LETTERS
LETTERS Heavy Traffic I cannot believe I read an eight-page article about the demise of the air controllers [“Money Over What Really Mattered: Where the Air Traffic Controllers Went Wrong” by...
...That is something closer to combat pay, though that may be an unfortunate term...
...Noah’s wetbehindthe-ears status that he would think it appropriate to pepper his piece with a smart-alecky anecdote about our Mr...
...Mollenhoff is widely conceded to be the father of modern investigative journalism in this country...
...It wasn’t, as Lemann suggests, the rebels and demonstrators...
...The fact of the matter is that the Washington Times has subscribers in all 50 states...
...And most recently, it is the new conservative creed that government is the enemy, that no one who can possibly help it should pay taxes, that our highest duty is to enrich ourselves and everyone else look out for himself...
...Supervisors are too numerous, and have too few reality-based functions...
...Noah is, after all, a journalistic nobody, who with further polish and experience may one day be ti journalistic somebody...
...Erroneous, in the first instance, because the newspaper-as any even halfway-serious observer should by now know-is not owned by the Moonies...
...Your use of the controller situation to advocate merit pay for teachers is not sound...
...It was the hardening of specialinterest lines among what had once been the New Deal coalition...
...First, when he erroneously says that reporters ignore stories in the paper owned by the Moonies...
...But secondly, because, in fact, stories from this newspaper are not only routinely and frequently picked up by the wire services, but also by correspondents in town by the dozen, and frequently reproduced by overseas media as well...
...It was a time when we believed the government cared for all of us and when there was pride, rather than shame, in caring about those weaker than ourselves...
...Finally, Mr...
...They reached too few people and many were, in their own way, trying to build a new sense of community...
...PARK Reston, Virginia Out of the Fifties Yes, as Nicholas Lemann has written [“Community Withniit Pnnfnrmitv The Rnarl RarG frnm Narcissism:’ September] there was a sense of community in the forties and fifties (and thirties, too) and it would be good to have it back...
...As I had occasion to tell a National Press Club audience recently, I would not presume to advise Mr...
...LLOYD McAULAY New York, New York “Staffing facilities at 90 percent of their peak load” was not something begun in the early seventies, but rather dates to Airways Planning Standard Number Five of the early 1950s...
...When the war ended we had a backlog of unmet needs from the Depression and war and we had the buying power, in accumulated soldier and civilian savings, to deal with them...
...I don’t think people ever advocated merit pay for controllers They simply advocated that those who could not cut the mustard be fired and those who had a tougher job be paid more...
...FREDERICK C. THAYER You emphasize that bad management by the FAA is the source of much of the controllers’ ill will...
...Head to head” competition requires that airlines provide duplicate service at peak hours...
...The Monthly should decide where it stands on regulation vs...
...So Mr...
...The sense of community grew most immediately out of the shared success in a war that everyone felt was good and necessary...
...That is the analogy to apply to the teachihg profession...
...Keisling reaches for tortured explanations: “some exotic form of madness:’ “Reverend Jim Jonestype mass suicide!’ Ridiculous...
...Mollenhoff‘s many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize...
...The material conformity-the need to have as nice a lawn and as new an appliance as your neighbor and, therefore, to get along on the job-grew out of 15 years of material deprivation...
...But the community and conformity had no necessary connection...
...The fact of the matter is that those persons include the president of the United States, who, we have it on reliable authority, turns to the Washington Times first...
...They arose from entirely separate roots...
...The fact of the matter is that we, in fact, know of no significant public figure who does not regularly read the Washington Times, and have tons of testimonials to demonstrate it...
...In fact, if 80 percent (the 74th most busy day) or even 70 percent (the 111th most busy day) was used, the public (Le., the airlines) would not willingly forego nonessential services...
...Just as it may make sense to pay a controller at O’Hare more than a controller at Charlotte, so too it may make sense to pay a teacher at a tough junior high school more than a teacher at a middle-class suburban elementary school...
...Noah makes the gratuitous claim that the Washington Times isn’t read by many people in Washington, let alone the rest of the country...
...Clark Mollenhoff, but would not bother to mention Mr...
...In addition, this phrase does not clearly explain what this concept means...
...Reagan astonished them with a quaint reaction-that he had been elected to enforce the law...
...SAUL SHIEFMAN Detroit, Michigan Blue Moon Were it not for my great and long-standing respect for The Washington Monthly, I would not bother to react to Timothy Noah’s “The Pentagon Press: Prisoners of Respectability” in your September issue...
...The number of marriages postponed by the Depression or separated by the war partially explain the era’s emphasis on having children and raising them just right...
...But, as I said in the beginning, Mr...
...Beyond that, I must respond to Mr...
...James Whelan is editor and publisher of the Washington Times...
...Washington, D.C...
...But that is not merit pay...
...Secondly, it is a little appalling that Mr...
...S.J...
...Much later, in the late fifties, we learned that what we were practicing was special-interest democracy but in the fifties the interests were simply separate components of a community that needed to be put on its feet...
...It is a measure, for example, of Mr...
...And before that, out of the shared experience of the Depression and the New Deal...
...Supervisors set a bad standard for classroom teachers because the way to better pay, more respect, and better perks is to go from a useful job to a near useless job...
...The other conformity, conformity of spirit, grew out of the Cold War...
...The profile, as applied, has far more effect on determining the total staffing than which day was used as the busy day...
...The controllers simply thought they couldn’t lose...
...Bradlee on how to make himself a better journalist...
...HARVEY H. HOLMAN Norman, Oklahoma Keisling repeatedly berates the Federal Aviation Administration for “catering to industry” by taking no action to level off the “peaks and valleys” in operations...
...In the FAA it was (or is) known as the “busy day” concept and it meant that the profile used to determine staffing was applied to the 37th most busy day of the previous year (i.e., 10 percent down from the busiest...
...Likewise, the major problem in the educational system today is not so much the teachers or their unions (although the teacher unions, like PATCO, completely miss the mark) as it is the supervisors...
...It was also the divisiveness of Vietnam...
...It was resentment of black demands and of government benefits to blacks...
...Some of those most eagerly getting along at work had been the first in their family to attend college, thanks to the GI bill...
...It was, just as background, the pain of impersonal social change happening too fast to be assimilated...
...Noah’s cheap shots at this newspaper...
...Noah, should ht wish to take the trouble, to examine bur bulging files of clippings from around the world...
...One day, with better reporting and judgment than he has demonstrated in this article, he may achieve such standing...
...Ben Bradlee, about his reading habits, as they refer to us...
...It was the inflation which frayed the social consensus...
...JAMES R. WHELAN Washington, D.C...
...LETTERS Heavy Traffic I cannot believe I read an eight-page article about the demise of the air controllers [“Money Over What Really Mattered: Where the Air Traffic Controllers Went Wrong” by Phil Keisling, September] that did not contain the most important name in the whole episode-Ronald Reagan...
...Timothy Noah replies: As all but the most distracted readers of my article must have noticed, my point was to praise Clark Mollenhoff and his series in the Washington Times on George Spanton, and to criticize Ben Bradlee and the respectable press for feeling free to ignore Mollenhoff‘s pieces because they appeared in a newspaper owned by the Moonies...
...Having watched the postal unions repeatedly bring home the Christmas tree, used to Jimmy Carter’s vacillations, and convinced that they were completely indispensable, the controllers were supremely confident of quick victory, despite their unreasonable demands...
...The fact of the matter is that, in just one year, the Washington Times has achieved a daily readership in the Washington area of nearly 350,000 persons...
...Furthermore, a more experienced reporter would have also been compelled to acknowledge that Mr...
...What broke up the sense of community...
...But I would remark that were he to read the Times more assiduously-as other serious journalists do-then he and his newspaper might, conceivably, be spared gaffes of the magnitude of Jimmy’s World, the Tavoulareas libel ordeal, and so much more which plagues the Post...
...I did once write an article for another magazine in which I expressed misgivings about the ownership of the Washington Times-the paper is owned by News World Communications, which is not legally part of the Unification Church but is run by Moon’s righthand man, Colonel Bo Hi Pak, and is widely recognized as a Moon organization-but as long as the Washington Times is here, I think it would be foolish to ignore its investigative coups, among which I count the Mollenhoff series on George Spanton...
...Many of the people moving into those look-alike suburban homes on their own piece of ground had grown up in four-flats and apartments and sometimes in quarters shared with other families...
...Teachers are not given the respect or independence required to operate as professionals in a classroom...
...Noah should take seriously what is obviously a wisecrack made by our arch competitor, Mr...
...We would invite Mr...
...But uneven traffic flows are largely traceable to competition, increased since deregulation...
...That will ruin any system...
...And, yes, it coexisted with a mood of conformity that was not as oppressive as some of the seers of the time contended...
...Noah is not yet of sufficient stature to stand in judgment of the fine and eminent journalists who make up the staff of the Washington Times...
...In fact, there were two kinds of conformity in the fifties...
...Whelan has my editorial stance exactly backwards...
...deregulation...
Vol. 15 • November 1983 • No. 8
