By Christopher Hanson

The country’s elite journalists saw Washington, D.C., as a hardship post before Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933. As Reporting from Washington tells it, the federal city was a cultural backwater that could not even produce a decent local newspaper, where boring presidents seemingly did nothing, and did not even do that very well. It was an information wasteland when Congress was in recess. It was a place of exile, far in mind, if not in miles, from the country’s news center, New York City, where any ambitious journalist wanted to work.

Such an attitude persisted even as New York’s Governor Roosevelt began his run for the 1932 Democratic nomination, according to the author Donald Ritchie, the associate historian of the U.S. Senate. In requiring Arthur Krock to leave his family in the city that never sleeps to take over the somnolent New York Times D.C. bureau, editor Arthur Hays Sulzberger said he felt “more or less like an executioner.” Krock was dismayed, but was at least more dutiful than his several colleagues who refused the assignment.

But reporters are drawn to power as bears to honey. When FDR and his New Dealers began to fight the Great Depression, the Washington press corps surged in ranks to keep tabs on the blossoming relief agencies, flowering recovery plans, and manic missteps that marked the birth of Big Government — whose era has never ended, despite what late twentieth-century politicians might have claimed.

Covering the period from 1932 to September 11, 2001, Reporting from Washington deftly recaps the days when syndicated columnists could see presidents on demand, when entrenched white male reporters resisted the idea of black and female journalists, when the old guard fought to stymie new media technologies. Even in the retelling, one is astonished at how newspaper moguls who controlled The Associated Press prevented radio from subscribing to the wire. They relented only when the networks agreed in the mid-1930s to withhold all news stories (except bulletins) for twelve hours and to air news only twice a day, after morning and evening papers had hit the stands. Newspaper execs who thought the news happened only on their schedule deserved the extinction that many of their descendants are now facing.

This book can be engrossing, especially when it describes journalists who deviated from their avowed role as sober watchdogs. For example:

We see Arthur Krock ghostwrite Joseph P. Kennedy’s 1936 book I’m for Roosevelt after using his Times opinion column to tout Kennedy for a White House post. But when Kennedy criticizes FDR in a letter to Krock, the newsman slips it to the White House in order to curry favor with Roosevelt at his patron’s expense. What a Krock!

We see the Chicago Tribune D.C. bureau chief Arthur Sears Henning casting his fate to conventional wisdom in November 1948. He writes of the presidential results at 9 a.m. on Election Day, repeatedly dismisses as “nonsense” AP reports that incumbent Harry S. Truman is running strong, and then goes on radio that evening to explain why Thomas E. Dewey won. Postmodernists who insist the press “constructs” the news should take note that this Dewey Defeats Truman debacle earned Henning his walking papers.

Reporting from Washington should remind sky-is-falling press critics there is little new in the current trend toward ideological reporting and attack-dog journalism. The hard-line publisher Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, for instance, likely had as steep or steeper a conservative slant in the 1930s than do Sinclair and Fox News today. McCormick’s Washington reporters learned they would catch hell for failing to tailor their news copy to fit the isolationist, anti-New Deal pattern laid out each day on the editorial page.

By the same token, Matt Drudge stood squarely on the shoulders of the columnist Drew Pearson when he leveled false wife-beating charges against a Clinton aide, Sidney Blumenthal, in 1997. In addition to solid scoops, Pearson’s column continued a steady string of falsehoods for years, including a 1949 report that Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal had cowered inside his townhouse while his wife was being robbed at gunpoint at their front door. Forrestal committed suicide soon afterward — though not, it must be said, entirely as a result of Pearson.

The book reprises publication of the Pentagon papers, exposure of Watergate and the My Lai massacre, and other examples of crucial watchdogging. But Reporting from Washington also notes that the press tends to embrace the “prevailing national consensus.” Ritchie doesn’t develop this point, but the big stories listed above broke when the elites of Washington were at odds over Vietnam and Richard Nixon. Likewise, the 2004 exclusives on Abu Ghraib prison abuse and hyped intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq came when vocal Democrats (and a few Republicans) in Congress were sharply questioning the wisdom of our current incursion into Mesopotamia.

On the other hand, President Reagan was so popular in 1986 that the D.C. press dogs had all but stopped hunting. It took a newspaper in Lebanon to get the scent of the Iran arms-for-hostages scandal. When Democratic opposition to the pending war in Iraq collapsed in 2002, the press muted its skepticism as well.

Ritchie describes the D.C. news media as a “fourth branch of the government,” but in reality they are afraid to operate independently of institutional political opposition. That means the press is least likely to serve as a check on official abuses or blunders when its critical attention is most needed.

In fact, far from curbing the excesses of the White House or Congress with reliable consistency, news media have often contributed to those very excesses, as when the U.S. reporting on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion took up the war howl. And as when stenographic journalism helped demagogues from Senator Joseph McCarthy to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth slice up their targets.

There is also a journalistic tradition of helping presidents dissemble, as when they float an idea anonymously and back off if public reaction is negative. Ritchie suggests that FDR would have suffered less damage if he had floated his notorious court-packing scheme as such a trial balloon. Ritchie forgets to mention the anonymous, successive, foreshadowing disclosure (“slow leak”), perfected in the Johnson administration. The planned tax hike or draft call is “under consideration,” then “under strong consideration,” then “more likely than not.” That allows the public to vent and prepare, so the president takes a lighter hit when he makes it official. As Neil MacNeil, a senior editor at The New York Times in the 1930s and ’40s, is quoted as saying in Reporting from Washington, “One of the major functions of the press in a democracy is to act as a cushion for unpleasant news.”

Even so, given the rising calls for accountability in journalism, Washington media might consider inserting pictographs to make the news process a tad more transparent: a balloon icon for trial ballon leaks, an icon with a “4” casting a shadow, for foreshadowing leaks, a knife for stab-in-the-back leaks, a blowfish for puffery leaks, etc.

The book’s most sizzling sections — a kind of press corps confidential — deal with the surprising number of reporters who sinned secretly by assisting the politicians they were assigned to cover while continuing to maintain an observer’s facade. Krock’s covert aid to Joseph Kennedy was no aberration. The columnist Joseph Alsop and Washington Post publisher Phil Graham flew to Los Angeles in 1960 to urge John F. Kennedy to pick a particular running mate: Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1950, the Chicago Tribune reporter Willard Edwards secretly turned his files over to Senator Joseph McCarthy. A Washington Times-Herald reporter, Ed Nellor, used those files to outline the speech that launched McCarthy on his campaign of anti-Communist character assassination. Edwards then reported on the speech, including parts that exaggerated what the files said about Communist infiltration of the State Department. Before long, Edwards had become McCarthy’s “loyal supporter and publicist,” mapping strategy for the Wisconsin senator and drafting speeches alongside Nellor, who claimed to have written about five hundred himself. Both men continued to report and draw their newspaper salaries, apparently seeing no ethical conflict in their double lives.

When Jack Anderson was an aide to Drew Pearson in the early 1950s, he rifled his boss’s files to provide fresh dirt for McCarthy, even though his boss was a sworn enemy of the Wisconsin Republican. McCarthy returned the favor by letting Anderson listen on the extension during supposedly confidential conversations with Republican leaders.

The Des Moines Register investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff made enemies by deriding press colleagues as pawns of the government. But behind the scenes, he provided dirt to the Senate panel investigating Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. The committee’s top staff member, Robert Kennedy, gave Mollenhoff a key to his office so the reporter could go through sensitive files and “leak” to himself any information he wanted to report!

Mollenhoff later worked at least as closely with Congressional Republicans, briefly joined the Nixon administration, returned to the paper, but never overcame suspicions that he was still a GOP operative.

One is left wondering how many of today’s Washington reporters have secretly gone over to the dark side.

Why journalists cross that line deserves a study in itself. Ritchie suggests that Mollenhoff’s zeal to be on the inside, changing the world, lured him in, and that Jack Anderson was currying favor with supersource McCarthy.

One suspects that the Krocks and Alsops might have wanted to wield the same power as the politicians with whom they socialized, just as politicians so often develop an itch for the riches of those who bankroll their campaigns.

Alsop, incidentally, was wielding far too much power just as a columnist. His reports that the Soviet Union had outpaced the United States in nuclear rocket production led candidate John F. Kennedy to hammer the “missile gap” issue, raising the fear factor in the 1960 campaign. But it turned out Alsop had based his story on CIA intelligence estimates that were ambiguous. Sound familiar?

For all its appeal, Reporting from Washington is weak in explication. The reader must pull patterns and themes from a thicket of facts without enough help from the author.

Reporting from Washington is repetitive, which makes its many omissions all the more aggravating. We get no mention of how Washington’s campaign correspondents ended up vetting candidates in presidential primaries, filling a void left in the 1970s and 1980s when political bosses lost the power to pick the nominees. Many of these reporters publicly urged the parties to find a way to regain control over the nomination process. Unfortunately, the parties obliged by turning control of the system over to big money.

Reporting from Washington also lacks any sustained account of how public relations armies have burgeoned all over Washington, turning the capital into a huge, perpetual pseudo-event, making some reporters crave assignments where news actually unfolds on its own — civil wars in Africa, for instance.

The book makes scant reference to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where The New York Times muted a story that might have averted destruction of an anti-Castro army. Or to the Cuban Missile Crisis, where reporters operated as superpower go-betweens and helped avert nuclear war. Or to the press’s role in undoing House Speakers Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich, Senators Harrison Williams, Brock Adams, and Bob Packwood. (And Ritchie is associate historian of the U.S. Senate!)

In short, this is a very rough first draft of history. Every historian has to choose and to discard. But Ritchie has left a great deal for future historians to address.

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