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By
early 1974, I was at a magazine in New York called New Times, brought
there by my closest friend from the Richmond paper, Frank Rich. ... we
hit upon the idea of resurrecting Bill Scott, now Senator Scott, as the
subject of a cover story. We would call it “The Ten Dumbest
Congressmen” and crown Scott “The King of Dumb.” Since I obviously
couldn’t do essentially the same piece again, the assignment went to
the magazine’s newly minted Washington correspondent, Nina Totenberg,
and I gave her all my notes. She did a masterly job, not only hunting
down new material on the hapless Scott but also including among her
nine other victims a few Democrats, for “balance.”
We could scarcely
believe what came next. Scanning the masthead of this obscure little
magazine and finding his old nemeses from the Mercury, the infuriated
Scott called a press conference, thundering that this was all the doing
of some left-wing kids from Richmond with an agenda—thereby turning it
into a national story and confirming the thesis of the piece.
Scott never lived it
down—even his obituaries mentioned the controversy. But what was never
noted—there or anywhere else—was that he was right. [Harry Stein- "How the Press Got Political"]
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