From Carter to Reagan
I may have answered the question that prompted my blog, “Who stole my country?” It was not the Republicans alone. It was the entire political class. Democrats bought into Republican repudiation of working people when Gary Hart mocked “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats.” It began in earnest under Jimmy Carter when he carried out much of the Trilateral Commissions’ agenda. Paul Volker, appointed by Carter as Chairman of the Federal Reserve was clear, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline.”[1] Alfred Kahn, Carter’s inflation adviser, declared labor one of the administration’s “natural enemies.”
In 1980 Carter put the country on an austerity diet that hurt ordinary working people during a time of inflation and employment. He closed large asylums for the mental ill. The institutions were supposed to be replaced with small unit housing, but that part of the program never got funded. Homelessness exploded and our prisons became the institutions of last resort for people with mental problems.
Shortly after I started producing ATC Carter faced another crisis. On November 4th, sixty-three Americans were among ninety hostages taken at the American embassy in Tehran. Three thousand students, infuriated that Carter invited the hated shah they had just overthrown to the United States for medical treatment, demanded that he be returned to Iran to stand trial. Correspondent Ted Koppel lunched Nightline, beginning every show with the words, “day two hundred and twenty-nine (or whatever it was), America held hostage!” (Dramatic music). It was a nightly humiliation for President Carter.
In late December of 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support a communist led government. In covering the invasion for All Things Considered, we faced a dilemma. The Soviets claimed to have intervened in Afghanistan because the United States was funding terrorists trying to overthrow the Afghan government. Some of our sources suggested the Soviet accusation might be true, but Carter, who promised never to lie to the American people, vigorously denied them.
ATC did not broadcast the rumors. I wondered what we would have done at Pacifica. We certainly would have been less willing to accept our government’s assertions. Would we have dug more deeply for better sources? Would we have found some way to get more reliable information from Afghanistan, as we had with the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion?
Cold War tensions increased after the invasion. When the Soviets refused to withdraw, Carter imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union in January. In March he cancelled American participation the 1980 summer Olympic games to be held in the Soviet Union. In June Carter reinstated the draft for all men between the ages of 18 and 25.
As it turned out, the Soviet Union was telling the truth, although to my knowledge not one member of the American press picked up on it. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in January of 1998, Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, bragged about Carter’s decision. Asked whether he regretted the covert action against the Afghan government, Brzezinski replied, “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”
On July 16th, 1980, Ronald Reagan was nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency. Using the country’s economic problems (inflation and unemployment) as the springboard for his campaign, Reagan’s sunny disposition reinforced his campaign promise “to make America great again.” Another increase in oil prices in 1979 had sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had heated up the Cold War. Iranian radicals were holding 52 U.S. citizens hostage in Tehran.
Despite Carter’s problems and Reagan’s sunny smiles, Carter remained ahead in the polls until a debate held just a week before the election, on October 28th. It was one of the most heavily watched television shows in history. Watching it in 2017 was a window into a different country. The questions the reporters ask are serious, respectful and informative. There were no questions about Carter’s alcoholic brother Jimmy or his unpopular suggestion that we drive at 55 miles an hour and only heat our homes to 68 degrees. There were no questions about Reagan’s age or his movie career. Debate topics included the Iranian hostage crisis, nuclear arms treaties, military spending, tax cuts, inflation, and waste and fraud in government spending.
Carter was forceful, thoughtful, and appeared confident. The things people remembered from the debate, however, all undermined Carter’s chances. Even watching in 2017, his invocation of his daughter Amy’s opinion on nuclear war seemed awkward and exploitative. It became the brunt of late-night talk show jokes almost immediately. One famous cartoon published the day after Reagan won, showed Amy sitting in Carter's lap with her shoulders shrugged asking "the economy? the hostage crisis?"
Reagan’s seemingly casual but brilliant aside when confronted by a Carter criticism, “There you go again,” became part of the national lexicon. In his closing remarks, Reagan simply asked, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago.”
Carter tried to portray Reagan as a reckless "war hawk" and a "dangerous right-wing radical". Watching in 2017, Reagan talks like a moderate, slightly to the right of Hilary Clinton. He was skilled at expounding the traditional Republican agenda, making it sound sensible and folksy. Too many people were “locked out of public lands.” Too many regulations hampered the development of nuclear power and job growth throughout the economy. Free enterprise can do a better job than government at building things. “Government isn’t the solution,” he famously said, “government is the problem.” He spoke of protecting working people from rapacious unions.
A few days after the debate, Reagan’s poll numbers had switched. He went from 3 points behind Carter to 3 points ahead. On November 4th Reagan won the election in a landside.
[1] https://medium.com/@timbarker_2092/a-note-on-paul-volcker-and-the-standard-of-living-d262f7f83b51
Reagan
Changes in administrations are good for news show and Regan stayed in the news from the day of his inauguration, when Iran released the remaining American hostages. In February 1981, he sent to Congress one of the most sweeping revisions of budget and tax policy ever attempted. The centerpiece was an enormous tax cut, based on a theory called “supply-side economics,” which argued that tax cuts stimulate investment, putting more people to work and therefore they raise tax returns in the long run.
Critics warned that Reagan revenue would fall far short of the administration’s claims and create huge budget deficits in the future. Reagan went on television and asked people to write their legislators and support the cuts. House Democrats began to bow to public pressure and added their own tax cuts. Reagan could claim victory on Capitol Hill, with the help of Democrats.
In March John Hinkley,Jr. attempted to assassinate Reagan, and the president’s graceful reaction impressed everyone. He may have been a second-rate actor in his early Hollywood days, but he played the president with remarkable skill.
In August about 13,000 employees of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike. Ever since it was founded in 1968, air traffic controllers have demonstrated over safety and fatigue on a demanding job with life and death stakes. Federal workers are forbidden from striking, but PATCO had supported Reagan during the election and Reagan had endorsed the union.
Air Traffic Controllers asked for higher pay, improved workplace conditions and a 32-hour workweek. President Reagan said the strike was a "peril to national safety" and ordered workers return to their jobs in 48 hours. When 11,345 failed to show up, Reagan fired them, banned them from federal service for life, and fined the union enough to drive it into bankruptcy. Reagan’s firing was an emotional story. Many workers were jailed, and thousands fell into poverty.
Reagan’s busted PATCO at an opportune time for the enemies of the labor movement. U.S. manufacturing output peaked in 1979 and manufacturing began its long slide, dragging the incomes of the middle class with it. Skilled workers weren't needed in the way they once were. Wall Street was back in power for the first time since 1929. (It still is.) Across-the-board deregulation, tentatively nurtured under Carter, was another core belief of the Reagan revolution. The third was another Carter initiative on steroids, a large military buildup.
Reagan’s most lasting legacy may be his demonizing of government. Those of us who grew up in the Great Depression and World War II recognize government as the place where ordinary people voting together have power over the psychopathic few who want everything for themselves. Through our government we have roads, airports, national parks, an accurate census, clean air and water, and we should have health care and a decent education. So why do most people hate government?
Using the New York Times, economist David George examined the words used to describe government over forty years. In the mid-twentieth century, words such as efficient, competent, and creative were far more likely to precede government or public sector activities than words like inefficient and wasteful. Between 1980, when Reagan was elected, and 2009, however, the balance shifted—from seven times more positive descriptions to roughly fifty-fifty. At the same time, the number of references to government also fell sharply. As have the number of federal workers. When Eisenhower took office, there was one federal worker for every 78 Americans. By 1989, the ratio was one for every 110.
All Things Considered
ATC went through a substantial rise in audience in the two years I was there. The launching a Morning Edition brought a lot more attention to NPR in general, and the election and dramatic events of those two years helped. But our regional reporters also helped increase our national audience and our editorial policy hooked more listeners. Provocative commentaries increased our audience, even if people were upset by what they heard.
The most controversial renegade I put on ATC was Richard Elman, my old friend and colleague from New York City. As I’ve said before, Richard was not political, but he had a wicked eye for hypocrisy, and he mocked the scared instead of the profane. Frank Mankowitz and most NPR staff reporters hated Richard Elman’s commentaries, but if you walked into the newsroom when Richard was on the air every reporter had stopped working and was listening to him. I would obnoxiously point out that Richard was great radio!
I could not broadcast everything Richard sent me. In one commentary on President Reagan, Richard said the president was made of “poly-scrotal Bakelite material” and was operated by a box located in his back, which is why Nancy was always standing next to him with her arm around him. Richard’s point was that Reagan was a puppet, but even I knew this metaphor was a bridge too far for public radio. If anyone has any old Richard Elman commentaries, let me know.
Mankowitz complained about Richard’s commentaries and eventually ordered me to take them off the air. I did so but kept Richard broadcasting on ATC as a book reviewer with a much more conventional tone. I was sitting in a bathing suit with Mankowitz around a pool in Los Angeles at a NPR national convention when someone came up and told Mankowitz that Elman was still on the air. He turned red in the face as he looked at me. Betting on the fact that he liked me, I suggested, “Hemmingway defined courage as grace under fire.” Mankowitz had the courage to laugh but it was Elman’s last broadcast.
I had already ruffled NPR’s feathers. On March 30th, 1981, only a few weeks into the new administration, John Hinkley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Reagan. We devoted the first half hour of ATC to the events themselves. In the second half hour we covered the reaction to the attack, with comments from his daughter, historians, political leaders in Washington and the usual commentators.
The Associate Press that day carried stories that in classrooms across the country African American students had stood and cheered when they heard of the attack. We broadcast one 30 second comment by an African America woman saying that Reagan’s death wouldn’t matter to her, because Reagan had never done anything for her people. The secret service arrived twenty minutes later. Much to their irritation, one of my producers had destroyed the original tape, which had been sent to us from a small station in the Midwest.
Many NPR stations were infuriated that we broadcast this woman’s comments. I was asked to participate in a conference call with the managers of more than three hundred stations. I explained that our job was to report the news, not to make it, and this was something our audience needed to know. It may not have satisfied everyone, but it shut them up.
My most egregious decision was to broadcast the phrase “mother-fucker” during an evening news broadcast. Here's the context. We were doing a story on Vietnam Veterans’ poetry, and the most powerful poem ended with those words directed at the audience, “You killed him you mother-fucker.” The phrase was essential to the impact of the poem. In my mind, it was the only phrase that encapsulated the obscenity of that prolonged war that destroyed so many of our young and millions of Vietnamese. I knew the broadcast might get us in trouble, so I voiced the poem myself.
Americans’ attitude toward “the seven words you can never say on radio or television” seems peculiar to me. First, the censored words all have Anglo-Saxon roots while the acceptable words have Latin roots. Rome began its final conquest of the Anglo Saxons in 43 AD. They had such a profound effect on English culture that it is still okay to refer to a woman’s “vagina” or a man’s “penis” (both words with Latinate roots) but not to refer to the same objects by their Anglo-Saxon words “cunt” and “cock” – which, incidentally, are warmer and friendlier. Forbidding those words on American radio and TV in the Twenty-first Century is an example of enduring cultural imperialism.
That being said, I should have run the decision by Barbara, but I knew she’d veto it. No one on my staff tried to stop me. Broadcasting those words reminds me of how much incredible freedom we had during the two years I produced ATC, because management was completely focused on making a success of Morning Edition.
There were consequences. The mandatory conference call with station managers did not go well. NPR was tired of me. I was exported to the position of Executive Producer and for a few months spent quite a bit of time playing video games in an arcade on 19th Street. Then someone found money for a long-held NPR fantasy, a television version of ATC. Given my television background, they asked me to produce it. Fearful of my editorial unpredictability, they made Al Pulmutter my executive producer.
The final product was, I regret to say, one of the worst programs I’ve ever produced. We called it All Things Considered on Main Street, a hodge-podge of stories with no particular theme. There was some terrific journalism, such as Bill Buzenberg’s piece on immigrant detention centers and some entertaining pieces like Cajon music in Louisiana. We got a respectful but unenthusiastic review in the New York Times. A second attempt was unlikely. I decided it was time to move on.
Inside Story
Inside Story was a PBS series that examined the performance of American journalism at home and abroad. It wasn’t afraid to use the same technics journalists used to get a story, including ambush interviews and leaving a camera running when the interview was formally over. Inside Story was the brainchild of Executive Producer Ned Schnurman who hired Hodding Carter to host the series. It was a shrewd choice. Carter had been spokesman for the State Department during much of the Iranian hostage crisis and anyone who watched the news knew his face.
Ned hired me in the Fall of 1982. General Electric was about to provide sole funding, a $4 million a year grant, enough to both produce and promote a decent series. The third season began in March of 1983. Pre-broadcast reviews were good. “Although some observers have felt that in the past the program did not quite live up to the very high expectations for it, this season, operating for the first time on adequate funding (from GE), ''Inside Story'' seems to be functioning exceptionally well as a kind of ombudsman between the people and the press.”
Hodding emphasized that there was a public demand for accountability by the media. ''The public wants to know that there is a watchdog watching the press. There seems to be a running hostility out there about what is perceived as a lack of accountability, a lack of responsiveness in the press.''
We kicked off the third season with a show that Hodding and I did on American Press Coverage of the Soviet Union. Most television correspondents didn’t speak Russian, knew little about Soviet or Russian history and stayed inside an expat bubble. The Soviets made it difficult to interact with its citizens, but it was not impossible. Hodding and I interviewed dissidents, some probably with Moscow’s knowledge, but I also met with ordinary Russians. More on that in a moment.
The most important insight I carried with me from our visit had little to do with the show we were producing. It struck me, in multiple ways, that the threat posed by the Soviet Union was highly exaggerated. The governing system was on a losing spiral. You saw it everywhere you turned.
Our Soviet handler was a Hollywood caricature of the Communist tough guy, with a leather jacket and cap, heavy boots and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his sneering mouth. He would only permit us to film pre-arranged and authorized interviews. When I told him I was going to interview the American ambassador, he absolutely forbade it. We had a screaming fight about it. How would he know, I asked. We’ll know, he said, and I’ll confiscate your film and throw you out of the country.
Between interviews, we would drive through Moscow looking for establishing shots, hoping to show viewers what life looked like in the Soviet capital. Every shot I wanted to take was impossible, because it required a permission that I had not obtained and would take weeks to get.
After a second day of complete frustration, I went down to the bar for a nightcap. A very attractive young lady asked if she could join me for a drink. I declined but looking around the bar I saw several of these gorgeous creatures approaching other single men. The next morning, I asked my Soviet handler about the women in the bar. He replied, “You mean the hookers? They are no problem. They don’t exist.” Here was an essential fact about the Soviet Union. Perception was more important than reality.
As we toured the city that day, I didn’t ask my handler if I could take a shot. When I saw something I liked I suggested we get out of the van and have a cigarette. It was a cue to my cameraman to get the shot while the handler and I looked the other way. I never asked for permission and if questioned my handler could say that the underhanded Americans tricked him while he was looking away! Sergi and I began to enjoy each others company. He knew some terrific places to eat
Most telling I thought was the unavailability of photo copying machines. They were few and far between, and when you found one you needed three keys to unlock them, one at least held by a loyal party member. This was absurd in the emerging information age. If the United States had used the money it cost to build one atomic bomb to parachute hundreds of thousands of zerox machine into the Soviet Union in 1983, the regime would have collapsed five years earlier than it did.
I also learned something about deep problems perhaps inherent in the collective ownership of the means of production. Just as it’s mistaken to put essential services such as health care, education, prisons and defense in the hands of private enterprise, it’s also dangerous to put every production decision in the hands of government.
On one of our last nights in Moscow, our Russian translators and fixers invited us to a party. Hodding had a late dinner meeting, and I went alone. One of our translators and I took a taxi to a housing complex. It was a cold, February evening with a scattering of snow on the ground and icy patches on the sidewalks. We entered the nearest building and walked from one end to other, then back outside where we cut to the left and entered another apartment building. We repeated the maneuver three times and finally stopped just inside a glass door and looked back. We waited quietly for about five minutes, when nothing stirred behind us, we took an elevator up to one of the top floors.
The small apartment was full of young people. Rock and roll played in the background. Everyone had a glass of vodka. The scent of marijuana was heavy in the air. When offered a puff on a passed joint I declined, fearful there could be a government agent at the party. An America reporter caught smoking dope at an illegal party in the Soviet Union would have been a great news story, but not the one Hodding wanted us to come back with.
By two in the morning the dancing had stopped, the party quieted down, Lady Day drifted out of audio speakers in the next room. The young people talked about life in the Soviet Union. The simplest things, it seemed, were always unavailable. When we came back, they pleaded, bring us cartons of pampers. We have only cloth diapers.
I said, but what’s the problem. Find a source of cheap absorbent paper, some plastic sheeting, you’ve all got sewing machines, make them yourselves and you can probably sell them. The idea was completely absurd to them. It wasn’t simply the practical problem of obtaining the absorbent paper and plastic that deterred them, nor the fact that it would be illegal to engage in such an enterprise. It was that whole concept of individual initiative seemed utterly foreign to them. They literally could not conceive of the idea.
Whatever threats the Soviet Union might have posed in the past, by 1983 it was a vast Potemkin village. (Grigory Potemkin, a Russian military leader is said to have had elaborate fake villages constructed for Catherine the Great's tours of Ukraine and Crimea). Moscow’s centralized authority stifled initiate. Its survival depended on fear, soul crushing hypocrisy and massive corruption for everyday existence. How much of our national treasure had we squandered on defending against a paper tiger?
Inside the USSR won the 1983 Edward R. Murrow Award and a 1983 National Emmy for Outstanding Coverage of A Continuing News Story.
Central America
Central American became a preoccupation for the Reagan administration and press coverage followed. Inside Story went to Central America first in August of 1983. The Reagan Administration was supporting a group of terrorists called “the Contras,” who were trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
At the time, Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua. They were a revolutionary party that in 1979 had overthrown a brutal regime headed by Anastasio Somosa. The Carter Administration initially supported the new Sandinista government with an aid package worth $125 million. Conservatives accused Carter of helping Moscow establish another Communist beachhead in the Americas. The charge was made more potent by Sandinista support for a left wing revolutionary movement trying to overthrow neighboring El Salvador’s right wing oligarchy.
A former colonel in Somosa’s National Guard named Enrique Bermúdez founded the Contras with soldiers that fled to Honduras after their 1979 defeat. Bermúdez secured aid from Argentina’s military dictatorship and recruited anti-Sandinistas and American mercenaries to join him. The Reagan Administration provided financial support, eventually $433 million. As Noam Chomsky commented, “You could probably start a guerrilla insurgency in mountain regions of the US with comparable funding.”
Despite the Contras unsavory reputation, the administration called them freedom fighters, “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers” Reagan said. “The Sandinista rule is a Communist reign of Terror,” he added. The American press largely went along with the administration’s comments.
In fact, according to a World Bank report, Nicaragua’s development projects were "extraordinarily successful … in some sectors, better than anywhere else in the world." In 1983, The Inter-American Development Bank concluded "Nicaragua has made noteworthy progress in the social sector, which is laying the basis for long-term socio-economic development." José Figueres, the father of Costa Rican democracy, wrote, "for the first time, Nicaragua has a government that cares for its people." None of these positive statements was reported in the American mainstream media.
It was not American coverage that took us to Nicaragua, however. It was Nicaragua’s own press. The Chamorro family, one of Nicaragua’s oldest, had been involved in the newspaper business for decades and in the Sandinista revolution since the beginning. It was editor Pedro Chamorro’s assassination by Somosa in 1978 that turned the vast majority of the country against him and brought the Sandinistas to power.
In 1983, four years later, the family was bitterly divided. They now ran three different newspapers. Pedro’s son, also named Pedro, edited La Prensa with an anti-Sandinista policy; Pedro’s other son Carlos edited La Baricada, the official Sandinista newspaper; and Pedro’s brother, Xavier, edited El Nuevo Diaro, with an independent but pro government bent.
Carlos told us, if you want to understand the revolution, talk to the peasants and workers where land distribution, universal education and health care were wildly popular. Pedro sent us to members of the elite, where land confiscation, high taxes, rationing, and neighborhood watch committees were an anathema. Businessman Enrique Bolanes, jailed twice by the regime, told us that the Sandinistas were going “beyond Somosa’s way of doing things” with this “monster of evil.”
Two of the most vivid scenes were 1) Commander Tomas Borges, the only surviving original founder of the Sandinistas who routinely refused to talk to the press, walking with Hodding among people in the barrio like a rock star. 2) Watching the absurd censorship of La Prensa by a 27-year-old Sandinista functionary.
We didn’t know it at the time, but another member of the family, Edgar Chamorro, had fled to Miami when the Sandinista entered Managua in 1979 and joined the Contras. He eventually quit the Contras and testified against them when Nicaragua brought a case against the United States in the World Court. “Many civilians were killed in cold blood. Many others were tortured, mutilated, raped, robbed or otherwise abused. … When I agreed to join … I had hoped that it would be an organization of Nicaraguans … [It] turned out to be an instrument of the U.S. Government.”
Nicaragua: A House Divided was well reviewed, including a long article in the New York Times and it won the 1983 National Emmy for Outstanding Background Analysis of a Single Current Story.