Dial R For Reality

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of “The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964,” lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

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Henry Kissinger lives. So do Alexander Haig, James Baker, Hamilton Jordan, John Sununu, John Podesta and Leon Panetta. Not only that, but five will get you ten that many a reporter in Washington or on the campaign trail know how to get one or more of them on the phone.

So you’d think that right after Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran that ad about the phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m., one of those reporters would have called one of those guys and asked: Has this ever happened? If so, how often? When it does, what does the president do? Has one of them ever had to make a split-second decision to launch planes, ships or troops? Did any of those phone calls ever alert a president to an imminent threat to America or Americans?
   
After all, now that the issue of whether the person answering that phone will be “tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world” has been raised, voters might want to know whether it reflects anything that happens in the real world.

Finally, last Sunday, more than two weeks after the ad first appeared, the Washington Post ran a page one story by Michael Abramowitz, who did call some of those above-named former officials and who provided answers to those questions.
   
The key answers were: Yes, the president sometimes gets middle-of-the-night phone calls, but very rarely, and in “none of these cases were presidents asked to make major decisions.”
   
The Clinton ad, then, while clever and politically effective, is something of a fake.
   
There is nothing unusual about political advertising with a casual attitude toward the truth. But one of the responsibilities of political journalism is to call attention to that casualness when it occurs. It shouldn’t take two weeks to fulfill that responsibility.
   
Not that there was any shortage of analysis and commentary about the ad, simply called “Children” on the Clinton campaign Web site. Indeed, it was parsed six ways from Sunday. It was condemned by some, praised as devilishly clever by others, evaluated for its impact on young mothers and assailed (unconvincingly) as racist.
   
But until last Sunday, nobody asked – and nobody seems to have picked up on the Post story since – whether it described real life. Whether, in short, it was true.
   
Raising another question: Does campaign coverage – indeed, do campaigns – reflect anything happening in the real world?
   
Maybe not. As it turns out, one need not even place a call to any of those eminent gentlemen. Former presidents, their senior officials and a few outside observers have filled several books about the Nixon, Ford, Clinton, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and an (admittedly rushed) perusal of them indicates the number of times in the past 40 years that a president was awakened in the wee small hours of the morning with news of impending peril to America or Americans: Zero.
   
The first President Bush did get a call at 3:30 from Baker, his secretary of state, to report the happy news that Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega had lost the Nicaraguan election in 1990. He was also awakened (though apparently it was before midnight) to get word of the threatened coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Neither event threatened anybody asleep in the United States.
   
Bill Clinton made and received late night phone calls, one of them to tell him about the latest wrinkle in the case of Elian Gonzales, the Cuban boy who was the center of an international custody squabble. Ronald Reagan’s aides were reluctant to awake him from his slumbers day or night, but they made an exception the night U.S. forces accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane.
   
Even Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 4 a.m. phone call to Jimmy Carter on Nov. 4, 1979, to tell him about the Americans taken hostage in Iran was not a warning of impending peril; the deed had been done. Come to think of it, peril is not likely to arise at that hour. The most dangerous part of the world these days lies in the area roughly from Cairo eastward to Lahore. When it’s 3 a.m. in Washington, it’s between 9 in the morning and noon in those precincts, hardly the ideal time for coups d’états or invasions.
   
It isn’t that nothing ever happened at 3 in the morning. It was 3:10 a.m. in Washington when Khmer Rouge Cambodian forces seized the container ship SS Mayaguez and snatched its crew on May 12, 1975. The Pentagon’s National Military Command Center found out two hours later.
   
And President Gerald Ford? He was informed by his national security chief, Brent Scowcroft, at their regular morning briefing. There was no hurry. It wasn’t as though Ford was going to be able to do anything intelligent in his drowsiness at a quarter after five. He called a meeting of his top advisers for noon.
   
Which, it seems, is what presidents do when they get one of those wee hours phone calls. It’s what Carter did when he heard about the hostages. At first, he and his advisers weren’t that worried, assuming that the crisis could be resolved quickly through diplomacy. Besides, all by himself in a White House bedroom, what else could he do but call a meeting for later in the day?
   
When the Yom Kippur war broke out on Oct. 6, 1973, President Richard Nixon was at his vacation digs in Key Biscayne, Fla. He came back to Washington later that day, but in no rush. Not only has a president, so far as we know, never given orders to launch some kind of military attack at 3 a.m., none has even summoned his senior aides to an immediate wee hours meeting. Presidents seem to know that they get better advice after their advisers have had at least one cup of coffee.

Even when presidents do have to make operational decisions in the middle of the night, they don’t do it alone. In September of 1970, when Israeli officials wanted Nixon to let them attack Syrian forces in Jordan, Haig (according to his memoir, “Inner Circle”) woke Kissinger up at 5:15 a.m.. Kissinger called Nixon, who said he would call him back. The three men conferred by phone in the early hours, between Nixon bowling a few rounds in the White House bowling alley, and together decided whether to approve Israeli air strikes (yes) and ground attacks (no).
   
OK, if the call from the duty officer in the Situation Room told the president that armed aircraft from a hostile power were on their way to the United States, the president would say “shoot them down.” But any president would do that, even one minimally “tested and ready to lead.” Hillary Clinton would, and so would Barack Obama, John McCain or your Uncle Louie. Even in that case, though, a responsible president would not – at 3 a.m., alone – order a counter-attack. The president might know that the planes came from Lower Slobovia, but no one could know whether they had been dispatched by the government there or by a loony rogue general. Any decision to retaliate could await the clear light of the morning, and the considered judgment of diplomats, generals, and – yes – political consultants.
   
In the real world, then, the more important question for voters might be not how often the president had been tested, but the names of the folks he or she has chosen to be in the room giving advice later in the day when the well-rested and reasonably-fed advisers get together to figure out what to do.
   
Politically, though, this might not have been as effective an ad for Clinton. It turns out that most of Obama’s foreign policy advisers served in Bill Clinton’s administration. The advice given to President Obama would probably be strikingly similar to the advice given to President Hillary Clinton. So would be the steps that either of them would take as president.

The 3-in-the-morning ad, on the other hand, did seem to be politically effective, perhaps because it made a reasonable political point. Its assertion that people would want the president answering that phone to be “someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military” is true enough. And it is at least arguable that in both her public and private lives, Hillary Clinton has been “tested” more than Obama.
   
That’s what the coverage of the commercial was all about – its effectiveness, its strategic implications, how it worked within the context of the campaign. All well and good. There should be such coverage. There should be a lot of it.
   
But isn’t it striking that for days no one seems to have thought of doing the reporting and research that would show that the ad is also fiction? That presidents do not actually do anything on those rare occasions when their phone rings in the middle of the night?
   
To be sure, the Obama campaign could have made that argument. Instead, it stayed stuck in its rut of repeating that Obama showed better judgment than Clinton on the Iraq question five years ago. It didn’t think of pointing out that Clinton’s ad was phony, an argument that could reinforce public concerns about her candor.

But that doesn’t entirely explain why so few reporters decided on their own to look into the commercial’s relationship, if any, to reality. Perhaps inside the campaign bubble, reality doesn’t matter.