February 15, 2006
The Late Reporting of Cheney's Hunting Accident
By Mark
Davis
I did not learn of Vice
President Dick Cheney's hunting accident until a friend mentioned
it to me late Sunday afternoon. I asked the normal first question:
"When did it happen?"
"Yesterday,"
he told me.
Uh-oh. As I learned the
details, I braced for the Monday White House press briefing. It
would take Osama bin Laden surrendering at the Pentagon to knock
Hunting-Gate off the front burner.
Sure enough, spokesman
Scott McClellan muttered some things the president was up to Monday
and then opened the floor for questions. The rodeo was on.
Reporter after reporter
asked scolding questions about why they, and thus the public,
were not told of the accident until nearly a day after it happened.
Mr. McClellan, who is
a messenger, not the craftsman, of the White House message, was
poorly armed and thus eaten alive.
The details of the actual
accident are fairly straightforward and easy to absorb. Harder
to fathom is how – and why – the executive branch
mishandled this story so colossally as to create 24, maybe 48
hours (if not more), of a self-inflicted minor nightmare.
As the sun hung low Saturday
afternoon at the massive Armstrong ranch southwest of Corpus Christi,
Vice President Cheney aimed at a bird out of a flushed covey of
quail, not knowing that hunting partner Harry Whittington was
behind him.
"The vice president
picked out a bird and was following it and shot," says ranch
owner Katharine Armstrong, who had accompanied the hunting party.
"By God, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty
good."
The lady has a gift for
relating details colorfully, and I suppose that's good, because
the task essentially fell to her to inform the world. The government
sure wasn't about to do it.
Poor Mr. McClellan clumsily
described a process he clearly knew little about Monday, describing
how "information was coming in through the evening hours
and into the next morning."
What he could not explain
was how a private citizen was left to inform local media of the
mishap and not a soul received the order to tell anybody else.
Mr. McClellan told reporters
that the proper focus of the first hours after the accident was
Mr. Whittington's health, which is totally true and totally irrelevant.
I don't believe the gentleman would have lost a drop of additional
blood because someone got on a cellphone to alert administration
staffers that they might have a tricky press release to write
in, say, the next few hours.
A press release. A 30-second
announcement. Either one of these at midnight Saturday, and this
is the non-story it deserves to be.
But in the absence of
that, the administration has received a public spanking that it
pains me to say it deserves. Thank heaven these people run a war
better than a hunting accident.
Why the silence? Knowledge
of this event had to permeate the halls of the White House within
hours. I don't buy an ineptitude excuse, so I believe a conscious
decision was made somewhere that it would not be so bad to let
the details trickle out Sunday afternoon. I can't imagine why,
except for the 200 reporters who surely would have heralded Mr.
Cheney's arrival at the hospital to visit Mr. Whittington.
But would that have been
so bad, compared to Monday's completely bungled explanation of
an event that would not have been such a big deal without the
needless mystery of how the news was handled? Would the Sunday
morning talk shows have punted their guests to provide up-to-the-minute
coverage of this? And even if they did, so what?
The first chapter of
any decent political manual contains a concrete rule – Don't
give your enemies a bat to beat you with. Were Monday's reporter
questions comically indignant in view of the actual gravity of
the event? Of course, but those questions were made possible by
the botched manner in which the public was informed.
Mark
Davis is a columnist for the Dallas
Morning News.
The Mark Davis
Show is heard weekdays nationwide on the ABC Radio Network.
His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.
