Author: terencef

40 Years Later: A Look Back at the Yom Kippur War

It should not have come as a surprise to Israel.

Not after Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat threatened war repeatedly, not after Egypt and Syria assembled massive military forces on the frontiers, not after Jordan’s King Hussein flew secretly to Israel to warn Prime Minister Golda Meir that an attack was imminent.

But it did.

And when full-scale war erupted at 2 p.m. on October 6, 1973, Israel was rocked back on its heels. In the first three days, Egypt re-crossed the Suez Canal and retook portions of the western Sinai; Syria rolled across the Golan Heights and shelled Israel’s northern settlements.

Israel hurriedly mobilized, fought back, regained lost territory, pushed forward to occupy more Arab land and finally, reluctantly, accepted a ceasefire on October 25.

When the shooting stopped, Israel’s forces stood in place, 25 miles from Damascus, 63 miles from Cairo.

The war came as a surprise because of skillful deception on the Arab side, but mainly because of hubris on the Israeli side.

Israel had grown complacent since its total victory in the Six Day War in 1967, convinced that Egypt would not dare attack without more and greater Soviet help and that Syria would never attack without Egypt.

Unmistakable warning signs were ignored or discounted. As late as the morning of October 6th, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan remained skeptical that Sadat would launch an all-out assault.  Only when a well-placed spy, Ashraf Marwan, the late President Nasser’s son-in-law, told the head of Israeli intelligence that Yom Kippur was the day, was the full mobilization order given. It was just six hours before the battle began.

So, the first and most important lesson of the war is obvious: never dismiss your enemy, never assume that something that was once true will always be true.

The legacy of the 1973 war, which the Arabs call the Ramadan War, is more complex and poignantly relevant 40 years later.  Negotiations after the war returned the Sinai to Egypt and led to the Camp David accords and a peace treaty that is frosty, but still in place.  The armistice along the Golan Heights is largely intact, despite the .current chaos in Syria. Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan, which sent only a token force to the front in 1973.

But peace with the Palestinians is as elusive as ever 40 years later.  Trust is as elusive as ever, on both sides.

More than anything, the war hardened attitudes on all sides.

Israelis have grown progressively more skeptical, if not cynical, about ever achieving a lasting peace with their neighbors.  Israeli settlers have become more determined to dig in. The Israeli right challenges the notion of a two-state solution. The Israeli left struggles to hear its own voice. Two generations of Israelis have grown up with the 1973 war as an object lesson that no one but themselves can be trusted with their security.

On the Arab side, the Ramadan War restored a sense of pride. Despite ultimate setbacks on the battlefield, Sadat achieved his principal goal: breaking the deadlock with Israel and forcing negotiations for the return of the Sinai. Syria’s Hafez al Assad emerged from the war battered, but still in power.

Nonetheless, the war convinced many Egyptians of the futility of defeating Israel on the battlefield. The Egyptian officer corps has grown wealthy and powerful since, but they haven’t fought Israel in 40 years and they are not likely to in the next 40.  Their problems are at home, in the Sinai and Tahrir Square.

If the Arabs have largely, if reluctantly, accepted that Israel is here to stay, it was the ultimate outcome of the 1973 war that made that case.

The Palestinians emerged from the war as the recognized authority of any future independent, sovereign Palestinian state. That status was formally enshrined in the 1974 Rabat summit conference that followed the October War, even if a genuine Palestinian state is only marginally closer to reality 40 years later.

There were major international repercussions as well: the newly-established détente between the Soviet Union and United States survived its first major challenge, Europe felt the sting of the first organized Arab oil embargo and the United States emerged as the indispensible negotiator of any future peace agreements in the Middle East.

The 1973 war was a watershed event, and not just for the region.

Forty years is not a long time in the larger history of the Middle East. But it is long enough to pause, look back, and recognize that the October War changed some things, even many things, but not everything.

TERENCE SMITH covered the 1973 October War as the Israel Correspondent for The New York Times.

Times, The Are A-changin’

So, how did I get the news about the news on the long weekend the newspaper business rolled over in the direction of its grave?

On my mobile phone, of course. Woke up Saturday to find that The New York Times had finally faced the harsh reality and sold the Boston Globe for $70 million, a tiny fraction of the inflated price it foolishly paid 20 years earlier.

Then, Monday afternoon, my phone chirped again with the stunning news that the Graham family was selling The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in cash. Moments later, The PBS NewsHour was on the phone, asking who I’d recommend to sort it out on the broadcast that night. Try Warren Buffet, I said, he’s buying newspapers these days. Maybe he understands something the rest of us don’t.

True, on Tuesday I turned to the print editions of The Times and The Post to get the full story. Both provided admirable and comprehensive coverage and, as usual, David Carr had the best commentary in the NYT. But the point here is simple: the news about the news business came to me on my phone. Digitally. Not in a newspaper. Everybody had it: Google, Yahoo and, of course, the newspaper websites.

Newspapers don’t deliver the news anymore. Certainly not in print. At least, not to most of us, even those of us with the most tenuous connection to the digital world. We know the headlines before we can pick up the paper. We have the basic facts. Who died, how many and where. Who’s selling, who’s buying.

What newspapers can do is give us the background, put a breaking news development in context, compare the latest news with what has gone before, maybe even tell us what it all means. That’s a crucial role. I hope it isn’t sacrificed completely in the economic crisis that is affecting all newspapers to a greater or lesser degree.

Warren Buffet sees a role for newspapers, in print and in digital form. He is buying them, frequently at fire-sale prices, in the Midwest and Southeast. His formula: small or medium-sized papers that have a close connection to their community. Makes sense to me. A friend of mine, Anthony Prisendorf, publishes The Berkshire Record, a thriving weekly in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His formula: local news and high school sports. Business is so good he is opening a second weekly in the area.

But what about the papers across the country, large and small, that are losing circulation and ad revenue? Those that don’t have a Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos or John Henry to write a check and salvage them? Will they survive? Will they still appear on newsprint in five, ten or 15 years? Does it matter?

Yes, it does. What matters is not so much whether the product comes to you on your front doorstep in the morning or whether it flashes on your phone or tablet. My own, personal preference is still newsprint. I like to hold it in my hand, roam through the pages, find stories I might not otherwise click on to read, see which stories the editors thought were most important.

But even I have become more and more comfortable reading on an iPad, getting the headlines on my iPhone, getting some commentary on Twitter or Facebook. I can adjust, dinosaur that I am. I swear I can.

What matters is not the form of delivery, but the journalism.
If the Billionaires can save newspapers by buying them and nudging them in the digital direction, more power to them. If they can write the checks that will send reporters to Damascus, Detroit and into the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, bless ‘em. Somebody has to keep an eye on the shop.

And, if I have to read the news on a finger-smudged screen, so be it.

Terence Smith is a journalist who has worked for The New York Times, CBS News and PBS. His website is terencefsmith.com

Red Smith Made It Look Easy

Columbia Journalism Review

“Give us this day our daily plinth,” my father, Red Smith, and his pal, Joe Palmer, the racing columnist, would pray, one with a scotch and soda in hand, the other bourbon and branch water, as they convened in Palmer’s book-lined study at the end of a day. It was their private joke–a plinth is the base of a column–but the prayer was fervent. My father’s search for his plinth was unending.

Walter Wellesley (Red) Smith was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin on September 25, 1905. He decided early on that he wanted to go to Notre Dame and become a newspaperman, just the way an older kid he admired had done, so he did. Simple as that. New York was always his goal, but his route was roundabout: The Milwaukee Sentinel, The St. Louis Star, The Philadelphia Record, and, finally, the big time: the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times. Along the way, he must have written thousands of sports columns, becoming arguably the best in the business, right up until his death in 1982. Now a new collection, American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith, is being published by Library of America.

In my memory, Pop was always writing a column, in a press box at the ballpark or racetrack, in his basement office at home, in a plane or train, or in the family car on summer vacation trips to Wisconsin. He would balance his Olivetti portable on his knees in the passenger seat, typing as my mother drove, shushing my sister, Kit, and me in the back seat. Once, when we moved into our house in Connecticut, he had the movers set up a table and chair beneath a tree and wrote a column there. It was moving day, but his deadline was looming, as always.

The columns, including those so ably collected in American Pastimes, were his métier, although he would have sneered at that word. The form suited him. He was good at capturing an event or a thought or a story in 800 words or so, often with an elegant phrase or a snatch of dialogue or the perfect anecdote. He demurred repeatedly when people urged him to write a full-length book about sports or anything else. “I’d rather go to the dentist,” he’d say.

Later in life, the suggestion of a biography or, worse yet, an autobiography, was dismissed out of hand. “To be written about is to be written off,” he told me more than once. That’s not true, of course, but it revealed his lifelong anxiety about being passed over or forgotten.

Even when he had become the most widely read sports columnist in the country and collected his share of awards, he worried aloud, at least to me, about whether his contract would be renewed, whether the paper would want someone else, someone younger and fresher, to take his place. He always described himself as “a working stiff.” That was one reason he always took the side of baseball players in their salary and contract disputes with owners. He saw himself as a performer, never an owner.

The column was his contract with life. As long as he was writing it, he felt he was in the center of things, that he still mattered. That’s why he kept at it until the week he died. As long as he was writing, he was part of the world he had lived and loved. Newspapermen were not just his colleagues, they were the best of his friends, the people he chose to spend time with, on and off the beat.

The annual sports calendar provided his material and often established our family’s rituals: spring training in Florida, the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May, then the Preakness in Baltimore, the Belmont in New York, Saratoga in August, baseball through the summer, the World Series and college football in the fall, heavyweight championship fights, and, every four years, the Olympic Games. It made for an intoxicating mix.

Curiously, for all the pleasure he took in it, he was an accidental sportswriter. As he told the story, he was a junior man on the news copy desk at The St. Louis Star, just a few years into his career, making about $40 a week, when the editor, the redoubtable Frank Taylor, discovered that half his six-man sports staff was on the take from a local fight promoter and fired them. Looking around for a replacement, he called my father over and supposedly the following conversation ensued:

TAYLOR: Do you know anything about sports, Smith?
SMITH: Just what the average fan knows, sir.
TAYLOR: They tell me you’re very good on football.
SMITH: Well, if you say so.
TAYLOR: Are you honest?
SMITH: I hope so, sir.
TAYLOR: What if a fight promoter offered you $10, would you take it?
SMITH (long pause): $10 is a lot of money, sir.
TAYLOR: Report to the sports editor Monday.

Once he got into it, he relished writing sports and thought it was as good a vehicle as any to shed some light on the human condition. “I never felt any prodding need to solve the problems of the world,” he said in an interview years later. “I feel that keeping the public informed in any area is a perfectly worthwhile way to spend your life. Sports constitute a valid part of our culture, our civilization, and keeping the public informed, and, if possible, a little entertained about sports is not an entirely useless thing.”
But during World War II, when he was the father of two and 4-F because of his eyesight and covering “games children play” for The Philadelphia Record while others were at the front, he admitted to a “desperate feeling of being useless.”

“I was traveling with the last-place Philadelphia Athletics,” he recalled, “and more than once, I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’” He comforted himself with the published report that FDR thought sports were important for morale. Readers, he said, could read the war news first and then turn to sports to get updated on what he described as “matters of major inconsequence.”

Pop roamed off the sports beat occasionally, covering the national political conventions in 1956 and 1968, but when invited to expand his column to politics and world affairs, as James “Scotty” Reston and others had done before him, he declined. Same answer when he was asked to become the sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune. No, he said, the column was his thing, the one thing he did best. He’d stick with it. I think he would have been a good editor, maybe even exceptionally good, but he was not drawn to management and titles never interested him.

He defined himself as a newspaperman, not a sportswriter or columnist. “I’d like to be remembered as a good reporter,” he said in more than one interview, and he meant the much-advertised romance of journalism was real to him, as real in his seventies as it was when he left Green Bay, Wisconsin, for his string of newspaper jobs. Until he reached The New York Times, already at normal retirement age, he had always worked for the second newspaper in a city. “I killed ‘em all,” he’d say with a smile.

He was often described as modest and unassuming, and he did adopt an aw-shucks diffidence in the face of prizes and praise. It wasn’t exactly an act; he thought he was lucky to have had the chance to do all that he did. But he worked devilishly hard, took his writing, if not himself, seriously, constantly sought to be better, and bathed in the admiration he received, especially from colleagues. As Daniel Okrent notes in the introduction to American Pastimes, he was stung when Arthur Daley won the Pulitzer before he did, and he often dismissed the prize as a sop given by the journalistic old-boy network to its favorites on the establishment papers.

Until he won his own Pulitzer, that is, on May 3, 1976, at age seventy.

I was the New York Times correspondent in Israel at the time. When I reached him on the phone in the midst of a newsroom celebration, champagne corks popping in the background, I dead-panned: “You’ll refuse it, of course.” He lowered his voice and growled into the mouthpiece: “Not on your life!” We both laughed our heads off. I was enormously pleased, and so was he.

Pop enjoyed great good health for all but the last few of his seventy-six years. Again, he was lucky, given all the late nights, booze, and decades of unfiltered Camels. His idea of a good time was to sit late at Toots Shor’s saloon, trading stories with the parade of writers, ballplayers, fighters, mobsters, politicians, and hacks that would come by his table during the course of a night. He was successful financially, but his real definition of economic well-being was to have enough money to be able to grab the check for the table at Shor’s on occasion and not break the bank in the process.

He loved his life, had two kids and two good marriages, and lived long enough to know his six grandchildren and two of his great-grandchildren and to take my son, Chris, fishing for the first time in his life. They laughed together and Chris caught a fish. That sunny day on Martha’s Vineyard became grist for a column, of course, his plinth for the day.

When his health was failing near the end, he struggled to overcome the congestive heart failure and kidney disease that would take his life. He wanted to get better, he said; the Super Bowl was coming up and he wanted to cover it, to write another column, a good column, and then another after that, and make that one better. Spring training was not that far away.

But if he didn’t get better, he told me, he had no complaints.

“I’ve had a great run,” he said.

And he did.

Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame

Hall of Fame Dinner Announcement
NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell, author and political journalist Haynes Johnson and New York Times/CBS News/PBS correspondent Terence Smith will be inducted into the Hall of Fame of the D.C. Pro Chapter, Society of Professional Journalists, on June 11, 2013.

The criterion for membership in the Hall of Fame is simply this: strong journalism over at least 25 years in Washington.

The four inductees will speak at the chapter’s annual Dateline Awards dinner in the ballroom of the National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, Washington, D.C.

On the same evening, the D.C. Chapter’s 2013 Distinguished Service Award will be presented to Steve Geimann, Deputy Team Leader at the Bloomberg News Washington bureau.

Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, is also the host of Andrea Mitchell Reports, a daily hour of political news and newsmaker interviews on MSNBC. One of the nation’s most familiar broadcast reporters, Mitchell also has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and multiple election campaigns. As a longtime analyst of the intelligence community, Mitchell’s assignments for NBC have included exclusive reports from North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Bosnia, Kosovo, Pakistan and Haiti. She has made regular appearances on NBC News and MSNBC programs, including “Today,” “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “Hardball,” “Morning Joe” and “Meet the Press.” Mitchell joined NBC News in 1978 as a general correspondent based in Washington.

Thomas Boswell began his career at The Washington Post in 1969 as a copy aide. Later he became a general assignment reporter for twelve years, covering such sports as baseball, golf, college basketball, tennis, boxing and local high school sports. In 1984, the Post gave Boswell a regular column. Boswell has written many books including “Game Day,” “The Heart of the Order,” “Strokes of Genius,” “Why Time Begins on Opening Day” and “How Life Imitates the World Series.” He has written for Inside Sports, Esquire, GQ and Playboy. He also makes frequent television appearances and does live chats on washingtonpost.com.

Haynes Johnson is an author, commentator, journalist and professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where he also is a contributing editor for American Journalism Review. Johnson came to Washington as a reporter for the Washington Star in 1957 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his reporting on the civil rights crisis in Selma, Alabama. Joining the Washington Post in 1969, Johnson served as a national reporter, assistant managing editor and national affairs columnist. He has made many appearances on the PBS-TV programs “Washington Week in Review” and “The NewsHour.” Johnson is the author of the bestsellers “Sleepwalking Through History”, “The Bay of Pigs,” and “The Landing,” a spy thriller. Other nonfiction works include “Divided We Fall,” “Dusk at the Mountain” and “The System.”

Terence Smith spent 20 years at The New York Times including eight years in the Middle East and Far East, covering four wars, peace negotiations and events in more than 40 countries. Smith also served as Assistant Foreign Editor and Deputy Metropolitan Editor in New York. In the Times’ Washington bureau, he served as diplomatic correspondent and chief White House correspondent. In 1985, Smith joined CBS News in Washington, covering the Reagan White House and, for nine years, reporting the cover stories for CBS Sunday Morning. In 1998, Smith turned to public television and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. As senior producer and media correspondent, Smith broadcast hundreds of reports and studio discussions on media, national and international issues. Smith is now a special correspondent for The NewsHour.

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NRA versus the NPC

For more than 100 years, the National Press Club has been neutral ground: an agreeable watering hole a few blocks from the White House where presidents and potentates have held forth on issues of the day. Sometimes, they even make news.

But yesterday, the NPC got played by the NRA.

The National Rifle Association sent its hired front-man, former Congressman and Bush Administration official Asa Hutchinson into the club surrounded by a small army of security guards — armed, of course — to announce at a news conference that the solution to violence in the schools is — wait for it — more guns in the schools.

Dana Milbank reported in the Washington Post this morning that Hutchinson was protected by about 20 guards, some in uniform, some in plainclothes, all packing.

According to Milbank, the “gun lobby goons” fanned out through the Press Club. He writes: “The NRA gunmen directed some photographers not to take pictures, ordered reporters out of the lobby when NRA officials passed and inspected reporters’ briefcases before granting them access to the news conference.”

The NRA antics, Milbank commented dryly, “gave new meaning to the notion of disarming your critics.”

This sort of display of firepower is so over the top, so in-your-face, so uncalled for, it can only be a political statement. The NRA was going to brandish its second amendment rights for all to see.

The Press Club, of which I am a member, was caught with its guard down.

Bill McCarren, the Club’s executive director, said there had been advance discussions with the NRA about security and that the lobby group had insisted it would bring its own, probably about nine. More than twice that showed up.

“It was definitely unusual, not a common sight,” said Angela Greiling Keane, the Club president, being diplomatic about a paying customer who had rented the facilities for the news conference. “It’s not something we would encourage our clients to do.”

McCarren said the show of force was hardly necessary. “We had General Dempsey (Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey) here and he didn’t bring a tank.”

An NRA spokesman — even one as placid and unthreatening as Hutchinson — is of course a potential target. There are crazies on both sides of the gun debate.

But in this case, the NRA was making a political point in front of cameras and reporters. Guns are the answer, they were saying, and not just a few. Subtlety has never been their strong suit.

Later yesterday, when Hutchinson showed up to tape an interview with Margaret Warner at The PBS NewsHour, he was accompanied by one security person. “We had no idea if he was armed or not,” said a NewsHour staffer.
Of course, there were no cameras in the green room, no audience to get the point that the NRA means business.

Wither the Newsmags?

As newspapers and magazines stumble along the rocky road from print to digital, two recent signposts seem to point the way forward: Time Warner’s decision to spin off Time Inc., its magazine division, and Newsweek’s termination of its print edition after 80 years of continuous publication.

The third general newsmagazine. U.S. News and World Report, went digital earlier and now is known mostly for its rankings of colleges and hospitals and the like.

What would Henry Luce think ?

His baby, Time, and its sister magazines, including People, Sports Illustrated and In-Style and others, will continue to appear in print, at least for the foreseeable. And why not? Together, they generate $3.1 billion in revenues, nearly half of the total of the nation’s 10 top-grossing magazines.

But that is apparently not enough for Time Warner, which is cutting them loose, along with some $500 million to $1 billion in debt, so the parent company can concentrate on its more profitable film and cable businesses.

In the fourth quarter of last year, circulation and advertising at Time Inc. were down sharply and revenues were off seven per cent, which is probably what prompted Time Warner to try to sell the magazine division and, failing that, cast it adrift.

Looking on the bright side, Time Inc. insiders say they will now at least be able to pour their revenues into their own magazines and websites, rather than Time Warner’s deep pockets. And this week, they were celebrating the success of their recent cover, “Bitter Pill,” Stephen Brill’s remarkable, 24,000-word takedown of the hospital industry, which was their best-selling issue in two years. It was proof, again, that people will seek out important reporting when it comes along.

But the trend lines for newsmagazines are hard to ignore. Even in these harsh economic times, I find it hard to believe that the news weeklies are not the vital magazines that I have known over the years.

During the eight years I spent abroad as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in the Middle East and Far East, Time and Newsweek were essential reading. In those pre-internet years, they pulled the week’s news and trends together and kept me in touch with the world beyond my own bailiwick. Their correspondents were among my best and best-paid competitors. They roamed the world, usually traveling first class. Richard Clurman, Time’s longtime Chief of Correspondents, was famous for booking two first-class seats: one for himself and one for his briefcase.

But the harsh fact today is that both the editorial and economic models of newsmagazines are broken.

Newsweek was sold for a dollar and a mountain of debt to the late Sydney Harmon. He merged it with the Daily Beast and still could not support it costly print edition. The brand continues with a vibrant website and has announced plans for a paid digital version targeted to a global audience. But it remains to be seen whether that will thrive.

Worse yet, the news weekly editorial model no longer works. With the internet, I no longer need weekly summaries and analysis of news that I get — indeed, can’t escape — 24/7 electronically. Realizing this, both Time and Newsweek switched to signed essay and long-form formats that are frequently well-written and well-edited. Witness the Brill piece.

But are they viable in the long run? That is uncertain at best.

A Sad Day

Today, March 19, 2013, is a tragic anniversary.

With one exception: It is the 10th birthday of my dog, Red, a fine Borzoi, who is a splendid companion and steady friend. Happy Birthday, Red.

But it is the 10th anniversary of the unjustified, immoral, wrong-headed, foolish, ill-conceived and flat-out wrong war against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

I hold no brief for Saddam and his perverse sons and dreadful reign of terror. But Iraqis, in time, would have dealt with Saddam. It was only George W. and Dick Cheney and Paul W. and Don R. who thought we had to do it for them.

Actually, what they thought — to the degree they thought it through at all — was that they could topple Saddam quickly (right) and get out promptly(wrong), and a Jeffersonian Democracy would bloom in the Iraqi desert in his wake (Really wrong.) And, they could finish what George H.W. left unfinished a decade earlier. Sheer fantasy.

So they listened to the siren song of Ahmed Chalabi and other Iraqi hucksters about how we would be welcomed as liberators and all would be well.

Instead, we spent $2.2 trillion and 4,200 American lives and countless Iraqi lives to produce what? A fractured, violent excuse for a country that is likely to split in thirds, with Kurds running the show in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.

Hardly worth the price.

Anyway. Red had a fine birthday, even if he didn’t know it was his day. He got an extra treat after dinner.

WOODWARD VS SPERLING: A TINY TEMPEST

Tom Brokaw had it right on NBC’s Meet The Press when he described the war of words between White House aide Gene Sperling and journalist Bob Woodward as “a speck that became a sandstorm overnight.”

Overblown is the word for it, since Sperling clearly was not threatening Woodward when he wrote in an e-mail that Woodward would “regret” accusing President Obama of “moving the goalposts” in his budget negotiations with the Republicans in Congress.

But Woodward chose to make an issue of it publicly, and repeatedly. Finally, on the Sunday shows this week, they both called for a truce and promised to put the argument behind them. We can only hope.

But this manufactured tempest did focus a spotlight on the often combative relations between the White House press corps and the Administrations they cover. It is, as the Daily Download’s Howard Kurtz described it on Reliable Sources on CNN, “a contact sport.” And it has been for years.

White House Press Secretaries often fight back when their respective presidents are criticized in print or on the air. It is a deliberate tactic, designed to intimidate reporters and make them think twice about taking the President to task.

Ron Ziegler and Larry Speakes were famously nasty in their tilts with reporters, as was the sarcastic Ari Fleischer. Jody Powell had an explosive temper and would rip into reporters when he thought they were overly critical of his boss, Jimmy Carter. As the New York Times White House correspondent , I was on the receiving end of blowback from Powell when I wrote critically of President Carter’s handling of the Iran-hostage crisis, but Jody would blow his stack and then forget about it. He did not hold a grudge.

“The closer a press secretary is to his President, the more angry and defensive they get,” Bill Plante, the longtime CBS News White House correspondent said Sunday. “When they are totally invested in the President, it clouds their view and they are less useful to us.”

Other press secretaries, like Marlin Fitzwater and Mike McCurry take a more gentle approach, often using humor to disarm, rather than the verbal sledgehammer. They are both considered to be among the most successful press secretaries.

The current incumbent, Jay Carney, is famous for the angry e-mails and phone calls he makes to reporters who criticize President Obama. Does his approach work? Many reporters in the White House press room think it makes him less effective.

But, of course, all loyalty in the White House is vertical, and if the President thinks his press secretary has it right, then he has fulfilled his first obligation.

And the attacks, no matter how angry, are rarely personal. Both parties — the media and the officials — recognize the arguments for what they are: a tactic.