Author: terencef

FAREWELL, JACK

There was a memorial today for Jack Nelson, the great civil rights reporter who served as Washington Bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times for 21 years and was a familiar face and voice on Washington Week in Review on PBS. It was an extraordinary gathering that will be replayed on C-Span at 8 p.m. EST tonight.

There have been too many memorials of late among reporters and their friends in Washington: Jody Powell, Bill Safire, John Mashek, just in the last few weeks.

But today’s event in the auditorium of the National Geographic Society in Washington was remarkable as a reminder of that special breed of reporter, most of them born in the south, who grew up personally and professionally covering the civil rights revolution. It was the seminal story of their time and they brought it home to the nation at large.

Several outstanding examples of the breed were in the audience today: Eugene Patterson, Gene Roberts and Howell Raines among them, along with some of those who fought the fight, including Rep. John Lewis and Julian Bond.

Gene Patterson recalled that Jack Nelson came to his job with a “high school education and a low boiling point” about the injustices he saw inflicted on African Americans in the south. He quickly proved to be, Patterson said, “the scourge of crooked sheriffs and thieving statehouse politicians” all over the region. Gene Roberts recalled that Jack took on the Klansmen he encountered, “pointing his finger at them like a pistol” as he questioned them.

Jack’s story and those of other reporters like him are recounted in “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and Awakening of a Nation,” which Gene Roberts wrote with Hank Klibanoff in 2006. It is worth a read, or a re-read, as a way to understand the careers and commitment of this dying breed.

WALTER AND DON

First, Walter Cronkite, dead last month at 92. Now Don Hewitt, gone today at 86. It is being described as the end of an era at CBS News.

Of course, the Cronkite-Hewitt era at CBS ended years ago.

In their day, CBS News was truly a world-wide news-gathering organization, with correspondents in bureaus around the globe. The news division was a prestigious loss-leader that fulfilled the network’s public affairs commitment and kept the FCC at bay. Founder William Paley was happy to pay the division’s bills because it gave him license to run the advertising-rich entertainment shows that brought in the dough.

Don Hewitt ruined all that. By doing news in an entertaining fashion, he established 60 Minutes as a run-away ratings winner and cash cow. The conglomerates who took over CBS after Paley — Westinghouse, Loewes and Viacom — realized that news broadcasts didn’t have to lose money. So, they 1.) cut costs; and 2.) converted each news broadcast into a profit center. The shows that made money survived. Those that didn’t disappeared.

“It’s all my fault,” Don Hewitt told me in an interview I did with him five years ago for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “60 Minutes was such a success that management decided that all news broadcasts could and should make money.”

To that end, the bean counters closed foreign and national bureaus, dismissed staff and let go half the correspondent corps. The news division that survives still has outstanding producers and correspondents, it still does good work, but more and more it is a news-packaging, rather than news-gathering, organization.

No one relished television news more than Don Hewitt. His enthusiasm was boundless and infectious. He was one of those producers who had 35 ideas a day, 34 of which were impractical, silly or outlandish. But one good idea a day is an enviable record.

He built a terrific repertory company of correspondents and made them into stars and millionaires. A few from the Hewitt era continue — Mike Wallace, Morley Safer and Andy Rooney — but the era, the Cronkite-Hewitt era, if you like, is long gone.

The worlds of journalism and literature lost two of the good ones over the weekend.

Walter Cronkite and Frank McCourt shared some of the same qualities: a sure sense of who they were, what they were about and what they wanted to accomplish. Walter came by his inner compass early and easily. He knew from his teen-aged years that journalism was for him and he pursued it steadily, in print, for a wire service, on radio and, at a time when it seemed like a risky venture with an uncertain future, in television. By the time he became the Most Trusted Man, he had a thorough grounding in news. Television brought out his inner ham, but he never lost his sense of integrity. He was as steady at the helm of CBS News as he was on his beloved sailboat.

I knew Walter mainly as a family friend. We sailed together on Martha’s Vineyard and I enjoyed listening as he and my father swapped stories over drinks in the evening. He was retired by the time I got to CBS News as a correspondent in 1985, but the News Division was still the House that Murrow built and the institution that Cronkite had guided so steadily.

He had stepped down from the anchor chair voluntarily two years before, mainly to make way for Dan Rather, but within a year he knew he had given up that perch too soon. He still had the energy and interest, and he was offended by the cold shoulder he got from CBS. But Walter was a classy guy above all, and he kept his second thoughts largely to himself. It was only in his later years that he publicly shared his dismay over the dismemberment of CBS News in the Tisch era and the general decline of television journalism.

Frank McCourt was famously a late bloomer, a writer who found his literary voice in his late 60’s after a full teaching career. But once he had written Angela’s Ashes, even before it was published, he knew he had discovered what he was meant to do. He told me that he had filled 40 small notebooks with recollections of his childhood and that he had to get the story out of his system. “I would have died howling,” he said, had he not set it down.

The memoir made him famous and wealthy. He never lost his amazement at that, or his sense of irony. “I’m an expert on everything now,” he told me with a laugh as he accepted an invitation to go to Ireland for a conference on the history of U.S.-Irish relations. “Didn’t you know?”

I profiled him for CBS Sunday Morning when Angela’s Ashes had just come out and before it was such a huge hit, tagging along with a camera crew when Frank and his brothers returned to Ireland for the first time together. There were some inner tensions and competition among the Brothers McCourt, Frank, Malachy, Michael and Alfie, but a shared sense of irreverent humor as well. They laughed at everything, even the stony graveyard outside Limerick where they had scattered their mother’s famous ashes and the former British Army barracks where they had played pranks as boys. It was a glorious trip.

I did another television interview with Frank a few years later when his second memoir, “T’is,” was published, this time for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The second volume never matched the commercial success of his first, but he was pleased, nonetheless. “You see?” he said, laughing, “I’m not a one-trick pony after all.”

We became friends in the years after that, sharing the occasional dinner with our wives in New York and Washington and a weekend at Notre Dame, where he saw his first big-time college football game. “That was grand,” he said, after the music of the marching band had died out (and USC had killed Notre Dame,)”a real extravaganza!”

Walter and Frank — I’ll miss them both.

OBAMA AND THE CHESAPEAKE BAY

President-Elect Barak Obama has been famously channeling Abraham Lincoln as he prepares for his inauguration.

This weekend, he’ll take a train, as Lincoln did, from Philadelphia to Washington. Next Tuesday, he’ll be sworn in on the same bible that Lincoln used and enjoy a lunch in the Capitol of Lincoln’s favorite dish of scalloped oysters. We can only hope that the 44th President’s passage through Baltimore is less fraught than Lincoln’s — the 16th President had to be spirited through Charm City in the dead of night for fear of assassins.

Aboard his train from Philadelphia, Obama will cross the Susquehanna River and get a close look at the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay. He’ll see pretty homes along the shoreline and boats under winter covers in the marinas. If it is a bright day, the Chesapeake will be gorgeous, as it usually is.

What the President-Elect will not see, and cannot be expected to appreciate looking out the train window, is just how troubled the Chesapeake is today compared to Lincoln’s day. In 1861, the Bay was clean and at the height of its reputation as an immense protein factory, providing millions of bushels of oysters, blue crabs and rockfish to feed the growing population of the United States. Perhaps a million people lived in its vast, 64,000-square-mile watershed. Most were farmers.

Today, the harvests of crabs and oysters are a tiny fraction of their historic highs. The Chesapeake is polluted, its water cloudy and, in places, dying. A quarter-century after the first inter-state agreement to clean up the Bay, officials recently conceded that they cannot meet even the modest goals they set for themselves back in 1983. The best estimates are that it will take a decade and some $19 billion dollars to clean up the Bay and restore to anything close to what it was like in 1861.

When his train arrives in Washington, President-Elect Obama will be besieged by demands for money — to fix the economic crisis, to put out the fires in the Middle East, to close Guantanamo, to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure.

Restoring the Chesapeake understandably will be far down on that list of urgent priorities. But it deserves the new President’s attention because it has reached, if not passed, the tipping point. Some 17 million people live in the watershed today, an estimated 170,000 more move in every year and developers are busy paving it over to accommodate them.

We have reached the point where only the Federal government can salvage the nation’s largest and most important estuary and make it into a model restoration for the rest of the country. We now recognize that the voluntary efforts to clean up the Bay over the last 25 years have stalled but not stopped the deterioration. It is time to replace them with mandatory controls, beginning with revisions to the Clean Water Act. Congress will have to do that, and the President will have to push to get it done.

“Save the Bay,” is the slogan on the bumper stickers that Barack Obama will see around his new home. Let’s hope he adopts it as his own.

TERENCE SMITH is a former correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He lives on the Chesapeake Bay. His website is terencefsmith.com

The most remarkable thing about Barack Obama’s remarkable campaign was his personal consistency.

In his victory speech last night before 100,000 cheering fans in Chicago’s Grant Park, he was the same composed, confident, understated, serious Barack Obama who came out of political nowhere to win the Iowa caucuses. That personal composure, a kind of inner grace, is his hallmark.

At a moment of exaltation, when he could have been forgiven for a letting it rip, he held himself in check. Even as the applause rolled over him, he stood there, alone, collected, secure.

“I hear you, I hear your voices,” he said to those who had supported John McCain. Indeed, it is his ability to listen, almost more than his eloquence as a speaker, that distinguishes Barack Obama.

From the beginning of this endless campaign, he sensed clearly that the American people were repelled by the fractious, bitter tone of political discourse. They were tired of the character assassination and negative attacks that characterize campaigning today, and more than anyone else, Obama understood that.

In the face of every provocation from Hillary and Bill Clinton and later, John McCain and, especially, Sarah Palin, he kept his cool. Even after the Republican convention, when his campaign seemed stalled in place and his closest supporters were urging him to lash out, to fight back, to show some emotion, Barak Obama continued on the same, steady, civil course.

He seems to have an almost perfect ear for the American political mood, a kind of political GPS that tells him where people are and where they want to go.

Nothing seemed to get to him, not the nonsense about his supposed friendship with the now-famous “washed-up terrorist,” William Ayers, not the racist ravings of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, not the Republican ads labeling him a socialist and Marxist. Obama answered or explained each, but in his own, measured, quietly-confident way. Somehow, he sensed that that would be enough to blunt the attacks, and that to go further, to lash out, would be too much.

This serene, unflappable manner served him well in the debates: not just the 19 with his fellow Democrats during the primary season, but more importantly, the three against John McCain. The 47-year-old Obama looked presidential, while the older, more experienced McCain came across as angry and erratic. People who were uncertain about Obama up to that point decided, yes, they could see him in the Oval Office after all.

It will be fascinating to see how the Presidency changes him. It ages everyone. And the challenges facing him are extraordinary. But that internal compass that guided Barack Obama through the campaign is likely to serve him well.