Inside the Beltway

Barnes factor

Our item about former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes coming to town tonight to warn that mudslinging by both parties is threatening to tear apart the fabric of the country raised a few eyebrows, including one gentleman’s who wrote: “Kind of ironic having him talk about partisan politics.”

Indeed, it was Mr. Barnes who stepped forward during the height of the 2004 presidential campaign to say he was now ashamed to have helped get a young George W. Bush into the National Guard. As angered as President Bush was by the suspiciously timed confession, little did he — or Mr. Barnes, for that matter — realize it would help seal his second term in the White House.

As it was, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, took his Vietnam War service from several decades ago and made it a central theme of his 2004 campaign — at a time when a more urgent, if not more unpopular, war was raging in Iraq. The rest, as they say, is history.

File and run

“Or maybe the case has no merit.”

So suggests the latest issue of the American Lawyer, citing one theory as to why Valerie Plame of CIA-leak fame suddenly parted ways with her attorney, Proskauer Rose partner Christopher Wolf — her next-door neighbor, no less — shortly after her civil action was filed against senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and White House aide Karl Rove.

“The breakup was a shock,” writes the magazine’sElizabethGoldberg, given that Mr. Wolf had filed the suit only “a month earlier.”

Headlined “File and run,” the article quotes lawyer Victoria Toensing, a former chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as saying: “I’m amazed Proskauer took the case in the first place.”

Another theory: “Proskauer might have gotten cold feet,” writes Ms. Goldberg. “The firm wants to beef up its D.C. practice … [a]nd heading the Plame case was not likely to please the Bush administration.”

Pass the sugar

Nancy Dickerson, who earned her final reward in the fall of 1997, was the first reporter to speak with John F. Kennedy after his presidential inauguration. She had dinner with Lyndon B. Johnson the night after JFK was killed.

“Mom was one of Kennedy’s favorite things: a woman,” writes her son John Dickerson, a former White House correspondent for Time magazine, in his new book, “On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News’ First Woman Star.”

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