The Breakfast Table

Cynthia Cotts and Dan Kennedy

Good morning, Cynthia–

Last week, as our time at the “Breakfast Table” approached, I was filled with dread at the prospect of having to banter about the plight of Elián González, surely one of the more inane stories since–well, since the last inane story, which, collectively, now seem to pile up so quickly that it’s hard to keep them straight, or even remember them.

But we got lucky. News happened. And the media–so exploitative and loathsome during all those weeks when there was nothing to do but hang out; the same media that produced the sleazy Diane Sawyer interview-that-wasn’t-really-an-interview with Elián, and that broadcast, over and over, the Miami relatives’ weird, disturbing video of a finger-waving Elián–performed extraordinarily well once there was something real to report.

(By the way, don’t you think the Miami Relatives would be a great name for a band?)

To my mind, and obviously I’m not alone in thinking this, the biggest kudos have to go to Alan Diaz, the AP photographer who captured the image of a government agent pointing his gun in Elián’s general direction, if not–as Janet Reno’s partisans have ridiculously argued–directly at the boy himself. Yes, the Miami relatives (let’s just call them the MRs) probably wanted a confrontation, as Bruce Shapiro noted in Salon today. Yes, Diaz was inside the house because he had ingratiated himself with the MRs. And yes, Elián’s apparently happy reunion with his father was long, long overdue. But Diaz’s photo demonstrates as graphically as possible what an incredible, unnecessary risk Reno took. Seven years after Waco, the attorney general once again resorted to potentially deadly force to save a child who was not in any obvious need of being saved.

On Sunday, I taped This Week rather than the vastly superior Meet the Press in the hope that Sam Donaldson would say something stupid enough to comment on. Sam turned out to be fine. But I was especially impressed with George Will, who got it exactly right by asking why the Justice Department didn’t get a court order, show up at Lázaro and Marisleysis González’s front door at a decent hour, and simply ask them to turn Elián over. “There was no reason to believe this family was violent,” Will said, as George Stephanopoulos smugly defended Reno. I don’t often find myself agreeing with Will, but then again, he and the New York Times editorial page don’t often agree, either; yet they’re on the same side on this one.

Which really makes me wonder what got into Howie Kurtz. His media column in today’s Washington Post is virtually a brief for the government. Writing of Diaz’s photo and of the video images of Elián being hustled away by federal agents, Kurtz asserts, “Incredible emotion. Great television. And a one-sided picture of events, obscuring the fact that the family had left the government with little choice but to seize Elián by refusing to surrender custody during lengthy negotiations.” Hey, Howie–there wouldn’t be a photo of a fed sticking a gun in (whoops, sorry; near) Elián’s face if a fed hadn’t stuck a gun near Elián’s face.

Back to This Week, and my favorite moment: Senator Bob Graham telling Cokie Roberts that Bill Clinton had promised him just three weeks ago “that there would be no taking of that child at night.” Let’s see, now. The raid took place at 5:10 a.m., right? Obviously Graham should have asked Clinton for his definition of the word “night.”

Talk to you later,
Dan