unexpected positions, such as when he praised Al Gore last summer, opposed the "immigration-bashing Proposition 187" in California when it was Republican party orthodoxy, or battled "congressional tormentor" John Dingell.
"You do want to surprise people, you do want to sometimes find the hole in the doughnut," said Gigot. "And I do view myself as a reporter. That's how I got started."
No matter how you feel about Bartley, it is clear that Gigot has a large act to follow. His page will be a work in progress. Certainly the underlying conservative approach, the free markets/free men approach, will not change. But he is not Bartley and no doubt the tone and approach will change over time. For now, readers of the page are still waiting for Gigot.
* Added after publication of print version.
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