The Goaded Fight Back

By Thomas Griffith

It was a quiet Sunday as the picadors at all three networks prepared to implant their banderillas in the hides of their talk-show guests. NBC's Meet the Press had drawn the best bull, the one most likely to be goaded into making a Monday headline. This was the controversial Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the U.N.

On the Meet the Press set, which looks like a courtroom lighted by Wurlitzer, the guest faces four questioners arrayed behind a judge's bench. That four on one, according to Moderator Bill Monroe, gives the lone guest the sympathy vote, but Kirkpatrick is not one to ask for sympathy. A former college professor, she has the manner of someone used to feeling intellectually superior to those she talks to, and probably must nudge herself not to talk that way to fellow diplomats or journalists.

The Israelis had just invaded Lebanon; the goading headline-seeking question to ask the Ambassador was whether the Israelis had "overreacted" to the attempted murder of their Ambassador in London. Kirkpatrick diplomatically ducked. The Israeli invasion, she said, was part of "an ongoing cycle of violence" in the Middle East. The questioner was dissatisfied: "Again, have they overreacted? Are they going too far?" Even Moderator Monroe, a forceful but fair questioner, persisted in speaking about overreactions. At last Kirkpatrick replied: "I just don't know that it's very useful even to try to characterize it as over or under or just right. I don't know what the unit of measurement would be, frankly, Mr. Monroe." Score one for the Ambassador.

Cross-examination is interrupted for a digression from the sponsor.

Over at ABC, on the David Brinkley show, the European economic conference had ended with a bland communique papering over disagreements. But ABC's guest, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, bubbled: "I would say that we've had a very good session. I think we accomplished everything that we wanted." When challenged about the communique's evasions, Regan was not to be drawn. Like most businessmen who go into government service, Regan tends to concede nothing and doggedly repeats his sales pitch. Not very rewarding.

When it comes to Sunday hand-to-hand combat, Secretary of State Al Haig does better. He was Brinkley's guest the following week. Haig has learned to evade by being, if Noah Webster will allow the word, circumloquacious. "I'm sometimes very good," he acknowledged, at ducking questions. Four times in 15 minutes he answered, "It's too early to say"--a damp response in show-biz terms, but then it often is too early to say. "Aren't you really pleased," asked George F. Will, the gung-ho conservative, at the defeat of two Soviet clients, Syria and the P.L.O.? Haig has learned to listen carefully for imbedded assumptions in questions he is asked. Haig: "No one is pleased when circumstances involve the loss of lives, and innocent lives." The final question concerned Kirkpatrick, who seems to think that her presidential ties grant her freer speech. The question to Haig was blunt: "Why is she still in the Administration?" Haig ho-ho-hoed his way out of that one, with some words about those "personal peccadilloes that tantalize you gentlemen so much."

We return you now to NBC's Meet the Press, and to how Kirkpatrick argued her right to be heard. She was asked about the embarrassing U.N. session when she voted against a cease-fire in the Falklands only to have to announce, after changed instructions arrived too late from Haig, that the U.S. wished it had abstained. The questions poured in: "Do you and Al Haig talk to each other?" "Could you be candid about this feud?" "Is there bad chemistry between you two?"

In Kirkpatrick the need to be diplomatic wars with her impulse to be candid. Candor won out, with a rebuke to her questioners and the press that was all the more effective for not being heated: "I don't think one could have a good government in which everyone agreed with everybody about everything ... the problem occurs when disagreements about policy leak into the press as disagreements among people... we have a kind of movie-magazine approach to the discussion of policy differences." She seemed to be saying that the press, in its superficial way, was missing the real story: policy differences between her and Haig are real and deep. "Furthermore, if I may say so, the President expects us to work together." Though goading questions can be unfair, sometimes they really illumine a debate.

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