All — all! — American presidents have problems with the press.
They don’t like reporters, the nosey parkers, and while the reporters may occasionally like them, they must try to hide any such feelings, as what they — we — are really after is a scoop. And these days, it is entirely bad form in the newsroom to cozy up to a politician, whether that pres is a liberal Barack Obama or a conservative George W. Bush.
The current president, Donald Trump, is neither a liberal nor a conservative. He’s a one-of-a-kind narcissist who, in a former life, made a business career out of cozying up to various journalists in the pursuit of furthering his Queens dreams of New York real estate domination. He would literally telephone any number of scribes pretending to be someone else with a hot tip about something, anything, that would further his up-and-down fortune.
And now, more’s the pity, he is again the president, pretending for the time being to see the journos who formerly made his bacon as the Enemy of the People.
It’s been 65 years since a president was elected who had cordial relations with the American press. From today’s rather prim perspective, matters were nuttily chummy.
Donald Trump does not drink. Joe Biden does not drink.
But Jack Kennedy would have any number of drinks, often, with his Georgetown neighbor Ben Bradlee — Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee — who was two years the junior of the blue-blooded politician at Harvard and served as he did with high distinction in World War II naval battles in the South Pacific. Their relationship continued though the 1950s as Bradlee took on senior positions at Newsweek and the Washington Post and Kennedy progressed from senator to president. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, doesn’t happen today.
I just finished “Fierce Ambition,” a fascinating biography of Maggie Higgins, the first American woman journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for war reporting. She was on the front lines with our troops in Germany, in Korea — where she won the Pulitzer and very nearly died in battle — and in Vietnam. A great beauty, she was also a Kennedy neighbor in Georgetown, and a drinker of many drinks with him. In the end she went native, as we say in the newspaper business, so much so that she married an Army general, and died at 45 from a tropical disease picked up in the Vietnamese jungle. While still a great reporter, she also endlessly lobbied JFK in letters and cables to expand the American fight against Ho Chi Minh.
Donald Trump, formerly almost equally chummy with liberals such as Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, in his ancient age has gone on a ballistic rampage against the media. He bans the Associated Press from covering him because it won’t rename the Gulf of Mexico, after 400 years, the Gulf of America. While he clearly loves Fox News and has, way beyond any Kennedyesque chumminess, nominated 19 current and former Fox folks to work in his administration — oftentimes because he thinks they look the telegenic part — he sued CBS for literally $20 billion for what he considers misleading edits of an interview with then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. He sued the pollster for The Des Moines Register for predicting that Trump would lose the race in Iowa last November, which he very much did not lose. The pollster was wrong. But what kind of president in a non-Stalinist nation thinks that being wrong is a federal offense?
Let’s pause for a moment to consider the dangerously insane situation this presents in the one nation in the world that considers freedom of speech and the freedom of the press fundamental to its existence, in its Constitution. Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chair, after opening investigations into NPR and PBS underwriters, last week said in an interview that he is considering pulling CBS’s broadcast license.
Maybe it’s too chummy — I think it is — for a president to have a lot of drinks with people who cover him. But that’s nothing compared to suing them for $20B and trying to put them out of business. Calling them “human scum.” You know what’s scummy? An American president baldly trying to throw the First Amendment to the Constitution in the trash.
Why, Americans of all political stripes, are you letting him do it?
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
