Mary Mapes Plans Tell-All Book

This we have from NewsMax.com. And so it begins: the Big Cash-in. When you or I lose our jobs, we have to slink away and say nothing unflattering about our former bosses, because we have to put their names on job applications, list them on our resumes (or curricula vitarum), and sometimes get letters of recommendation--a difficult-enough thing to ask for under the best of circumstances, as any denizen of Monster.com will attest. But when a Mary Mapes loses her job, she gets to rat out her former bosses and make a pile of money while doing it.

Not that I sympathize in the slightest with CBS or with Viacom, its owner. To begin with, they should never have let the Killian Memoranda story go to air, and arguably should never have had such loose cannons on the gundeck of the fourth estate working for them. And then--the kicker--they fire her outright, giving her no severance beyond the standard package, and forget an elementary thing like a golden liplock. So--with her lips unlocked, she's out for revenge.

In sum, if ever two sides of a war of words (and possibly nerves) deserved all the harm they are about to bring to one another, Mary Mapes and CBS/VIacom would be those two sides.

Her agent (and how about that--she already has an agent!), however, makes this really incredible statement:

[She] plans to argue for the veracity of the four memos supposedly typed by President Bush’s former National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, in the early 1970s...Now that the other people have copped a plea ... she’s the only one who can tell this story.

This is just silly. She still believes that those memos are genuine? Or that she can fool milliions of people into believing that? And what's this about "copp[ing] a plea"? When was anyone at CBS brought to book in a court of law? That's what should have happened--but all that did happen is that Dan Rather is about to be put out to pasture--sort of--and four people have lost their jobs, and none of them would be exactly hurting if they never got that kind of job again. (Actually, one of them is still holding out for whatever settlement he can wring from CBS--but that's another story.)

IThe only value that this book is likely to have is as evidence against those at CBS who did not lose their jobs, including Dan Rather (maybe) and Andy Heyward (most definitely). But if she's going to continue to insist that the memoranda were genuine, she'll be nothing but a laughingstock--and the publishing industry will have yet another piece of trash to its dubious credit.