FREEDOM OF THE PRESS 

by William H. Benson

November 15, 2007

     On November 17, 1734, New York’s colonial authorities arrested Peter Zenger, a recent immigrant from Germany who had, upon his arrival, begun printing the New York Weekly Journal. William Cosby, the governor, charged Zenger with publishing articles about the governor that he considered libelous. However, the court acquitted Zenger on August 4, 1735, arguing that even though Zenger had written highly critical comments about the governor, everything he wrote was true.

     The case set an important American tradition, that those serving in public positions are valid subjects for public criticism, but that the criticisms must be true. The case paved the way for freedom of the press, which was then guaranteed in the First Amendment of Madison’s Bill of Rights in 1789: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press.”

     In 1798, during the John Adams administration, a Federalist-controlled Congress passed a controversial law, known as the Sedition Act, which prohibited the publishing or even the utterance of any “false, scandalous, and malicious” criticism of the government or its top officials. Ten Jeffersonian Republicans, mostly newspaper editors, were convicted, and three were jailed. An outraged Jefferson declared that the Sedition Act was a violation of the First Amendment. After a time, the Sedition Act was struck down.

     So we see that a certain tension has marked relations between public officials and the press throughout American history. Kennedy had a wonderful rapport with the press, probably the best of any modern-day President. The Washington press corps loved his charm and appreciated his wit during their press meetings. Nixon had the worst. After his failure to win the election as governor of California, he leveled them with his rejoinder, “You won’t have me to kick around anymore.”

     In a new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich, a columnist for the New York Times, makes a strong case that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld artfully deceived the press in their run-up for war against Iraq, and “the press, by and large, took the bait.”

     The war was sold upon certain premises: that there was an official Iraqi connection with at least one of the 9/11 terrorists, that Sadaam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, specifically aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium, and that there was no reason to wait for the final proof—a nuclear explosion.

     We soon learned that none of these claims was even remotely true, and that this was not simply a case of incorrect intelligence. A British memo surfaced in July of 2002, months before the war, which said that “the intelligence and facts” about W.M.D.’s “were being fixed around the policy” of going to war.

     A biographer of Bush’s Presidency recently wrote: “Bush was not relying on intelligence to buttress his claims of Saddam’s dark fantasies of plotting attacks on America with Al Qaeda. . . . For no such intelligence existed.”

     There is plenty of blame to share for this failure, and some rests upon the newspapers and the reporters. They should have known better than to swallow all that Bush was saying. They should have dug deeper and not buried their concerns on the back pages.

     A reviewer of Rich’s book asked a series of pointed questions: “How could this have happened? How could some of the best, most fact-checked, most reputable news organizations in the English-speaking world have been so gullible? How can one explain the temporary paralysis of skepticism?”

     A writer to be worth anything must think unconventionally, and she or he must question everything, take nothing on faith until she or he has proved true what the political leaders are saying. Narrow-mindedness, prejudice, and narrow horizons can stand in the way of getting at the truth. That is the funny thing about facts; they keep getting in the way of our prejudices, and our own biased distortions of the truth.

     It is the duty of the press in a free society to certify as true that which the politicians publicly state, and if it is not true, to say that it is false. That was the premise of Zenger’s case, and in Bush’s geared-up campaign to take out Saddam Hussein, the press failed to attack, criticize, or even act skeptical.

ALIVE

by William H. Benson

November 1, 2007

     On Thursday, October 12, 1972 forty passengers boarded a Fairchild F-227, a prop-powered aircraft owned by the Uruguayan air force. A rugby team from Montevideo had chartered it to take the team’s members to Santiago for a match against Chile’s team. With a crew of five, the aircraft headed west toward the Andes.

     That afternoon, due to bad weather reported high in the mountains, the pilot landed at Mendoza, Argentina, at the base of the mountains, and the crew decided to spend the night there. The next day the pilot was still unsure about the tricky wind conditions above the Andes, but the rugby team begged him to go, and so he agreed.

     They crashed that afternoon, Friday, the thirteenth. An air pocket had dropped the aircraft several hundred feet, and it was unable then to climb. The right wing hit first; it whipped around, and cut off the tail. Then, the left wing was severed, and the fuselage, instead of slamming into the side of the mountain, fortunately skidded along like a toboggan on the snow field.

     Of the forty-five on board, thirty-two survived the crash. Amazingly only a handful of them had severe wounds. Nando Parrado, then only twenty-two, hit his head and was unconscious for three days. When he awoke, he was told that his cranium had broken.

     The stronger team members did what they could to survive the cold at 12,000 feet elevation. On three sides of their position, stood towering peaks. With debris from the crash, they fashioned a wall at the broken-off end of the fuselage, and thus spent their nights inside shivering due to the brutal cold, but surviving. They expected help immediately, but then they heard on a transistor radio that the search had been called off.

     Two weeks later, on the night of October 27, an avalanche buried the Fairchild and dumped three feet of snow into the interior of the fuselage, suffocating eight people who slept on the floor. Someone dug down and found Nando’s face, and thus he lived.      

    They had little protective clothing, only light jackets, no sleeping bags, no gloves, no sunglasses, and no food. To survive they resorted to cannibalism, eating the bodies of those who had died, despite feelings of revulsion, sin, shame, and guilt.

     A group formed among them, which they called the Expeditioners, to climb their way to help. Three of them walked to the west toward the closest peak, but came back that same day utterly exhausted, claiming that even though it looked close, it would take days to climb it. Another foray to the east located the tail of the aircraft, and within it, they found insulation, which they sewed with copper wires into a sleeping bag for three.

     On his own, Nando Parrado decided that he could scale that western peak. No one supported his belief. He took the sleeping bag, two other men—Roberto Canessa and Antonio Vizintin—and a ten day supply of food. Nando reasoned that to stay at the Fairchild was death, for it was all around them. The mountain wanted to consume them. Human life in the Andes was an anomaly, and the mountain would defeat them all.

     It required three days of exhausting work for the three boys to scale that western peak. The incline was often vertical, with little to hold or grab. At that altitude, over 17,000 feet high, they found that the mind shuts down, and the body is so easily tired. At the summit Nando and Canessa sent Vizintin back to the Fairchild, and the two boys rested one more night. Six days later, after walking down the Chilean side of that mountain, they saw a man on a horse, signaled him for help, and he called the authorities. The news electrified the world: some of Uruguay’s rugby team were alive after seventy days.

     Nando directed the daring helicopter rides—on December 22 and 23, which safely delivered the other survivors, reduced to fourteen, from the Fairchild to civilization.

     Human physical power is one thing; human mental will power is another. Of all those boys stranded on that mountain, only Nando Parrado had the will and strength in sufficient combination to conquer that mountain. Daily he had visualized his climb up and out, and he believed that he could hear his father coaching him each step.

     Last year Nando, now fifty-seven, published a book, Miracle in the Andes, an exciting re-telling of his ordeal.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

by William H. Benson

October 18, 2007

     On October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy received evidence that the Russians were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles off Florida’s coast. Photographs taken the day before from a U2 aircraft had revealed large-scale military activity. The Russian leader, Nikita Krushchev, was installing forty-two medium-range 1100-mile nuclear missiles, twenty-four 2,200 miles nuclear missiles, plus twenty-four SAM anti-aircraft missile groups. He was also sending 42,000 Soviet troops and technicians.

     U.S. military advisors told the President that by December fifty of these missiles would be deployed and ready to aim at U.S. targets, capable of destroying in seventeen minutes the main U. S. defenses.

     This heightened level of military activity was impossible to hide, and, yet, when Kennedy confronted Krushchev about his actions, he lied, claiming that the missiles were all only short-range. He boasted to the young President that not even Stalin would have dared exporting missiles to Cuba.

     Thoroughly shocked by Krushchev’s deception and arrogance, Kennedy called a meeting on October 16 of the executive committee of the National Security Council. Some, such as Dean Acheson and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, argued for an immediate air strike and a follow-up ground invasion. Others, such as Adlai Stevenson, suggested that they barter, offering to give away something in exchange for a Russian promise to remove the missiles. Others suggested that Kennedy do nothing

     Kennedy hesitated, unsure now of what he should do.

     Once consulted Richard Nixon, advised him, “I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in.” But, the Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued against a pre-emptive air strike, in that it was not in the U.S. tradition: “The burden of carrying the Mark of Cain on your brow for the rest of your lives is something we all [would] have to bear.”

     Eighteen months earlier, the new President had approved a naïve CIA plan to send into Cuba armed Cuban exiles, intending to overthrow Castro’s Communist government. The Cuban leader had read about the operation in U.S. newspapers, and so his troops were ready: they killed 114 of the invaders and took prisoner the rest, 1189, nearly all of whom were executed or died in Cuba’s prisons. The Bay of Pigs fiasco shook Kennedy’s confidence in himself, and also in his intelligence officers.

     Finally, on October 22, Kennedy decided. He imposed a naval quarantine upon Cuba, holding in reserve an air strike. Soviet ships carrying missiles to the islands were forced to turn around. Kennedy then pledged to Krushchev that he would not again try to invade Cuba, granted other concessions. Upon those promises, on October 28, the Russian leader agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba. Castro was furious.

     Most of the world was unaware how close the U.S. and the Soviet Union were to a nuclear war. Kennedy had available 800 B47s, 550 B52s, and 70 B58s, each with their bomb-bays closed and thus poised for an immediate takeoff. Ninety B52s, each carrying multi-megaton bombs, circled above the Atlantic. He made active the nuclear warheads on a hundred Atlas, fifty Titan, and twelve Minuteman missiles and placed all military commands in a state of Defcon-2, the highest point of readiness.

     Even though Kennedy appeared to have won this contest, historians, such as Paul Johnson, have since suggested that it was more of a defeat. At that time, the U.S. had enormous advantages in military might, and the President could have demanded the removal of the missiles, without offering any concessions. As it turned out, Kennedy, according to Paul Johnson “acquiesced in the continuance of a Communist regime in Cuba in open military alliance with Soviet Russia. . . . The United States would have been well within its moral and legal rights in seeking to overthrow Castro and impose a democratic government.”

     Forty-five years have passed, and we still have a Cuba with Castro and a paralyzing but quite legitimate fear that nuclear weapons may fall into the wrong hands.

SOUTHERN LITERATURE

by William H. Benson

October 4, 2007

     The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee will celebrate the Southern Festival of Books next weekend. It is an event celebrated the second week of October each year, and its purpose is to promote reading and writing, as well as a broader understanding of the language and culture of the Southern states.

     Two of the best writers America has produced were from the South: Samuel Clemens also known as Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken. Actually, they were from Southern slave states that did not join the Confederacy at the time of secession: Twain was born and raised in Missouri, and Mencken hailed from Baltimore, Maryland. Few writers since have demonstrated greater skill with the English language than did Twain and Mencken.

     Twain knew the South. He knew her people, their language, and the details of their lives. He knew the river! It was “the great Mississippi, the great majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.” From the river Clemens took his name. Rivermen would call out “mark twain” when sounding two fathoms.

     On the steamboats Clemens piloted, he met up with all types of characters: the gamblers, the fast talkers, the dull-witted, the destitute, the innocent dupes, and the downtrodden. When he set about to write his stories, Twain drew heavily from his days on the Mississippi. He created Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the slave Jim who all lived in St. Petersburg, Missouri. Jim, with the help of young Huckleberry, escaped his owner by boarding a raft, and the two slid down the mighty Mississippi.

     But Twain knew the ugly side of life in a small Southern town. Through Huckleberry Finn’s voice, Twain described the degradation of the poor slaves and of the desperate white sharecroppers. Huck Finn told how Colonel Sherburn in public shot and killed a town drunk named Old Boggs. The Colonel was never arrested, for he knew that no jury would ever convict him. With clarity, Mark Twain painted a devastating landscape of a Southern village, complete with murder, drunkenness, human ownership of other humans, mob rule, and utter hopelessness.

     It makes for great literature, but it must have been a terrible life for most. It is no wonder that Samuel Clemens as an adult chose to live in the north—in Connecticut and in New York City, and also in Europe.

     In the spring of 1882, two decades after Sam had left the Mississippi, he returned to St. Louis, and aboard a steamboat, he sailed up and down the river. He was stunned at how backwards the South was relative to the North. He thought it was because the Southern people were still gripping their feudal past. The economy of the former Confederacy was blighted, and the people were lost in sentimentality and romanticism.

     “Everybody bragged, everybody blustered,” he said, and “all over the land, two things could count upon reverence and championship—religion and slavery.”

     Fifty years later conditions had not changed much. H. L. Mencken echoed similar sentiments in his highly critical essay, The Sahara of the Bozart. “And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

     “Alas, for the South!” Mencken wrote. “Her books have grown fewer. She never was much given to literature.”

     The situation in the South has greatly improved since the days of Twain and Mencken. The former Confederate States now are economic powerhouses. Her cities—Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth, Little Rock, and Charlotte—are world class. Except for Reagan, all of our Presidents since 1980 were from the South: Carter was from Georgia, both Bush’s claim Texas, and Clinton was from Arkansas. Truly, the South’s economic and political transformation is our nation’s miracle, a rags-to-riches story.    

     And slowly, Southern writers, such as William Faulkner of Mississippi, have created a respectable Southern literature. And then there are the modern popular writers: John Grisham of Mississippi and Patrick Conroy of South Carolina. The South’s books have grown, not fewer, but larger. 

SCHOOL DAYS

by William H. Benson

September 20, 2007

     The calendar and the cooling of the temperatures tell us that another school year has arrived. The fall sports schedule is in full swing, and just beyond the horizon lies the winter schedule. The presence of the book backpacks indicates that teachers are poring on the homework—their duty and a very good thing for the students, and the more serious students are responding with hours of solitary concentration.

     In 1987, twenty years ago already, a professor at the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom, published The Closing of the American Mind, a book that spent more than a year on the best-seller’s list then. A humanities scholar who specialized in the works of Plato and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Bloom issued a series of daring claims in his book about what is wrong with the university as a whole, with the disciplines included within the humanities, and with the students themselves.

      Things went wrong on the university campus, so Bloom charged, in the 1960’s when certain pieces of that vast collection known as the Western Canon, which includes Plato, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Emerson and others, were replaced with writers more modern and also representative of women and minorities.

     The literature curriculum, in other words, was dumbed down to accommodate students unwilling to work as hard as the great writers require of readers. As the Greek and Roman classics had disappeared in the previous century, so now had other worthy writers. It was the students’ loss, and yet they and many at the universities wanted writers more relevant, what ever that may mean.

     But the larger question is, “Why study the Western Canon or the humanities or history or English or philosophy at all?” In the light of the costs of a four-year degree, it does seem ludicrous to spend the time and money reading Spinoza and Nietzsche. Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor said it this way, “The big question for humanists is, ‘How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists?’ That’s been tough, really tough.”

     Allan Bloom tried to answer that question. A liberal arts education, he believed, should provide a student with “four years of freedom”—“a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.”

     Bloom identified certain opinions that students bring with them and also the distractions that together prevent students from receiving all they can at the university.

     He said, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. Students are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. The true believer is the real danger. . . . This is something with which they have been indoctrinated.”

     Openness has rejected the natural rights of people. Unreserved equality and total tolerance for others’ opinions has overthrown identification of evil ideas and recognition of the world’s injustices. Suddenly, everything, including truth and beauty, is relative. And so Bloom entitled his book as he did: the American mind is closed, and yet thinks it wide open. The word sophomore unites two disparate Greek words: wise and fool.

     Music is the major distraction for students, Bloom claimed, a not so surprising comment. “Though students do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. This is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it.”

     Yes, music is still a powerful influence among students, but I see that the cell phone and the internet have gradually replaced music as the students’ source of distraction. The cell phone seems a permanent fixture today, something Bloom did not foresee in 1987.

     Education is there at the university, available for anyone willing to work. The learning is profound and life changing. Bloom put it this way: “The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures.”