A More Radical Dishonesty

LIKE THE EARLY Communist Party, newspaper coverage of Gerald Ford has gone through four periods. Three drastic shifts have occurred practically overnight, just like shifts in the party line. It's true that they've synchronized with public events--Ford's appointment to the vice-presidency, Nixon's resignation, and Ford's pardon of Nixon. But none of these events showed a side of Ford entirely unrelated to what he was before.

The Communist Party's wild fluctuations are often taken--reasonably enough--as evidence that it was unwilling to think for itself, uninterested in the real events happening around it, or simply dishonest. Few critics seem to have drawn similar conclusions about today's analysts. Instead, there've been considerable, and badly needed, warnings against a permanent honeymoon. The New York Times's Russell Baker warned that reporters were inflating Ford to a superhuman figure; in the September issue of [MORE], the Times's William Shannon chimed in with admonitions against letting Ford off easy or getting overly cozy with his friends.

So far at least, Shannon's fears seem to have been ungrounded. At Ford's last press conference--the one where he defended the Central Intelligence Agency's intervention in Chile and his own pardon of Nixon--reporters fired a whole battery of hostile questions at him. But the barrage doesn't explain the earlier backing and filling--if anything, it appears to make it more puzzling.

In the beginning, Ford was just a quiet minority leader from Michigan, defending a Republican administration's positions competently if not outstandingly, taking a conservative but far from unusual position on labor and civil rights issues, and only rarely entering a public spotlight. The Almanac of American Politics might cite the consummate political skill with which he led the fight to keep Congress from stopping the bombing of Cambodia. But newspapers gave little attention to such day-to-day details, preferring to focus on the more startling although less murderous activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

When Ford became vice-president, naturally, he became better known. Liberal columnists discovered that he was more or less honest but not too bright. They quoted Lyndon Johnson's pronouncement on the subject--"Gerald Ford is too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time," and they inveighed against Ford's defense of Nixon, against his statement just a few days before the Judiciary Committee voted that the evidence did not support Nixon's impeachment.

In the third period, after Ford's assumption of the presidency, most commentators apparently decided--undoubtedly correctly--that it was better to be honest but dumb than to be smart and a crook. "Gerald Ford is Middle America," Time magazine said firmly. As long as Ford continued to cook his own breakfast and refused to follow his predecessor in fattening himself at the public expense, commentaries indicated, all would be right with the republic. Like Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorian, they were obsessed with the ideal of saintliness and convinced of the supreme importance of not eating too much.

Now that Ford has stopped cooking his own breakfast, about all the commentators have left him is his honesty. The inadequacy of such a simple formulation suggests why they're so ready to reverse themselves at such length at such short notice. The result is to reduce the politics of the day to the president's personal character, and his personal character to reporters' changing fancy.

COMPARED TO HIS predecessor, Ford's personal independence and that of his entourage certainly seem unimpeachable, enough to satisfy Diogenes or W.C. Fields that here, at long last, is an honest man. Nixon continues to affirm his innocence; Ford alludes to Nixon's having been "shamed and disgraced." Nixon's press secretary was a notorious liar; Ford's first press secretary resigned when he felt he'd become a party to deceiving the public. Mrs. Johnson came out for beautifying America; Mrs. Ford comes out for legalizing abortion and ordaining women ministers. When reporters in 1962 asked him if American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, Kennedy denied it; Ford forthrightly acknowledged that the CIA had ignored international law in Chile.

The only trouble is that the meanings Ford attaches to what he says are sometimes so divorced from reality. A defense of the CIA on the grounds that Popular Unity tried to suppress political opposition is easier to disprove than a denial that the CIA intervened, so it has less serious consequences, but its resemblance to the truth is hardly closer. Too many of Ford's basic assumptions--that any government friendly to his government deserves and indeed has its people's support, for instance, or that what's good for General Motors is good for the world--are lies. However scrupulously honest Ford's reasoning from such premises, he still comes out with conclusions--that Congress should provide even more aid to South Korea and especially the Saigon government of South Vietnam, for example--which it would be difficult for him to reach in any other way.

This more radical kind of dishonesty was apparent at least as early as Ford's first press conference, the one that everyone liked because it symbolized a new presidential openness. A reporter asked whether Ford would extend Nixon's policy of detente as far as overtures toward Cuba--the Cuban government suggested that it would welcome such overtures. Ford indicated that though he, personally, had nothing against accepting the Cuban revolution, there was nothing that he could do about it--at least not yet--because of U.S. loyalty to the Organization of American States, which had voted to expel Cuba.

Out of historical context, the statement might seem frank and even commendable in its adherence to international co-operation. But in fact, the OAS is not a confederation of equal states, each of them respecting collective decisions, as it would have to be for Ford's statement to make sense. Today, and even more so when it voted to expel Cuba, the OAS is dominated by the United States--the richest American country, the one whose corporations dominate large sectors of the others' economies. And this was particularly relevant in the OAS's expulsion of Cuba, a decision taken at the insistent urging of the United States and in large part by governments subservient to the United States government.

None of the reporters at the press conference followed the Cuban question up, and I didn't see any commentary on it afterwards. Why wasn't Ford's answer--like the visits to Cuba at about the same time by Senate committee staffers and the contemplated visits by a couple of senators--subject to at least a little criticism in the light of the last ten years' history?

ONE REASON MAY be that a lot of reporters seem to share the radical dishonesty involved in refusing to question--refusing even to think about--false assumptions. If they're honest reporters, they remain willing to discover some of the falsities that derive from the assumptions--but their reporting, as in the case of Ford's Cuba statement, still often comes out superficial and finally unrevealing.

Even the Times's background round-ups--often the most interesting thing in the paper--often grow out of such unexamined biases. This summer, for example, the Times gave prominent play to a three-part series on South Vietnam by David K. Shipler. The series contained considerable information--most of it at least a year or two old--on the torture that is commonplace in the Saigon government's political prisons. Shipler laid great stress on the fact that many of those tortured are not communists, and in general the moral of the series appeared to be that the United States should suggest to General Thieu that he institute some prison reforms and some civil liberties, and maybe consider cutting off aid if he--out of sheer perverseness, possibly--refused.

The continuity of oppressiveness among all the governments fighting the National Liberation Front hardly entered into Shipler's articles, though it certainly seems to suggest that the oppressiveness has roots deeper than General Thieu's personal idiosyncracies--roots in popular support for the NLF, for example. Like Ford's policy pronouncements, and unlike the articles of the Times's other Vietnam reporter, James M. Markham, Shipler's articles were based on an unconsidered assumption that the NLF couldn't possibly speak for the people of South Vietnam, and merits suppression by any means necessary. Working from this assumption, Shipler spends all his energies on comparatively slight points like the number of non-communists--innocent people--falsely described as communists--guilty people. His ability to distinguish what matters most ends up at about the level of Linda Charlton, whose coverage of Rockefeller's confirmation hearings in The Times lumps together questions about the Attica killings and Rockefeller's remarriage.

When reporters are unwilling to examine the assumptions they bring to whatever they report, it keeps them from understanding or even concerning themselves with the importance of what they're saying. Repeating catchy phrases about walking and chewing gum at the same time is easier than thinking, but it's less helpful in understanding what's going on. So stories focus on things that don't matter much, and when that becomes clear they shift to things that matter even less, from Ford's alleged slowness to his willingness to pick up his own newspaper. And when reporters discover the same man they're been billing as an exemplar of truth-telling telling lies about Chile, they don't know how to account for it: all they can do is change their line. Because they share Ford's false assumptions, his more radical dishonesty.