The Fromson File

I must confess: I don’t like Newt Gingrich. He’s an insufferable bore. He talks too much. He has an opinion about everything, none of it conciliatory. Most of it in fact is irrational. He is not what anyone might consider to be a deep thinker. While Barack Obama demonstrates leadership abroad, Gingrich is pursuing worn-out ideas that continue to harp on government spending, waste in Washington and the need for unregulated tax cuts for the rich, none of which are on the minds of shoppers at Costco or Walmart.

Consider the opinions of Gingrich on the Belgian Congo; on race relations in the U.S.; about immigration from across the border; or how to treat underprivileged , hungry people. The inference is fairly clear. Gingrich has never been challenged by his all-white panelists on the CNN election platform. None of the presidential candidates who cluttered cable television last week were ready to respond to tough questions. The panel overall was as meek as mice.

After an airing of the past revelations uttered by Gingrich, it is impossible to imagine how many African-American or Latino voters will cast a ballot for him as president. Gingrich is an uncontrollable motor mouth. Yet, despite such flaws, many of his supporters still believe him fit to be a President or world leader..

As Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist of the New York Times said of Gingrich recently “He is a glib speaker, even when he has no idea of what he is talking about.” Krugman went on to say “My sense is that he’s very good at double think—that even when he knows what he’s said isn’t true while he’s saying it.

To any reporter who has covered politics from the highest to the lowest level — and I’ve covered many including the ill-fated Goldwater campaign in 1964 — it’s clear that Gingrich is tempted to say anything in public once he has access to a microphone or platform. Careless ideas simply roll off his tongue. So outrageous, oftentimes he can shock anyone within hearing distance. Gingrich has disdain for many Americans; not only poor ones, but blacks, gays, Arabs, or welfare recipients for starters. His analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian issue is so absurd and over-simplified you would have to worry if he were elected president.

But Gingrich is not the sole champion of negative thinking in Republican ranks. The tactic may easily come back to haunt him on Election Day, if he gets that far. Having covered enough national politics, instinct tells me that a persistent negative campaign could sink the GOP. On the other hand, I would not be surprised by an Obama victory next November, providing he makes a slight indent in the unemployment and inflation figures. My hunch then is the President could win re-election next year and even by a substantial margin.

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We seventh graders who lived on December 7, 1941 will always remember the Day that Will Live in Infamy, marking the day of the Japanese’ surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. I can never forget the time when several Los Angeles policemen escorted several of my Japanese-American friends in tears out of our classroom to be re-united with their parents and shipped to remote relocation camps in one of the most shameful acts enacted by the U.S. government in World War II.

We had no reason to doubt that the plotters behind the sneak attack were led by a buck-toothed Japanese admiral named Isoroku Yamamoto. That’s because the government told us so. His image as a cunning enemy appeared in innumerable newspapers across the country. Time Magazine published a cartoon of Yamamoto as an arch villain, a personification of “Oriental treachery.”Allegedly, he was said to have boasted that he would dictate surrender peace terms in the White House. All of this and more was spelled out by a U.S. Naval historian named Ian W. Toll in an Op-Ed article that appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday.

At the outset,Yamamoto was portrayed as a fire-breathing war-monger who plotted the sneak attack on the U.S. But Toll has set the record straight. The supposed villain claimed all along that victory .over the United States was impossible. Toll described Yamamoto as one of the most colorful, charismatic and broad-minded naval officers in the Imperial Navy. He graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy. He traveled widely in the United States before the war, spoke adequate enough English as a student at Harvard University for two years, read American history voraciously after World War I, including several biographies about Abraham Lincoln; none of which has ever appeared in the American press.

According to Toll, the naval historian, Yamamoto despised the Japanese Army. He was known for his anti-war views, arguing there was “no chance of winning the war with the United States.” In August 1939, he was named commander in chief of the highest sea-going command in the Japanese Navy, and while he opposed war with the U.S., he actually planned the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. But despite his temperate views, Yamamoto was not a great strategist. He was responsible for the Japanese defeat in the Battle of Midway and the campaign to re-capture the island of Guadalcanal. But while Yamamoto’s naval strategy was faulty, he was a major factor in setting the ground for the anti-war temperament that helped Japan to emerge from the shattering defeat in World War II. Surprising as these revelations are, so too are the questions about U.S. veracity when it goes to war.

Tags:   Ian W. Toll · new york times · Pearl Harbor · YamamotoNo Comments.

Dear Mr. President,

After three hours of watching television Monday evening that began with another of your polite and reasonable appeals to the nation, it’s clear that the talk, the debates, the interviews about the financial crisis engulfing most Americans assuredly is doing nothing to excite your supporters and in fact is making most of us feel brain dead.

C’mon Mr. President, if the constant meetings with John Boehner and associates do not seem to be pulling your cord, then take a deep breath and cease being the conciliator.

Remember way back when you pursued the Democratic nomination for president, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani addressed a group of Republican delegates by using a sneer to cite your experience as “a community organizer.” The crowed booed and hooted at the mention of your name as “a community organizer.” Now we who have covered a lot of politics in our lives knew exactly what Giuliani and his audience were driving at. They knew you had earned your spurs working in the troubled inner city of Chicago, alongside my old friend, Saul Alinsky. Giuliani’s remark was nothing less than a piece of racist trash. But who cared. The press wasn’t there to cover it.

Fast forward to the present time: Those guys on the other side of Capitol Hill, coupled with a pack of ambitious presidential candidates who want to replace you, along with those silly little women from Minnesota and Alaska who aspire to make their beds in the White House, have the audacity to believe they can defeat you. So what? Just because cable television and even National Public Radio gives them unwarranted air time does not legitimize their candidacy. What that’s all about is ratings, getting politicians to scream at each other.

The Republicans clearly will do anything they can to defeat your re-election bid. Just listen to one of their principal spokesmen, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Your defeat is his obsession. So stop kidding yourself or us. The senator from the blue grass country is leader of the pack. So you might as well challenge them to a bare knuckle fight. It is plain nonsense to hear them talk about speaking in behalf of the American people when you would suffer from eye strain trying to find any credible African Americans or working-class or unemployed Americans who ever appear on Capitol Hill as part of the GOP leadership.

All we ever see on television when the GOP bunch appears is an assortment of white, button-down cheerleaders who never have stood in line for an unemployment check in their lives. If only you and the ever so polite Washington journalists would ever get it through your heads, just throw their notebooks down in disgust and stop talking to each other, we might realize some progress on debt reduction and all the other stuff that preoccupies the so-called dialogue with the American people. That stuff means jobs and particularly jobs with some specificity.

To hear or watch the overall cast of Washington’s talking heads on Sunday Mornings or the daily cable shows must cause you either to scream or laugh at them. I’m waiting for an intelligent couple of producers to put a brake on these television stars and tell them to stop talking to each other and instead engage in discussion that makes absolute common sense to most Americans. I’ve talked to farmers, steelworkers, teachers and soldiers in my lifetime of reporting and believe me, they are a lot more intelligent than some of our anchormen and women give them credit.

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Tags:   barack obama · Debt Ceiling · Dwight Eisenhower · Harry Truman · John Boehner · Media criticism · Mitch McConnell · national debt · Rudy Giuliani1 Comment

When Harold Evans was editor of the Times of London back in the early 1960s, he published a book (GoodTimes, Bad Times) about his tenure at the newspaper that described his years with Rupert Murdoch as the publisher. In reviewing that book, I was struck by one anecdote he included in his memoir that described the day Murdoch came into his office and thumbed through the pages of the Times. Observing the coverage by one of his correspondents sent to Warsaw during a periodic Polish crisis, Murdoch said rather sarcastically, “I see you have the story on page one.” Evans acknowledged the story’s treatment, which prompted Murdoch to reply wryly, “Do you know where I would have placed the story?” Roughly speaking as I remember the review, Evans said no and Murdoch turned to page 72 or thereabouts. “That’s where I would have put it.”

The anecdote seemed to be a signal that Evans knew he was on his way out as editor of the Times, then Britain’s most distinguished newspaper. My conclusion was that Evans would gloat some day when his judgment of Murdoch would be vindicated. Well, Sir Harold, congratulations!

Anyone with half a brain knew all about Murdoch from the time he invaded all of journalism with his purchase of dozens of newspapers in the U.S. and Britain, but also television stations. It was inevitable because Murdoch has repeatedly demonstrated an absence of ethics, decency and integrity wherever his money has allowed him to make his presence felt. Moreover, it is a terrible irony that his grandfather, Sir Keith Murdoch, was one of Australia’s most distinguished journalists. His coverage of the battle for Gallipoli in 1915 ended with the dismissal of the British commander of troops there and brought Sir Keith international recognition and his elevation to become one of the most powerful journalists in the land down under as editor and/or publisher of the Melbourne Age.

Rupert Murdoch’s tenure in contemporary journalism may never be what it has been in the past several decades. But the nagging issue that has only been brushed over by journalists charged with reporting the Murdoch scandal is how he and his family never seemed to care about the qualifications of those people they hired, including Rebekah Brooks, who were handed the power and influence to render the boneheaded and embarrassing decisions that have been disclosed in recent days. A journalism major could not have earned a university degree or gotten a job with those credentials. At least I hope so.

Tags:   australia · galipoli · Harold Evans · Keith Murdoch · Rebekah Brooks · Rupert Murdoch · Times of LondonNo Comments.