THE SCRAPBOOK doesn't pretend to understand newsroom politics at the New York Times but dimly recalls a tradition at the paper of record of pretending that its reporters, as a matter of policy, should stay above the fray -- should not appear as partisan hacks on television, not cheerlead for their favorite Democratic politicians, and above all not make such a partisan spectacle of themselves as to confirm Reed Irvine's deepest suspicions of liberal bias. Apparently that stuffy old-school thinking has gone by the boards.
Last week's edition of Time featured a profile of Ted Kennedy written by Adam Clymer, the Times's veteran Capitol Hill reporter. The profile, an excerpt from Clymer's forthcoming biography of Kennedy, is breathtaking in its adulation of the Massachusetts senator. Clymer begins with a startling bit of moral equivalence, nothing that Kennedy's senatorial achievements are responsible for "changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne." The issue, one would think, is not who remembers her name, but what Kennedy did. Nonetheless, Clymer laments that Kennedy's "failures outside the Senate have drawn more public attention than his successes inside it."
It gets better. Clymer asserts, with no evidence, that "the nation's health is still vastly better" thanks to Kennedy, and that he "made elections cleaner with the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974." Clymer also praises Kennedy for having blocked Robert Bork's Supreme Court confirmation; Kennedy's vile demagoguery on that occasion goes unremarked. Clymer closes by proclaiming Kennedy not just "the leading Senator of his time" but also "one of the greats in the history of this singular institution."
Kennedy should just hire Clymer and make an honest staff assistant out of him.