Truth to Power

[fiona_grady]

David Auburn's play "The Columnist" is based on a life of the famous American columnist Joseph Alsop.  Alsop was a syndicated columnist for decades, and in the very first scene he boasts of speaking truth to power and denouncing Senator McCarthy with "guns blazing". "This is the lesson of American great freedom of speech and freedom of press", Alsop educates the young man in his hotel room.  The hotel is in Moscow, the young man has apparently just had sex with the venerable American journalist, and very soon thereafter it becomes clear that this was a successful KGB blackmailing operation.

Even though the Moscow angle is all the rage today, and many critics opened their reviews of the play with the (rather embarrassing) Eurekas! of this suddenly timely and pertinent exposure of the KGB, this is not what the play is about.  It is more about how one of the most powerful journalists in the land who not only has an access to the White House but also speaks into the ear of the President, is in his private life deeply closeted and emotionally repressed. Even though the sordid blackmail details do surface in the play again and again, I thought that it was mostly about the corruption of power.

The powerful and wealthy Alsop entertains presidents, members of the cabinet, and ambassodors in his lavish home.  He has private numbers of everyone who is anyone in Washington and New York, his is an extensive network of friends and acquiantances in high places all over the globe.

When the Vietnam War rolls in, he travels to Hanoi and Saigon and reports about the fighting spirit of the US troops; his columns call for escalation, for victory.

To me, the most poignant scene of the play is not the aftermath of the KGB blackmail, after all, the KGB has always been involved in espionage and sabotage, and the Cold War was never over, Russian reset button notwithstanding.

Far more memorable is an encounter between Alsop and David Halberstam at the bar in Hanoi.  Halberstam ridicules Alsop's "reporting": Alsop stays at the Embassy, travels around in an armored car with a translator and a handler, listens only to his friends at the Pentagon, and his opinion columns about the war are only informed by this limited worldview.

The journalist who was once fearless and principled enough to take on the mighty Senator McCarthy, has gradually become a mouthpiece of the Administration.

Today, most of the columnists and their modern day equivalents travel through the world in their own versions of armored cars, accompanied by handlers.  They hobnob with the powerful, they move in the glittering circles, and then they dare opine about the state of things in the land and in the world.

Perhaps that is why they have only just waken up to Russia's menace, or why the election of Trump to the White House was such a shock to them.

Comments

[eta-ta.livejournal.com]

Except in that particular case (Vietnam) Administration was right, and all-fearless journalists, reporting from the trenches and starting the defeatist movement were wrong - as we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt.

[fiona-grady.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I don't know beyond a shadow of a doubt that those opposing the war were wrong. I think, very few wars can unequivocally be declared as "right", Vietnam War, definitely not being one of them. Whenever the subject of that particular war comes up, I offer a simple test: would you have liked for your son to be drafted to fight in IndoChina?
I know my answer would have been no.

[eta-ta.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have liked my son to fight in any war - WWI, WWII or any of the Middle East. This is a normal feeling for any mother.

Vietnam War abandonment left Vietnam open to Soviets and their inhuman regime. To utter misery, mass murders and plagues of the whole people. To economic devastation, to mass exodus of "boat people", to keeping Vietnam of becoming another of "Asian tiger states". And it led to Cambodia and its red Khmer.

More so, it showed the world that America can be defeated: from within.

I have to say, I am disappointed in you...well, you have your lefty background, but to that extent?!
PS
In your summary, the play is trivially suggestive of current events. A homosexual who is on the Right? The Left, formally professing to be defenders of personal freedom, can't stand this violation of their identity politics - and attack the black sheep, in their hatred and slander surpassing the "reactionaries" they claim to fight.
Just as they became the worst Anti-Semits, worst misogynists, worst homophobes - once they realize their target is on the Right politically.
Why, Slate even resorted to cleansing its archives off articles defending pedophiles (when it was Polanski it suited them) - while the disgustingly duplicitous scandal with Milo was unfolding.

So just like the left scam attacked and slandered Milo, D. Auburn has attacked a long-dead Right journalist - for his homosexuality (-wait, so it is now Bad? - no, sonny, only if practiced by our enemies) - and his journalistic integrity. Something the Left forgotten the meaning of long time ago.

[fiona-grady.livejournal.com]

No mother wants to see her son drafted but somebody's son has to go and fight the war and, possibly, come back in a coffin draped in a flag. That is why in a democracy people have not only the right but an obligation to voice their protest against the wars that kill and maim the country's sons, but whose purpose is murky.
I don't know about Left and Right, at least, not in the rigid terms that you offer: the Vietnam War was started by Kennedy and wholly owned by LBJ (the very same President who declared the War on Poverty and instituted welfare as we know it). The war was ended by Nixon, a right-wing Republican.
My (perhaps too brief) summary does not do the play justice: it is complex, it is sympathetic to Alsop, he is shown as a patriot and he is courageous. When KGB tried to blackmail him, he disclosed all first to the US Ambassador in Moscow, and then to the FBI, rendering the blackmail effort useless.
The rumination about excessive access and fraternization with the power and, thus, fossilization of a journalist's worldview is my takeaway from the play. Auburn, I think, had more varied goals: wider acceptance of more nuanced understanding of homosexuality among them.

[eta-ta.livejournal.com]

As if if the war's purpose is clearly defined, a mother will object less to getting her son back in a coffin!
In the democracy one can not use a mother's feelings on her son's dying overseas as a criterion for foreign policy. As you noted yourself, there are other considerations. And that applies to both WW, to North Korea, to both Iraq wars, etc.

Nixon had to bow to overwhelming public opinion. In that he was doing his job as elected official: serve the voters. The sum of factors was against him.
But who unleashed anti-war propaganda machine? Was J.Fonda left- or -right wing? Kerry? All those humanitarian photographers, journalists and radio hosts? Who painted military as criminal killers, drug-addicted bloodthirsty napalm-spraying beasts?

Of course Vietnam war is a complex topic - it would be, with so many tangents (general strategy, political doctrine, funds, generals vs Congress, etc) - but its objectives were never murky. It was to win proxy war against USSR. That's why the useful pinkos in US universities were so against it.

Yes, I know about the blackmail and Alsop's report (only to CIA, not FBI; A. was collaborating with CIA during the war and talked to his acquaintances there. It's CIA who spread the news to FBI).
"...excessive access and fraternization with the power and, thus, fossilization of a journalist's worldview" - that could be said about any noted journalist. From Hemingway (and one of his wives, her name escapes me at the moment), to Orwell, to any number of contemporaries, particularly on the Left.