Letters

...I refer primarily to the astounding chain of errors in judgment that produced the boxed story concerning an eiicounter between two passing American journalists and a taxicab driver in Lebanon, and proceeded from there to the final inexcusable cover quotation-a quotation that simply does not appear in the story and is supported (if that is the correct word) only by the odd story that William McPherson told Fallows and that Fallows then decided to use...

...It is not enough to be against something like the war very early on, you have to therefore proceed with what that teaches you...

...Kraft’s brilliant perceptions in order to dramatize his misjudgments...

...Kraft’s flaws while minimizing his achievements...

...Rather it was a lack of respect for the public intelligence, a belief that we did not know what was happening and could not tell the difference between lies and the truth and could not understand the games they were playing...

...The second explanation, related to the first but of far broader significance, is the way that criticizing someone has become equated with putting him down...

...The areas of agreement far outweigh in scope and importance the gentlemanly quarrels that make the day-to-day news so entertainingly trivial...

...One person’s subversion is another’s progress, I. F. Stone once said...

...The similar note, “YOU can’t say that about Joe Kraft,” which is so clear in letters like Walter Pincus’, seems to reflect both a genuine love for one’s friend and the club’s practical notion that diminution of an influential associate is diminution of oneself...

...James Fallows’ treatment of Joseph Kraft in the March issue of your magazine is badly distorted in the sense that it magnifies Mr...

...Likewise, what to Joseph Kraft is “responsibility” and to Mr...

...Richard Holbrooke is Managing Editor of Foreign Policy...

...Kraft’s, and I agree with some of Mr...

...I took some pains in the article to emphasize that Kraft is good, that, of the columnists writing today he is probably the best...

...Of course it is also possible to criticize particular pieces of Mr...

...So he became rather than a man who knew what was wrong and knew what was wrong early, an extension of those who had been wrong-in effect a conduit for them and for their mendacity, Nor was the problem, and this is crucial, one of intelligence...

...Fallows puts it, can be dangerous...

...Kraft, I think he withholds credit where he would really agree it is due...

...WALTER PINCUS Washington, D.C...

...We think that, in the interests of practical achievement, it is sometimes a good idea not to let abstract ideas get in the way...

...In touch with modernity, they have advanced much further than their fellows down the path from traditional societies...

...In honesty with myself, I have to confess that there were moments of mdicious glee when I discovered evidence I thought would be embarrassing to Kraft, and that I-like, I believe, most other writersfelt some pride when I thought I had figured out what someone else was doing wrong...

...One is that we could not think of a title and cover which better expressed the real meaning of the piece...

...Suzannah Lessard wows me as Hannah Arendt and Rebecca West did when we were all younger, and Tom Bethel1 must have satisfied my schadenfreude requirements for the next six weeks...

...the cover was a picture of Kraft with the caption, “‘Joseph Kraft Is The Most Famous Journalist in America’-Joseph Kraft...

...William Greider is a reporter for The Washington Post...

...I’m certain others who respect Joe’s work will write protesting the Fallows treatment and thus we will all add to the impression that his words and your magazine will have sparked a serious discussion...

...But the reader is now left with the impression that there was an effort made to “get” Kraft-for what purpose is not clear...

...The “Alliance for Progress” waved the altruistic banner of American technological largess while increasing corporate penetration and building up Latin American military elites, at the expense of ideological anti-capitalists (thus irrelevant or irresponsible to Kraft) like Allende...

...Part of that reaction undoubtedly grew from loyalty and respect, while part reflected editors’ and columnists’ practical concern about sources and contacts...

...Whatever Mr...

...My purpose was to try to understand the roots of his limitations, to point them out as forcefully as I could, but not to demean or ridicule Kraft...

...The Struggle for Algeria (page 253) American intervention, Vietnam and elsewhere, has depended heavily on these arrogant sentiments...

...Stone, etc...

...he can, when necessary, make it without the Gerald Warrens-or specifically the Ron Zieglers of this world, viz., his own selfpromoted tour of China when the Nixon management left him off the official 1J.S...

...Fallows’ and an admirer of your magazine...

...Kraft has struggled to keep perspective while on the inside in Washington-that is, to give his readers the benefit of first-hand acquaintance and information without being coopted...

...Principles undebated are undiscovered and unquestioned...

...One of the points I tried hardest to develop in my article was the influence of this loose network of alliances on Kraft’s own writing-how the mixture of genuine respect for friends and expedient concerns about sources kept him from criticizing some of Washington’s more respectable figures...

...But the basic problems are two: to what extent Joe’s unquestionable errors, shortcomings and blindspots are also functionally connected with his virtues...

...TIMOTHY FRASCA Washington, D.C...

...One is the nature of the Washington liberal-establishment club, of which Kraft and many of our correspondents are members, and which has been characterized by a reluctance to criticize one’s friends...

...and to what extent they reflect not only the consequences of too much too often, and the intrinsic lousiness of the art form, but also the large and specific peculiarities of American journalism, culture and even geography that make the syndicated column viableand even necessary-in the first place...

...Granted that these are hard to deal with in ten, or even a hundred, thousand words...

...It is true, in general, that columnists write too much, and with too little fresh research or perception...

...Stanley Karnow is Associate Editor of The New Republic...

...This seems to me the crucial point...

...The author replies: There are three things I regret about this article...

...WILLIAM McPHERSON Washington, D.C...

...Fallows’ disagreements with Mr...

...Those were not hollow attempts at balance...

...The outstanding case in point was his early and brilliant perception of the disaster toward which we were heading in Vietnam...

...I can understand your general view that we liberals ought to be more honest about our own faults...

...But to make.a splash with his views, what better gimmick can there be than using hindsight, some hyped-up quotes and highly selective examples to attack Kraft, the man who today writes the best newspaper political column...

...I do not think the failure was an intellectual one...

...I might also have demonstrated more awareness of why someone like Kraft would want so much to be a columnist-of the marvelous, liberating appeal that the personal platform of a column held for a writer starting out in the early fifties, when the other alternatives, Luce-journalism and the like, seemed so confining...

...The McPherson and Cockbum anecdotes were presented as semiperipheral information we considered amusing and perhaps enlightening...

...I much admired your piece on Joe Kraft in the current issue, not only for what it is, but for what it isn’t, Le., cheap-like the Cockburn sidebar, which I nonetheless admit gave me some guilty pleasure, and certainly has its documentary significance...

...The assumption in many of these letters is that I was out to get Kraft, to destroy him, to make my name as a writer by rubbing dirt on his...

...The treatment so disfigured the piece that the serious ideas it had to offer were lost...

...once they perceived what was happening they took it further, and they realized that the very ‘good guys’ that they had once dined with in Washington were the problem-not Westy or Depuy or someone like that...

...The criticism of Kraft would have been seen within a different context...

...Their vast tracts, a century ago, were people by primitive agricultural communities, virtually immune to change and limited in horizon to a radius of a few hundred miles...

...Kraft deserves more credit than I gave him for making this effort with Kissinger, even while he deserves to have it pointed out that with most other figures, including Bundy, Connally, Rehnquist, and Mills, he has represented cooptation at its extreme...

...Those motives, and others, created the unmistakable tone of, “You can’t say that about Dick Helms in the press reports...

...When Walter -Pincus throws those judgments back as if they rebutted anything else to be said about Kraft, he reveals exactly the attitude I find so dismaying: that one cannot criticize unless one is trying to condemn, that to raise a question about someone’s performance is to deny that he has any worth at all, that the way to respond to criticism is with a similar attempt to destroy your enemy...

...I dare say Mr...

...But it seems to me that to ignore such questions must vitiate even a very good piece like yours, if only-snicker if you will-by implying that things are simpler than they are...

...In China covering the Nixon visit, Kraft tells a Chmese acquaintance, “You always insist on settling principles first...

...Suddenly, and in some cases brutally, there supervened contact with the advanced civilization of the West...

...My third regret is that the three boxes we published appeared to be one-sided...

...I think Mr...

...I also have some specific quibbles, but these are largely marginalia: if only for personal reasons, it seems to me of some practical interest that Joe is also decent, helpful, and unpatronizing to peripheral and unimportant acquaintances like me...

...Fallows correctly noted in his piece, I admire and respect Joe Kraft, in part because he is a friend, but largely because he is one of the best journalists in the country...

...I mention this because Kraft’s name is often linked with Lippmann’s, and yet there is one thing that distinguishes Lippmann over those many years, it is not so much his clear intelligence but his belief that we could understand him and follow him...

...James Fallows’ piece on Joseph Kraft was distressing to read...

...Too close analysis would disregard the turbulent in-house bickering over the seminar table among government bigwigs and journalists like himself and find them holding hands beneath...

...In isolating these three passages, our intention was to use “sidebars” for two of their classic purposes...

...His anecdote concerned two Middle East guides who told him, in identical phrases, that “the most famous journalist in America,” Joseph Kraft, had visited their town...

...If James Fallows’ intention was to produce a serious discussion of Joseph Kraft, then he was badly hurt by the overall packaging that enveloped the article...

...Your piece on Joseph Kraft was superb and so relevant to a new generation of reporters who are coming to realize that brains and charm do not always make correct policy...

...Hapgood’s review made me reflect on the nature of things, e.g., court-ordered disgorgement of highway funds, phalanxes of unemployed labor, depression in the building trades, non-existence and indefinite postponement of a rail link between the Long Island airports and Manhattan on budgetary grounds, etc...

...Moreover, unless Kraft had a midget public relations man riding along in the glove compartment, it is hard to imagine any other explanation for the story...

...I am an old friend of Mr...

...Such passages abound as: “. . .Algeria shows in acute form the process by which Asia and Africa came suddenly awake...

...Kraft’s, a more recent one of Mr...

...list, and the bonus in the form of being allowed to stay on after the official Americans had to go home...

...It is unfortunate that you chose to put that particular line on the cover of your magazine and attribute it to Mr...

...Fallows’ criticism-for example of the articles on McGeorge Bundy and John Connally...

...Louis, Mo...

...Kraft without checking its accuracy with me...

...Dana Spitzer is a reporter for the St...

...Joseph Kraft is an astonishing journalist, and I adnure him But Mr...

...The pressure to be “responsible,” as Mr...

...Doesn’t the establishmentarian breakfast oracle perform a useful, and even a unique, service in a continentalsize country with a minimal national press and an endemic weakness for local publishers whose idea of intellectual enrichment for their editorial writers is to buy them a subscription to 7he Wall Street Journal...

...The result, in my opinion, is an unbalanced portrayal that in many ways tells more about Fallows than it does about Kraft...

...That’s fine...

...thus the parameters of public debate are shrunken to narrow, intramural issues like the usual Democrat versus Republican twaddle...

...I regarded him as a columnist better than his competition but still grievously short of his own potential...

...Kraft has certainly made his share of mistakes-as did, I should add, Walter Lippmann...

...Or hold his own without benefit of an institutional toga like The New York Times...

...As Mr...

...If the status quo is comfortable, debate on basics probably is not...

...In that respect it is worth pointing out that Mr...

...I reported the story according to my clear recollection of the way I heard it, including the “final twist” that Kraft himself was the one who had advertised his merits...

...But at some point we all run up against my favorite German proverb, “if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bus,” and I wonder if we wouldn’t do as well, or even better, to acknowledge the obvious-and not merely, I mean, to imply it-i.e., that none of us can get along on one columnist, one newspaper, etc., if we really want to know what’s going on around us...

...The basic dishonesty in the Fallows article, however, is that it chooses to disregard several of Mr...

...Or, to make this more specific, can a man make it in Washngton without being compulsive, upwardly mobile and egomaniac...

...DANA SPITZER St...

...Without these distorting factors the article would have had a different tone...

...DAVID SCHOENBAUM Iowa City, Iowa David Schoenbaum is a professor of history at the University of Iowa...

...Where a generation of other reporters might have come a step or two slower to realizing that the war was terrible (Wicker, Lewis, etc...

...Fallows has diminished, and the point about columns which he was trying to make has been submerged by his obvious desire to appear the dragon-slayer at any cost...

...This seems to me the central difference between the two columnists and the reason we were so much in Lippmann’s debt...

...The article accurately pegs the cozy relationship Kraft enjoys with government elites and his subsequent awe of these “noblemen” but only implies what needs to be said flat out-that the brouhahas of debate splashing across the Post’s op-ed page only mask the basic congruence in philosophy between Kraft and the mainstream of government policy...

...Whle the driver did describe Kraft as “the most famous journalist in America” he did not say that Kraft “told me himself he was the most famous journalist in America...

...they were, in my mind, the fundamental reason for writing about Kraft...

...We believe in principles in the United States, but we think that they are something you carry around in the back of your head, not taking about them too much...

...ANTHONY LEWIS Boston, Mass...

...Kraft does not “consort” with Brandt, Brezhnev, Chou En-lai, etc...

...Fallows apparently has h s own standards for what an analytical newspaper column ought to be...

...My respect for Mr...

...More deep-rooted disagreement outside those boundaries becomes “irresponsible” and often “reactionary” to Kraft since it stands in the way of his idea of the future...

...But when you tlunk of the pomposity and viciousness of some journalism, it is a gross distortion of values to prove your gutsiness toward liberals by scoring smart-aleck points at the expense of a man as humane, intelligent and fair as Joe Kraft...

...Second, I regret that William McPherson’s recollection of our conversation differs from my own...

...the longer box, examining the connection between a columnist’s special standing and the direction his writing took, was a theme we considered significant but somewhat off the track of the main article...

...Thank you for the piece...

...But I have never known him to argue such matters other than courteously, and seriously...

...Walter Pincus is the executive editor of The New Republic...

...Fallows is “loyalty” or “reverence,” others call “collaboration...

...The final twist given the anecdote about the Lebanese driver’s encounter with the journalist Joseph Kraft is inaccurate...

...All the more shame, since Kraft is, as Fallows pointed out, a significant journalist deserving of serious discussion for both his strengths and weaknesses...

...William McPherson is book editor of The Washington Post...

...Louis Post-Dispat ch...

...David Halberstam is the authorof The Best and the Brightest...

...Granted also that to understand all is not to forgive all...

...In Kraft’s early ’60s books, The Struggle for Algeria and The Grand Design, the crudest cultural jingoism drapes his ideology of progress, in which the West molds Asia, Africa, and Latin America in its own image, all for their own benefit of course...

...Kraft’s own hidden ideology, the ideology of “progress” (which is taken to mean high-technology development and expansion) formed and still forms the basis for much of American policy towards the Third World...

...But he covered these men as if it were business as usual, as if they really did know what they were talking about, as if their pseudo information were real...

...Fallows is either naive or vicious, for example, when he focuses on Kraft’s erroneous approach to Connally but dismisses in a sentence the fact that Mr...

...Will he be taken seriously by people who should take h m seriously-not only by voter-taxpayernewspaper readers like you and me, I mean -without being identifiably sovereign and establishmentarian...

...No wonder he wants to draw a “decent veil of oblivion” over the Vietnam debate after the 1972 election, just before the murderous Christmas bombings...

...He never learned and understood the lesson of what he had been ahead on-never covered the isolation of the White House, the madness that the war produced in Washington...

...RICHARD HOLBROOKE New York, N.Y...

...The Most Famous Journalist in America” was the title...

...The cover, the title, the accompanying boxes were a series of cheap shots...

...I did not regard Kraft as an enemy...

...Anthony Lewis is a columnist for The New York Times...

...Kraft was one of the first journalists to forecast the Vietnam disaster...

...They took the lessons they learned from Vietnam and went deeper and deeper and became more and more alienated...

...I suspect it was a human or social one-if you are going to dine with these people and covet their information and access, and have them to dinner then you have to take them and their mock world of mock information and mock reality seriously and at face value...

...I agree that Joe Kraft, or anybody else, might be a better journalist if he wrote less, required less fear, tolerance and/or approbation in high places and asserted the purposeful irresponsibility-I mean this in a neutral sense-of Nicholas von Hoffman, Murray Kempton, I.F...

...WILLIAM GREIDER Washington, D.C...

...Nor does Fallows tell us anything about Mr...

...He covers them as any reporter does-only better...

...What is at the heart of the debate on Joseph Kraft is not whether or not he was one of the first to write about the darkness of Vietnam but whether he was ever affected by what he wrote, whether he was willing to follow through on his perceptions...

...In saying this, I am admitting that there is more I might have done to sympathize with Kraft, but everything I did say in the article was directed toward this goal: to understand, and criticize from that position of understanding, and have that criticism accepted as something other than an attack on the subject’s personal worth...

...I remain convinced that lack of self-esteem is the least of Kraft’s problems, but that was not the point I wanted to make, and it is obvious that the cover has deflected readers from what I considered the far more serious question to ask about Kraft...

...Whether or not you like Kraft, or think that he has failed to live up to his bright promise (which was, as I understand it, the point of the article), you owe it to your readers and your subjects to deal with them fairly, and not to set up inaccurate straw men...

...Although Richard Holbrooke and some of the other letter-writers evidently interpreted the boxes to mean that we were deliberately highlighting the material contained therein, that was not our intended meaning...

...But in equal honesty I can say that the main purpose of the piece was not to “get” Kraft but to understand how someone of hs talent and his prominence in the field could fall so short of expectations...

...Since Joe Kraft is a good friend, my criticisms of James Fallows’ rambling, simplistic and sometimes cheap analysis of Joe’s writing may reflect a personal bias...

...Between us, I am still convinced that I am The Next Walter Lippmann...

...STANLEY KARNOW Washington, D.C...

...Sharing the government’s goals in Vietnam, although criticizing its tactics-for incompetence and brutality, not intention-Kraft perceives as “irresponsibility” in segments of the antiwar movement what actually is rock-bottom political differences...

...That sort of tilt on the part of Fallows is serious, especially when so many of us who covered Vietnam in the early 1960s were arguing not against the American commitment but against the techniques being used...

...he wrote nothing of their real entrapment...

...Having been right, he pretended that those who were wrong were in fact right...

...The Washington fascination with who’s in and who’s out is tedious...

...As Anthony Lewis suggests, I might have applauded the effort to resist co-optation without wholly divorcing oneself from Washington...

...Similarly, I disagree with Mr...

...Kraft’s complicated and, in my estimation, courageous relationship with Kissingera relationship that has permitted Mr...

...The same phenomenon lay behind the unusual deference with which the Washington press treated Richard Helms during the Watergate hearings...

...If that had been our intention, we would have used the familiar, accepted device of repeating, in quotation marks, excerpts from the text whose importance we wanted to underscore...

...Kraft’s view on such matters as the CIA and the Security Council leak to Jack Anderson, as he disagrees with my views on other things...

...Willynilly the dormant communities stirred...

...Perhaps I could have done more by way of understanding...

...I could not do it...

...I thought you captured the mores of that breed perfectly with fairness for Kraft’s obvious superiority, but still hitting the target sharply...

...Russell Baker is a columnist for The New York Times...

...RUSSELL BAKER New York, N.Y...

...Joe learned the lesson more quickly, and did nothing with it-for him it was business as usual...

...Which of us would not like to call back things he has written...

...The presentation :f the piece was at the level of the Beaverbrook Press as parodied by Evelyn Waugh...

...But my even greater bias, raised by the Fallows piece, is against sloppy reportingparticularly if it has been tailored to make a point that would not stand up if a balanced factual presentation had been made...

...I thmk all three were hurt by your March issue...

...he works, as well as writes, hard in the sense of acquiring and commanding information...

...Letters Joseph Kraft I thought the article on Joe Kraft [“The Most Famous Journalist in America,” by James Fallows, March] was especially good, although I was disappointed by the suggestion that Joe is finally going to be pronounced the winner of The Next Walter Lippmann competition...

...My recollection remains the same...

...For my part that is not so...

...Kraft feels differently about them now, too...

...This note is to tell you what a fine piece you did on Kraft...

...Kraft to cover Kissinger without the fawning obsequiousness of many of our colleagues...

...But then the problem with those illustrious decisionmakers of that era was not intelligence either...

...The message is: let’s you and me and him get together and do what I want-backed up with the reins of state power...

...What provokes me to afterthoughts has as much to do with what you didn’t say as what you did...

...That is a brave and very difficultthing to do...

...Fallows has shown us h s soft spots in a way that David Halberstam taught us about the weaknesses of the men who got us into Vietnam...

...We believe in settling principles last...

...Kraft has done it better than any other present columnist...

...It is clear that this article has provoked an unusually hostile response, and as I have tried to understand why that is so, two explanations have come to mind...

...DAVID HALBERSTAM New York, N.Y...

...Vignettes of the great often make embarrassing reading later, or even sooner...

...In fact, I might add that I enjoyed the whole issue...