Word: stockman
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President Reagan was making his way out of the White House press room after concluding his fifth news conference last Tuesday when CBS White House Correspondent Lesley Stahl held up a copy of the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly (circ. 335,800). David Stockman, Director of the President's Office of Management and Budget, was on the cover. Had the President, asked Stahl, seen Stockman's critique of his economic program in the magazine? The President, taken aback, replied that he would ask Stockman what he had said. He did. And the furor that followed (yeeNATION)provided...
Ironically titled "The Education of David Stockman," the 24-page Atlantic article by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor William Greider, 45, was a painstaking, often sympathetic portrait of a tenacious ideologue disillusioned by the hard realities of politics, both inside the Oval Office and on Capitol Hill. Stockman's candidly pessimistic observations were made during 18 interviews between December 1980 and August 1981. Stockman's first reaction to the firestorm of criticism that greeted the Greider story was a flat denial-not of the views he is quoted as expressing, but of Greider's right to quote...
Greider, a respected 13-year veteran of the Post and a friend of Stockman's for about four years, said he had won Stockman's cooperation by agreeing in advance that the interviews would not be published in the newspaper. Instead, a long magazine story would be produced several months later. Post Managing Editor Howard Simons, who clears all freelance work by his staff, approved the project. Says Greider: "Nobody will talk with such consistency and intimacy for a daily newspaper...
...ground rules are not uncommon in Washington. Reporters are always eager to find out what the Government is really up to. Public officials are often just as eager to feed the press their side of things, either to promote a pet project or ensure their place in history. Indeed, Stockman had granted similar briefings to several other journalists. One danger in these arrangements is that reporters might repay such helpful sources with flattering coverage. Another is that journalists might find themselves reporting public statements that are at odds with what they have been told in private...
...Post's case, both Greider and Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee say that the background sessions with Stockman helped guide the newspaper's coverage of Reagan's economic program. Says Greider: "If you went back you would see a lot of Post stories reflecting my conversations with Stockman." To bolster this claim, an article in last Friday's Post by Robert G. Kaiser listed four stories that had included information supplied by Stockman. In two of them, it was attributed to him; hi the others, it was attributed to a White House official. Bradlee said the Post...