Presidents Come And Go-- But The CIA Bureaucracy And Its Priorites Are Timeless

Earlier this evening Ken did a proper Ben Bradlee remembrance. Chris Hayes did one for MSNBC viewers (above) last night right after we heard about Bradlee's passing. I was living overseas for the entire Nixon era-- sometimes in places where American news was scarce (like Afghanistan, India and Ceylon) and sometimes where it was less scarce (like in Holland and Finland) but Bradlee during the Watergate scandal was such a towering figure of journalism that even I heard of him. He was part of the reason Americans held the media in such high esteem relative to other institutions. Ken referred to the Pew Research Journalism study this week that measured trust in news sources. Actually, it measured distrust. Obviously the most distrusted sources are fake news propaganda operations for the Republican Party-- Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Glenn Beck. Almost 40% of Americans know Limbaugh's drug-induced ravings aren't worth listening to. (More than 1 in 4 conservatives agree that news from Limbaugh isn't worth trusting.) Conservatives don't trust the Washington Post either, but normal people generally do. Overall (so including crackpot wing nuts), the Post is distrusted by 14% of Americans, but only 6% of liberals say they don't trust the Post as a news source, similar to the NY Times and PBS.

But are conservatives savvier than liberals when it come sot the Post's truth worthiness? I'm spending a lot of time catching up on the contemporary American history I missed while I was living abroad-- basically, while Nixon was president-- by pouring over Rick Perlstein's new book, The Invisible Bridge, which tells the story of America and how it went from Nixon's downfall to Reagan's rise. And Bradlee, he reminds us, wasn't only about standing up for Woodward and Bernstein while they brought down Nixon. The roots of public skepticism about the Post as a dependable news source goes back a ways-- right to the heroic figures of Bradlee and publisher Katherline Graham.

Perlstein wrote about the apparent change of heart at the Post immediately after Nixon was forced for resign. "The longing for conservative innocence Ronald Reagan was selling ," he wrote, "was strong, for thiose with eyes to see in all sorts of quarters. Three panels, in the House and the Senate and under the auspices of Vice President Rockefeller, were hard at work behind closed doors investigating epic abuses of public trust by the nation's intelligence agencies. Lillian Hellman, the left-wing playwright, lectured Columbia University graduates in a commencement speech reprinted in the New York Times: 'You who are graduating today, far more than those who graduated in the sixties, have very possibly lived through the most shocking period in American history... you know that government agencies-- the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and God knows what yet hasn't come to light-- have spied on innocent people who did nothing more than express their democratic right to say what they thought. You have read that the CIA has not only had a hand in upsetting foreign governments it did not like, it has very possibly been involved in murder, or plots to murder. Murder. We didn't think of ourselves that way once upon a time.'" Today, four decades later, the CIA is trying to infiltrate its own agents into Congress and to destroy the career of the senator, Mark Udall, who has tried the most aggressively to hold them accountable for their criminal behavior. Bradlee was one of the major American editors who chose to not cover, at least not seriously or vigorously, the deprecations of the CIA.

[T]he Columbia University Board of Trustees, which oversaw the selection of Pulitzer Prizes, snubbed its advisory board's selection of Seymour Hersh's blockbuster CIA exposé. Its other selections were anodyne, they "seemed to go out of their way," Time observed, "to find relatively noncontroversial subjects." The press, newly emboldened, after talking down a president, was supposed to be the headquarters of the new suspicious circles-- The New Muckrakers, according to the title of a book by the Washington Post's Leonard Downie Jr. Its back cover boomed: "There is a new kind of American reporter. He does more than record news. He makes history." The book quoted Downie's colleague Bob Woodward: "It's almost a perverse pleasure. I like going out and finding something that is going wrong." But it felt to some like there had been enough of all that.

As a historian later reflected, Hersh's "early determination to carry the Watergate mentality into the post-Watergate era made his colleagues uncomfortable and even angry"-- even, or especially, at the Washington Post, which seemed to be shrinking back from its reputation for making history, as if in guilt. The Post's publisher, Katherine Graham, told the Magazine Publishers Association that reporters were becoming "too much a party to events... To see a conspiracy and cover-up in everything is as myopic as to believe that no conspiracies or coverups exist." Their editor Ben Bradlee worried that "these tendencies to develop a social, messianic role for the media, when added to the already feverish drive for the sensationalist story and the scoop, [will] lead to further dispositions that should concern us." And the post's intelligence beat reporter immediately hit his Times counterpart's CIA scoops for a "dearth of hard facts"-- even though, in subsequent months, every one of its claims had been vindicated and more. Late in March, Leslie Gelb of the Times reflected in the New Republic on the reasons for the rest of the media's reluctance to pick up on the CIA story: a history of coziness between the press and the clandestine service "going back to the days of the OSS"; a culture of "long established social relationships"; and even more significantly, a discomfort that the "Stain of Watergate" was "spreading out to the past, to the pre-Nixon years, and to the future. The dream of being able to make Nixon vanish and keep everything else was coming into jeopardy."