Columnists in Jelly-Bean Land

By Thomas Griffith

Many syndicated Washington columnists respond so predictably to events that they are merchandised to newspapers as liberal or conservative voices, as if editors needed a handy guide on how to balance their opinion pages. But all columnists sometimes react in unexpectedly revealing ways. A sampler of how columns are tilting this summer:

Living with Reagan. Liberal columnists, chastened by liberal defeats and aware of Reagan's personal popularity, at first included a ritualistic reference to the President as a "nice guy" before savaging his policies, as if anxious not to seem partisan. That's how things are in Jelly-Bean Land. Now Reagan's congressional successes have brought a new note of grudging admiration. Liberal Tom Wicker finds Reagan "an able and resourceful political leader whose amiable underplaying reinforces even while it obscures his effectiveness." Right-wing columnists feel much freer in muting their enthusiasm for the President. In the territory where Rowland Evans and Robert Novak roam--and where seldom is heard a discouraging word about Senator Jesse Helms and other rightists--the atmosphere is humid with intrigues, heavy-breathing innuendoes and indirect quotes ("Important conservative Republicans in Congress, while keeping mum publicly, grumble privately that the President has lost control of his own Administration to moderate forces"). Reagan momentarily retrieved himself to Evans-Novak at Ottawa by proving "rigidly ideological as no other American President has been." Criticism might be preferable to that kind of praise.

In office, Reagan is much less dependent on the press than he used to be when campaigning (then, he often drew his facts from newspaper snippets, and found his U.N. Ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, by admiring a magazine article she wrote). Now Reagan seems to get ideas mostly when they are brought to him as problems. That leaves little place for intellectual gurus. Columnist George F. Will, who might have aspired to play such a role, now plays candid friend on the outside. This requires some gymnastic stretches--insisting that he still deplores Reagan's campaign promise to give a woman a Supreme Court seat while approving Reagan's appointment of Sandra O'Connor.

Going after Timerman. In the Reagan world of rigid attitudes but genial demeanor, public vendettas are thought to roil the atmosphere unnecessarily. The closest thing to vengeful behavior in the new Administration is the Jacobo Timerman affair. It was Timerman's eloquent description of torture under Argentine arrest that did so much to defeat Ernest Lefever, the man chosen to head the Administration's human rights policy. Thereafter, two of Reagan's journalistic supporters, Irving Kristol in the Wall Street Journal and William F. Buckley in the National Review, set out to discredit Timerman. Challenged on his facts, Buckley said he got them from Carl Gershman, counselor to U.N. Ambassador Kirkpatrick. Gershman ducked responsibility too: "It's up to the journalist if he wants to check it out." But was this hatchet job by two conservative journalists orchestrated by the Reagan people? Kristol says that he got his information from the American Jewish Committee, Israeli friends and Argentine Jews. He insists that he talked to no one in the Administration and that he hasn't "even been thanked by them." Give the White House (but not the U.N. delegation) the benefit of the doubt.

Avoiding the "Whatevers." Israel is a classic place to test columnist prejudices. Some American journalists, like some American politicians, have long been guilty of a new crime discovered by the Chinese Communists. This is to be guilty of the "whatevers"-- supporting whatever Israel does, like those Communist officials who supported whatever Mao recommended. Though Columnists Anthony Lewis and Joseph Kraft are supporters of Israel, they are not guilty of the whatevers. Lewis has continually shown his independence in interviews with Palestinian leaders. Kraft, who found Menachem Begin "insufferable in victory" after his election, believes that "as a good ally, the United States has an obligation to save him, and his country, from his worst self." Begin is making such independence fashionable, but these two columnists were there earlier, when it wasn't so easy.

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