The Fromson File

If public opinion polls in the past six months are to be believed, my fellow Americans seem to have lost their way. They have seemingly been bamboozled by agitators on the right. They are panicked by the loss of their homes and jobs, confused by a war over which they have no control and cast adrift by a president who hesitates to attack the financial interests that are destroying the middle class.

The battleground is clear. The Democrats — the party of “now” — contains too many wimps willing to succumb to the Republicans: the party of “no.” Moreover, too many well-intentioned citizens across the country, described as independents, seem ready to hand over control of the country to the devils on Wall Street and the corporate-industrial complex who are eroding the nation’s destiny and self-confidence.

These villains would, of course, deny it. But in pursuit of profits, they are waging class warfare by hoarding their cash and shipping jobs abroad, all the while financing their mouthpieces on Capitol Hill who blame Barack Obama for not coping with the unemployment crisis. At the same time, they have yet to propose a solution of their own for a nagging problem that brings back reminders of the Great Depression. According to the Los Angeles Times, “evidence is growing that companies are moving more jobs than ever to China and other countries—a trend that could exacerbate efforts to bring down the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate.” The latest Commerce Department data shows that “employment at the foreign subsidiaries and affiliates of U.S. multi-national firms grew by 729,000 in two years to U.S. 11.9 million.”

“Over that same period, domestic employment by such firms slipped by 500,000 jobs.” John Boehner, who looks like he suffers from a perennial case of ulcers and excessive visits to a tanning parlor, is leading the charge of his pale-faced Republicans. The dour Congressman from Ohio, is doing little but complain about the Obama Administration while he pockets the loot delivered by dozens of lobbyists in Washington. The idea of Boehner as the next leader of the House of Representatives in the upcoming election, is something for serious-minded folks from his district to think about when they go to the polls next month.

It’s time for the President to stop playing Mr. Nice Guy. To the train, Barack, to the train! Lay down the gauntlet like Harry Truman did in 1948. Take a high speed train across the country and stop at as many cities and towns as possible from now until Election Day, challenging Boehner and his do-nothing friends in Congress to tell the nation precisely what they are going to do to put America back to work. Obama might begin by challenging American companies to “bring back the jobs” from overseas for the next decade until we get our economic problems resolved. That will help to convince many people who supported his election the last time around that their vote was not in vain.

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President Obama’s swift response to the McChrystal interview in Rolling Stone avoided a disaster that could have crippled his Administration. That he did not was a sign, not of his weakness but his strength. It was his ability to evaluate the challenge and quickly recover with the imaginative choice of General David Petraeus to succeed the ousted commander in the field that was so compelling and contrary to the image that has been emerged of the president in recent months.

Like all stories, there probably is another side to it that in time will emerge. The question is why did as shrewd a soldier as McChrystal choose to self-implode in an off-beat publication with an interview that he had to know would wreck his career? Was it his frustration with having too many so-called experts streaming into Afghanistan and reporting back to Washington with their own perceptions of what was happening on the ground?

Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a man of strong opinions and insufferable arrogance, is not the kind of a man a decorated general with an enormous ego of his own could tolerate for long. Ambassador Karl Eichenberry, the former commander of military operations in Afghanistan, made no secret of his own displeasure with the way the war was being fought. He repeatedly second-guessed McChrystal in his communiqués, both to the White House.and the State Department from where Hillary Clinton had to be heard.

All of this perhaps was compounded by the presence of too many journalists who were embedded with McChrystal’s army. They were critically unable to see the downside, both of the General’s personality and strategy.

Less than 24 hours before President Obama fired McChrystal, I attended a preview of a new and widely-praised documentary entitled “Restrepo” The film was produced and directed by veteran journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Heatherington who won the Grand Prize at the Sundance Festival this year. They spent nearly a year, attaching themselves to a platoon of B Company, 2d Battalion of the 517th Regiment of the 187th Airborne Brigade. To digest their unit identification and to have audiences understand what an engaging and courageous number of American soldiers were was the core of the film. What made it so powerful was the interviews with individual soldiers, away from the field of combat but re-assigned later in Italy. It gave the young men an opportunity to reflect about what they had endured in their own calm words. That enriched the texture of the film. Viewers could come to appreciate the dangerous and risky nature of the mission to which the young soldiers had been assigned. But we were never told why they were sent there, and (I’m not sure) neither were the soldiers. Neither Junger or Heatherington ever questioned whether the operation was worth the life of one American, nor did we hear any such reflections of that nature out of the mouths of the soldiers. Restrepo, by the way, was the name of a medic in their platoon who was killed early during their march into the mountains.

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By the end of the day, the career of General Stanley McChrystal will be over. If not, President Obama will be sowing the seeds of even more confusion and disagreement over his policy in Afghanistan than he has had until now.

Following the emergence of the controversial interview with Rolling Stone magazine in which McChrystal showed little diplomacy in describing other Administration officials involved in Afghan policy, the President has been left little wiggle room. He cannot possibly allow the impression of dissension to continue without appearing to be weak or indecisive, not at a time when so much negative news about Afghanistan is appearing on the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers almost every day and McChrystal’s most vocal ally is President Hamid Karzai.

It reminds me of the last major confrontation between a U.S. president and one of his top generals in the midst of the Korean War. It was Truman versus MacArthur. Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur in which the four-star general thought he was bigger than the nation’s elected leader. Granted McChrystal has not gone that far. He has not even criticized President Obama. But where discretion was called for, the commander of all forces in Afghanistan did not remember his history.

In October 1950, President Truman had a war on his hands in Korea that was growing in unpopularity when he ordered MacArthur to meet him on Wake Island in the middle of the Pacific. Truman wanted to remind his general who was in charge. The message did not take. Six months later, after assuring the President that the Chinese Communists would not enter the Korean War and then they did, MacArthur publicly advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the Chinese and threatened to bomb the mainland. Truman had enough. He fired the general. It was shocking news across the nation. The man from Missouri was pitted against a genuine military hero of the Pacific War who had accepted the surrender of Japan on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri.

It ignited a nationwide storm of criticism, mostly from Republicans. I was on my way to Korea as a GI draftee when MacArthur was greeted by a tickertape parade in Manhattan. House Speaker Joe Martin then invited MacArthur to address the U.S. Congress that was televised nationally. In his closing remarks that have remained in the history books, the general declared: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

McChrystal’s plight may be something less serious, except to say the controversy over Afghanistan is mounting at a time when McCrystal has chosen to draw swords with just about every prominent member of the Administration. The General does not seem to have as many allies and the President, faced with a multitude of other problems, is running out of time. The principle of civilian authority is at stake.

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It’s difficult to realize how good Southern California had it back in the days when Channel Two — then KNXT — introduced television viewers every weekday night “from the mountain to the sea” to the Big News. It was the hour-long creation of Sam Zelman, then its news director. It was a tribute to the viewers’ intelligence. Sam employed Joe Benti, Maury Green, Ralph Storey and Bill Stout. to report and analyze the news. A first- rate group of producers and editors made KNXT the ideal model of what a television station’s news programs ought to be. Bob Wood, the station manager who later would become the president of CBS News in New York and give the nation “All in a Family,” recognized the value of Zelman’s concept. John Hart was named to open a Washington bureau and Bob Simmons to report regularly from Sacramento. No one complained about budgetary problems back then. KNXT management and the network bosses willingly underwrote the model. But then something happened to television news departments elsewhere several years later when they lost their souls to a man named Frank Magid.

They used to call him the news doctor, but when Magid first showed up Los Angeles and other major television markets across the country in the late 1960s, serious news directors used to cringe and say, here comes Doctor Death. But their bosses, the station managers, were different. They lacked Bob Wood’s vision. Their ears perked up when Magid showed up. He was like a visiting potentate. He brought with him, they thought, a cure for sagging ratings of their morning and evening news programs. Forget that it was a lack of imagination. Simple, said the television consultant from Iowa: forget all the serious stuff and substitute it with stories about crime, sex, gossip, scandal and acrobatic whales. Throw in weather, traffic and sports. Then put gabby, sometimes perky, anchormen and women in front of the cameras to read the teleprompters on the false premise that they actually were responsible for reporting the news. That was the ticket. Who cared about the public or journalistic excellence. The stations made money and so did Magid.

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