Author: terencef

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.

CORNELL CAPA

When the great photographer Cornell Capa died at 90 last week, the obituaries said he covered conflicts from Latin America to the Middle East, including the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors.

What the obits didn’t describe was the pivotal moment when he decided, during the last days of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, to stop being a war photographer and realize a much bigger dream. It was a courageous decision — to break off covering a war — in order to take on the biggest challenge of his life and leave something monumental behind.

At age 55, Cornell had seen his share of war. And the Capa family, of course, had suffered a tremendous loss in 1954 when Cornell’s charismatic brother and photographic mentor, Robert, was killed on assignment in Indochina.

But when the fighting erupted in Israel in 1973, he shouldered his camera bags and began covering the war with me for The New York Times. I was the paper’s bureau chief in Israel at the time and felt lucky to have a veteran like Cornell by my side.

We traveled with the Israeli forces as they regained the initiative against Egypt in the Sinai and then headed up to the Golan Heights for the climactic battle against the Syrians. The Israelis had the Syrians on the run, but the fighting was intense.

At one point, we were pinned down in a ditch by the side of the road as Syrian artillery shelled an advancing Israeli armor unit. Suddenly, Israeli jets screamed low and fast over our heads and knocked out the Syrian guns. The Israeli tanks started forward again and Cornell and I picked our selves up and followed. The sign by the side of the road said: “Damascus, 55 kilometers.”

That night, after I had filed my copy to The Times and Cornell had transmitted his pictures from the Israeli northern command headquarters in Safed, we had a beer and turned in. We knew the war would not last much longer — a ceasefire was being negotiated — but there was more fighting to be covered tomorrow.

About 1 a.m., Cornell came to my room with a tormented look on his face. He said he had come to a tough, but inescapable decision. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I am the last surviving male in my family. I can’t put them through anymore of this.”

Cornell went on to explain that he had arranged for a gifted Israeli photographer to take his place. The Times would have its pictures.

Cornell hadn’t lost his nerve. He had that to spare. He had found his mission. He said he was going home to New York to raise money to create a center for what he called “concerned photography” — his term for photojournalism that made a difference. He had a vision for something that would be a monument to his brother, and much more. He owed it to his family, he said, to fulfill that vision.

Good to his word, Cornell the next year established The International Center of Photography, which has grown into what The Times described in his obit as “one of the most influential photographic institutions for exhibition, collection and education in the world.”

The Yom Kippur War, incidentally, ended a couple of days after Cornell left, in a ceasefire that continues to this day. The armistice line between Syria and Israel is not far from that sign that read, “Damascus, 55 kilometers.” More news by category Topic -: Tramadol hydrochloride tablets Safety of phentermine Pyridium Generic viagra cialis Cialis generic india Information about street drugs or xanax bars Snorting phentermine Hydrocodone overdose Lithium Amiodarone Imiquimod Tramadol next day Pfizer viagra sperm Vidarabine Prevacid Viagra cialis levitra comparison Dutasteride Lisinopril Thiotepa Female spray viagra Black market phentermine Betamethasone Cialis forums What does xanax look like Loss phentermine story success weight Viagra alternative uk Mecamylamine Eulexin Viagra xenical Xanax in urine Macrodantin Epivir Ditropan Woman use viagra Cialis erectile dysfunction Xanax withdrawl message boards Atorvastatin Generic ambien Is phentermine addictive Next day delivery on phentermine Ethanol Natural phentermine Avandamet Xanax long term use Information medical phentermine Cialis experience Phentermine no perscription Compare ionamin phentermine Viagra cialis levivia dose comparison Noroxin Effects of viagra on women Viagra shelf life Hydroxyurea Dog xanax Viagra class action Hydrocodone cod only Nicoumalone Phentermine snorting Mirtazapine Quazepam Isradipine Xanax look alike Moxifloxacin Viagra experiences Piroxicam Nicorette Sotalol Cash on delivery shipping of phentermine How do i stop taking phentermine Niacinamide Phentermine weight loss Phentermine

Rooney, our elegant, black-and-white Borzoi, or Russian wolfhound, is dead. At age five. From bone cancer. A terrible conclusion, by any description.

Not big news, perhaps, but it is to me. He was the most free-spirited, acrobatic, energetic, sunny, enthusiastic, delightful, downright funny dog . Never met a person or fellow canine he did not like. (That generosity did not apply to cats, rabbits or squirrels.)

We named him after Andy Rooney, because of his prominent, white eyebrows, which stood out against his black face. I kept Andy posted with e-mails on his development, even asked his namesake’s advice when puppy Rooney chewed my loafers. Andy was no help. Said he raised English bulldogs. Didn’t know much about Borzois. So much for canine guidance from the curmudgeon of CBS.

Rooney was the best companion: always game for an adventure, a walk, a boat ride. He used to sit on the aft seat of the runabout, almost like a person would, with his feet on the cockpit sole, thrusting his long, bony nose into the wind. It was comical, except that Rooney had an innate grace that always made him look dignified.

Once, when Susy and I were walking Rooney and Red, our other Borzoi, in an open field near a marina on the Chesapeake Bay, a flock of swallows — hundreds of them — began swooping low and fast over the field. Their aerial chroreography was stunning to three of us. To Rooney, it was an invitation to dance. He began chasing the birds, leaping at times to see if he could fly. Around and again he raced, in great elliptical loops, exhuberant, uninhibited, full of joy. The swallows escaped unharmed, of course, but it was a spectacle.

Rooney survived surgery when a portion of his lung gave way. He recovered and resumed his acrobatic ways. When a squirrel ran up a tree, Rooney would levitate in joyous pursuit. The squirrel always got away, but for Rooney, the pleasure was in the chase.

Three months ago almost to the day, we took Rooney to the vet because of a limp in his left rear leg. Bone cancer was the diagnosis. It was a death warrant. JFK once famously observed that life is unfair. Indeed it is.

When five former secretaries of state — three from Republican administrations and two from Democratic — sit down to give foreign policy advice to the next President in the midst of two wars and a heated campaign, sweet reason and unanimity is not guaranteed.

Include polar opposites like Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright in the mix, and the odds become longer.

Yet bipartisan consensus is what emerged this week at the University of Georgia, where I moderated the 16th Conference of Former Secretaries of State, produced by the Southern Center for International Studies, which will be broadcast on PBS next month. The roster included Colin Powell, James Baker and Warren Christopher, along with Kissinger and Albright.

All five agreed that the next President should close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and open a dialogue with Iran without preconditions. They also advocated a more pragmatic, open-minded approach to Pakistan, continued close ties with India, further efforts to engage China and a renewed push for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Guantanamo, they said, has become a blot on the U.S. reputation abroad. Even Kissinger, who said he had concerns about how to handle the inmates in the U.S. legal system, agreed that the camp should be closed.

Talking with Iran is essential, they said, because of the key role Iran plays in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. “One has to talk with adversaries,” said Kissinger, the man who forged the opening to China three decades ago. Colin Powell agreed, recalling the talks he conducted with Syria during his tenure in President George W. Bush’s first term. “They are not always pleasant visits,” he said, “but you have got to do it.”

The Secretaries agreed as well that the U.S. embargo against Cuba has failed and should be dropped. “When policies don’t work for 50 years,” said Warren Christopher, “it is time to think of something else. The audience of 2,300 at the Dean Rusk Center broke into applause.

Perhaps politics can stop at the water’s edge, after all.

Two of the best practitioners of the English language died this week: William F. Buckley Jr. and W.C. Heinz.

They could not have been more different writers.

Bill Buckley delighted in the complexities of the language; his erudite phrasing was over-the-top, but entertaining. Often he was just trying to score points over one of his adversaries on Firing Line. One of his favorite responses was: “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you actually believe what you are saying.”

Bill Heinz sought the simplicity of the language. As a newspaper reporter, distinguished war correspondent, sports columnist, freelance journalist and novelist, he wrote clean, spare prose, always trying to get to the essence. Hemingway was his hero and literary model. Once, when he had all but exhausted himself in writing a novel, his doctor told him: “Bill, if you don’t stop trying to be the greatest writer in the world, you’re going to kill yourself.” “I’m not trying to be the greatest writer in the world,” Bill answered. “I’m just trying to be the best writer I can be.”

In August, 2004, I spent an afternoon with Buckley at his lovely home overlooking Long Island Sound in Stamford, Connecticut. I’d come with a producer and camera crew from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to interview him about his decision to step down from the National Review. I was there on business, but Buckley could not have been more gracious and welcoming. He showed us around, invited us to share lunch, played his harpsichord for us and acted as though there was nothing he would rather do with his afternoon.

Buckley had converted an adjacent barn into an office. In the middle, all-but-hidden by memorabilia and books and files and clutter, was his computer. He was going to continue writing his newspaper column, he said, because it gave him three kinds of satisfaction. “One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”

Bill Heinz was an equally gracious host. He was a close friend of my father, the late sports columnist Red Smith, and I grew up listening to the two of them trade stories in the Heinz home or ours. My father recalled one time when he was in Cuba visiting Bill’s literary hero at his Finca Vigia, just outside Havana. Hemingway had just read Bill’s first novel, The Professional, about a prize fighter, and was full of praise for it.

“But damn,” Hemingway said of the main character, “I didn’t want Bill’s fighter to lose.” “You didn’t want him to lose?” my father said, incredulously. “How about Bill? When he started the book, he knew how he had to end it. But after he wrote the first line leading into the fight, he had to take a day off and walk in the woods to get up the courage to have his fighter knocked out.”

For Bill Heinz, writing was a contact sport.

“It is time to get real — get real about how we actually win this election,” Hillary Clinton told an audience in New York this week. “it is time to get real about the challenges facing America.”

“Get real,” is her new mantra.

The unspoken subtext is “don’t get your hopes up, don’t let charisma carry you away, don’t fall prey to that inspirational elixir Obama is selling.”

“Get real.” How lame is that as a rallying cry for a struggling campaign? It is such a downbeat, eat-your peas message. Which of her highly-paid advisers came up with that? It reinforces her negative image as an admonishing, lecturing, know-it-all.

Hillary Clinton may still pull off victories in Texas or Ohio on March 4. It is always a mistake to count out a Clinton in a campaign before the votes are in. And the reporters who are writing her political obituaries are getting dangerously ahead of the story.

But this much is already true about Clinton-for-President in ’08: it was her bad luck to have to compete against a candidate whose story is even more remarkable than hers.

She stood out against the Bidens and Dodds and Richardsons — all credible, conventional candidates — as the first woman frontrunner in a presidential race. But Barak Obama stands out even more, as a symbol of the nation’s deepest division and as individual who can help bridge that gap.

Obama is more than that, of course. He is enormously articulate and blessed with a dignified composure and inner calm that has carried him through 19 debates without a serious stumble. He also has a sense of humor, which helps.

He seems to have a near-perfect pitch when it comes to gauging the public mood. He senses, for example, that voters are sick and tired of the politics of character assassination. When Clinton attacks, striking out in last night’s debate with a crack about “change you can Xerox,” he shakes his head and turns the other cheek. Smart politics. She looks tough; he looks presidential.

It is Hillary’s fate that when she finally gets her chance at the brass ring, a truly different candidate is there to take it — and her specialness — away from her.

Having read the New York Times’ page-one piece this morning about John McCain’s alleged involvement with a young woman lobbyist during his 2000 campaign, and Bill Keller’s defense of it and The New Republic’s frothy story-behind-the-story, I can only conclude that the paper must be on very solid grounds.

I say this not because I know the inside story here — I don’t.

I say it because there is no way that a smart editor like Keller would go with a story based on two unnamed sources — former McCain aides now disaffected from him and his campaign — unless he had somehow independently satisfied himself that what they said was true.

He wouldn’t take their word for it. His reporters must have come up with corroborating support from others. The cost to him and the paper would be too great if it was wrong. He knew going in that this was going to provoke a firestorm.

The thrust of the report is simple: the two former aides say they went to John McCain and warned him that if he continued to be seen frequently with Vicki Iseman, a young, blonde lobbyist 30 years his junior, it was going to jeopardize his presidential ambitions. The Times’ story also quoted John Weaver, a close McCain confidant, as saying that he met with Ms Iseman at a café in Union Station and urged her to stay away from the Senator.

Today Senator McCain said that he had not been cautioned by aides about appearing with Ms Iseman, whose clients included telecommunications firms with important business before McCain’s Commerce Committee, and had never had an improper relationship with her. He also said he did not know of Mr. Weaver’s reported contacts with Ms. Iseman.

So there it sits as of this writing.

The New Republic, incidentally, has almost nothing to support its lighter-than-air account of the newsroom debates over the story at The Times prior to publication. Of course there was debate prior to running such a story. The suggestion that The Times would feel forced to run the piece because of The New Republic’s queries is silly.

That was the least of their worries

Eugene Robinson, arguably the best columnist writing in America today, posed a two-part question in his column this morning in The Washington Post:

“Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators… basically in the tank for Barack Obama?”

Gene’s answer: no and no.

My view: yes and yes.

The coverage of Hillary during this campaign has been across-the-board critical, especially since she began losing after New Hampshire. She may have brought much of the negative reporting on herself, sometimes with the help of her husband. Able and articulate as she is, Hillary can be as polarizing among the media as she is with the public.

And her campaign has taken the tough-love approach with the reporters who cover it, frequently ostracizing those they think are critical or hostile. That kind of aggressive press-relations strategy may sometimes be justified, but it rarely effective. Reporters are supposed to be objective and professional. But they are human. They resent the cold shoulder, even if they understand the campaign’s motivation.

The result is coverage that is viscerally harsh: her laugh is often described as a “cackle.” Her stump speech is dismissed as dry and tiresomely programmatic. She is accused of projecting a sense of entitlement, as though the presidency should be hers by default, that it is somehow now her turn to be president. When she makes changes in her campaign hierarchy, she is described as “desperate.”

Chris Matthews argues on MSNBC that Hillary “bugs a lot of guys, I mean, really bugs people — like maybe me on occasion.” Further, he has theorized that she has got as far as she has as a candidate only because of a sympathy vote, because “her husband messed around.”

Is that misogynistic? Perhaps. Is it unfair? Probably. Is it crude? Of course. Is Chris on to something? Maybe.

But whatever the case, Hillary and her supporters have reason to complain about the tone of their press notices, if not the substance. Of course, when a front-runner begins to stumble, the coverage is always more critical. And reporters are as subject to Clinton-fatigue as anyone else. But the attacks on Hillary have seemed over-the-top in recent weeks. A barely-suppressed glee often creeps into the commentary when Hillary loses another primary or caucus.

By contrast, has the coverage of Obama been overly sympathetic? Have reporters romanticized the junior Senator from Illinois? Have they glamorized him and his wife? Did they exaggerate the significance of Ted Kennedy’s endorsement? Have they given him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his meager experience?

Of course they have.

His rise to front-runner is described as meteoric, his speeches as mesmerizing, his crowds as enraptured, his charisma as boundless. Obama is characterized as the second-coming of JFK, etc. etc. It is all a bit much.

What is behind this enthusiasm? It is not so much personal preference or political bias. It is this: Reporters love a good story, and Obamamania is as good as they come. There has not been such drama and excitement in a presidential race in years. Reporters are suckers for a story that writes itself.

Last summer, the astute National Journal reporter Carl Cannon argued in an Aspen Institute panel that the media were missing the significance of Obama’s candidacy, failing to grasp the inherent newsworthiness of his rise from obscurity to the national scene. Carl was right then, but nobody is missing it now, and the result is coverage that is often just short of gushing.

In the end, the contrasting tone of the reporting in the Democratic race may not determine the outcome. But it will influence it. Bill Clinton is right when he angrily protests that “the political press has avowedly played a role in this election.”

In his frustration and fury, Clinton probably doesn’t understand the real motivation or comprehend what is behind the critical coverage of his wife and the fawning, sometimes cheerleading reporting of the Obama phenomenon.

But he is on to something.