JULY 27, 2005

I remember falling in love with April Ryan, soul sister of American Urban Radio Networks, after seeing her bite into McClellan like a turkey leg on C-SPAN a year or so ago. April has both great admirers and detractors -- she is, like Helen Thomas, a tenacious and loud truth alarm, even if she rarely makes any headway.

When the rest of the White House was evacuated because a misguided Cessna flew into its airspace a while back, there had been no alarm in the Basement to evacuate the journalists. It was April Ryan who ran through the halls yelling for everyone to get out. It left several members of the press corps with a hinky feeling that the White House would not grieve overmuch if they were blown up.

April Ryan has an uncanny talent for finding the only substantial word in McClellan's otherwise calorie-free statements. I saw her zero in on the word "young," which she felt was being set up, in advance, as a wedge against upcoming information on John Roberts:

RYAN: Scott, why is it that you continue to cushion John Roberts' work during the Reagan administration ... You continue to say, he was "young." You've used those words consecutively for a couple of days. Are you aware of something that is getting ready to come out in the 65,000 documents from the Reagan era that will make this administration say, well, that was when he was young and he has now changed his mind, because there's a major --

McCLELLAN: OK, let me address that -- let me address that very quickly: No. [Laughter.]

RYAN: Well, why do you continue to preface, he was young, then? Why do you continue to say that, because you lead us to believe that --

McCLELLAN: Because I'm stating a fact.

RYAN: Don't be smart about it. I'm looking for a serious answer.

McCLELLAN: Ken, go ahead.

I overheard another journalist joking with Ryan after this particular spat, giving her some good-natured advice. "You got the question right, but you can't just attack it like that. I mean, come on, you can't just come out and say, So Scott, when did you stop beating your wife?"

This was one of various independent confirmations of an impression I'd had about the way questions are asked in the Briefing Room. There is a tiny pinhole of opportunity, which is the holy grail for the press corps. There is a wild, pervasive hope if a question can be built stealthily enough, there is a sliver of a chance that Scott will say something unexpected. It has become the operative carnival dart-game ... hit the microscopic nerve, win a prize. It seems that most of the corps regulars have won this jackpot once or twice and have been chasing that elusive high ever since, at the expense of asking harder and/or more bluntly direct questions, or asking them in a more aggressively unified way.

JULY 28, 2005

On the 28th, the room felt surly and resentful.

Ken Herman of Cox News serves as a kind of token hipster class clown. He's an over-tan, charismatic swinging-dick sort, partial to seersucker, with a high, reedy voice and a propensity for quotable wisecracks. He is the only guy in the corps you could imagine working for National Lampoon, or writing things in bleach on a golf course in the dead of night. His sass is indiscernible in his straight reportage, but in the room, he delivers the occasional futile, self-sacrificial joke-question that pokes at the collective boil of frustration and dismay forming over the room.

Herman offered this gem of insouciance, on my penultimate day:

HERMAN: Scott, last night on the "Tonight Show," Jay Leno, who apparently is subbing for Johnny, displayed a video of the president at the Capitol yesterday. In that video, the president walking away from the press lifts his hand and raises a finger. Mr. Leno interpreted it as, shall we say, a finger of hostility. Each of our fingers has a special purpose and meaning in life. [Laughter.] Can you tell us what finger it was he held up?

McCLELLAN: Ken, I'm not even going to dignify that with much of a response...

HERMAN: Well, it was not a finger of hostility?

McCLELLAN: Ken, I was there with him, and I'm just not going to -- I'm not going to dignify that with a response....

It seemed to me that Herman's unconscious role in the dysfunctional family of the White House press corps was to restore morale, like the youngest son whose unspoken duty is to take emotional responsibility for Mom at the expense of his own progress. Say what you like about the relevance of Herman's question, it loosened the Darth Vader stranglehold from the collective neck for a minute.

The one reporter who seems immune to that stranglehold is Helen Thomas. Because of her outspokenness, she is often referred to as a "gadfly" these days. "I'm in the deep freeze," she said in reference to her current credibility status. "It doesn't matter. I've been in the freeze before."

A working journalist for 62 years, Ms. Thomas has sat in front of every president since John F. Kennedy. She is the only member of the press corps who has the power and freedom to say what she believes about the bigger picture, on the record. Years have not diminished her laser sharpness. Thomas is so candid, direct and honest that listening to her is as jarringly refreshing as sitting under a cold waterfall, after a few days in the corps.

"Reporters have not done their job," Thomas said. "They've given [Bush] a free pass and they've let the people down. They haven't been watchdogs, but lapdogs.

"The press officer has to wear two hats. True, he speaks for the president ... [But] he also, through the press, has to give the truth back to the American people. [The press] is the transmission.

"You have to pile on these people," Thomas said. It had to be the whole press corps, she said, or questions would be dismissed as coming from "an isolated enfant terrible."

"McClellan was on the ropes. [July 11] was the one time finally, finally, the press corps came alive ... If the reporters stick to the subject ... that will worry the White House that they're not getting their message across and they have to go and change it in some way, and maybe even tell the truth sometimes.

"If [reporters] don't ask the questions, no one else can, or will. We are the last line of defense. We're the only forum, the only institution in our democratic society that can question the president. We have that privilege ... The press has a duty to find out the truth. No one else can question him ... If we fall down on the job, the people suffer. [The Bush administration] doesn't think the people have a right to know, but we know they do. You can't have a democracy without an informed people.

"How will we know all the things that are done secretly in our name if we don't try to find out? The American people cannot fly blind, as they have now in this war ... We went to war under extremely false pretenses, and nothing can justify that.

"Every American is responsible for what this president does."

Thomas, on one of the more cacophonous days in the briefing room, was the only reporter who brought up Karl Rove. Her question was immediately slapped away by McClellan.

"Why'd you do that?" I asked her on the way out, because it was obvious at that point that Scott was a tomb on the subject, and it was futile.

"To let him know the question wasn't going away," she said.

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