Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

Early last spring, the sharks were closing in on Hillary Rodham Clinton. Damaged first by allegations about her husband's near-compulsive infidelity and then by accusations about her own financial past, Mrs. Clinton had to fight back. But how? Although she would later call a much-praised formal press conference, the First Lady's public relations offensive in those bleak days amounted to hosting exclusive teas not with Johnny Apple of the Times or with David Broder of the Post but with four "celebrity columnists" (their term): Jeannie Williams of USA Today, Liz Smith of Newsday, Cindy Adams of the New York Post, and Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News. In a bid to reach their vast audiences--USA Today has up to six million readers and Smith is syndicated in 70 papers across the country--Mrs. Clinton twice kibbitzed with these women at New York hotels, winning flattering columns from each.

"She's very impressive and very, very smart," Jeannie Williams recently told me. "I think she really truly does like to chat about fun stuff--about what the celebs are doing. We talked about the kinds of things that David Broder wouldn't care about." Adds Smith: "She appears to be candid and down-to-earth, which is a terrific trick for a public person.... She has given us access that I don't think too many journalists have had." Smith, one of whose columns was headlined "Hillary Hits Back at Critics," is right. Asked why Mrs. Clinton has granted such generous audiences to this journalistic circle but to no other, her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, says, "I don't discuss why we do the things we do, but suffice it to say that Mrs. Clinton likes all of those women very much and enjoys spending time with them."

Of course, it was time well spent in making her case to millions of ordinary Americans. Mrs. Clinton undoubtedly knew this, and may have congratulated herself on her strategic wisdom. But whether they knew it or not, Mrs. Clinton and the columnists were playing out long-standing roles in a social drama established by a man an entire generation of Americans may have never heard of: Walter Winchell.

Look back for a moment: On May 10, 1938, Winchell, the syndicated gossip columnist of New York's Daily Mirror and NBC radio broad-caster, left his informal headquarters at Manhattan's Stork Club to spend the day in Washington. This was no ordinary visit, and Winchell was no ordinary visitor: The Washington Times-Herald assigned eight reporters to cover the occasion for its front page; J. Edgar Hoover attended a luncheon in his honor. And, at four o'clock that afternoon, Winchell was shown in to see President Roosevelt. The session was scheduled to last five minutes; it ran nearly an hour. FDR's secretary "bounced in three times," reported Newsweek, "only to find Roosevelt, not Winchell, was prolonging the conversation."

Always shrewd, FDR entertained Winchell with very good reason. In the late thirties and early forties, 50 million Americans, out of an adult population of about 75 million, either listened to Winchell's weekly radio broadcast or read his six-day-a-week column, which was syndicated in more than 1,000 newspapers. (This eclipsed even Will Rogers, who had a radio and newspaper audience of 40 million before his death in 1935.) And during the Depression and World War II, there was no voice more favorable to Roosevelt than Winchell's. After the president's first inauguration, in 1933, Winchell hailed FDR as "the Nation's new hero" and asserted, "Better times are almost here again--because of President Roosevelt!" For the next 12 years, virtually every Winchell column and broadcast would include a bouquet for FDR.

Without much exaggeration, it could be said that Washington's reverential reception of Winchell on that spring day in 1938 signalled the irrevocable intersection of politics and celebrity--the moment at which public...