General Raines

New York Press ^ | 6/25/02 | MUGGER - Russ Smith

[areafiftyone]

General Raines

David Remnick is the best editor The New Yorker’s employed in decades.

The weekly’s June 17 & June 24 "double" issue dedicated to fiction and "family histories" was an achievement unparalleled by any other magazine this year–Vanity Fair, for example, is in nosedive mode–with the lone exception of every month’s Atlantic. Jonathan Lethem’s heartbreaking "Alone at the Movies," Donald Antrim’s beautifully-written if depressing "I Bought a Bed" and Jeanette Winterson’s "Mother from Heaven" would all lift the quality of lesser publications such as New York, Esquire or GQ. But the standout in this New Yorker was actor/writer Steve Martin’s "The Death of My Father."

I’ve never been a fan of Martin’s: His introduction of the grating phrase "wild and crazy guy" was criminal enough, and his films (with the exception of Parenthood) have left me cold. But just the beginning and conclusion of Martin’s memoir gives the reader an entirely new perspective on the man. (In addition, as reported in the Daily News, Martin made a pretty funny quip in a recent tribute to Tom Hanks: "When you look at [Hanks], you wouldn’t think this is one of the greatest actors of our generation. You’d think more, ‘Excuse me, what are today’s specials?’")

He begins: "In his death, my father, Glenn Vernon Martin, did something he could not do in life. He brought our family together. After he died, at the age of eighty-three, many of his friends told me how much they loved him–how generous he was, how outgoing, how funny, how caring. I was surprised at these descriptions. I remember him as angry. There was little said to me, that I recall, that was not criticism. During my teen-age years, we hardly spoke except in one-way arguments–from him to me."

Glenn Martin’s "honesty" with Steve is detailed throughout the piece, including a bad review of his son’s first appearance on Saturday Night Live in a local newsletter and the comment, at a dinner party after the younger Martin’s first movie The Jerk was released, that Steve was "no Charlie Chaplin."

In 1997, as his father was dying, Martin recalls: "I stood at the end of the bed, and we looked into each other’s eyes for a long, unbroken time. At last he said, ‘You did everything I wanted to do.’ I said, ‘I did it because of you.’ It was the truth. Looking back, I’m sure that we both had different interpretations of what I meant. I sat on the edge of the bed. Another silence fell over us. Then he said ‘I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.’

"At first, I took this as a comment on his plight but am forever thankful that I pushed on. ‘What do you want to cry about?’ I finally said. ‘For all the love I received and couldn’t return.’ He had kept this secret, his desire to love his family, from me and from my mother his whole life. It was as though an early misstep had kept us forever out of stride. Now, two days from his death, our pace was aligning, and we were able to speak."

"The Death of My Father" is a dazzling article and a credit to Remnick’s editorial acumen.

On the other hand, The New Yorker’s chief (who himself is an excellent writer, particularly on the subjects of sports and the Middle East) has glaring blind spots. His lead "Comment" author Hendrik Hertzberg is a premature anachronism whose obsessions about Republicans diminish the magazine. Joe Klein (apparently on loan to Slate these days) has lost his juice in covering politics, either re-hashing the tired "conventional wisdom" of daily op-ed columnists or ginning up the electoral prospects of a "character" like South Carolina’s Alex Sanders, who almost certainly will be defeated by Lindsey Graham in this November’s U.S. Senate contest.

And the less said about Adam Gopnik the better.

But nothing compared to the publication of media-insider Ken Auletta’s fawning profile of New York Times executive editor Howell Raines in the June 10 New Yorker. Auletta litters his lengthy article with telltale reminders that he and Howell are friendly, a red flag that should’ve made Remnick cringe. At the piece’s end–and this is not a one-session read, especially since so much of the material isn’t new, much of it already reported in The New York Observer–Auletta writes: "‘Change always takes people out of their comfort zone,’ Raines said one evening, over a glass of bourbon and water in his small back room."

Swell. Fine by me if Auletta and Raines are chums and enjoy a cocktail together, but it ought to disqualify the former from writing the most exhaustive piece on the editorial general of (regrettably) America’s most influential newspaper.

Eighteen months ago, before Raines, then editorial-page editor, was named to his new post, it would take a most imaginative person to conjure a scenario in which the Times would descend even further into a de facto newsletter for the Democratic Party. After all, it’s not as if Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, Richard Berke, Elisabeth Bumiller and Katherine Seelye (and that’s just a sampling from the "A" section) hadn’t already cemented the paper’s standing as the last word on political correctness and unbridled arrogance.

But in Auletta’s portrait, Raines is revealed as a repulsive newspaperman.

He writes, after a long opening segment on the Times’ coverage of Sept. 11: "In a September 12th e-mail to the newsroom, Raines wrote, ‘Thank you one and all for a magnificent effort in putting out, in the midst of a heartbreaking day, a paper of which we can be proud for years to come... In a different context of violence, Yeats wrote that "a terrible beauty is born."’"

No doubt that Raines, like so many New Yorkers, knew people who perished that day, lost businesses, or were displaced from their homes, but instead he focused on the extraordinary beginning of his editorship. Except for this power-hungry boss, who reveled in his staff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of a national disaster, who else could find any "beauty" in the devastation of Sept. 11? And to quote Yeats, whose poem "Easter 1916" was indeed a different "context of violence," is so offensive that it reduces Raines to the level of a self-promoting hypocrite like Michael Moore.

I’ve the fortitude to cite just one more example of Raines’ madness. When the Enron business scandal broke, it was like Christmas Day for the man who fancies himself, though unelected, as a national and international policymaker.

Auletta writes: "[Raines] wanted editors ‘to forget turf lines,’ the assistant managing editor Carolyn Lee says. ‘Howell wants speed.’ He wanted the Washington and the Houston bureaus, the national desk, and legal correspondents to get involved, as he asked for separate stories and also for long narratives that would give readers what Raines calls ‘one-stop-shopping pieces.’ He told his business editors, ‘The Enron story is going to be your World Trade Center story.’"

A Mild June Swoon

Whenever the Red Sox are slumping–and this past weekend’s sweep by the Dodgers ought to be a serious wake-up call to Boston’s management–I look at a Globe column written last year by Bob Ryan. The subject wasn’t precisely the same, the debate over former manager Jimy Williams, but Ryan’s conclusion still rings true: "The team is chugging along, playing the greatest game ever conceived by mortal man in a pleasing and efficient manner. And if they don’t win, it’s because they’re not good enough, not because they all got together, took a vote, and decided to make your life miserable. Stop whining. It’s not about you, your father, or your Uncle Earl. It’s just baseball. It’s supposed to be fun."

Considering the Sox’s anemic offense–Tony Clark and Jose Offerman have to go–the team’s lucky to be just a half-game behind the Yanks as of June 24. By next Sunday, I suspect the gap will widen by another two games, but the season’s not even at the halfway point and this year’s club is the best Boston has seen since 1975.

Besides, the conclusion to this year’s Downtown Little League schedule last Saturday more than compensated for Brian Daubach striking out about 100 times in the last week. Junior’s team, the Indians, topped their division in a nail-biting contest against the Rangers, scoring two runs in the bottom of the sixth to win 10-9. Seeing all the pre-teens whooping it up like it was the World Series was quite a sight, all the more satisfying since after Sept. 11 the League’s organizers had to perform minor miracles just to let the season proceed. Those men and women are the real champs.

A Desperate New Republic

Say a prayer for the confused editors and reporters at The New Republic: While the ramifications of Martin Peretz’s sale of two-thirds of the weekly remain to be seen, one TNR writer after another lapses into dreamland touting a Democratic challenger to President Bush two years from now.

First it was Jonathan Chait (April 29) floating the DOA theory that John McCain will switch parties and confront his nemesis in the White House. Chait cites McCain’s alliance with Democrats like Teddy Kennedy, Carl Levin, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Fritz Hollings and Russell Feingold on issues that rank-and-file Republicans oppose. Chait, in his enthusiasm for a McCain candidacy, glosses over the Senator’s pro-life stance, an immediate disqualifier in the Democratic primaries.

Chait deceives himself in this paragraph: "Besides, McCain wouldn’t need to be the favorite candidate of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and People for the American Way. If McCain were to run as a Democrat, he would, as four years before, go over the heads of constituency groups and appeal directly to the grass roots. McCain has great appeal among both rank-and-file labor and the reform-minded upper-middle-class voters who flocked to the good-government messages of candidates like Bill Bradley and Paul Tsongas."

Bradley and Tsongas, of course, both lost their bids for the nomination, but I’ll grant Chait that convenient amnesia. What he forgets is that McCain’s main constituency was the media, which was desperate to stall Bush’s GOP coronation. In addition, every other Democrat running for president will be pro-choice, and if he thinks that McCain’s somewhat murky pro-life stance will win over "grass roots" voters he’s simply delusional.

Michael Crowley, who’s more realistic than his colleague Chait, wrote a long story on June 3, pumping up the bona fides of John Kerry. Although the story wasn’t an outright endorsement–Crowley cites Massachusetts’ junior senator’s arrogance, elitism and the embarrassing anecdote that John Forbes Kerry as a youth signed his name "JFK"–he correctly predicts that the charisma-challenged legislator’s biggest asset is his service in Vietnam. Trouble is, unless the economy’s in the tank in 2004, Kerry doesn’t have a prayer of winning a single state in the South.

Finally, in the current TNR Jonathan Cohn makes the case for Vermont’s governor Howard Dean. This one is a real stretch. The following passage might as well serve as a reminder to potential donors that Dean has almost no chance of facing Bush in the general election.

He writes: "By demonstrating the popularity of campaign finance reform, McCain forced George W. Bush to embrace the cause–a commitment Bush had to keep as president. It’s possible to imagine Dean playing the same role for the Democrats in 2004. Unlike his better-known competitors, he has argued explicitly, even enthusiastically, for repealing part of the Bush tax cut. He has also placed universal health care, beginning with children, at the center of his nascent campaign. Although risky, these proposals could move the political debate back to the issue on which Bush is the most vulnerable: his administration’s decision to squander Clinton-era surpluses and sacrifice vital government programs in order to give wealthy Americans a tax break."

Cohn, like most Democrats, forgets that McCain’s appeal was his personal history; campaign finance reform was a media issue that consistently polled near the bottom of voters’ concerns. And universal health care? Ask Miss Hillary about that socialist scheme.

The 2004 election will be a referendum on President Bush and will have little to do with who his challenger is. If Bush dithers on Iraq and Iran, if there’s another recession and continual terrorist attacks in the United States, I don’t think he’ll defeat the most likely Democratic candidate: Al Gore.

Maureen Cockburn

It’d probably be a fruitless mission, but I’d bear the transportation costs of a St. Lucia witch doctor to surprise Alexander Cockburn one morning in Northern California while he read Le Monde as fortification for a long horse ride in the country. Clearly, as exhibited by Alex’s most recent New York Press column, the entertaining (and usually insightful) writer’s soul has been captured by the Times’ Maureen Dowd.

That’s a rabbit punch, I know, because Cockburn is capable of actually thinking, as opposed to the Hollywood-drenched Dowd, who most likely taps out her semi-weekly column during commercials of West Wing or yet another DVD viewing of The Contender. On June 23 Dowd was dumbfounded that President Bush doesn’t watch tv news while he’s exercising. She said: "Why does the leader of the free world, a man with limitless opportunities for stimulation, seem to get really jazzed only when he can run his 6:45 miles? Does it ever occur to Mr. Bush and his aides to vacate the gym and nail down a Middle East policy?"

Does it ever occur to the dilettante Dowd that "nail[ing] down a Middle East policy" is impossible when Israelis are being slaughtered by Arab fanatics?

It’s debatable whether the once-glib pet of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. gets more "jazzed" about whether Minority Report beats Lilo & Stitch at the box office than the possibility of Washington, DC, New York or Tel Aviv getting blasted by a dirty nuke, but I think New York Press’ West Coast correspondent does ponder such issues. It’s just that he occasionally composes his column in a Palestinian fog.

Cockburn wrote: "How aghast that malign political genius [Richard Nixon] would have been at the pathetic ignoramus occupying the Oval Office once fragrant with Dick’s curses. What a falling off there was there! From malediction to malapropism, I’m sure W’s speech is less burdened by obscenity than that of the Navy vet and seasoned poker player, but this is the pudeur of the born-again imbecile. W has the vocabulary of a 12-year-old, though most 12-year-olds have an infinitely stronger grasp of world affairs.

"Our spaniel press makes Herculean efforts to pass over the fact in tactful silence, but the truth is that George W. Bush is the laughingstock of the world, by dint of the obvious fact that his maximum level of competence was that of greeter at the ballpark in Arlington, which, as the blues piano player Dave Vest recently remarked, is the only real job he ever had before he met Ken Lay."

In private, I’m quite certain George W. Bush’s language is salty enough to meet most journalist’s standards, although Cockburn and his repellent buddy Edward Said would be distraught at the lack of anti-Semitic slurs. As for "political genius," few presidents had Nixon’s skills, but if Bush had his way in 1992, Dan Quayle (the media-assassinated veep) would’ve been dumped from his father’s ticket in favor of Colin Powell, quite likely leading to Bill Clinton’s obscurity in Arkansas.

Yes, Bush may be the laughingstock of the slothful cafe society in Europe, but so what? It’s unlike Cockburn to parrot the mainstream American press, which, contrary to his assertion, constantly pokes fun at the President’s frequent mangling of words. Journalists, because they make their living writing and pronouncing words, some more successfully than others, are so solipsistic that they believe anyone without that skill is dumb. Including the "real people" (ie., voters) they persistently condescend to. Which means, to the Beltway elite (and Cockburn), that most Americans, including Bush, would be spared execution under the Supreme Court’s recent capital punishment ruling that exempts the retarded. I mean, the mentally-challenged.

[Valin]

remind me again why I'm supposed to care what Russ Smith thinks, about anything?