The Fromson File

Ironically, Jack Nelson died in the week that a documentary depicting the history of the Los Angeles Times began making the rounds in theaters across the country. The film is about the Chandler family and how one newspaper had an impact on greater Los Angeles. It also is the story of how one Chandler named Otis was determined to make the Times one of the best newspapers in the country. The nation was caught up by the civil rights movement, but the Times had virtually ignored the story until Nelson was hired to run the southern bureau in Atlanta and increase its coverage dramatically.

On March 7, 1965, Jack and I met for the first time, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, Alabama, he reporting for the Times and I for CBS News.

State troopers on horseback, camouflaged with gas masks and armed with clubs and tear gas were determined to halt civil rights marchers from walking from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery some 50 miles away. Nelson and I were shoulder to shoulder, watching the cops beat down, almost kill, civil rights workers like John Lewis, who later would become and still is one of the most distinguished members of the U.S. Congress. After the dramatic march was attempted again a few weeks later, this time with the protection of National Guardsmen activated by President Johnson, we reached Montgomery safely. Shortly thereafter I learned of the Ku Klux Klan’s murder of a volunteer worker from Detroit named Viola Liuzzo. I doubled back down the highway to find her bullet-ridden car. Her body had been removed before a number of reporters, including Nelson and I could catch up to the story. At the Selma City Hall, we waited for a statement by the FBI and the Selma sheriff, a redneck named Jimmy Clark. We found his explanation of Liuzzo’s slaying to be outrageous when he declared, “the niggahs did it.” Clark’s reaction was found to be even more offensive to reporters from the south, like Nelson.

We could not imagine then that what happened in Selma and on a lonely highway leading to it would set the stage for passage of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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By now, every journalist, official, professor and think tank guru within sight of Afghanistan has had an explanation for coping with the war. They’ve analyzed every aspect of the problem. But most of the solutions have been as clear as mud. Get out, stay in — no wonder that the public truly isn’t confused. It hardly can agree on what the United States should to do about a conflict that is costing American lives, not to speak of billions of dollars and declining support of an unpopular war. The state of the economy and the cost of health care are uppermost in the minds of most people.

On Tuesday evening, the outstanding PBS documentary, Frontline, examined what it described as “Obama’s War.” So it is, given the President’s earlier support of the conflict.. The high-level meetings that are underway with his senior advisors at the White House may produce a solution. But, it won’t please everyone.

Even the best reportage, first on Iraq and now Afghanistan by Frontline, is seen through a measured lens. Hardly a Taliban image or voice was seen or heard. The American point of view supporting the war got plenty of air time. The ever-confident Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, headed the list of those who generally reflected the U.S. perspective.

General Stanley McChrystal, whose thankless job is to win the war, articulated the problems inherent in the counter-insurgency scheme of things. But he did not say on camera what he has been saying in private for the past two weeks; that at least 40,000 more troops are needed if the Taliban are to be defeated. The echoes of General William Westmoreland’s plea more than 40 years ago for an additional 206,000 troops in Vietnam came back to haunt me. Victory eluded him nonetheless which could be McChrystal’s fate too if President Obama endorses his request.

McChrystal’s recommendation reminded me of the warning expressed by three prominent figures associated with the Vietnam conflict. General Creighton Abrams, the late Army Chief of Staff; Caspar Weinberger, the former Defense Secretary and General Colin Powell, the onetime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all declared that the United States should never again involve itself in a major war without the overwhelming support of the American people. So far, an estimated 51% of the nation is opposed to the war, but that is hardly overwhelming.

Just like the Marines at the battle of Hue learned more than 40 years ago, guns alone could not defeat the enemy. The Marines unleashed enormous fire and air power in an effort to dislodge the North Vietnamese who were dug in from inside the walls of The Citadel in the center of the old Vietnamese capital. It was only after the Communists decided to withdraw that the fighting ended.

In Afghanistan, the gallant young men of Echo Company of the 24th Marines were shown unloading their firepower on the Taliban. But rarely, if ever, were the insurgents seen firing back from the ill-defined underbrush. Nonetheless, they were able to inflict troubling casualties on the Marines.

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Not in many years has television given the American viewing public an example of as impressive a documentary as Home Box Office did Monday evening with the airing of “The Last Truck: the Closing of a GM Factory.”

It was absent the voice and presence of a prominent network anchorman or voice-over narrations by another reporter. It had none of the silly questions that permeate so much of contemporary television reporting. Moreover, it was not the kind of hit and miss reportage that has been so common on television during the economic downturn these past few years. Instead, it made room for the voices and faces of real people, the workers of the GM truck factory in Moraine, Ohio, who had given the best part of their lives to building and assembling American vehicles that were rolling off the production line for the last time. The death knell was to be sounded two days before Christmas 2008.

Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert headed the team of producers, directors, editors, cameramen and women who put their souls into making this hour-long film. It was not anger as much as disappointment and quiet bewilderment that they captured about the future lives of the men and women, whose own parents had assembled GM trucks before them. For these white and African American workers, this was not the kind of retirement they expected. Nonetheless, their pride in producing an American vehicle on its last day, was a compelling moment. They were proud of their membership in the United Auto Workers Union whose negotiations with GM ensured them decent salaries, benefits and pensions. Or so they thought.

“The Last Truck” was nothing less than a portrait of the nation”s work force under siege. If tears came to the eyes of some of the GM workers, it would have been difficult for people watching at home not to have shed a few tears as well, hearing and watching blue collar Americans describe the last painful weeks and hours of jobs they thought would never end. What was not remarkable to me, but may have been to most people sitting at home, was the sensitivity and clarity of the workers, none of whom had more than a high school education.

It was not surprising to me because over the years as a reporter I have interviewed countless working class Americans on automobile assembly lines or in the farm belt of the country. They have never failed to impress me with their native intelligence, but in saying farewell to each other, they displayed an uncommon bonding that crossed racial lines and showed a remarkable love for each other. That may not have been anticipated by journalists who grew up in urban America and approach stories like this with some pre-conceived notions about how working class people could or would express themselves in the worst as well as the best of times.

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The United States has never before had a Foreign Legion like the hired guns the French used as enforcers during the days when the tri-color flew over their colonial empire in the 19th and 20th Centuries. They were soldiers of fortune, cherry-picked from some of the most ruthless military resources anywhere in the world. In short, many of them were scumbags for which the French took little public credit. The less they knew of these recruits, the better.

If President Obama is beginning to look like a wimp, pre-occupied with bi-partisanship, now’s the time to show the American people they’re wrong. He can do that immediately by putting the brakes on the legion of private contractors recruited by the Pentagon to do the kind of work it would not dare assign to American GIs in Afghanistan. According to the New York Times there are far more of these hired guns doing America’s bidding than soldiers who would be under stricter constraints if they were in uniform. From what we know of President Obama, we cannot believe he wants to have anything to do with a legion of foreigners who are not answerable to U.S. military commanders.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Times reported Wednesday, 57 percent of the Pentagon’s force in Afghanistan consist of private contractors. They may be from the notorious Blackwater company, now known as Xe Services recruited by the Bush/Cheney Administration that made its name during the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. It is not clear whether or not companies like Dyncorp International or ArmorGroup which is owned by Wackenhut Services are spinoffs from Blackwate/Xe or in some way are affiliated with them. For sure, the private contractors over the past two years consist of 65% of the non-military on duty in Afghanistan. Over the past two years, the figure would be even higher. What’s clear is that each of these companies is being paid six figures that are difficult to track down.

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Tags:   afghanistan · al qaeda · barack obama · blackwater · osama bin laden · Taliban · xeNo Comments.