How Ronnie Ran the Show

...But to merit coverage, critics must themselves be members in good standing of the Establishment...

...Conglomerates continue to gobble up independent newspapers...

...Surgeons removed the offending length of intestine...

...In instance after instance—the Korean Air Line calamity, the Grenada invasion, the Libyan bombing, and nuclear disarmament negotiations, among others—TV and print journalists meekly echoed the Administration line...

...I think it is wrong as well to say that the Iran-contra affair blocked the White House agenda for the sufficient reason that no agenda existed...

...Unlike them, however, he angrily promotes a compelling thesis: The media all too willingly have collaborated in the deceptions, puffery, image spinning, and propaganda emitted by the White House...

...they also lied to each other and withheld crucial information from the President, who rapidly forgot the Utile he was told...

...Most cities are served by a single newspaper...

...This is to say that rather more than they probably would admit, journalists share their owners' interest in tax reduction and the stability of the economy...

...If someone in high authority makes an announcement, it is featured at the top of the evening news and on the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times...

...Finally, the old charmer's popularity rating had sufficiently recovered by the summer of 1988 to encourage George Bush to tie his hopes simultaneously to the American flag and the President's coattails...

...If Ronald Reagan, in a particularly addled moment, announced that the moon was made of goat cheese and the Milky Way was in fact a huge river of chablis, TV would lead with the story, take a commercial break, and only then solicit comments from appropriate experts...

...They edit Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy, teach at Ivy League universities, feed at foundation troughs, and personally differ very little...

...For the most part, Democrats and Republicans agree broadly on foreign policy and national security issues...

...22.50...

...Echoing the Tower Commission, Mayer and McManus hold Regan largely responsible for the Iran fiasco...

...Moreover, TV anchors, featured reporters and syndicated columnists are themselves celebrities and compensated accordingly...

...Something inside him had cancer...

...Nobody in the White House had prepared an encore...

...Since the media are huge conglomerates, Hertsgaard argues, it is only natural that their owners and managers move in the same social circles as their peers in industry and finance...

...Strongest of all has been Nancy...

...RIP cancer...

...Ronald Reagan simply denies any event that clashes with his cherished fantasies...

...Granted, leading Democrats will be asked to comment on Administrative statements...

...They may not directly order editors to go easy on an Administration solicitous of their interests or express their dissatisfaction with particularly enterprising reporters, yet ambitious journalists respond to signals— to who gets promoted, who gets the desirable beats, and who, like Raymond Bonner recently at the Times, is taken out of Central America and reassigned to the metropolitan section...

...On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency By Mark Hertsgaard Farrar Straus Giroux...

...The country appeared ready to forgive Reagan all transgressions...

...As Jane Mayer of the Wall Street Journal, and Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times almost too thoroughly demonstrate, the President's sporadic involvement in the Iran-contra affair invariably focused upon the fate of the hostages...

...408 pp...

...Such individuals operate outside the mainstream, though, and are not to be trusted...

...A Richard M. Nixon or Jimmy Carter might have faced impeachment...

...The gamut of respectable comment runs from the Brookings Institution on the "Left" to the American Enterprise Institute on the "Right"—from A to B, from Tom Wicker to George Will...

...It is unlikely that their "enterprise" would have flourished if the President were not obsessed with the hostages and oblivious to Secretary of State George P. Shultz' reiterated warnings that swapping arms for captives would simply encourage more abductions...

...Since Ronald Reagan is incapable of abstract thought, yet reacts sentimentally to hard luck stories, he might well contribute to the relief of a disabled person without connecting the individual's plight to his Administration's policy of purging hundreds of thousands of men and women from the disability rolls...

...American journalists report the news, they do not in their own voice point out inaccuracies in official statements, much less provide alternative interpretations...

...During Reagan's first four years, Baker, Deaver and occasional Edwin Meese III, abetted by Nancy, talked the President out of his more nonsensical notions and managed to get him to condone tax increases in 1982and 1984...

...Regan, endowed with an ego and tantrum level enormous even by Washington criteria, all by himself replaced the troika...

...In his triumphant first year, Reagan cut taxes, set in motion the largest Pentagon spending spree in peacetime history, and gutted many Great Society programs...

...Regan White HouseChief of Staff, and welcomes direction by stronger characters...

...Bereft of political experience, contemptuous of Congress and practically anybody not his equal in wealth, he resolved to let Reagan be Reagan...

...Unfortunately, the subtitle of Landslide turns out to be inaccurate...

...Some of Mark Hertsgaard's discussion in On Bended Knee overlaps Mayer and McManus...

...The President's job approval rating did drop precipitously after Iran...

...Indeed, together Landslide and On Bended Knee amount almost to a requiem on our political culture...

...The solemn pundits who politely discourse on the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour come with the most respectable credentials...

...Meanwhile, book publishing has fallen even more prey to the forces of concentration...

...Dependingupon theirtemperament, most people either courageously confront unpleasant reality or cravenly evade it...

...For Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North and the late CIA Director William J. Casey, successive shipments of arms to Iran quickly turned into a cash bonanza for the contras and projected off-the-shelf operations in Angola and elsewhere...

...But the Administration's single foreign policy achievement—the INF treaty—occurred after the scandal and the investigations that ensued...

...If anyone needs to be reminded, our President, accurately labeled by Clark Clifford "an amiable dunce," reads little, signs virtually any piece of paper presented to him, confuses reality with old movies, rarely intervenes in the formulation of policy, passively accepts major personnel rearrangements such as the fateful swap of jobs at the start of his second term that saw James Baker become Secretary of the Treasury and DonaldT...

...The media could have run the Iran story well before it blew open if it had given credence and importance to Left-wing sources here and in Latin America...

...If an obscure Lebanese newspaper had not disclosed the arms-forhostages scam, the media in all probability would have continued to report as fact the lies of North, Abrams, Casey and lesser prevaricators...

...The bulk of Landslide is the clearest chronicle of the Iran-contra affair I have encountered...

...The man who boasted of his ability to manage the White House had allowed Iran and Nicaragua to slip entirely out of his control...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman In depressing detail, these well-written, amply documented chronicles of the Reagan era corroborate the portrait of the White House etched in acid by such former insiders as Larry Speakes, David Stockman, Donald Regan, and even Michael K. Deaver, last of the president's loyalists...

...Hertsgaard makes the important point that the media unleash their investigative reporters only when the political establishment splits...

...I wish Hertsgaard were less persuasive...

...Worse still, the fewideas embedded in the Presidential brain are resistant to contrary evidence and to amendment...

...After the Tower Commission report made it clear that North and company had been negotiating with agents of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the President continued to believe in the existence of Iranian "moderates," and to deny any exchange of weapons and intelligence data for hostages...

...In part the fault lies in the same restrictive journalistic convention exploited by Joe McCarthy...

...He did not suffer from cancer either...

...The Post, and tardily the Times, pursued Watergate only because by 1973 the Vietnam War had divided Congressional opinion and aroused dissent within the Administration...

...The conduct of this cabal was reprehensible, but they got away with literal murder because nobody, least of all the President, was minding the White House store...

...Respectable firms end up in the hands of Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell...

...North, Rear Admiral John M. Poindexter, Robert C. McFarlane, Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, and Casey not only flagrantly lied to Congressional committees and to Shultz, their most important internal opponent...

...It all rings too true, and the situation is likely to get worse instead of better...

...Star Wars, low taxes and the heroic character of the contras are nonnegotiable eternal verities...