Flirting with Communism
I was at the bottom. Incompetent in my job asd unable to support a family. The saving grace was Clink Jenks who became our entryway into progressive political action. He had been an organizer for the Mine Mill and Smelters union, one of the few American unions that had not expelled its Communist members despite the anti-Communist Crusade, a decision that led to Mine-Mill being expelled from the CIO in 1950. Jencks was hauled before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1952 and again in 1953. Federal agents arrested him on charges of falsifying a noncommunist affidavit he had signed in 1950. Harvey Matusow, a paid informant for the FBI, was the only witness against Jencks and Matusow later recanted his testimony. However, while Jencks pursued his appeal, Mine-Mill took him out of New Mexico and ultimately asked for his resignation.
Jencks was blacklisted. He would find a job, get hired, and a few weeks later an FBI agent would visit Clint’s new boss and tell him Clint was a Communist. Enthusiastically or reluctantly, Clint’s new boss inevitably fired him.
When I met Clint, he had won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study economics at UC Berkeley. Like the Communists I had met in Paris and New York City, Clint and Virginia remained dedicated to women’s rights, racial equality, a fair shake for the working man, decent living conditions, health care for all and world peace. Personally, they were courageous, idealistic, and great leaders.
You can get a glint of Clint’s leadership skills today, captured forever in a remarkable American film called Salt of the Earth. Mine-Mill sent Clint to Silver City New Mexico right out of college. He was tasked with helping local miners organize what became a bitter strike. When a group of blacklisted Hollywood film makers were looking for an inspiring story to tell, the Mine-Mill strike was perfect.
The film tells the story of a group of Hispanic American workers seizing control of their lives, demanding union recognition and getting it, while they deal with sexism in their own community. It is a daring message in which the community wins when the women take over the strike, and the men take care of the babies and do the cooking and washing. Salt of the Earth has played all over the world. It was the first film that Vaclav Havel showed after the Czech velvet revolution. Salt of the Earth has never run commercially in the United States.
The film hired two professional actors, but the rest of the cast was made up of union members, including Clint and Virginia. Clint suggests, nudges, and defers to the membership. He takes a beating from company thugs. Virginia pushes the women to take over the picket line when their men are threatened with jail and fines.
Unlike the Lefties in New York city, Clint and Virginia remained active and urged us to join a Marxist discussion group. I found it hard to whine about my own miserable situation when Clint was around. He was a big bear of a man, reminding me of the Jolly Green Giant featured on boxes of frozen peas. Clint spoke slowly and thoughtfully and to the point. He had an enormous trust in the intelligence and good will of other people, particularly working people. He led by empowering those he led. Of all the lessons that Clint taught me this was the most important for my own professional career. For some reason, in my experience, it’s a form of leadership that upper management usually avoids.
We devoted our spare time to political activity. The main issue was nuclear war and radioactive debris in the atmosphere. Some Americans and even entire communities were building fallout shelters where they hoped to wait out a nuclear exchange and emerge to pick up life’s threads. It seemed absurd. There weren’t going to be any meaningful threads to pick up. One of the most popular movies of 1959, On the Beach, portrayed the last days of human life on the planet.
There was a brief thaw in the Cold War in 1959. Soviet Premier Khrushchev came to the United States in September on a highly successful twelve-day visit, marred only by an outburst when Disneyland denied him entrance for security reasons, they said. Everyone knew it was a conscious slap in the face by the militant anti-communist, Walt Disney.
The trip ended with two days of talks at Camp David. In a joint communiqué the two leaders said that “the question of general disarmament is the most important one facing the world today.” A summit was planned for Paris the following spring, after which Eisenhower and his family would travel to the Soviet Union. It seemed for a moment as if the two super-powers could peacefully coexist.
We talked a lot about civil rights. In southern states at the time, African Americans were not allowed to sit in the same public facilities as whites. Students began challenging he law in 1957 by sitting down at lunch counters where they would wait, without being served, until the counters closed, or the police arrived. In 1959 students sat-in at a Woolworth's department store lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. It became national news. Within 2 weeks the sit-ins had spread to 11 cities, led by a new organization called The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or SNCC. Support groups quickly appeared on 21 northern college campuses, among them UC Berkeley.
There were also protests against the coming execution of Caryl Chessman, the so called “Red Light Bandit.” Chessman had been convicted of robbing and raping several women in Southern California by stopping their cars in secluded places with a flashing red light attached to his automobile roof in imitation of a police vehicle. Chessman denied his guilt, but world-wide demonstrations against his execution didn't depend on his guilt or innocence. He was the first American to be sentenced to death for a non-lethal crime, rape. While in prison Chessman had written four books and to many people, he seemed rehabilitated. Our slogan: “The only man in the California prison system who has actually been rehabilitated and they’re going to kill him!”
Demonstrations took time, energy and endless meetings. Decisions had to be made, locations identified, fliers printed and distributed. phone calls placed, posters and picket signs produced, transportations arranged. At every demonstration and meeting I took part in the people who were first to set up and the last to leave after cleaning up, were communists or ex-communists. So, at a time when almost everyone else had left or been driven out of the party, I became interested in getting involved. The Party seemed like a Unitarian Church that actually did something to help people.
Political Work
We supported the Cuban Revolution and went to lectures by Americans who had visited the revolutionary country. Paul Baran, an economics professor at Stanford University, was a favorite. Baran was famous for saying, when challenged about Marxism’s failure in the Soviet Union, “socialism in a backward and underdeveloped countries has a powerful tendency to become a backward and underdeveloped socialism.” Cuba, we all hoped, would be different.
Baran argued that the United States’ aggressive foreign policy was an inevitable, or at least likely, consequence of modern capitalism, which produces more things than consumers can buy. The easiest way to absorb the surplus is in military spending, post-war reconstruction and opening new markets for consumption. Baran believed the surplus wasted on military expenditures should go to social benefits like health care, education, a modern infrastructure, and other improvements to the nation’s commons. The subsequent decent living standards for working people would benefit all of us in a society less prone to violence and despair.
This was a vision of the world I wanted to help create, but like most of my fellow citizens, I was trapped. As a new head of household, my only rational decision was to continue working at a job I hated. George S. Koch Associates couldn’t support me unless I could grow the company. But I couldn’t sell. Where was I to go? And wherever I went, wouldn’t I be aiding and abetting a system that I believed was irrational and destructive?
Clint’s Marxist discussion group was a stepping stone to Communist Party membership, and we toyed with the idea. The communist party in California, so far as I could tell, was recovering from its fall into irrelevancy. Party members had left in droves after World War II because of Stalin’s despicable rule and the virulence of US anti-communism. By 1959, the worst was over. Party members could boast about Soviet ruler Krushchev’s secret speech to the Politburo in 1956 when he repudiated the abuses of Stalin. Of course, the same party intellectuals found it difficult to explain away Krushchev’s brutal suppression of the 1956 popular revolt against communist rule in Hungary. They blamed it on the hostility of the West, which forced the Soviet Union to maintain friendly border states. How would we feel about a Communist Mexico aligned with the Soviet Union?
If I had any illusions about earning a living on the left, it would be as a labor organizer. Clint and Virginia suggested I spend time in the Central Valley, working with migrant workers. Cezar Chavez and Dolores Huerta had co-founded the National Farm Workers Association three years earlier. They were working in the southern part of the Central Valley. Clint was helping organize agricultural workers in the North. Chavez and Huerta were just beginning to get noticed. It would be five years before their famous grape strike. Organizing was just beginning in the North.
We moved into a share cropper’s shack and started to meet our neighbors. I spent a few days in the fields to try to prove myself. With no experience, I worked for the lowest pay, stoop labor. I don’t know how people did it on a regular basis. It was sometimes 110 in the sun and the black, red soil seemed to release waves of heat. Fields could be a 40 minute drive from the camps and you didn’t get paid for travel. Workers got up at 5:00 and got home by 7:00 or 8:00. They were cheated at every turn by crooked scales and unfair competition from even cheaper Mexican labor. A good farm worker could make only $6 or $7 a day. Whole families picked, with kids as young as 4 in the strawberry fields.
People accuse progressives of romanticizing the poor, making them somehow morally superior. They are not morally superior, but they have a lot more compassion. Poor folks have their share of wife beaters, drug addicts, alcoholics, bullies, and psychopaths. But if you ever really need help, if you’re broke and hungry, head for the poor part of town. Everywhere else, they’ll call the cops. If you’re a journalist, this is where you’ll find your best sources. The bus boys, waiters, drivers, hookers, sergeants in the army might tell you the truth. The powerful and those who work for them consistently lie.
Immersing myself in world of agricultural workers was exciting, frustrating, exhausting and a terrible hardship on my wife and kid. I gave up and went back to work for my father.
KPFA
We spent many evenings at Clint and Virginia Jencks listening to Berkeley’s local FM radio station KPFA. There was nothing else like it. An interview with Paul Robeson, the blacklisted singer with the remarkable voice; a conversation with a priest who worked inside San Quentin prison; a blacklisted professor who served prison time for defying McCarthy; a sympathetic discussion of homosexuality ... the first in American broadcasting. There were commentaries by Soviet apologist William Mandel, Conservative Republican Casper Weinberger, movie critic Pauline Kael, Eastern mystic Alan Watts, and the Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth. There were programs by opera buff Anthony Boucher, Jazz enthusiast Phil Elwood, and a late-night folk music show by Gert Chiarito that attracted local musicians such as the then unknown guitarist Jerry Garcia, later leader of The Grateful Dead.
The station was listener supported, accepting no other funds, and hence on a perennial campaign to attract more paying listeners. With the dearth of FM radios available at the time, KPFA offered a free FM radio with every subscription. We jumped at the opportunity and I started listening every night.
KPFA’s signal did not come through clearly in the lower hills of El Cerrito. We had to sit by the radio and twiddle the dial. It felt like living in occupied Europe during World War II, listening to the BBC over a short-wave radio. There may have been a reason for that. The driving force at KPFA and Pacifica at the time was Elsa Knight Thompson, who had learned her craft while broadcasting for the BBC to millions of Europeans in occupied Europe during the war.
Sick of hearing me bitch about my miserable job, my wife suggested I talk to KPFA. I couldn’t imagine that they had any jobs available. Wouldn’t everyone want to work there? Nevertheless, I called the station. They told me that they weren’t hiring, but they were looking for volunteers and that’s how most people got hired.
KPFA’s offices were above Eddy’s Restaurant. I almost missed the small door at the end of Eddy’s plate glass windows on Shattuck Avenue and then walked past it several times to get up my courage for the interview. Finally, I climbed the sagging, narrow, steep wooden stairs painted an institutional green, entered a hallway with a warren of offices piled high with old copies of the New York Times, stacks of magazines and mimeographed pamphlets, a sense of impending chaos, a cross between the temporary headquarters for the latest protest movement and a bohemian coffee shop.
Squirreled away behind a partition I discovered in an island of calm an infinitely patient, proper gray haired lady, the indispensable Vera Hopkins, who uniquely paid attention to my claim that I had an interview with station manager Dr. Harold Winkler.
I had on my jacket and tie but most of the staff was dressed like college students or San Francisco beatniks, a level of informality unusual in any workplace in those days. Winkler, the exception, also had on a jacket and tie. He seemed to me subdued and exhausted. His office was the book lined alcove of a university professor, with a large, wooden desk, a blotter and ink well, a neat pile of papers, in and out boxes, a green shaded bank lamp and a black rotary telephone. He was a small man, with wide shoulders, an elegant neck, confident chin, thin lips expressing a permanent sense of disappointment. He wore rimless glasses. His hair was neatly trimmed and a distinguished shade of grey.
Among his first questions, how many foreign languages did I speak? I had the immediate sense that I was talking to somebody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He told me to come back to start volunteering in a week. He’d find a place for me. It was Friday, April 29th 1960. I needed to give my father notice. We agreed that I would stop working for him on May 13th.
The following week, Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union had shot down a U-2 spy plane. CIA flights over the Soviet Union were an open secret. Time Magazine had published an article about the U-2’s in 1958, hinting at illegal flights. But no one could believe that Eisenhower would jeopardize his summit with Khrushchev scheduled ten days later. We were relieved when Eisenhower’s administration issued a statement that the U-2 was a weather plane that had gone off course. The summit was still on.
Then, on Saturday May 7th, Khrushchev put pilot Gary Powers on display. Powers had been captured alive, neglecting to take his CIA provided suicide pill. He told the Soviets everything. Khrushchev showed off the gold watches and coins Powers had carried with him to barter with the locals, the suicide pin he was supposed to use if captured and copies of the pictures the U-2 had taken of Soviet airfields.
Eisenhower might have avoided responsibility and kept alive hopes for a summit by blaming his staff, but his generation didn’t do that. It may have been a mark of his character, but for Khrushchev it was a slap in the face. Not only was the American President untrustworthy, he didn’t mind admitting it. Khrushchev cancelled the summit and called off Eisenhower’s trip to the Soviet Union. The hope for world peace was shattered.
We were sure the CIA had set this up, but Eisenhower said he had authorized the flight. He walked into the Oval Office on May 9 and said out loud: “I would like to resign.” Everyone knew that he had lied.
Much later, in retirement, Eisenhower said the greatest regret of his presidency was “the lie we told about the U-2. I didn’t realize how high a price we were going to pay for that lie.”… “I had longed to give the United States and the world a lasting peace. I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.”
I Become a Journalist
I arrived at KPFA on May 13th a little after 8:00 am with a fresh cup of coffee from Eddys. It was the first day of HUAC hearings in San Francisco. KPFA was one of the Committee’s targets. Staff members, volunteers and KPFA on-air stars (I recognized the voices of Gene Marine, an investigative reporter with a tough guy private eye voice, chief announcer Fred Haines who sounded like warm honey, and Dale Minor, whose deadpan baritone prepared you for the worst, which is what Dale frequently gave you), all gathered around the desk of a tiny woman with a hunched back and the piercing eyes of a gypsy fortune teller, Elsa knight Thompson.
Elsa stood out from all the others by the force of her unflinching character. She seemed to be from another world than the rag tag crowd surrounding her. Elsa acted as if she were on the stage with the daily excitement of her life a continuing drama, vivid and dynamic, her own person in her own words, in her own dress, her own jewelry. Everything Elsa did had a flare.
Elsa ran our HUAC operation by public telephones like a general managing a chaotic battlefield before the age of field radios. I was stationed at the edges of the crowd with a Mohawk portable tape recorder on loan to the station for possible purchase. Portables were just entering the market. KPFA’s only other portable tape recorder was an Ampex reel-to-reel machines packed in a Samsonite suitcase, not battery operated. No one really knew how to use the new Mohawk, so they dumped it on me.
The star witness that day was a KPFA regular, William Mandel. He did a weekly program on the Soviet press and was considered a Soviet apologist. Mandel had testified in front of Congressional committees before, and everyone expected fireworks. Students and other KPFA supporters lined up outside the hearing room, waiting to get in. The police only allowed in pre-selected Committee supporters. Students, using tactics they’d seen students use in the South, staged an immediate sit-in in front of the hearing room.
At the committee’s request, police turned high pressure water hoses on the demonstrators. Fred Haines was stationed near the door with an Ampex: "The police have grabbed a Negro by the ankle and are dragging him down the stairs on his back by the ankle. Down a flight of some sixty hard marble stairs. One policeman is presently dragging three girls all at once together …”
I spent much of the morning with Archie Brown, a Harry Bridges Union man who had fought in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade. The participation of the Longshoreman’s Union, the old left of the 1930’s and ’40’s, was exciting and hopeful, the remnants of the past and the sharp edge of the future forging a bond. The Longshoreman’s Union, like Mine-Mill, had been expelled from the CIO for tolerating Communists in their union.
Archie advised me to carry a pocket full of steel ball bearings to throw under the feet of the mounted police when the horses charged. The police no longer used horses.
By early afternoon, I had become one of Elsa’s tape runners, driving the raw tapes back to her editors in Berkeley. Mandel, as expected, had defied the committee.
"Honorable beaters of children and sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes. Distinguished Dixiecrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman; eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with which we must live at peace in order for us all and our children to survive; my boy of fifteen left this room a few minutes ago in sound health and not jailed solely because I asked him to be in here to learn something about the procedures of the United States government and one of its committees. If he had been outside where the son of a friend of mine had his head split by these goons operating under your orders, my boy today might have paid the penalty of permanent injury or a police record for desiring to come here and hear how this committee operates. If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States constitution - if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane.”
KPFA was on the air that same night with an impromptu documentary stitched together as we went along, sometimes only a minute or two before air. Phones never stopping ringing. We kept updating the documentary every few hours as events unfolded.
Here is Elsa’s opening narration.
We present now the first of two documentary programs produced in KPFA studios on the House Un American activities subcommittee which met in San Francisco in the supervisor’s chambers of the city hall on May 12th,13th and 14th, 1960. (chanting)
The impact of the events surrounding these hearings have largely overshadowed the hearings themselves. By the time the committee took its noon break on Friday, excitement was intense. And the recording which follows was made inside the chamber as the hearing was about to reconvene. The audience was already seated and outside on the white marble stairs there was a crowd, mainly students, around 150 people. As you listen you will hear the news that the police have turned the fire hoses into this crowd.
Dale Minor: There is a great deal of commotion outside these chambers as you can hear. I have no idea what is going on. A host of reporters and photographers here in the press box are trying to shove their way through the double doors just at my back. They seem to be blocking the outside. There the doors have opened. I can see nothing but booted white crash helmets and motorcycle cops. The demonstrators are in front of the main door, off to the side of my field of vision. (chanting)
A full scale riot seems to be underway outside the doors, with fire hoses and everything.
It was a new kind of radio documentary based on portable tape recorders just becoming available and it became the signature mark of Pacifica’s programming during the Elsa era. An amalgam of microphones recording events in real time, aided by voice over descriptions by a reporter at the scene, usually done carefully, objectively, with very little emotion.
Tape was cheap and could be used repeatedly, so we let it run. At one point our Chief Engineer Irwin Goldsmith noticed that committee members were whispering amongst themselves. Irwin turned the microphones up as committee members made an unlawful deal with a friendly witness. It was a compelling component of the program. We were all trained to keep our ears open and our tape rolling.
The next day I roamed the halls of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley. The young demonstrators who had been washed down the stairs the day before were reading their over-nights in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. They exploded in shock. The newspapers were not telling the true story! This became the reaction of demonstrators at every event I ever covered.
Listeners wouldn’t stop calling. They wanted to hear Mandel again. They wanted to hear the students. People would meet in the streets and quotes lines from Mandel’s testimony. The broadcasts put KPFA on a new map and rebroadcasts at Pacifica’s New York station, WBAI, and its LA station, KPFK, would do the same.
I was completely entranced. I believed that if people really knew the truth about what was going on, they would change things. I no longer wanted to be a demonstrator. I no longer wanted to be a labor leader or a politician or a festival producer, let alone a gas station attendant or short order cook. I wanted to observe the essential events taking place around me and tell their stories. I wanted to be journalist.
Elsa Knight Thompson
KPFA put me to work writing the copy between programs. In my spare time I organized their tape library. That’s when I had my first run in with Elsa Knight Thompson. I had avoided her because of her famous temper. She confronted me in the control room demanding a tape to record an interview she was about to conduct with James Baldwin. KPFA was broke, as usual, and there were no blank tapes. Elsa stormed up to me and in a venomous undertone, inches from my face, declared, “If Jesus Christ walked in here tomorrow there would be no tape to record him on.” I erased another archive and Elsa went on to do the interview.
Tapes came in from all over the world. When I had time to look through them I found remarkable gems among the useless failures. I might find a box from North Africa with a note attached to it by a rubber band. "I had a chance to interview Ben Balthazar on my office dictaphone. The quality isn't too good, but this is one of the most inaccessible guerrilla leaders in Africa today."
My duties soon expanded to tape editing. I became responsible for cutting commentaries, book and movie reviews. They were supposed to be fifteen minutes long, but while some of commentators adhered strictly to their time limits, others ran over. The most egregious was movie reviewer Pauline Kael. With what must have been a supreme lack of respect, I cut her work ruthlessly. She ranted and raved about “that tape boy.” But drama and literature director, John Leonard, stood up for me, telling Pauline she could come in on time or suffer the consequences.
In a few months I was hired full time as Production Director, at $105 a week. We gave up our house in El Cerrito and moved into a tiny house within walking distance of the station. We reduced our meat intake to one pound of hamburger a week and lived on beans, rice, lentils, and vegetables. We were expecting our second child.
Fred Haines gave me my first opportunity to announce a few months after I’d joined the staff. He sat me in the control room chair of studio B and explained: "When the music ends, turn down pot one, turn up the mike pot, stop the left turntable with your left hand, read the script while checking the mike level on that meter in front of you, use your right hand to start turntable two but let the record slide on the felt until you find the cue point and then turn up pot 2, then let the record go as you finish the script, and turn down your mike pot.” And then he said with as much excitement as Fred ever revealed, "You're on the air!" and thankfully guided my hands through the mechanics.
Elsa stormed into the studio moments later and gave me her terrifying look. "If you must speak on the radio, at least have the decency to learn how to talk properly. Come into my office." And thereupon began my education in broadcasting from a woman who became my first and only mentor. Her reaction to my amateur voice was typical Elsa. Both the indignation and the generosity, the concern with professionalism and the willingness to teach. In about 2 and a half hours she taught me as much as any voice coach. Years later I had a friend who gave voice lessons to professional singers in New York City. Elsa’s exercises were the same as her exercises. She’d been trained by the BBC.
The BBC recruited Elsa when a programmer overheard her speak on behalf of orphan children being evacuated from England to the United States at the beginning of World War II. The line he overheard was pure Elsa. When asked if she was going to evacuate illegitimate children, Elsa responded, “There is no such thing as an illegitimate child -- there may be illegitimate parents.”
Her intelligence, wit and tobacco/whisky voice helped her rise quickly in the BBC during the war. She headed the international affairs desk of a program called Radio Newsreel, which reached 20 million people. Elsa wrote the first documented stories on the Nazi extermination camps. The program and her work in general had a huge impact and she influenced many journalists. She worked at the BBC for 8 years, from 1941 to 1949 and got to know Dylan Thomas, George Orwell and CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow.
Elsa’s principles were unflinching. She had watched the BBC use the communist left during the war to rally anti-fascist resistance in Europe and was appalled when they refused to have anything to do with the same lefties after the war. Elsa was no communist sympathizer. She refused to return to Hungary with her lover because the communist government there curtailed free speech. But she was unabashedly on the left.
Her break with the BBC came when a senior colleague told her bluntly, “Elsa, you’ve got the highest rating that any woman has held in the news division, but you’ll never go up any higher because the next move will put you over men and that they will not tolerate.” It was 1949.
It took Elsa eight years to find KPFA. No American radio network would touch her on her own terms. She worked at WCFM, the first cooperatively owned radio station in the United States, in Washington, DC until it failed in 1953. She then sold sewing machines and worked as a clerk in Garfinkles in Washington to stay alive.
Elsa started at KPFA in April of 1957, when Pacifica founder Lew Hill was in his final struggle to retain control of Pacifica. As Lew became less active in day-to-day affairs, Elsa took over his vision, modified it and forced it on Pacifica by the sheer weight of her intelligence, professionalism and dedication. She shared Lew’s vision of a radio station committed to world peace, understanding among people, tolerance and the importance of a vibrant, diversified culture. Unlike Lew, Elsa was no pacifist and I suspect would have fought in World War II if she had been a man. Lew sat the war out as a conscientious objector.
Elsa was a consummate professional who maintained the highest broadcast standards. She did not believe that truth was found halfway between two extremes, the “liberal broadcasters” cop-out, she called it. Gene Marine recalled listening from home to a documentary he had produced. It was followed by a discussion with Elsa and the station manager. The manager complained that Gene’s program had not been fair in giving equal time to both sides of the controversy. Without a beat Elsa replied, “Sometimes the facts are biased.”
For Elsa the truth usually lay to the left of center. She may have considered herself a socialist. She often explained that “A conservative is someone who wishes the world to stand still wherever it is that they have found it became it is satisfying to them in its present state. A liberal is a man or woman who wishes the world was a nicer place. A socialist is someone who is prepared to try to make it a nicer place. And a communist is a socialist in despair.”
This puts Elsa squarely in the deepest and richest tradition of American journalism. From its founding father Tom Paine who helped bring the common man through six and half years of brutal revolutionary war in the 18th Century, through Lincoln Steffens and the turn of the Twentieth Century muckrakers, to today’s Twenty-first Century investigative reporters and whistle blowers, our best journalists have had an instinctive distrust of authority, wealth and privilege. They are a Fourth Estate in the full sense of the phrase, viewing those in power with skepticism and extending compassion to the weak and helpless, fascinated by society’s outcasts and its mad geniuses.