Personal Account of Journalist or Professor – education and deconstruction.com

The Times of My Life

The Book of the Week is “The Times of My Life” by Max Frankel, published in 1999. This autobiography describes a journalist originally from Germany who came of age during WWII.

The author’s Jewish parents were citizens of alternately Polish or German territory, but their passports were Polish. So in October 1938, Hitler deported them and the author, then about ten years old, to Poland. But for the incredible survival skills of his parents, that led them to eventually flee to the United States after many hardships, the family would surely have perished during the war.

When he wrote of the their final destination, Frankel recounted two curious perceptions held by Europeans at that time: Three major New York institutions included Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia and Columbia University, and “…millions of Jews live in New York and were unafraid to speak Yiddish, not just in the streets, but on the radio!”

Frankel caught the journalism bug in high school, thanks to an inspirational English teacher. In the early 1950’s, as a sophomore at Columbia University, he was afforded a unique opportunity to work as a journalist for the New York Times, covering campus news. His pay was almost double the school’s tuition. Newspapering was time-consuming and labor-intensive then, what with penciled-in headlines, carbon copies and pneumatic tubes to transport articles on paper to typesetters.

The author stayed with the New York Times for decades. The 1950’s found him reporting on the U.S. government. The McCarthy Era was Hitlerian for him. Senator Joe McCarthy and his partner in crime, Roy Cohn acquired presidential power when they were granted access to personnel records of government employees to spy on them– the kind of abuse of power that smacked of Germany’s dictatorship. News gatherers in those days merely conveyed information, practicing neither introspection nor analysis. However, Frankel described all journalists in history: “We enjoy disaster, murder, riot, revolution.”

The author covered Moscow in the late 1950’s, Cuba in the early 1960’s, and Washington again in the mid-1960’s. He wrote brilliant legal arguments for his employer’s case when it printed the Pentagon Papers. He recounted a 1980 political joke, whose concept will remain relevant for decades: In an alley, a voter is accosted at gunpoint by a pollster and asked, “Carter or Reagan?” After a momentary pause, the voter says, “Shoot.”

In the late 1980’s, the author achieved the position of executive editor. He spent a chapter on how he changed the hiring practices of the paper with affirmative-action type initiatives. A separate, longer chapter was spent on homosexuals. He lamented over the constant conflict all news organizations encounter between staying profitable and maintaining neutrality when conveying information about their financial supporters– advertisers, readers/viewers/listeners who purchase such information– and stockholders.

Read the book to learn the details of Frankel’s extreme and diverse experiences.

Rehnquist

The Book of the Week is “Rehnquist” by Herman J. Obermayer, published in 2009. This slim volume describes the author’s friendship with the late William Rehnquist, a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, appointed by Richard Nixon.

Rehnquist was born in 1924 in a suburb of Milwaukee, WI. During his decades as a justice, he wrote opinions favoring federalism, deregulation and stricter law enforcement. Read the book to learn about his career history, frugality, gambling habits, movie viewing tastes and his last illness.

All Too Human

The Book of the Week is “All Too Human” by George Stephanopoulos, published in 1999. This is a personal account of the author’s employment experiences with former president Bill Clinton beginning with Clinton’s 1992 campaign and ending with his own resignation at the end of Clinton’s first term.

The author was a close, trusted advisor of the president. In 1992, the press was engaging in negative, tabloid-like reporting on Clinton’s alleged extramarital affairs and 1969 draft-dodging of the Vietnam War.

Stephanopoulos– who started out in the position of press secretary, then became a consultant– described his 80-hour-a-week job thusly: “Every day was a dozen meetings, a hundred phone calls, a new crisis, another first.” He had to play nice with the press while at the same time, serving as an enabler of image management of the president. The author was continually advising his boss on how he should handle the infinite issues and problems that cropped up daily.

Beginning in 1994, an unwanted interloper by the name of Dick Morris imposed undue influence on the president, that created philosophical and workplace conflict. Morris was pressuring the president to balance the budget on a timetable that would result in broken campaign promises.

By the autumn of 1995, “… the evening news was a chorus of criticism from Democrats, Republicans and independent observers, who all agreed on one point: that the president would say anything to anyone to get his or her support.”

Read the book to learn about the author’s involvement with Clinton’s first-term actions, good and bad, and how Clinton got reelected in 1996.

Talking Back

The Book of the Week is “Talking Back” by Andrea Mitchell, published in 2005. This is the career memoir of a TV journalist at NBC.

Mitchell started her career in the mid-1960’s covering local politics in Philadelphia. Her desire to cover national politics necessitated a move to Washington, D.C. Through the decades, she witnessed and reported on various presidential campaigns and administrations– good, bad and ugly. She traveled the world extensively, and conveyed lessons on history and politics that the nation’s leaders failed to learn.

“In administrations that lack discipline, or are led by chiefs of staff short on character or judgment… underlings desperate to please the boss [president] start breaking rules.”

There were ironies, too. During the Iran-Contra scandal, the Iranians didn’t know they were paying for an anti-Communist operation whose money was laundered through Israel– a sworn enemy of Iran.

The author’s career had its ups and downs. In the late 1980’s, she was assigned to cover Capitol Hill rather than serve as Chief White House Correspondent. The former position conferred lesser status. However, she had more freedom of movement and topics on which to report, due to her distance from the president– who required an entourage and heavy security. She could pursue important stories on foreign policy, the budget, or energy legislation, rather than public relations events and sensationalism. In 1993, she was named to the latter position, but could no longer be a political analyst on the Today show, as at that time, it was considered a conflict of interest to have the same person both report and analyze political news.

Mitchell covered the Savings and Loan scandal, a common occurrence in American financial history. A pattern of abuse in the private sector, aided and abetted by government, was followed by a taxpayer bailout.

Prior to the First Gulf War, “Dick Cheney and Colin Powell told us that occupying Iraq would saddle America with the burden of running it.” It was difficult enough for people from the three major sects of Islam to live together peacefully in the same country without a foreign power’s attempting to supervise a transition to a different political system.

Controversy over gender and racial issues came to the fore after the Anita Hill – Clarence Thomas episode. The catch-22 for females trying to build their careers, especially in male-dominated fields (such as TV news) was that if they complained of sexual harassment, they’d be complaining to its very perpetrators. The times, they are a changin’.

In 1992, Mitchell, in reporting on Bill Clinton’s presidential run, pursued an unending series of campaign scandals. Two years later, she was present at a press conference at which Hillary Clinton was responding to Whitewater accusations. “It was a flawless performance, but the first lady still would not admit to any errors of law or judgment in her financial dealings. And behind her calm gaze, I saw a woman still enraged that people would even question her ethics.”

In the mid-90’s, the author was required to have two reputable news sources before she was allowed to go on the air with a big news scoop. Read the book to learn of other ways “news” gathering and reporting have changed through the decades, and Mitchell’s experiences dealing with the changes.

Reporting Live

The Book of the Week is “Reporting Live” by Lesley Stahl, published in 1999. This career memoir tells how the author clawed her way to the top of the TV news ladder (especially political news) as a female who eventually started a family, beginning in the early 1970’s, when “… the television networks were scouring the country for women and blacks with any news experience at all” to comply with affirmative action initiatives.

In her early 30’s, the author had a couple of years under her belt when she started gathering stories for CBS radio news. Television news people considered themselves superior to those in radio. Stahl worked as a reporter around the clock to prove her worth to everyone around her.

Covering the Watergate scandal was a particularly trying endeavor for all news organizations. The author was assigned, at dawn, to stake out the homes of the accused in order to stick a microphone in their faces and shout questions at them in front of the camera, and attend press conferences. Nixon was reelected despite his treachery, because when the economy is on an even keel, voters are hesitant to change horses in midstream, even when there are rumors of wrongdoing, according to Stahl.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, the author’s crew used new-fangled cameras that weighed 12 lbs, whose batteries weighed 20 lbs and were supposed to last an hour but never did. There was separate unreliable equipment imported from Japan for the soundmen, that weighed 50-60 lbs.

Stahl had no guilt about working her normal (extremely long) hours during her pregnancy and afterwards, due to her mother’s commanding reassurance that her career should come first. In early 1979, when she was named White House correspondent, her bosses asked her whether she was comfortable being away from her infant daughter, given the demands of her job. They would never have asked that of a man.

Reagan decreased taxes for the wealthy and imposed severe budget cuts in social programs. He appointed an anti-environmentalist to run the EPA. He pushed the national debt to an all-time high and significantly increased military spending. His speeches often contradicted what he was actually doing. Nonetheless, his image as Mr. Charisma endeared people to him on a personal level. The charm of the messenger made people blind to the message. They ignored his numerous actions that seriously damaged the country in many ways during his administration. One of the first problems he caused was a deep recession in 1982. His poll numbers sank, so of course his staff: quarreled, tried to plug the leaks, and bashed the media.

When Stahl’s daughter was four, she and her husband had to undergo a laborious preschool application process. “This was far more of a strain than deadlines or prime time news conferences.”

In the early 1980’s, Stahl’s producer had to do extensive planning when her reporting required her to follow the travels of the president for a couple of days from rural Iowa to Des Moines. The producer had to order rotary-dial phones for every stop, large hotel rooms in which to edit video, motorcycle carriers in which to run video, a microwave transmission facility, and a helicopter to fly the video to Des Moines. These resources were pooled with the other networks. Anyway, the White House deliberately pulled the plug on the audio of the reporters during the president’s speech.

In 1983, CBS changed the look of its evening news slot to show one star: Dan Rather. The other networks followed suit. “Now there were three young, handsome men at the three helms… and I [Stahl] was about to turn 42, the age past which newswomen weren’t supposed to survive on television.”

Read the book to learn what transpired when Lawrence Tisch took over CBS, how the “news” changed in terms of content, how Stahl topped off her career, and much more.

That Was the Life

The Book of the Week is “That Was the Life” by Dora Jane Hamblin, published in 1977. The original Life magazine was launched in November 1936. The weekly publication let photos tell news stories, with brief captions.

Caption-writing was laborious, fraught with “cooks”– at least ten of them, spoiling the broth at a layout session. Making headlines fit was a big challenge.

Most Life photographers had unlimited expense accounts (and spared no expense on transportation, food and equipment), were arrogant, and chased after what today would be considered non-stories. They got local authorities to turn outdoor public areas into photo studios using generators, stroboscopic lights, klieg lights, electric wires, a crane, etc., transported by flatbed truck. They sometimes made tens of people wait for hours in difficult poses while preparing all that. “Writers and editors, faced with the need to make even the most banal occurrence seem important, reached always for superlatives or piquant details and, if they couldn’t find them…” would stretch the truth. They thought their jobs were the most important in the world. They had such an inflated sense of self.

Photos were published in the magazine as is, with no doctoring, through the 1950’s, however. There was even a “Chinese firewall” between the editorial and the ad departments, to prevent the appearance of favorable reportorial coverage of advertisers. Bureau chiefs would compete by sending reporters to chase an international story with wasteful redundancy.

When there were big stories to cover, Life covered them. In summer 1958, the magazine threw a budget-busting party to get a scoop on the U.S. Navy’s current underwater war toys. Sailors and the females hired to keep them company, had a grand old time enjoying rich food, alcohol and dancing. The following day, hung over staffers’ typewriters were clicking with the story. In early 1965, Life had more than thirty people fly eight hours to London to cover Winston Churchill’s funeral.

Part of the 1950’s gravy train included an independent study program for lucky employees, who were paid over years to basically write a PhD dissertation, parts of which became magazine articles. Reporters traveled, at times, to places like Marrakech, Baghdad and the Nile Valley, and withstood harsh conditions, such as camping out in a snow-bound military post heated by a wood-burning stove, where wolves were present. Other reporters tested culinary recipes or sampled restaurant food for weeks on the company’s dime.

By 1956, there were three versions of the magazine: in America and Canada, in Spanish for Latin America, and Life International. At its peak, eight million copies of the first version and almost a million of the third version were sold per week. Life‘s United States competition included Look magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. In Europe, subscribers could purchase Paris Match in France, Europeo in Italy, the Daily Express in London, and Quick, or Der Stern in Germany, instead of Life.

Life employees worked around the clock with deadline pressure for all, and frequent travel for some, so their social lives were usually spent with their colleagues; many celebrations were hosted and paid for by their workplace. Office supplies were provided for staffers’ personal use, and they got a library, post-office and medical services in-house.

Read the book to learn of other characteristics of that bygone era of magazine publishing.

A Good Life

The Book of the Week is “A Good Life, Newspapering and Other Adventures” by Ben Bradlee, published in 1995.

The author was a descendant of a prominent Boston Brahmin family. Unsurprisingly, his older brother and he both graduated from Harvard; never mind their grades. Then, in the middle of WWII, he was stationed on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific.

After surviving the war, Bradlee and the first of his three wives moved to New Hampshire. He was an integral part of a small, regional Sunday-only newspaper until its demise. Subsequent to that, the Washington Post hired him the first of two times at the tail end of 1948.

Bradlee was at Newsweek when John Kennedy was elected president. Kennedy got along with the press famously, like an old, dear friend. In August 1965, Bradleee became managing editor of the Washington Post. “The newsroom was racist… the mind-set of the Post made the editors ask how much an assignment cost, instead of how much the paper needed the story.” Case in point: The Post was (inexcusably) nearly a week late in reporting on the Watts riots.

Newspapermen at that time had five deadlines a day– in determining which stories would be printed in the morning and evening editions, which story would be on page one, etc. Needless to say, Bradlee’s never-ending work meant he never saw his family. Especially after the Washington Post continued publishing installments of the Pentagon Papers in the summer of 1971, after the New York Times was legally banned from doing so. Not that the Post wasn’t banned, but it was willing to go to the mat for the principle of a free press.

Political turmoil was next on the agenda, with the Watergate break-in, on which the inimitable pair Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did a thorough investigation and engaged in bold, ongoing disclosure. Bradlee wrote, “The denials exploded all around us all day like incoming artillery shells.” Bob Dole accused the Democrat, liberal-leaning Post of knowingly helping George McGovern’s campaign by alleging that Nixon committed crimes as part of his reelection campaign. The president was a bit resentful of the intrusion on his activities. Just a bit. Bradlee thought it likely that personally and professionally, his own phones were being tapped and he would be subjected to a rigorous IRS audit.

In May 1973, not to be outdone in pettiness, vengefulness and meanness of spirit, Nixon insinuated to the author and others that their lives were in the balance for turning the screws on him. “All of these lies were on-the-record lies, before television cameras, before reporters, on the telephone, before large audiences, in a generation of Washington reporters generally considered by every generation of editors to be the finest reporters in the land.” People complained that the Post would never have investigated JFK the same way it did Nixon, because the liberal media always went after Republicans only, never Democrats. In recent decades, that changed, but the lying has increased, too.

Read the book to learn more about Bradlee’s families, of a dishonest Post employee, and other challenges the author faced. In sum, “…there is really no protection against a skillful liar, who has earned the trust of his or her editors. That is equally true of business, law, medicine, all professions.”

Live From the Battlefield

The Book of the Week is “Live From the Battlefield” by Peter Arnett, published in 1994. This is the career memoir of a Darwin Award candidate.

Arnett was a war correspondent for wire services and then on TV for CNN. He had “nine lives.” He was the first to report on Laos’ August 1960 coup because he swam across the Mekong River to get to Thailand to file his story. Reporting the story before all other competing news outlets was his employer’s major goal. For the rest of the 1960’s– more than eight years– he was stationed mostly in Jakarta and Vietnam. He braved thick, slimy swamps, snipers, red ants, napalm, violent antiwar street protests, wiretapping and censorship.

General William Westmoreland and his ilk had hubris syndrome. Unfortunately, they were originally provided with the power to orchestrate how they wanted the U.S. to fight the Vietnam war. Needless deaths resulted because Westmoreland failed to break the enemy’s will. In late 1967, “In the year end assessment the AP asked me [Arnett] to provide, I seemed to describe a war on another planet…” compared to the propaganda released from the General’s public relations team. After the author witnessed and reported on the damage and casualties of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Westmoreland “… confidently proclaim[ed] that American forces were on the offensive and the enemy was on the run…”

In the autumn of 1981, videos of news stories had to be shipped from El Salvador to Atlanta for editing about every two days while Arnett was at CNN, so he couldn’t report live. However, CNN scooped the three major TV networks on stories in the United States.

Fast forward to the beginning of 1991. CNN was able to do live reporting. During the first Gulf War, it was the only news organization allowed to have a special conference-call setup between Baghdad and its headquarters in Atlanta, thanks to its special relationship with the Iraqi government. However, most of its staff left before the war started; there was a scary rumor afoot that the luxury al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad where they were stationed would be hit by friendly fire. The journalists were also afraid they would be taken hostage, tortured or killed on false charges, such as spying– because Iraq was the enemy. The Pentagon’s press office reported the official start of the war 27 minutes later than CNN. Even so, Iraq banned Arnett from using CNN’s high-tech equipment shortly after the war’s first bombs fell. He had to use a (voice-only) satellite phone instead, that had been smuggled into Iraq. Making the complicated calls involved using a gasoline generator, satellite dish, keypad, modem, and a ground station in Norway.

Read the book to learn of the controversy over the bombing of a factory that made powdered milk for babies and/or was a war communications center in Iraq; how the United States’ aid affected the state of political and military affairs in Afghanistan during the 1980’s Russian occupation and afterwards, and much more.

Curfewed Night

The Book of the Week is “Curfewed Night” by Basharat Peer, published in 2010. This is a personal account of someone who grew up in the 1980’s in Kashmir– a region that is partly in India and partly in Pakistan. The author’s village was in the Indian portion. The people grew rice, mustard and apples. His grandfather was the headmaster of the local school.

The author’s family was Muslim but espoused some modern, Western values. His grandfather allowed him to read American comic books of superheroes. He also read Urdu and Farsi poetry, and played cricket with other boys.

In early 1990, militants killed hundreds of pro-Indian Muslims and Pandits in Kashmir. The militants were teen boys agitating for Kashmir independence. At fourteen years old, the author got caught up in the excitement of fighting for the cause. His family convinced him not to join in. They wanted him to be a civil servant. He kept his impulsiveness in check, but knew some young men who did not– who died or returned alive from the war, but ran into some serious problems.

The men who were eager to fight had to go to Pakistan for training in small arms, land mines and rocket-propelled grenades for a year or two. They learned to use an assault rifle– an AK-47 (aka Kalashnikov) and throw a hand grenade. By 1992, wealthy families were sending their kids to other continents to get them out of the war zone. Although the author’s family couldn’t afford to do that, it did send him to boarding school in Delhi.

Read the book to learn what happened to Peer, about religious conflicts in Kashmir, and the violence of the separatist movement, which continued for more than a decade.

China Underground

The Book of the Week is “China Underground” by Zachary Mexico, published in 2009. This is an American journalist’s account of China’s state of affairs in the early 2000’s.

The author interviewed citizens in various walks of life to get a bead on the economic, social and cultural atmosphere in the nation. He found that entrepreneurs abounded in the “new China” but corruption and vice fueled a large portion of the economy. Bribery of government contacts was a crucial factor in making money.

Government censorship of all entertainment was draconian. People might have been getting richer, but they still feared getting arrested for exercising free speech. In early 2007, China’s prisons were filled with more journalists than any other nation’s– thirty-one to be exact.

The author encountered a leader of a Black Society gang that ran rackets in construction, karaoke bars and seafood importation. He also met a prostitute and a Nigerian drug smuggler, both of whom would stop their illicit activities once they earned sufficient money to do so. He visited a brothel disguised as a beauty salon, as prostitution was supposedly illegal. There was a black market in gay porn flicks. Another interesting factoid: The pay-by-the-hour hotel was located right next to the university in Wuhan. For, six or eight students lived in a two hundred square foot dorm room. Two hundred thousand students populated the campus. Wuhan is one of China’s highest-temperature cities in summertime, about one hundred degrees Fahrenheit daily. As in all the cities, it has visible, lung-assaulting air pollution.

Smoking was a given in public places of shopping, eating, drinking and touring; even hospitals (!) Many apartments sported solar panels to heat their water, so when the sun failed to shine, there was no hot water. The author learned that he could go to a public bathhouse’s sauna to take a shower, relax with drugs or alcohol, and/or a comfort woman.

As of 2007, the country still lacked widespread use of credit cards, so it was shut out of a whole host of economic sectors, such as online transactions, travel booking, entrepreneurial opportunities, etc. The Chinese education system focused on regurgitation of facts but neglected to teach understanding of concepts. Cheating was rampant; even plagiarism was pervasive at the best universities. No one wanted to lose face in a scandal with bad publicity, so officials looked the other way.

Such were China’s priorities.

All of this contradicts the belief that if a nation like China is evolving at a fast pace economically, then it must also be moving in a positive direction culturally and socially. Explosive growth has actually led to extreme income disparity, and resentment among the lower classes. Additionally, the rats in the “rat race” have an indifferent attitude toward deaths resulting from a lack of health and safety regulations, because that is the cost of economic progress in their society. However, even during the early stages of their industrial development, most other countries valued human life to a much higher degree than China.

Read the book to learn of the craze called The Killing People Club, the author’s interactions with a rock star, a filmmaker, and a graduate student, and much more.

Side Note: This blogger was bothered by the author’s frequent use of the word “couple”:

“…couple more overpriced beers…”

“…happens a couple times…”

“…for a couple hours…”

“…a couple other guys…”