The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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that it was emotionally necessary that Mr. Lindsay and, later, poor Mr. Beame, should denounce the conservatives as racists and rabble-rousers and hate merchants. They owed it to their public, even as the minister of religion owes it to his, to enjoin against the wiles of the devil. The devil, I happen to believe, exists. And many people believe that conservatives are basically racist and misanthropic: so never mind, the politician reasons, whether the devil exists, take advantage of him. If necessary, give him flesh.
It is always interesting to speculate on whether the care and feeding of hobgoblins is altogether cynical, whether the politicians come to believe their own myths. I can very well imagine Jackie Robinson at a cocktail party asking Wagner, “Why didn’t you do something about that vicious, racist address?” How would Wagner—the politician—have responded? I can less easily imagine the question being raised with Wagner by, say, Roy Wilkins; or by Mr. Justice Samuel Hofstadter (“Are you nuts, Sam?” would probably have been the response). There isn’t much point in speculating on Wagner’s subjective evaluation of a speech the misimpression of which he intentionally ratified. He would not be the first cynic to reach high office, nor his office the highest ever occupied by a cynic, however amiable. I recall an anecdote told me by Mr. Herbert Hoover a few years ago. He began it by saying how good a friend he was of Mr. Harry Truman and how well they had got on together during the period after the Second World War, when Hoover consented to head the commission on the operations of government. Then one day, in October 1948, while Truman was campaigning feverishly for re-election, Hoover picked up the morning paper and read that the evening before, in Boston, Truman had denounced the Republican Party as desiring to reintroduce the age of Hoover, defined as the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the greedy rich. “I vowed,” Hoover told me, “never to speak to Truman again.” But when, a few months after his election, Truman asked Hoover to drop in at the White House on an urgent matter, “I couldn’t, of course, refuse a summons from the President of the United States. But I was determined to tell him off before we got down to business, and I did: ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘the remarks you made about me in Boston were as dirty and unforgivable as any I ever heard in a lifetime of politics.’ ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Truman replied affably. ‘When I came to that paragraph in my speech, I almost didn’t read it.’”
Concerning the press, I learned at first hand not only the obvious lesson, that corrections very seldom catch up with distortions, but several other things besides. One of them is that, other than on the obvious occasions, one cannot know when a news story is going to be midwived by an enterprising reporter. I had expected no coverage at all, indeed I had completed the preparation of my talk late the previous night and did not even bother to make arrangements to have it retyped and reproduced. In the unlikely event that a reporter should want a copy, we could easily go off somewhere and Xerox a copy or two direct from my own manuscript—the time would be noon Sunday, and there would be no immediate pressure from deadlines.
No reporter asked for a copy, nor, as a matter of fact, approached me in any way. It had never at that point crossed my mind to enter politics, so that it wasn’t a matter of cautionary coverage that brought the press there. The Mayor and the Police Commissioner, after all, were present, and each of them spoke briefly, and just conceivably the Mayor would say something electric—this was to be a campaign year.
As it happened, the affair did turn out to be news. But I didn’t make the news because of what I had said, nor the policemen because of how they acted: a single reporter made the news. What I said, if it had been literally transcribed in a news story, would I think have been very interesting indeed—obviously one finds one’s own analyses interesting: but it would not have been news, it would have been commentary. What I said in that talk I could not myself digest into two paragraphs, so that if a reporter felt the obligation to report on my part in the affair, he’d have done what so often is done, which is merely to take one or two statements from the speech, decide that they should be those that are reproduced, and file the story.
But here a reporter had taken words not quite my own; failed to qualify them as I had qualified them; and—an infinitely adaptable resource at the disposal of any reporter who lacks either skill or conscience—there is the audience. The size, nature, and behavior of an audience are the most malleable factors in a newspaper story, and I saw them shaped time and again during the campaign. One can always produce, in self-defense, a copy of one’s speech. But one cannot produce the audience—for instance to establish that it was not true that it was rowdy; or that it was true that it was rowdy; or that it was not true that there wasn’t a single Negro in it, or the opposite; or that it wasn’t composed primarily of people in their late sixties, or of children in their early teens; to ascertain whether or not someone was carrying a placard suggesting that John Lindsay was a Communist, or whether someone else was there carrying one suggesting that Buckley was a Fascist.
Audience reaction can be ascertained through a tape, but that is a pretty clumsy business. To prove that there was silence requires the use of an extra-literary dimension—the use of the ear; and such awkward and humiliating arrangements as calling in a group of witnesses, and playing back the tape. It is risky at best. For one thing a tape may not have been made; for another, newspapers simply aren’t as a general rule interested in workaday historical revisionism. So that the mere process of self-defense against a press which manipulates the audience factor is at worst impossible, at best terribly clumsy. Yet consider, remaining with the present example, the impression that can be conveyed by the journalist’s brush:
He said the demonstrators “refused the order” not to march in defiance. And the cameras showed only the beatings, “nothing of policemen’s restraint” in the face of orders defied. The Hilton’s Grand Ballroom rocked with applause, as Mr. Buckley smiled out at the crowd.
Now the exact words are not mine, nor is the emphasis the emphasis I made; but that much, at least, is correctible by the release of the text, though to be sure only effectively so depending on one’s access to those who read the original misrepresentation, and that of course is virtually impossible to achieve. We have seen that by good luck a tape recorder was rolling, and the press did turn out to hear the silence that didn’t rock the ballroom at this point in the address. But, finally, how could I prove that I didn’t smile out at the crowd? The answer of course is that I couldn’t; can’t. In fact I didn’t smile—at a professional level because at that point in my text, in heat after an elusive point, I needed to generate a fierce concentration of the kind that induces an audience to follow closely an intricate analysis. A smile would snap the mood. And, of course, because to have smiled at the moment would have been humanly, aesthetically, and emotionally unthinkable. In tense situations, unmonitored by television, a single reporter has the same power to create an image of his own choosing that a sculptor has sitting in front of a lump of clay.
A week or so after the affair, I appeared before a seminar of the Columbia School of Journalism, and in that bright company speculated on the theme that however you dot your i’s or cross your t’s, it may in fact be that to bring up a particular subject before a particular audience results in a dialectic whose meaning is a function of time and place. I remembered that a year ago Senator Goldwater had made his famous remark about atomic defoliation of the forests in Vietnam. The reporter had asked what is to be done in South Vietnam about the Communists’ supply lines, which move under cover of the forests and the jungles. Goldwater had answered: “There have been several suggestions made. I don’t think we would use any of them. But the defoliation of the forest by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done. When you remove the foliage you remove the cover.” Headlines. New York Herald Tribune: “GOLDWATER’S NUCLEAR PLAN TO WIN VIET.” New York Times: “GOLDWATER URGES NEW VIETNAM AID: WOULD USE ATOMIC WEAPONS TO CLEAR RED SUPPLY LINES.” Washington Post: “A-ATTACK ON VIET JUNGLE PROPOSED BY GOLDWATER.” Chicago Tribune: “GOLDWATER PROPOSES ATOMIC FIGHT IN ASIA.”
I remember, at the time, calling these extraordinary misrepresentations to the attention of a reporter from The New York Times, who expressed himself as outraged, no doubt sincerely, that this should have happened. He went on to track down a sensationalized dispatch from the Associated Press as having been originally at fault.