Caught In the Crossfire   

Perhaps nothing illustrated the ascent of Talk TV so vividly as Michael Kinsley's journey from cloistered magazine intellectual to television shouting head. After six-and-a-half years in the trenches, he heads for a newser medium in cyberspace.

In the fall of 1979, Michael Kinsley made his reluctant debut on national television.

Kinsley was the editor of The New Republic, perhaps the favorite magazine of the chattering classes, and was starting to draw attention as a brilliant young journalist. He was a Rhodes scholar, a Harvard Law School graduate, a former editor at The Washington Monthly and an unabashed liberal with a stunningly analytical mind. A bit nerdy looking, with short hair and glasses and a slightly perplexed expression, Kinsley was, above all, a man of letters. He was openly disdainful of what he described as "televised journalistic gasbaggery."

The hot political story of the season was an accusation that Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter's chief of staff, had snorted cocaine. Kinsley wrote an editorial in The New Republic ridiculing the "giant web of hypocrisy" among journalists and other critics, who barely bothered to hide their own marijuana and cocaine use, but trumpeted such charges during the drug-soaked culture of the '70s. A producer for "The Today Show" called to ask if he would discuss the piece the next morning. Kinsley protested that he was hardly an expert on the Washington drug scene.

"In those days," Kinsley said, "knowing nothing about a subject made me hesitant to talk about it on TV."

ûhe producer persisted, and Kinsley agreed to speak generally about the hypocrisy issue as long as he was not asked to expound on drug use in Washington. He was clearly nervous as he arrived at the NBC studio on Nebraska Avenue, where he discovered that the station's interns knew more about the subject than he did.

Tom Brokaw was anchoring from New York, and his first question was about the use of drugs in Washington: "Tell me, Mike, how widespread is it?" Kinsley mumbled an unintelligible reply, which Brokaw asked him to repeat. Kinsley was furious. "They violated their promise from the word go," he said.

Welcome to the world of television, Mike.

The journey of Michael Kinsley from cloistered magazine intellectual to televised shouting head in many ways mirrors the rise of the talk show culture itself. The growth of these programs depends on a steady supply of print journalists who lend their knoýledge and prestige to an entertainment format sorely lacking in both. The talk shows need guests with the little chyron captions identifying them as representing The New Republic or Time or the Washington Post. And the journalists need television for the visibility, celebrity and lecture income it bestows.

It is a Faustian bargain, and one that Kinsley's friends never thought he would make. As a writer and editor, Kinsley dealt in subtlety and nuance. He was often eccentric, always cutting against the grain of conventional wisdom. He could expose the weakness in a liberal argument with the same coldhearted efficiency with which he skewered the right wing. The notion that he would wind up as the cohost of CNN's "Crossfire," engaging in verbal wrestling matches night after night, squeezed into an artificial position "from the left," seemed unimaginable to his friends and colleagues.

Morton Kondracke, who was then working with Kinsley at The New Republic, drew barbs from the boss each Friday as he went off to tape "The McLaughlin Group." Someone would ring a bell, and Kinsley would lead the catcalls.

"He thought this was beneath the dignity of a serious journalist," Kondracke said. "His exact words were, 'There goes Mort, off to make a fool of himself again.' I told him, 'Michael, you will do this one day.' He said, 'No no no no no.' "

On those occasions when Kinsley dabbled in television, he seemed to feel slightly soiled. After one such experience in the mid-1980s, Kinsley penned this apologia: "I've served as a summer replacement on the Cable News Network show 'Crossfire,' which makes McLaughlin look like tea with Nancy Reagan. On 'Crossfire,' two journalist 'hosts' snarl and scream inhospitably at two bewildered 'guests' and each other for half an hour every weekday... By the end of my two-week stint I was a trained killer, unfit for human society and in need of plastic surgery to remove the permanent sneer from my face."

It was just the beginning.

"Crossfire" was launched in 1982 with a seemingly mismatched pair of antagonists who were sparring each day on a Washington radio show. Tom Braden, a liberal newspaper columnist, was a former CIA agent in a rumpled trenchcoat who chain-smoked Marlboros. Patrick Buchanan, a conservative columnist, was an Irish street brawler and former Nixon operative who favored pinstriped Brooks Brothers suits.

" 'Crossfire' has its limitations, but if the show's well done you can hear, aggressively presented, both sides, maybe three or four sides, on major issues of the day," Buchanan said. "We don't want the old 'Meet the Press' where someone rattles off his cassette for two minutes. You push and poke and get people to say what they really think.... It's sort of a no-B.S. show."

More important, Buchanan's mere presence on the show was, in his view, an ideological triumph. Here he was, a former White House aide who had helped write the Nixon-Agnew attacks on the press, coming into America's living rooms each week on both "Crossfire" and "The McLaughlin Group."

Kinsley, meanwhile, was still struggling with television. Each time he was asked to appear on "The McLaughlin Group" it was a harrowing experience. He did vast amounts of research. He would print out four or five pages of notes from his computer, complete with contingency plans if the conversation took an unexpected turn.

One Friday morning there was a last-minute change of topics before the taping. "I actually chickened out," Kinsley said. "I freaked out and got stage fright and begged Fred to substitute for me about an hour before the show." His colleague Fred Barnes was the perfect choice, Kinsley says, because "Fred's never let talking about something he knows nothing about bother him."

Over time, Kinsley grew more inured to the stresses of television. He began appearing with William Buckley on "Firing Line." Soon he was filling in more regularly on "Crossfire," although he was still embarrassed when the show would book guests like The Amazing Randi to discuss paranormal psychology.

On one program, Kinsley was calmly interviewing a member of Congress when the voice of a "Crossfire" producer exploded in his earpiece: "Get mad! Get mad!" Thoughtfulness, it seemed, was not a quality the show valued highly. It was temper-tantrum television.

Still, Kinsley's growing visibility hardly prepared his friends for his next move. In the summer of 1989, as Kondracke was giving Kinsley a ride to work, "he said he was thinking of leaving the editorship of The New Republic to do 'Crossfire' every night," Kondracke said. "I damn near drove into a tree."

But Kinsley had tired of a decade of magazine editing and of his constant arguments with Martin Peretz, The New Republic's owner and editor in chief. He convinced himself that a television job would give him more time for his syndicated "TRB" column and other writing. The six-figure salary was also a major attraction.

"I like the fame and fortune," Kinsley admitted. "I didn't go on 'Crossfire' for self-sacrificing reasons. The pay is great compared to The New Republic." He further rationalized the move by insisting that writing for an opinion magazine, no matter how erudite or insightful, was no way to reach the masses. "The real world is that people make up their minds watching TV," he said.

Painfully awkward at first, Kinsley gradually learned the rituals of television warfare. He said he began to make "certain intellectual compromises that you hope aren't corrupting." And then there were Buchanan's attacks and insults. Kinsley never socialized with Buchanan, and the relationship sometimes grew tense.

"Buchanan has this very bad habit of patronizing you, and it's taken me awhile to figure out how not to let him dominate the agenda and frame the issues," he said. "If he brings up some total red herring, you've got to have a sense of how much time you have and whether you're gonna take on the red herring or let it go by."

An equally challenging adjustment for Kinsley, who enjoyed the theoretical twists and turns of column-writing, was the black-and-white nature of the format. A "Crossfire" producer would call in the morning to ascertain his position on some topic, and if it wasn't the usual liberal stance, there would be a long sigh.

"When I first got to the show, it was a big problem for them that I was a free trader," Kinsley said. "Their lock on the issue was, right wing/free trade, left wing/protectionist. Time has solved that problem because Pat Buchanan is the world's biggest protectionist. We now have a new cliché." Still, he said, "I can ask 10 skeptical questions on any issue, even if I disagree with it. That way I can have my intellectual honesty."

CNN staffers welcomed his approach. "Michael is easier because he's more intellectually versatile than Pat," one said. "He has legal training and he can argue an issue very efficiently on television that he doesn't really believe in. It's sort of the dirty little secret of 'Crossfire.' "

Sometimes the secret got out. On one show Kinsley told attorney Floyd Abrams, his designated sparring partner: "I'm actually on your side tonight, but of course, like any good lawyer, I can argue it round or argue it flat. So look, the case for the other side is this..."

üisaffected liberals began to grumble that Kinsley was no match for Buchanan's conservative fervor. Writer David Shenk even complained about Kinsley's "croaky voice," saying that "his civility, his affection for the finer points of policy and his lawyerly interrogative style are the antithesis of compelling television."

Kinsley conceded that he didn't uphold the liberal banner the way Buchanan champions conservatism. In fact, he calls himself "a wishy-washy moderate." But he insists it's not necessarily bad for liberalism that he was less ideological than his right-wing counterpart.

"Certainly, real hard-core, left-wing opinions don't get on 'Crossfire', just as they don't get on other shows," he said. "This is partly a reflection of the range of American political debate, from extreme right to moderate left. And it's partly a knee-jerk reaction by television producers."

Kinsley felt hamstrung in other ways. At The New Republic the point of publishing the magazine was to spot an intellectual trend before it made its way into the New York Times or the Washington Post. But at CNN, Kinsley found there was little enthusiasm for getting out in front of the news. The staff was more interested in the Beltway flap of the day, no matter how trivial. "I've actually heard producers at 'Crossfire' use the phrase 'ahead of the curve' as a pejorative," Kinsley said.

The raucous tone of the show often worked against it. While it dealt with substantive issues, some members of Congress, particularly those in leadership positions, shied away.

A number of "Crossfire" guests came away vowing never to return. Steven Roberts of U.S. News & World Report said he hated his only appearance, to talk about press coverage of Gennifer Flowers, and refuses to go back. "They spent the whole time yelling," he said. "They just wanted to pick a fight. They had no interest in a calm discussion of the issue."

Political analyst Norman Ornstein said that when he appeared the hosts "both tried to rile things up. They want to goose it to a higher level.... There's more entertainment value if it's 'Jane, you ignorant slut!' "

Dick Davis, CNN's senior talk show producer, says the program's shouting-match reputation is overstated. " 'Crossfire' is one of the best shows on television because the whole point is not to allow the guest to get away with having their spin go unchallýnged," he said. "Prominent senators and congressmen have told me it's their favorite show because many of these guys are debaters. There are some other people who don't like doing the show and don't come back. They feel they're interrupted too much. There's a real fine line from it being an exciting show to sometimes going over the line."

Buchanan, who joined the White House in the mid-1980s, left the program again in late 1991 to challenge President George Bush in the Republican primaries. He was replaced by John Sununu, who had just been forced out as Bush's chief of staff. Six weeks after the '92 election, CNN announced that Buchanan was rejoining "Crossfire," which had been paying him $438,000 a year, and would rotate with Sununu. The man who had passionately denounced Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton before the cheering Republican delegates would now be commenting on President Clinton's performance night after night.

"What did they expect me to do, become a brain surgeon?" Buchanan said. "Journalism is what I do for a living. My cards are on the table. Nobody's ignorant of the fact that I worked for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew."

Kinsley gradually turned more aggressive. One night the Rev. Jerry Falwell was in the crossfire, and Kinsley was determined to score a direct hit.

Falwell and his Liberty Alliance had been peddling videotapes that touted all kinds of wild conspiracy theories about Bill Clinton, including an accusation that he had been an accessory to a murder in Arkansas. Kinsley thought the program was the perfect opportunity to expose Falwell, and things quickly heated up.

"The trouble with people like you, Mr. Falwell, is you can dish it out but you can't take it," Kinsley declared.

Falwell pressed on, calling Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders "a first-class wacko, saying that all Christians are a menace to the children of America."

"She didn't say that. She said that you were a menace," Kinsley replied.

Falwell insisted that Elders is "in favor of sniffing cocaine."

"That's a lie... That's a lot of crap," Kinsley retorted.

Buchanan stepped in to referee. "We're going to try to get my cohost under control," he said.

The wrangling continued, with Kinsley accusing Falwell of spewing "garbage."

"You're going to get ulcers if you don't slow down a little, Michael," Falwell said.

Buchanan intervened again. "Michael, you shut up for a minute," he said. And a moment later: "Michael, stop making a fool of yourself."

Kinsley was seething. When they closed the show, Buchanan said: "You didn't sound very gracious in those thank-yous, Michael."

"I don't feel very gracious, especially toward you," Kinsley replied. He later demanded and received an apology from Buchanan.

"When he gets mad, it's self-righteous anger," Kinsley fumed. "When I get mad, it's 'Michael, you're being childish.' "

Kinsley also chafed at the nasty exchanges he was having with combative guests like Falwell. What television wants, he said, is "jovial disagreement: 'We're all pals here, just joshing around in the locking room,' when I think they're fucking liars."

In his writing, Kinsley was far more than a mere entertainer. He would devise clever concepts – a gaffe is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth – that others would recycle for years. He could change the Beltway conversation with a single column that stripped away political pretensions. When the press was filled with hand-wringing over the toll the Iran-contra affair was taking on President Reagan, Kinsley made the case for liberal glee. "Simple honesty requires any Washington type to admit that this is the kind of episode we all live for... Repeat after me: Ha. Ha. Ha." He lectured his readers for getting exercised about congressional overdrafts at the House Bank, writing: "Get serious. Grow up."

More important, Kinsley was one of the few columnists who actually pored over the fine print of public documents. He ridiculed then-Attorney General Ed Meese's pornography commission by quoting its bizarre inventory ("Big Boobs, Big Boobs #1 and #2, Big Boobs Bonanza, Big Boys and their Buddies, Big Bust Bondage..."). He showed that President Bush's civil rights bill was nearly as supportive of racial quotas as the Democratic version Bush kept denouncing. He single-handedly demolished Bush's charge that Clinton had raised taxes in Arkansas 128 times, showing that the list included such absurdities as extending the dog-racing season. He deflated one of the more overheated Whitewater charges by dismissing as "ridiculous" the notion that a phone call by George Stephanopoulos to the Treasury Department amounted to some kind of scandal. Other commentators followed suit.

As Kinsley's television fame grew, he became the liberal pundit most reviled by conservative activists. There was something about his demeanor, his intellectual stature, that drove them up the wall. When he criticized Rush Limbaugh or Mary Matalin, the former Bush campaign operative who now cohosts "Equal Time," they would bad-mouth him with a vengeance.

"Kinsley is symbolic of everything we loathe and despise," Matalin said. "He's a hypocrite and he's a fraud. He criticizes other people for 'spin' and then he becomes Mr. Show Biz, Mr. Sound Bite. When you speak to a conservative audience, you can get the same applause trashing Kinsley as trashing Saddam Hussein."

Kinsley shrugs off the animosity. "That's because there aren't too many liberals out there," he said. "If I'm their idea of an evil left-winger, they have no idea what one is like."

At times Kinsley seemed to yearn for the quieter sanctuary of print journalism. While defending affirmative action programs, he wrote in The New Yorker: "In our sound-bite-and-spin political culture, it is hard for logic to prevail over emotion. You cannot trump a simple and ringing principle like colorblind equal opportunity with 'Wait a minute – it's more complicated than that.' "

Such subtle arguments were lost amid the shouting at CNN. But the larger problem for Kinsley was that he could not function on television as a Clinton "surrogate" the way Buchanan had been a Bush surrogate. In his writing, Kinsley did not turn a blind eye to the president's flaws. A week before the inauguration, Kinsley wrote that Clinton, like Bush, had known all along that official statistics were underestimating the budget deficit but had been "playing along with the hoax." He found himself unable to argue that Congress shouldn't hold hearings on Whitewater. And when Paula Jones accused Clinton of sexual harassment, Kinsley wrote that "it is very hard to believe that Paula Jones is making the whole thing up," and that even if she was exaggerating it did not "justify more lies by the president of the United States."

On "Crossfire," however, Kinsley could not equivocate or Buchanan would tear him apart. "I'm Clinton's defense lawyer," he said. "Whatever Clinton does, I'm expected to come on and defend it." Kinsley, who had relinquished his editing job for "Crossfire," finally gave up his syndicated column. He still wrote occasionally for The New Republic, Time and The New Yorker, displaying the kind of mixed feelings about Clinton that simply wouldn't wash on television.

Buchanan, by contrast, was liberated by the Clinton presidency, free to bash the Democrats night after night with the same passion he had shown at the Republican convention. He knew how to play to the crowd.

One night, when "Crossfire" was staged before a live audience at George Washington University, the hosts were arguing over the faltering prospects of Clinton's health reform plan. Kinsley acknowledged at the start that "Clinton has done a bad political job" in selling the plan. But he added that "the campaign by Republicans and special interests has been very dishonest."

"Michael, stop this incessant whining!" Buchanan shot back. "You lost the country, Michael. Face it!"

Buchanan accused the Clintonites of writing their health plan in secret. Kinsley replied that Buchanan's former boss, Ronald Reagan, often did the same thing when drafting legislation. "That is a perfect example of the phony-baloney campaign you guys are running," Kinsley said.

"We had a leader, and you don't have one!" Buchanan exclaimed as the crowd burst into applause. It was no contest.

By late 1994, everyone in Washington knew that Buchanan was pursuing another campaign for the presidency. While he was regularly assailing Clinton on "Crossfire," Buchanan was actively testing the waters for a '96 challenge to Clinton. In early 1995, Buchanan was openly campaigning in New Hampshire and courting party members at presidential straw polls in Louisiana and Arizona. Yet, until he officially announced, CNN had to cling to the transparent fiction that he was not a candidate. Finally, on Februay 16, 1995, the charade ended. Buchanan announced his presidential exploratory committee.

Buchanan's final "Crossfire" debate with Kinsley – the end-of-show segment known internally as "the yip-yap" – turned into a paid political advertisement. When Kinsley smirkingly doubted that his colleague could be elected, Buchanan declared: "I'm the only one out there who is an economic nationalist, who thinks NAFTA was wrong, GATT was wrong, the World Trade Organization was wrong, the peso bailout was wrong." Then he unfurled a fundraising banner – 1-800-GO-PAT-GO – which Kinsley helped him hold up for the camera. In the control room, one producer put his head in his hands. The staff had not been warned in advance. But it hardly could have been a surprise. There was no longer much difference between the talk show world and the political battlefield. It was all one, long permanent campaign.

At the height of his "Crossfire" Mareer Kinsley had two tempting opportunities to escape the din of the show.

The first was in late 1993, when two senior White House aides, David Gergen and George Stephanopoulos, approached him about becoming a Clinton speechwriter. Kinsley thought it would be an awkward fit. He had never written a political speech and believed his style was too idiosyncratic for the White House. But he told Gergen that if the president offered him the job he would probably feel compelled to accept.

"I've argued again and again that President Clinton is good for the country," Kinsley said. "If they come and say we need your help for Clinton to succeed, then your bluff has been called." To Kinsley's relief, the phone call never came.

In the spring of 1994, the owners of New York magazine offered Kinsley the editor's job. He had been itching for a chance to run a magazine but was wracked by indecision about whether to leave "Crossfire" and move to New York. He drove his friends crazy with his neurotic hand-wringing. When Kinsley told CNN President Tom Johnson of the offer, Johnson asked: "How can you give up your global visibility?"

It was during a trip to the Middle East that Kinsley realized he had become an international celebrity. "It is a very giddy thing to be recognized on the streets of Jerusalem and Saudi Arabia," he said. "I sort of stumbled into the media of the future and was going to throw it all away for this Gutenberg medium on its way out." Did he really want to put out issues on the 10 best pizza places in New York? Kinsley wasn't sure. He tentatively accepted the magazine job, then turned it down, then immediately decided he had made a huge mistake. CNN was indeed a mighty global megaphone, Kinsley concluded, but it was a megaphone he didn't control, one in which he just played the loudmouth's role.

In the end, it came down to a choice between the power of the written word and the reach of the televised shout. Kinsley felt like a tragic character in a Eugene O'Neill play, reciting the same lines night after night.

In November, after six-and-a-half long years, Kinsley announced that he was abandoning "Crossfire." Desperate to run a magazine again, he decided to make the leap into cyberspace. He had been pitching companies on the idea of hiring him to start an online magazine, and Microsoft accepted. The Kinsley venture would be part of Bill Gates' new Microsoft Network. Details were sketchy – how often it would be published, how much it would cost, what it would be called – but that didn't matter. "I really wanted to get back to print, and this is print, even if there is no ink and paper," Kinsley said. TV, he decided, was "not really my thing."

At 44, Kinsley was leaving not just television but the Beltway culture itself. Within weeks he was preparing to move to Seattle to launch the magazine, far from all the officials and analysts who paraded through the CNN studios. The man who had ridiculed televised gasbaggery and then joined the hot air club had finally had enough. l