the kicker

What Gonzales Didn’t Say

What goes unspoken stays unspoken

August 27, 2007

It came as no surprise this morning at Alberto Gonzales’s press conference announcing his resignation that the AG didn’t go into the details of why he was quitting. In fact, he seemed to honor our intelligence by not resorting to one of those patented excuses so familiar now, that he wanted to spend more time with his family, or had really always been planning to end his tenure in the dog days of 2007. Then again, if he had tried one of these, the sound of collective laughter in Washington might have been deafening. So instead he choose to completely ignore the question. The 120 seconds were filled instead with bromides about how he had “lived the American dream.”

That left it to the press to at least nod to the reasons for the major development. Yet strangely, very few news sources mentioned an omission that seemed obvious to everyone watching. The New York Times described the two-minute presser like this: “Mr. Gonzales appeared cheerful and composed when he announced that he was stepping down effective Sept. 17. His very worst days on the job were ‘better than my father’s best days,’ he said, alluding to his family’s hardscrabble past. ‘Thank you, and God bless America,’ Mr. Gonzales said, exiting without responding to questions.”

The AP and Reuters did no better, with neither wire service mentioning the fact that Gonzales gave not even a made-up reason for why he was abruptly leaving his post. Reuters went with this: “In a statement at the Justice Department, Gonzales thanked President George W. Bush for his friendship and said despite his own troubles, he considered it a great privilege to have led the department.”

From what I could find, the only version that seemed to strike the right tone was the Washington Post in the second clause in its lede: “In a brief statement, he called his 13 years in public service a ‘remarkable journey,’ but he gave no explanation about why he chose to resign now after resisting months of pressure to quit.”

More than any other news source, the Post captures the awkward and glaring absence of reason. In this case – as in many others — it’s not enough for reporters to write down accurately what was said. Sometime readers need to know what was left unspoken.

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.