Author: Kenneth Neill

Last Wednesday, November 30th, Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New
Orleans, was here in Memphis, meeting with former constituents semi-permanently
resident in our city, compliments of Hurricane Katrina. About 800 of them showed
up that evening at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Midtown, to hear
what their mayor-in-absentia had to say about the Big Easy’s future, and what he
had to say about his and their place in that future.

 

Nagin’s Memphis “homecoming” was hardly a blip on the
national news scene, especially since all media eyes were focused that day upon
another speech, one that was given by another politician whose career also took
something of a Katrina detour. George W. Bush may have never mentioned the
hurricane in his rally-round-the-flag effort at the US Naval Academy in
Annapolis, Maryland, but watching the two men speak that day gave me real
insight into what works and what doesn’t in the world of oratory. Whatever his
faults (and I’m told he has many), Ray Nagin’s speech indicates that he “gets
it” when it comes to leadership. George W. Bush hasn’t a clue. Not a clue.

 

The refugee crowd that greeted the New Orleans Mayor in
Memphis was similar to those at “reunions” he’s sponsored throughout the South:
mostly black, but clearly a cross-section of displacement – old and young, rich
and poor, people from all walks of life. Indeed, the audience at Mississippi
Boulevard Christian Church was just about as carefully screened as a one
randomly gathered on a Manhattan subway platform.

 

Contrast that with the entirely different “crowd” that
listened attentively to the President earlier that day at Annapolis. The Naval
Academy’s corps of midshipmen formed, literally and figuratively, a captive
audience, one with a vested interest in applauding every word spoken by their
Commander in Chief. (The official transcript of Bush’s speech contains 24
applause breaks.) In such circumstances, Bush could have asserted that the moon
was made of green cheese, and the midshipmen would have given him a vocal
high-five.

 

Actually, the President said things almost equally
far-fetched. “We will never back down, we will never give in, and we will never
accept anything less than complete victory,” he told the middies, delivering his
now-customary empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy, even though the entire
universe by now is well aware of how his Operation Iraqi Freedom has backfired
big-time. By Thursday morning, in fact, all the major newspapers were pointing
out factual errors in W’s speech, one which was judged by all but his most loyal
partisans as something of a rant, a speech as much detached from reality as,
well, he is.

 

This should have come as no surprise. Since his
re-election, the President has remained steadfastly within his own private
bubble, as if he were doing a reality-TV version of “The Truman Show.” Bush
doesn’t seem to notice or even care that there’s a real America out there beyond
the military bases he always visits, the whirlwind photo-op road trips to garden
spots like Latvia and Mongolia, the well-screened crowds at Republican party
gatherings, and, of course, the friends who gather for his many holidays at his
beloved ranch in Crawford.  Tellingly, the President hasn’t had a full-fledged
press conference since July; in fact, he hasn’t had any meaningful face-to-face
encounters with what might be called “ordinary people” since the Presidential
debates last fall.

 

By contrast, Ray Nagin had more face-time with randomly
selected Americans in his brief hours in Memphis last week than George W. Bush
probably has had in the past year. Standing at the church podium, behind a bank
of a thousand bright-red holiday poinsettias, and dressed nattily in a dark blue
suit — in person, Nagin has a self-assured presence that doesn’t always come
across on television — the Mayor of New Orleans got down to business almost
immediately: 

 

“I wanna speak to you tonight in the spirit of truth. I’m
gonna tell you what I know (about the situation in New Orleans), and tell you
what I don’t know. And then I’m gonna try to answer all your questions as best I
can. And if I can’t, I’ll try to get back to you with real answers.”

 

Just try to imagine George W. Bush starting his Academy
speech – or for that matter, any speech – with those lines. Imagine the stunned
stage-propped midshipmen not knowing what hit them.  He wants us to ask
questions, without anybody vetting them first? Then imagine Bush trying to
answer those questions with something besides formless jargon. Then take a deep
breath. Imagine hell freezing over.

 

Back in Memphis, Nagin wasn’t kidding about the Q&A
part. He spoke for about half an hour, and then spent the next two and a half
hours mostly listening, as his reluctantly-transplanted constituents trooped up
to the microphones in the aisles, sharing with the Mayor their criticisms, their
opinions, their hopes, and their fears.

 

Their comments were sometimes petty – one woman simply
couldn’t understand why the Mayor didn’t know why her company had moved to
Memphis — and most ended up being statements rather than questions.  One
passionate Catholic priest spoke at length between his tears about his affection
for his damaged city’s history and culture. And some folk were downright
confrontational, like the woman who wondered why the Mayor had snuck off for a
Jamaica vacation two weeks after Katrina hit.

 

But Ray Nagin took a licking and kept on ticking. Nothing
fazed him. He stood at the podium politely listening to each and every question
— over forty people eventually spoke out, before they had to shut down the
microphones – along with the lights – at eleven pm.

 

All the while the Mayor seemed more psychiatrist than
politician. He told the woman who complained about his Jamaica trip that he
understood her point, but hoped she could understand how he felt like he needed
some quality time with his family, the family he hardly ever sees. (The crowd
did, as the applause that followed indicated.)  He made suggestions to those who
wanted tangible advise, commiserated with those who simply wanted to share their
sorrow, and in the process “uplifted” nearly everyone in the room. As another
more famous Southern politician might have put it, he felt their pain. 

 

One thing was perfectly clear: for better or worse, Ray
Nagin is comfortable in his own skin, something that George Bush just as clearly
is not. With all kinds of domestic storm clouds circling over his White House
and the Iraq war he sought out so deliberately, the President spends most of his
time now circling the wagons. Ray Nagin takes a different approach, being
unafraid to “shoot straight and let the chips fall where they may,” as one
frustrated Memphis refugee grudgingly admitted at the microphone.

 

Over the past year, George W. Bush has been asked time and
time again if he thought he’d made any mistakes in Iraq. Every time, he answers
the questions with a shrug and a smirk, and words to the effect of “Mistakes?
How would that be possible?” Nothing gets in the way of the President’s vision
of a rosy future for the Middle East, one that he himself has done so much to
carve out and create. Not even two thousand dead Americans, and untold more
innocent Iraqis. Not an America made less safe against terrorism. Not even a
hurricane called Katrina.

 

Here’s how Ray Nagin answered the same $64,000 question
about his handling of Katrina. In fact, he not only answered it; he asked it
rhetorically, as if to save his audience the trouble of asking:

 

“If I had had the chance, would I do anything differently
than I did that last weekend of August?”

 

He paused and smiled at the church crowd. “You’ve gotta be
kidding. Of course, I would!  Here are three things I wish I’d done
differently…”

 

Nagin ticked them each off, one finger at a time. “I blame
myself for not ordering a mandatory evacuation earlier. That’s 50,000 people we
didn’t get out, that we could have and should have.”

 

Then he spoke directly about the infamous placement of
transit-system buses that coulda/shoulda been staged on higher ground. “We
staged them above the hundred-year flood plain, but that just didn’t cut it. It
was a mistake. My bad.”

 

Then came the Big One, number three: “My biggest mistake? 
That was assuming that, after three days of waiting, the cavalry would come. I
thought everybody knew that this was too big a job for our city government, for
any city government.

 

“I kept waiting, thinking help was on the way. It wasn’t.
And it still isn’t…”

 

The church got as quiet as if a funeral was in progress, as Nagin completed his thought. “Doing it again, I would not wait for the cavalry. I would try to think of something else to do.”

Who could blame him? As yet another famous politician from the South once said, inexplicably referencing our own state, of course, but, hey, it’s the thought (?) that counts:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” p>

 

An Open Letter to Harold Ford, Jr.

Dear Congressman Ford:

It was good to see you again Friday night (August 19th) at the University of Memphis Law School Alumni Association’s annual awards dinner, where you were the keynote speaker. I have not had the opportunity to hear you speak in person on the current situation in Iraq in quite some time, given how your duties in Washington and your travels across the state as you campaign for the Senate have kept you away from Memphis. And given our many differences of opinion as regards our nation’s state of affairs, I was very much looking forward to your remarks, and to coming away with a better understanding of your point of view as regards this difficult situation.

I must say, however, that I left the banquet room even more confused than ever as to what exactly your attitude towards the Iraq conflict is today. More importantly — despite your assertions to the contrary — I had a hard time finding anything in your remarks suggesting that you have a clear idea of what our government’s approach to Iraq should be going forward.

At least you made one thing perfectly clear: you in no way, shape, or form have any regrets about the support that you gave President Bush at the outset of this sad odyssey. “I support this war in Iraq,” you said forcefully. “I supported it from the very beginning for one reason. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy.” Going forward, therefore, you’ll get no more pleading from me that you “do the right thing,” and admit that your vote for the War Powers Act in October 2002 was a mistake. Because you clearly don’t think it was…

But while I respect your clarity of expression in that regard, the rest of your speech left me, well, speechless. At one point, for example, when criticizing at length the Bush Administration’s conduct of the conflict — something upon which we do agree mightily — you refer to “the erroneous point of view that we went to Iraq only because there were bad people (there).” And then, quite remarkably, you had this to say:

“If the new standard is ‘bad people’ for going to war, we’re going to be busy for a long, long, long time. (Applause.) Because we can start at one tip of Africa and go to the other, we can start some places in Asia, and even there’s a few friends in Europe along the way, if bad leaders, cruel leaders or leadership is now the standard for going to war.”

I’m sorry? I sat upright in my chair when you uttered these sentences, having just heard you say from the same podium, not more than five minutes earlier, that you supported the initial decision to attack Iraq “for one reason. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy.”

I know you are a graduate of the University of Michigan law school, and I know sitting alongside us in that banquet room Friday night were maybe 200 law-school professors, judges, and practicing attorneys. The law is all about language, about using words to achieve clarity, about using logic to arrive at fair judgments. And yet, here you were, one minute stating as unequivocally as possible that you thought our invasion of Iraq was justified because we were nailing a bad guy, and the next minute, with a straight face, saying that we couldn’t just go around the world invading countries whose leaders were bad guys. (Later, while leaving, I pointed out this seeming contradiction to a lawyer friend. “Yep,” he laughed, good-naturedly. “Those comments would look mighty bad in a deposition. We’d have some kind of fun with that.”)

So which is it, Congressman: are “bad guys” bad, or are they not? Do we beat up on bad guys only when we — or in this case, you — think it’s a good idea? Or do you have any real opinion on the subject at all? If verbal gymnastics like this were part of a Jon Stewart Daily Show skit, it would probably be funny. But when such verbal duplicity comes out of the mouth of the front-running Democratic candidate for the Tennessee Senate, concerned citizens are well within their rights in asking for their money back.

You have been accused by many critics, not just me, of being, shall we say, “soft” on the issues, willing to say just about anything, in hope of striking the politically-correct “moderate” pose that might possibly get you elected to the Senate as a Democrat in a state that’s gone heavily Republican in the last two national elections. Others besides me have pointed at your recent voting record in Congress as an indication of this zeal for the middle ground. But talking out of both sides of your mouth doesn’t qualify as “middle-speak,” Congressman; it qualifies as “mush.”

The rest of your speech, frankly, was something of an anti-climax. You said much that I agree with; I particularly liked your suggestion that the Bush Administration’s greatest failing, not just in Iraq, but as regards our entire foreign policy in the region, was its over-reliance on military strength and our appalling ignorance of Middle Eastern cultures. But mixed in with your many cogent comments were nonsensical ones, about how Bush’s “instincts” had been “right” (they have been consistently wrong), and about how the President was “right to take (Saddam) down.” What is that all about? After all, this is a President whose own well-documented incuriosity about Middle Eastern culture – just what you talked about – exactly mirrors Middle America’s. This President has proven to be an ineffective leader whose own failure to prepare effectively for a strange new war in a strange old land has already cost tens of thousands of human beings their lives. This is a man who refuses to have a conversation with Cindy Sheehan about why her son died in that war, a man whom much of world regards as a war criminal. And yet you took pains to tell us all Friday night that you “love him personally”?

What gives, Congressman? What do you really think of George W. Bush, and what is your real opinion of the conflict in Iraq? And who is the real you?

Far be it from me, of all people, to give you any advice. But I would suggest you read a short essay about the Iraq debacle by Ray McGovern, entitled “There’s Such a Thing as “Too Late,” posted Friday on the Common Dreams web site. (Here’s the link.) In that essay, McGovern refers to the famous speech Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967 – one year to the day before his assassination here in Memphis.

This speech, as I am certain that you know, was among Dr. King’s most famous: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence,” in which he spoke of how the time had come to link the civil-rights struggle with the movement to end the obscenity which the Vietnam War had become. Re-read that speech, Congressman, if you can (here’s the link; you can actually listen to it here as well) and, please, ponder what Dr. King says. Substitute the word “Iraq” every place where he uses the word “Vietnam,” and perhaps you will agree with his contention that there does indeed come a time when silence or equivocation becomes, as he says, “betrayal.”

I’ll leave you with the thought below, not mine, of course, but Dr. King’s, from his memorable speech, which in places reads as if it could have been written yesterday. I look forward to seeing you again soon, and discussing all this in person:

“These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”

Kenneth Neill is the publisher/CEO of Contemporary Media, Inc., the parent company of The Memphis Flyer.

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The Commercial Appeal last Monday published a strongly worded editorial defending Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who has been jailed for contempt of court for refusing to reveal a confidential source who might have been responsible for outing Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, in October 2003. This is a complex, convoluted story, but in its first reference in print to the Plame scandal, the CA chose to focus upon praising Miller for refusing to reveal her source. “Judicial interference with the relationship between reporter and source is a violation of First Amendment rights,” asserted the CA. “Judith Miller’s service in the cause of journalism and democratic society has been nothing less than heroic.”

While going to jail is no one’s idea of a good time, “heroic” seems a peculiar adjective to use in connection with this journalist, one whose previous claim to fame was misreporting – in stories based primarily upon unnamed sources – that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” Miller’s Times stories about WMD relied almost exclusively upon anonymous government officials and unnamed Iraqi exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi, whom Bush administration insiders hoped to install as president when “democracy” was brought to that country.

Chalabi has since been utterly discredited, but sadly, Judith Miller has not, at least not yet, perhaps because many people in our business have joined The Commercial Appeal in rushing to her defense in this current situation. But while I’m as devout a supporter of the First Amendment as anyone, I find its application in the Miller case wrongheaded and something of an exercise in sophistry.

Protecting one’s sources is all well and good, but it’s not the only measure of a journalist’s worth. First and foremost, a reporter needs to perform competently and behave ethically. If he makes use of anonymous sources, he has a responsibility to ensure that he is not being sold a bill of goods by those contacts, that his sources are also behaving ethically.

These are important benchmarks for our profession. And to me, these are First Amendment issues every bit as relevant as a journalist’s willingness to protect his sources at all costs. Building stories around unreliable and/or clearly biased contacts who demand anonymity can be as serious an ethical betrayal as identifying a protected source. In such instances, the First Amendment cuts both ways.

Miller is not just a cub reporter who happened to get a few facts wrong. She is an experienced Times veteran, a woman whose “journalistic” efforts played a crucial role in convincing the American public that invading Iraq was a necessary, pre-emptive act of self-defense. She and her newspaper helped legitimize a war of aggression against a sovereign nation, a nation whose ruler was by all accounts a thug, yes, but a nation that did not pose any real threat to American security. By exaggerating that threat, by misusing anonymous sources, Miller in her own way is as responsible as anyone for the havoc unleashed upon Iraq.

Guilty at the very least of extraordinarily poor judgment, and perhaps guilty of far more, Miller should have been fired the moment that her WMD stories were revealed to have been little more than hoaxes. Instead, the Times half-apologized for its sloppiness in publishing her reports.

Miller now finds herself at the center of a First Amendment storm. But the real issue has nothing to do with protecting sources; it centers upon how a reporter who deliberately chose to represent “reality” as her anonymous contacts suggested has somehow managed to keep her job at what once was America’s greatest newspaper. n

Kenneth Neill is the publisher/CEO of Contemporary Media, Inc., which publishes the Flyer.

 

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in the 1944 elections, America was neck-deep in World War II. And while victory was in sight, he insisted that his inauguration the following January be handled with a minimum of pomp and circumstance.

FDR began his fourth term with a simple swearing-in ceremony and a brief speech from the South Portico of the White House to a small crowd.This was followed by a modest luncheon for top officials and their families (the total attendance was less than a thousand) where, as one reporter noted, the menu reflected “wartime austerity: cold chicken salad, rolls without butter, unfrosted pound cake, and coffee.”

“He [Roosevelt] did not want an elaborate ceremony,” says historian Donald Ritchie. “There was no parade, no balls or anything like that. They really didn’t want a celebration because of the circumstances.”

On January 20, 1945, Roosevelt delivered the inaugural address reprinted below. Today, as Republicans prepare to celebrate George W. Bush’s reelection with a $40 million inauguration, in the midst of a hellish guerrilla war in Iraq and in the immediate aftermath of a great natural disaster, perhaps they should ask themselves: What would FDR do?

Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. Vice President, my friends, you will understand and, I believe, agree with my wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words brief.

We Americans of today, together with our allies, are passing through a period of supreme test. It is a test of our courage — of our resolve — of our wisdom — our essential democracy.

In the days and in the years that are to come we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war. We can and we will achieve such a peace.

We shall strive for perfection. We shall not achieve it immediately — but we still shall strive. We may make mistakes — but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.

I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled, “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights — then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.

Our Constitution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet. But it provided a firm base upon which all manner of men, of all races and colors and creeds, could build our solid structure of democracy.

And so today, in this year of war, 1945, we have learned lessons — at a fearful cost — and we shall profit by them. We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger.

We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community. We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear. We can gain it only if we proceed with the understanding, the confidence, and the courage which flow from conviction.

The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. So we pray to Him now for the vision to see our way clearly — to see the way that leads to a better life for ourselves and for all our fellow men — to the achievement of His will to peace on earth. •