The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In the autumn of 1963 ? while the Cuban missile crisis was raging elsewhere ? yore scribbler was seated at the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, sharing a drink with David Halberstam of the New York Times and Malcolm Browne of United Press International. From where we sat, we could see the flames of gunshot battles across the river ? American troops sent as "observers" in the fight against the Viet Cong. Both Halberstam and Browne later won the Pulitzer Prize for their despatches from the field, telling the American public that the Pentagon was lying and that the U.S.-backed guys were not winning, but losing, the war. The John Kennedy White House phoned the New York Times and demanded that Halberstam be fired for filing such rubbish. Scotty Reston, the celebrated Washington bureau chief of the Times, sent a famous message back to the JFK White House. To wit: "My newspaper has been here long before you arrived, and it will be here long after you have gone." Walter Cronkite (the polls every year anointing him as "the most trusted person in America") decided himself to go to Vietnam to find out who was telling the truth ? the young reporters or the Pentagon. He spent a week there, talking to the young reporters and the lying generals, came back and on CBS (hello there, Dan Rather) delivered a devastating report over several nights over what he had found. President Lyndon Johnson said to his aides, "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." He retired to his Texas ranch, and declined to run again. See 'Who' P.# Con't from P.# This all comes to mind because of this incomprehensible American election, that seems to be who did what unto whom 30 years ago ? the Bush-funded twerps smearing John Kerry's three Purple Hearts and the slow-to-respond Democrats dredging-up (hello, Dan) supposedly spurious documents about what every one knows ? that Dubya used Daddy's connections to find a way to be a pilot in the National Guard, protecting on weekends Texas from Oklahoma. We are now into the middle of the presidential debates which supposedly will decide the fate of all western democracy. Will "body language" ? Tricky Dicky Nixon's five-o'clock shadow and sweat, Bush Senior looking at his wrist-watch in boredom ? overcome the intellectual struggle over the unemployment rate and outsourcing? It turns out that Kerry and Bush ? two years apart at Yale ? took the same, easy course: History of American Oratory. Both passed, of course, as did everyone else. The difference is that Kerry became the head of the Yale debating team. And, led his university to become the first team to best the previously never-defeated lads from Oxford. Meanwhile, Dubya never once tried out for a Yale sports team ? football, basketball, nothing. He became a male cheer leader. (While also a famous drinker.) A future president? One would not think. The problem is that John Kerry has the very same sin that our Stephen Harper has. He is very intelligent, obviously, very serious, very hard-working. But he is very hard to warm to. As one of his close friends says, "He has to stop talking in semi-colons." He hasn't, unfortunately, a chance. The cheer leader is going to win. When confronted with a war they can't win, Americans ? the most patriotic people in the world ? back their leader. X X X AND ANOTHER THING Did I miss it, or did a single Canadian reporter at his press conference following Paul Martin's Mother Theresa-like address to the United Nations in New York, point out that barely half of the UN Assembly cavern was filled for his speech, while the stats show that 18 nations rank above Canada in the percentage of GNP devoted to foreign aid to the Third World?4/10/04
