Exclusive: Mr. Blumenthal Once Thought “Self-Serving Recourse to the Press” Was Bad.
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal gets a big smooch in today’s Hartford Courant. “Boy wonder” and “golden boy” pepper the story on Republican Linda McMahon’s expensive campaign to undermine Blumenthal’s favorable image with the public. Emphasis is on his careful cultivation of the press, traced to his internship at The Washington Post in his distant youth.
The Greenwich Democrat learned a lesson valuable about the explosive nature of press manipulation in the epic year of 1970, shortly after leaving the Nixon White House for the Marine Reserves in South Carolina. Mr. Blumenthal had been considered to head VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. There are differing accounts of why it went wrong. Blumenthal was suspected of being the source of stories that he turned down the job because he disagreed with Nixon administration policies in Southeast Asia, which had started a firestorm across the nation that spring. Young Mr. Blumenthal wasn’t going to get near that.
The ensuing weeks of controversy, according to a letter of apology Mr. Blumenthal sent to President Nixon from Parris Island, South Carolina, “caused me more sadness and anxiety than any others I can remember in my life.”
He shares the lessons of the trauma with the 37th president of the United States in the respectful but groveling August 13th letter. Brace yourself. “During my sixteen months on the White House staff,” writes Eddie Haskell the Daniel Patrick Moynihan protege, “I learned the importance of discrete and loyal staff work–in an Administration which has encouraged critical self-judgement and new ideas–and the immense damage that may be done by hasty or self-serving recourse to the press.” [Emphasis added.]
You can read the letter in this pdf: Blumenthal to Nixon- Sorry about that leak.
2 comments
Well, this is consistent with what we have been getting from Dick Blumenthal all along. He is mostly content to sit back and let his minions at publications, such as the Hartford Courant, do his attack work against Linda McMahon for him (the name Rick Green comes to mind). This, while he keeps up the appearance of taking the “higher road.”
Yet, the only promise we have received from Dick Blumenthal is a promise to sue, sue, sue. That’s one promise he would most likely keep if sent to Washington. However, filing lawsuits is not going to dig our economy out of the abyss it now finds itself in, as a result of the failed policies of this Congress and Administration. Nor is it going to bring back private sector jobs any time soon.
Actually, the attack work is being done by the CT Democratic party who is using money funneled to them by the Blumenthal family’s vast fortune. Spouses, children, in-laws, etc.