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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser '64 For journalists and journalism, these are, to quote Dickens, “the best of times and the worst of times.” There are new technologies for gathering the news, new kinds of media in which to disseminate it, and better-trained writers to make sense of events. However, arrayed against the prospect of a brighter future are some disturbing trends, as giant multimedia conglomerates, driven by investors to cut costs, trim their news-gathering operations. The intersection of Wall Street and Main Street is of vital importance to more than just the denizens of print, electronic, and Internet newsrooms, say Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, executive editor and associate editor respectively of the Washington Post. “News matters,” say the authors. “Good journalism makes a difference somewhere every day . [and] gives every one of us the opportunity to be real citizens of our own time.” Veteran reporters Downie and Kaiser discuss how the news is gathered by the various media outlets and how the integrity of the process can be threatened by economic considerations. For example, in a chapter on the networks, the authors present candid interviews with Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings in which the anchormen comment on the differences between one of their recent newscasts and a show each anchor did in the early 1980s. Production quality might be better now, but news values were higher then, says Rather. “Nobody said, ‘Well it costs too much and we can’t afford that.' . Those decisions were made on the basis of, Is it important? Is it interesting?. That’s changed quite a bit.” Covering the globe can be expensive, and nowhere is this more true than in investigative journalism, where reporters may need to travel many miles over a period of weeks, even months, and where the story may, as was the case with Watergate, endanger the financial health of the news gathering operation, to say nothing of the safety of the writers. Among journalists, Downie and Kaiser point out, there is a fear that business pressures will undermine accountability reporting, which the authors term journalism’s “highest purpose” because it encourages “the honest and open use of power” and thus helps “make America a fairer society.” But as the events of September 11 and its aftermath demonstrate, Americans are hungry for high-quality news. Satisfying that appetite could even be profitable. “This truly is an information age, and good journalists are among society’s most reliable and helpful guides to it,” say Downie and Kaiser.
Bradley Graham ’74 In July 1979, Ronald Reagan, then a Republican candidate for U.S. president, made a campaign stop at Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain, deep inside of which is the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense facility. NORAD’s charge is to provide the nation with advance warning about a nuclear attack, but, Reagan would learn, accurate tracking of incoming missiles was all the facility could do. The nation’s vulnerability had a powerful effect on the future president and, not long after Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, he became the chief evangelist for the Strategic Defense Initiative, an antimissile “umbrella” then known as “Star Wars.” Reagan was not the first U.S. leader to propose a system for blasting hostile missiles from the sky, nor was he the last to do so. But for a variety of reasons—some political, some technical—NORAD can still only monitor an attack. However, the dream of stopping one in its tracks remains strong, and with the inauguration of George W. Bush '68 last year, the missile defense issue, which had been on the back burners during the Clinton administration, has resurfaced with a vengeance. Bradley Graham, the military affairs correspondent for the Washington Post, offers an in-depth and well-paced account of the political and technological challenges that have to be addressed for such a system to become a reality. The book is admirably nonpartisan, and in putting it together, Graham had access to everyone, from current and past U.S. presidents to the scientists attempting to figure out how, in the words of early skeptic Dwight D. Eisenhower, the military could hit “a bullet with a bullet.” Despite the fact that this country would eventually put men on the moon and “win” the space race, the U.S. remains, despite a success or two, unable to reliably knock a missile out of the sky. There are also, Graham points out, formidable hurdles, most notably the ABM treaty, on the diplomatic front that must be resolved before such a system could be implemented. Then too, with the end of the Cold War, there are concerns about whether such an antimissile shield is even needed. Terrorism has sharpened the arguments of detractors and proponents. “Critics argued that the terrorist strikes in New York and Washington proved Bush had been concentrating on the wrong threat,” says Graham. But, the author adds, the possibility that a rogue nation could develop a long-range missile “also made a case for protecting American cities by all available means, including missile defense.” Readers who would like to be brought up-to-date on this contentious matter will find no better resource than this book.
Julia
Glass '78 “Some of us get love just. exactly. right—as right as it can be—and others get everything else right but,” says Fenno McLeod, one of the characters searching for elusive happiness in Three Junes, the debut novel of Julia Glass. Fenno considers himself part of the “right but” group, and in this story about three generations of the McLeod family, Glass chronicles attempts at joie de vivre that are constantly threatened by the remembrance of things past. The story begins with the recently widowed patriarch’s tour of Greece. His gay son, Fenno, narrates the second part from his life of cautious abandon in New York City. Finally, the book concludes with a surprising melange of lives that converge at a house in the Hamptons. The novel un-folds by way of constant fluctuation between the present moment and old memories, as if with an unwillingness to let things go. These are characters haunted by infidelity, departed loved ones, and a familial distance marked by a literal and figurative oceanic divide. Fenno once refers to change as “a car hitting an icy patch and whipping me in a vicious circle to face the same direction but with a fearful new perspective.” To accept change as simply new—and not fearful—is the challenge that Glass’s characters face.
Ann
Satterthwaite '60MCP A city planner by trade, the author is more interested in social and community issues than in the psychology or deconstruction of individual consumer behavior. Her study of the $3 trillion retailing business analyzes trends all too familiar to any shopper today—the growth of giant chains at the expense of small businesses, homogenization of product lines and stores, and the loss of social contact in the shopping experience thanks to malls and e-commerce. Satterthwaite offers her own perspective, partly by delving into history as far back as the shopkeepers of Mesopotamia and the consumer protection regulators of ancient Egypt. In her search, she finds proto-malls in ancient Rome and recalls a struggle to save “Mom and Pop” retailers from megastores in the work of Emile Zola. Retailing, tainted by Victorian contempt for haggling, was a stigmatized part of the economy and not even represented in the Fortune 500 until May 1995. Above all, it has been left—for too long, she argues—to the vicissitudes of laissez-faire economics. What appeals most in her laborious survey is the firsthand knowledge and deep-felt appreciation of specific shopping institutions. The century-old outdoor ethnic market in Chicago banished to a remote suburb; the demise of an authentic French emporium in Georgetown; the destruction of pharmacies by managed care; our large urban market arcades—the reader senses the flavor of shopping in these places and can only applaud the author’s appeal for safeguards to preserve such human interactions in planning our future.
Brief Reviews Alita Anderson '01MD Stephen Raleigh Byler '98MAR David L. Goodrich '52 Elizabeth Hartmann ’74 Jules David Prown, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art Carol Weston '78
More Books by Yale Authors Kelly Askew 1988 and Richard R. Wilk, Editors Roberta Baker 1979 Stuart Banner 1985 Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology and Linguistics; Karen Wynn, Professor of Psychology; and Ray Jackendorf, Editors Frank Clifford 1967 Donald J. Cohen, MD, 1966MD, and Linda C. Mayes, MD, Arnold Gesell Associate Professor of Child Development, Yale Child Study Elisha Cooper 1993, Writer and Illustrator Nora Ellen Groce, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health; Josiah David Kaplan; and Lawrence C. Kaplan, MD John W. Harper 1945W Dwight Heath 1959 Jonathan Scott Holloway 1995PhD John Jagger 1949BS, 1954PhD Alvin Kernan 1954PhD Kate Manning 1979 Brian Massumi 1987PhD Max McCalman and David Gibbons 1979 Maria E. Montoya 1986 Anthony C. Moore 1959 James A. Ogilvy 1968PhD Steve Olson 1978 Ann Packer 1981 S. (Ja'far) Reiss 1956 Bryan Mark Rigg 1996 Shawn W. Rosenberg 1972 Barnett R. Rubin 1972 Stephen Sandy 1955 Peter Sheras 1970 Robert J. Smith 1957 Alexander Stille 1978
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