Twenty nine years ago, Juan Williams was a brash young reporter for the Washington Post. I was at a convivial luncheon party where he didn't really recognize me as a new member of the Reagan Administration. With his guard down he let it be known at our table what contempt he had for President Reagan and his policies. He was so harsh that I remember thinking, I don't believe I should ever allow myself to be interviewed by this man.
Indeed, a couple of years later, I had moved from the Census Bureau to the White House's Office of Planning and Evaluation. One of our initiatives was development of a family issues program--one that led in time to changes in the tax treatment of families, enactment of adoption-friendly policies and an anti-crime effort to protect missing and exploited children. Somehow, Juan Williams got wind of the families initiative and decided to write about it.
Understand that at the time the press and broadcast antipathy to anything the Reagan Administration did was intense. I was worried therefore that any premature publicity in the Post--especially if hostile--could derail our plans. I was particularly unwilling to speak to Williams because I regarded him as hopelessly biased. More to the point, when he telephoned for an interview I told him so.
Williams couldn't believe I was saying that to him. He said I was questioning his integrity as a journalist. I didn't say I was or wasn't, only that I declined to be interviewed. What, he wanted to know, made me think he was biased? I explained that I knew how he truly felt because I had heard him in person tell people. He couldn't for the life of him figure out when that had been. But I think he must have believed me.
Anyhow, he didn't write the article, obviously. Later, Bob Merry of the Wall Street Journal wrote a good story about the family initiatives.
But I was intrigued over the years to see how Juan Williams' career developed. He seemed in many cases, on race stories and others, to want to give at least a nod to views different from his own. He also seemed to enjoy informality.
Unfortunately, he ran into trouble at the Post in 1991 when he was charged with sexist comments by female employees. He obviously hadn't learned that men can't banter about sex with women in the newsroom--especially in the newsroom, perhaps. (Liberal bloggers already are dredging this incident up as a way to discredit Williams today.) Regardless, he did recover in time and found a new home at NPR.
Now he has been fired by NPR, but not really because of the statement that he sometimes is uncomfortable in the presence of Muslims in airports. After all, his statement was made in the context of his larger position, which is that such discomfort, however genuine, must be set aside in the interests of fairness. In other words, his gaffe, if that's what it was, could only be turned into a firing offense by exaggerating and misinterpreting it.
It is strange, in fact, that the campaign against Williams by the notoriously far left CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) should be credited with bringing him down. No, the main reason NPR sacked him is that his comments on Fox, and often on NPR itself, sometimes veer away from the uniform liberal patter that characterizes the network. Liberals, as they do in one forum after another in our culture, had been contacting NPR to demand that he not pollute their air space. They are uncomfortable in the presence of a black reporter whose views are sometimes conservative. They want such people banned.
Oddly, Juan Williams actually is still a liberal in most respects. He just has learned to be more respectful to the other side. As such, he is a better reporter and a sympathetic figure to any but the most deep-dyed partisan.
Good for him. Not good for his career at NPR, however.
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