THE ADVOCATE 611
VOL. 79 PART 4 JULY 2021
estate, regulatory and similar matters, but a lot is also spent on fighting for
constitutional freedoms and against those who would limit them. Mr.
McCraw has been the NYT’s deputy general counsel since 2002 and is also
a vice-president. He was previously deputy general counsel for the tabloid
New York Daily News, a rather different beast. In his book, Mr. McCraw tells
interesting stories about the legal and constitutional interactions of the NYT
with the courts, governments and prominent individuals, particularly the
Bush II and Obama administrations, and through the first part of Trump’s
misrule. We may be sure he is not telling everything, but there is some good
stuff.
Mr. McCraw covers battles with Trump and his hench-creatures,5 before
and after he took office; attempts to omit the mainstream press from public
events; Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails; doublespeak in all its forms—“fake news”,
“lie”, etc.; struggles with the alphabet soup of government agencies; leaks
generally, and WikiLeaks specifically; real government secrets, espionage
and such; authoritarian, anti-democratic demagogues; foreign reporting,
and the perils to reporters of same; use and misuse of freedom of information
legislation and requests; and your editor will be pleased that both
“Magic Alex” and Bob Dylan are mentioned. I am more of a fan of Dylan than
I am of “Magic Alex” – Ed.
Most famously, in October 2016, just before the U.S. presidential election,
the NYT published an article titled “Two Women Say Donald Trump
Touched Them Inappropriately”. Trump’s legal shills wrote, threatening a
libel action and demanding a retraction and apology. Mr. McCraw wrote the
reply. He might well have taken the classic approach to such nonsense and
replied: “F*** Off. Strong Letter to Follow.” Instead, he wrote: “The essence
of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation … Nothing in
our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump,
through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.” In
other words, that it was impossible to libel Trump. An American archetype,
he had debased his reputation to the point where it could not be debased
further. There was no further communication from Trump’s lawyer.
The Post got its moment in the sun when two of its reporters, Carl Bernstein
and Bob Woodward (with the aid of Mark Felt, a.k.a. “Deep Throat”),
relentlessly pursued the Watergate break-in starting in June 1972. Their
efforts led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974, just before his
inevitable impeachment and conviction, and the conviction of many of his
associates for political crimes. All had an unhealthy disrespect for the rule
of law. The initial stages of the investigation are covered in All the President’s
Men (1976), starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Pick your stars;
both movies are worth seeing—and at the public library.