Pushiness We Can Respect
Powell, Jody
PUSHINESS WE CAN RESPECT by Jody Powell Sam Donaldson's style is more than just entertaining Let's get this out up front: I like Sam Donaldson. More to the point, I even liked the guy when...
...Not a terribly original idea, but one that has suffered from some degree of neglect in recent years...
...Hold On, Mr...
...The first has to do with the nature of a reporter's job, particularly at the White House...
...President...
...Now, with most journalists pumping out lame defenses for their six-year failure to challenge much of anything about the present administration, Donaldson's dogged approach deserves more than casual consideration...
...Mostly it is a collection of stories, anecdotes, and observations...
...It's him alright...
...What about the one that elicited the sweeping condemnation of the Soviet Union at Mr...
...tury of Washington journalism, and it's not...
...Who asked the question on Martin Luther King that produced evidence of profound presidential ambivalence over whether King was a "communist sympathizer...
...does not claim to be a scholarly dissertation on the last quarter cenJody Powell, press secretary in the Carter White House, is a syndicated columnist and a commentator for ABC News...
...He says he rejected the idea of hiring a ghostwriter, and it's clear that he's telling the truth...
...More to the point, I even liked the guy when we were hurling insults and accusations at each other in the White House briefing room some years back...
...PUSHINESS WE CAN RESPECT by Jody Powell Sam Donaldson's style is more than just entertaining Let's get this out up front: I like Sam Donaldson...
...The Donaldson ego is there, too...
...In at least two areas, however, his book has serious things to say about business immediately at hand...
...Read a few paragraphs aloud and your eyebrows begin to arch upwards in that inimitable Donaldson style...
...To be published at the end of March...
...If he had a story he knew you'd hate—and he often did—he'd make sure you got a chance to have your say...
...President...
...Indeed, a reasonable case can be made that more attention to establishing the record and keeping it straight over the past six years might have kept the administration and the country out of the mess in which we now find ourselves...
...All are now using presidential answers to Donaldson questions to explain belatedly to the public what this administration is really like...
...People at ABC (and elsewhere) have called me worse...
...You guessed it, and the list goes on and on...
...The bias toward being exciting and being first can produce its horrors, as several of Donaldson's stories make clear and as those of us who've been on the receiving end of network coverge will readily attest...
...Their curiosity will simply get the best of them...
...No ninny in New York was going to call in at the last minute to tell him how to cover the White House...
...Well, now there is a Donaldson book*, and it comes right at you, too...
...Or the one that produced the first statement from the president, or any other administration official, that the goal of American policy was to "remove" the Sandinista government of Nicaragua...
...Some of those people out there who have delighted in Sam Donaldson as the television correspondent they love to hate, who damn his irreverent questions even as they delight in the answers they provoke, are going to read his book...
...The latter are rare enough in Washington books of any description and particularly scarce in those by journalists...
...Random House, $17.95...
...Donaldson says his job is to challenge presidents, to press them for explanations and justifications, to get the man at the top on the record and keep that record straight...
...Some even turn up their noses at presidential press conferences...
...It's that problem, not political bias, that those "media critics" should be addressing...
...Reagan's first press conference...
...Still, there is more than the usual ration of selfdeprecating stories and admissions of error...
...It's vintage Sam...
...It is simply not possible to read Donaldson's account of the truimphs and disasters of his career—charges onto convention podiums, leaps from airplane doors, stake-outs, ambushes, and all the rest—and conclude that he and his colleagues are primarily interested in promoting a political point of view...
...Most of the journalists now squirming in the wake of the Iran scandal wouldn't be caught dead shouting a question at a president from behind a saw-horse...
...Hold On, Mr...
...Toward the beginning of his chapter on television news reporting he unabashedly observes: "Call me a braggart, call me arrogant...
...And they're going to end up seeing their old bugbear as a very human, witty, even—God help us—likeable fellow...
...The other thing that Donaldson's book should do, though I'm not sure to what extent the effect was intended, is to disabuse all but the most perverse of the idea that political or ideological bias is the major problem in Washington journalism...
...Their interest, sometimes to excess, is getting a story and getting on the air, preferably at the top of the evening news and ahead of the competition...
...Unlike some of his colleagues, he always came straight at you...
...Actually, Donaldson's book may have another consequence—one that was almost surely unintended...
...And when you talked to Donaldson about a story, you were dealing with the man who makes the decision...
...Appropriately, his first chapter is entitled "Challenging Presidents ." What he has to say is hardly new, and it might not have seemed terribly important three months ago...
...At that level it is the best such collection to come along in quite a while...
...But when you need the job done on deadline, you'll call me...
Vol. 19 • February 1987 • No. 1
