Opinion
Nicholas Von Hoffman
Tired writer to take a month off
This column won’t be appearing for about a month,
but the writer hasn’t been fired, exiled, furloughed or
repressed. He’s tired and needs rest.
Judging from the mail, the phone calls and casual
inquiries on the street, a number of people think the
column is under perpetual threat by a hostile
management. Actually, life around the office isn’t tense
at all. On most days the editors don’t have any strong
opinion about what’s been said, on others they show
signs of agreeing and occasionally they not only disagree
but write to refute the specious reasoning appearing in
this space.
All of which is good for it shows this newspaper and
quite a few others are coming around to the idea that one
of their functions is to be a place where ideas can dispute
with each other. This angers some readers, who prefer
to filter out any contact with notions and thoughts which
don’t sit well with them. They call up and say they will no
longer buy a newspaper which is insane enough to print
the ravings of that mad baboon.
Others comfort themselves with the thought that the
column appears on what they call the women’s page, the
unspoken assumption being that if the management had
any respect for it they’d put it in a section that people
define as for and about the male gender. Writing for
women, even in some women’s eyes, is regarded as a
demotion, a second-rate assignment. Yet even though
the readership of this column seems evenly divided
between men and women, it’s the women who are the
better letter writers.
Men will sometimes write and cuss you out, call you
a Communist, and sign off mumbling to themselves.
Women rarely do. They think a very long time before
they write. They think about a column for two or three
months before they decide what their position is and
write to tell you about it.
The mail is often sad and moving. There are letters
from people who’re dying, from people who’re getting
divorced, or thrown out of school or into jail. Seldom do
they write to tell you the good news in their lives. Often
they send helpful information; a number of these
columns derive originally from reader mail.
Sometimes when you read these letters you ask
yourself why you’re in this weird line of work. You know
it has satisfactions but you can’t say precisely what they
are. Friends will say that you get a lot accomplished, but
a wise man doesn’t go into newspaper work in hopes of
accomplishing anything.
The ambition to get things done, get people elected,
get roads built or foreign policy changed has wrecked
many good newspapers and good newspaper men. If a
paper is instrumental in getting a mayor elected, it’s
stuck with him; he’s their guy, and they’ve got to defend
the idiot no matter what he does.
The same holds true for a program or a policy. A
columnist would advocate it only in a spirit of pure
pessimism, not in hopes it’ll be adopted, but that it will
be discussed. If it is adopted, he’d better crawl away
from it quickly for ego investment in an idea is more
subversive of independent thought than backing a
candidate.
One of the traps of our business—newspapering in
general and column-writing especially—is the tug
toward playing surrogate. Surrogate Clarence Darrow
to free the innocent, surrogate President to save the
Republic, surrogate football coach to give us a winning
season. They say newsmen eventually wind up looking
like the people they cover, crime reporters like cops,
diplomatic correspondents like ambassadors, and so
forth, but it’s bad for us when it happens because as
much as possible we should be cantankerous, eccentric,
misanthropic nobodies. As much as possible we should
scrape off what other people accumulate in life, a sense
of place and position in society. But it’s hard because
newspapering partakes of show biz and we all love to
star.
We have power problems as well. We, too, have
heard about the power of the press, the thunder of the
fourth estate and that the pen is mightier than the sword.
In an exquisitely inexact and unpredictable way there is
power in a few of these words we write, but it’s a fickle
power resembling the priest's prayer for rain.
Sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn’t, but even
when he does it may not come the way he wants it. He
may get flooded out.
Perhaps the most influential newspaper writer in
this millenium was Karl Marx. He did, indeed, have the
power to call down the rain and the thunder and the
lightning, but if he’d known he would be used as the
excuse for the neo-czarism of the Russian socialist state
he probably would have shot himself. Power is in the
press only in an abstract way; it is not institutionally
reliable like a judge’s or a legislator’s, not accurate like
the sword it is said to be mightier than. When we
newspaper people try to invoke this power and use it we
become propagandists for somebody else’s real power or
foolish little guys running around screaming a lot of stuff
that nobody can understand because it sounds like we
have cotton in our mouths.
The satisfaction of writing such a column doesn’t
have to come from having discernible impact. It can
come from play,the play of words, the play of ideas, the
play of yelling and being yelled at, the play of trying to
invent new ways of looking at things, of imagining new
combinations to try to figure out what’s going on, what
they’re doing to us. Such is the satisfaction of this
somewhat one-sided conversation that we have three
times a week.
Play is a word that connotes fun, and fun, for no good
reason, we consign to the frivolous and insincere. But
play can be sincere as any musician or football player
will tell you. So also with the play of this column which,
in retrospect, is sometimes wrong but always and
assuredly fun.
On the right. . . William F. Buckley Jr.
Moynihan is nice to almost anyone
Really, people ought to take turns
hiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan if only for
the pleasure of his leave-takings. His
apopemptic graces are equisitely
developed, and what he said about Nixon
and his administration was overdue to be
said by someone with high standing in the
academic community, particularly
someone whose own preferences in politics
are Liberal, and who grew up in the gar
dens of Camelot, first as equerry for
Averell Harriman, and later as servant to
the king himself. The question now is
whether the Liberal community will listen
to what he said because it was their old,
accredited pal Moynihan who said it. Or
whether they will simply say that
Moynihan has gone daft, and go back to
treating Nixon and Nixon’s ideas with the
discrimination of Herblock.
Memorable words
To the end that his words shall not be
quickly forgotten, I repeat one or two of
them. Remember, here is Moynihan in the
East Room of the White House, speaking to
several hundred members of Mr. Nixon’s
administration. He comes now to his final
words, or exhortations, as he calls them.
“The first is too be of good cheer and
good conscience. Depressing, even
frightening things are being said about the
Administration. They are not true.” These
words, incredibly, are of revolutionary, or
if you prefer counter-revolutionary,
moment. Because it is quite literally true
that the nation’s academies are crowded
with people who teach that Nixon and the
men who surround him are evil. That they
are mass murderers, who do it for fun and
profit. That they care not about human
suffering, or indeed about anything more
wholesome than their own rancid self
interest. It may seem odd that it should be
necessary to speak these words of denial.
“They are not true”—an elegant meiotic
simplicity that lends special eloquence to
the sentence, which is normally rendered
with verbal extravagance, of which an
example might be, “People who say that
kind of thing about the Administration are
sowing seeds of division and hatred,” etc.,
etc., etc.
Startling insight
And then Mr. Moynihan said
something else which is substantively
arresting. “Time and again, the President
has said things of startling insight, taking
positions of great political courage and
intellectual daring, only to be greeted with
silence or incomprehension. The prime
consequence of all this is that the people in
the nation who take these matters
seriously have never been required to take
us seriously.”
A brilliant perception. Now those who
are wise in the ways of the world know that
undoubtedly Mr. Moynihan had in mind
some of the words and concepts which he,
Moynihan, had sold to the President, or
written in for him in some of his speeches.
Poor Patrick, he did not understand. Any
Conservative who has ever been scratched
in action understands perfectly. Most
Liberals, who are moralists, are taught to
believe that an idea is to be appreciated or
rejected depending on its provenance. If it
happened that Adlai Stevenson and
Everett Dirksen made the identical
proposal on the same day, Stevenson’s
idea would 'have been celebrated,
Dirksen’s ignored.
Ideas by the truckload
Good ideas have come out of Con
servative hatcheries by the truckload
during the last ten years or so and they are
simply ignored. TTiat this should be the
case even when the ideas come out of the
mouth of the President of the United
States, who is charged by the Constitution
with proposing laws to Congress, is not
merely intellectually scandalous, it is
politically stultifying.
It is, finally, remarkable that Mr.
Nixon succeeded in touching so deeply a
man as sensitive as Moynihan, as worldly
wise and as obstinately Liberal.
Remember, this is the Nixon that Joe
McGinniss made a fortune out of by
mocking, and that Garry Wills (in his
fascinating book) scarifies as a human
being. Moynihan said: “(I) have seen him
late into the night and through the night
and into the morning, struggling with the
most awful complexities, the most
demanding and irresolvable conflicts,
doing so because he cared, trying to
comprehend what is right, and trying to
make others see it, above all caring,
working, hoping for this country that he
has made greater already and which he
will make greater still.”
Dr. Johnson said that epitaphs are not
where to look for lapidary judgments on a
man’s behavior in this world. But Nixon is
very much alive, and Moynihan will have
to live with these words. I wish him luck.