What the heck's going on? Bob Woodward - the Bob Woodward - is now making news instead of breaking it.
The Washington Post's bigfoot reporter has made a cameo appearance as The Deposed in the ever-expanding Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame-Bob Novak-Scooter Libby-Judith Miller Follies written, directed and prosecuted by Pat Fitzgerald.
Ziegfield never had such a cast, and now it includes an icon of American journalism. Didn't anybody read "All the President's Men"? Woodward is supposed to be the Star Reporter, remember, not some bit player who's just subpoena-bait. How the mighty have fallen! These days, Washington reporters seem to spend more time under oath than deadline pressure.
The man who helped put Deep Throat at the center of a Pulitzer Prize-winning, president-resigning, generation-shaping mystery could do no better this time than some Shallow Throat who gave him a tip he didn't seem to realize was a tip for the longest time.
It seems Shallow Throat was just one more among the Washington throng who fingered Valerie Plame, the most overt covert agent in the history of spookdom.
Apparently anybody who was, knew, or wanted to be anybody in D.C. knew that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. The real mystery has become who in Washington didn't know she worked for the CIA. Her name might as well have been up in lights: VALERIE PLAME, SECRET AGENT! As for hubby, Joseph C. Wilson IV, the minor ex-ambassador who started this whole rumpus, he's proven to be the most unreliable source on at least two continents.
Back at the oh-so-serious, award-winning Washington Post, poor Woodward seems to have been the last newsman in the country to realize that Wilson's missus was news. Now he's had to tell a grand jury (1) who told him Plame's name and job title, and (2) when. The answers: (1) Not Scooter Libby, and (2) way back in mid-June 2003.
That's about a month before Bob Novak publicly outed Plame in his column, and even before Libby, former chief of staff to the vice president and designated fall guy, tipped off Miller, former ace reporter for the New York Times who's now bucking for martyrdom.
Woodward clearly hadn't read Prosecutor Fitzgerald's script.
The prosecutor told everybody that Libby was the first White House official to give this info to a reporter when he outed Plame to ... one forgets. Miller? Novak? Carl Bernstein? Walter Winchell? It's so hard to keep up.
Hey, it's all good copy, as they used to say in newsrooms circa the 1930s. Let's hope no other members of the press have to go to jail but, if they do, that they'll try to enjoy it. It can be done.
Thank you, Wilson Quarterly, which has a sense of humor despite being published by a think tank, for resurrecting the name of Marie Torre from the 1950s. She was a columnist for the old New York Herald Tribune, which made up in style whatever it lacked in depth. Torre got her fortnight of fame by defying a judge's order to reveal who had dished some dirt on the legendary-in-her-own-time Judy Garland, who was always great copy, whether comic or tragic.
Torre would spend 10 days in jail but much longer in the limelight, drinking it all in. ("Social invitations doubled. My mail tripled. Jackie Gleason sent me a luscious chocolate cake with a file in it.") Now there was a lady who knew how to enjoy being the big story. So what do we get these days? Miller, Miss Deadly Earnest herself.
All of which leads one to suspect that the American sense of humor, if it isn't extinct, is very much an endangered species. The Miller story needed a chocolate cake with a file in it.
Paul Greenberg is the editorial page editor and Kane Webb the assistant editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Greenberg's column appears routinely in The Bee on Wednesdays and occasionally on other days. His e-mail address is paul_greenberg@adg.ardemgaz.com.
