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Sound and Fury
 Also by Eric Alterman

Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters /n Foreign Policy (1998)

ItAiri't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (1999)
Sound and Fury
The Making of the Punditocracy

Eric Alterman

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Lyrics from "Johnny 99" copyright © 1 982 by Bruce Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Springsteen/ ASCAR Used by permission.

Alterman, Eric.

Sound and fury the making of the punditocracy

Copyright © 1 999 by Enc Altemnan
/ Eric Alterman.
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All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a Includes bibliographical references and index.
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TO MY PARENTS AND TO THE MEMORY OF THEIR PARENTS
 2

Contents

'
Introduction

SECTION ONE THE BIRTH OF A NOTION

1 The Road to Lippmanndom 21

2 Lippmanndom '8
3 Post-Lippmanndom: The Rest and the Rightest ,
57

SECTION TWO THE REAGAN PUNDITOCRACY

4 TheTriumph of George Will 85
5 Attack of the McLaughlinites i06
6 All theViews Fit to Print 'W
7 Glass Houses and Revolving Doors 148
8 We Are the Wild Men 1*3
9 Even the New Republic ... '78

SECTION THREE CONSEQUENCES: THE BUSH AND

CLINTON YEARS
1 The Man with No New Ideas 205
I I Operation Pundit Shield 229
1 Operation Pundit Storm 246
13 All Monica, All theTime 262

Conclusion 279

Notes 291

Index 313

vli
/ live in New York and I have not the vaguest idea what Brooklyn
is interested in.

—^Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (1920)

lean speak to almost anything with a lot of authority.

—Fred Barnes on The McLaughlin Group (1992)

 Introduction

o n what forecasters like to call "an unseasonably warm"

February morning in 1990, my friend Loring and I rode
the subway to the Capitol, where Vaclav Havel, the new
president of Czechoslovakia, was to address a joint session of Congress.
Our friend George had secured two guest passes for the occasion but mis-
informed me when I asked him whether I needed to wear a tie. I was
therefore barred at the door until I managed to convince the head of
security that a sports jacket and a beat-up old wool scarf worn as an ascot
represented "formal deeplomatic vear in mine country." Tragedy nar-
rowly averted, we entered the chamber and took our seats with the sena-
tors and representatives.
Havel entered the hall to a thunderous standing ovation. It was quite a
moment, and even the tough guys in the press gallery were fighting back
tears. This modest, diminutive playwright, fresh from facing down the
guns of the Soviet empire and leading his country in a democratic revolu-
tion, had been invited to share his wisdom in the hall that sits at the rhe-
torical center of what was now, undisputedly, the most powerful nation in
the history of the world. Never in my adult life had I witnessed so unam-
biguous a victory for the forces of sweetness and light.
But for all the emotional power and moral uplift of the occasion, I still

left the hall depressed. Havel was not exactly at his best, but he was still

Vaclav Havel. He explored many of the great themes of personal and

political responsibility with uncommon wit and originality and was cer-
tainly the only person in the chamber's history to offer even a brief plug
for a Hegelian interpretation of the dialect of historical consciousness.
But the sense that I was being addressed by a political leader who felt no
compulsion to speak down to his audience, to insult its intellect with
empty-headed rhetoric and pander to its egocentricity with kitschy enco-
miums, was almost wholly new to me. Seated above Havel's lectern, with
that eerie, lost-in-space smile of his, was Vice-President Dan Quayle. The
hall exploded when Havel declared that Marxism had been wrong,
although the representatives did not bother to listen to his explanation of
just what the Marxists were wrong about. ("Consciousness precedes
being, and not the other way around," Havel stated.) How is it, I won-
dered, walking back toward Union Station to catch a train home, that the
Czechs and Slovaks managed to elect this exquisitely eloquent, intellectu-
ally challenging moral champion as its president on their very first try,

while more than two hundred years after our revolution, we remain
mired arguments about flag factories and Willie Horton?
in
If ideas have consequences for society, then so, too, does their absence.

Jay Leno and David Letterman get plenty of mileage out of current politi-
cians' day-to-day squabbles, but our lack of coherent political discourse
really is a serious problem. Our politicians' rhetoric is so riddled with mis-
information, mindless cliche, and meaningless spectacle that it has
ceased to have any relevance to the problems it alleges to address. Even
the candidates hardly pretend to believe themselves any longer. The
forms of American political —
communication nine-second television
sound bites, negative advertisements, and ceaseless fundraising have —
buried even the possibility of fruitful debate. And the political system has
coasted so long on the fuel of its own irrelevance that the people who
operate it have lost both the imagination and the inclination to rethink
its premises. Meanwhile, back in the real world, America's problems pro-
liferate. Our economy declines, our cities collapse, our environment
deteriorates, and Washington fiddles.

It is dangerous, Thucydides reminds uncouple words from

us, to

things. We begin by fooling others and end up fooUng ourselves.

Because
American politicians' words are so thoroughly uncoupled from the things
about which they speak, the role of setting the parameters of our national
debate, of determining what problems require urgent attention and what
issues may prove to be important to the national interest, must fall else-
where. In our case, that means the media. Nothing else remains. As our
political parties more than glori-
have transformed themselves into litde

fied fundraising operations, and labor-related

and voluntary civic, ethnic,
organizations have retreated into local politics or been shunted to the
sidelines by megabuck special interests, the only place where national

Sound & Fury

political communication and exchange can take place is within the elite
television and print media outiets.
The problem here is that for a variety of reasons some commercial, —
—
others cultural the media is not up to its task. First, the most the obvious
criticism: the media is owned by international corporate conglomerates
whose interests frequendy conflict with those of the larger public. Equally
troubling are a series of more subtle barriers to honest communication,
such as the role of journalistic "objectivity." Almost everyone seems to
agree that objective reporting is something to which a journalist should
aspire. Yet the rules of objective reporting often prevent the media from
providing exactly the kinds of contextual information that allow readers,
viewers,and listeners to understand what is truly going on. This not only
impedes our ability to judge a story's significance, but also gives politi-
cians enormous latitude with the truth. Much of even the most conscien-
tious objective journalism consists of the "misstatements" that politicians
would like their constituents to believe.*
Because objectivity is the principle by which virtually all important elite

journalism defines itself, the only participants in the media's discourse

licensed to provide context sufficient to allow people to form even a
remotely well-informed political viewpoint are the pundits. Only the pun-
dits are accorded both the authority and the audience necessary to
explain, in language a concerned citizen is likely to understand, why
such-and-such proposal is either healthy or catastrophic for the future of
the republic. Only the pundits are invested with a responsibility to point
out when a group of politicians are conspiring against the many on
behalf of the few. Only the pundits are allowed to make the necessary
connections between a scandalous rip-off of the public trust and a mas-
sive buyout of a political party. In that segment of the media in which our
political discourse takes place, the pundits alone have the power and the
obligation to point to a naked emperor and observe that he has no

*A minor example in this case makes a major point. On March 24, 1990, the New York Times
reported that President Bush had announced himself to be opposed to statehood for the
District of Columbia because, the president said, "its funds come almost exclusively from
the Federal government." Instead of seeking to discover whether the president's insistence
was true or false, the report merely quoted an opposing politician, in this case Jesse Jackson,
calling Mr Bush "unfair" forhis attempts to "disenfranchise six hundred thousand Ameri-
can citizens." The story wholly conformed to the Times demanding standards of objectivity
but was nevertheless based on a falsehood. As the Washington Post did happen to mention in
its story the same day, only 14 percent of the district's budget is provided by the Federal gov-

ernment. Objectivity, in the unfortunately typical case of the Times report, had absolutely no
relevance to truth. See Philip Shenon, "Statehood for Capital Opposed by President," New
York Times, 24 March 1990, and Ann Devroy and R. H. Melton, "President Opposes State-
hood," Washington Post, 24 March 1990, p. Al.

Introduction
clothes on —^without first attributing it to "sources close to the alleged
parade route."
It is the argument of this book that our economy, our security and,
most particularly, our democracy, are imperiled by the decrepit state of
our national political discourse. We lack the ability, as a nation, to con-
duct a simple, sensible, and civil conversation about the choices we face.

Unless we diagnose the disease and begin to treat it, the sick state of the
American body politic will certainly worsen. The net result will be not
only the amplification of what George Will calls the "tawdry ferocity" of
American debate, but the increasing paralysis of our political system in
the face of the most daunting set of challenges America has faced since
we slept though the birth of Fascism more than half a century ago.

I do not argue that the dominance of our national political dialogue by

political pundits is the only serious roadblock to the achievement of a
vibrant political culture in the United States. The power of money in
American politics is an ongoing scandal. So is our inability, liberal and
conservative, to deal honestiy with the unspoken fissures in our society
deriving from racial prejudice, religious conflict, and class-based stratifi-

cation. Our shameful education system turns out so many illiterate citi-

zens that intelligent poUtical participation is all but impossible except for
a decreasing minority. And political corruption, individual alienation,

and a general have led large numbers of Americans per-

civic laziness —
haps even a majority —
remove themselves from political life. Finally,
to
the omnipresent influence of television, coupled with the increasingly
short attention span of the viewing audience, has reduced much of the
discourse to a kind of semiotic shorthand, designed to trigger the emo-
tions without disturbing the mind. Many of these carefully constructed
sound bites are nothing more than advertising slogans lifted directiy from
Hollywood or Madison Avenue.* Few last long enough to form a coherent
thought, much less outiine a sensible political program.
Owing to the dominance of form over content —in this case, media
—
forms drowning out political content the elevation of one issue or view-
point over that chosen by the competition is a function less of any real-
world concern than of the twin dictates of television production values
and the mores of Washington's Insider Working political culture.
together over the past couple of decades, these two forces have spawned
something I call the punditocracy. The punditocracy is a tiny group of
highly visible political pontificators who make their living offering "inside
political opinions and forecasts" in the elite national media. And it is

*"Where's the beef," "make my day," "read my lips," etc.

4 Sound & Fury

their debate, rather than any semblance of a democratic one, that deter-
mines the parameters of political discourse in the nation today.*
Defining who is and who is not a pundit at any given time can be a
tricky matter. Webster's informs us that a pundit is "a person of great learn-
ing"; William Safire's Political Dictionary expands the definition to "a polit-
ical analyst, usually associated with a sizable broadcasting outlet." Broadly
speaking, pundits are the people anointed by the media to give their
opinions on things. Political pundits give their opinions on things politi-

cal. Whether these people bring any special expertise to their subject is

wholly at the discretion of those doing the anointing. The ability to call
oneself an expert on a particular topic is a useful, but hardly necessary,
qualification.
The punditocracy, like what used to be the Soviet politburo, has full-

fledged members, candidate members, and membership hopefuls. Not

all pundits are invited into the punditocracy, and not all members of the
punditocracy are professional pundits. As with the ex-Communists, rela-
tionships are in a state of constant flux and rarely conform to an easily
discernible hierarchy.
A few extraordinarily visible perches within the insider media automat-
ically confer to their holders a seat at the punditocracy banquet table.
These include the chairs on NBC's The McLaughlin Group and Meet the
Press, CBS's Inside Washington, ABC's This Week, and CNN's The Capital

Gang 2ind Crossfire, as well as regular slots on all-news cable stations such as
CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel. The punditocracy's print
portfolio consists of the op-ed columns of the New York Times, the Washing-
ton Post, and the Wall Street Journal; the top editorships of the New Republic
and the Weekly Standard; and the Washington-based columns in the news-
weeklies. The most celebrated commentators —
super-pundits like George
F. Will, William Safire, and William Kristol —
earn mountains of money
and play a role in insider culture analogous to that of Leonardo DeCap-
rio or Brad Pitt in Hollywood. Their colossal incomes derive, however,

'Evidence of the American people's alienation from their political system is not exactly diffi-

cult to come by. The Times Mirror Company publishes a monthly poll of just how much
attention Americans pay to the news. An extensive survey of this data indicates that to say
that it more than half the country to sit up and pay
takes a major war (or a tax cut) to get
no exaggeration. At one point in 1990, more Americans were aware
attention to politics is

that George Bush hated broccoli than that he had ordered the invasion of Panama. See
Times Mirror Company, "The American Media: Who Reads, Who Watches, Who Listens,
Who Cares," 15 July 1990. This phenomenon has important implications for any consider-
ation of the revival of American democracy, most of which are beyond the scope of this
book. For an excellent discussion of many of them, however, see the Kettering Foundation's
pamphlet "Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America" (1991), discussed in the
conclusion of this book, and E. J. Dionne's thoughtful work, Why Americans Hate Politics
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

Introduction
 a

not from their newspaper columns or their television commentaries, but

from the inevitable celebrity appearances that these positions automati-
cally generate.
For those without access to the television personality/ syndicated col-
umnist route, admission to the punditocracy becomes largely a matter of
conflating a career as former secretary of something or other with a
healthy dose of self-promotional talent. Henry Kissinger and William
Rogers, for instance, both were secretaries of state for Richard Nixon.
Kissinger became a super-pundit; Rogers was never heard from again. In
addition to his regular column syndicated by the Los Angeles Times and
carried in the Washingt07i Post, Kissinger is a regular "expert" on Nightline,

The NewsHour with Jim and many other network and public televi-
Lehrer,

sion outiets. He is amounts of space to vent

also frequently given massive
his feelings in Time and Newsweek. Kissinger is the lodestar against which
former officials' pundit careers are measured. His closest competition
all

comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser,

who has shadowed Kissinger for his entire professional life. Brzezinski has
no syndicated column, but he is a talk-show/newsweekly/op-ed page fix-
ture whenever a crisis materializes. It may be no coincidence that both
men speak heavily accented English and therefore sound "intellectual" to
American audiences. It is certainly no coincidence that Ted Koppel —
figure invested with nearly divine powers within the punditocracy
realm —considers these two men to be perhaps the most intelligent politi-
cal analysts in the United States.*
Beneath the Kissinger/Brzezinski stratosphere hovers a seemingly lim-
itiess— usually male —
supply of former officials of past administrations
ready and willing to share their expertise on today's issues with the larger
public. Those who have successfully trained themselves to speak in short
sentences and communicate in snappy slogans are rewarded with limited
associate memberships in the punditocracy. When a crisis occurs in their
"area," they are suddenly besieged with callsfrom bookers at Nightline,
Crossfire, and The NewsHour, editors from the major op-ed pages and
newsweeklies; and reporters seeking a sound bite to confirm what they
already intend to say. The terms and duration of their memberships
depend on a number of factors, including the length of the crisis and the
pundit's ability to impress the gatekeepers who make the appointments.
The Persian Gulf War was worth a lifetime of New Republic articles and
strategically placed op-eds for military experts appointed by the networks

'Another exceptionally talented performer during the 1980s was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who
managed, despite the perceived disadvantages of being a Democrat, an academic, and a
woman, to catapult into the first rank of ex-officialdom.

Sound & Fury

to walk the audience through the minefields of Kuwait. An invitation
from The NewsHour to discuss, for example, a trade dispute between the
United States and the European Community, however, will result in little
more than the fifteen minutes predicted by Andy Warhol and prescribed
by the show's producers.
The outer limits of the punditocracy are composed of a short list of
televisually sophisticated academics. While these "experts" are not neces-
sarily respected in their respective fields, they are, without exception,
adept at responding to questions with a minimum of professional jargon
and a maximum of clarity and brevity. The ability to begin sentences with
a folksy, "Well, Ted," or "That's an interesting point, Jim," is useful too.
On extremely rare occasions, it is possible for a single book or magazine
article to propel a writer straight into the center of punditocracy debate.
Just what confluence of events is necessary to accomplish this is not
wholly clear, but academics Allan Bloom and Paul Kennedy and one-time
political apparatchiks Frances Fukiyama and Kevin Phillips have all trav-
eled this path in recent years. Of course, it did no harm whatsoever that
each of the works in question was championed within the punditocracy
before the political explosion that opened the riches of temporary mem-
bership to their authors.
In the 1990s, the advent of three all-news cable stations (CNN, the Fox
News Channel, and MSNBC) coupled with the growth of the Internet,
,

vastly inflated the outer reaches of the punditocracy by opening up doz-

ens, if not hundreds, of new slots in news programming. This inflation
had the effect of producing many new stars, most of whom were lawyers,
and of creating a second and third string of pundit wannabes who could
— —
be viewed or downloaded from the Internet ^virtually every moment of
every day. Curiously, the explosion of the punditocracy did nothing to
devalue the insider positions. The Sunday shows and op-ed pages
remained in charge, but they commanded a much larger universe. The
enormous gulf discovered by pollsters separating the members of the
twenty-four hour punditocracy and the general public on the issue of
President Clinton's fitness for office during the period of the Lewinsky
scandal, however, demonstrated the potential for an anti-punditocracy
backlash in the public at large.

In most cases, however, the public's views are not relevant. The public
does not possess the means nor, apparently, the inclination, to interfere
in Washington's policy apparatus in any but the most exceptional cases.
This is particularly true in matters relating to foreign policy. It is not the
populace's views that are defined by the pundits, but those of the Wash-
ington insiders —that informal aristocracy of the powerful, the influen-

Introduction
tial, and the well-connected in whose hands either fate or a presidential

appointment has placed the levers of national power. The people who
inhabit the insular world of Insider Washington are largely divorced from
the travails that can make everyday life in the United States such a strug-
gle. They live in neighborhoods like Georgetown, Cleveland Park, and

Chevy Chase, with green lawns, safe playgrounds, good schools, and an
extra room for the maid. Their biggest problem in life, according to one
Washingtonian magazine survey, is traffic.
Within insider culture, social status rests not so much on wealth as
on proximity to power. How much money you earn is less important
than whether you have been to Katharine Graham's (or, even better,
"Kay's") for dinner. Wisdom is judged not on the depth of knowledge
but the speed with which it is acquired. If you have to wait for the polls
to close to hear who won an election somewhere, forget it. The only
returns worth mentioning are those gleaned from exit polls. The only
scandals worth raising an eyebrow over are those about to break. To
know who is about to be appointed assistant secretary of state for Near
Eastern and South Asian affairs is a great deal more impressive than
knowing where the hell either place is. Insiders intimidate outsiders in
cocktail party conversation by implying that they know more about a
particular policy than they can, in good conscience, say. (This has
always been Henry Kissinger's secret.) Even worse, insiders possess the
unspoken potential to end a conversation by responding, "Oh, really?
The Under Secretary and I just flew back on the Concorde together,
and he says you don't know what you're talking about." And it is in this
tiny but powerful universe that the intellectual sovereignty of pundit
power reigns supreme.
The power of the punditocracy takes many forms. One can identify
examples of political pundits entering the history books directiy. Pat
Buchanan has used his status as a pundit to run for president three times
now. Buchanan is, of course, a special case, and he is unlikely ever to vdn
his party's nomination, but a pundit presidential candidate has been inev-
itable for more than a decade, ever since the punditocracy achieved its
prominence as the primary locus of our national political discourse. On
announcing his first candidacy in December 1991, Pat Buchanan could
credibly brag that "No other American has spent as many hundreds of
hours debating the great questions of our day on national television."
With seven weekly tele\ision appearances, two regular columns, and a
popular newsletter, Buchanan was able to enlist the support of his conser-
vative minions through infinitely greater access to the American people
than any mere representative or senator. As a result of his unmediated
televisual relationship with his constituency, Buchanan was able to over-

Sound & Fury

come accusations that he was both an anti-Semite and a "pacifist isolation-
ist" regarding the Gulf War —accusations that would likely have sunk the
aspirations of any professional right-wing politician limited to the usual
sound-bite responses.
On a less grandiose but equally significant scale, we have seen a num-
ber of direct pundit interventions into national and international politics.

Ironically, we may have the punditocracy to man who sat

thank for the
just "a heartbeat" from the presidency for four years. When Dan Quayle
launched his aggressive insider campaign for the vice-presidency, he first
conspired with his close friend, Washington Times pundit and former
Reagan administration official Kenneth Adelman. "We should have a lit-
tie boomlet over this," advised Adelman, sitting by the pool with the then-

unknown senator. A few days later, on August 10, 1988, a column

appeared in the Washington Times under Adelman 's name entitied, "Why
Not Dan Quayle?" George Bush apparendy read and heavily underlined
it. Days later, Quayle was asked to appear on ABC's This Week with David

Brinkley. James Baker, the most powerful and influential figure in the

Bush campaign save Bush himself, told Quayle not to do it. But George
Will intervened and apparendy, in Quayle 's view, outranked Baker.
Quayle did the show and got the job.
Pundit interventions in international politics are rarely so heavy
handed, but politically no less significant. New York Tim£s columnist Wil-
liam Safire, for instance, went on a rampage in 1989 against Germany's
sale of poison gas to Libya, calling it "Auschwitz in the Sand," and compar-
ing it to a "final solution" for the Jews. Chancellor Helmut Kohl com-
plained to his American visitors that "this Safire fellow has done more
damage to German-American relations than any other individual." But
Safire 's story turned out to and the Kohl government was forced
be true,
to instigate a criminal investigation and change its export laws. When
George Will challenged Ferdinand Marcos' democratic credentials on
This Week with David Brinkley, Marcos responded by calling a snap election
on the air, setting in motion a process that yielded the "People Power" rev-
olution of 1985. Lyndon Johnson once said that the Washington Post op-ed
page under editor Russell Wiggins was "worth two divisions" in Vietnam,
while \he Jerusalem Post likened New Republic owner Martin Peretz to a simi-
lar percentage of the fighting force of the Israeli military. Punditocracy
efforts, as is discussed later in the book, were absolutely essential to Presi-
dent Bush's efforts to convince Congress to approve his decision to go to
war in January of 1991. When, in the war's bloody aftermath. White House
Chief of Staff John Sununu quipped that the only pressure on the United
States to intervene on behalf of the Kurds was "coming from columnists,"
these same columnists reminded him that, six months earlier, they were

Introduction
"the only ones supporting the use offeree to liberate Kuwait." Within two
weeks of the invasion, the president had reversed himself and accepted an
open-ended commitment to defending the lives of the Kurds.
But these are rare cases. Usually, the punditocracy's influence is invisi-
ble and therefore unprovable. No politician can credit a television talk
show or newspaper op-ed column with influencing his policies, lest he
compromise his reputation for independence. Not a single political pun-
dit earned a mention in Ronald Reagan's memoirs: not even Pat Bucha-
nan, who served as White House director of communications, or George
Will, who coached the president's debating tactics, touched up his
speeches, and frequendy hosted dinner parties Reagan attended.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine a president who could have paid
more attention to political pundits than Ronald Reagan. In addition to
hiring Buchanan and befriending Will, Reagan was a dedicated fan of The
McLaughlin Group and was known to bang on the tables at Camp David
when one of its members took issue with one of his policies. He appeared
at the Group's birthday party; visited its host, John McLaughlin, at his
home for dinner; and appointed McLaughlin's wife to be secretary of
labor. Reagan was also known to call members of Agronsky and Company
after the show. The president took Sun Myung
the editorial pages of
Moon's Washington Times so seriously that when Buchanan entered the
White House, he proceeded to allow his entire communications staff to
languish in bureaucratic limbo while he devoted himself to the only work
he thought truly mattered: planting articles and ideas in the Washington
Times' far-right Commentary section.
Even more important than the ability to influence the president's
mind is the ability to fashion his intellectual environment. Walter Lipp-
mann observed nearly fift)' years ago that "he who captures the symbols
by which the public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that
much the approaches of public policy." These approaches are exacdy
where the influence of the punditocracy is so powerfully pervasive. As
right-wing media critic Jude Wanniski observes, "If politicians are able to
decide what the electorate wants, they have to have the parameters of the
debate communicated to them by the scriveners." By determining these
parameters, the punditocracy can create for a president either a hostile
or sympathetic context in which to pursue his agenda. James Fallows, a
speechwriter in the Carter White House, recalls that "what was on the op-
ed pages provided the boundaries of what we were allowed to say in the
speeches. Underlings in the government, like me, could move the ball up
and down the playing field, but the columnists defined the field." Part of
Fallows' job, therefore, was to contact op-ed writers to convince them to
address issues which the president was preparing to approach. In one

lO Sound & Fury

particularly illustrative case, Fallows actually ghostwrote a New Republic
editorial himself to legitimate a discussion of its subject by his employer,
the president of the United States.
The Carter presidency predated the explosion of pundit television, and
the "punditocracy effect" had not yet reached its present proportions. The
fruition of its influence can be seen in the 1985 invention of the "Reagan
Doctrine" by New Republic editor, Washington Post and Time columnist, and
Inside Washington regular panelist Charles Krauthammer. On the basis of a
few throwaway sentences in the president's State of the Union address,
Krauthammer created a concept that brought coherence to what had pre-
viously been just an amalgam of rag-tag drug runners, terrorists, Islamic
fundamentalists, Maoist revolutionaries, and a few hapless democrats pac-
ing the Capitol hallways for taxpayer handouts. As "freedom fighters" for
the Reagan Doctrine, these sorry fellows were transformed into romantic
agents of the "restoration" of "democratic militance," fighting to turn back
Soviet gains at "the limits of empire." In addition to considerably flattering
Reagan's intelligence, Krauthammer's rhetorical umbrella vastly increased
the limits of the ideological and financial tribute that high-powered Wash-
ington influence peddlers were able to wrangle out of Congress for the
Afghans.
Similarly, when in March 1983 Ronald Reagan unveiled his "dream"
of a nuclear astrodome-protected United States that would render
Moscow's nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete," a healthy portion
of the punditocracy underwent what one writer called "a mass conver-
sion reminiscent of that decreed by King Ethelbert of Kent in the sixth
century." Led by Kissinger and Brzezinski, the punditocracy created an
ideologically inspired smokescreen on behalf of the strategic defense
initiative (SDI) that enabled the Reagan administration and its allies in
Congress to soak up tens of billions of tax dollars on what was clear to
all disinterested parties to be a perfectly pinheaded scheme.* The fact

that 98 percent of the members of the National Academy of Scientists

in relevant scientific fields believed that SDI would never "provide an
effective defense of the entire U.S. civilian population" and only 4 per-
cent expected such a system to be "survivable and cost-effective at the
margin" did not carry much weight in Washington. The history of sup-
ply-side economics, moreover, discussed at length in Chapter 8, can be

'Kissinger described SDI as "a major contribution Western strategy

to perhaps
. . .

[Reagan's] greatest contribution to strategic theory" ("How

to Deal with Gorbachev," Neivs-
week, 2 March 1988, pp. 42, 47). Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Jastrow, and Max Kempleman
chose the almost comically appropriate biblical incantation that "faith can move moun-
tains" in support of their own version of the system (see "Defense in Space Is Not Star Wars,"
The New York Times Magazine, 27 January 1985, p. 47).

Introduction
charted along similar lines as the earlier discussion. Within the con-
fines of Washington's punditocracy-driven insider debate, when reality
and ideology come into conflict, it is the former, almost uniformly, that
gives way.

For the first half-century of its existence, political punditry was simply a

branch of journalism. A newspaper column was considered the reward

for a particularly distinguished career as a reporter or, in rare cases, a
mark of incipient political genius. The first Washington pundits arose in
the decade between 1910 and 1920 as a complement to increasingly
objective news reporting. During most of the previous century, journalists
had few pretenses about their prejudices, and owners frequendy used
their newspapers as political weapons. Neither had much incentive to
divorce their opinions from the news and, hence, equally littie interest in
explicidy labeled commentary. Washington was, for most of this period, a
backwater swamp compared to New York or Chicago, and journalists with
literary pretensions wisely steered clear of it.
The first truly influential Washington pundit, Walter Lippmann, was
in many ways the least typical. Lippmann had earned himself a national
reputation as a New York editorial writer and columnist, as well as a
best-selling author, when complications in his personal life led him to
relocate down South in 1936.* Lippmann 's newspaper analyses were so
vastly superior to those that preceded his arrival that he single-handedly
raised both the social statusand the professional standards of his cho-
sen profession. His columns provided other journalists with an intellec-
tual standard to which they might aspire and his readers with an
education in the principles of foreign policy as the young republic grew
to superpowerdom. Equally important, he offered high officials the
opportunity to challenge, refine, and ultimately communicate their
own ideas before attempting to chisel them in the stone of government
edict.
But Lippmann was less a journalist than a public philosopher. The
pundits who followed him did not have the option of simply applying
their genius to the daily rush of events and knocking off something
brilliant before lunch. They compensated by combining journalistic
investigation with a bit of context, a few explicitly stated opinions, and
the kinds of inside dirt that could not comfortably be included in a
straight Some, like James Reston of the New York Times,
news story.

rested their reputationson their journalistic prowess. Others, like

Joseph Alsop, earned reader loyalty through a combination of Lipp-

*Lippmann fell in love with the wife of his best friend, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and the
two left their respective spouses in New York to begin a new life together.

I S Sound & Fury

mannian hauteur, Restonian legwork, and virulent anti-Communism.
As their influence grew steadily during the postwar
few pundits
era, a
developed their own political constituencies and achieved the ability to
throw their weight around Washington the way any senator or repre-
sentative might. In Lippmann's case, his endorsement of a presidential
initiative was said to be roughly equal to the combined clout of either
four U.S. senators or the Speaker of the House. But the numbers of the
select few whose views mattered in the success of a given government
policy were truly minuscule. Beyond Lippmann, Reston, and Alsop, it is
difficult to name more than a dozen pundits whose influence lasted
longer than a single decade between 1930 and 1980.
The nature of the job and the power of its practitioners began to
change during the 1970s, when television discovered punditry and vice
versa. Once again Lippmann was the pioneer, and once again his
example spawned an offspring that bore him only passing resem-
blance. In the early 1960s, CBS News took the extraordinary step of
devoting a series of television interviews to a man whose only celebrity
derived from his fame as a political columnist.* In the final year of that
decade, Post/Newsweek stations took the equally remarkable step of
devoting a weekly television show to the opinions of a group of journal-
ists, none of whom was named Walter Lippmann. Agronsky and Company
eventually spawned a series of imitators, opening the doors of stardom
and riches to its beneficiaries and vastly increasing both their visibility

and ambitions.
Because of its tangled roots in personal journalism, political com-
mentary, and television production values, the punditocracy never
developed a recognizable code of ethics. This situation was further
complicated by the entry into the profession in the early 1980s of large
numbers of political operatives who could not even pretend to con-
sider themselves journalists. No longer a means of rewarding the pro-
fession's most distinguished members, the jobs opened up to political
deal makers, speechwriters, press flacks, and professional ideologues.
During this period, the political column came to be seen as the step-
ping stone to riches, fame, and kingmaker status all in one. Even bet-
ter, there were almost no rules about how such success might be

achieved. John McLaughlin, himself credibly accused of (and sued for)

extremely offensive sexual harassment, feels free to attack the charac-
ter and credibility of Anita Hill without so much as mentioning his own
sordid history.^ George Will coaches the president on his debating

'The first "Conversation with Walter Lippmann" aired on August 11, 1960.
^McLaughlin settled the case out of court for an undisclosed payment. See Chapter 5 for
details.

Introduction I 3
 —
techniques and then judges his performance a few days Morton
later.

Kondracke and Fred Barnes of Fox News Channel's The Beltway Boys sell
their dinner conversation to wealthy American Express Platinum Card
holders, "by invitation only." Kondracke, together with Robert Novak,
happily accepts thousands of dollars in payments from the Republican
party, ostensibly in return for sharing his political wisdom at a gather-
ing of its governors. Novak and his partner, Rowland Evans, have cre-
ated something approaching a mini pundit conglomerate, hosting two
television shows, publishing three newsletters, sponsoring pricey off-
the-record briefings by cabinet officials for corporate fat cats, and
like Barnes and Kondracke —auctioning off their dinner conversation
to starstruck fans. If anyone objects to the coziness of these arrange-
ments, their beneficiaries are shocked that anyone would question
their integrity.
Just why this class came to cohere as the most
of commentators
influential determinants of the shape of American political discourse
in the early 1980s may be clearer to future historians than it is today.
The most convincing explanation lies in the coupling of the collapse of
the punditocracy's competition with the inexorable expansion of the
empire of media dominance in all aspects of American cultural life. In
many ways, the pundits won the fight because they were the only guys
left standing in the ring. The bull market in pundit influence coin-
cided with the collapse of the bipartisan establishment that had guided
American foreign policy for the previous five decades. This process
began in Vietnam, which sapped the self-confidence of the "Wise Men"
and destroyed the trust the American political system had invested in
them. It continued through Watergate, the oil crises of the 1970s, and
the debilitating stagflation of the same period. The rise of the New
Right provided the final shove over the ledge. Political parties by and
large disappeared during this period as well, in part because of inter-
nal divisions on both sides and in part because the onset of the elec-
tronic campaign made their infrastructure obsolete. The community of
academic experts on whom our national political discussion had previ-
ously relied took the same opportunity to withdraw to the academy
partially as a result of Vietnam-related divisions and partially as a result
of an increasing obsession with social-scientific arcania. Independent
intellectuals of the Partisan Review model also slipped off the public's
screen during this period, falling victim to the balkanization of public
culture and the collapse of the socioeconomic foundation that sup-
ported their professional lives.
An equally important factor was the pundits' ability to hitch themselves
successfully to Ronald Reagan's rising star. Whether right-wing pundits

I 4 Sound & Fury

 S

became influential during "the Reagan revolution" or influential pundits

became right-wing is a chicken-and-egg problem. Either way, the pundi-
tocracy proved that could read election returns as well as any legisla-
it

ture. Most newspaper publishers and the lion's share of public affairs
television funding originated on the Right, as well; their prejudices were
suddenly unleashed by the newfound respectability Reagan accorded
them. Suddenly, views that had been considered Cro-Magnon just months
earlier became sophisticated. While a tiny cadre of stalwarts managed to
hold fast to their liberal instincts during this period, most professed to
see new wisdom in cutting taxes for the rich, threatening war with the
Soviets, and cracking down on vodka-guzzling welfare queens. The pundi-
tocracy hardly required a weatherman to determine which way political
winds were blowing.*
A final addition to the dominance of misinformation and misinter-
pretation in American political discourse was the punditocracy's ever-
expanding pretension to expertise in areas its members could not
really be fairly expected to master. This is less a reflection on the tal-
ents of the men and women who people the punditocracy than on the
increasingly impossible demands of their jobs. In Lippmann's day, both
the world and the American role within it appeared a great deal sim-
pler. When David Halberstam returned from two years in the Congo in
the mid-1960s, his boss, James Reston, sent him over to see Lippmann.
When he arrived, the pundit asked him, "When I understood Europe
they told me I needed to understand Asia. Now that I've been trying to
get Asia, they tell me I need Africa. What can you tell me about Africa?"
When Halberstam gave up daily reporting and was approached by a
syndicate about beginning a regular column, he remembered this story
and decided the entire idea was futile. Even in Lippmann's later days,
punditry was becoming increasingly difficult to defend as an intellec-
tual enterprise.
Today, a good column has become harder than ever to write, not
only because issues have proliferated and increased in complexity, but
also because this has become increasingly obvious inside Washington,
owing to an explosion in the specialized fields of policy research and
political consultancy. The most defensible columns are those that spe-

*Several rightist organizations have spent a great deal of their funders' money convincing
Americans that the media is on behalf of liberals. I would not argue that the media is
biased
—
not biased, or that this bias does not manifest itself on certain issues particularly abor-
tion— in a politically liberal direction. But the bias is more cultural than political. It is
urban, secularist, pseudo-sophisticated, wholly ahistorical, and tremendously cowardly in
the face of concerted government or corporate pressure. Overall, conservatives benefit
more from these biases than do liberals, but the point is arguable.

Introduction I
cialize in a particular beat or speak with an intensely personal voice
while addressing larger issues from something approaching a human
scale. The problem with beat columns, however, is that they force pun-
dits down the same hole into which reporters historically fall: they
become prisoners of their sources. The latter, more personal style can
have great value when done well. But the temptations toward laziness,
self-satisfaction, and plain old burnout are more than most pundits can
resist. Only a negligible number of pundits manage to pull off the

simultaneous feats of and integrity required to

intellect, reporting,
write an honest analytical column about the panoply of issues facing
America. The number who manage to present a coherent, contextual
viewpoint on television is zero.
As with virtually every aspect of life it touches, television has
degraded the quality of political punditry, coarsening its language and
destroying what remained of its Lippmann-era sophistication. The level
of political analysis on even the best of these shows is usually a notch
below that heard on Friends. Moreover, because virtually everyone in
Washington journalism entertains at least a daydream of the riches and
fame that only television can bring, even good journalists are tempted
to imitate increasingly rich and famous performers, and so television's
simpleton virus flows throughout the entire political discourse. Even in
the unlikely event that a pundit has no wish to become rich and famous
through television, he must nevertheless address himself to the particu-
lar pseudoreality television has created.

During the 1990s, the size of the punditocracy exploded, and its frivo-
lousness increased exponentially. The O.J. Simpson case, the death of
the Princess of Wales, the trial of the au pair Louise Woodward in the
so-called nanny murder, and the JonBenet Ramsey com-
investigation,
bined with the media's obsession with President Clinton's relationship
with Monica Lewinsky, drove nearly all serious discussion of larger
problems from the public domain. The endless talk of sex and murder
in the American public sphere made it nearly impossible for interested
citizens to feel themselves to be participants in a larger conversation
about the nation's future. The public frequently condemned the
media's relentless focus on sex and tawdry tabloid topics, but the pro-
ducers of these shows insisted that they had no other way to attract
largenumbers of viewers. The result was an endless cycle of cynicism
on both sides and an ever-widening gap between the rulers and the
ruled. "Ignorance is correctable," notes the social critic Neil Postman,
"but what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?" By allow-
ing the punditocracy to determine the content of its political dialogue.

IC Sound & Fury

 7

the American political system has committed itself to a path that all but
guarantees the acceleration of the destructive pathologies threatening
our common future. What follows is an examination of how this cata-
strophic situation came to pass.

Introduction 1
 "

SECTIOH ONE

THE BIRTH OF A NOTION

"/ wish we had never come to Washington. New York is so much

nicer and the people there are much more amusing; they dance
ever so much better and send one flowers all the time, and then
they never talk about first principles.

— Sibyl Lee, in Henry Adams' Democracy (1880)

 CHAPYER ONE

The Road to Lippmanndom

T he word pundit is a bastardization of the Hindi honorific

pandit, which confers on its holder the implication of
great learning. Pandit derives from the Sanskrit pandita,
meaning "scholar." Its metamorphosis into the American vernacular owes
a great deal to the wives of a group of Rochester, New York, professional
men who joined together in 1854 to found a club "devoted to the serious
and conscientious investigation of the truth." Not much in the creativity

department, apparently, the men decided to call their club "The Club."
Their wives, however, thinking all this high-mindedness to be a bit much,

took to referring to the group as "The Pundit Club" in a facetious refer-

ence to the Eastern tide. The members were well acquainted with the
word's connotations; one of its members, the Reverend Doctor Mcllvaine,
had given a report to the group entided "Observadons on the Sanskrit
Language," and soon, in good spirits, they adopted the appellation as
their own.
The term meandered into the American public dialogue via an article
in the Saturday Review, dated 1862, in which the author noted a point on
which "the doctors of etiquette and the pundits of refinement" were
likely to differ. The final stage of its etymological development seems to

have come from the pen of Henry Luce, who founded Time magazine in
1923. Luce adopted the term pundit, which he derived, most likely, from
—
another well-knovm club this a group of Yale undergraduates and —
applied to the New York World editorial writer Walter Lippmann.

II
 It is particularly fitting that Lippmann should have the honor of being
the first journalist so zinged with the moniker, since the art form did not
begin to approach its current level of pretension until he chose journal-
ism as a profession on graduating from Harvard in 1910. Pre-Lippmann,
journalists had been considered incompletely evolved life-forms on the
American Reporting was seen a job for winos, perverts, and
social scale.
those without sufficient imagination to become successful gangsters. The
notion of a young man choosing to be a journalist rather than a professor
of political philosophy at Harvard, as Lippmann had done, was akin to
that of a guest at a societ)' cocktail part)' refusing a glass of Dom Perignon
and inquiring, instead, if the hostess could come up with a cold SchUtz.
The emergence of Walter Lippmann as America's semi-official public
philosopher in the 1920s and 1930s represented the fulfillment of a kind
of circular journey for American journalism. In the days of the American
and pamphleteers
revolutionary press, politicians, journalists, pundits,
were by and large the same people. Politicians owned and published
newspapers and pamphlets, and probably no one even thought to sepa-
rate fact from opinion. The press played an absolutely essential role in
the creation of a revolutionary consciousness among the colonists, stok-
ing a \ibrant public discourse in the late 1760s and early 1770s from resis-

tance to rebellion. To achieve this transformation, they created an

ideology that was both angry and inspirational. Firebrands Samuel Adams
and Thomas Paine used the printing press what were seen as little
to turn
more than obnoxious restrictions sent over by the king into an irreconcil-
able conflict between freedom and slavery. The most important pundits
of the time were, therefore, by definition the most important journalists
and politicians as well.
With victor)' over the British assured, the pundit-politicians turned
their attention to the shaping of the new nation. Between 1787 and 1788,
Alexander Hamilton, together with James Madison and John Jay, pub-
lished the eight)'-five essays that made up the Federalist papers in the
semiweekly New York Independent Journal in support of the proposed con-
stitution imder the nom de plume "Publius." Their opponents, less well

remembered although names

equally well regarded at the time, used the
"Brutus," "the Federal Farmer," and "Cato" in response. Both sides pro-
\ided a standard of scholarship and eloquence against which all subse-
quent political punditry would pale.
The American opinion magazine, in which so much of the modem pun-
ditocrac)' is today housed, owes its pedigree in large measure to the wit and

A copy of the British Spectator, founded in 171 1,

energ)' of Benjamin Franklin.
landed in Franklin's hands when he was a young man, and he "bought it,
read it over and over, and was much delighted with it." The sixteen-year-old

19 Sound & Fury

 3

Franklin then began his punditry career by stealth —slipping columns

underneath the door at his brother's newspaper and signing them "Silence
Dogood." Between April and October 1722, the New England Courant pub-
lished fourteen such letters, in which the fictional Mrs. Dogood complained
of political and religious hypocrisy, championed feminist rights, and laughed
at Harvard. James Franklin was so angry and embarrassed when the author's
identity was revealed that he ran his precocious brother out of town. Young

Benjamin was forced to move to Philadelphia, where he worked at various

printing trades, finally founding his General Magazine in 1741.*

During the early life of the republic, newspapermen did the bidding of
politiciansand were rewarded in kind, with no questions about where
allegiances lay. Building on the success of his FederaUst experience,
Hamilton founded the New York Evening Post in 1801, where he frequently
dictated the editorials verbatim. Ten years earlier, during George Wash-
ington's presidency in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson promised the revo-
lutionary poet PhilipFreneau a $250-a-year clerkship at the State
Department and complete access to all of his correspondence in return
for establishing the pro-Jefferson National Gazette.
The cozy printing-contract-for-friendly-partisan arrangement contin-
ued through 1860, when the founding of the Government Printing Office
put an end to the president's store of newspaper venture capital. Before
that, Andrew Jackson set something of a record, carrying fifty-seven jour-
nalists on the public payroll. They were, according to John Quincy

Adams, without exception "the vilest purveyors of slander during the last
electioneering campaign," which by the way, Adams lost.+
The carrying of a newspaperman on the public payroll was no doubt
helpful to the scribe's standard of living, but it was hardly necessary.
James Gordon Bennet, the profession's first Washington correspondent,

"Without Freedom of Thought," wrote Mrs. Dogood, "there can be no such Thing as Wis-
dom and no such Thing as Publick Liberty. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a
. . .

Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech." See Karl E. Meyer, Pundits, Poets
and Wits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xvii. The letters themselves can be
found in Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press, ed. Vemer W. Crane (Chapel Hill, NC: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1950). The full name of Franklin's magazine was The General
Magazine and Historical Chronicle for All the British Plantations in America. Unfortunately for
Franklin's place in the record books, however, he went to press three days after his
employee, Andrew Bradford, brought out his short-lived American Magazine.
+See John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts, The Press and the Presidency (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), p. 78. Adams' quote may deserve greater credibility than his polit-
ical interests might imply. These appointments were drawn from a pool described by fel-
low editor John Fenno as "the most ignorant, mercenary, and vulgar automatons that ever
were moved by the constandy rusting wires of sordid mercantile avarice." Quoted in Allen
Nevins, American Political Opinions, 1893-1922 (Port Washington, NY: Kinnikat Press,
1928), p. 7.

The Road to Lippmanndom 1

ably demonstrated the prevailing standards of fairness and objectivity in
his first New York Herald dispatch, published on Januar)' 2, 1828, when he
disclosed that be found that the Jacksonian party are the truest
"it will

friends of the country, and that they will encourage every interest but
favor none." Although wealthy publishers and their hired editors did
enjoy the prerogative of purely editorial columns, these were often noth-
ing more than a harmless vanity: the true editorializing was done in the
news columns.
For the first twelve or so decades of the republic, the only generally
recognized names in the journalism profession were those of the
wealthy owTier-publishers, crusading editors, and the syndicated feature
writers, the vast majority of whom were humorists and satirists. Many
belonging to the first category did enjoy a significant degree of influ-
ence over the opinions of their literate publics. The late A'^^; York Times
pundit Arthur Krock saw the forerunners of his profession at work at the
Cincinnati Liberal/Democratic convention of 1872, at which publisher-
journalist Horace Greeley was nominated for president. Scheming quite
openly to deny their print colleague his ambition were four powerful
editors who called themselves the "Quadrilateral": Henry Watterson, the
legendar}' publisher of the Louisville Courrier-Journal; Murat Halstead of
the Cincinnati Commercial; Sam Bowles of the Springfield (Mass.) Republi-
can, and Horace White of the Chicago Tribune. The editors were so
impressed with one another's wisdom that each printed the editorials of
the other three in his paper.' The plot failed, due to the fact that Gree-
ley's assistant, Whitelaw Reid, was inexplicably admitted to the inner
councils of the cabal.
The incident may mark the beginnings of the all-important institution
of the syndication of individual pundits. The technological phenomenon
of newspaper syndication itself, the foundation on which pre-electronic
punditrv' rested, came on the heels of the invention of the telegraph,
when, in May 1846, the New York Tribune and the New York Herald began
running identical wire dispatches from Washington.^ The most widely
syndicated writers were, however, rarely political. The New York Sun svudi-
cated the work of Henry James. McClure's syndicate handled the work of
Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Henry Cabot Lodge, Rudyard
Kipling, Jack London, and Arthur Conan Doyle. William Randolph

'Greeley was nominated on the Liberal Republican and Democratic tickets. He lost to
Republican U. S. Grant, which is just as well, since Greeley died before the electoral college
cast its ballots. See Arthur Krock, "The Early Personal Journalists," in Walter Lippmann and
His Times, Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jo%'ano\ich,
1959), pp. 83-110.
^his development led to the formadon of the .Associated Press three years later.

94 Sound & Fury

 S

Hearst's syndicate —the great-grandfather of today's King Features— fea-

tured the sardonic skepticism of Ambrose Bierce before he disappeared

into the Mexican Civil War and the prophetic satire of Chicago wit Finley
Peter Dunne, whose barkeep, Mr. Martin J. Dooley, rivals Huckleberry
Finn and Jay Gatsby as modern punditry's favorite fictional oracle.
Before punditry could play a significant role in political debate, how-
ever, "straight" American journalism needed to rid itself of the opinion-
ated arguments that were its foundation. The initial seeds of objective
reporting appeared in New York in 1851, in part as a reaction to the per-
ceived excesses of the crusaders. First and foremost among the guilty, no
doubt, was Horace Greeley. Though not quite as vociferous as the Libera-
tors William Lloyd Garrison, Greeley barely stopped to take a breath as he
and his newspaper, the New York Tribune, thundered against war, social
inequality, and the South's peculiar institution. In addition to sponsoring
unknown European journalist by
the foreign-correspondent career of an
the name of Marx, Greeley's Tribune can take credit for founding the
institution of the modern editorial page.* The great American historian
and former New York World editorial writer Allen Nevins described Gree-
ley's creation as follows:

a page treating a wide variety of topics in a variety of manners, though pur-

suing a consistent policy: achieving a level of genuine literary merit; pro-
duced by a body of editors, not by a single man and representing their
united elevated judgment and information; and earnestly directed to the
elevation and rectification of public opinion.

What Greeley did not do, or make any pretense of doing, was remove
the same opinions from his news pages. His former managing editor,

'Greeley's hiring of KariMarx is a wonderfully ironic episode in the history of both the
philospher and American journalism. Marx himself hated writing his columns, and
political
complained to a friend that "this continual journalistic hack-work is getting on my nerves. It
takes up a lot of time, destroys any continuity in my efforts and in the final analysis amounts
to nothing (quoted in Neil A. Grauer, Wits and Sages [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
at all"
versity Press, 1984], p. 7). Looking at his published letters, however, it is hard to work up
much sympathy. Unbeknownst to Greeley and his managing editor Charles Dana, Marx had
subcontracted out at least —
nineteen of these London-based dispatches those dealing with
revolution in Germany and published between October 1851 and
and counter-revolution
—
October 1852 to his uncredited German partner, Friedrich Engels. The articles stopped
arriving, however, because the paper cut the fee for them by 50 percent, from ten dollars to
five. With his family sick and hungry, the author "did not have the penny to go read newspa-

pers." Why he needed to read newspapers, however, when Engels was doing all the work,
Marx does not The entire correspondence between Marx and Engels on the sub-
explain.
ject is Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Letters: The Personal Correspon-
reprinted in Karl
dence, 1844-1877, ed. Fritz J. Raddatz (Boston: Litde, Brown, 1980), pp. 34-51. The "did not
have a penny" quote appears on page 51.

The Road to Lippmanndom 1

Henry J. Raymond, did not appreciate what he considered to be the over-
wrought prose of his ex-employer, and on September 18, 1851, he
responded with the launching of the New-York Times. In a thinly veiled jibe
at Greeley, he promised his readers on page one of the inaugural issue
that "We do not mean to write as if we were in a passion unless that
should really be the case; and we shall make a point to get into a passion
as rarely as possible."
If one wished to chart the earliest antecedent in the search for the
journalistic Holy Grail of "objectivity," one might do well to begin with
Raymond's first issue. His paper was intended to emulate the Titnes of
London in its aspiration toward a journalism of authority and complete-
ness. Raymond's Times did introduce a new note of decency and restraint
into political journalism, but a man who served as chairman of the
Republican National Committee and managed Abraham Lincoln's sec-
ond presidential campaign is not really an appropriate model for aspiring
objectivists. Moreover, Raymond's impact was slight and, after his death

in 1869, the profession came to be dominated by E. L. Godkin, the com-

bative British aristocrat who campaigned against American imperialism,
government corruption, and unsound money.
The editor of the New York Evening Post and Nation magazine for nearly
three decades, Godkin was said by William James to be the most influen-
tial writer of his generation. A combative generation it must have been.

Godkin called President Cleveland an "international anarchist" and com-

pared the modes of operation inside the nation's yellow journals to those
of Hell, gambling houses, brothels, and brigands' caves, noting that,
judged purely on the basis of intellectual integrity, the newsrooms finished
a poor fifth.* With the influence of Godkin and the continuing preemi-
nence of old-time publisher-editors like Watterson of Louisville, Kentucky,
Samuel Bowles I and II of Springfield, Massachusetts, and William Allen
White of Emporia, Kansas, another serious stab at the virtues of newspaper
objectivity would have to wait until nearly the end of the century.
In 1896, a Chattanooga publisher named Adolph Ochs purchased the
ailing New-York Times. Ochs was a man with big plans. On August 19, 1896,
the paper's readers awoke to a "business announcement" explaining that
it would henceforth be the policy of the paper "to give the news, all the

news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in

good society" and "to give it impartially, without fear or favor, regardless
of any party, sect, or interest involved." Adolph Ochs' Times would be an

*The Nation, America's oldest continuously publishing political magazine, was founded by
the architect Fredrick Law Olmstead in 1865. Godkin, its founding editor, sold it to his New
York Evening Post in 1881, where it was issued as a weekly supplement for the next thirty-
three years.

16 Sound & Fury

 7

"independent newspaper" that would "tolerate no tampering with the

news, no coloring, no deception." It would stand for "the fullness, trust-
worthiness and impartiality of its news service." Ochs' pronouncement
was soon reprinted in papers across the country.
In addition to his grand public gesture, Ochs instituted a number of
new features in the newspaper, all of which were directed toward attract-
ing a new kind of readership. He began with a weekly financial review and
followed up with a list of "Buyers in Town," listed court cases and records,
and included a column called "The Merchants' Point of View." Most
reporters expected these changes to make the Times duller than ever but,
to their astonishment, the paper attracted thousands of new readers and
the flow of advertising increased fantastically. Soon enough, the paper
that had been losing $1,000 a day when Ochs purchased it became the
"Business Bible" of New York and a veritable money-printing machine for
Mi. Ochs. Circulation skyrocketed from 9,000 in 1896 to more than
120,000 nine years later and to 343,000 by 1920.
The economic foundation of Ochs' success can be gleaned from the
incredible urban growth statistics of the period.* New York was exploding
with new wealth and By providing com-
a newly well-educated population.
mercially oriented information to consumers and removing both the cru-
sading tone adopted by Greeley and Godkin and the sensationalist
ravings of the yellow journals of the time, Ochs managed to invent a new
and tremendously profitable form of American journalism and a status
symbol for an emerging commercial class.
As Christopher Lasch observes, this new press attracted exactiy the
kinds of readers advertisers were eager to attain:

well-heeled readers, most of whom probably thought of themselves as inde-

pendent voters. . . . Responsibility came to be equated with the avoidance of
controversy. . . . Some advertisers were also willing to pay for sensationalism.

*The percentage of the American labor force engaged in non-agricultural work jumped
from 41 percent in 1860 to 62 percent in 1900. Bank deposits tripled between 1865 and
1885, then quadrupled in the twenty years following that. The population of New York City
jumped from 1 million to 1.5 million between 1880 and 1890. Meanwhile, illiteracy declined
from 20 percent of the population to 10.7. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Rise of the City, 1878-
1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1932). For more recent data and interpretative material, see
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper
and Row, 1972), and Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America
(New York: Macmillan, 1976). The literacy figures in particular had enormous implications
When "Boss" William Macy Tweed instructed his henchmen to destroy copies
for politicians.
ofNew York's anti-Tammany newspapers in the 1860s, he worried not about the editorials,
but only about their cartoons. "My constituents can't read," Tweed explained, "but damn it,
they can see pictures." Tweed died in prison in 1878. See Stephen Hess, "The Ungentle-
manly Art," The Gannet CenterJournal (spring 1989): p. 122.

The Road to Lippmanndom 1

 though on the whole, they preferred a respectable readership to sheer
numbers. What they clearly did not prefer was "opinion." It did not guaran-
tee the right audience. No doubt they also hoped that an aura of objectivity,
the hallmark of responsible journalism, would also nib off on the advertise-
ments that surrounded the increasingly slender columns of print.

Historians generally consider Ochs' Times to be the first example of a

newspaper dedicated to objective journalism. But what Ochs and com-

pany sought to achieve in the Times was less the goal of objective jour-
nalism than the appearance of it. As Godkin's successor, Oswald
Garrison Villard, demonstrated in his 1933 book Some Newspapers and
Newspaper-Men, the Times was still what Garrison called "a class paper,
pure and simple." Its dedication to impartiality fell by the wayside when
it proved ideologically inconvenient. Vociferously opposed to the Rus-

sian Revolution, the Times reported that Petrograd had fallen six times,
been on the verge of capture three more times, been burned to the
ground twice, and been in absolute panic twice and in revolt against the
Bolsheviks on six different occasions, and insisted that the regime was
on the verge of collapse over ninety times. None of these impending
catastrophes, Charles Merz and Walter Lippmann pointed out in the
New Republic, had much foundation in fact. But for the purposes of
delineating the history of punditry, the Times' failure to be "objective"
in its news columns is less important than the impression it created: that
"objectivity" was possible and desirable, and that any responsible news-
paper had better strive for it if its owners wanted to be rich, powerful,
and admired like those of the New-York Times. As a result, during the
next two decades, smaller-scale imitations sprouted up across America.
Although the professional developments it inspired were gradual,
Ochs' philosophical departure was, in fact, a radical change. Without at
least the pretense of objective news reports as a counterpoint, it is impos-
sible to imagine punditry's occupying anything like the political role into
which it has grown in the twentieth century. Absent a professionally
sacred faith in objective news gathering, there would be no call for politi-

cal pundits to comment on it and interpret it. This relatively banal obser-
vation goes a long way toward explaining why the United States is the only
Western country to enjoy (if that be the word) the presence of a pundit
class: it is the only nation in which the aspiration toward objectivity domi-
nates the profession of quality journalism. Where journalism drops the
pretense of reporting only fact, the need for opinion writers, dedicated,
ideally, to placing the news in a larger and more useful context for read-
ers, diminishes accordingly.

18 Sound & Fury

 —
Around the same time that newspaper publishers were beginning to
emulate Ochs, the young Walter Lippmann attempted, in three remark-
able studies of the American media, Liberty and the News (1920), Public
Opinion (1922), and The Phantom Public (1924), to grapple with some of
the more complex interrelationships between imperfect journalism and
the fragilities of modern democratic practice. Given the limits of even the
best American journalism and the inability of average citizens to grasp
even the most basic facts about their leaders and institutions, how, Lipp-
mann asked, could a functional republic be forged?
Reality, to Lippmann (and to Ochs, no doubt) was something pictura- ,

ble, like a baseball box score or a stock market quotation. He titled the
most impressive chapter in Public Opinion, the most demanding of his
studies, "The World Outside and the Picture in Our Heads." The prob-
lem with journalism, according to Lippmann 's critique, was its inability to
focus the lens correcdy on the more intricate manifestations of reality.
"News comes from a distance," Lippmann complained, "it comes helter-
skelter." Journalism works fine, Lippmann explains, "when it can report

the score of a game, or a transadantic flight, or the death of a monarch."

But where the picture is more complex, "as for example, in the matter of
a success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people
where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subde and a matter of bal-
anced evidence," then journalism "causes no end of derangement, misun-
derstanding and even misrepresentation."
The inherent limitations on journalists, moreover, are compounded by
the inability of the general public to understand and assimilate the
imperfect information it receives. The thirty-three-year-old public philos-
opher is rather harsh on his fellow citizens, but contemporary informa-
tion surveys would seem to bear him out:

The mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, under-

nourished and frustrated individuals, is very considerable, much more con-
siderable there is reason to think than we generally suppose. Thus a wide
appeal is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbari-
ans, people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people and people whose
experience has comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion.
The stream of public opinion is stopped by them in litde eddies of misun-
derstanding, where it is discolored with prejudice and far-fetched analogy.

The net result of imperfect journalism consumed by ignorant people is,

in Lippmann 's view, the creation of a "pseudo-environment," in which a
perverse kind of democratic politics takes place.

The Road to Lippmanndom 19

 Hardly the "omnicompetent" agrarian yeoman of JefFersonian theory,
Lippmann called him, had a vision of
the private citizen, or "outsider" as
political realities hardly better than that of a deaf spectator in the back row
of a sporting event. "He does not know what is happening, why it is hap-
pening, what ought to happen; he lives in a world which he cannot see,
does not understand and is unable to direct." "We must assume," there-
fore, "that a public is inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, that it discerns
only gross distinctions, is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted; that,
since it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes whatever it considers, and is

interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict." The

danger arises when the members of the populace become the "inevitable
victims of agitation and propaganda." The victors in such a system are "the
quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist." The result, both for
democracy and for intelligent governance, is disaster.
At first, in the 1919 articles that became Liberty and the News, Lippmann
suggested addressing the problem simply by improving the quality of the
journalism Americans received. He complained that reporting was not a
"dignified profession for which men will invest the time and cost of an
education, but an underpaid, insecure, anonymous form of drudgery,
constructed on catch as catch can principles." Merely to value the
reporter in terms of his "real importance to civilization" would go some
distance in alleviating the problem.
By the time he published Public Opinion three years later, however, Lipp-
mann had grown increasingly pessimistic. Journalism did not offer much
hope. Even if undertaken relatively objectively, it could not create the
"mystical force called Public Opinion" merely by "acting upon everybody
for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours," when all other public institutions
had failed to do one of the strangest intellectual excursions
so. Instead, in

of his career, Lippmann proposed the creation of "intelligence bureaus"

—
made up of what he called "special men" social scientists whose job it
would be to model reality like a DNA molecule and explain it to the con-
fused citizenry. His prototype was the government's Bureau of Standards.
In Lippmann's plan, the group would act as a kind of social scientific
House of Lords, which, freed from the pseudo-realities of democratic poli-
tics, would be able to inform and persuade in a such a manner that citi-

zens would be protected from their own ignorance and gullibility.

For all the brilliance and prophetic qualities of Lippmann's diagnosis,
he never did come up with a sensible solution. He wisely abandoned his
intelligence bureaus in The Phantom Public, but failed to replace them with
a workable alternative. Fortunately for the history of punditry, however,
Lippmann did offer a kind of stopgap answer to the problem: the services
of one Walter Lippmann. Through his newspaper column, his books, and

IP Sound & Fury

 —
later his television appearances, Lippmann interposed himself between
the inadequacies of incomplete, biased, and stereotyped "objective" jour-
nalism and the mass of confused, ignorant, and just plain lazy American
citizens who were otherwise defenseless against the emotional pull of their
pseudo-environments. In doing so, he filled what was and remains an
absolutely crucial vacuum in the functioning of American democracy.
—
While the governing elite the "insiders," as Lippmann called them
sought to manipulate the news media to "manufacture the consent" of
the governed, Lippmann worked diligentiy to inform himself on the
great issues of the day and then educate his readers to a point at which
they might in telligendy judge the actions of their leaders. "In this," Lipp-
mann contended at the end of his career, he and other pundits per-
formed an "essential service ... to find out what is going on under the
surface and beyond the horizon; to infer, to deduce, to imagine and to
guess what is going on inside, what this meant yesterday and what it could
mean tomorrow." In this selfless pursuit, political punditry would do
"what every sovereign citizen is supposed to do but has not the time or
the interest to do for himself."
The theory's fault line lies in its vulnerability to human idiosyncrasies.
To work effectively, the theory required that two enormous assumptions
be true: first, that the pundit could accumulate, through disinterested
inquiry, the requisite insider information from those who control it
rather than through some implicit quid pro quo of sympathy and sup-
port; and second, that the pundit would continue to identify with the
interests of the outsider class over those of the insider elite (despite the
and social lives were likely to be
fact that virtually their entire professional
dominated by interaction with that same ruling class). Should either of
these two assumptions be undermined, the pundit becomes not an agent
of democracy but an accomplice to its subversion.

It is right and proper that one of the American political biogra-

richest
phies of the past generation had as its Lippmann. Lipp-
subject Walter
mann was bom with the American Century, exacdy one hundred years
after the Constitution, and spent his entire professional life seeking to
educate his countrymen about the risks and responsibilities that their tre-
mendous power entailed. From the period in which Teddy Roosevelt
called the twenty-six-year-old writer "the most brilliant man of his age in
the United States" through the days in which Lyndon Johnson drove him
out of Washington, so angered by Lippmann's refusal to endorse his war
in Vietnam that Johnson took to making bawdy jokes at Lippmann's
expense in the presence of foreign dignitaries, no other private individ-
ual played so central a role in the shaping of the nation's political debate.

The Road to Lippmanndom 3 I

Lippmann's own preeminence coincided with America's rise from
rise to

a massive, untamed industrial giant to the most influential power the

world has ever seen. Given the relative ignorance that even the most
sophisticated Americans exhibited about the foundations of international
diplomacy and the vast ambitions of the emerging foreign policy elite, it
seems fair to conclude that if Walter Lippmann had never existed, Amer-
ica would have had to invent him.
Lippmann was not the first full-fledged Washington pundit. David
Lawrence, the founder of US News and World Report, began adding a tag
line identifying his pro-business, anti-labor opinions to his New York Post

dispatches in 1915. When the Post began syndicating him a year later, he
fulfilled the basic criteria for Washington punditry, nearly twenty-five
years before Lippmann joined him: he wrote his column from Washing-

ton, he was nationally syndicated, and he had been given full authority by
his superiors to vent his opinions.
Lawrence and his journalist colleagues, however, formed an intensely
parochial and self-contained fellowship. When Arthur Krock first arrived
in 1919, he found what he called "a small group of pompous frauds"
dominating the Washington press corps, "identifiable not only by their
disinclination to do legwork, which was great, but in most cases by their
attire. They habitually wore frock coats and silk hats, dropped big names

in profusion, carried canes and largely made contacts with their single
news source in the noble saloons of the period." Before Lippmann came
to the city in 1939, Washington punditry was important only to Washing-
tonians —and to them not terribly so.
Lippmann began his career as a regular political commentator in
November 1914, having already published two considerable works of polit-
ical inquiry, when he appeared on the masthead of the first issue of the

New Republic. Herbert Croly, the magazine's editor-in-chief, and Willard

and Dorothy Straight, its financiers, were deeply committed to Roosevelt's
Bull Moose Progressivism. Lippmann, by his own account, was positively in
love with the Moose himself. But the romance soured almost immediately
when the magazine, opposing Woodrow Wilson's foray into Mexico in
December 1914, gendy chided Roosevelt for trying to goad the president
into a full-scale invasion. Roosevelt went on a rampage, damning the New
Republics editors as "three circumcised Jews and three anemic Christians."
With Teddy raging, Woodrow Wilson saw his opening and launched a
personal lobbying campaign for the magazine's support, inviting Lipp-
mann to his summer home in Shadow Lawn, New Jersey. There the presi-
dent expertly massaged the young writer's ego, showing him secret cables
and soliciting his advice. Probably no pundit has ever survived a personal
session with a president and classified war cables without soon convincing

11 Sound & Fury

 1

himself of the merit of the man's viewpoint. When it was over, Lippmann
returned to New York and convinced Croly as well. Shortly thereafter, he
received his first invitation to dine at the White House.
From dinner at the Wilson White House to the days of his banishment
from Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office more than half a century later, Lipp-
mann dealt with the tension inherent in his business in a decidedly
ambivalent fashion. He professed the need for "airspace" between the
worlds of power and punditry but freely ignored his own advice. Time
and again, Lippmann proved all too easily misled by powerful insiders
who encouraged him to mislead his powerless outsiders, with disastrous
results. In the matter of the still unsolved 1948 murder of the journalist
George Polk in war-torn Greece, Lippmann lent his name to a white-
washed investigation that dishonesdy served the interests of U.S. Cold
War diplomacy. Whether calling a 1933 speech by Hitier "genuinely
statesmanhke" and "evidence of good faith" or accepting the Pentagon's
1965 assertion that the bombs it was dropping on North Vietnam did not
"kill anybody" because "they're political bombings," Lippmann found

himself being made to look ridiculous by history. On these occasions, as

on many others, Lippmann simply accepted the word of power as suffi-

cient evidence of its good faith.

Throughout his early life, Lippmann had benefited from the patron-
age of great and powerful men, to whom he attached himself with an
enthusiasm that Michael Kinsley has named "the American sycophancy."
From the time that he abandoned his radical Greenwich Village preten-
sions and metaphorically moved uptown to the luxurious and well-
funded liberalism of the New Republic, Lippmann wedded himself to the
views and interests of the American elite. Party meant nothing to Lipp-
mann. His only loyalties were to the influence of his ideas and the idea of
his influence.
As his friend James Reston observes, "One of the interesting things
about Lippmann was that he did more to argue for the principle of
detachment and was [himself] more attached" to politicians than any
other columnist. Reston attributes Lippmann's weakness on the issue to
his need for social status and his "fascination for the social whirl." Lipp-
mann loved, according to Reston, "going to embassies and philosophiz-
ing after dinner and he liked to be asked to the White House. It's true
that people talk about money as corruptive, but the social life is much
more so than money."
After the war and a unhappy return to the New Republic, Lipp-
short,
mann was recruited for what may have been the best job in the history of
journalism: editorial writer for New York World. Since the WorW turned out
its final heartbreaking issue on February 27, 1931, America has yet to see

The Road to Lippmanndom 3

a paper so literate, so exciting, and so faithful to the Front Page legends
with which modern underappreciated journalists still console themselves.
The World was a monument to the possibilities of drinking, lying, gam-
bling, and relatively honest daily journalism.
Under editor Frank Cobb, the World invented the home and hearth of
modern punditry, the op-ed page, and amassed a staff of writers that
would make any modem editor cry. Heywood Broun, who began as a
sportsvmter, moved his pro-labor column to the op-ed page where he
fiercely defended its leadership from the attacks of the Hearst chain and
the Republican president. The rest of the constellation included Maxwell
Anderson, the future playwright; James M. Cain, the future novelist; and
Allen Nevins, the future historian.
Cobb w^s diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 1923 and left Lipp-
mann as editorial editor-in-chief. Although were unsigned,
his editorials
Lippmann, by now the author of four celebrated books and coundess
magazine articles, had grown into a New York society celebrity. He found
his counsel sought after in many quarters, including Calvin Coolidge's
White House. Needless to say, he emerged from his meeting with
Coolidge with renewed sympathy for the president's predicament.
In the history of political commentary, 1923 is a seminal year for
another important reason: the debut of Time magazine. Henry Luce's
prospectus for his new magazine estimated that the number of American
college graduates had reached 1 million by this time. Despite rising edu-
cation levels in the country, the vast majority of people outside New York,
Boston, and Washington, D.C., had almost no access to quality informa-
tion about the state of affairs in the world — ^with the exception of those
who read Walter Lippmann. most American
Television did not enter into
lives until the 1950s, and commercialwhich began in the 1920s,
radio,
was a medium devoted primarily to the insights of commentators like Jack
Benny and George Bums. Few if any syndicated columnists paid much
attention to foreign events, and most local newspapers did not run the
Washington columnists who did.
In the coming decades, Luce and Time -would share with Lippmann the
batdeground for the college-educated mind in America. But in the 1920s,
Time still held only the promise of power and influence. Its tiny New York
staff clipped and pasted from other sources, throwing in generous helpings

of American "com" as demanded by Luce. The early 1920s Time-W2& not

terribly political, and it was not until the 1930s that the voice of Luce, with
its emphasis on small-town Presbyterian virtues, virulent anti-Communism,

and the U.S. imperial mission in Asia, came to dominate its news coverage.
When the Wor/cJ finally expired in 1931, Lippmann moved to the Repub-
lican Herald-Tribune and began writing his regular column, "Today and

14 Sound & Fury

Tomorrow." Having turned down offers of a chair at Harvard, the presi-
dency of the University of North Carolina, and journalism jobs at the New
York Times, the World Telegram, and the Hearst chain, it was hardly an over-
statement whenTm^ announced that, at age forty-one, its cover boy, Walter
Lippmann, had become the "Moses," the "Prophet of Liberalism." The fact
that a writer identified with daily journalism could be considered for so
wide a range of honors, much less turn them down, bespoke a cultural rev-
olution in society's perception of the profession for which Lippmann was
almost singularly responsible. Before a distinguished crowd assembled by
the Academy of Political Science at a dinner given in his honor, Lippmann
defined what he considered to be the tenets of progressive politics, under
fire from Left and Right during the dark days of the depression:

Who but a political hack can believe that . . . the fate of the nation hangs
upon the victory of either political party. . . . Who can believe that an
orderly, secure and just economic order can be attained by the simple pro-
cess of arousing the people against the corporations. ... Is it vain to sup-

pose that our problems can be dealt with by rallying the people to some
crusade that can be expressed in a symbol, a phrase, a set of principles or a
program? If that is what the progressives are looking for today, they are

looking in vain.

Lippmann's liberalism had, by 1931, lost all vestiges of its former radi-
calism. He had long ago given up, as Reston notes, "bleeding for the
poor." The problems faced by modern government, he recognized, were
post-ideological and managerial in nature. Thirty years before Daniel Bell
sounded his clarion call to the New Class/managerial elite, Lippmann
"more civilized and rational" organi-
enlisted liberalism in the search for a
zation of the corporate economy. While some of his former colleagues at
the New Republic were calling for a vote for the Communists, Lippmann's
liberalism was now completely self-identified with the exercise of power

Thus did Walter Lippmann fulfill the role he had envisioned for his phi-
losopher kings in Public Opinion. By convincing both the rulers and the
ruled that his work was integral to their well-being, he created a central
role for political pundits in the political power structure of the emerging
superpower. The American people needed him to understand their
world. The government depended on him to explain its role, both to the
citizenry and to itself. Both political punditry and elite journalism grew in
status as a result. As Lippmann negotiated these trends in the 1920s and
early 1930s, the role of other pundits also expanded in the public's con-
sciousness. Evidence of the increasing importance of pundits of all politi-

The Road to Lippmanndom IS

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Enfermée dans sa maison, la femme chinoise ne fait guère parler
d’elle. En revanche, elle agit puissamment. Elle remplit, dans le
silence, ses devoirs de femme et de mère ; aide son mari ou son fils
de ses conseils, souvent plus réfléchis, plus prudents et plus sages
que les décisions de l’homme.
Notre gouvernement a très bien su apprécier ce rôle de la
femme : il la récompense souvent, en lui accordant des titres, des
honneurs qui lui donnent même le droit de porter l’uniforme. Bien
plus, en l’absence du mari, pour les cas d’urgence, la femme du
fonctionnaire chinois a le droit de prendre connaissance des affaires
et de leur donner la décision qu’elle croit convenable.
Ainsi avantagée par nos coutumes privées et publiques, la
femme chinoise ne saurait être saint-simonienne. Émancipée, elle
n’a pas lieu de réclamer son émancipation : elle tient, à côté de
l’homme, une place assez importante pour n’avoir pas à demander
davantage.
La nature destine l’homme et la femme à faire œuvre commune,
à associer leurs forces. La concurrence, ici, n’a pas de raison d’être.
L’homme, pour sa part, n’est que trop heureux de partager bonheur
et honneurs avec celle qu’il aime ; la femme, de son côté, sachant
bien que, seule, elle ne peut arriver à toute cette prospérité, a tout
intérêt à pousser son mari, à coopérer à son élévation. Même douée
du plus grand talent, la modestie est encore le plus bel ornement de
la femme. Quelle plus belle destinée que celle d’un être plein de
grâce et d’intelligence, qui sait se dévouer et rester dans
l’obscurité ?
Il est cependant des femmes que les circonstances ont amenées
à exercer une action tout individuelle. Aussi, depuis l’antiquité
jusqu’à nos jours, la Chine célèbre-t-elle ses héroïnes, ses
historiennes, ses femmes-poètes ou auteurs ; jamais, par exemple
— je me hâte de l’ajouter — mon pays n’a connu une seule femme
politique.
Et nous n’avons qu’à nous en féliciter. Artiste et poète, plus que
l’homme, la femme se trouvera d’autant moins à l’aise dans l’action
publique qu’elle aimera davantage le vrai et le beau : or beauté et
vérité n’ont rien à faire avec la politique. Que la femme s’en tienne
aussi éloignée que possible : elle y gagnera beaucoup… et nous
aussi.
Les « femmes-auteurs » sont, au contraire, très nombreuses en
Chine et très estimées, comme on va le voir dans le courant de cet
exposé très sommaire.
Lorsque Confucius composa le Chi-King, ou Livre des Vers, il mit
à la tête de ce recueil de trois cents odes, des strophes dues à
l’inspiration d’une jeune fille.
Plus tard, au premier siècle, sous la dynastie des Han
postérieurs, Mme Tsao-Tchao continua le traité d’histoire
contemporaine, resté inachevé par suite de la mort de son frère,
Pang-Kou. Elle fut chargée d’enseigner la littérature à l’impératrice et
aux grandes dames de la cour.
Vers la même époque, c’est une grande dame, du nom de Ouei-
Fou-jen, qui devient professeur d’écriture de Ouang-You-Kung, le
calligraphe célèbre, auquel la Chine doit le meilleur modèle de ses
caractères.
Sous les Thangs (de 684 à 701), une jeune fille, Mlle Tcheng-
Tchao-Yung, occupe, pendant vingt ans, le poste de chef du cabinet
des affaires de l’impératrice Tien-Hiao : pendant la durée de ses
fonctions, aucun lettré de l’empire ne se vit délaissé et l’instruction
littéraire reçut tous les encouragements possibles.
Une dame Li-Tsing-Tchao publie au dixième siècle plusieurs
mélodies célèbres. Ses ouvrages sont reconnus encore aujourd’hui
comme supérieurs à ceux des lettrés les plus distingués de la même
époque.
Il faut que je m’arrête plus particulièrement aux femmes-poètes :
de tout temps, elles ont été, chez nous, très nombreuses ; l’Empire
du Milieu, sous ce rapport, ne le cède en rien à l’Occident ; peut-être
même, la muse nous a-t-elle mieux traités. Il n’est guère en effet, de
femme chinoise des classes supérieures, qui ne sache faire des
vers.
 Les sujets favoris de leurs poésies sont toujours les fleurs, la
lune, les oiseaux, le zéphyr, la musique ; tous ces thèmes gracieux
qui frappent l’imagination et dont la douceur s’harmonise si bien
avec le caractère féminin. La femme aura toujours tendance à
s’envoler vers ces régions plus délicatement poétiques, où elle se
sent plus à l’aise, où elle est vraiment chez elle.
Voici quelques échantillons de poésies, composées par des
femmes, et que je soumets avec confiance au jugement de mes
lecteurs :

LE PRINTEMPS

Le froid qui règne, ne me permet pas encore d’ouvrir les stores

de ma fenêtre.
Pourtant, les quatre-vingt-dix jours du printemps vont être
bientôt écoulés.
Tout en jouant, je fabrique, avec des papiers multicolores, des
drapeaux que je planterai au jardin.
Je veux qu’ils protègent, contre le vent et la pluie, les boutons
des fleurs.

Une explication est ici nécessaire : les drapeaux en question

étaient, par une antique superstition, voués à la reine des fleurs : en
même temps, on y attachait des grelots, dont le son effrayait les
oiseaux et préservait les semences.

FIN DE PRINTEMPS

Sur dix arbres, neuf sont dépouillés de fleurs.

Comment en serait-il autrement, après tant de pluies,
secondées par tant de vent !
Seules, les araignées font tous leurs efforts pour retenir un
semblant de printemps,
Et réussissent, dans le coin du jardin, à amasser quelques
pétales dans le filet de leurs toiles.
 N’y a-t-il pas quelque chose de tout à fait original dans cette
façon d’interpréter les plus petits détails de nature : et, pourtant,
l’image est très vraie.

La philosophie ne manque pas à nos « dixièmes muses ».

Témoin l’application suivante de la théorie des causes finales :

LE TEMPS SOMBRE DU PRINTEMPS

La Providence aime trop les fleurs,

Pour ne pas veiller avec soin à leur température ;
De peur que la pluie ne soit trop froide, le soleil trop chaud, pour
ses préférées,
La Providence veut qu’il fasse sombre, pendant la floraison.

La saison chaude, elle aussi, a ses poètes : on le verra par les

vers qui suivent :

AU COMMENCEMENT DE L’ÉTÉ

Je ne crois pas qu’après le printemps, les beaux jours doivent

être rares.
Car, derrière ma fenêtre, abritée par l’ombrage verdoyant, je
puis mieux étudier la nature.
Et, que vois-je ? Les papillons, un peu frêles encore, voltigent
gracieusement, après la pluie bienfaisante.
Et les pétales des fleurs tombent silencieusement, d’eux-
mêmes, sans être maltraités par le vent.
Lasse, enfin, de regarder, j’ouvre le King sacré du Bouddha et
cherche à en déchiffrer les phrases mystérieuses, au
sens caché.
Je n’ai interrompu ce travail, que pour jouer un air sur ma
guitare, lorsque j’ai éprouvé le besoin de me distraire.
J’avais fermé ma fenêtre : mais je la rouvre aussitôt,
 Me rappelant que les hirondelles, dont le nid est au plafond de
ma chambre, ne sont pas encore rentrées.

Cette peinture paraîtra étrange peut-être ; mais, certainement

c’est un tableau vrai, profondément senti et de délicatesse toute
féminine.
Dans la pièce qu’on va lire, il ne s’agit plus de description, la
femme dit adieu à celui qu’elle aime et lui fait ses dernières
recommandations :

A MON MARI, PARTANT POUR LE GRAND CONCOURS

LITTÉRAIRE

Depuis un an, nous avons préparé vos bagages.

Et, aujourd’hui, il faut partir.
En votre absence, qui donc appréciera mes vers ?
Quand je ne serai plus à vos côtés, hélas ! soignez du moins
votre santé !
Je sais que votre affection pour moi vous forcera à revenir au
plus vite.
Pourtant, je crains toujours que vos succès ne vous retiennent
un peu trop longtemps.
N’ayez aucune crainte pour vos parents, pour vos enfants,
auprès desquels je vous remplacerai dignement.
Écrivez-nous souvent et envoyez-nous beaucoup de vos
poésies.

J’ai réservé pour la fin des vers tout différents de ce qu’on a vu

jusqu’ici : la Tisseuse est connue de tous, en Chine ; le lecteur, j’en
suis sûr d’avance, dira comme moi que la faveur dont jouit ce poème
auprès du public chinois est parfaitement méritée.

LA TISSEUSE

Le clair de lune d’automne est blanc comme la neige ;

 Le vent d’automne, comme un fer, me coupe le visage.
Une lampe pâle, placée à côté de mon métier,
M’éclaire toute la nuit et, seule, me tient compagnie pendant
que je tisse.
Le produit d’une nuit passée à veiller n’est que de quelques
mètres ;
Celui de deux veilles ne me donne pas encore la matière d’une
pièce.
J’ai bien besoin de repos. Mais le souci du lendemain
m’empêche d’y penser.
Hier, en allant à la ville, vendre le fruit de mes veilles,
J’ai vu la splendide corbeille d’une riche mariée,
Composée de plusieurs milliers de pièces de soie et de douze
malles, pleines de vêtements.
Qu’elle est heureuse, cette mariée qui, sans connaître le mûrier
ni le ver à soie, possède tant de robes !
Je rentre triste et pleure, devant mon métier, en pensant à ma
malheureuse personne,
Qui passe sa vie à fournir les vêtements pour d’autres… qui se
marient !
Dans un mouvement de désespoir, je saisis les ciseaux, pour
couper mon étoffe !…
En me couchant, j’entends les grillons, qui crient dans la cour,
comme pour m’appeler et me dire de me mettre de
nouveau au travail.

Je ne connais rien de plus douloureux que la plainte de cette

pauvre fille ; que ces accents à la fois si doux et si mélancoliques de
l’ouvrière.
Pour aujourd’hui, j’en reste là, je crois avoir donné par les extraits
reproduits ci-dessus une idée approximative de la valeur littéraire de
nos femmes-poètes. Je serai heureux, si le lecteur trouve aussi qu’il
se dégage une véritable poésie de ces productions des bas-bleus
chinois.
TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Pages
Préface 1
Le Mariage 3
La Fièvre 13
L’Exposition Universelle de 1889 21
Le Tour du Monde en 72 jours 37
Une Première 49
Les Morts 65
L’Ombre chinoise 77
Si ? 83
Le Duel 93
La Villégiature 103
Une Visite au Musée du Louvre 113
En Ballon 123
A la Bourse 131
Dans le Train 141
Les Grands Magasins 151
Au Grand Prix 159
La Presse 169
A travers champs 179
 La Bibliothèque nationale 189
Les Cirques 201
Un Cabinet de lecture 211
Les Cafés de Paris 221
La Famille 231
Une Visite au Palais de Justice 241
Au Quartier latin 253
La Justice politique en Chine 263
Les Bas-bleus, en Chine 271

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