THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701190015
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Margaret Edds
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: 78 lines
We could have told them.
Any Virginian with an ounce of memory would have known what to do with a tape of a politician making a cellular telephone call.
Or at least what not to do with it.
The ``not'' would include leaking it to the press. Unless, of course, you believe the information therein is so vital to the future of the country that it's worth risking your neck to make it public.
The reason for this, as is emblazoned in Sen. Chuck Robb's memory, is simple: Disseminating the contents of an illegally recorded telephone call turns out to be illegal as well. No matter how much you expect the conversation to make mincemeat of your political foe, you can be sure that you'll wind up in the chopper with him.
That's why Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who was given a tape of House Speaker Newt Gingrich discussing his ethics problems via cell phone, now appears to be in as much hot water as Gingrich over the affair. The FBI is investigating how the tape wound up in the hands of The New York Times, and McDermott has recused himself from the House Ethics Committee's probe of Gingrich.
For Virginians, the convoluted mess is an exercise in deja vu.
Time was when the nation could turn to the commonwealth for advice on balanced budgets, weapons systems and the price of tobacco. But in the spring and summer of 1991, the state's body politic got a crash course in another field of expertise - electronic eavesdropping.
In case you were vacationing in Siberia back then, the episode was one of many twists in the long-and-tortured love-hate (mostly hate) relationship of Robb and former Gov. Doug Wilder.
Faced with damning media exposure about his personal life, Robb chose to blame Wilder for fueling the frenzy. As supposed evidence of Wilder's untrustworthiness, the contents of a secretly recorded car telephone conversation between Wilder and Chesapeake developer Dan Hoffler mysteriously turned up in The Washington Post and the Roanoke Times.
In the conversation, held the year before Wilder's 1989 run for governor, Wilder was quoted as saying that Robb was ``finished'' because of revelations about his social life. As a result, ``I don't want his endorsement, don't need his endorsement,'' Wilder said.
Aides involved in leaking the tape, which had sat around Robb's office for more than two years, apparently believed that its content would critically wound Wilder, who had reveled in Robb's endorsement when he received it the year after the conversation.
What happened instead was that the aides lost their jobs and were forced to plead guilty to charges stemming from the tape's dissemination. Robb himself came perilously close to being indicted.
The upshot, then as now, was that no one came off well. Public cynicism grew, both over the lengths to which politicians will go to discredit one another and over the hypocrisy of public figures who say one thing in public, another in private.
Gingrich's transgression in that vein would seem to be several notches beyond Wilder's. For one thing, Wilder had never left much doubt about his true feelings toward Robb, even though the two usually wound up conveniently entwined at election time.
Gingrich, in contrast, was overheard plotting strategy for a Republican response to ethics charges against him. He had pledged the Ethics Committee not to mount a counterattack.
It can be argued that a leak from Representative McDermott's office, if proved, isn't quite so premeditated as the sudden release of a tape that had been in Robb's office for more than two years.
Even so, those who play with fire accept the risk of getting burned. And politicians who write laws shouldn't act as if they're above them. Telephone conversations are, by law, supposed to be private.
If McDermott leaked the tape, and it has yet to be proved that he did, he took a calculated risk that should cost him his office. If Gingrich turns out to have violated the terms of his agreement, he should follow.
Meanwhile, the larger lesson for every public figure is to neither say, write nor record in private what you wouldn't like to see in print the next day.
If that message could penetrate every cranium in Washington, it would be the greatest human advance since, say, cell phones replaced rotaries. MEMO: Ms. Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.