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 ost
journeymen I know who are in the business, myself included, wince
at comprehensive references to "the press."
This
is so in part because editors and reporters and columnists and researchers
have their own opinions about public people and public events and
are annoyed by collective generalizations. Everyone craves singularity.
This is true of other generic groups. An Argentine doesn't like
vague (or unvague) references to "Latin American" sentiments; academics
don't like generalities about their political, or even philosophical,
preferences.
Notwithstanding, there are the raw data — the famous Lichter-
Rothman survey of 1980 — which disclosed that 80 percent of
the media elite had voted Democratic in every presidential election
from 1964 to 1976; a poll of voting by the faculty of Dartmouth
revealed that, if found, Republican professors are kept in zoos
and fed irregularly; the Media Research Center, whose curator L.
Brent Bozell (my nephew) is a lively presence on the scene, and
amasses evidence of Democratic proclivities. But statistical compilations
are without flavor. For that you need skilled writers with an eye
for detail and for special piquancies.
We have this from Rick Perlstein.
Mr. Perlstein, a young journalist, is himself an ardent enthusiast
for the American Left, but in his book on the 1964 presidential
campaign, he saw it all and tells it all, including eye- popping
accounts of the excesses of his own political tribe. Before the
Storm is a book about Barry Goldwater's campaign for president.
It is intriguingly subtitled: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking
of the American Consensus. What is meant by that is that Goldwater's
disastrous electoral count in 1964 (he won only Arizona and five
Southern states), was misinterpreted by hot-pants ideologues like
Professors Schlesinger and Galbraith as the end of the conservative
movement. But something happened on the way to a liberal consensus:
The conservative movement thought dead was in fact gestating, and
16 years after the defeat of Goldwater would bring in Ronald Reagan.
The press that accompanied Goldwater on his campaign liked the man,
but disdained his cause. " 'How could such a nice guy think
that way?' one [reporter] asked…. Their objectivity began failing
them. In Montana, 10,000 stood in the freezing rain to welcome Goldwater,
and the number the press somehow settled on was 2,500. Jack Steele
of the Scripps-Howard chain so lowballed the turnouts that Karl
Hess [Goldwater's speechwriter] strolled into the press quarters
with a token of appreciation: a carving of a hand with the middle
finger extended. Steele reported the incident in his copy —
a testament to the inner circle's blind indifference to public relations."
Meanwhile, Perlstein tells the reader with his robust vision, President
Lyndon Johnson was micromanaging his own campaign, the high- low
point of which was the television ad of the little girl and the
daisy and the atom bomb that voters were encouraged to believe would
fall on her if the GOP contender were elected. "If it hadn't been
for Goldwater," Johnson aide Kenny O'Donnell recalled afterward,
the press would have "just murdered him," such were LBJ's excesses.
Perlstein looks hard at the conduct of the president of the United
States who was trying to intimidate the voters on the matter of
Goldwater's incompetence to preside over the nuclear football. "The
man [who did have] his fingers on the nuclear button sometimes weaved
off his campaign plane stinking drunk; he made mistakes on the stump;
he contradicted himself in interviews. On his way to opening day
in Detroit, in order to squeeze as many VIPs into his plane as possible,
he booted onto an accompanying plane the military aide who kept
the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist that contained the codes to
launch a nuclear strike. That plane nearly ended up crashing. Reporters
looked the other way. 'Thank God for Lyndon Johnson,' a scribe from
the St. Louis Post Dispatch thought to himself, as the president
lit into Goldwater once more as a 'ranting, raving demagogue who
wants to tear down society.'"
Perlstein hardly excuses Goldwater's own excesses. "Goldwater's
speeches were now sheer extrusions of rage…. It was the only
way he himself could understand this great national salivation over
an opponent he now despised." The end could not come soon enough,
but there were those who saw, and Perlstein records why, that Goldwater
had aroused sentiments that did not fall back to sleep with the
great LBJ landslide. His engrossing book invites reflection on the
role of the press in campaigns. In 1964 there was a need for mediation.
When such as Martin Luther King and George Meany transcribed the
nomination of Goldwater into a threat of American fascism, the press
was needed to bring sanity. Before the Storm is an entertaining
book, but also an invitation to reflection on the heavy responsibilities
of the press.
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