Bad News: The Foreign Policy of the New York Times
Bethell, Tom
that Wilhelmian Germany was an "appeasable" state, unlike either the United States or France at that time. A state with unlimited goals, which aims for world hegemony, cannot be accommodated,...
...Sometimes the big guns, like Sherlock Holmes's dog, were silent...
...Actually, he feels fairly lucky...
...Society, he says, has a right to demand a certain level of education in each of its citizens...
...His entire existence is chopped into units so restrictive that the idea of genuine reflection becomes ridiculous...
...His discoveries were not encouraging, at least not if one thinks that high school ought to foster intellectual development...
...This is the kind of book that journalists almost never write in their retirement, and I suspect that it was his personal involvement in some of these events that gave Braley the energy needed to pursue the daunting task of revising history and opposing fashion...
...But their teachers also are mistreated and forced to live with the knowledge that they cannot do good work because the conditions of their employment won't permit it...
...PeterV Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack...
...One may simply posit that the Times is consistently pro-socialist, always trying to get a little bit more of it at home, and constructing excuses for those countries that are dominated by it abroad--that is, countries controlled by the Soviet Union...
...This ideology in turn seeped into the reporting from the field...
...The Horace of Sizer's title is not the Latin poet, nor the eccentric proprietor of Strawberry Hill, nor even the nineteenth-century educational reformer...
...As Sizer rightly proclaims, "their personal engagement with their own learning is crucial...
...In fact, he goes so far as to say that the single variable which makes a genuine difference in the schools is the social class from which students come...
...At one point Sizer asks, "Can an ungenerous and irresponsible adult culture long get away with preaching virtue to its young...
...Braley wants us to know that the heavy guns of journalism--in particular those of the New York Times--could overpower less audible but sometimes more accurate disp a t c h e s - - f o r example those o f Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune...
...For over twenty years he was foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News, mostly in Europe...
...The students are the chief victims because they miss an opportunity to have their minds activated...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Or...
...It may be that the high school is becoming, like numerous other elements of government, an additional component of the...
...Implicit in his reservations about compulsory schooling is the expectation that once liberated from onerous bureaucratic requirements the schools would become inviting enough to attract most of the students who now attend unwillingly...
...Thus it seems to me that the Times's ideology can be more simply, characterized...
...His ineffectiveness derives from a schedule that has him rushing all week long from one task to another...
...But it makes no sense to exact this duty by prescribing the same stint of schooling for everyone...
...The Times's editorial pages remain left-wing, however, and in this the paper seems to be running counter to a media trend, if that is what it is, of "news" based on essentially leftist premises, combined with editorials tinged with a mild conservatism...
...His harried, droopy life is the focus of the problem...
...BAD NEWS: THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES Russ Braley/Regnery Gateway/S22.50 Tom Bethell I f journalism is the first rough draft of history, then Russ Braley has composed a second and considerably amended version...
...But, Io and behold, Horace's Compromise is not a work of quantitative scientism but rather the straightforward report of the former headmaster of Phillips Academy who visited dozens of schools over a two-year period and is John R. Turner is Director o f Continuing Education at St...
...Now there's an incantation to conjure up visions of grave-faced committees harrumphing their way to statistical inanity...
...And with a final chapter entitled "A Paralysis of Imagination," the answer is clear...
...Sizer believes in the dictum coined by Robert Hutchins, that the best education for the best is the best education for all...
...It is at this earlier stage, the time of first the Elder and then the Younger Pitt, that one sees a sounder view of world politics...
...While it is necessary that the U.S...
...What we are justified in expecting are literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding, simple standards which can be met by fewer than twelve years of school attendance...
...But at least we can be grateful to him for having raised them...
...non-response to the building of the Berlin Wall, he was "chastised" by the speaker, Dean Rusk...
...The Fascists are to be combatted and the mob p l a c a t e d . " Moreover, '' Times editors appear to see the Third World and black Americans in the same picture frame, to be placated, patted on the head, solicited, so they won't rise up in bloody revolt against privilege...
...But society is generally satisfied because "the adolescents are supervised, safely and constructively most of the time during the morning and the afternoon hours, and they are off the labor market...
...The same statesmen who favored appeasement in North America--Burke preeminent among them--favored stubborn, unreasonable, and prolonged struggle with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, for they understood the difference between national revolutions with limited aims, and those with unlimited aims...
...And he is content, after a fashion...
...B r a l e y ' s analysis of this ideology is interesting...
...The whole of Horace's Compromise can be read as an answer to the question...
...The causes of Horace's predicament are evident to Sizer: parental indifference and the vested interests of a voracious educational bureaucracy...
...James Reston in essence knew that Kennedy had capitulated to Khrushchev in 1961, but maintained a discreet silence on the topic in his column...
...Central America correspondents Alan Riding and Raymond Bonner have continued in the apologist tradition established by the Times's prewar Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, but even they pale by comparison with Matthews...
...understand the very real limits on its power, and the relative decline of that power in the world, we must also bear in mind the differences between our position and that of the British during the first half of this century...
...And, in Mr...
...At one point in his absorbing reconstruction of the Tom Betheii is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Americans have, traditionally expected schools to stand for certain values, but the takeover of the educational establishment by social-scientific hierarchies has fostered the shallow belief that values can be completely separated from their religious roots...
...Yet he also knows he is teaching his students almost nothing...
...It's a page-turner, quite apart from anything else, and I found the section on the Cuban revolution, with Herbert Matthews acting as Castro's P.R...
...Our empire is an even looser one than theirs, and far less hampered by the need for direct administration of our dependencies...
...He assigns them one theme a week, and figures he can spend an average of five minutes reading, correcting, and commenting on each paper...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...Writes Braley: Some of the Times correspondents rank with the world's best, but they cannot run the newspaper from the field, and they don't always fit into management positions...
...Once a student has shown that he has satisfied these claims, or, I suppose, that he is incapable of satisfying them, no further schooling should be required...
...A state with unlimited goals, which aims for world hegemony, cannot be accommodated, and it is foolish to think otherwise...
...In the home office and Washington bureau, John Oakes of the editorial page, columnists Reston, Wicker and the two Lewises, editors of the magazine, Book Review and later Times books, offered upcoming Times staffers the key to advancement...
...Anyway, do get Braley's book...
...Sizer doesn't come right out and say so, but the implication is fairly clear that lurking within Horace's privy soul is something close to love for Big Brother...
...Here and there we find hints that he may include himself among the misinterpreters...
...As Sizer says: "Without good teachers, sensibly deployed, schooling is barely worth the effort...
...If the upper grades of the public schools were thereby freed from their baby-sitting function, they could then turn their attention to the intellectual development of the students who remained...
...For this reason one wishes Kennedy had made an effort to compare the strategy of Great Britain's rise with that of its fall...
...Fear of a Fascist takeover in Washington...
...Kennedy's analysis is even more dubious if applied without reservation to the contemporary United States...
...This, announces Sizer, is simply "whistling in the dark...
...Unfortunately Bad News is not likely to receive the attention it deserves, because the authors of the first draft not only are very much still with us, but today occupy the most influential editorial posts, and they are not likely to be enthusiastic about this revision of their youthful dispatches from the field...
...Alas, when Sizer raised the possibilities of these reforms with Horace, he did not get an enthusiastic response...
...One need not postulate guilt-ridden editors throwing worried glances back at the South Bronx and Harlem as they flee to Scarsdale...
...Observers of the public schools can be both grateful and relieved that Theodore Sizer has produced a readable and sensible book on education...
...As a result, the Times became "the champion of any and all revolutions," and went out of its way to "deny any distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian r e g i m e s . . , all authoritarians must be deposed, to quell Fascism and placate the revolution," while leaders to be preserved "have included CastrO, Mugabe, Ho Chi Minh, the Alexander Dubcek group, Janos Kadar, Wladyslaw Gomulka and Erich Honecker...
...My impression, for what it is worth, is that things have been slowly changing at the Times in the last few years, especially in its news division...
...foreign policy in the years 1945-75--and his main purpose is to correct some of the more conspicuous errors and misinterpretations of the first drafters...
...adults cannot 'give them an education.' " Furthermore, with an engaged student body, the schools could finally face the truth that an education which does not include "education in character" is scarcely worth the name...
...And fear of a Jacquerie by the underprivileged...
...This is not an elitist argument to abandon the children of the poor...
...One might expect something of a different character when he learns that Horace's Compromise is--forgive me but I must quote--"the first report from a study of high schools, cosponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Commission on Educational Issues of the National Association of Independent Schools...
...Even so, I hasten to add, there is much to be learned from the late British imperial period...
...Unlike theirs, our economy remains strong and creative...
...The Washington Post is frequently this way...
...All one need do is follow Horace around for a couple of days to see why the schools are intellectually enervating...
...He has done a monumental amount of work, written a big book (679 pages), and has performed us a great service...
...It "appears to derive from two nightmares," he writes...
...He is the embodiment of busy-work...
...Horace knows that the schools are paralyzed, but he has little faith they can be enlivened, and he is intensely fearful that any change will work against him...
...Horace may or may not have the potential to be a good teacher, but he is clearly not sensibly deployed...
...A consistent motif throughout Horace's Compromise is the author's disgust with the way less privileged children are now treated by the schools...
...In any event, Braley was involved in the initial reporting of some of the events that he describes, and he is understandably eager to set the record straight...
...Sizer's judgment, "that is what high school is all about...
...The two books discussed here are units in the remarkable parade set off by the nation's belated discovery that American high schools are not exactly palaces of intellectual scintillation...
...On the evils of the latter Sizer could not be more explicit: "The existing hierarchies are comfortable for the people at the top of school bureaucracy and for their influential colleagues in the university with whom they are interlocked in a variety of training-to-license programs...
...man on the front page of the New York Times, to be of exceptional interest...
...Equally manifest to Sizer are the corrective measures that ought to be taken...
...Braley's canvas is large--primarily U.S...
...Some of its foreign reporters are now plainly anti-Communist (Alexander Cockburn unfailingly identifies them for us in his press column), as is the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal...
...But as we can see from the foregoing, the Times has in fact made a distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, because it consistently assaults the former and defends the latter...
...He's a composite figure, a 53-year-old English teacher in a pretty good suburban school whose working conditions are more pleasant than average...
...Sizer's thesis is that the average citizen is an unwitting participant in a conspiracy to keep the schools dull, flat, dreary, insipid, trivial, and monotonous...
...Sizer's analysis, however, is probably too gloomy, because it overestimates the importance of formal schooling in adolescent development...
...Young people who want to learn have plenty of opportunities outside of schools, and obviously, many take advantage of them...
...Horace knows he is a lot better off than his counterparts who labor in the inner cities...
...Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna summit, for example, he observes in a footnote that, having asked a sensible question at a press conference dealing with the U.S...
...The "HalberstamHiggins War" took place in Vietnam in 1963, but one suspects something very analogous may be going on in El Salvador today...
...Braley concludes that the New York Times, in the period under consideration, in fact subordinated a policy of objective reporting to an ideology or preconceived worldview...
...The American high school of today--and this is true throughout the nation--is a youthtending institution devoted to preserving "mediocre harmonies...
...Mary's College of Maryland and author o f the column "'An Idea o f Freedom...
...Horace, in fact, isn't even a real person...
...The correspondents became hostage to the Times" slide into ideology...
...And from these youngsters much more could be expected than is now the case...
...I do not mean to suggest that he has an axe to grind...
...The students are usually "docile, compliant, and without initiative...
...One only wishes that so learned and eloquent a historian as Paul Kennedy had addressed these issues in depth...
...Appeasement of the Munich variety was advocated in the name of "realism," of a sophisticated and unsentimental assessment of world PLENUM PUBLISHING CORPORATION 233 f~pr,nq %tr~,el New York N Y 1001.3 THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...Everyone on the staff understood what was wanted after the promotions of Herbert Matthews and David Halborstam...
...This would suggest that it is as much a requirement of statesmanship to recognize when Realpolitik is inadequate as it is to know when it is invaluable...
...There is money in the hierarchy...
...now telling us what he found...
...NH 03054 Please send me information about this program Name Address City State Zip Telephone politics...
...One is considerably better than the other, but both address the same conditions and both are in general agreement about what ought to be done...
...Few would deny the relevance of such striking parallels as the tensions between maritime strategies and continental commitments, and between liberal values and imperial necessities...
...Presumably, if the schoois were capable of dealing with subtleties, basic moral questions could be discussed without the frothing at the mouth which now accompanies any hint of a religious issue...
...A failure to have noticed the distinction would have produced an inconsistent pattern of support...
...our primary opponents, in contrast to theirs, are shackled by economic systems that create wealth slowly if at all...
...They would have to learn more while being taught less...
...Horace meets 120 students a day...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
