Presswatch/Fools for Grenada

...Both the White House and the Pentagon, wrote ombudsman Robert J. McCloskey of the Washington Post, "created needless controversy" that did not help the President...

...DeLorean's constitutional right to a fair trial was jeopardized, but no conceivable public purpose was served...

...Consider, for example, three pressing areas in need of reform: the tax system, the federal judiciary, and our monetary system...

...Some kind of secrecy...

...It's hard to trust people who would do that...

...Why did he [the President] bar the press from the invasion of that small island as General Eisenhower did not feel it necessary to do when his forces challenged the might of the Nazis...

...28 media...

...Several papers recounted the initial reaction of the rescued students, then returned to them a few days later to make certain the students' accounts had not been revised by coolerheaded hindsight...

...The networks, of course, had lots of film...

...a double payroll tax on the selfemployed...

...He is coauthor of The Case for Gold, and has written for Harper's, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications...

...It is the gotcha approach: the government makes a claim, we come up with counter-evidence--gotcha...

...If you think lying is admissible under the circumstances, fine...

...The press was left thunderstruck...

...They also did some criticizing, but the press in those days hadn't adopted its current adversarial pose...

...Some sneaked in anyway without harming themselves, the military mission, or the truth...

...More taxes: a tax on gasoline...

...The night before the invasion, the White House lied--it may have been an inadvertent lie, but it was a lie nonetheless--in denying that an invasion was planned...

...The trouble with the press is that it wants to play two roles at once, the relentless adversary of the government and the eyes and ears of the public...

...On this one, I shall not yield...

...A few, but not many...

...This tax increase does not invoke the shape of a more limited government...

...Seldom has the press's appetite for gotcha stories been more whetted than in the case of the Grenada invasion...

...Still, it was excessive...

...He seemed to equate the absence of combat footage taken by network cameramen with no coverage at all...

...The public wants eyes and ears, but probably not ones that are poisonously adversariai and self-righteous about it...

...Most of the press criticism of the Administration included the disingenuous reminder that reporters had been allowed to accompany troops on the major battles of World War II...

...He answered his own question, saying Reagan feared the real facts would come out and his reasons for the invasion would be exposed as empty...

...a tax on Social Security benefits...

...Amazingly, a reporter and photographer for Newsweek flouted the Admires" tration's rules and slipped into Grenada on their own, interviewing Grenadians and American soldiers, taking pictures and returning to tell about it...

...But the press reacted as if the Administration's effort had succeeded...

...Now, that's a nice way of putting it, except that this was not some congressional fight over curbing the Freedom of Information Act...

...THE In this spirit, I would argue that the times demand activist measures if we are to restore the liberties and values that have been systematically subverted for over a generation...

...a contingency surtax on personal and corporate income...

...Thirteen years ago, Frank Meyers made the following observation: There is a real contradiction between the deep piety of the conservative spirit towards tradition, the preservation of the fibre of society, and the more reasoned, consciously principled, militant conservatism which becomes necessary when the fibres of society have been rudely torn apart, w h e n . . , revolutionary principles ride high, and restoration, not preservation, is the order of the day...

...No one can seriously believe that Congress will really use these taxes to balance the budget...

...Well, they have and they weren't...

...It was a life-anddeath situation, one in which the press's proper role was to do more than provide "one side of the debate...

...Strange are the ways of secrecy and censorship...

...asked Anthony Lewis in the New York Times...

...Right now we may have the most conservative President we are likely to see in our lifetimes, a President dedicated to thorough-going reform of our nation's institutions in order to uphold the everlasting and constitutional values that made our country prosperous and free...

...It is not a new problem...

...AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984...

...In a recent book called Low Tax, Simple Tax, Flat Tax,* two economists from Stanford, Robert E. Hall and Alvin Rabushka, have developed an impressive case for a flat tax...

...Still others argue that my unapologetic defense of traditional family values was pass~ in a world of singles bars and palimony lawsuits...

...My opponent, Mario Cuomo, said after the election that I sounded too much like Ronald Reagan...

...it just wasn't of the Marines hitting the beach or the Army Rangers parachuting from 500 feet onto the Point Salines airfield...

...A NEW CONSERVATISM by Lewis Lehrman I n 1982, as many readers of The American Spectator know, I ran for governor of New York...

...On this issue, there is a split today between conservatives that hobbles us...

...Now, unfortunately, there is drift concerning how best to attain the goals of the Reagan mandate...

...Anyway, reporters were often trusted by the Pentagon during World War II...

...Its extensive coverage of the war was strikingly superior, especially its piece on Fidel Castro's thwarted intentions in the Caribbean...

...When its own interests are involved, the press routinely acts foolishly...

...Marines and Army Rangers landed there yesterday despite President Reagan's statement to the contrary...

...As ever, the press admits to no conflict between the two...

...I shouldn't call it a pose...

...day they occurred...

...In truth, you didn't have to be a knee-jerk cynic or Reaganophobe to he surprised that the students backed Reagan's claim as dramatically as they did...

...Their evidence suggests *McGraw-Hill, $9.95 pbk...

...it's the real thing...

...Even before any of the students had returned, the Washington Post ran a story to the effect that "Americans in Grenada were not in danger before U.S...

...For the second year in a row, we are facing a budget deficit of colossal proportions...

...I don't...

...And if they weren't, there was the practice of military censorship to make sure their battlefield reports weren't too revealing...

...What we ought to be doing is moving in the exact opposite direction, toward lower taxes and control...

...This time the shoe was on the other foot: The press suspected the students weren't endangered, the students said just the opposite--gotcha...

...In the months that have passed since the election, there has been no shortage of experts to explain my loss...

...McCloskey is quite right...

...The New York Times editorially likened what it called the Administration's "trying to keep the public in the dark" on the Grenada maneuver with the Soviets' refusal to allow newsmen near the spot where Korean Air Lines flight 007 was shot down...

...The way to achieve this, he said, "is to silence one side of the debate...

...At the Pentagon, there was a little too much joy in thwarting the press...

...And should a reporter agree to rules of censorship and then defy those rules to break a story knocking the military, the press would more than likely bestow on him some sort of First Amendment Award...

...Some say I put too much emphasis on public order, a crackdown on crime, and the restoration of the death penalty...

...This time, it was absurdly excessive in talking about "secrecy" and "censorship" as practiced by the Reagan Administration...

...Others claim my call for a 40 percent tax-rate reduction was out of touch with the inevitable economic fate of socialism in one state, as in New York...

...But I suspect fear of the facts wasn't the reason the Administration didn't invite the press along...

...Certainly the White House and the Pentagon sought to control the flow of information about the invasion tightly, at least in the first two days...

...If there is anything I have learned as a rookie politician, it is that to establish a goal without the appropriate means to reach that goal is to court political disaster...

...a tax on petroleum production...

...A segment of the press takes its duty to consist not in providing an account of events but in knocking down the government's stated reasons for these events...

...Only this gotcha story turned out to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 27 be both premature and wrong...

...But the two don't always fit well together...

...Reporters, however, are trendy, and some press gurus saw my poor red suspenders as another great conservative issue, like the Panama Canal...

...Thomas Shales, the TV critic of the Washington Post, called it "the little war that wasn't there--not there on the American television screen, where one would have expected to find it...

...Would any reporters nowadays submit to official censorship by their own government...

...They failed...

...The press's sense of responsibility simply goes awry on occasion, as was demonstrated several days before the Grenada invasion when CBS News aired some film of John DeLorean's alleged drug dealing...

...In their wildest dreams, Reagan and his aides couldn't have imagined students kissing the ground at Charleston Air Force Base or a self-confessed dove saying he was now the champion of the military or a woman saying that Reagan had saved her life " l i t e r a l l y . " The Washington Post more than made up for its misguided gotcha story...

...A simple "No comment" or "I don't have anything I can give you on that" would have sufficed...

...No kidding, that's what the editorial said...

...Given the Vietnam experience, the joy was understandable...

...Regardless, the lying in this instance was unnecessary...

...Yet what has been the response...

...It is a division between those who sincerely believe in a slow, gradual reform and those who favor more activist measures...

...In World War II, reporters did quite a lot of cheerleading...

...And it appeared the same day that the paper devoted three-quarters of its front page and more than five pages inside the first section to Grenada news...

...I take pride in that comparison, but the real reason for my defeat, I believe, goes much deeper...

...a tax on health benefits...

...The public miraculously learned of both these the Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...

...Contrary to what has become the conventional wisdom among conservatives, the White House and the Pentagon were not entirely blameless in the squabble with the press over covering the invasion of Grenada...

...The press failed to perform one of its fundamental duties----distinguishing between intention and reality...

...I bought them, I paid for them, and I'm going to keep them...

...Its report of the students' return was better than any other publication's, with reporter Ward Sinclair writing that the students "painted a tableau of fear, bloodshed and chaos...

...My answer was forthright: "I wear them to keep my pants up...

...There was in fact a secret anti-red suspender campaign against me...

...It was fear of the press...

...Indeed, it was the only anti-red campaign ever supported by the New York City Lewis Lehrman is founder of The Lehrman Institute, a public policy forum for the study of economics and foreign policy and state and local government problems...

...Information gushed out...

...Reporters surely could have been given full access to Grenada sooner, maybe two or three days sooner...

...on expenditures...

...Wherever I went journalists would ask, "Lehrman, why do you wear red suspenders...

...That familiar role was left to the sole dominion of the press...

...In barring reporters from accompanying the invading forces and then from circulating freely around Grenada, the AdministratiOn wanted to make sure the public reached the "fight conclusion," wrote Richard Cohen of the Washington Post...

...Folks found out the old-fashioned way: The Pentagon disclosed them and newspapers and broadcasters passed the information along...

...Yet to its credit, the Administration did not play the fool in the Grenada episode...

...Despite playing the fool in the spat over restraints on cove-age, the press did ~v~r~trkably well in actually reporting the Grenada gory...

...That's the job of Waiter Mondaie, Alan Cranston & Co., not the press...

...Newsweek recovered flashily from a year or more of being trounced by 7"trne...

...Following established procedure, they will be used merely as an invitation to more spending...

...What had reporters drooling was the chance to rebut the claim that the medical students on Grenada were in danger and needed to be rescued...