The Nation's Pulse/The Liberals' Lost Weekend
Novak, Robert D.
THE NATION'S PULSE ............................................................................................................................................................................ THE...
...Just at the time that the police were trying to win the confidence of the terrorists to negotiate a peaceful end to the crisis, one of the hosts of a local talk show asked the terrorists, "How can you believe the police...
...He claimed the "Reaganite fetish of `privatization...
...the parade of the tall ships...
...A San Francisco radio station monitored police frequencies during the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and learned of an impending arrest of three terrorists...
...Perhaps the weekend was conceived as more of a farewell to liberty than a celebration...
...You get the idea: Reagan bombed poor, innocent Libya—which, after all, hadn't done us the favor of formally declaring war, thereby eliminating all doubt about their role in international terror—because the people interviewed months earlier by the Holloway Commission indicated they'd like firm steps taken against terrorists...
...It's a great American tradition that dates back about two weeks," sneered Kinsley, with special contempt reserved for Bob Hope as a recipient...
...THE LIBERALS' LOST WEEKEND by Robert D. Novak proprieties in the forthcoming celebration...
...Arthur Schlesinger, theoretician of the New Frontier's left wing, wrote in New York magazine that "what ought to have been a grand national occasion, organized by the Republic itself, has turned in private hands into a shaming orgy of commercialism...
...T101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 ican's pride and the media elite's disdain may betray an endemic sourness of spirit among those who try to set the nation's tastes but do not succeed...
...She compared Liberty Weekend with the Bicentennial celebration of 1976, when Americans were in a chastened mood over Vietnam and Watergate ("We were grateful rather than triumphant"), and found it wanting...
...and that history demonstrated progress and unity through the story of liberty...
...Morton Kondracke of Newsweek praised McLaughlin for "one of the best lead-ins to a program I've ever seen," then went on to predict "excess" and "overkill...
...Phobia over too-close contact with their fellow citizens, of course, did not show up in the national news media's lamentations preceding the weekend...
...Or, if you prefer, order the Autumn '86 series only (a total of 7 editions) for $59...
...This July Fourth weekend," Weisberg predicted, "is likely to be remembered as the most revolting display of patriotic glitz and tacky pageantry in the country's history...
...It was tasteful and stirring, as was most of the program...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...Liberty of her dignity...
...Date Signature To order direct by VISA or MasterCard or for more information call: 1-800-824.0829 In Tennessee and Alaska call collect: (615) 383.8534 Print Name Address City/State/Zip Phone Do not send cash...
...I missed that event, so I shall not carry away the sight of 200 Elvis imitators...
...This was immediately broad-cast;- the terrorists heard it and evaded the police trap...
...During the Hanafi Muslim occupation of the B'nai B'rith building in Washington, D.C...
...Suzie Martin, Chairperson, National French Contest Sterling Hts., MI ------------------------------------------------------TO: Champs-Elysees, Dept...
...One might have hoped that Horrock and O'Shea would point out that terrorism is adopted by countries like Libya precisely because it is an unconventional, low-intensity form of warfare...
...I am enclosing: ^ $112 ($120.68 in Tennessee) ^ $59 ($63.57 in Tennessee) ^ Check enclosed...
...Yet, non-journalistic friends invariably expressed envy that I was going to be lucky enough to watch the relighting of Miss Liberty from Governors Island, the parade of the tall ships from the carrier Kennedy, and the fireworks display from the battleship Iowa...
...All but the very highest level of VIP's at Liberty Weekend encountered endless waits, bungled transportation, and crowds, crowds, crowds...
...Because of the sense of being there...
...X, P.O...
...President Francois Mitterrand concluding his French speech with an English birthday wish for America and the Statue of Liberty...
...The New Republic, vacillating between neoliberalism and neoconservatism, moved left...
...These Americans had no tickets for special events, but there was no lack of activity for them...
...The street scene looked a little like the Pamplona festival in Spain I attended a year earlier: food stalls selling a wide variety of ethnic fare, free entertainment on temporary streetcorner stages, beer sold outside taverns at makeshift counters, smiling people wandering through the carless streets, just having a good time...
...Mort Kondracke, on "The McLaughlin Group" that weekend, said he had been wrong the previous week...
...It also should have been instructive for a nation of immigrants that today, as frequently in the past, flinches at welcoming newcomers to our shores...
...Not far below the surface, however, can be found political motivations...
...the Vietnamese refugee girl reading her prize-winning essay on liberty...
...The memories I do retain are '(1 " ' ~e en, rain Keep current with trends in contemporary French language and culture with Champs-Elysees, the unique "audio magazine" hosted by top European radio and television personality, Georges Lang...
...What my friends in Washing-ton wanted to avoid at all costs, middle America felt it could not miss...
...The New York scowl had disappeared for a weekend...
...Box 158067, Nashville, TN 37215-8067 Please enter my subscription to Champs-Elysees...
...G 1986, CHAMPS-ELYSEES...
...The two events that most moved me were two that prospectively disturbed Mr...
...dollars...
...Hundreds of journalists raced to the spot, and of course no transfer of money took place...
...The mass swearing-in of the new citizens was a stirring moment for a grandson of immigrants...
...divests Miss When I mentioned to colleagues in the news business that I planned to visit New York City July 4 for the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, the in-variable reaction was wonder and pity...
...As July 4 neared, more and more mainstream journalists reenacted Eugene McCarthy's apt metaphor of birds joining their companions on a telephone line...
...Please charge my ^ VISA ^ MasterCard Print Name on Card Card No...
...Though she suffered minor stomach wounds and her husband was hospitalized with deeper cuts, she told Mayor Ed Koch that the attack, which took two lives, "should not detract from a party you gave for a whole nation...
...Kinsley (who, predictably, did not attend...
...She describes what's wrong not only with the Liberty Weekend but with America: "We're complacent, we're standing tall...
...Ill-advised it might have been, but it consumed no more than four minutes of one Wolper-staged gala...
...It's tasteless...
...Four days later Schleyer was dead...
...In response to the terrorists' demands that their comrades in other countries be freed, an aircraft—which was supposedly carrying the released terrorists—landed in Cairo...
...The Chicago Tribune ran a three-part series in May on the American response to Libyan terrorism...
...Produced entirely in modern idiomatic French, Champs-Elysees features conversation about current affairs, travel, cuisine, the arts, and entertainment along with interviews and a sampling of today's best French popular music...
...These two volumes, edited by J. Rufus Fears, Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University, will be followed shortly by a concluding volume, Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality, which includes a significant selection from the unpublished Acton papers...
...Order now and receive the Autumn '86 and Spring '87 series (a total of 14 editions) for just $112...
...The terrorists then broke off all negotiations with the government, opened a channel to Schleyer's son, and negotiated a ransom of fifteen million dollars...
...The volume concludes with Acton's famous Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895, "The Study of History...
...The symbol, harped on by nearly every journalist who wrote about the weekend, was an Elvis Presley look-alike contest...
...It's the transformation of America between the start of the Jimmy Carter years and the six years of Ronald Reagan...
...Acton's concept of liberty was the unifying theme of the essays collected in the first volume of this edition, Essays in the History of Liberty...
...Kinsley, promoting Weisberg's article over CNN, elaborated: "I'll tell you what glitz is...
...PRESSWATCH As promised last month, here are just a few of the cases in which the media have helped terrorism: •In 1974, terrorists seized a court-house in Washington, D.C...
...But the true spirit of Liberty Week-end was felt away from the great war-ships, the $5,000 seats at Governors Island, and the special treatment for VIP's...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 29...
...Prof...
...As luck would have it, they kept the hostages in a room that had a two-way mirror in it, permitting the police to see what was going on...
...Writing on such diverse topics as the divorce of Henry VIII, Leopold von Ranke, and the History of the Papacy, Acton argued that history should be impartial, based on archival research, and founded in moral judgment...
...The critics were in full cry, asserting the events had fulfilled their worst fears...
...It was to be found in the streets of lower Manhattan, shut off from vehicular traffic, where Americans from across the continent strolled, celebrating the rededication of the symbol of their precious liberty...
...Meanwhile, it is discouraging to see that an impressive number of American journalists consider acts by our government to strike back against terrorists as somehow immoral...
...Exp...
...Can I come along to carry your suitcase...
...On November 22, 1974, a British Airways airplane was hijacked to Cairo airport...
...The mood was personified by Connie Nichols, a banker's wife from McPherson, Kansas, who was one of the victims of a deranged, saber-wielding Cuban immigrant who ran amuck on the Staten Island ferry in the closing hours of the previously violence-free weekend...
...We've invaded Libya, we're fighting a surrogate war against a little country in Central America...
...One could continue this list at far greater length...
...As an aid to comprehension, each 45 minute cassette program comes with a complete printed French transcription and a special French-English vocabulary section...
...the magnificent fireworks display...
...Following the hijacking of an American airliner in 1972, in which the hijacker parachuted to safety, police planned to place transmitters in parachutes in the future...
...A good percentage of the country's respectable commentators were out on that line with the Nation, trashing the festivities in advance...
...After the relighting ceremony, Shales wrote of some people—himself obviously included--!'who like to think America is `about' more than sales figures, merchandising brainstorms and the blowing of one's horn...
...Hope was there, as were all the others (including Henry Kissinger, Itzhak Perhnan, I. M. Pei, James Reston, and Elie Wiesel) except the nonagenarian Irving Berlin...
...Why would these people, without an unimpeded view of the Statue much less access to the festivities, travel hundreds or thousands of miles to watch over television what they could have seen in their homes...
...But after the weekend's windup, he more precisely pinpointed the source of his disaffection...
...On the weekly talk show "The McLaughlin Group," moderator John McLaughlin introduced a discussion of the controversy this way: "Tacky, tacky, tacky: the gross-me-out Fourth, or no way to treat a lady...
...In truth, the media assault had lots more to do with Ronald Reagan than with Elvis Presley lookalikes...
...But a local radio reporter broadcast a real scoop: There were no terrorists on board, it was a hoax to trick the hijackers...
...At least one did...
...Noting a "high profile" over the weekend for Ronald Reagan,his wife, and his Cabinet, Shales said "this is hardly an administration that is likely to go down as one of the most liberty-loving in history...
...They were unmoved by the mass swearing-in, called "stilted" by Baltimore Sun television critic Bill Carter...
...was a frequent request...
...in this volume may be found the historical studies upon which Acton drew to explicate his understanding of the idea of liberty...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 74.40 North Shadeland, Dept...
...The 7i-ibune's authors (Nicholas Horrock and James O'Shea) began with an ac-count of a public opinion poll taken at the request of the Holloway Commission on terrorism in December 1985 to determine the attitudes of the American public on the matter...
...But that's not really what makes my good friend Mary angry...
...We have measured our muscle against some of the smallest nations on the globe and we have prevailed...
...the countries that engage in terrorism don't want to be openly identified with it, but they do want the results that they gain from it...
...Champs-Elysees is the most exciting French material Eve ever seen published...
...She was "sullied" because fund-raiser Lee Iacocca and impresario David Wolper were in charge, instead of the government...
...The same instruction can be ascribedto the presentation by President Reagan of a "Medal of Liberty" to twelve distinguished Americans of foreign birth...
...Shales was relentless, summarizing the weekend as "a tasteless trivialization of a treasurable idea...
...One of the hostages on the BA plane was immediately killed...
...Roberta Brandes Gratz, writing in USA Today, went so far as to say that "a sullied image is indelibly affixed to Miss Liberty's sparkling new looks...
...The spectacle of Liberty Weekend that made Americans feel proud en-raged Mary McGrory and a good many other journalists, who are less willing than she to admit ideological motivations but jabber instead about bad taste...
...Columnist Haynes Johnson, writing in the Washington Post, sounded the same theme: "I would prefer her [the Statue's] preservation to have been accomplished by the expenditure of public funds instead of the spectacle of private firms coming to her rescue and then cashing in on their good works...
...Boy," one journalistic friend told me in a refrain often repeated, almost word for word, "that is the last place in the world I would want to be...
...Schmid and diGraaf show, for example, how media coverage of one event serves as an inspiration for others (hijackers of airplanes who asked for parachutes became a near-epidemic at one point, clearly because of the publicity given to the first such cases), how journalists encourage terrorists, and so forth...
...The villain is privatization...
...In the September 19, 1977 edition of Stern magazine in Germany, it was revealed that the government team negotiating with the Baader-Meinhof Gang for the release of hostage Hans Martin Schleyer, had no intention of releasing the prisoners that the German terrorists were demanding in return for Schleyer...
...But Kondracke was alone...
...to meet their demands, took off two hours earlier, thus depriving the governments involved of the possibility of immobilizing the aircraft in Algeria, rather than facing the almost hopeless task of liberating the hostages in Beirut...
...Hardcover $15.00 ISBN 0-86597-048-3 Paperback $ 7.50 ISBN 0-86597-049-1 Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...It's supposed to make us feel proud—and patriotic...
...they want to portray Reagan as bombing Libya simply because the poll—of which the President was most Michael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies...
...And for those interested in the phenomenon, I highly recommend a little-known book, written by two Dutch scholars, Schmid and diGraaf, Insurgent Terrorism and the Western News Media (Leiden, 1980...
...The terrorists, who had taken the plane to Algiers and had given the authorities until 7 a.m...
...The Tribune's journalists avoid this matter...
...This was announced by the German Press Agency, which even went so far as to report the time and place that the ransom was supposed to be paid...
...No wonder, then, that media scolding began with the ultra-leftist Nation, a publication committed against capitalism and patriotism in America...
...The critics concentrated on the event's vulgarity and commercialization, with an overlay of distaste for overt patriotism...
...Included are several essays not printed since Acton's time and his most important historical essays from the Rambler, Home and Foreign Review, North British Review, and the English Historical Review...
...The gap between the ordinary AmerLibertyPress LibertyClassics SELECTED WRITINGS OF LORD ACTON VOLUME II ESSAYS IN THE STUDY AND WRITING OF HISTORY By John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton Edited by J. Rufus Fears This second volume of the LibertyClassics edition of The Selected Writings of Lord Acton brings together lectures, articles, and reviews which demonstrate Acton's lifelong devotion to the study of history...
...Liberty Weekend turned out to be so much better than the gloomy predictions of the nay-sayers that I wondered whether some of them might admit error...
...in 1977, the terrorists were interviewed on radio talk shows...
...AS-9/86 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 27 rich: President Reagan presiding over the relighting of the Statue, accomplished by laser technology...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...in charge," and the "vulgar pageant" of the new-citizen swearing-in...
...and took hostages...
...She went through the obligatory ventilation about commercialization, the Elvis Presley look-alikes, the special medals, "Hollywood and Broadway...
...It is a model of hownot to analyze foreign policy...
...But this fact was revealed by the media, and the terrorists had the mirror covered with—fittingly enough—newspapers, thus increasing the hostages' risk...
...You'll receive a new issue twice-monthly beginning the week of September 8. Your cassette-transcription is fantastic...
...By publishing an article called "The Selling of Miss Liberty" last November, it triggered media frenzy by alleging imRobert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist and sits to the right of Morton Kondracke on "The McLaughlin Group...
...That came close, but it took syndicated columnist Mary McGrory to really make the point—shared but not admitted and perhaps not even perceived by so many colleagues...
...During the TWA hijacking in the summer of 1985, an American televi-sion network announced that the "Delta Force" had been sent to the Mediterranean to free the hostages...
...What's glitz is 40,000 people being sworn in [as citizens] across the country...
...While my colleagues were turning down gilt-edged invitations of the kind I received, hundreds of thousands of their countrymen were pouring into lower Manhattan—without tickets, without a vantage point to watch the festivities, often without a place of lodging...
...Having condemned Wolper in advance for tastelessness, Washington Post television critic Tom Shales could only ask after the relighting ceremony: "Is good taste incompatible with love of country...
...Editor Michael Kinsley assigned his favorite young hatchetman, Yale University under-graduate Jacob Weisberg, to savage the ceremony with "Gross National Production" in the June 23 issue...
...Horrock and O'Shea continued: Although they couldn't have known it, these ordinary Americans . . . played a key role in setting the Reagan administration's policy on terrorism—a policy that last month sent American aircraft to bomb Libya, a sovereign nation . . . that was not formally at war with the United States...
...Here is evidence of an elite's determination to avoid rubbing shoulders with the masses...
...This was published within two days of implementing the strategy, thus rendering it useless...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
