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By David Rogers and Tom Elia
September 20, 2004
The New Editor
Almost two hundred years ago, the great romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the
definitive poem describing the sadness felt at the collapse of a once-proud giant. Though the
poem Ozymandias is among the most evocative in the English language and a favorite of
ours, we never felt the sorrow at a giant's collapse more keenly than this week.
Political junkies at an early age (one in Chicago and one in Austin), we grew up on CBS and
Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite. Among some of our earliest presidential memories are the
1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Dan Rather tangling with Nixon, and Lyndon
Johnson's funeral (which, in Texas, was treated like the end of the world).
We believed every word Walter Cronkite said. We were riveted by the reporting of Rather,
Morley Safer, Mike Wallace, and Shana Alexander and James Kirkpatrick doing
Point/Counterpoint on 60 Minutes.
When one of us was fourteen and on a family vacation to North Carolina's Outer Banks --
while cousins played outside on the beach -- reading Dan Rather's The Camera Never Blinks
cover to cover was the order of the day. The book, quite possibly the world's longest job
application, was gobbled up whole.
When Dan Rather graduated from 60 Minutes to the news desk after Cronkite's last "That's
the way it is...," we were sad but thought that it was the greatest thing, ever, to have Dan
Rather ascend to the throne of the network news. We were in good hands.
For some of us, the belief that Jimmy Carter would provide strong leadership was
unquestioned; the belief that Walter Mondale was a great leader was unflinching (for some of
us not so much); and there was no doubt that Texas Treasurer and future Governor Ann
Richards would one day be President of the United States.
The fall of Dan Rather prompts reflection on all that. The Democrats were once a great
party, and CBS was once a great network. Both of us are too young for Edward R.
Murrow's This is London broadcasts (though one of us listened to recordings of some of
those broadcasts on a Hi-Fi), but we are not too young to understand the tremendous popular
positive propaganda value those broadcasts had in the world's darkest hour.
And we both appreciate the daring of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Democratic Party in
moving to save democracy and capitalism when many thought both were doomed, and that
the 1930s Republican Party was ineffective and seemingly helpless in the face of the Great
Depression. And Harry Truman brought many Democrats who were unconcerned about
communism into the global fight to contain Marxism until Reagan could close the book on
that sad chapter in human history.
But, oh, how the mighty have fallen. The network that helped to end the career of Senator
Joseph McCarthy on charges of fakery and shamelessness has collapsed in a heap under the
weight of forgery and denial. The party that saved the world has dropped from Roosevelt
and Truman to Carter to Kerry. The party that rallied a nation to cross two oceans to defeat
fascism can't even rally it's own activists to say that the murderers who destroyed the twin
towers are evil.
51% of Democrats think that the attacks on 9/11 were a result of American wrongdoing
abroad. (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll, released September 16,
2004.) About 50% of New York City residents believe that government leaders "knew in
advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they
consciously failed to act."(Zogby International poll taken August 24-26, 2004.)
The mind reels.
The Democratic Party has fallen under the spell of defeatist, desperate, far-Left,
Blame-America-First demagogues. There may be no saving it. Just like there is no saving
Dan Rather.
It's sad. While some of us have left the Democratic Party and abandoned CBS, we feel sorry
for those who have not. And we feel regret that once-great institutions have collapsed so
completely. It's not good for America, no matter your political persuasion.
There are legitimate questions to be raised about America's place in the world and how best
to defend our people, and about wasted money and what tactics and strategy would best
serve our nation. Sadly, CBS and the Democratic Party can no longer fulfill the task of
asking these questions, and so leave a vacuum in which those in power cannot be challenged.
As the poet Shelley wrote of the decayed ruins of a former colossus, "My name is
Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
David Rogers and Tom Elia are both contributing editors for The New Editor.
Paul Geary
David Rogers