(Here you are, Madam Wow [and anyone else interested]. I hope you don't mind that I didn't smarten up the quotes or rescue italics.)
January 26, 2003
Smoking Gun
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
"Blix: 'No Smoking Guns' in Iraq,'" headlined The Philadelphia Inquirer (or the "Fluffya Inkwire," as the locals say). "No 'Smoking Guns' So Far'' was The Washington Post's head. ''U.N. Inspectors Criticize Iraqis Over Arms List'' was The New York Times's more objective headline, with the hot phrase in the subhead: ''But search teams find no 'smoking gun.'''
The phrase earned such display because it was used by Hans Blix, chief inspector for biological and chemical arms, in his preliminary report to the United Nations Security Council two weeks ago. ''Evidently, if we had found any 'smoking gun,''' he wrote, ''we would have reported it to the Council. .. . The absence of smoking guns . . . is no guarantee that prohibited stocks or activities could not exist at other sites, whether aboveground, underground or in mobile units.'' With the issuance of his interim report, scheduled tomorrow, world headline writers will return to the phrase that would trigger overwhelming support for nonmetaphoric guns to start smoking.
When did that phrase first become the favorite figure of speech meaning ''incontrovertible incrimination''? The answer is elementary, Watson. In an 1893 Sherlock Holmes story, ''The Gloria Scott,'' Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of a grisly murder by a sham chaplain aboard a prison ship: ''We rushed into the captain's cabin . . . there he lay with his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic . . . while the chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand at his elbow.'' A good copy editor would have fixed Doyle's awkward ''in his hand at his elbow,'' and Sir Arthur chose pistol rather than gun, but that Holmes citation seems to be the start of the cliche that grips us today.
It was made famous during the Golden Age of Political Coinage. The Watergate era coined or popularized Saturday night massacre, stonewalling, cover-up, dirty tricks, straight arrow, expletive deleted, third-rate burglary, plumbers, Deep Throat, Big Enchilada, enemies list and my personal favorite, twisting slowly in the wind. That was when Doyle's smoking pistol, which had changed in occasional usage over 80 years to smoking gun, blazed its way into dictionaries.
It first appeared in The New York Times on July 14, 1974, in an article by Roger Wilkins: ''The big question asked over the last few weeks in and around the House Judiciary Committee's hearing room by committee members who were uncertain about how they felt about impeachment was 'Where's the smoking gun?''' The question was rooted in a Nixon defense strategy, to narrow the grounds for impeachment to a provable crime. On July 31, Representative Jack Brooks of Texas told the impeachment panel that he thought Nixon was guilty of income-tax evasion: ''Millions of Americans will view this evidence as a so-called smoking gun.'' With insufficient proof, that charge did not stick.
On Aug. 5, the committee released a transcript of a recording of the meeting held two years earlier, on June 23, 1972, in which the White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, asked President Nixon, ''You think the thing to do is to get them, the F.B.I., to stop?'' and Nixon replied, ''Right, fine.'' Representative Barber Conable of New York promptly said that ''looked like a smoking gun,'' and the recording became known as ''the smoking-gun tape.''
Today, in applying the phrase to the inspection of Iraq for evidence of making weapons of mass destruction, those opposing an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime have adopted the defense strategy of Nixon's lawyers: to demand incontrovertible physical evidence, which journalists and United Nations officials agree to call the smoking gun. Proponents argue that circumstantial evidence points to a weapons buildup, and that United Nations Resolution 1441 places the burden of proof of disarmament on Iraq, which has not yet been forthcoming about producing evidence of a nonsmoking gun.
The Security Council, then, will soon be seized with the question made famous by restaurant hostesses: ''smoking or non?''
--Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
