August 22, 1967
Page 23521
A SPEECH BY JOURNALIST ERIC SEVAREIID
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, Eric Sevareid is one of America's most responsible and respected journalists and commentators.
I had the good fortune recently to read a speech Mr. Sevareid made in January to the Massachusetts State Legislature. His speech was entitled "Politics and the Press."
Mr. Sevareid concludes his remarks raising basic and essential questions about our foreign policy, questions which each citizen should come to grips with.
Mr. Sevareid challenges yesterday's answers to the new and complicated international problems of today, and he calls for a more learned and understanding appraisal of the world and our role in it.
Mr. President, I highly recommend Mr. Sevareid's remarks, and ask unanimous consent that the speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
POLITICS AND THE PRESS
(An address by Eric Sevareid, CBS News national correspondent, delivered before a joint session of the Massachusetts State Legislature, Boston, Mass., January 24, 1967)
I cannot imagine an occasion in my life of greater satisfaction and moment than this one. I had never thought that I would one day be welcomed before this ancient body, that I would climb this hill in this Commonwealth, which become landmarks on the indelible map of the inner mind when the schoolboy first opens the book of the great American story. Here, more than anywhere else, I should think, began the process of welding the Athenians' art of democracy with the Romans' science of government.
I was a schoolboy on the Dakota prairies where all was new and raw and wanted building. At times, as my understanding increased, I envied those of my generation who were born in places like this, the old and established places, and had, I thought, only to open their minds and arms and inherit it all, ready made. But I am grateful, now, for my origins. At each stage of the westering impulse America re-made itself socially and physically from the beginnings, from the log house and the loneliness, the hand axe and the terrible labors. Something of what your forebears, very long ago, experienced on these shores of rock my forebears, not very long ago, experienced on those plains of snow and dust. I understood the Pilgrims and what it meant for them far sooner than I understood Harvard and its meaning.
But there was a precious thing we did not have to build, which we took from you. It came through the few books in the library off Main Street; it came through the speeches of the occasional Chautauqua lecturer who appeared in the Opera House above the general store; it came through the talk of my father at the dinner table. New England, Massachusettts, Boston – the great men, their electrifying, illuminating words, as stirring to us then out there as they must have been to your ancestors when they were spoken and written here. They formed the invisible environment in which we lived, the most lasting environment of all. By this mysterious alchemy the miracle of Americanism of national union was performed, quietly, in secret as it were, across thousands of miles, the invisible cords stretching into every valley and clearing, guiding us, binding us all in the face of the worst that the world and our own worse nature could bring against us.
So it is good to be here, where all seems familiar and reassuring; nothing strange; a place I have, in a sense, inhabited all my life.
POLITICS AND THE PRESS
I am here to talk to you about politics and the press, and their relationship, the high art of governing men and the profession or the calling, at least, of informing and explaining to men.
I represent what is called electronic journalism, to use a phrase I once coined in one of my less graceful moments: It was, with radio, the function of informing and explaining through the ear; and now with television, through both ear and eye. And it has become the most immediate, dramatic, in some ways the most powerful form of journalism. Certainly, the most personal, as the affectionate letters from strangers and the denunciatory telegrams arriving at offices like mine attest every day.
The politician, local or national, the journalist, in print or by broadcast, have more than a little in common, beyond the fact that we make our mistakes in public and have no hiding place. About eighty years ago James Russell Lowell wrote: "In a world of daily – nay, almost hourly, journalism, every clever man, every man who thinks himself clever or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point blank and at the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought."
About a hundred and eighty years ago, John Adams wrote, sardonically, of the Congress: "every man in it is a great man, an orator, a critic, a statesman; and therefore every man, upon every question, must show his oratory, his criticism and his political abilities."
Not quite on every subject or question anymore, for the journalist or the politician. Among both, the specialists have developed. But on a frightfully large number of subjects and questions. It will always be this way; it has to be this way. You require no explaining why a world of specialists only would be a jungle, the world of our final floundering. Serious statesmanship and serious communication with others cannot exist without the generalist, the man of the broad and liberal experience and teaching, the philosopher, homespun or literary, of the human condition.
The general politician and the general journalist – we are jacks of all trades and masters of none save the trade of being jack of all, a trade by no means easily mastered. We must always know enough of what is old to recognize what is new, enough of what has been good for man to sense what is going to harm him. People like you work the cutting edge of history; people like me along with you, live at the growing points of society. And we live together, in a frequently miserable marriage of necessity as restlessly close as any two elements of society knows. You make a bit of history every day; we write the first rough draft of history every day. Together we compose the invisible environment of the American mind, make the community weather, sound the tones of the day. And frequently, we detest each other, because as in any marriage, we happen to have certain conflicts of interest. These can be ameliorated but never solved. They would be solved only in the event that one side or the other abandoned its responsibilities, in which case, I fear, this free society would be free no longer.
THE "CREDIBILITY" GAP
The relationship is a daily improvisation as are most of the creative tensions in American political life, including those I would suppose, between executive and legislative and judiciary.
In the national capital, where I live and work, the relationship is severely exacerbated at the present time. The phrase "credibility gap" has become a tiresome cliché already, but the very fact of its existence suggests that the condition is unusual. It is unusual only in degree, but I must say that in a quarter century of reporting Washington I have never seen it in such a high degree as this. The press – print and broadcast – is in part responsible because it has not always understood what the administration was saying and has, on these occasions, translated caution to mean dissembling. But the press is not very different from what it was in the capital five, ten or twenty years ago. It is the governing personnel that has changed the most. And the President is the key to this. It is not only that he is unusually sensitive to criticism by nature, not much given to a humorous recognition of his mistakes and bred in the manipulative techniques of the corridors of Capitol Hill – it is also that he is the kind of master personality to whom other personalities, other egos, exist chiefly as tools and extensions of his own. He therefore has created a certain claustrophobic feeling in the Administration, a certain spirit of intimidation which encourages his lieutenants and assistants to release what news is favorable and to withhold what is unfavorable, in order both to protect the President and to protect themselves from the President.
SOURCES OF MUTUAL MI TRUST
We had some of this under President Kennedy who could also be quick of temper and sharp of tongue and who also tended to divide the journalists into friends and enemies; we had some of it under Eisenhower, not much under Truman, and, unless my memories of those days are faulty, very little under Roosevelt in whose administration powerful personalities – like Ickes, Hull, Hopkins, Wallace – were not only permitted to exist but who spoke out powerfully, often against one another, sometimes even against their chief.
A credibility gap, a lack of trust between the federal government and the press and people – this is a most serious thing, one not easily put right. But I have the feeling it is magnified because of the context in which it exists. This President is at the low point of what may be only another political cycle of a familiar kind. He has rapidly escalated the military effort abroad and it seems caught in a log jam; he has rapidly escalated his domestic welfare projects at home and they seem caught in a log jam. For the time, at any rate, the people have small sense of affairs moving, here or overseas. If and when they begin to move, we will all feel that in our spirits; the press generally will forget its present pique, will give credit when it is due, and then, I think, we may all forget that phrase, "credibility gap.
But I remain a journalist and instinctively I side with the press in the ultimate squaring of this particular account. So I shall defer any full flowering of sympathy with officials who feel badly treated by the press until that marvelous day, when I wake to see public officials complain that this newspaper or that commentator has bestowed greater praise upon them than they deserve, which, indeed, happens frequently. That will be a day to remember!
AN HISTORIC CONDITION
Bad blood between those who govern the people and those who monitor the governors and report to the people is nothing new in the American story. It is a condition we have never lived without.
George Washington sickened of the treatment he received from much of the early American press. Thomas Jefferson, who said once that he would choose newspapers over government if he could have but one or the other, left the White House as a reader of only one paper, the Richmond Enquirer, and that chiefly for the advertisements because, he said, they contained the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
I think news reporting of government has greatly changed since then. So, I fear, have the advertisements.
But that there has been a substantial growth in the quality of American journalism is as clear to me as that there has been a substantial growth in the quality of our legislatures, state and federal.
You would have to search hard for a Jefferson or a John Adams in the Federal Congress of today, but you must search hard, also, to find much corruption by money, to find sluggards, drunks, the boors and the ignorant. The pace is too fast, the load too heavy, our public affairs far too complicated to afford such men, anymore.
I believe the American press to be better educated, more responsible and alert than it has ever been. I am aware of certain recent strictures, including the remark of Professor Arthur Schlesinger, late of these parts, who said that after working in the White House he could never again take seriously the testimony of journalism on important government decisions. Its relation to reality, he said, "is often less than the shadows in Plato's cave."
The professor's charge was answered years before it was made, by Mr. Walter Lippmann who said, "The theory of a free press is that the truth will emerge from free reporting and free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account."
The ultimate burden must fall upon the individual citizen. If he wishes to be well informed he must read widely in the press and listen widely to the broadcasts. No one example of either can serve him more than very partially.
The press is indeed powerful. And is therefore dangerous indeed. Power in any form carries danger within it somewhere; and, as John Adams tried to warn his countrymen long ago, "power always thinks it has a great soul." But if there is an imbalance of power in our country today, I beg you to consider whether it is the power of the press that has been doing the growing at the expense of the others, or the power of government, specifically the federal government and more specifically the Presidency, which acts more on its own in direct ratio to the fatefulness of the decisions to be taken, the Cuban missile decision, and the decision to make a major war out of the Vietnamese guerrilla war, very much included.
POWER AND ITS HAZARDS
Power is required if we are to do anything, good as well as evil. But we had better, you and I as well as Presidents, be frightened of the power we have; the real danger begins at the point where we are no longer frightened. If it is true, as a Frenchman recently said, that in this life men must choose between anxiety and boredom, all those of us who hold a fragment of power had better be anxious. This is an anxiety of an evangelical nature, our saving grace. We cannot have it both ways; we cannot ask authority over the minds and lives of others, rather direct in your case, indirect in mine, and also ask to sleep easy in our beds.
No doubt we would all sleep, if not well, a little bit easier if we could use our instruments, law and communications, better than we do. I am a more credible authority on the fallings in my field than on those in yours, so let me glance around my own house which has a fair proportion of glass in its walls. I began broadcasting news and impressions about the news twenty-seven years ago when the great war was starting and at the scene of it. I might have remained with the printed press and its established comforting traditions. But something exciting was happening, the beginnings of the first new form of journalism in a very long time. We all then found it nerve- wracking, difficult. We were an odd lot – some of us, like me, better reporters than speakers, others the reverse. But we were, I think essentially responsible, under the intuitive caution and common sense of the leaders, like the late Ed Murrow, who set the tone and the guidelines for the new profession. We had to create a tradition, as it were.
The obstacles were, and are, enormous. One is the basic nature of the broadcasting industry. In this country, many newspapers were founded by men with something particular to say and who wished to say it. A lot of them became simple business properties as they were handed down through the generations, but a meaning, a mystique had been established. Radio and then television stations were started simply and purely as business. Their owners then found themselves, often to their surprise and confusion, custodians of free expression, regents and guardians, along with publishers, of the First Amendment, but with their role and rights still somewhat obscure by reason of their existence through specific government license, not true in the case of the papers,
Then, too, by the nature of the structure, the news functions of networks and stations constitute only a department in a great entertainment industry. The news people live in constant competition with the entertainment people for budgeted funds. Even more acutely, they must compete for time, for minutes and hours, and in a more decisive way than a managing editor competes with the advertising department for a newspaper's space.
BROADCASTING AND PRINT
I am sure that broadcasting and the printed press are much more complementary than competitive to one another. Most comparisons between their output are rather meaningless. Their opportunities and limitations are wholly different. A newspaper's space can be expanded, but there are only so many hours in the day. A newspaper's space can be contracted, when there is little news to give, but broadcasting must live with the fifteen minute quarter-hour and the thirty minute half-hour.
A newspaper can use its space concurrently, broadcasting must use time consecutively. Page one, that is, can show you simultaneously a variety of news items, some played prominently, some obscurely, and the reader's eye can skip about to take its choice. Broadcasting must deliver one news item at a time, so that the story of a bus accident at Fourth and Main receives essentially the same prominence as the story of a great revolution in China. A newspaper can offer details including many statistics because the reader can go over it all again if need be; the broadcaster cannot because the listener cannot.
Daily newspapers have radically declined in numbers; broadcasting stations – radio especially – have radically increased. There are probably now too few of the first, too many of the second. In any case this double phenomenon obliges a negative answer to those who contend that stations, because they use public airways under government license, have no right to editorialize, on the news, while newspapers do. Most do it badly, timidly, but that, too, may change with time. If they have this right, as common sense says they do, then they have the right in full and may properly endorse political candidates, a matter now much in contention.
It is not proper that the more numerous and pervasive medium should have fewer liberties than the less numerous and pervasive, but it is not proper, either, that it should handle its liberties in careless manner. Radio is a case in point where news is concerned. There are now so many radio stations, they have sprung up so quickly that professionalism with the news has taken hold only here and there. News is thrown on the market as quickly and cheaply as recorded jazz or used cars or deodorants. These hourly little swatches of news, delivered in the self-conscious baritone of youngsters just out of their high school or college speech class – these I would call the "non-news programs." People tune into them, I think, not to know what has happened, but what has not happened. To make sure that the atomic bomb has not fallen, that bubonic plague is not sweeping the nation. It would be as useful just to ring a bell every hour on the hour and have someone cry, "All's well." It would also provide time for an extra detergent commercial.
I am not at all sure that radio news is getting better. Television news by the networks and the larger stations I think is getting steadily better. The original trouble with it was that its managers fell in love with the pictures and some of its practitioners fell in love with their own image on the screen. What didn't move, wasn't news. An idea wasn't news, because you couldn't put a camera on it. A number of broadcasters thought – and some still do – that they had to perform the news.
So we have seen too many character actors and too few minds of character in action. This is changing, steadily for the better. We are learning that a few thoughtful words can often be more revealing than ten thousand pictures and that the people welcome them.
BUILT-IN PROBLEMS
We have some built-in problems, the answers to which we haven't yet come upon. One is the problem of dealing with a complex news story with the simplicity demanded in a hard news program. The printed press has the same problem. Long ago it invented the so-called "all purpose" news story technique which puts the most dramatic single fact in the lead, following it with the less dramatic but often essential facts so that any editor can cut off the story where he wishes. Editing from the bottom up. That is the way the news agencies in particular do it. As James Reston of The New York Times points out, this practice sharpens and inflates the news. It encourages, he remarked, not a balanced but a startling presentation of the news. Time after time, with a complicated story, the result is distortion.
The same is true of the picture medium. I was extremely conscious of this last spring in Vietnam.
Buddhists staged some riots in Saigon and Da Nang. The TV cameras wheeled up. They focus, of course, on whatever is most dramatically in motion. They act like a flashlight beam in the darkness. Everything else around, however vital to the full story, is lost in the darkness and ceases to exist. The pictures could not show you that a block away from the Saigon riots the populace was shopping, chatting, sitting in restaurants in total normalcy. The riots involved a tiny proportion of the people in either city; yet the effect of the pictures in this country, including in the Congress, was explosive. People here thought Vietnam was tearing itself apart, that civil war was raging. Nothing of the sort was happening.
Our problem is to find the techniques that will balance the spot news and the spot picture and put them in proportion, and without letting hours or days go by until we can do a special report or a long documentary to explain it all as it really is. This is one reason television news is going back to the daily commentator or "analyst" as they are now called. The men who were used heavily and quite well in the hey-day of radio.
I could talk at great length about these practical challenges and responses, but perhaps to no great purpose. The true challenge, the deep and abiding problem is something of a very different order.
It is to see the world not only steadily and whole, but as it is, not as our minds have been conditioned to believe it is. To think closely about this is, very often, to feel one's heart sink.
Why has this been called the "age of the journalist"? Why are most of the really enthralling, best-selling books no longer novels of fiction but accounts of real events and real persons? It is because history is moving in geometric progression, because public events more and more dominate private lives, because the most vivid imagination can scarcely compete with the daily realities. Whatever men can think of doing, science and technology now permit them to do, and they do it. As journalists we are not keeping pace with the realities; we report them but we do not truly understand them, so we do not really explain. I have read much and listened much but I do not understand what will really happen, to what end, when we have men on the moon; I thought I knew something about China but I am at a loss to perceive the inner meaning of the present convulsion in the world's biggest country. I have closely followed the civil rights story but if you asked me now to explain what lies in the deepest recesses of the heart of a Negro boy in an American ghetto, I could not tell you. I am sure they will build the supersonic jet passenger plane but I cannot tell you whether it will improve human life or make it just a bit worse. I am told by experts that a given business, or for that matter, the federal government, can grow to any size at all and under the modern methods of management, operate just as efficiently as when they were small, but I don't know why and I don't quite believe it. I have read much and seen much of the country called Vietnam but I have never dared try to explain, for want of conviction, why the South Vietnamese fight with poor spirits and the Northerners with determination.
THE REAL "CREDIBILITY GAP"
Here lies a credibility gap that is really worth talking about. Constantly, our measurements of things fall short of the realities the people see. It is not that we hide or alter the truth; it is that we often cannot penetrate the truth. It is deep in our American faith to believe that progress, human and material, must inevitably spread here among ourselves and in the distant impoverished lands.
It may be quite as likely that catastrophe is approaching, not the millennium. But, poor creatures that we are, we cannot say even this for sure.
My immediate fear is that the gap lies not only between the journalists and the truth but between our national leadership and the truth. I fear the intellectual lag; I fear that yesterday's truths have become today's dogma. Is Mao Tse-Tung's China really to be compared with Hitler's Germany?
Is Vietnam really today's Czechoslovakia? Does communism always and everywhere require physical containment or does it not have within itself its own built-in braking mechanism, its own containment? Is it true today, as the administration believes, and as seemed very true in the thirties and forties, that peace and freedom are indivisible? Or is it the real truth that peace and freedom will continue to coexist with war and tyranny as they have coexisted through most human history?
Up to what point is it the responsibility of the United States to try to renovate the economies, the institutions, the ways of life of distant and alien societies, and can this, in fact, be really done? Is democracy an exportable item at all? It is the basic faith of our foreign policy that peace, democracy and material progress are not, each of them, merely good in themselves, but interdependent. I try to find evidence from history that this is so, but I find very little.
Could it be that we are making a gigantic mistake, that we fail to perceive what Archimedes perceived? The Greek mathematician, with his levers and pulleys and screws, said that he could move the world – if he had a place to stand. He knew he did not. He knew his feet had no separate foundation, that he was in and of the world. As a country, we often seem to think that we stand in a separate place. Perhaps this is why we talk about "conquering nature" or "conquering space." But we are of nature, we are in space. We talk of renovating, uplifting almost all the world, of creating what Secretary Rusk calls a "world order" to govern relations between the nations. But we are in and of the world with our due share of ignorance, sloth, fears, dangers, prejudice. So much so that we have not been able to renovate our own society, the fearful problems of which pile higher and higher.
THE FATAL MISTAKES
Again and again we must remind ourselves of that truth which John Adams perceived as he walked this hill, long ago: "Power always thinks it has a great soul" In that thought lies the secret of the terrible, sometimes fatal mistakes made by every great national power in the past. If our country is indeed the last, best hope of man, it is imperative that somehow, some way, America prove to be the exception, in the long litany of power misused.
We are involved in all this together, you of government, we of the press. We think of ourselves as practical men and we see with much the same eye. We have read our economics, our political science, our sociology. The federal government, like the American press, habitually sends men of that training and cast of mind to foreign places and they habitually measure affairs and prospect in those places with these instruments, the only ones they know. And time after time their diagnoses and remedies prove to be wrong. Today's Africa is the best example of this I know.
The preparatory work, helped along by many Americans as well as Europeans, the planning for political institutions and economic processes was done with dedication, yet in one place after another it was all blown to pieces when independence came.
For the critical forces there had little to do with institutions, with politics or economics; they had to do with ancient tradition, profound emotions. The local witch doctor often proved a better judge of his people and their needs than the traveling expert from M.I.T. Among foreigners there it was the anthropologists who were closer to the truth with their predictions, and the psychologists, the philosophers and the poets.
I believe the American State Department must think hard about this. I know the American press, broadcasting included, must think hard. It must develop the new generation of journalists in a different way, with our training but much more besides, including the most exotic languages of Asian peoples, much history, philosophy, comparative religions, psychology and world literatures. For America is now everywhere in the world, touching everything and we shall not understand what we are doing in this new and revolutionary world unless we find fresh eyes and ears.
It was of this that Dr. Charles Malik, the statesman of Lebanon, was speaking, some years ago before a gathering of journalists in New York. He perceived then what I have been able to perceive with clarity only recently and after much renewed travel abroad.
It so happens, he said, that precisely at the moment when they are most desperately needed, the liberal arts are in a state of crisis. "Do you think," he asked, "that the coincidence of these two crises – the special crises of the liberal arts and the general crisis of the world – is purely accidental?
"If you aim," he said to us, "at the real truth in your mediation, not the obvious truth, not the superficial truth, but the deep, hidden tragic truth; if you always faithfully bring out what is ultimately at stake today, namely that there is a rebellion of the elements against all that you have held true and holy and sacred for thousands of years then," he said, "I believe you will put the entire world in your debt."
That, I am afraid is the real dimension of the task that faces the man of the press today, especially in this earth-shaking nation of the United States. In considerable measure, it is also the task of the American man of politics.
I am not sure that either you or I have chosen the most completely satisfying work in which we spend our days – though I suspect neither of us would want it different. I can only suggest that neither one of us is likely to die of boredom.