JOURNALISM AND INTEGRITY

...And having gone on the attack, he often used his skill in words to embed among his sentences a shift of meaning which altered the picture of his opponent from that of someone possibly in error to that of a malefactor who had committed a crime...

...but in the end he seemed the saddest of men himself, the writer consumed by his own hatreds: of William Jennings Bryan of whom his obituary was so vicious that Mencken's editors wondered if he realized Bryan was dead...

...That is why it mattered that Walter Lippmann majored in philosophy at Harvard...

...a gorgeous porpoise with red, blue and purple spots, streaking through phosphorescent seas, forever lashing his tail...

...Mencken's man is the darling of the community's "frauds and idiots and the despair of its honest men...

...To Mencken, Heywood Broun, the liberal columnist and early founder of the American Newspaper Guild, was "an old quack...

...How the hell can you do that...

...death comes "like Sandburg's fog," "on cat's feet...

...I remember that his targets at various times were the disreputable saloons and the mayor, and that once he wrote a piece on how to drink a mint julep...

...Take the glamour out of war...

...Through much of this alternately insightful and dreary collection runs the image of the journalist as the used-up man, the burnt-out case, the middle-aged city editor, the dead romantic worn down by compromises, gone sour and old before his time, who drinks more than he reads, who has not yet caught up with the novel theory that newspaper editors should be men of honor...

...and an uncompromising demand for personal and professional self-examination...

...Both Broun and Pegler appear in the early chapters of Phillip Knightley's The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam-The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, the most important and provocative book on journalism in recent years...

...as strong an indirect moral argument for pacifism as we shall see for some time...

...In war after war we see truth and integrity sacrificed because editors demand colorful battle descriptions and human interest stories rather than "dull" background or historical reports, because the generals who control accreditation insist that their exploits be heroically portrayed, because it was "better" for the public to believe that America had lost one battleship at Pearl Harbor when correspondents could see five resting on the bottom, because it was supposedly better for us not to know the extent of the American atrocities in Vietnam until Seymour Hersh tracked down Lieutenant William Calley back home...

...Broun's legend survives, he says, "for the purity of the example he set for American liberalism...

...and why Joseph Pulitzer insisted that his editorial writers be well-read in history and law...

...and of FDR who finally outwitted and crushed Mencken at a Gridiron Club dinner hy blasting the press in a speech made up entirely of Mencken quotes...

...I wish I could report that the original Broun's elusive personality had been aptly captured in the late Richard O'Connor's biography, Heywood Broun...

...If a writer has an inner core-and if he can write-he will become a mediator between the public and the Truth...

...Two other reviewers, former war correspondents, have criticized Knight-ley for not having been a war correspondent himself...

...for him, to deny "bias" was to reject "the only factors which really matter-honesty, understanding and thoroughness...

...Rather than tone down his defense of Sacco and Vanzetti Broun left the World...

...Finis Fair's eccentric, highly personal and ultimately moving biography of Pegler, Fair Enough, based partly on Pegler's unpublished papers, reveals a man who had no core, no self...

...yet there is still much in the analogy that holds...

...he said: "I'm not about to write sidelights...

...And the September [MORE] has reprinted the most pertinent passages from this volume-all with the presumption that contemporary journalism is so anemic that a resurrection of this bilious Baltimore roaster will elevate public taste...

...I suppose it's an impression I got as a child-when I first worked my way through the (to me) awesome, grimy city room of the Trenton Times to the little grey compartment in the far corner where my father, with two fingers, for over 40 years tapped out way over 40,000 editorials for the Trenton Times, the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Herald-Tribune...

...The crudest blow, he said later, was that the Germans had never heard of him or his writings...

...But eventually Broun saw Pegler as the worst kind of fraud a talented man can be-an intellectual fraud-a secretly kindly fellow who merely posed as an irascible terror for the sake of professional advancement...

...Good for him...

...yet there is not enough here on the development of his thought or on the power of his prose that would give a less-than-middle-aged reader any sense of the real substance of his contribution...

...For Matthews, it seems, his own convictions provided his touchstone for truth...

...Perhaps more than any other modem conflict the Spanish Civil War highlighted the ultimately unanswerable question: to what extent should the correspondent allow his own convictions to influence what he writes...

...The quintessence of Peglerism was attack...

...That may be fun for a while...

...The Mencken mystique has enjoyed a revival during the last few years- reissued collections of his early columns and an impersonation in a short-run off-Broadway one-man show...

...Mencken could write tenderly and compassionately, as he did in his reminiscence of Rudolph Valentino, the unhappy young man who daily lived the dreams of a million other men...

...Or so cold-bloodedly detached they would rather watch a Buddhist monk douse himself with gasoline and photograph him going up in flames than kick the gasoline out of the way and miss the "historic" shots...

...And O'Connor's own prose is a string of journalese that, I hope, would make his subject cringe...

...Matthews now admits he was wrong to see the war in ideological terms...

...Particularly J. Anthony Lukas' true-friendship article on his former mentor James Reston warning him that he is getting too cozy with power and losing his master journalist's bite...

...For the war correspondent's moral problem is every reporter's dilemma on a larger map with life as well as honor at stake: trying to have some sense of who he is-which will determine what he decides to report and how big a sacrifice he will make to tell the reading public what he is convinced they should know in order to make an honest judgment on world events...

...But, H. L. Mencken wrote in The Smart Set, 1918 (reprinted in a collection of his journalism commentaries, A Gang of Pecksniffs), while trying to explain why journalists wrote so little about their profession, ". . . the gentlemen of the press, as a class, are an unreflective and unanalytical lot . . . they seldom give any sober thought to the anatomy and physiology of the business of their lives...

...Public confidence in enough of the other institutions- like government, the medical and legal professions and the church-that once emanated at least the appearance of stability and integrity has dipped...

...Eventually he told -and brought home to the government and future history the fact that, from now on, the public had something to say about the conduct of a war...

...and when he had once placed a person or institution in enmity, Pegler could be unscrupulous in his choice of weapons...

...It is a trade that uses men up, especially mentally...

...His life seems one long resentment, publicly displayed...

...And he makes a stylistic leap for someone he admires, as in his 1925 review of Don C. Seitz' biography of Joseph Pulitzer...

...They are young men with the Allied Expeditionary Forces in World War I, discovering, to their anger, a basic theme of Knightley's tract: that governments-even democracies-are not primarily interested in truth and that most journalists aren't either...

...You can't take the glamour out of a tank burning or a helicopter blowing up...

...Herbert Matthews responds: "I would always opt for honest, open bias...

...During the so-called Golden Age of war reporting, between the Civil War and World War I, with only a few exceptions, the correspondents were "everyone agrees, a colorful crew...

...He belongs to a good club, and the initiation fee was his soul...

...That business, indeed, holds them by its very condition in a state of mind which is the opposite of analytical...

...With one or two exceptions, they pandered to the bloodthirsty tastes of the age, chronicling the deaths of thousands of men with little concern beyond whether the event they were witnessing would make a good report...

...Unanswerable because, in the long run, the interaction between objective and subjective truth becomes so much a function of character...

...and when Broun dies he leaves "a large vacant space in the life of his, time...

...It is like watching fireworks or counting syllables in William Buckley's vocabulary...

...Otherwise he might not be alive and sensitive enough to write: this challenging political and journalism history...

...After a year he quit and returned home to die at 52, disgusted at not being allowed to visit the front lines...

...William Howard Russell of the London Times, "the first and greatest" of war correspondents, "the miserable parent of a luckless tribe," watched the soft-headed British nobility make a mess of the Crimean War and asked his editor: "Am I to tell these things, or hold my tongue...

...It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex...

...Broun had even tried to get him to like Eleanor Roosevelt...

...and, for criticizing the World in The Nation for knuckling under to the Church on birth control, he had to leave it again...

...They enter upon it romantically, and when the romance is gone they go along wearily and unthinkingly...

...In fact there was no way to frame a definition of Westbrook Pegler, except to say that his was a personality of warring opposites, which never completely canceled each other out...

...That is to say, it is a trade that makes them stupid...

...It was typical of Broun that he had tried to hold onto Pegler's friendship while Pegler referred to him as "Old Bleeding Heart...

...And why it is important that journalism reviews like [MORE] thrive and that the recent collection of its best essays, Stop the Presses I Want to Get Off, should be widely read...

...but most of all I remember that it was very serious work and that the one quality you should have in the newspaper business (or get out) was integrity...

...But they did not measure up to their job...

...Thus, writing a news story or a column, deciding what aspect of an issue to emphasize-where the central truth in a conflict lies-is making a series of judgments that well from character, the core of the spirit, flesh and bone slumped over the typewriter in the middle of the night...

...Uppermost in any honest journalist's value system must be the willingness to lose his job, to say no to an editor or publisher rather than let anything come out of his typewriter that is not in his soul...

...Then, he went to cover the American Civil War and was canned by his superiors for predicting the North would win...

...Today Broun, who once, perhaps even more than Reston now, told World readers what to think for the day, is almost a forgotten man-living on in a paradoxical way in his son, Heywood Hale Broun, the CBS-TV comic-sports correspondent: a dapper mustachioed figure whose madras sports coats belie his father's reputation for slovenliness but whose self-mocking puns and alliterative metaphors are right in the tradition of the man who opened a report on a 1923 World Series: "The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail...

...But Knightley's real story is not just the death of truth but the moral death of men who at one stage of their lives are called to be prophets and end up being whores...

...but it has very little to do with the quest for truth, and it's not what journalism is for...

...who won the battle too many men quit-to keep his self-respect...

...Broun, O'Connor concludes in his best line, "was his own man...

...A newspaperman should work with his heart as well as his mind...

...Mencken was glad to see journalism slowly reforming itself in the 1920s, and he could acknowledge a rare good man like John Haslup Adams of the Baltimore Sun-"the only man who never made a visible compromise with his convictions"-and a few others like Walter Lippmann of the World and Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation, who retained a healthy distrust for the democratic process but who continued to believe that justice was still possible in the world "if those who favor it will only fight for it hard enough...

...War correspondents, by laziness or incompetence, are too willing to be sucked into the propaganda machine, to view a conflict either through the eyes of the side they're traveling with or according to the ideological baggage- be it Marxism, British Imperialism or American Manifest Destiny-they have toted into battle with them...

...and the way may be open for journalists -aided by the unshakable authority of cold print on a page-to make a claim to moral leadership, to give some assurance that someone is taking on the Old Testament prophet's job of afflicting the comfortable and the Christian's vocation of comforting the afflicted...

...During World War I the most experienced, most glamorous and richest ($32,000 a year) of the correspondents, Richard Harding Davis, after writing a magnificent description of the German army entering Brussels-"like a river of steel it flowed, gray and ghostlike"-was captured and almost shot by the Germans as a British spy...

...Writing of JFK's funeral, he called John F. Kennedy, Jr...

...but I cannot...

...the little donkey," and, on Robert Kennedy, he told his long-suffering typewriter that he hoped "some white patriot of the southern tier will splatter his spoonful of brains in the public premises before the snow flies...

...War is good for you...

...To read long doses of Mencken today is to indulge whatever low appetite we have for watching a strong mind and quick tongue horsewhip an idea or person he scorns...

...Finally, the World-Telegram drove him out by chopping his columns to bits and "balancing" them with Westbrook Pegler, his former friend who vilified him in print all the way to his deathbed...

...He compares Broun's appearance to "an unmade bed" twice...

...And there is the pitiful Tim Page, the very young free-lance combat photographer who, when asked to write a book that would take the glamour out of war, responded: "Jesus...

...They showed little humanity and no historical perspective...

...It is like prison and military chaplains barking like wardens and blessing bombs-who become so like what they cover, so absorbed in their bloody work that they carry guns and fashion snazzy uniforms for themselves...

...To millions of Americans, up to his death in 1940 (the year when he wrote three columns for Commonweal), Broun was the genial crusader, the portly knight of the Algonquin Round Table, one of the best loved newspapermen of his generation...

...Perhaps he has missed what some still call the great experience of each man's generation...

...They were, in the words of Vincent Sheean, "professional observers at the peep show of misery...

...For the best journalists, as well as being detectives, historians, political scientists and literary artists, are moralists...

...Drew Middleton of the New York Times replies that while no one can be completely objective, objectivity-getting the facts-is the goal...

...He left no "vacant space" in our lives...

...when Broun leaves the cast of a show he produced and foolishly played a part in, it becomes "time to ring down the curtain...

...but, in Knightley's judgment, he was ahead of his colleagues who were, outright propagandists-like Claude Cock-burn for the Communists, William P. Carney of the New York Times for the dominantly pro-Franco Catholics, and Ernest Hemingway who simply used the war "to gain a new lease on his life as a writer...

...It is doubly ironic that biographies of Broun and Pegler should appear at the same time and that both men are now perhaps best remembered less for their accomplishments than for the 19S4 libel case in which Quentin Reynolds sued Pegler for calling him a coward, war profiteer, skinflint, social climber and nudist who joined in "interracial orgies" at Broun's Connecticut Sabine Farm, where Pegler himself had been a guest...

...he says Broun's friend and permanent house-guest, Ed MacNamara was a "former member of the constabulary"-meaning ex-policeman...

...And it is why people really care how Eric Sevareid is going to end his Ciceronian sentence, and why Anthony Lewis seems to have taken a vow to never let anyone forget that Nixon and Kissinger bombed Hanoi at Christmastime...

...Swope went on to say in his 1949 preface to A Treasury of Great Reporting that "journalism is a priestly mission," that newsmen should embrace and mull over the classic anthology of war, crime, tragedy and sob stories as ministers meditate on the Bible...

...Both the priesthood and the press have changed since Swope coined that excess...

...What we lost when we lost Broun was a warm and very insecure man whose life, more than the lives of bis peers, was one long search for values he could depend on and share-from Socialism to the Guild picket lines, through his let's-keep-our-independence marriage with feminist Ruth Hale, to fellow-traveling, to the Roman Catholic Church...

...It was syntax in the service of character assassination, and not at all pretty...