A Word with Mr. Kornacki

If you have a moment to slip outside the War Room, Steve, I'd like to address a most intriguing paragraph you wrote in today's Salon.com article, "Olympia Snowe's huge gift to Democrats" You reiterate Sen. Snowe's statement as to why she is stepping down: “Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term. So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.” Your interpretation of her words begins: The charitable way to read [Sen. Snowe's statement] is that Snowe is tired of pretending to be more outraged by the Obama administration and Democrats in general than she actually is and that she’d rather retire than keep catering to the Tea Party. More realistically, she just honestly believes that D.C.’s current polarized condition is equally the fault of both parties. Again, if she really wanted to work across the aisle and with the White House more, she probably could have, because of the option of an independent reelection candidacy. Yet your very next sentence begins: But even if she wasn’t particularly helpful to them these past few years, Snowe is doing Democrats a huge favor now. May I suggest that your "charitable" reading of Sen. Snow's statement is the exact meaning she had in mind to deliver. She is known to be a centrist. If anything, that jump in the American Conservative Union rating from 48 in 2009 to 64 in 2010 says a lot about the brow beating she has taken from her party in the last two years. The soup from which you draw the idea that she is equally fed up with the polarization of both parties is as thin and insubstantial as the intellectual tea that suckers those Senators who vote according to its precepts. I notice you offer us no example of Democrats polarizing to damage the legislative process, while we have only to turn on the TV evening news...after evening after evening, to learn how the Republican side of both aisles of both houses have voted en bloc to stop passage of a bill, after a bill, etc. What you do is hurry into another sentence: a sentence projecting your own ideas of what Sen. Snowe COULD do...if she were not utterly beaten down by what she has been through this past year; indeed, if she did not already have a decent plan for follow-through...the very plan you stated first in your thoughtless meanderings in and about Sen. Snowe's dynamics. The one thing you have overlooked...the one plausible possibility, Mr. Kornacki, is that Sen. Snowe has set up the election cycle to go exactly the way she wants it to go. A thought very much worth considering... Yes, time for you...and me...to be on our ways.

Come in Ms. Walters, I have a few words...

Friday, February 10, 2012, the full cast of "The View" interviewed Ms. Mimi Alford, author of the recently published Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath. Because the comment section for this segment was not available during the several times I visited "The View’s" web site, I would like to invite Ms. Barbara Walters into my consultation room to consider the following:

Ms. Walters, you noted at least twice during your interview of Ms. Alford that she would make "plenty of money" from the sales of her book, and asked whether she had considered the feelings of Caroline Kennedy when she decided to publish her account.

I can't help but wonder if you have completely missed the complex but increasingly visible issues underlying the workplace affair.

Let us begin where you are: your bias, quite obvious, was against the public airing of the events in Ms. Alford's life. That is to say, your bias was toward the protection of Mr. Kennedy's reputation at the cost of Ms. Alford's telling the truth in whatever manner she wished.

Your desire to protect Mr. Kennedy's reputation is, I believe, a moot concern. That he was a womanizer is an established fact. As for guarding Caroline Kennedy from that truth, not even you can believe she is not able to protect herself from any discussion of this book, as will her friends and associates. You yourself may find the relatively lascivious descriptions in this book personally disquieting, but if that is the case, please make your point plainly.

The complex but absolutely necessary issue to understand here, both at the level of Ms. Alford's (or any workplace subordinate's) personal emotional level and in the larger historical context, has to do with the revelation of the truth. In this case, Ms. Alford says, and she is entirely believable, that her life has been devastatingly compromised by the truths revealed in this book.

There is only one issue here, and that is the traumatic nature of a relationship between a person of power and a subordinate. No matter the extenuating circumstances, in a relationship of this nature the subordinate has two choices:

1.    go along

2.    say no and risk ???

The person in power creates the incalculable risk within the subordinate and does so by design. He (I will use he in identifying the predator throughout to avoid the tedium of the term he/she) does so by the very act of choosing a subordinate with whom to have the relationship. Let there be no question: the person in power always and at every stage designs the terms of the relationship, whether the subordinate has approached him initially or not. It is the responsibility of the person in power to keep the relationship from happening in the first place (which is apparent in Mr. Kennedy's case from the fact that he assigned a power broker to procure for him this woman and others).  Once the subordinate has submitted to the relationship she will remain entangled in it until she jumps ship (and emotionally entangled until she comes to a full and abiding understanding of how she came to be victimized in the first place).

Ms. Alford did not realize the detriment her relationship with the president was causing her before he died. Maybe she never did. But she came to terms with her life.

Then after a lifetime, as does sometimes happen in the lives of people who have struggled for mastery of their lives, circumstances beyond her control overwhelmed her in an exact repetition of the first time. She experienced the very fate her first husband had drilled into her would spell disaster:  her tryst with the president was made public. For the second time in her life, in a surreal way, a powerful public man (a book writer) seemed to have taken control of the most intimate concerns of her life.

Again, Ms. Walters, throughout the course of this interview you fail to grasp any insight into precisely what it is you are trying to learn, i.e. what has motivated Ms. Alford to write this book. The fact of the matter is that, in so many words, she has told you: that having the affair made public after forty years has caused her to relive all of it, including its excruciating humiliation.

Of everything I have read or heard Mimi Alford say I believe every word...except one. Meredith Vieira asked Ms. Alford whether she would change the past, and she said, "No." This question, upon which every one of us reflects from time to time, is a question of gargantuan proportions. The woman who sat for your interview revealed true dignity in the face of your intrusive questions. I give her the right, even having told the lewd truth, to hold some of her painful feelings in reserve from Ms. Vieira.

Ms. Walters, if there are secrets in your past, they have not seemed to set any internal, emotional limits on the amount of money you have been able to make, that we the public know of. Are you absolutely sure that Ms. Alford is not due the opportunity to make money in her life now?  Your questioning of her strongly implied that you knew of some higher responsibility she was committed to keep. I know of no higher responsibility than telling the truth in the public forum, especially when it is not news. You may not have agreed with the details of the way she went about doing it, but not to have saluted her courage, in setting the stage for any other questions you might have had, was simply an attempt by another person in power to vilipend her. Perhaps because you are a woman, perhaps because she has done the hard work of therapy that she spoke of, she was able to fend off your attempts, and for that I do salute her.

I sincerely hope that something I have said here will resound as you sit with others who have taken the path you would not have chosen. I hope that, even when you do not agree with their decisions, you will listen for the courage in their stories that is not your own.

Thank you, Ms. Walters. I see that our time is about over...