Two Kinds of Journalism
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing TWO KINDS OF JOURNALISM BY BARRY GEWEN n an excellent Foreword to Richard Rovere's posthumous Final Reports: Personal Reflections on Politics and History in Our Time...
...Newfield is out on the front lines serving all of us, and contributing more to thepub-lic weal than the entire staff of theTVew York Post put together...
...Simply through her idealism, her integrity and her energy she invigorates, as, by telling her story, does he...
...The assignment turned out to be perfect for Rovere, It removed him from the drudgery of fact-gathering that is the lot of most of the capital's press corps...
...Rovere explains here how his editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn, after overcoming their initial resistance to printing a Washington column and his own reluctance to write one, offered the direction he needed, instructing him to report not what was happening butwhat the best-informed people thought was happening...
...He freelanced for a while, got fired from one magazine and left another, until Shawn saw one of his pieces in Harper'sand hired him in 1944 to do profiles for the New Yorker...
...By the same token, he was repelled by demagogues like Joe McCarthy, true-believers like John Foster Dulles, and demagogic true-believers like Richard M. Nixon...
...The barrel itself is rotten...
...In the case of Robert Kennedy and Muhammad Ali, he adds greater depth to already familiar figures by relating personal experiences...
...That detachment did not, however, translate into aloofness or foppish arrogance...
...Another target was a ring of landlord-arsonists, "The Men Who Are Burning New York...
...like Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes, possibly even some blacks and Jews among his forebears...
...And in his piece on the Mayor himself, Newfield squawks about crime and mass transit in a manner more appropriate for a noisy know-nothing than an award-winning investigative reporter, who should be explaining what reforms are genuinely possible given the current fiscal, legal and social constraints...
...Frustratingly, Final Reports reveals nothing of the inner turmoil he must have experienced nor his means to a resolution...
...During the late '60s, Rovere's passion erupted into open despair over the Vietnam War...
...I bore at least a measure of responsibility for the mess...
...describes some of the qualities that made his late friend one of the outstanding political journalists of the postwar period...
...Not surprisingly, Newfield wrote a glowing defense of the FBI probe—too glowing...
...Neither fit, and by 1940 he was a man adrift, knowing only that he wanted to be a writer...
...Several people have gone to jail at least in part because of Newfield's efforts...
...He is already missed...
...Newfield and a co-reporter, with the assistance of a city fire marshal, spent six months tracking down leads and making connections...
...At school he was assigned to a class for slow learners...
...John Murphy: The Worst Congressman" is a follow-the-money expose of a lawmaker with a greater concern for the welfare of the Shah of Iran and Ana-stasio Somoza, the former Nicaraguan dictator, than for the interests of his own constituents...
...This cowboys-and-Indians approach will not appeal to everyone (underdogs can be wrong, too), but it would be churlish to snipe...
...I had prattled about the 'free world,' 'Communist aggression,' 'global menace,' and the like...
...Incomplete at his death, Final Reports is fragmentary, skimpy, filled out with entries from his journals and leaving a reader wanting more...
...The insurance companies were apparently unwilling or unable to investigate a series of suspicious fires...
...Shortly after the article appeared, Murphy was caught up in the Abscam operation and is now serving a three-year sentence in Federal prison...
...His ethnicity was uncertain...
...it is enough for him to bring to light Ben-stock's quiet David-and-Goliath struggle...
...Rovere was, in his way, a moralist, a partisan and, in a manner imperceptible to those who wore their loyalty on their sleeves and the flag in their lapels, a patriot...
...The trail led to a shady realtor with underworld ties who eventually pleaded guilty and became a government witness...
...Consequently, "the past does not tug at me as it does at those who are preoccupied with establishing their relationship to it...
...He first tried strict Calvinism, then communism...
...The New Yorker was lucky to have had him—and he was lucky to have had the New Yorker...
...at other times he does not provide enough of them...
...No purpose is achieved by overwrought pronouncements like: "Congress does not have a few bad apples...
...His warm depiction of Bill Moyers focuses attention on a man easily overlooked...
...It allowed him to savor and record the clash of ideas...
...It is something of a miracle that Rovere was able to ground his irony in moral seriousness...
...Writers & Writing TWO KINDS OF JOURNALISM BY BARRY GEWEN n an excellent Foreword to Richard Rovere's posthumous Final Reports: Personal Reflections on Politics and History in Our Time (Doubleday, 244 pp., $16.95), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...Four years later came the Washington job...
...Champion of the underdog and gadfly to the powerful, he parades his virtue across almost every page of The Education of Jack New-field (St...
...Just how he accomplished this is not entirely clear, though his outsider's background outlined in the early chapters of Final Reports was undoubtedly a factor, He grew up belonging to no group or place...
...Into an upbringing that was a blank Rovere brought a passion for total commitment...
...As an ironist he was attracted to such political wits as John F. Kennedy and Adlai E. Stevenson (while retaining enough objectivity to be able to write, "it has always seemed to me in retrospect that a Stevenson victory in 1952 would have been a disaster for the country...
...In this public search for new and coherent formulations, Rovere's clearsightedness, his cool balancing of realism with morality, would have been invaluable guides...
...But when genuineness went on the march, as it did under Lyndon B. Johnson, he backed off...
...Rovere, from 1948-78 the New Yorker's Washington correspondent, was dispassionate, reflective, independent, skeptical, "preeminently a civilized man...
...Rovere would have seen the comedy in her supporting Ed Koch for governor, a man she must detest but whose elevation would have cleared Bellamy's path to the mayor's office...
...Newfield is merely appalled...
...His lucidity and obvious decency understandably evoke for Schlesinger the name of George Orwell (indeed Rovere provided the introduction to The Orwell Reader), yet his writing had a charm, an allure, that the brittle Englishman's lacked...
...The collection of reminiscences —part autobiography, part reportage—that is Final Reports represents less a book than a tribute, a reminder of what was lost with Rovere's untimely death in 1979 at the age of 64...
...Rovere seduced, hooking any reader who happened upon his "Letter from Washington" column with a striking combination of delicacy and acuity...
...An assault on Nelson Rockefeller's career rehearses the late governor's conservative, hardline policies without ever suggesting why he was booed by Goldwater Republicans at the 1964 convention...
...Oddly for a gadfly and professional naysayer, his admiring portraits are more convincing than his negative ones, where a reader too often feels that the whole story is not being told...
...With Arthur Schlesinger I had written a book stoutly defending American intervention in Korea, which I now saw to have been based on the very fallacies that led to Vietnam—conceiving communism to be monolithic and using military means to achieve political aims...
...Rovere says that his detachment saved him from the anguish others went through during similar transitions—"I think I felt mostly that I had made a fool of myself'—yet one senses his damned irony getting in the way...
...In the best of these appreciations, "Marcy Benstock: The Woman Who Blocked West-way," Newfield can forgo discussing the pros and cons of the highway project...
...His childhood was a string of negatives...
...His articles on the scandals in the nursing home industry helped bring down Bernard Bergman who, says Newfield in "Reflections on Hunting Bergman," became "my obsession, my personal Moby Dick...
...in his last years, when he was in constant pain (and writing about it with his usual unemotional clarity), he brooded over the course of American foreign policy and his own past views...
...Often Rovere seems to hide behind his words...
...It is a book that suggests what might have been...
...As a self-proclaimed heir to the muckrakers Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens, he revels in gritty facts and the dirt of politics' daily brawls, reporting his discoveries of mal- and misfeasance in a streetfighter's crisp, staccato prose...
...At his death, Rovere was groping toward a reappraisal, and now that the Henry Jackson wing of the Democratic Party has all but evaporated, those Cold War liberals who have not joined the Reagan Administration are rethinking as well...
...Jack Newfield, the Village Voice writer, comes from an entirely different school of journalism than Rovere...
...Rovere's special sensibility was forged during this difficult period when he gave up on causes to pursue a writer's trade...
...Martin's, 200 pp., $12.95), a collection of pieces from 1964 to the present...
...The tributes work, on the other hand, because Newfield doesn't have to bother presenting the full picture...
...A reassessment of New York City Council President Carol Bellamy takes her to task for the kinds of compromises that may well be the price of realistic politics...
...Genuineness appealed to him for its humanity—he could enjoy Harry S. Truman and appreciate Robert A. Taft...
...He was as well an elegant literary craftsman with a poet's care for language, reporting on the ebbs and flows of power as a drama critic would on the anfractuosities of a play...
...His family was always on the move, socially as well as geographically, and whereas others of his generation succeeded because a book in the hand substituted for a silver spoon in the mouth, Rovere's boyhood interests ran to Babe Ruth and Moon Mullins...
...Much of The Education of Jack Newfield is devoted to personalities...
...It gave him sufficient distance from the daily fray to indulge the detached, ironic voice that throughout his career was probably his most conspicuous characteristic...
Vol. 67 • February 1984 • No. 4
