The WSJ and the NYT on Whitewater, Lewinsky

A friend and reader emailed to suggest a post on how the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reviews treated Ken Gormley's new book on the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations of Bill Clinton, The Death of American Virtue. The reader wrote that it's as though they're reviewing two different books. To me the striking thing was how similar the two reviews were in their failure to deal with the roles that the two newspapers themselves played in aggressively pressing for special prosecutors and in investigating and airing the Clinton scandals. We got into that point a bit in an earlier post concerning the New York Times. To me the newspaper that looks best on the whole thing in retrospect is the Forward, which under Seth Lipsky's editorship hewed to the line of Justice Scalia's dissent in Morrison v. Olson, that the special prosecutor was unconstitutional.