Personal Account of Journalist or Professor, Miscellaneous – Page 5

how to rig an election (sic) / Team of Vipers

American politics has boiled down to the worst traits of human nature. Here are two books that put them in a nutshell.

The First Book of the Week is “how to rig an election (sic), Confessions of a Republican Operative” by Allen Raymond with Ian Spiegelman, published in 2008.

The author, originally from New Jersey, started his political career in the early 1990’s. He worked on a Republican campaign there in which “… we smeared them [the opposing candidates] as Trenton insiders who fired people, screwed you out of your money, and gave kickback deals to people who donated to their campaign.” Creativity in committing evil is an essential trait for a political operative. This author had it in spades.

For, the smearing part was outrageous lies in the form of attack ads. And they were cleverly timed, spread far and wide and believed by voters so that the victims couldn’t defend themselves or strike back easily. This is now what American campaigning is all about.

By 1995, the author had done his sleazy job so well, he was named chief of staff of a freshman New Jersey Congressman. He was one of the youngest of his kind, with blank-check security clearance in the Capitol. His boss was assigned to the Transportation Committee. Members of that Committee preside over an industry with big-money political donors who pay to play.

Raymond dodged a bullet when he wasn’t convicted for launching a robocall campaign that misled voters with slurs that completely misrepresented the candidates opposing his client, at a politically sensitive time period.

The author’s philosophy, when he was caught committing what was considered a crime by the Justice Department, was this: Everyone in politics can behave (or misbehave) as they please, as long as they don’t get caught breaking the law. The author didn’t (!) consider himself unethical when he “… obstructed a political party’s ability to contact voters.”

More specifically, during an election, his political-telemarketing business jammed phone lines of Democratic candidates. To his credit, beforehand, he checked with an attorney to learn whether that act was legal, and was initially told that it wasn’t illegal.

Read the book to learn the details (hint– Raymond didn’t pass Go, and he didn’t collect $200).

The Second Book of the Week is “Team of Vipers, My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House” by Cliff Sims, Former Special Assistant to the President, published in 2019.

Sims was born in Alabama. His father was a Baptist pastor. He started as a blogger writing on politics. In 2016, his influential “Yellowhammer” was instrumental in ousting Alabama’s governor for having an affair.

The author founded a media company before going to work for the Trump administration. In August 2015, Sims hosted a radio interview with the future president. This was two months after the candidate had thrown his hat into the ring.

Sims asked tough questions such as what had led Trump to change his views, since “He [Trump] had come under scrutiny for his many contributions to Democratic candidates over the years– including the Clintons…” And his utterances had been on the liberal side of the political spectrum. Trump waffled in answering that question, and in a downright cringeworthy way when asked about abortion.

Nevertheless, Sims’ communication skills and contacts led him to be tapped to become a close aide to Trump prior to election day. In October 2016, with the surfacing of a horribly embarrassing 2005 video clip featuring a Trump who was shamelessly, crudely expressing his sexist views– his election chances were suddenly judged to be almost nil. Sims proved to be particularly loyal to the candidate, anyway.

Sims described his West Wing workplace as easy in one way. Trump had a hands-off management style because he trusted his minions’ judgement to take action pursuant to his agenda. They could do so without having to get approval from a hierarchy of bureaucracy.

But its internal politics were like a chaotic corporate ladder– not unlike Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice”– a bunch of mean-spirited, petty, vengeful people jockeying for power, who spread vicious rumors, and publicly dressed each other down for their own selfish ends.

The root of the problem was that “Roles, goals and objectives weren’t clearly defined.” The workers had titles without job descriptions. They cooperated to help their employer only insofar as they helped themselves. Trump didn’t want to hear about employees’ petty squabbles. He didn’t care whether valuable people left for nicer pastures. He just wanted to see loyal people.

Admittedly, Sims himself took part in the adolescent antics. Clearly, such an environment is unsustainable in the long run for anyone; it is psychologically exhausting.

Read the book to learn the ugly details of Sims’ West-Wing-insider experiences attempting to do the president’s bidding while trying to avoid the social manipulation of his colleagues borne of jealousy of him– due to his disproportionately high amount of face time with the big boss.

Reporter

The Book of the Week is “Reporter, a Memoir” by Seymour M. Hersh, published in 2018.

Born in 1937 in Chicago, Hersh took over his family’s dry-cleaning business for his mother when his father died in 1954. For, his twin brother was busy at college and his older twin sisters were elsewhere. Upon attending junior college, he met a professor who changed his life; who told him that the University of Chicago was a better place to develop his talent in writing.

When Hersh worked as a copyboy for City News in Chicago, “The cops were on the take and the mob ran the city… The guys [reporters] on the street who did not get their facts straight or were consistently being out-reported did not last long.” Apparently, times have changed. In 1959, Hersh became a full-fledged reporter.

In 1966, after having acquired experience in various places, Hersh began earning his reputation for exposing ugly truths, at once depressing and infuriating, mostly about the U.S. government. No lie about the Vietnam War was too extreme to cover up the Johnson administration’s embarrassing, unethical goings-on. He and I.F. Stone were two of the few journalists who ferreted out the truth, but, since they were against the war, were smeared as pinko at best, and couldn’t be believed.

In late 1967, Hersh sold out and became press secretary for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. He lasted three months, for various reasons; after which, he returned to informing the public via New York Times articles, and books, about controversial, big, dirty secrets that led to serious harm to animals and humans, being perpetrated by the U.S. government.

For instance, hundreds of thousands of animals were killed by anthrax and Q fever germs (among other toxins and biological substances) in experiments around the world, in research funded by the United States.

Dugway Proving Ground in Nevada was NOT an isolated incident. “It was the same old story: A local community financially dependent on the military had kept its collective mouth shut” in connection with the deaths of six thousand sheep due to a nerve gas mishap.

Nixon tried to do an end-run around pesky Geneva Convention provisions in connection with “legalizing” defoliants and herbicides in South Vietnam. As is well known, his presidency revolved around the war. Not fun and profit.

After the war, Hersh continued churning out books and articles on Watergate, and other scandals of which the public wouldn’t have been informed but for him. Two New Yorker magazine articles ran to 25 pages each. They “… were fact-checked line by line, by two experienced young women who essentially moved to Washington for weeks.” Again, apparently, times have changed.

Hersh was subjected to harsh criticism from people who admitted they hadn’t even read his (admittedly long) book on Kissinger. Some things never change.

Read this book to learn of Hersh’s investigations into: the My Lai Massacre (whose details were revealed thanks to him), the evil activities in which Nixon, Kissinger, Robert McNamara, CIA members and others engaged, Osama bin Laden’s murder, and much more.

The Place to Be – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Place to Be– Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News” by Roger Mudd, published in 2008. The author was a TV journalist. The “glory days of television news” of fifty years ago was comprised of the same kind of sleaze that is current politicians’ public and personal behavior (i.e., the Democrat or Republican-funded publicity stunt of the week– they take turns, especially during election season).

Born in 1928 in Washington, D.C., Mudd began his career in 1953. At CBS, in July 1961, he got his first opportunity to report news on camera. Later, he was assigned to cover Capitol Hill, an inferior territory compared to the White House. In autumn, 1963, the duration of a television news show increased from fifteen to thirty minutes. That was a big deal. Thereafter, more people chose to get their main source of news from TV rather than newspapers and radio.

Because public viewing of the 1952 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings proved to be an embarrassment to the U.S. government, House Speaker Sam Rayburn banned the presence of TV cameras from House Committee sessions until 1970, and live coverage, until 1979; in the Senate, until 1986.

In December 1970, Mudd unwisely delivered a speech at Washington and Lee University, stating his opinion that radio and TV news were information sources inferior to print; the former appealed to the audience’s emotions in short sound bites; the latter, to intellect and in depth.

CBS didn’t take kindly to Mudd’s truthful assessment. Of course, his career suffered after that. He was passed over to fill in for Walter Cronkite during the summer, and later, to become the one anchorman on the evening news. Vice President Spiro Agnew at the time had been on the rampage, attacking the media for attacking the government.

Read the book to learn of additional similarities between TV “news” of Mudd’s generation, and now.

No Is NOT Enough

The Book of the Week is “No is NOT Enough, RESISTING Trump’s Shock Politics AND WINNING THE WORLD WE NEED” By Naomi Klein, published in 2017.

The author explained that a tribal-unity mentality took hold of consumerism starting in the 1980’s. Attaching oneself to a big brand name to feel accepted by a group became the new normal. Donald Trump has latched onto that trend, by generating investments in properties that have borne his brand name in places like New York City, Florida, Dubai, India, Canada, Brazil, and South Korea.

According to the author, at the book’s writing, sweatshops in China made his and his daughter’s clothing lines. The Trump family sees public office “…as a short-term investment to enormously swell the value of your [sic– Trump’s, not your] commercial brand in the long run… It’s the U.S. government as a for-profit family business.”

Despite Trump’s extensive deregulation of the oil industry, one really fortunate factor– currently slowing the rate of occurrence of environmental and historically redundant catastrophes (that have been decades in the making)– is that low oil prices have deterred oil companies from engaging in super-expensive, super-damaging, super-risky fracking and deep-sea drilling.

The author also discussed the ideology of the extreme Right– neoliberalism– in which the free market should always dominate, “… regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all.”

Leaders with sociopathic tendencies are setting bad examples of how to treat people and how to behave. This is disturbing because the fish rots from the head down. The author’s description of the moral characters of many of Trump’s appointees in particular, are reminiscent of the people in the “boardroom scene” of the movie “Dogma” starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (Watch the clip on YouTube, of course.)

Every day he has been in office, all Trump has done is attack, lash out, threaten or criticize. He has been a regular Don Rickles, without the comedy. A great New Year’s gift would be a Trump “Hissy-Fit-of-the-Day Calendar.” Here are just a few of the ideals, organizations and people with which or with whom he has expressed his displeasure, verbally and textually: the Constitutional right of due process, NFL players, wildlife, federal unions, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, liberal world order, the Federal Reserve Bank, Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani, Amazon.com, Red Hen, the European Union, GOP Senator Jennifer Hansler, the preexisting-conditions-provision of heath insurance, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Harley Davidson, transgender inmates, Syria, salmon recovery, late-night TV show hosts, Palestinians, counsel Robert Mueller, NATO, Representative Mark Sanford, women’s health care, national monuments, breastfeeding, the global trade system, wind power, Theresa May…

The world is moving closer to another bout of systematic brainwashing, blaming, and genocide of late because market economies are failing to give sufficient dignity to the downtrodden through affordable housing, healthcare and education. Most employers no longer provide affordable health insurance, and retirement plans– as they automatically did decades ago. Education costs have soared. So new graduates start their careers with crushing debt load.

Read the book to learn of the kinds of situations toward which the Trump administration is heading (besides those mentioned in the above paragraph)– needless deaths and preventable damage, like from Hurricane Katrina (and why other similar disasters stemming from disasters are likely to occur again– due to opportunists); why Hillary Clinton lost her bid for president; how certain European countries are taking steps to save the environment; and the scary, depressing consequences of not challenging the status quo, and how to do it.

Deadline

The Book of the Week is “Deadline” by James Reston, published in 1991. This is the career memoir of James “Scotty” Reston. Originally from Scotland, he became a highly respected employee at the New York Times for many years.

In 1928, the author began to attend the University of Illinois’ school of journalism, whose tuition was $28 per semester. In his senior year, the bank from which he wrote the check to pay such tuition, failed due to the Great Depression. Fortunately, the governor of Ohio, a friend of his, lent him the money to continue at the school.

When Reston was 25, the Associated Press hired him to be an urban columnist six days a week. Perks of the job included free restaurant meals, theater shows, opera, etc. with the understanding that there would be favorable coverage of the providing entities.

In the mid 1930’s, the New York Times was one of several newspapers in New York. It competed by sending seventy (!) reporters compared to the others’ twenty, to cover an important story.

Reston wrote about many of the twentieth century’s important political and economic issues– the scandals, wars and international incidents. He lamented over the fact that “The government accuses the press of threatening the national security by printing the truth but sees no such threat when the government itself tells lies.”

A large portion of the book was dedicated to Reston’s opinions on America’s foreign policy through the decades. He believed that the country remained dominant, rich and strong after World War II despite its political scandals and periods of disarray, because its democracy, although imperfect, was still way superior to the kinds fascism, socialism and communism practiced by other nations.

Read the book to learn the details.

Madness Under the Royal Palms

The Book of the Week is “Madness Under the Royal Palms” by Laurence Leamer, published in 2009. This book conveys the nature of the people who live on the island of Palm Beach, Florida.

The posh area surrounded by the Intracoastal Waterway is where social climbers show off their fancy, expensive residences, cars, boats and significant others. Some are pretenders, frauds or criminals, but most of them, even with all of their trappings of wealth, are unhappy. No flaunting would be necessary if they were truly secure with themselves.

The author described two deaths attributable to the haughty environment, plus a few “May-December” marriages that ended in divorce that: a) included litigation over the prenuptial agreement as a way of protecting one’s assets from a gold-digging spouse (and ex-spouses; who might buy a $12,500 red-ostrich pocketbook at Hermes on Newbury Street), and b) the traumatic impact on the children involved.

On another topic, “It was not just manners that were breaking down but a profound social code that had governed Palm Beach for a hundred years.” One example of disruption of the status quo was the approval of Jews and gays as members at a country club. Donald Trump’s club, Mar-A-Lago broke the exclusivity barrier in Palm Beach. It wasn’t that he necessarily favored civil rights, however; it was merely a happy side effect of his desperation for money when he started the club in the mid-1980’s. One example of desecration of the social code- rudeness unprecedented for the 1990’s– could be seen in the bribing of valet parking attendants so boors could cut the line of people waiting to have their cars fetched after attending a social event.

Read the book to learn what transpires annually at the hundreds of Palm Beach charity events, balls, celebratory meals, fashion shows and parties, etc.; the gossip sources, and the current distinguishing feature of the truly wealthy.

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.