The Case for TV Journalism
FRANK, REUVEN
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. The Kennedy Gamble By Roger Kingsbury Washington Robert Kennedy's miscalculations began with his assumption that Senator Eugene McCarthy's well known dislike of political...
...The upgrading of ghetto residents must precede...
...Moreover, because the best way to achieve profitability quickly is to cut labor costs, many industrial workers also oppose the reforms, fearing they too may lose their jobs when overemployment gets to be a luxury that can no longer be afforded...
...McCarthy's lieutenants tell anyone who will listen that Marvin Watson, Johnson's chief of staff, was their secret weapon in New Hampshire...
...One can only guess at the reasons...
...Possibly the audience applause at anti-Russian lines...
...The play was, therefore, a requisite establishment of credentials before Mickiewicz could begin addressing his fellow Poles as a wieszcz with any reasonable hope of their heeding him...
...Add to this the widespread unpopularity of Warsaw's official position on the Middle East conflict, and the hostile reaction to insinuations about a potential "internal enemy" or "Fifth Column" (read here, regrettably, Jews...
...who told Congress on July 27, 1967: "National commentators on television and radio decry what is happening today, but over many yesterdays they permitted their facilities to be used as incitement to riot—and now they too are reaping what they have sowed...
...The anti-Russianism of 19th-and early 20th-century Polish culture posed no problem for the regime in the past...
...In 1960...
...Soviet prestige is threatened by any "peace with honor" our superior fire power might impose...
...The reason is the perhaps natural confusion of a news medium with the information it carries...
...And the Polish feeling of intellectual superiority has only sharpened the antagonism toward a stand-still regime for whom excuses can no longer be found...
...Some of us were there to give the American political system one final chance before refusing any further cooperation with it, and some of us were there because we had sufficient confidence in the system to believe that the McCarthy candidacy could bring about a basic alteration of national policies...
...And the most important social class, the industrial workers, is by and large as conservative in Czechoslovakia as in Poland...
...Polls show a rapid rise of "hawk" sentiment in the month following the attacks on Hue and Saigon...
...Regardless of whether those who accuse tv think this is what they are saying, those who agree with them think it is...
...Meanwhile, California Kennedyite Jesse Unruh publicly declared that McCarthy had "served his purpose," clearly suggesting that the stalking horse should now make way for the real racer...
...And students vented their hatrea of political injustices not by mass public demonstrations or the destruction of property but impassioned clandestine intellectual activity...
...across the country were solidly in Kennedy's camp one year ago...
...Richard M. Nixon got 65,204 votes in the gop primary against John F. Kennedy's 43,372 votes in the Democratic primary...
...And there is incredulity over his reported statement to Democratic party chairmen recently that he places domestic politics and primaries on the bottom of his priority list...
...As a result, Nixon and McCarthy came on strong...
...is sending additional men and weapons to Vietnam to avoid a Dienbienphu at the hands of the Vietcong...
...They say that then they waged such monstrous strife, They did not spare the foe his forest trees And burned the grain still ripening in the ear...
...In 1952, Estes Kefauver beat HST in the primary, and went on to win all the other primaries...
...Nor did he quote Roger Wilkins, director of the Community Relations Service of the Department of Justice...
...This is not a matter of debate...
...He, like many others in Washington, is convinced that what is at stake in 1968 is not only the political lives of Johnson, McCarthy and Kennedy, but also the future of the party each desperately wants to lead...
...This, incidentally, was the only such accusation I heard about, and I found nothing of the kind in my own canvassing...
...Except for the title and a mechanically appended ninth scene—the poet's way of suggesting a continuity of his thought and work from 1823 to the Dresden period—folklore gives way completely to a drama based on the arrest, imprisonment, trial and sentencing of the Wilno youths...
...In designating his drama Forefathers' Eve, Part III, Mickiewicz was borrowing a title from two of his works published in 1S23: Forefathers' Eve, Parts II and IV...
...Besides the workers' passivity, the Czechoslovak tradition of compromise and bargaining in part explains the comparative calm surrounding the changes in Prague...
...It threatens not only to destroy the little nation they both pretend to be helping, but much more...
...For a very politically conscious youth and intelligentsia, the prohibition was further evidence of the extreme conservatism into which the regime had sunk...
...Johnson is thoroughly disliked even among many who plan to vote for him against the likes of Richard Nixon...
...Now we hear it at home...
...On the progressive side, Ota Sik, the chief architect of economic reform, has appeared especially frequently in a concerted effort to persuade workers that reform will be to their benefit...
...They turned to McCarthy not only because of his opposition to U.S...
...Nevertheless, it could not be called a comfortable experience...
...That was the oracular rigamarole up to 1936 when Republican Presidential candidate Alf Landon took two states including Maine...
...From then on: "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont...
...But came convention time...
...Now the impression is that he really wanted to run all along...
...Imagery makes its own impact...
...The Tsar is still more clever and he bleeds Poland more deep: he crushes out the seed...
...In November 1823, he and a number of his friends were arrested on charges of having organized secret societies and engaged in anti-Russian political plotting...
...We were also enjoined to stay away from the press, dire warnings being given us about the consequences of an injudicious remark to a network microphone...
...But the law would already be in force...
...A crucial contest is now taking place in which the bureaucrats and the "Red" managers are ranged against the professional economists, the technicians, the younger, better-trained managers, and the political progressives...
...Several Republican Nixon supporters wished me luck, and one member of our group described an incident in which a lady took his literature and with the utmost kindness declared: "Thank you...
...Student volunteers, of course, have always been part of American politics (I have mixed memories of street-corner leafleting for New York State Students for Johnson in 1964), and reform politicians have normally made extensive use of them...
...They were replaced by a fresh contingent from Boston on Monday morning and most of us stayed, doggedly determined to make an impression on the seemingly unapproachable voters...
...The emotional impact o?such lines on Polish audiences tends to blur certain essential facts about Forefathers' Eve...
...A satellite Poland stood at the brink once more in October 1956, when restraint on one side and concession on the other concluded the drama before the de-noument was reached—as it was in Hungary...
...There are military men who tell us it is how we are reporting the Vietnam war that is causing Reuven Frank, a new contributor to these pages, is currently the Executive Vice-President of nbc News...
...The ideology has not changed from the days when he asserted, "We will By Reinhold Niebuhr desert neither our principles nor our friends...
...The episode was unnecessary and politically motivated, but isolated—it was far from being part of a "final solution" to a "Polish problem...
...It was at this point that bitter disputes broke out between Novotny and Dubcek in the Party Central Committee...
...While the bigger cities are more Democratic, they do not hold their local elections on primary day...
...More specifically, it can be attributed to the courage of those in the Party who were willing to accept the necessity for change, and to the theoretical discussions of the past few years about the need for a realistic reassessment of the nature of Socialist polities...
...And some independent voters (there are about 120,000 in New Hampshire) chose —as they legally can in the state?to vote in the Democratic primary for McCarthy...
...The memorandum went on to cite a serious instance of alleged misconduct for which the network was being criticized publicly as well as privately in high places...
...If McCarthy goes over to Kennedy, he will have difficulty taking his troops with him...
...But the incident is not an isolated phenomenon...
...Even more depressing to the progressives was the willingness of the workers to support a Party that is morally bankrupt and has no compunctions about exploiting the latent anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism of the masses: In June 1967, Party leader Gomulka warned Polish Jews that a "Fifth Column" would not be tolerated...
...So great, moreover, is the historically understandable anti-Russian content of 19th-century Polish literature, that to prohibit classical works on the grounds of this sentiment would be tantamount to repudiating vast areas of national heritage...
...3) now he continued to rise in New Hampshire...
...Many Democratic members are caught in the cruel pincers of the Johnson-Kennedy rivalry...
...Some columnists asserted that President Nguyen van Thieu mistakenly regarded the Vietcong offensive as a coup engineered by Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, the two being wilful rivals within the military junta...
...As the driver began turning the wheel, the outcry revealed a negative consensus on the idea, but the joke was appreciated...
...In the late '50s we television journalists were accused of helping achieve a racially integrated society...
...The President's Commission on Civil Disorders recently held a special weekend for representatives of news media, with one session for the pencil and print fellows and one for tv men...
...rather than at 6 p.m...
...Finding the town and his teaching assignment equally dull, he left the position after a year to return to the richer life he had left behind in Wilno...
...In the case of urban riots, the situation is quite different...
...But JFK won and Nixon lost...
...And never has there been such a time for exhorting a news medium to help solve the problem, for insisting that it submerge itself in self-policing methods, for suggesting that it be controlled by law and administrators...
...will help bring about the conditions that these honest men honestly believe will be better for us all...
...Simultaneously with the initial discussions of economic reform in Prague, there came a recrudescence of national sentiment in Slovakia...
...In both Czechoslovakia and Poland, the workers hold the balance of power...
...top Kennedy talent went to work for McCarthy...
...Obviously, McCarthy got far more votes than anybody had expected...
...Small town New Hampshire is GOPish...
...a surfacing of frustration rooted in the hopes of October 1956 and aggravated by the progress observed in other East European states?Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia...
...Despite the wide variety of opinions and positions, irreverence was universal: On the bus ride up from New York we passed an Army Reserve Training Center...
...This did not make us feel that our contribution to the campaign was appreciated...
...Indeed, the nations of Eastern Europe are watching closely as the Czechoslovaks and the Poles seek opposite solutions to a problem they all share: How to legitimatize Communist rule and institutions in the "post-revolutionary" epoch...
...If he does, then he is that rarest of candidates who, though bitten by the bug, is immune to candiditis...
...In modern times, politicians look for similar omens before, and during, the electoral fray...
...Joan Baez was on the phonograph, leading to jealousy on our part...
...it was assumed that any unorthodox appearance would alienate votes in great numbers...
...A little more than 48 hours later he announced his readiness to run for the White House, to allow America another Kennedy versus Nixon referendum...
...But we never expected to poll 42.4 per cent of the Democratic votes, depriving the incumbent of a majority, and almost outpolling the President if Republican McCarthy write-ins are included...
...the Persians used to execute couriers who brought bad news...
...But first those who want to establish controls must die off—my generation and yours if, just to pick a shibboleth, you remember the Korean War directly or from newspapers rather than from history books...
...it does hasten him on his way to the nomination...
...Thousands of his countrymen—soldiers, intellectuals, prominent figures in the revolutionary government—were streaming westward in what the Poles call the Great Emigration, and Mickiewicz met them on their way through Prussia...
...The long narrative monologues recalling the brutal treatment of the Wilno youths by the Russian authorities, the unflattering portrait of the head of the Russian investigating commission, and the satire of Polish lickers of Russian boots paint a grim picture of a Poland prostrate beneath the Russian heel...
...For example, with notably few exceptions Polish literature is free of the anti-Semitism that underlines the treatment of Jewish characters in Russian fiction...
...to 6 p.m...
...the McCarthyites tried to understate their expectations to make the most of their final vote...
...Forefathers' Eve thus becomes a national drama, perhaps in some respects even a national ritual...
...those goals remain visionary...
...of Kennedy's chances of stealing away McCarthy's promising grassroots movement...
...The pro-rector of Charles University, Eduard Gold-stiicker, candidly observed at the time: "One has to see the initiative of the students for what it is—an effort toward further democratization of our nation...
...The owner of this gored ox is the white middle-class majority: well-meaning, self-congratulating, suddenly offended, and frightened...
...The two major news stories in our day are both dramatically of this kind: the war in Vietnam and racial disorders in the cities...
...Starting from the basic facts of the Wilno episode, Mickiewicz employed visions, mystic trances, messianic utterances and supernatural powers to portray the spiritual transformation of a young romantic into a national poet-seer (in Polish, wieszcz) whose soul united with his nation's: Now is my soul incarnate in my country And in my body dwells her soul...
...Third, he was assisted by the 11th hour withdrawal of George Romney...
...when we called on those who had expressed sympathy for McCarthy to make sure they would not neglect to vote, we were painstakingly instructed to be respectful, almost self-effacing...
...Satan himself has taught him how to destroy...
...Indeed, have we not seen Soviet artillery bombard the South Vietnamese cities with long-range shells and rockets during the last offensive...
...But everyone also wants to be reassured that if they go with the President, they'll be on the winning side...
...but I don't plan to vote for any Communists this year...
...This turmoil imperiled the whole American enterprise of carving a democratic state out of a culture incapable of either integral nationalism or free government...
...Among the more than 200,000 voters who did not come out, a majority of whom will vote in November, the percentage for McCarthy would be much lower than his 19 per cent...
...Should the Polish workers be induced to switch sides, changes in a progressive direction would become possible...
...Others, especially in the North, applauded the aim and refrained from criticism, not because they recognized we were not responsible for social change but because they approved of what they thought we were doing...
...Kowno...
...That is clear from the 1960 primary, when he carried the state by 21,832 votes over John F. Kennedy...
...Still, for the poet to speak of persecution, let alone to imply a policy of genocide, is unwarranted...
...Kennedy's position is further complicated by the real possibility that Lyndon Johnson could be defeated by his Republican opponent...
...Impatience demanded an early end to the war: Pull out all stops or just pull out...
...The effect of this noncommital attitude was quite discouraging to us...
...The conservatives were further bolstered by the Church's refusal to openly support the demonstrators...
...For McCarthy, the good showing in New Hampshire was his third boost: 1) He took an unexpectedly big bite out of the Minnesota delegation...
...Were he alive today, Mickiewicz would doubtless be gratified at the thought of a popular student movement against official repression seizing his Forefathers' Eve as its focus and initiating demonstrations around his statues in Warsaw, Cracow, and Poznan...
...And with China jeering at the alleged partnership between the USSR and the U.S., Moscow is no more inclined to give up the struggle than our hawks are...
...They are banking everything on the fact that although Democrats place great value on party loyalty, they place even more value on winning elections...
...Students, too, had long been manifesting a profound disaffection with political and cultural conservatism (in 1964, 8.4 per cent of the students were affiliated with the Party...
...Late in the summer of 1967, nbc News sent a memorandum to all its staff members which began: "It seems that honest, intelligent people, some of them in positions of authority, are ready and willing to impose controls on television news coverage and presentation...
...A head-on clash, though, is unlikely...
...Ironically, the Polish people have traditionally regarded the Czechs as cautious opportunists, guided by the survival-above-all psychology of the "good soldier Schweik," and have always seen themselves as brave romantics fighting for change against all odds...
...Nothing terrified our superiors more than the sight of a beard on the street...
...Sometimes the threat of control is stated openly, sometimes it is only implied...
...The tv meetings kept coming back to whether our coverage had in any way been responsible for what happened...
...These earlier "dramas" (to use the term very loosely), together with the posthumously published fragments of Part 1, are a typical romantic idealization of folk culture, in this case the pagan Belo-Russian rites of ancestor worship...
...But the proper business of journalism is journalism...
...The diffident crusader became the determined campaigner...
...But no matter how closely we shaved, we still did not look like New Hampshirites...
...Neither the family structure nor ethical and moral value systems have been radically altered...
...Almost as often, criticism of television journalism for too little coverage develops into criticism of tv for reporting too much...
...His strength reflected a confluence of several factors: First, Nixon has always run strong in New Hampshire...
...was the cry at the first student demonstrations in Warsaw earlier this month...
...It's too much to expect responsibility from the paranoid and split personality Stokely Carmichaels of the nation, but is it too much to expect responsibility from the news media without whose cooperation the Stokely Carmichaels could never preach their message of hate and insurrection...
...but 2) it is not telling the whole truth...
...In 1968, Nixon took New Hampshire in a walk, getting more votes than Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy and Rockefeller added together...
...To be sure, the very conservative, high-circulation Manchester Union Leader pointed out that the state was being subjected to an invasion of hippies: but that paper also advised Democrats to write in Nixon's name on their ballot, and the almost complete non-compliance with the recommendation indicates the power of its appeal...
...Now, the Polish intelligentsia and students are being spurred on by the "cautious" Czechs: "Long live Czechoslovakia...
...so that the cameramen would have time to fly their film to New York for the 11 p.m...
...Another was appalled at the idea of advocating violation of the law, and even objected to the nationally coordinated demonstrations Martin Luther King Jr...
...Many generals taste frustration because there is less national and emotional support than they would like for the way the war is going, even among the majority that backs the war itself...
...The ever-present fear of a united irredentist Germany, the seemingly insoluble Church-State conflict, and the steady growth of intellectual audacity have stiffened the inflexibility of an essentially conservative regime...
...being coached on the subject—but we shaved and put on ties for the edification of the New Hampshire electorate...
...In addition, Kennedy has been warned, by friend and foe alike, that his political escalation can only serve to wreck the Democratic party for years to come...
...imagination and ingenuity expressed themselves in other forms as well...
...One Czechoslovak apparatchik, a Central Committee member, recently described the current situation to a Yugoslav journalist this way: "To us who belonged to the old generation, everything became clear once power was assumed...
...Yet between one time and another in history, between one country and another across the face of the earth, the consensus varies concerning the better society journalism should foster...
...Who," he asked, "are these generals who claim to speak for a nation...
...But Kennedy also knows that while he wants to be President in 1968, getting his party's nomination is another matter...
...Watson's lack of political knowledge and limited shrewdness have frustrated just about any Democrat of consequence over the past few years...
...Within 24 hours of the New Hampshire primary, the New York Senator made it known that he was "reappraising" his role in the campaign...
...For President Johnson, the results from New Hampshire—coming on the heels of Minnesota and Massachusetts—must raise doubts as to whether the traditional rule that a sitting President cannot be denied renomination is a self-enforcing law...
...The Poles have made some important second-echelon shifts—such as replacing Warsaw Party Secretary Stanislaw Kociolek with Jozef Kepa —but these have effectively strengthened the authoritarian, anti-intellectual, nationalistic and anti-Semitic "Partisan" faction within the Party...
...and a major preoccupation of such leadership as we had was to find ways of keeping us off the streets and out of sight when we were not working...
...In fact, three Republicans who promised me they would write in McCarthy's name on their ballot struck me as being more enthusiastic for him than any Democrat I talked to...
...On the trip up to New Hampshire we wondered if we could win 25 per cent, and if that would keep us alive until the more promising Wisconsin primary...
...Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...all those doubts...
...He's proved, beyond question, that he's nothing more than an irresponsible opportunist...
...As we boarded the bus at 11:00 p.m., with the television network computers predicting 39 per cent of the vote for us and 51-52 per cent for Johnson, there was a richly satisfying feeling of significant accomplishment, a feeling that few of us had experienced in our previous forays into politics...
...Had the initial goals of "revolutionary Communism" been achieved, the East Europeans would now be left merely with technical tasks...
...Amid the many new uncertainties issuing from New Hampshire, one thing is certain: It has produced candidates...
...Sharp applause at lines construed as relevant to contemporary Polish conditions in plays both classical and modem, foreign and domestic, is hardly a novelty...
...The obvious guess is blaming the messenger for the message...
...He is a candidate who smiles like one, talks like one and acts like one...
...When he withdrew, many of his followers were left without a "dove" to lead their flock...
...In 1952, when Truman's name once more appeared o.-i the primary ballot, he was beaten by Senator Ke-fauver, 12,791-12,211...
...He simply said what a lot of people are saying...
...With thou dost glow like clouds that wander high Yet know not what they do nor where they fly...
...2) he won the Massachusetts preference primary by default...
...When news outlets are criticized in sober, general, theoretical terms for alleged involvement in situations of major social concern, the criticism can often be traced specifically to whoever's ox is being gored...
...Whose word is to be taken about what should be done...
...After graduating from the University of Wilno in 1819, Mickiewicz took a job as schoolteacher in the other important city of Polish Lithuania...
...That is not true, though, of Forefathers' Eve, Part III...
...The exaggerated nature of Mickiewicz's account was not rooted in a desire to whip his readers into an emotional frenzy over Russian atrocities in partitioned Poland (the play wasn't even performed during his lifetime...
...This removed from the political struggle one of the vital elements of the 1956 "Polish October...
...There were so many of us, and we were so conspicuous, that it was feared our very presence would be taken as an invasion of privacy by the natives...
...In Vietnam itself, reporters from all media have benefitted from a degree of cooperation known in no other war...
...Senator McCarthy's candidacy may have had the highly salutary effect of demonstrating to the Administration the bankruptcy of the "McCarthyite" tactics Governor King and others used against us...
...But in Congress, where nearly every Democratic member in both houses has been privately worried about Johnson's political problems rapidly becoming their own, the reaction to Kennedy's decision can be summed up in a word—panic...
...I'll believe Johnson has a chance to win, when I see Watson sent home to Texas," a leading Democrat has declared...
...On January 30, authorities imposed a ban on further performances of the play in Warsaw's National Theater...
...of McCarthy's growing strength in Wisconsin and Minnesota...
...One of you, in chains, by thought alone Can overturn or raise the loftiest throne...
...and 3) if the whole truth were told our (the critics') positions would be the popular ones...
...But Stevenson was renominated...
...What was Mickiewicz's reason for this exaggeration...
...Though we provided virtually all the manpower used in the campaign, we were something of an embarrassment, and very much a cause for anxiety among our superiors...
...Similarly, the imposition of official bans is a ticklish matter in the case of modern Polish literature, which has continually questioned the viability of traditional values...
...I agree that the President can best serve his own political interests by solving Vietnam and the gold drain, and doing everything possible to keep summer violence to a minimum," said one Democratic strategist...
...For only by reading the newspapers did we learn how well we were doing...
...When its citizens come out to vote for local officials, they use the occasion to vote in the Presidential primary as well, thereby swelling Republican totals...
...In the decisive Dresden period of his life Mickiewicz came to believe that he was destined to fulfill himself not merely as a poet—that he was already—but as a national bard, a wieszcz, entrusted with the spiritual leadership of his people...
...No sacrifice was too great, including miniskirts and beards...
...Filled with the heady mountain air of New Hampshire, he began to act as if he were the inevitable heir to the throne...
...What does this mean...
...The author of the Star article, a staff employe of a Senate committee, had gotten his information from the author of another article, who claimed to have gotten his information from a former nbc News staff member...
...He also picked up an unearned plus: The down-the-middle split in the Democratic party vote helped Nixon with Republicans who want a conservative who can also be a winner...
...McCarthy's victory, his ability to attract a highly effective volunteer army of campaign workers, his honest and informal manner, his excellent opportunity to emerge in the near future as a formidable national figure to be reckoned with?all this underscored the need for Robert Kennedy to take the offensive in search of his lost strength...
...The men were billeted in the lounges of the dormitories at a nearby college, the women at a local ywca...
...It is precisely because Kennedy feels he can win the Presidency that he is risking his political future in a brutal struggle to wrest the nomination...
...On the younger side of that divide people tend to accept television reporting: They like it, dislike it or ignore it, but they do not blame it for causing the conditions it shows...
...Several of the participants tell me the meetings with the newspaper and magazine group were about improving coverage...
...Perhaps we should require our reporters to hold up each story 24 hours so they could gather perspective, he suggested...
...Someone suggested that we attack the place and make March 8 the American 26th of July...
...JFK was also beneficiary of the New Hampshire Democratic party's heavy Catholic enrollment, a continuing condition that did not hurt Eugene McCarthy either...
...Only Rumania has sustained a high-powered economic drive through the '60s, and successfully mobilized public opinion for an independent foreign policy...
...In 1956, the Polish Party was split into Stalinists, liberals and Go-mulkaite reformers...
...Nowhere in his article, though, was there any indication that the author meant anything but July 24, 1967, and people honestly concerned about the rioting on that day eagerly blamed the tv crews because of the newspaper story...
...How many times have Stokely Carmichael and like figures been on Meet the Press, The Today Show, Hunt-ley-Brinkley, and countless other channels of national communication...
...Hundreds of civilians were killed across the country...
...It's happened to other media...
...tired from the long ride and the late hour, were paraded past nbc's cameras to demonstrate our dedication to the American ideal of the cleanshaven face...
...By the second night many of us had found other arrangements...
...True to their stereotype, the natives listened to us with stone faces, replying to every cunningly calculated pitch with "uh-hm" or the elongated New England form of "yup...
...The first is that our fire power, our helicopters and our economic advantages are really not enough to cope with jungle guerrilla warfare...
...Thus the senseless struggle going on in the tiny Southeast Asian nation is a threat to all mankind...
...In what we thought was a rather humorous, if not ridiculous incident, a campaign leader boarded our bus three blocks before its destination point in Manchester and informed us with the greatest solemnity that the national press was waiting to observe our correct appearance...
...It means Nixon is a very strong candidate—at this time in New Hampshire...
...Gored oxen...
...Idon't know about other people's intellectual friends, but mine want mankind to be free in order to achieve their own aims, and to find happiness in the society they envisage...
...Prague's New Economic Model, introduced on January 1, 1967, relies heavily on the decentralization of decision-making and the concept of profitability, thereby placing a premium on managerial expertise and production efficiency alien to the Stalinist era...
...Although we reacted to the Vietcong mortar and rocket shellings with vigor, it required some 22 days and the destruction of 70 per cent of its buildings to recapture the old imperial city of Hue...
...Second, Nixon was the beneficiary of the Vietcong Tet offensive...
...Fourth, a dedicated student movement, withdrawing from withdrawal, threw itself into the McCarthy campaign with zeal and discipline...
...Saigon proved powerless to prevent looting, or to provide adequate shelter for the poor people who were made homeless...
...McCarthy's added write-in votes on the gop side gave him a total count only 230 short of LBJ's...
...If Kennedy succeeds in shoving McCarthy aside and somehow manages to grab the nomination, he stands a reasonably good chance of defeating his late brother's rival...
...Despite the dramatic friction between the two Senators in the first post-New Hampshire days, however, the conflict is more superficial than real...
...Both are right—with hawks outnumbering doves...
...There is certainly more understanding and more intelligent help in the mechanics and logistics of getting the news out...
...If the public's confidence in what we are doing is undermined, with more or less conscious intent, it is true that our freedom will be diminished...
...Ironically, it was the press that provided us with much of our will to persevere...
...For the present regime, the audience's reaction to the anti-Russian lines is an embarrassment...
...has attempted to explain Kennedy's motivation by telling a journalist friend that the Senator "doesn't want to let down the youth of the country who believe in him...
...even though we had expected it...
...Where the Czechoslovak Party has appointed a commission to formulate a New Political Model, the Polish Party has refused to entertain any notions of political reform, thereby driving dynamic young intellectuals like Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski into Utopian, radical schemes for political reform —or, more correctly, revolution...
...The credentials committee, the platform committee, the speaker's rostrum, the convention program, not to mention the delegations themselves, will be entrusted to Johnson loyalists who are political powers in their own rights...
...In both cases, of course, the talkers were talking politics...
...The nurses at the college, who were Nixon supporters, were kind enough to allow five of us to use beds in the infirmary...
...Disturbed by a crisis of conscience over his failure to reach the fighting, the poet settled among the emigres in Dresden, where in 1832 he composed Forefathers' Eve, Part III...
...And LBJ, who has been holding the middle-ground, suffered accordingly...
...In his article on "Mass Media and Mass Violence" in The New Leader of January 15, Eugene Methvin, an associate of Reader's Digest, cited to this effect Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, the police director of Newark, an editor of the Detroit News, and supported their view (or were they supporting his...
...There should be less reporting, they argue, and more background, more analysis, or interpretation, or whatever the word is...
...Consequently, Republicans outpoll the Democrats in New Hampshire primaries...
...The third and most important factor that should give us pause is this: The U.S.-Soviet contest in Vietnam threatens the precarious nuclear partnership which is responsible for the precarious peace now secured through the "balance of terror...
...it was Russian autocracy...
...In short, the Vietnam war, as United Nations Secretary General U Thant never tires of explaining, is well-nigh insoluble because the prestige of two giant nations is involved...
...This alliance pressed its demands against the Czech political leadership—itself internally split and alienated from many Czech intellectuals—and thus helped encourage the discontent that exploded at the Czechoslovak Writers Union Congress in June 1967...
...This is the kind of statement American correspondents hear from Foreign Office secretariats, and not only in Communist countries...
...Forefathers' Eve, Part III, is a poetic-dramatic record of that personal metamorphosis...
...In reality, Watson is the man to see...
...On paper, the President's campaign team consists of Watson, James Rowe, a lifelong Johnson intimate, and Postmaster General Lawrence O'Brien...
...Only Yugoslavia has faced the challenges of the new era and drastically restructured its economy, its government and, to a lesser degree, its Party...
...Why give this all up for a Kennedy—a clan he never loved...
...Third, the McCarthy campaign got a real lift when "Citizens for Kennedy" swung its support to the Minnesota Senator in early February...
...Discomfort was soon added to disappointment...
...What was objected to in the play...
...The Kennedy Gamble By Roger Kingsbury Washington Robert Kennedy's miscalculations began with his assumption that Senator Eugene McCarthy's well known dislike of political campaigning would end in a meager showing in New Hampshire...
...Several weeks ago, in Saigon, a Marine colonel told me our reporters were so harried by our deadline conditions that they could not place specific events in the context of larger military objectives...
...When nbc called the author of the story to ask where he got his information, he said he was not referring to the Cambridge rally of July 24, 1967, which had ended in a riot...
...One thought of thine, like hidden lightning flashing, Through gathered clouds can send the thunder crashing In wasteful storm or pour down fruitful shower...
...This involved discussions of German idealistic philosophy, and the writing and underground circulation of manuscripts—above all poetry—dedicated to ending tyrannies...
...If the elan of "revolutionary Communism" is gone, though, many of its institutions and functionaries remain: the secret police, the managers who are more "Red" than "expert," the hack ideologues and the Party apparatchiki who have learned little and forgotten less...
...The radio and the press, in the last few months practically free of censorship, have taken these discussions into living rooms across the country...
...Where the Czechoslovaks face up to Slovak grievances, the Polish Party violates the professed principles of Communist "internationalism" by cynically exploiting anti-Semitism as a political expedient...
...It strikes me that the obsessive apprehension over our image among the New Hampshirites was largely a case of nervous nellyism...
...How many times have the major networks permitted a Carmichael or a 'Rap' Brown to use their facilities to enter the homes of millions of Americans with their messages of hate and violence...
...There have been statements by Senators, Congressmen, mayors, police directors and editorial writers claiming that the riots in the cities were caused, or at least exacerbated, by what the rioters saw on television...
...When the Sunday New York Times informed us that the Johnson people credited us with a potential for bringing out 5,000 votes, we were surprised and gratified...
...policy in Vietnam but also because he dared to set aside the pragmatic for the principled...
...A side room was provided for us, with the sound piped in...
...America's simple ideological pretensions stood in a strange but revealing contrast to the muddled historical realities...
...Steps are being taken to secure a retraction, but it will never catch up...
...On the other hand, the foreign press was welcome, apparently being considered no threat, and the presence of a Japanese camera crew at one of our briefings filled our leaders with pride...
...The play proclaimed his identification with the national struggle and determined the future covirse of his life...
...And in New Hampshire they hit him both from left and right...
...While some young firebrands on the scene complain about restrictions, veteran war correspondents are awestruck at how much help is available...
...The people were all admirably polite, if noncommital...
...Cloakroom whisperings tell of Kennedy moves to tempt Democratic governors to declare as favorite sons on the first ballot...
...The polish student demonstrations revealed the existence of a strong alliance between the various factions in the Party, the police, and pax, the pro-regime Catholic organization headed by Bo-leslaw Piasecki (a most unsavory character in an unimpressive gallery of politicians, who led a prewar Fascist organization...
...Hence the role of New Hampshire, a small state of little political import but much portent thanks to its early primary...
...Their task has become the management of an established system rather than the transformation of society...
...Will McCarthy step aside for Kennedy...
...this month, counter-demonstrating workers waved signs reading "Down with the new Fifth Column...
...Today, however, the younger generation demands many answers to a single question: What kind of Socialism should we have...
...Indeed against this iconoclastic tradition, LBJ did better than his predecessor standard-bearers...
...There is considerable irony in this struggle between the world's two superpowers, both of whom label themselves "anti-imperialistic...
...Mickiewicz had also felt the heavy hand of political repression in his youth, and he made these experiences the subject of Forefathers' Eve...
...Several of them, including Mickiewicz, were sentenced to exile in Russia...
...We vowed that the Senator would have to do well, merely in payment to us for our labors...
...In 1948, when President Truman stood for re-election without an opponent in the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic voters asserted their anti-Establishment attitude in the only way they could: They stayed home...
...Senator Kennedy, who has had experience in locking up a Democratic convention, knows this...
...But the party has now been shaken to its roots...
...There is resentment as well over the President's apparent reluctance to make political appearances outside of military bases or Beaumont, Texas...
...Despite the hostility his tardy entry into the field engenders among McCarthy supporters, Kennedy is right in thinking that those Democrats and independents who despise Johnson will stay with him in a race against Nixon...
...meeting in fact took place at 9:30 p.m...
...In this sense, Kennedy has accurately gauged the mood of the country...
...Richard Melman attends the Columbia School of International Affairs...
...The atmosphere of frustration engendered by this summer's riots is expressing itself in a need to lash out at television reporting...
...We spent up to eight hours a day on our feet—annoyed only by the hours of enforced idleness and waste, not the frantic activity required of us in the periods of work...
...Truman polled 4,409 votes...
...McCarthy benefitted somewhat from this movement toward the political poles...
...Reporters have one thing in common with minorities: In time, history judges a society not only on what it does to them but on what it does to itself thereby...
...If the progressives in Czechoslovakia succeed in winning over, or at least neutralizing, the workers, their apparent victory will be consolidated...
...An admiration tinged with envy has been aroused by the resurgence in those countries of a nationalism that demands, first of all, greater autonomy from the Soviet Union...
...But the Presidential nomination went to a "dark horse"—Adlai Stevenson...
...Even the hamlets won over by the pacification program were once again insecure, for troops had to be withdrawn from the countryside to reinforce the defenses in the towns and cities...
...The evidence lies in the fact that in the delegate fight, the LBJ slate ran 45 candidates for 24 positions available against a McCarthy slate that very sensibly ran only 24 candidates for the 24 openings...
...On March 12 there were two entries, Nixon and McCarthy...
...The single spark which actually ignited this tinderbox of discontent was a production of the 19th-century Polish drama, Forefathers' Eve (Dziady), by the romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855...
...The Johnson people sought to discourage the McCarthy people...
...The Kennedy people think that if Johnson gets hit with another disaster in Vietnam and with a lot of riots at home before the convention, his delegate hold will wash away...
...Previous contributors to the series, which presents the thoughts of college students on the issues of greatest concern to them, were John Kyper of the University of Vermont ("Vietnam and Beyond," NL, January 1) and Elliott Abrams of Harvard ("The Sky is Falling," NL, February 12...
...Policy debates in Czechoslovakia are taking place against a background of contending social, ethnic, intellectual and economic groups...
...Indeed, Polish writers have always been more generous in their treatment of other nationalities than their Russian counterparts...
...Later Saturday night we all trooped down to Manchester's chief hotel to hear Senator McCarthy speak...
...But the romantic apotheosis of the human will proclaimed early in the play must ultimately be perceived as the more profound challenge: O man, didst thou but know how great thy power...
...How else did a King—Martin Luther—receive international acclaim and a prize from a dynamiter's rationalization...
...Where once the Communist leaders were revolutionaries dedicated in theory to unravelling and reweaving the social, political, economic, cultural and ideological fabrics of the East European societies, today they are eager above all to preserve an uneasy status quo...
...The result was that several carloads of students in Manchester returned to New York the Sunday night before the election, after two days of unrelieved frustration...
...Typical is the case of an Eastern liberal who was hit from both sides last week within a 15-minute period: First Democratic party chairman John Bailey and James Rowe called to ask for Johnson support...
...In a recent interview with Life magazine, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin warned that Russia would come to the aid of any young nation that had been the beneficiary of a "war of liberation" if its "socialism" was endangered by our "capitalistic imperialism...
...Should McCarthy ultimately be inclined to do so, he would have to break faith with his most devout and effective followers: the student youth...
...Somehow, he did not quote Representative Durward Hall (R.-Mo...
...It was basically this esteem for the man, I think, that made us work so hard in a campaign about which we were initially rather dubious...
...Needless to say, the works are free of any political tendency...
...A compensation was that the New Hampshirites applauded very enthusiastically, exceeding our own applause in every case...
...And those of us determined to be loyal need the President's open encouragement and support...
...In the political arena, the Czechoslovaks have made personnel changes toward a more progressive leadership...
...If the law a few years back could have forced television reporting to help (or hinder) the process of integration, would that still look like such a good idea today...
...We all agreed that Senator Kennedy would be the stronger candidate, but many could not forgive him for what they considered cowardice in the face of the enemy, and vowed to scorn him even if he entered the race...
...To insure the Minne-sotan's fading quickly from the scene, the New York Senator decided to withhold any public support or private financial help from the McCarthy drive...
...For Mickiewicz, who had meanwhile made his literary debut with two volumes of poems in 1822 and 1823, the exile from November 1824 to May 1829 was far from a hardship...
...Then the oppressor was not a Polish government, for none existed...
...The changes in Prague, therefore, were not merely the result of infighting among ambitious leaders at the top, as the popular image would have it...
...Today it consists of "Partisans," anti-Partisan authoritarians, and Gomulkaite conservatives...
...In short, the Communist societies of Eastern Europe are now in a state of uneasy equilibrium—maintained by increasingly conservative politicians...
...And it is a cliche by now that Marines never think they are getting a good enough press...
...Wilkins told the President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders that a Department of Justice study in more than 200 cities—some the scenes of big riots, others of little riots, and most of no riots at all—had found no evidence that rioting resulted from or was even encouraged by riots being reported on television...
...The Senator, in his wrap-up address on local television Monday night, apologized to the electorate for any disturbance or invasion of privacy on the part of his supporters...
...The latter generally see the New Economic Model as the critical issue determining the future of Socialism...
...of a possible McCarthy triumph in New Jersey where he is likely to pick up delegate strength in a contested primary...
...The authority of the "democratic" government in Saigon was weakened in the supposedly safe urban centers...
...But have we seriously considered the hazardous struggle with the USSR in which we are involved in Vietnam...
...Zdenek Mlynar, for example, the head of the Central Committee commission to formulate a New Political Model—itself testimony to the realism and courage of some elements in the Party—had argued that a decentralized economy creates economic interest groups which should enjoy a legitimate voice in a competitive political process...
...The House has twice passed legislation making it a Federal offense, through the Interstate Commerce Clause, to intend to incite riot, etc...
...The First Amendment was written by men who believed government should be checked, and that free journalism—not necessarily responsible journalism, not specifically socially useful journalism, not exclusively ethically directed journalism—was a good check...
...While the Czechoslovaks have been tolerating intellectual protests, the Poles have been jailing various writers, or expelling them from the Party...
...Television reporting could be required to take part in projects noble in concept but not journalistic...
...One staff member used the words "propagating effect"—which has such a nicety of phrasing, such an implication of social insight, that I fear the fact that no direct evidence has been adduced to support it will not be enough to drive it away...
...Yet if this was the immediate purpose of Forefathers' Eve, it is lost in the emotional tension raised by the play...
...television is telling the truth...
...The immediate impact of the Vietcong resurgence was to polarize American politics...
...The silent recollection or applause of protest that the play evokes is determined by the reality beyond the theater...
...In 1956, when Democratic slmd-ard-bearer Adlai Stevenson bec.ime a write-in candidate, he polled some 3,000 votes against Kefauver's 21,000...
...In the other 34, delegates are elected without a commitment...
...Nixon immediately challenged Rockefeller to come out or get out...
...After investigating the allegations, nbc found that the article was written by a "freelance writer who had no direct knowledge of the event...
...I don't want to pick on Methvin...
...Whether Nixon has the nomination in the bag or whether McCarthy has the nomination within his grasp is less important in terms of political momentum than surface appearances...
...An interesting question and/or example is raised by this consideration...
...I suggest that an even better guess is the reluctance (it should be a refusal) of television journalists to help achieve the often noble aims of their critics—in other words to be conscious instrumentalities of social control...
...Still...
...Yet, there is no question about the choice of protesting Democrats in a contest between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy...
...We were also divided into Bobby-philes and Bobbyphobes, with the latter in the majority...
...We have paid a high price in blood and money to save a little sliver of a nation that has no conception of national identity, and whose mandarin landlords remain notoriously tardy in keeping their promises of land reform...
...But it was Truman, not Dewey, who was elected...
...Poor Harry S. Truman polled practically nothing in the Democratic primary...
...Let us recognize that the vulnerability of this medium to control is greater than that of other media...
...Leaving Russia in 1829, Mickiewicz travelled around Western Europe, finally settling in Rome...
...instead, the caustic New York Post columnist proposes that the Senator from New York get on the bandwagon of the Senator from Minnesota...
...While the women spent their entire days at the telephones, learning to pronounce the Senator's name with a New England intonation, the men went out canvassing and door stuffing...
...Whatever our mixed feelings for Kennedy, we all shared an intense admiration for our candidate, his incompetence at campaign demagogy notwithstanding...
...Even voters hostile to Senator McCarthy were decent to us...
...Nixon's showing is impressive...
...Lodge was not even in the running...
...His delegate slate polled some 9.000 votes against Kefauver's 13,815...
...For while Johnson can collect a substantial number of chits owed for patronage, public works, defense contracts, etc., the Kennedy brothers, by dint of incessant political fund-raising appearances over the past two years, have many favors to collect of their own...
...We were a heterogeneous group trying to project a homogeneous image...
...In October and November 1967 students at the Prague Technical College vocalized their feelings in dramatic demonstrations for light and heat in their dormitories...
...then Theodore Sorensen and Ted Kennedy called with a similar request in behalf of their man...
...Nixon appealed to American frustration, promising to end the war by getting tough...
...The failure of the Poles to follow the present Czech pattern, or their own pattern of 1956, is most easily understood in terms of the current configuration of social and political forces in Poland: The liberals of Po Postu (banned in 1957) and the Crooked Circle Club (shut down in 1962) among the intellectuals, and members of the Pulawy group (the Party's liberal faction) among the politicians, have been increasingly isolated, or removed from office, since the retrenchment of 1958...
...It is clear, however, that the Johnson people really believed originally that McCarthy would be beaten three or four to one...
...Angry discontent over the slow pace of economic progress and unrealized hopes for political reform become the dry timber of revolt and insurrection...
...Granted, the charges against the youths were largely unfounded, the sentences imposed in a few cases were harsh, and there may have been instances of maltreatment...
...In 1956, Kefauver beat his writeGus Tyler, a frequent contributor, is the ilwgu's Assistant President...
...Regardless of what you may have read in the newspapers or seen on television...
...In the case of Governor Rockefeller, the New Hampshire primary has pried open the mouth of the sphinx...
...They constitute a large and powerful political class living parasitically off a system approaching institutionalized paralysis...
...I shall be free—yes, and full well I know, The sort of grace the Muscovite will show Striking the fetters from my feet and hands To rivet on my spirit heavier bands...
...Simultaneous changes in Prague and Warsaw would also increase the pressure for change in Hungary, where the populace has remained passive since the searing experience of 1956, and in Walter Ulbricht's conservative East Germany...
...this is a matter of law...
...The anti-Johnson movements were united...
...Morale across the country is nonexistent...
...Moreover, the network memorandum continued, "All men on the scene told us no such thing happened, that the 8 p.m...
...It is this question of direction which the Czechoslovak Communist party is now confronting openly, and which the Polish Party is desperately trying to avoid...
...Whether producers stage only the celebrated Part III of the work or an abridged version of all four parts (as is now the tendency), today there is no escaping the impact of the drama of Polish students persecuted under Russian tyranny for no reason other than their love of liberty and fatherland...
...So far...
...At the state headquarters in Concord, where some of us went Sunday night to pose for Walter Cronkite, who arrived after we left...
...It was there that news rsached him of the November 1830 Warsaw insurrection of Polish cadets...
...Since Methvin further omitted the mayor of Plain-field, New Jersey—who told Congressmen that rioting in his city was caused by ghetto dwellers sitting before their television screens and watching the people in Newark loot with impunity—perhaps he knows enough about Newark and Plainfield to know that communication between those two cities, and especially between their ghettos, needed no help from television...
...Second, our famed democracy becomes an "ideology" when we seek to impose it on a peasant culture, and it is at a great disadvantage against the Communist creed of "wars of national liberation...
...The current unrest in Poland is Harold B. Segel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Literatures at Columbia...
...The question you hear most often," said an aide to House Speaker McCormack, "is 'Can Johnson win on the first ballot?' Nearly everyone is furious with Kennedy for what he is doing to the party...
...The indictment of Russian tyranny—or tyranny in any form—holds the audience tightly in its grip...
...All of us objected to the "Get Clean For Gene" tactic—either because we considered a false image dishonest, or because we already looked conventional and resented This issue "View from the Campus" descends from the ivory tower to report on the field trip in American government conducted earlier this month by Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire...
...Both these observations apply to people who complain of shortcomings in the coverage of the two current major news stories...
...Arthur Sylvester, the Defense Department's former press spokesman, used to make speeches in public about how our film concentrates on specific occurrences without showing what is going on simultaneously to the right and the left...
...Generals and civilians who direct the military are men under self-control, and their argument rarely becomes shrill...
...But Zvi Gitelman is a member of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia University...
...We had been told we would sleep on the floor and had brought sleeping bags or blanket rolls...
...Naturally, the Model poses a threat to those managers who hold jobs solely as a reward for Party loyalty, as well as to those bureaucrats in the central ministries whose tasks are being decentralized...
...There are other rumors that what Kennedy actually wants to do is force Lyndon Johnson into awarding him the Vice Presidential nomination and a clear shot at 1972...
...He continued: "The feeling is that Kennedy will try to score big enough in the California primary to encourage a convention stampede...
...After New Hampshire he must be recalling 1952, when Estes Kefauver moved on from there to win every primary across the country...
...Their criticism of television's performance usually winnows down to criticism of television for being invented...
...Your generation and mine knew journalism without television, however, and in a perfect example of post hoc ergo propter hoc illogjc we blame television's methods of reporting the news, and the fact that it does, for what we do not understand or do not care to live with...
...Great damage has been done to us and to our profession by these false and misleading statements," nbc concluded...
...It does indicate a growth of hawk sentiment...
...Then he asked what degree of strategic expertise we required of reporters before assigning them to cover the war...
...Slovak intellectuals have demonstrated in the past that they would sooner cooperate with conservative Slovak apparatchiki than with Czech progressives when they feel their national identity threatened...
...Urging progressives to educate the public, he has ordered a slow pace of personnel and institutional changes...
...And it must rankle the former U. S. Attorney General to discover that Gene McCarthy has become what he...
...The large number of students who turned out, however, did give this campaign a unique texture...
...The law makes it possible...
...Revising the Communist Establishment By Zvi Gitelman The current top-level changes in Czechoslovakia and the political unrest in Poland are diametrically opposed responses to a profound problem plaguing the Communist states of Eastern Europe...
...The access of the American public to free information would end up controlled, limited, directed...
...The pattern is classic...
...It must be assumed that these controls once imposed would not be limited to this subject or this field of human activity...
...A more typical response was that of a farmer in Auburn, the only voter to ask me where I came from, who was quite impressed with the fact that someone would travel all the way from New York to talk to him...
...A Stokely Carmichael calling for insurrection on a street corner soap box is a curiosity—a 'hippie' talking to a few other 'hippies.' But a Stokely Carmichael talking face to face to millions of people, recognized by those whose responsibility it is to make sober judgment about whom to give mass exposure, is immediately transformed from an oddball to a national figure...
...For them it has always been there, like running water in kitchens and "psychedelic" lights at high school dances...
...And a brutal struggle it will be...
...there is an atmosphere abroad which makes it thinkable...
...Against divided Democrats Nixon can win...
...There is serious, wide-ranging, national deliberation under way on how best to democratize the country's social and political life...
...Since 1963, when the Czechoslovak economy, once the most modern and stable in East-Central Europe, showed a negative rate of growth, the Party has been forced to accept economic reform, with its explosive political and social implications...
...But the central fact that stands out in the New Hampshire primary —after piercing the thick veil of particulars, personalities and parochialisms—is the polarization of American politics in the weeks immediately following Tetcong...
...by 1966 the figure was down to 5 per cent...
...He is aware, too, that by challenging President Johnson for the nomination his potential supporters are vulnerable to the Texan's legendary strength as a superb political in-fighter with a refined talent for knocking dissident heads together...
...Recent evidence also indicates an increase in the "reactionary" followers of Kazimierz Mijal?the quixotic Stalinist holed up in Albania who broadcasts propaganda attacks against the Polish Party...
...While LBJ has been busy fighting a shooting war abroad, his domestic enemies have been busy fighting a political war at home...
...There is enormous respect for what the Kennedy juggernaut can accomplish, once it is unleashed...
...in this instance, at this time of history, control of television news would be presumed by the controllers to prevent or ameliorate race rioting...
...Consider the elections from 1948, the first post World War II balloting, to the present: In 1948, Thomas E. Dewey won the Republican primary with 18,860 votes...
...The power and prestige of the Presidency are nonexistent if they are not put into play...
...PERSPECTIVES A Threat to All Mankind All was confusion in South Vietnam in the wake of the Tet holiday attacks on the cities...
...When the banned production of Forefathers' Eve, directed by the talented Kazimierz Dejmek, opened at the National Theater in Warsaw a few months ago, the play evoked a warm audience response that the authorities chose to regard as protest...
...In fact, the fear of our antagonizing voters with our clipped, impersonal, hard-driving New York mannerisms was so intense that canvassing was drastically curtailed for the remainder of the campaign...
...There can be little doubt that the January removal of Antonin Novotny from Prague's Party leadership was seen as the culmination of one stage of Communism...
...They could sometimes be induced to give expression to their disaffection with the Administration, but refused to betray any interest in McCarthy...
...All editors know this, and use such devices as a "letters to the editor" column as lightning rod and circulation builder, while pretending to discharge their putative obligation to be balanced...
...Even as loyal a Bobby-booster as James Wechsler faults RFK for suggesting that McCarthy make way...
...Meanwhile, shaken Democrats are near revolt at the sorry state of political craftsmanship exhibited by the White House in its handling of Massachusetts and New Hampshire...
...This power potential that had been dissipating itself in a variety of personal and political idiosyncracics cohered around McCarthy with an energy and earnestness that no old-fashioned machine can match...
...Although Johnson outpolled McCarthy, 49.5-42.4 per cent, the division was close enough to make this a serious split...
...Henceforth his art was to be a commitment to the cause of national regeneration...
...As Maine goes, so goes the nation...
...According to a story in the Washington Sunday Star of August 6, 1967, an nbc television newsman had stated that civil rights demonstrators in Cambridge, Maryland, conferred with assembled broadcast cameramen and then agreed to move scheduled demonstrations back from 8 p.m...
...As we gathered at a hotel on the edge of Manchester Tuesday evening for our victory celebration (the President was right—we would have called any result a victory), we had the feeling, mainly through wishful thinking and close attention to an optimistic national press, that we would do rather well...
...I would go so far as to say that few of us did...
...By the time he arrived at the Russo-Prussian border, the revolt had already been crushed...
...has scheduled for April on the grounds that they might adversely affect the Oregon primary...
...Though President Johnson's political fortunes may plunge still lower than they are at present, it seems highly improbable that the Democratic convention will do anything other than dutifully nominate its incumbent leader...
...Nor is there any overwhelming Soviet military or political presence in either country that might push the working masses into the ranks of the progressive reformers, as happened in 1956...
...Democratic mayors and governors have been enlisted by the two camps to line up Congressional pledges, and if there is a consensus view among the badgered legislators it is that the President is too powerful to resist...
...Yet like most of us, he agreed in the end that our sacrifices seemed worthwhile...
...In the years since 1956, however, the theater has been more of an outlet for pent-up emotions than any other institution of Polish life—including, until now, the universities...
...When the poet emerged from the torment of inner conflict over his ambivalence toward the 1830 insurrection, he identified himself with the Great Emigration, just as the poet of Forefathers' Eve identifies himself with his nation...
...Of the approximately 155,000 votes cast in the primaries, McCarthy polled about 19 per cent...
...President Johnson, in a Dallas address, assured his audience that "free men will never bow to tyranny...
...This marked the first time the play had ever fallen under the official ban of a Polish government...
...If television in truth caused the riots, then rats and unemployment and hopelessness did not...
...Today there are serious students, particularly among Negroes, who think integration cannot be effective as a first step...
...a sound which became infuriatingly familiar...
...Wooing the Tup' Vote By Richard Melman his is the shortest my hair J has been in years," complained one of the young warriors who did battle for Eugene McCarthy earlier this month in the hills of New Hampshire—and shook Lyndon Johnson's throne...
...Nevertheless the New Hampshire totals, though numerically representing less than 1 per cent of the nation's voting strength, are significant as a force adding momentum to existing movements...
...But most of us were surprised at how hard a floor really is...
...Methvin also reflected the feelings of many people when he said: "The journalists' own freedom will diminish or grow in direct proportion to the public's confidence in their performance...
...our fears that the rock-ribbed reactionaries would be waiting for us with shotguns, determined to stop the Communist infiltration at their property lines, were entirely unfounded...
...Post New Hampshire, there are five: Everybody has decided you can't win this horse race by standing still...
...What is more, intellectuals and students, even when allied with economists and progressive politicians in a potential leadership cadre, do not in themselves constitute a mass force in society...
...We believe that the principal loser would be the American audience, but the control would be exercised against television news...
...By elevating the Wilno episode to the stature of a national calamity, he could show that there had been a time when his own patriotic zeal had brought him persecution and deprivation...
...As in Hungary and Poland in 1956, the combination of a badly split Party leadership, intellectual disaffection, and student demonstrations provoked significant political change—the important difference in Czechoslovakia being the passive role of the working class...
...Clearly, the Communist governments are no longer able, by coercion or persuasion, to direct the energies of their millions of citizens into gigantic industrialization and collectivization programs...
...One of those who believes Nixon has it and that McCarthy has proven—to use Richard Goodwin's phrase—that LBJ is "vulnerable" in 1968, is Senator Robert F. Kennedy...
...The Slovaks' deep-rooted cultural, economic, and political grievances offered a firm base for an effective alliance between Slovak intellectuals and politicians...
...Both hawks and doves are reading the outcome as a victory...
...Unable to resume the difficult journey toward Utopia, these men are nevertheless unwilling to abandon the vision...
...There are at least five reasons for this: First, the Tet offensive aided McCarthy too, albeit far less than it did Nixon...
...Maine once played the role of New Hampshire...
...In this respect, Nixon and McCarthy gained impetus...
...At present, the U.S...
...Collectivized argriculture continues to coexist with a thriving private sector...
...Here the demands are many, the chorus is swelling, and the issue is acute...
...One man I spoke with was taking time off from his activities in counseling students interested in draft resistance, and looked forward to the disruption of the Selective Service System through massive non-cooperation...
...Yet it should be stressed that the play is not a political diatribe, nor was it motivated primarily by a desire to incite anti-Russian sentiment...
...That we gathered after the closing of the polls in a mood of optimism was chiefly due to the newspaper reports...
...Mention has been made in the Western press of the anti-Russian nature of Forefathers' Eve, Part III...
...These people, irrelevant survivors of a bygone era, quite naturally refuse to recognize their own obsolescence...
...Our "free society" is not as imposing as our ideological myths would have us believe when measured against the ideological myths and social realities of Vietnam, North and South...
...These ideological myths were calculated to convince us that our imperial prestige was involved when we stumbled into a civil war in an obscure nation...
...My fatherland and 1 are one great whole...
...The critic never concedes he is advocating that we manipulate the audience for him...
...This information may be unpleasant, unpalatable, and disturbing...
...He was kept under police surveillance, to be sure, but his reputation as man of letters had preceded him, insuring an exile considerably mollified by literary soirees, the friendship of prominent Russian literary figures (among them Pushkin), affairs of the heart, and extensive travel in European Russia and the Crimea...
...Yet the public was given the impression that they were seeing largely 'spontaneous crowds of protestors,' " the paper charged...
...Optimism gave way to elation as the tallies came in, and we shouted ourselves hoarse and drank ourselves sick...
...The tyranny under attack was Tsarist Russia, and the Poles usually distinguished between the despised autocracy and a basically warmhearted, likeable people...
...THINKING ALOUD The Case for TV Journalism By Reuven Frank If television reporting can avoid serious government interference for one more generation, it will be home free...
...Culture & Politics in East Europe—Two Articles The Polish Spark By Harold B. Segel If the conditions are ripe, a single spark grows into a conflagration...
...While we understood that the New Hampshire voters rather than non-voting campaign workers should get the auditorium seats, the continuing quarantine was not appreciated...
...in opponent (Adlai Stevenson) by 7-1...
...In 1964, LBJ broke the tradition: He was a Democratic standard-bearer who actually won the Democratic primary, getting 29,317 votes on a write-in...
...It is in the latter states that Kennedy may decide to make his major play, hoping to elect delegates informally loyal to his candidacy...
...What a contrast to Poland...
...Against this stylized background, the poet spun a tale of unrequited love culminating in madness and suicide very much reminiscent of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther...
...On to Wisconsin, baby...
...Second, Romney's withdrawal helped not only Nixon but McCarthy as well...
...In 1964, Henry Cabot Lodge stunned the nation by beating both Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller handsomely in the gop primary...
...The White House line floated on Capitol Hill is that the President will benefit by the Kennedy-McCarthy combat...
...This attitude toward Polish students and intellectual protestors contrasts sharply with the progressive alliance in Czechoslovakia, where students, intellectuals, Slovak politicians, progressive Czech politicians, liberal political theorists ind influential economists have joined forces...
...it does show Nixon's basic appeal to Republicans...
...Interestingly, New Hampshire young men seem to wear their hair long as a rule, though styled differently from the East Village hippies, and tend to dress in open-collared shirts and jeans...
...This marked the first significant stirrings there since 1960, when Slovak autonomy was reduced in an administrative reorganization...
...In fact, no evidence could be found that the tv newsmen had rigged anything on any date...
...READING THE OMENS After New Hampshire By Gus Tyler In ancient days, men of affairs looked for omens before battle...
...Senator McCarthy's effort in New Hampshire did not depend entirely on us: The billboards, newspapers, and electronic media were saturated with his advertising...
...Some of these wrote in McCarthy's name in the Republican primary...
...Sooner or later the criticism falls into this pattern: 1) yes...
...I have litde doubt that restrictions on television reporting, motivated as punishment but rationalized as social uplift, would be popular in some government circles and in most of middle-class white America...
...Esteemed as the greatest Polish poet of his time...
...Significantly, though, theirs may not be the most enduring alliance either, because of the nationalist factor...
...He received almost the same number of votes, 29,021, in the present 1968 write-in, the second time he broke the tradition...
...It wasn't even a good speech that the Senator made, and we strenuously objected to his remark about the "children's crusade...
...We were not consciously boosting integration or anything else, but those who opposed what was happening blamed television news for it...
...This may seem like a witless way to do business...
...It is no secret that the majority of McCarthy's youthful supporters Roger Kingsbury, a free-lance journalist, lives in Washington, D.C...
...There has even been much serious discussion in Yugoslavia concerning the possibility of instituting a two-party or a "no-party" system...
...Once the votes were counted, however, it became apparent that McCarthy's unexpected showing in New Hampshire was a greater blow to Kennedy's fortunes than to President Johnson's...
...In view of the anti-Establishment bent in New Hampshire Democratic primaries, the "pledge card" effort of the Johnson backers was undoubtedly counterproductive...
...Nor do we believe that such actions, if taken, would be unpopular...
...In his last weeks, Romney appealed to the peace sentiment...
...After Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, he is no longer the lonely philosopher delivering a low-key sermon in a campaign cathedral...
...Whether a good McCarthy showing could pull Kennedy out of hiding and into contention was a major topic of conversation, and most were both pessimistic and angry on the point...
...Many of the lines indeed are inflammable: / have read of wars in ancient, ixeathen days...
...Estrangement from the intellectuals and students, as well as Poland's firm bonds with the Soviet Union, moved the regime to prohibit further performances of one of the most highly regarded classics in the national repertoire...
...Our post-Korea young think of television, including television news, as part of the Establishment...
...The basic task was to construct Socialism...
...You can check with Hubert Humphrey for confirmation on that one...
...This would probably mean an eight-year wait until conditions once again were ripe for a promising Democratic run...
...One gimmick devised for the purpose was a non-alcoholic party at headquarters Saturday evening, where we unhappily sipped Coke to the accompaniment of terrible rock music...
...It was the press, also, that led us to raise our expectations to the 30-35 per cent level in the last two days, when the evidence of our senses was disappointing...
...he was referring to demonstrations two or three years earlier in the same city that had nothing to do with black power and did not end in a riot...
...New Hampshire has augured unambiguously—and, generally, incorrectly...
...After much hesitancy and soul-searching, the poet decided to return to Russian Poland to take part in the uprising...
...At the Chicago convention, McCarthy can start off with 300-400 votes and, with luck and pluck, even more...
...For election day...
...Our initial impressions of New Hampshire did not encourage us...
...The assumption is that background, analysis, etc...
...Conservatives and liberals alike have been on the air waves in an effort to sway public opinion...
...Despite attempts by the Orthodox Church to suppress them, the rites were still celebrated in some remote parts of Lithuania and Belo-Russia in the early 19th century...
...Nixon polled well over 50 per cent...
...For the latter makes that wily old Communist patriot, Ho Chi Minh, the father of a united country, while we are only the residuary legatees of the French colonialists...
...In 1968 the Czechoslovaks are acting somewhat like the Poles did in 1956...
...I submit that this mild-sounding orotundity is a blatant and dangerous misreading of the history of the American free press and of its role in American society...
...Finally, McCarthy benefitted from the anti-Establishment habits of the New Hampshire Democrats...
...A McCarthy speech-writer offers a more widely held view: "This is Kennedy at his ruthless worst...
...Finally, Nixon was the beneficiary of a big Republican turnout for the local elections to public office that take place along with the primaries...
...According to Kennedy's figuring, at most McCarthy would set the stage for later big-league opposition to the Johnson Administration by articulating the grounds for rebellion—Vietnam, inept leadership, public unrest, and the like...
...eight months later he rolled 107,995 votes or 47 per cent of the total...
...It would be grudging support to be sure, but Kennedy would be the clear winner...
...McCarthy's percentage far exceeded the early expectations of his opponents, and even the closing predictions of his backers...
...In these circumstances the American "will to win," our patriotic fervor, must be dampened by three significant considerations...
...What is more, McCarthy—with his crusading campaigners and convinced voters—came close to his maximum strength in the primary...
...But television has no practical way to use this approach, so we tv journalists arc left with a field of gored oxen and admonitions to change our ways...
...Lately, too, the military's unhappiness with television news has been subdued and lingers only in the background, like a toothache...
...Kennedy, has always sought to be: the leader of a highly charged youth brigade determined to slay the dragons of entrenched power...
...But the events of a little more than a decade have eroded the restraint and defined the concession on the narrowest possible terms...
...Unless the pro-Johnson leadership was plain stupid, one must assume they expected such an overwhelming victory that they could risk running double the number to be elected...
...It turned out that we were being more correct than the people to whose correctness we were trying to appeal...
...It's our turn...
...Where the Czechs have relaxed censorship, the Pole have evenhandedly banned performances of Adam Mickie-wicz's 19th-century anti-Russian play, Dziady (Forefathers' Eve), Stanislaw Witkiewicz's inter-war protest play, Gyubal Wahazar, and Janusz Szpotanski's contemporary satire, Cisi i Gegacze (The Quiet and the Babblers...
...Rather, his intention was to enlarge the significance of the event, to envelop it with the aura of a national calamity comparable at least to the 1830 Uprising...
...Indeed, it is a measure of Kennedy's desperation that he has chosen to contest the Democratic nomination at a time when his personal and political popularity are at the lowest point since his brother's assassination...
...In a nation where patriotism is often measured in blood, Mickiewicz felt an obligation to atone for his failure to suffer for Poland during the November Uprising...
...Those who are disturbed will always accuse the medium of creating the disturbance it reports...
...They have also cemented the bonds between Poland and the Soviet Union, whose history of mutual relations is a centuries-old plaint of fear, suspicion and hatred...
...12 The New Leader In the case of Forefathers' Eve, then, it would appeal that the regime was overreacting to a mood it felt impelled to curb...
...Our room was soon being referred to as the leper colony...
...Ethnic affiliations, far from diminishing, have in some countries grown so strong as to become once again a fundamental component of domestic politics...
...We had seen the early polls giving the Senator 11-12 per cent of the vote...
...Didst thou but know that o'er each thought of thine There wait, as earth and air await the thunder, Demons and angels held in breathless wonder...
...perhaps commanding officers should insist on it...
...The important thing to remember about Chicago this summer is that the President has a tight hold on the entire convention machinery, virtually insuring the nomination for himself...
...Autonomous centers of authority, such as the church, are more or less tolerated...
...For the new First Secretary, Alexander Dubcek, has declared that "The chief method of Party guidance is, and must be, persuasion...
...Not since 1884, when James G. Blaine took the gop nomination from President Chester A. Arthur, has an incumbent been denied his right to seek re-election...
...In fact the unrest may in the end prove a blessing not for progressive Poles but for the Partisans, who are undoubtedly arguing that the half-measures of the Gomulka regime are insufficient and that the coalition of "Zionists," dissident intellectuals and irresponsible students must be suppressed once and for all...
...Commissioners divided their time between the two groups...
...We can expect that Americans . . . will soon believe that nbc rigged the riots in Cambridge, Maryland...
...Nixon was left uncontested except for a Rockefeller write-in that was started too late to be effective...
...news roundups...
...The Establishment does not...
...A partitioned Poland experienced it in November 1830, and in Jan-nary 1863...
...We were put to leafleting instead, to limit our having to talk to voters...
...thousands were left homeless...
...The three bearded men among us were then ordered to remain on the bus and out of sight while the rest of us...
...After the first day's canvassing, a few calls came into headquarters complaining of the patronizing or high-pressure tactics used by a few of us, and at subsequent briefings the necessity of a gentle, subtle approach was impressed on us with great care...
...Those labors were not of unquestioned value...
...And this future, no less than that of the three contestants, is very much in doubt as the battle lines are being drawn for the troubled period ahead...
...Election day was devoted to poll-watching and foot-pulling...
...And there has been a tacit, if reluctant, recognition of the fact that popular cultural preferences run strongly to Western music, art and films...
...Neither I nor any of my colleagues was greeted with hostility by the people we met...
...When Kennedy ran in 1960?unidentified with the national Democratic Establishment—he polled a high of 43,372 votes, while Stevenson got 168 write-in votes...
...And poor Gene doesn't have enough funds to take a straw poll in Oregon...
...unable to perceive any alternative to the present system, they are unwilling to risk new departures...
...The feeling among Democrats is that only a President who is woefully inept in handling national politics would allow such mistakes as Massachusetts and New Hampshire and still keep a tight leash on O'Brien...
...His act, in their eyes, became bolder and braver precisely because Kennedy did not make the run...
...These controls are somehow imposed on the fallacious ground that an evil unreported would thus be an evil prevented...
...Combat fatigue reached the point where one young man declared to me: "I don't like New Hampshire...
...Only 16 of the 50 states have a referendum on Presidential preference...
...The first is that Mickiewicz's account of the Wilno events should not be taken too literally...
...This would minimize the clash between the two Senators and maximize opposition to the President...
...On Election Day...
...The Irish Mafia and an unlimited bankroll is a tough combination to beat in any primary," a McCarthyite Congressman admitted...
...Whatever it was planned to be, it appeared as an effort to coerce voters—exactly the wrong thing for these ornery mountaineers...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
