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EDITOR'S NOTE: This
appeared in the Sept. 1 1998, issue of NR.
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the day Monica Lewinsky's lawyers announced their client's immunity
deal with Kenneth Starr, Geraldo Rivera demonstrated once again
why he's the White House's favorite media personality. At the start
of his nightly CNBC legal-affairs show Rivera Live, he played
a clip of President Clinton's black limousine driving up Pennsylvania
Avenue after a tribute to the two slain Capitol Police officers.
"As [Clinton] left the solemn ceremony at the Capitol, which
dealt with bravery and heroism and sacrifice, his motorcade passed
the very courthouse where Ken Starr has been obsessed with sex,
sex lies, and audiotapes,'' said Rivera in a voice-over.
This short
scene from the Clinton - Lewinsky immorality play was unadulterated
White House agitprop: a good president trying to do his job while
an independent counsel hounds him relentlessly. Rivera has said
that "history will recognize [Clinton] as a great man.'' Starr,
on the other hand, is "crude,'' "absolutely shameless,''
and "increasingly irrational.'' On June 30, Rivera labeled
the independent counsel "unpatriotic'' for taking Linda Tripp's
testimony while Clinton traveled in China. "They say Ken Starr
has no sense of public relations, and that he's constantly shooting
himself in the foot,'' he said. "I think today he shot us all
in the heart.'' Sniff, sniff.
Rivera Live
has become the major venue for discussion of Clinton's zipper problem,
partly because no other program covers all its salacious twists
in such detail and partly because of Rivera's anxious partisanship.
Since the intern portion of the scandal erupted in January, nobody
has defended the White House more vigorously than the one-time trash-TV
host. Rivera fancies himself a reporter, but he's really just a
repeater: night after night, he faithfully follows the administration's
line on the scandal topic du jour. His program lays bare the moral
calculus of Clinton's defenders, although most of them don't state
it so forthrightly.
Rivera does
not actually think the president is innocent of wrongdoing: "We
all suspect — everyone watching this program probably suspects
that something happened'' between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky,
he declared on July 23. But, in Geraldo's mind, no president ought
to get in trouble for indulging a natural instinct. A few minutes
after Rivera aired his suspicions about Clinton's intern policies,
for example, a guest on his show mentioned that White House press
secretary Mike McCurry has a tough job defending the indefensible.
A quizzical look appeared on Rivera's face. "Never told a sex
lie?'' he asked.
To the 55-year-old
owner of America's most famous mustache, sex lies are a different
kind of dishonesty, and perhaps not a problem at all. "What
man is not going to lie about it?'' he asked on July 14. These are
the 1990s! When the Heritage Foundation's Todd Gaziano appeared
on the program and said that perjury used to be considered a much
more serious crime than it is today, Rivera snapped back: "And
they used to paint a great big A on you when you cheated on your
wife.''
If they still
did, Rivera would look like a body painting by now. In his 1991
autobiography, Exposing Myself, he brags at wearying length about
the many women he has bedded and the lies he has told to cover up
his affairs: "I was like a junkie when it came to women, an
alcoholic, and even my best intentions were not enough to keep me
faithful for long.'' By his own account, he is a pathological womanizer.
"I've had thousands of women, literally thousands,'' he told
Playboy in 1989. "Figure it out for yourself. If you
had a different woman every couple of days, and you do it for some
years running, it just adds up.''
It also distorts
moral sensibility. Rivera's memoirs contain one of the most deeply
confused sentences ever to appear in print: "My marriage was
important to me, and so I made sure my outside encounters never
became more than one-night stands.'' He wrote that about his third
marriage; he's currently on wife number four.
Rivera's career is at its height today. Always hungry for respect
from the establishment media, he started to draw renewed attention
with his aggressive coverage of the O. J. Simpson trials. He took
the side of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and
made Rivera Live one of the most-watched programs on cable television.
It was the only hit on CNBC's prime-time lineup, inspiring the channel's
parent company, NBC, to counter Fox News's serious bid for Rivera
by signing him to a six-year deal worth more than $30 million (second
only to Tom Brokaw at NBC News). In addition to the legal-affairs
show, Rivera will host Upfront Tonight, a CNBC nightly news
program that debuts August 24; he will also star in four prime-time
specials for NBC News each year and make special appearances on
the Today show. All this permits him to dump his decade-old
talk show, Geraldo!; ratings had slipped in recent years,
and this pioneer of daytime deviance had refused to stoop to the
new lows reached by Jerry Springer and Co.
As part of his new arrangement with NBC, Rivera covered Clinton's
trip to China and displayed the same pro-Clinton bias that has marked
Rivera Live. When a TV Guide reporter asked Mike McCurry
how Rivera won access to the president in China when other reporters
did not, McCurry replied: "When it comes to scandal stuff,
Geraldo has been as open-minded as you would want a journalist to
be. We notice things like that.''
Before his
Clinton-inspired eminence, Rivera had become best known for a series
of weird professional mishaps. In 1986, for instance, he hosted
a highly rated live two-hour special to investigate the contents
of what was allegedly Al Capone's hidden vault; it turned out to
be empty. Two years later another fiasco raised him to new heights
of celebrity, but not necessarily the kind he wanted. During a fight
on his daytime show in 1988, one guest threw a chair at Rivera and
broke his nose. Suddenly Geraldo had reached the level at which
a person is known instantly and everywhere by his first name, like
Newt or Ahh-nold. He grumbled about not being taken seriously, but
before long he was pulling some new stunt like having body fat extracted
from his rear end and injected into his forehead. He did that in
1992.
Geraldo wasn't
actually born Geraldo; he was given the name Gerald by his Jewish
mother and Puerto Rican father. When he was growing up, everybody
called him Gerry. After graduating from Brooklyn Law School, he
became a small-time lawyer representing a hard-left Puerto Rican
activist group known as the Young Lords. They displayed pictures
of Castro, Lenin, and Marx in their office, and Rivera frequently
made television appearances on their behalf. Al Primo, the news
director at WABC, was then looking to hire a Puerto Rican reporter
for Eyewitness News. He spotted Rivera on an evening broadcast
and invited him for an interview. They quickly came to terms. Just
as Rivera was getting ready to leave, Primo asked, "By the
way, what's Gerry short for?''
"Gerald.''
"Gerald?
It's not very Puerto Rican, is it?''
"No,''
said Rivera, who then suggested the stage name Geraldo.
Primo tested
the sound of it — Geraldo Rivera, with a G that sounds like
an H and three rolling R's. "That's better,'' he said. "Let's
go with Geraldo.''
The decision
gave birth to a persistent rumor that Rivera's surname is actually
Rivers. (That rumor is false. It is true, however, that in high
school and college he would occasionally spell his last name Riviera.)
Rivera hates it when people ask him about this story. Sometimes
he will overcompensate in trying to bolster his ethnic image. When
he invited Jorge Amselle of the Center for Equal Opportunity onto
his show in 1996 to discuss a Supreme Court decision on language,
he seemed astonished that anybody with the name Jorge could support
official-English laws. "C'mon, don't you eat rice and beans,
man?'' he blurted at Amselle, who grew up in Latin America.
At WABC, Rivera tomcatted recklessly. By the early 1970s he had
been involved in scores of liaisons and had financed at least two
abortions for women he had impregnated. The fact that he was married
to his second wife (Edie Vonnegut, daughter of Kurt) for much of
this period didn't slow him down. "It was common for women
working for me in those days to wind up in my bed. It was like a
part of the job description,'' he wrote in his autobiography.
The Clintonesque
parallels are almost eerie. In 1972, Rivera began a long-term affair
with Marian Javits, wife of liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits.
One of their encounters occurred on a day when Henry Kissinger was
scheduled to have dinner at the Javitses' home. The Secret Service
scoured the place beforehand, but as Rivera reports in Exposing
Myself, Marian "wasn't the type to let a small thing like
the Secret Service get in the way of romance.'' To evade the agents,
they slipped into the Javitses' mirrored bathroom for what Rivera
calls "one of the most thrilling sexual experiences I've ever
had.'' That evening, as Rivera sat across the table from Kissinger,
he wondered what the Secret Service had revealed to President Nixon's
Secretary of State: "I felt sure he knew what went on there
that afternoon — the Secret Service was in the next room, combing
the apartment, how could he not know? — and the thought of
his knowing made the memory even more improperly delicious.''
Even though
he was a working journalist, Rivera actively supported George McGovern
for president in 1972. "The campaign seemed almost a holy crusade,''
he wrote. He stumped so vocally, in fact, that WABC had to suspend
him from Eyewitness News until after the election. The incident
did not stop Rivera's steady rise. In 1976, he attended an event
for Jimmy Carter and suffered no consequences. Soon enough, he was
hosting a late-night chat show, and in 1978 he was hired by ABC
News for 20/20. Rivera became one of the network's star correspondents,
and his cavorting reached new levels. As his third wife rested in
a hospital bed after delivering his first child, the wayward Geraldo
rang up two old flames: "Our lovemaking was a personal celebration
for me,'' he recalls.
In 1985, Rivera
protested a management decision to spike another reporter's story.
As the tension mounted, his personal assistant (whom he later married)
was caught using an ABC courier to buy marijuana, allegedly for
a friend. Rivera was quickly canned. Only now is he regaining the
mainstream respectability he lost at that moment.
His brand of advocacy journalism may yet win it all back, or at
least earn him sufficient ratings to sustain his rantings. Rivera
still dreams about being a network anchor. That's clearly out of
his reach now, but he has already grasped another career goal; writing
of his days as a cub reporter in New York, Rivera says: "My
position at Eyewitness News could not shake me from my activist
roots, but it could (and should have, and finally did) reshape the
manner and method of my activism.'' Today, Rivera's activism allows
him to man the barricades for the president of the United States.
And after more than six months of on-the-air debate and a lifetime
of experimentation, he has come up with what may turn out to be
President Clinton's best defense against Ken Starr: "Never
told a sex lie?''
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