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Michael Kranish
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Michael Kranish has reported from the Boston Globe‘s Washington D.C. bureau for the last 16 years. He served as the paper’s White House correspondent for the last two years of George H.W. Bush’s presidency and the first two years of the Bill Clinton’s term. In 1996 and 2000 Kranish covered the presidential campaigns as the Globe‘s national political reporter. Most recently, Kranish co-authored John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography: By the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best, published this past Tuesday, April 27. (An excerpt from the Kerry biography can be found here.) Today Kranish discusses Kerry’s military records, The Boston Globe, and “power walks” with George H.W. Bush.
Thomas Lang: Last week a number of newspapers, including your own, specifically mentioned your reporting as a factor in forcing the Kerry camp to release the senator’s military record. Do you see your role as more of an objective bystander or active player?
Michael Kranish: Most definitely as an objective, active reporter. Player is your word, not mine. This seemed very straightforward to me. Senator Kerry was on “Meet The Press” and was asked whether he would release all of his military and medical records.
“I have,” Kerry said. “I’ve shown them, they’re available for you to come and look at.” He added that “people can come and see them at headquarters.”
So on Monday morning I called the campaign and said I was coming over to see the records. I went to the campaign headquarters. I was told that I could not see the records and to call a press aide. I called the aide and he said that the only records Kerry would release were the one or two dozen pages the campaign had already sent me or showed me. That did not include any evaluations and other documents. So I wrote a story about that. The next day, the Kerry campaign reversed course and started releasing a lot of records, including the evaluations they had never released before. On Friday, it showed reporters some medical records, but would not release them publicly.
TL: The Boston Globe’s coverage of Sen. Kerry has been very skeptical and probing. As Kerry’s hometown newspaper, how has the Globe approached covering the candidate?
MK: I’m not sure skeptical is the word I would use, because it implies we don’t believe something. Probing, yes. I would say that like any reporters, we don’t take things for granted, we want to check out everything, and I mean everything. In researching our seven-part series, and in the research for our book, we tried to go back through history and double and triple check everything we could. I’m pleased to see that on ABC-TV’s web site, they concluded that the book was fair and portrayed Kerry as the three-dimensional character that he is. That was our aim. It is too easy to take things for granted, repeat the same seven anecdotes, and talk to only those the campaign suggests. We tried to talk to everyone the campaign suggested, and then to many others who knew Kerry and illuminate what happened at key periods. This is a complex and endlessly fascinating candidate for president, and anything less would not do justice to him, in my view.
TL: Last June, in a profile of Kerry, you wrote, “The rap on John Kerry is that he is an aloof politician who lacks a core.” Is this rap a creation of the press or does it have grounding in reality?
MK: I think we fairly presented it as “a rap,” and then explained that he is far more complex than that. I am asked that “aloof” question countless times, so obviously it is something that is out there, and I even hear Kerry joke about it.
TL: You were the Globe’s White House correspondent for the George H. W. Bush White House and two years of the Clinton White House. How does this current administration’s treatment of the press corps compare to those two White Houses in terms of access to information and its attempts to spin the reporters?
MK: Well, I am not the reporter covering this White House so I can’t say how they treat reporters covering this president. The first President Bush was fairly accessible — I did a number of interviews with him, went on some “power walks” with him where I was allowed to ask questions if I could keep up with him, and had fairly good access to staff. I had less access to President Clinton, although I interviewed him a number of times as well. I hear from colleagues that it is much tighter under this president, but I don’t have any personal experience. When I covered George W. Bush as a candidate in 2000, he was fairly accessible and did interviews with me, but my experience with him ends upon his election, when others picked up the direct coverage.
TL: The title of your book is John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography: By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best. As one who knows Kerry the best, what can you share with us about the candidate that most people don’t know?
MK:
1) Kerry’s grandparents on the Kerry side were Jews from what today is the Czech Republic named Kohn and changed their name to Kerry and religion to Catholic.
2) Kerry is an avid cyclist, motorcyclist, a pilot who does aerobatics, a windsurfer who has surfed long distances.
3) Kerry, despite his pedigree and his current marriage to Teresa Heinz, had financial difficulties and often slept on couches in the apartment of friends. He described his financial situation in the mid-80s as “tight … I was not in a situation where I was flush.” He pocketed $21,000 from a low-risk real estate deal arranged by his campaign treasurer.
—Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.