This Day in Journalism History (Raines Begins Trying ‘Times’ Running the Gray Lady)

Sept. 5, 2001—Howell Raines took over as executive editor of The New York Times with superabundant self-confidence. In two stormy years atop the “paper of record,” he exuded a grating self-righteousness. Several years later, following revelations of widespread fabrication and fraud by reporter Jayson Blair on his watch, he reviewed his fall from the newspaper where he had worked for 25 years with self-pity.

Less than a week after assuming control, Raines threw the paper’s overwhelming resources into the biggest story that he and other journalists had ever covered: the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

At first, it seemed to vindicate his philosophy of “flooding the zone,” or devoting saturation coverage to a major news event, day after day. In his first year at the helm, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes, including the first given to its metro desk since the 1950s.

But more than he or his acolytes realized, all that celebration and self-congratulation were not entirely warranted.

First, the staff responsible for producing the prize-winning stories (including its ongoing special section, “A Nation Challenged”) had been largely picked and guided by predecessor Joseph Lelyveld.

Second, as noted in Eric Boehlert’s Salon post-mortem on the scandal that ended Howell’s reign, top editors’ direction of the DC bureau’s news coverage “represented an unprecedented attempt to micromanage the newspaper and infuriated editors and reporters, many of whom began to flee to other papers and other jobs.”

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the newspaper who had selected Raines for the top editorial post, should have taken more seriously a December 2022 Newsweek article warning of newsroom rumblings about this direction. 

He must have sensed that, for all his friend’s talent (a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, for a 1992 Times Magazine essay about his family’s maid, Grady Hutchinson, in the segregated South of his childhood) and experience (bureau chief stints in Atlanta, London, and Washington), Raines needed to relax his management style.

According to Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile, “The Howell Doctrine,” Sulzberger not only cautioned Raines that he could not employ the star system he had used as Washington bureau chief, but confided in associates "that he would have blocked Raines’ promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was not convinced that he had changed.”

But you might as well ask a leopard to change its spots. It wasn’t enough that Raines thought he had a mandate from Sulzberger to make the paper “smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience on which its future depends,” as he put it in a May 2004 Atlantic Monthly account of his tenure. 

He also saw a conflict between “the senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the newsroom floor and among mid-level managers.” The latter, he claimed, “wanted the paper to stay the way it was.”

The members of the latter faction went unnamed. There is every reason to think that the claim was fatuous, a grope in the dark by a former journalism giant too blind to understand how his own failings led to his departure from the job he craved and the paper he loved.

In his first day on the job, Raines thought he was sending a symbolic signal to staff by putting on his desk a copy of the Charles Gaines 1972 novel Stay Hungry, the application of which seemed obvious to him in a competitive news environment.

But he missed the other signals that the newsroom picked up about his imperious manner in fielding questions at breakfasts and lunches, including an expression that even friends thought made him look like “an angry hawk.”

Terms other than “flooding the zone” might better describe the coverage that Raines soon assigned to some topics, with the most polite being “crusade.” “Obsession” would fit even better. “Hobbyhorse” might have worked especially well in some instances:

* The verdict was most mixed on the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal. No doubt, an institution to which one in five Americans belonged at the time needed to be scrutinized, and there was no doubt that exposing the misdeeds of individual priests and the coverup by the hierarchy prevented countless future crimes. But the number of collective column inches, the lack of oversight on individual stories, and the secular viewpoint of the paper’s staff and readership raised real questions about objectivity and even anti-Catholic bias. (For instance, assuming that TV showrunner David Kelley was “raised Catholic,” it headlined a review of one of his scripts about the abuse scandal, “A Catholic Writer Brings His Anger to 'The Practice'”—and needed to run a correction when it turned out that Kelley was, in fact, raised Protestant.) Moreover, Raines’ motives for propelling the coverage were hardly pure; Martin Baron, executive editor of The Boston Globe, later told Roy Harris for a 2008 article for Poynter that he heard his counterpart at the Times was “annoyed that we were onto the biggest story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer,” and determined that his paper would cover it at the national level and consign the Globe to local stories about the scandal.

*The Bush administration claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was certainly covered in depth, but without the skepticism it deserved. A 2004 “Editor’s Note,” after an internal investigation, concluded that Judith Miller’s stories on this justification for the war buildup that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged” by senior management at the time—an assessment that Raines predictably took issue with.

* Campaigning incessantly for the Augusta National Golf Course to open to women was hardly the most consequential story in Raines’ tenure, but it was certainly the one that provoked the most ridicule. The revelation of spiked columns by two writers who disagreed with the position only made matters worse.

But the Blair fiasco represented a fundamental challenge to the Times’ credibility that could not be ignored.

What Raines’ friends and defenders downplayed, in noting that other journalists were not forced out of their positions or faced such dire damage to their reputations for their misdeeds, were the sheet multiplicity and breadth of Blair’s transgressions, including fake quotes; locations supposedly visited even as he sat in his Brooklyn apartment; details invented from photographs and other news reports; and passages plagiarized from other reporters.

An exhaustive, nearly 7,500-word post-mortem that, to his credit, Raines authorized, concluded that at least 36 of Blair’s final 73 stories filed before his resignation were tainted by fraud. 

Worse, high-level figures such as Washington editor Jill Abramson and metro editor Jonathan Landman had been raising red flags, with Landman even warning, in a blunt April 2002 memo, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

Five works elapsed after Blair's firing before Sulzberger took further action. When Raines could not contain the mushrooming scandal or the newsroom muttering that had now become a cacophony, he and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced to resign.

The disappointment must have been enormous when Raines finally grasped that he would function as an agent of change at the Gray Lady in a far different fashion than he expected.

Largely because of the Blair scandal, the Times instituted the ombudsman position (or, as they called it, a “public editor”), an independent watchdog who investigated reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness. 

Six journalists performed that function for the next 14 years, until the paper decided that the rise of social media helped maintain accountability. (I still think that was a mistake.)

In Andy Robinson’s July 2017 retrospective on the position in the Columbia Journalism Review, Margaret Sullivan, the penultimate Times public editor, noted the scandal epitomized “so many issues that were and still are happening in newsrooms: the effort to diversify the staff, people who find mentors, the pressure that reporters are under, the intense pressure that they’re under at places like The New York Times, the things that can go wrong, the way that in the new age you could simply be talking to your editor on your cell phone, and they wouldn’t know where you were.”

This Day in New York City History (‘Beau James’ Walker Inaugurated Mayor)

Jan. 1, 1926—In a pattern that held true for his attendance at major public meetings for the next seven years, Jimmy Walker was late—by 90 minutes—for his own inauguration as New York mayor.

This time, he had a valid excuse: he and wife Allie were helplessly mired in the traffic that had come to clog the streets of Gotham with the rise of the automobile—a problem he intended to alleviate once he took the oath of office.

As he becomes the focus of the same ceremony, Zohran Mamdani maintains a relationship with the electorate significantly different from Walker’s, going beyond the fact that the former is an insurgent with democratic socialist sympathies while the latter was a product of the Tammany Hall political machine.

No, those who cast their ballots for Walker (and even many of those who didn’t) couldn’t help liking him; Mandami’s voters believe in him. If that trust is ever broken, God help him.

Sharing a hotel room with Walker on a trip to Albany, Gov. Alfred E. Smith, remarking on his protégé’s slender form in multicolored pajamas, compared him to a candy cane. In time, the wisecrack assumed a double meaning. Like that confection, Walker was fun to take in but not as substantive as might be wished.

By the conclusion of his time in office—induced by a wide-ranging corruption probe by Judge Samuel Seabury—Walker earned several nicknames, including “Gentleman Jimmy,” “The Night Mayor,” “The Jazz Mayor,” and, inevitably, given an incurable tendency to tardiness that even delayed him from meeting with President Calvin Coolidge for 40 minutes, “The Late Mayor.”

But I prefer the one I heard nearly half a century ago, the title of a 1957 biopic starring Bob Hope: “Beau James,” a moniker that underscored his reputation as a dandy.

If you want a more complete idea of Walker’s colorful personality, then I urge you to read my blog post from nearly 16 years ago that took as its point of departure Red Smith’s dazzling reminiscences.

But the post you’re reading now focuses on several of the flamboyant politician’s policies—and the extent to which his managerial strengths and weaknesses, along with the contemporary environment, affected his ability to implement them.

In the attached blog post from nearly five years ago, longtime NYC archivist Kenneth Cobb paid Walker the compliment of taking his work seriously—something that the mayor all too often did not. 

Similar to Bill O’Dwyer at City Hall 20 years later, Walker was a glad-handing pol with great ability to maneuver others toward a desired outcome, but often beset by stress and ill health and disposed towards delegating matters to energetic but hard-pressed staffers.

In contrast to O’Dwyer, Walker’s ailments were more severe and self-induced. His epic nocturnal partying required him to sleep it all off, exacerbated his allergy towards handling difficult problems early in the morning, and drove him towards frequent vacations, including to Europe and Palm Springs—a total of 143 days in his first two years alone. 

The result: for seven years, New York not only had a “night mayor,” but a part-time one.

The place to start in assessing Walker is his inaugural address, where he outlined several key areas of concern: health, business conditions, housing, transportation, education, parks and recreation, child welfare, and police and fire protection.

This is the kind of speech almost any New York mayor would give. In fact, its surprising aspects, considering Walker’s prior reputation as a witty party leader in the State Senate and his subsequent bantering with the press, are its lack of memorable lines and overall seriousness.

It turned out that Walker did achieve some of his goals, including:

*establishing the Department of Sanitation—implementing “the first major improvement in the city’s sewage problem in its history,” according to Donald Miller’s history of Jazz Age Manhattan, Supreme City;

*creating a City Committee on Plan and Survey that ended up watered down by Democratic borough sachems and eventually eliminated through budget cuts in the Depression, but not before advancing the ideal of an objective master plan for the city;

*expanding parks and playgrounds by purchasing thousands of acres;

*enhancing public health by consolidating 26 municipal hospitals under a single commissioner, authorizing massive hospital construction and modernizing Bellevue’s psychopathic division;

*supporting civic aviation by initiating construction of Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s first municipal airport;

*maintaining the five-cent subway fare;

*presided over the opening of the first section of the Independent (IND) subway system; and,

*spearheaded construction of the West Side Highway.

Ironically, the beginning of the end for Walker began within only a few days of his greatest political triumph: a reelection victory in November 1929, as he took 60% of the vote compared with 25% for Republican Fiorello LaGuardia and 12% for Socialist Norman Thomas.

But the stock-market crash that occurred on “Black Tuesday” at the end of October meant that the mayor could no longer count on a vigorous private sector to fund his ambitious new programs—and that there would be less patience for stunts like signing into law a pay raise for himself as the first order of business in his second term.

Franklin Roosevelt, now in charge in Albany and with his eye on the White House, instigated the Seabury inquiry that turned up the heat on Walker through the spring and summer of 1932. 

But in the end it was Walker’s mentor Al Smith—no longer in office but out of patience with the "candy cane's" blatant philandering and laziness—who delivered the coup de grace, bluntly telling him, “You’re through.” That night, at the beginning of September, Walker wrote his letter of resignation, effective immediately.

Charm and generosity have enabled many politicians to survive all kinds of disasters, and Walker demonstrated those attributes to an unusual degree.

You will find no argument from me that he was fiscally fraudulent. (Herbert Mitgang’s history of the Seabury investigation, Once Upon a Time in New York, leaves no doubt on that score.) 

But his corruption pales next to the current Presidential administration, and unlike the present Oval Office incumbent he spurned attempts at naming after himself initiatives he had championed. “The mayor of New York still believes himself to be a public servant and not a potentate,” he said.

Moreover, for everyone who rightly recalls the bribes and what Walker termed “beneficences” that came his way for those courting favors, you will discover someone else with ancestors who survived in difficult times through charity arranged or personally distributed by him.

Flashback, February 1825: Adams Victory in Disputed Presidential Race Launches ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge

With none of the three major candidates winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the 1824 Presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which awarded the office to John Quincy Adams in February 1825.

I wrote 15 years ago about Adams’ first year in the White House, while surveying his prior distinguished diplomatic career and consequential post-Presidency. But the month in which he fulfilled his ambition for the nation’s highest office was so astonishing—and such an anticipation of how current thinly sourced smear campaigns can poison the electorate—that it deserves exploration in depth.

With the popular James Monroe declining to run for a third term, the stage was set for an electoral free-for-all in 1824, featuring four candidates:

*Secretary of State Adams, the son of another President, John Adams, drew strength from the Northeast, especially New England.

*Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, looked to a base mostly confined to the West and South, with residual support in the Northeast.

*Treasury Secretary William Crawford, though the favorite of the Democratic-Republican Party establishment, had suffered a debilitating stroke before the election. Though unable to campaign, he retained support in the Deep South.

*Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who earned the least votes in the Electoral College, ended up exerting the greatest influence on the vote.

The election of 1824 was the first that used the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which called for the House of Representatives to pick among the top three candidates in the Electoral College.

Those three turned out to be Adams, Jackson, and Crawford. Although Jackson led the Electoral College count (and, most historians contend, what would have been the popular vote), he did not have a majority. Crawford’s medical condition effectively made it a two-man race between Adams and Jackson.

Four years before, it took the Missouri Compromise to avert a civil war over slavery. Many of the sectional differences barely muzzled in that agreement were coming to the fore again.

A sense of déjà vu must have particularly gripped Adams: as in the election of 1800 (lost by his father), it would take a New York Federalist to secure the outcome.

But, while Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had persuaded his side to vote for Thomas Jefferson rather than Aaron Burr in that earlier election on the 36^th House ballot, it took only one ballot—cast by 60-year-old aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer III—to settle matters in 1825.

Legend holds that, while agonizing on the House floor over whom to support, Rensselaer noticed a ballot placed in front of him reading, ADAMS. Believing this to be divinely inspired, the congressman voted accordingly.

If only matters had remained that simple…

In an early attempt at creating a unifying “team of rivals” strategy that Abraham Lincoln later used, Adams asked Crawford to remain as treasury secretary and Jackson to take over the War Department. Both declined.

The selection of the third rival, Clay, sparked enormous controversy. The President-elect knew him as a fellow diplomat in the Treaty of Ghent negotiations that ended the War of 1812, and though he didn’t particularly trust the Kentuckian or care for his drinking and gambling, he knew he was able and shared common domestic policy goals.

Adams asked Clay to become Secretary of State after his House of Representatives victory, not before (contrary to what some Websites and podcasts claim to this day).

But, because Clay had swung the vote of his state’s delegation to Adams, and the State Department had served as a steppingstone to the Presidency for all occupants of the office in the prior 25 years, an anonymous letter soon appeared in Philadelphia’s Columbian Observer charging that the two men had engaged in a “corrupt bargain.”

Eventually, the “anonymous” Congressman emerged from the shadows to admit being the source of the allegation: George Kremer of Pennsylvania.

William Russ, Jr.’s article about the incident in the October 1940 issue of the academic journal Pennsylvania History noted not only that Kremer had “sunk into oblivion, even locally,” but that before and after his moment in the spotlight he was “obscure.” That difficulty in remembering him has only increased with time.

In 1825, Kremer, then completing his first term as a congressman, was hardly a disinterested observer, and certainly not a distinguished one. Successive stints as a storekeeper, lawyer, and two-year state legislator had done nothing to disabuse perceptions that he was a backbench time-server, a reputation not helped by his propensity for wearing a leopard-skin coat on the floor of the House. 

The topic that preoccupied Kremer in Congress–eliminating waste and abuse in government—frequently seemed like a pretext to contest initiatives that involved funding internal improvements—the policies that Clay and Adams supported and that Jackson opposed. Kremer, in fact, often anticipated many of the same arguments that MAGA supporters use today against government expenditures.

Challenged by Clay to testify and offer evidence before a congressional committee that would investigate the corruption allegations, however, Kremer backed down, saying at first, bizarrely, that he hadn’t intended to "to charge Mr. Clay with corruption," then refusing to testify on constitutional grounds, before finally crowing, after his three terms in Congress, how proud he was for his part in spreading the news about the scandal.

To be sure, backers of all four major candidates maneuvered furiously for advantage behind the scenes. But no documentary evidence has ever been produced substantiating the claims about Clay and Adams.

Moreover, despite friction between the two men in the past, even a shouting match, there could be little doubt that the House Speaker preferred Adams to Jackson—or, to put it another way, that Clay regarded Jackson as unsuited for the Presidency by virtue of his military background, hair-trigger temper, and distrust of banks.

None of that mattered to Jackson. He could have remembered that Adams, unlike Presidential aspirants like Crawford and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, had come to his defense in the Monroe Administration over his overly aggressive responses to Native American raids from Florida into Georgia.

But it was easier for him to think he’d lost because of the “corrupt bargain” than because of his incompatibility with Clay. So he not only nursed a grudge against the two men, but encouraged his supporters to regard the new administration as illegitimate—not unlike how Donald Trump convinced his followers that, all evidence to the contrary, the election of 2020 had been stolen from him at the polls.

Like his father, Adams erred in believing that he could govern above the fray, without benefit of political adherents. Jackson would not make the same mistake. (The “spoils system” is one Jacksonian legacy that Trump seems especially eager to copy in his return to the White House.)

When Adams left office four years later, defeated by the man he’d beaten previously, Jackson, he was one of the unhappiest men ever to occupy the White House.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams was so peeved by what transpired in his single term in office that he didn’t stick around for the inauguration of his successor.

Historians still regard Adams as the greatest Secretary of State in our history, and, like Jimmy Carter, he earned great respect for his post-Presidential career (see my prior blog post about his fight against the Jacksonian “gag rule” meant to squelch any opposition to slavery in Congress).

But his term in the White House was virtually unrelieved misery for him and his family, because of the stark mismatch between his lofty policy goals and miniscule political instincts. 

Flashback, March 1974: Nixon Imperiled as Watergate ‘Unindicted Co-Conspirator’

A 50-page grand jury report in early March 1974 shattered the relative calm that had descended on Washington after Richard Nixon had appointed Leon Jaworski four months earlier as the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

Nixon may have felt that at last, the firestorm ignited by the firing of Jaworski’s predecessor, Archibald Cox, and the resignations of Attorney General Elliott Richardson and William Ruckelshaus in protest during the “Saturday Night Massacre” had settled down.

He had stated in the annual State of the Union message that “one year of Watergate is enough,” and Jaworski’s crackdown on leaks from his office even as he sifted through evidence surrounding the coverup of the June 1972 break-in at Democratic national headquarters allowed the President to catch his breath and believe that he could hold onto his office.

But the sealed grand jury report altered the political atmosphere immediately, as noted by New Yorker reporter Elizabeth Drew, in in one of the best contemporary accounts of the crisis that drove Nixon from office, Washington Journal:

“Even though the indictment was expected, it came as a hammer blow. That keeps happening: the impact of the actual event is sharper and more disturbing than was anticipated. We can anticipate the facts but not their impact, their emotional reverberations. So we are unnerved when seven former Administration and reelection-committee officials—including the President’s closest associates, men who held great power—are indicted.”

Those figures included Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, former Attorney General John Mitchell, and special counsel Charles Colson, all of whom were convicted for their role in the affair.

But the big bombshell was contained in a bulging briefcase that passed from the jury to Judge John Sirica, then to the House Judiciary Committee: the naming of Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the case—a dubious first for the American Presidency.

The President’s career was in mortal danger now, as Capitol Hill had been notified that his involvement in the coverup was extensive—enough that it might constitute evidence that he had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that could trigger impeachment.

The question at the heart of Watergate—is the President above the law?—was now posed inescapably.  It would not be answered clearly even with the resignation of Nixon, once his political support had evaporated, five months later.

His pardon by successor Gerald Ford left an imperfect denouement, with the President out of office but never having been brought to trial, let alone found guilty by a jury (though Ford would emphasize that the pardon constituted admission of wrongdoing).

Even before then, however, the case had, to some extent, been clouded with ambiguity. Though impeachment had been mentioned in the Constitution, that document had been silent on whether the President could be indicted.

In fact, as related in Win McCormack’s article in the March 2024 New Republic, the answer had developed out of another investigation of the time, involving bribery charges against Spiro Agnew.

The Vice-President had moved to sidestep the investigation into his conduct as governor of Maryland (with, as it turned out, Agnew continuing his larcenous ways as he moved into the nation’s second-highest office) by demanding a trial by the Senate.

The Justice Department had wanted a determination that the Vice President could be indicted. The Veep, every bit as corrupt as Nixon but more bombastic and less capable than the President, would otherwise be left in charge with his own corruption charges pending if Nixon were indicted.

Left unsaid by Richardson and his lieutenants but clearly implied, however, was that the wish for a finding that though a Veep could be indicted, a sitting President could not.

While Jaworski was eager to accept this solution, many in the group of prosecutors he had inherited from Cox were not. Jill Wine-Banks, for instance, a young assistant prosecutor, disagreed with her boss.

A few years ago, in promoting her memoir, Watergate Girl, she pointed out the injustice of Nixon’s men going to jail while their boss suffered no such penalty.

The makeshift solutions meant to ensure, as the cliché of the time went, that “the system worked” were not without critics even then, as Wine-Bank’s example demonstrates.

Americans' tendency to forgot (or, for some youngsters, never learn) their history has meant that many might even regard the scandal, in the dismissive phrase of Nixon press secretary Ronald Ziegler, as a "third-rate burglary."

Drew's account offers a useful reminder of why the crisis involved far more than a mere break-in, even that it wasn't simply that "the coverup was worse than the crime":

"The problem for the White House, as we keep learning, was that there was so much to cover up. The break-in at the Watergate combined the elements of covert operations, espionage, secret funds, hidden contributions, and aggression against political opponents (real and perceived) which also characterized other activities carried out under the Administration.”

But, in deciding to review Donald Trump’s claim of Presidential immunity from prosecution, the Supreme Court may well make a greater hash of things than occurred in 1974 under Chief Justice Warren Burger, when the justices' unanimous decision might have  upheld the doctrine of executive privilege but not in the case of a criminal prosecution.

In contrast, now the court contains one associate justice (Clarence Thomas) whose wife connived behind the scenes to keep Trump in power—a conflict of interest if there ever was one.

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Agnew Resigns in Disgrace)

Oct. 10, 1973—Less than two weeks after defiantly vowing that he would not resign as Vice-President even if he was indicted, Spiro Agnew did exactly that, pleading no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption.

John C. Calhoun had resigned as Andrew Jackson’s Veep over policy differences, but Agnew was the first to leave the office in disgrace.

The investigation that brought him down, though separate and distinct from the Watergate scandal involving his boss, Richard Nixon, furthered the growing national impression of an administration reeking with corruption, and fed the possibility that, if one of the two highest elected officials in the land could be forced out, so could the other.

Perhaps because he largely faded out of the spotlight after his time in office, perhaps because he increasingly became viewed as a useless occupant of a once-useless office, Agnew and his crimes have been largely forgotten.

Outside of The Baltimore Sun—in effect, during his days as governor of Maryland, his hometown newspaper—hardly any major newspaper has observed the anniversary of the departure of a politician once the proverbial “heartbeat away” from the Presidency.

I am writing this blog post partly to fill this informational gap. 

Fundamentally shallow, ill-informed, unscrupulous, and unworthy of high office, Agnew demands our attention because he tapped into what has become apparent in the years since as some of the worst instincts of the American people: zenophobia, resentment, and alarming credulity about the greatest canards about the press and dissenters.

Only in his second year as governor of Maryland in 1968, Agnew received Nixon’s backing as Vice President after having swerved from a relative racial moderate to an uncompromising champion of “law and order” who requested and used the National Guard after unrest following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He could facilitate Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to peel white voters away from their traditional Democratic voting patterns—yet did not command conservative allegiance the way that California Governor Ronald Reagan did.

To Nixon’s chagrin, Agnew increasingly built a base in that very voting bloc, largely because he gleefully seized the attack dog role that the President assigned him, in speeches featuring alliterative phrases crafted by speechwriters William Safire and Patrick Buchanan. 

The right-wing contingent of the GOP ignored Agnew’s gaffes and racial/ethnic slurs (e.g., “fat Jap,” If you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all”) and embraced him as its champion.

Even though he had become disenchanted with Agnew’s poor management skills, his predilection for hitting the golf course rather than learning policy, and his lack of seriousness and temperamental steadiness, Nixon ironically found in 1972 that he could not dump the Veep from the ticket without alienating the conservative wing of the party.

Only a couple of months into the following year, just when Agnew had emerged as a strong contender to succeed Nixon at the end of his term, the Vice-President picked up the first hints that he was being investigated for extorting money from contractors while governor of Maryland. Amazingly, he continued to carry out the scheme while Vice President.

Following a script that Donald Trump would follow far more successfully more than 40 years later, Agnew demonized reporters and sought to quash the investigation as a witch hunt (even, as Rachel Maddow revealed in her podcast and book Bag Man, enlisting George Bush—then head of the Republican National Committee—in the effort).

It all came to naught. Agnew’s call for his impeachment before the Senate—where, he calculated, he stood a better chance of surviving than in a court of law—led Nixon to decide that this was a threat to his own political future.

Moreover, Attorney General Elliot Richardson regarded as untenable any scenario in which Nixon, if impeached, could be succeeded by Agnew, himself a crook.

The path was paved for a deal that, even at the time, many (including the young prosecutors investigating Agnew) regarded as what UPI’s Mike Feinsilber called at the time “two standards of justice, one for the powerless and one for the strong.” 

“Accused in 40 detailed pages of having pocketed well over $85,000 in kickbacks," Feinsilber explained, “Agnew was given lighter punishment than others get for stealing a car.” That “punishment” turned out to be a $10,000 fine, a three-years probation sentence, and disbarment by the Maryland court of appeals.

After saying goodbye to Nixon, Agnew never spoke to the President again. When the Veep showed up at his old boss’s funeral in 1994, many in Nixon’s family and inner circle may well have welcomed him as much as a skunk slipping into a perfume factory.

After all, he had charged, in a memoir published seven years after leaving office, Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, had urged him strongly to resign: “The President has a lot of power—don’t forget that.”

“I interpreted it as an innuendo that anything could happen to me,” Agnew recalled. “I might have a convenient ‘accident.’”

By the way, that memoir was titled Go Quietly…Or Else—a title more appropriate about an encounter with the Mafia than about service to the American people. Altogether in keeping with the undignified, unsavory liar and crook who produced it.

TV Quote of the Day (Steve Martin, on Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Clean Image’)

“You have such a clean image. And that’s hard to do in today’s world. I suggest that whatever you’re paying the National Enquirer, you should double.”—Actor-comedian Steve Martin, to late-night host Jimmy Fallon, appearing with Martin Short on The Tonight Show, February 14, 2019

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the “two-minute hate” is a public screaming session in which members of a totalitarian state vent their anguish and frustration toward a politically expedient enemy. It becomes a “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer.”

In the age of shortened attention spans and social media, that tendency to express one’s suppressed hate has spilled over from politics to entertainment.

When, it’s discovered, performers behind the scenes are not as genial as their public image, the vitriol directed in their direction becomes too much to handle, and damage-control doctors (formerly known as publicity agents) justify their salaries by working overtime and taking any headache remedy at hand.

Rosie O’Donnell, dubbed “The Queen of Nice” by Time Magazine as a daytime talk-show host in the early years she was on, can relate. So, even more so, can Ellen DeGeneres.

The latest TV star to experience this phenomenon is Jimmy Fallon—the subject, you may have heard, of a Rolling Stone expose of his show’s toxic environment.

Fallon is now in a situation in which every utterance that he or a guest makes is likely to be scrutinized on the spot or reinterpreted at some point in the not-so-distant future, at least sometimes in a manner not originally intended. It’s happening already, in the Tonight Show episode featuring today’s “Quote of the Day.”

Fallon’s critics are citing Steve Martin’s joke as a sly way of pointing out the host’s phoniness—especially since it came right after friend Martin Short’s remark in a similar vein: “This is the greatest show on television because there’s no host on late night that pretends to care the way you do. I mean, no one captures phoniness the way you do.”

A close look at the Martin-and-Short segment in which this exchange took place shows how out of context such criticism is (especially since the two comics lobbed increasingly absurd remarks not only at Fallon but also each other). But that won’t seem so to Fallon haters.

“There’s no business like show business,” advised Irving Berlin, but that adage is only true to an extent. Money passes through show business like all other kinds, bringing with it greed, insecurity, ruthlessness, and the arrogance of power.

If show business does differ from other professions, it is because its members are more glamourous and more charming than the rest of us—and, thus, more adept at concealing their less savory character traits.

The Fallon Fiasco is, in a sense, an outgrowth of the #MeToo movement—which, far more than an attack against the misuse of sex in employment, was an outburst against the misuse of power.

In the wake of these scandals, employees have grown more accustomed to bringing their grievances to journalists. What toxic entertainers and their enablers may have counted on previously—silence—no longer works so well.

In years past, biographers would have to wait at least several days following their subjects’ burial before they could safely state with little fear of recrimination, for instance, that Jackie Gleason was far from “The Great One” to Honeymooners writers, or that Johnny Carson could be variously drunk, verbally abusive, or aloof when not in front of an audience. Quite a difference from today.

Will Fallon be canceled as a result of these revelations? Not necessarily. With the writers’ strike putting TV production on hiatus, he will have more time to work out an apology to the public and not just to his staffers.

If the not-so-subtle hints in the article are true, he could also take the time to go into rehab, in order to deal with the substance abuse that, the Rolling Stone article strongly hints, may have contributed to his moodiness.

In one sense in his remark above, Steve Martin was being more correct than he may have realized with his reference to The National Enquirer.  In 2016, a Presidential aspirant arranged to have Enquirer publisher David Packer pay for, then kill, a story that could have damaged his candidacy.

Only now has that “catch-and-kill” program put the candidate in any sort of legal jeopardy—but I’d still bet that he is less likely to face the consequences of that than Jimmy Fallon, whose conduct did far less damage to the American republic.

Quote of the Day (Mike Lupica, on the Increasingly Tangled Tale of Herschel Walker)

“One more thing about [onetime Heisman Trophy winner and current Senate candidate] Herschel [Walker]? I’m really starting to worry about just the sheer logistics of what next Father’s Day are going to be like for this guy. The more you read, the more you think he hooked up with everybody except Stormy Daniels.”—Columnist Mike Lupica, “Shooting From the Lip,” New York Daily News, Oct. 9, 2022

Stormy Daniels? Please! Don’t go giving the guy any more ideas!

(The photo accompanying this post, showing Herschel Walker at the 2018 College Football Playoff National Championship Playoff Fan Central, was taken Jan. 6, 2018, by Thomson200.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Bedazzled,’ on a Faustian Bargain for Prime Minister)

George Spiggott [aka Satan] [played by Peter Cook]: “Now, then, what'd you like to be first? Prime Minister? Oh, no, I've made that deal already.”—Bedazzled (1967), screenplay by Peter Cook, from a story by Dudley Moore, directed by Stanley Donen

As Peter Cook’s clever take on the old Faust tale indicates, Boris Johnson (yes, he’s the one pictured, not the late, lean Mr. Cook) is hardly the first British PM suspected of bargaining with Ol’ Scratch for a stay in 10 Downing Street. 

But the man who used Brexit as his crude instrument for supplanting predecessor Theresa May must now feel that, after only three years in power, his sojourn in Hell is arriving a bit early.

Now that he’s resigned under overwhelming duress—and even then, vowing to serve until his party can find a replacement—Johnson may wish that he had fewer of those Houdini-like instincts long wondered at by the press.

In the end, all of those escapes from political death only prolonged the final agony: questions about what he was doing about former deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher, who was accused of groping two men last week. All of this was too much for nearly 60 members of his government who resigned.

In his overturning of the traditional political order and his fast-and-loose approach to the truth, Johnson has sometimes been compared with Donald Trump. I can’t imagine that Johnson’s former ministers and party colleagues loathe him more than Trump’s did. 

But the political situation in the UK was certainly more conducive to them telling the PM that it was time for him to go.

You can almost hear the sigh of relief over Johnson’s departure coming from the Republic of Ireland. After all, Brexit—and Johnson’s unseemly trashing thrashing about to maintain the loyalty of Ulster Unionists—led him to trash the Protocol agreement his own government negotiated just a few years ago, unnecessarily complicating the survival of the Good Friday Agreement that wound down 30 years of “The Troubles.” 

(For an analysis of the damage caused by Johnson’s blithe disregard for his own diplomacy, see David Lammy’s Guardian article from three weeks ago.)

"The relationship between our governments has been strained and challenged in recent times," acknowledged Taoiseach (Irish PM) Micheál Martin, who urged Johnson’s successor towards “broader bilateral relations between us…[and] to work together in a spirit of respect, trust and partnership." 

Let’s see if the nation that produced the likes of Johnson, chuckling at the antics of the overgrown schoolboy scamp even as he overturned one political norm after another, is now ready to move decisively away from his policies. Lots of luck with that—especially if Peter Cook’s “Mr. Spiggott” has anything to say in the matter.

Essay: Falwell Jr. and Religious Right Show When ‘Heaven is Not Averse to Compromise’

“Some joys, it’s true, are wrong in Heaven’s eyes

Yet Heaven is not averse to compromise;

There is a science, lately formulated,

Whereby one’s conscience may be liberated,

And any wrongful act you care to mention

May be redeemed by purity of intention.”—French playwright Moliere (1622-1673), Tartuffe (1664; English translation by Richard Wilbur, 1965)

Religious hypocrisy—the target of Moliere’s sharp satire in 17^th century France—remains just as powerful, perhaps even more so, in 21^st century America. That is the only way to view the news coming out of the evangelical world, starting—but by no means ending—with Jerry Falwell Jr. (pictured).

The son of the founder of the Moral Majority has taught all too many Americans, like Moliere’s scoundrel, that “Heaven is not averse to compromise.” That is benefiting him at the most opportune time: When he has jeopardized his job as president and chancellor of Liberty University through colossal folly.

How many male educators who take it on themselves to guide the morals of young people—and are not shy about doing so—then turn around and post, for all the world to see, on Instagram, a picture of themselves in unzipped pants, with one hand holding a glass and the other around the waist of a young woman whose shorts are also unzipped?

What could that educator have been thinking when he tapped out this caption to the picture? “More vacation shots. Lots of good friends visited us on the yacht. I promise that’s just black water in my glass. It was a prop only.”

That caption only makes matters murkier. What, for instance, is “black water”? What was it a “prop” for? And if this was a yacht, was it the “Monkey Business”—that vessel where, before the 1988 primary season began in earnest, Democratic candidate Gary Hart was photographed with his arm around a young lady not his wife?

At this point, perhaps when the stuff in the “black water” wore off, someone must have persuaded young Falwell to try to contain the damage. It began promisingly enough, when he deleted the post. But then he gave an interview to a local radio station in Lynchburg, Va., and—well, read what he said:

“Yeah, it was weird. She’s pregnant. She couldn’t get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like… I had on a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in a long time and couldn’t get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers. She’s my wife’s assistant, she’s a sweetheart. I should have never put it up and embarrassed her. I’ve apologized to everybody. I promised my kids I will try to be a good boy from here on out.”

Jeans he “couldn’t get zipped”—one too many Taco Tuesdays for the school president? Isn’t that a product of one of the seven deadly sins—gluttony? 

But the clincher in this statement is that phrase “good boy”—a final flippant note that falsified the hymn of contrition.

These days, most authority figures—particularly those at an institution ostensibly dedicated to moral formation—would find it impossible to survive a sex scandal. Even at a secular school, they would be forced to resign immediately, with the board of trustees proclaiming that it’s retained outside counsel to investigate the leader’s misbehavior and the toxic environment he fostered.

But most authority figures also have not labored for Liberty University, with a board of trustees that, with many members loyal to Falwell through friendship (William E. Graham IV, grandson of Billy) or blood (Falwell’s brother Jonathan, also a minister), were willing to overlook “Junior” Falwell’s previous transgressions--numerous enough that I'm not sure why the school wasn't renamed Libertine University.

The so-called “mainstream media” such as The New York Times have been endlessly derided (and yes, let’s stipulate not without reason) for their bias against religious organizations such as Liberty University.

But I must say that these outlets pulled their punches in reporting on other Falwell controversies in the coverage of this recent incident. Invariably, they have listed only two or three.

Chalk it up to impulses toward charity, or, if you insist, the need not to strain the eyeballs of time-pressured readers. 

But no such constraints exist for Messiah University historian John Fea, who, in a blog post after the latest incident, listed three dozen examples of objectionable Falwell statements or actions that could have--but didn't--bring the hammer down on him (e.g., Falwell “created a Blackface face-mask and tweeted about it” and “Michael Cohen had ‘racy photos’ of him and his wife”).

This latest controversy—created, be it noted, entirely through Falwell’s insane Instagram post—proved a bit too much even for the executive committee of the board, which forced him to take an “indefinite leave of absence” even as catcalls from the student body were so loud they could have brought down the walls of Jericho.

(Who could blame these youths who, after being hectored to adhere to “The Liberty Way”—an honor code prohibiting premarital sex and private interactions between members of the opposite sex—now had to watch when the same proscriptions did not apply to their president? Like Bill Murray being pulled towards a seductive Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Falwell Jr. seems to think that, when applied to himself, “it's more of a guideline than a rule.”)

Clearly, the board was playing for time—time either to announce, after a decent interval, that Falwell had undergone some combination of 12-step program and spiritual counseling to announce that he’d been “redeemed,” or—if the outrage and ridicule still hadn’t subsided—to have a successor in place if Falwell is forced to step down permanently.

Don’t be surprised if Falwell survives this. What others might view as rank pretense, the religious right writes off as a redemption story in the making.

Why should they be put out when Falwell grabs a single woman by the waist when they have already excused a Presidential candidate who’s boasted about grabbing women “by the p----y?”

Unfortunately, Falwell’s not the only one willing to wink at “boys will be boys” behavior—and even engage in some of his own. Far too many evangelicals—and the entire religious right movement—have compromised their stress on personal integrity to win and keep access to power.

It was one thing to support the divorced movie star Ronald Reagan, who secured the allegiance of Falwell’s father and other key evangelicals in the 1980 election when he told them at a major Dallas confab,  “I know you can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.”

But they could console themselves with the notion that Reagan’s second marriage had endured for nearly 30 years, that there was no serious question that he adored wife Nancy, and that he had a record of public service that could be analyzed.

But they had to shut their eyes far more to Donald Trump, who was unapologetic about his two divorces, exhibiting no real interest in atonement, and—unlike most of the other GOP candidates—lacking any governmental record to prove his fidelity to conservative ideals.

But, as recounted in a New York Times article this past weekend, he told them something, in a Dordt University address, they dearly wanted to hear:

“Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

The same address became notorious in non-evangelical circles for another Trump statement: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Ever since then, evangelicals have gone a long way towards confirming Trump’s boast. It doesn’t matter to them that in the process, they demonstrated that their most telling contention about Bill and Hillary Clinton—that character counts—was utterly hollow as they followed someone who far surpassed them in moral turpitude.

Indeed, they exiled anyone who dared to question their passionate embrace of this President with no solid religious or even moral anchor—including at (surprise!), Liberty U., where, four years ago, Mark DeMoss was forced off the board of trustees for criticizing Falwell for personally endorsing Trump for President.

Enjoyment of the kind of power promised by Trump parallels the religious right’s sense of aggrievement and encirclement. All their gains in positions filled and right-wing Supreme Court justices are being jeopardized now through their overreach.

No longer are evangelicals content with debating issues that, no matter what else one might think of them, are indisputably moral in nature, such as abortion and gay rights. Now, they are forcing stalemates on issues of public safety and personal security: gun control, climate change, even COVID-19.

Religious conservatives on social media have raised hackles about politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom being “anti-Christian” for restricting indoor religious gatherings during the COVID-19 outbreak. 

It’s too bad these religious hand-wringers don’t spend as much time denouncing leaders like Falwell whose serial offenses have led more people to question the value of Christianity than an entire school system of secularists.

Tell me: Why do the loudest shouters about others’ sins get caught engaging in them so often themselves?