25 years since Eastern Airline Strike began

I joined the Socialist Workers Party 4 months aftern the Eastern strike started.  It was and is a real confirmation of the party's perspectives.

An outline for an article I really wish I had time to write:

25 years since the start of the Eastern Airlines  Strike

1.  Lorenzo and "Lorenzoism"

2.  The 1989 political context

                Rout of organized labor

                                PATCO

                                P9

                                Continental

                                UK Miners' Strike

                1987 Stock Market Crash

               

3.  Machinists, pilots, flight attendants

                Labor solidarity

                Rank and file leadership

4.  Pittston Coal Strike

                Convergence with Eastern strike

                Interpenetration and reinforcement

5.  SWP Working class campaign

                JB [plenum]: "This train has left the station         

                and we are in one of the rear cars. We have to 

                fight our way to the front"

                                               

                IAM fraction members

                Building solidarity through the fractions

                Propaganda and recruitment

                A striking confirmation of the

                                "changing face of US politics."

7. "These are great and glorious times we are living        

in." [JB, Thanksgiving 1989 St Louis, MO                 Active

Workers Conference.]

                Cuba's rectification campaign

                Eastern/Pittston: a break in the rout?

                ANC

                FSLN

                Abortion rights/clinic defense

                Eastern Europe/USSR

               

8. Eastern went out of business as Gulf War began

                Union tops maneuvers fruitless

                "Better to die on your feet than live on

                                your knees."

                Rank and file lasted "one day longer"

                                than Frank Lorenzo.

9. On going to work wearing a "No Lorenzo" button:

                Some personal notes

__________________________

Words from one of the strikers:

The Eastern Strike Was A Victory For Workers 

BY ERNIE MAILHOT

Reporting on the Northwest Airlines pilots strike, the big- business press often refers to the 1989-91 strike at Eastern Airlines as a "defeat for both the company and union." The following excerpt, from The Eastern Airlines Strike: Accomplishments of the rank-and-file Machinists and gains for the labor movement, tells a different story. Ernie Mailhot, a ramp worker and cleaner at Eastern Airlines, was a rank-and- file striker. He was strike staff coordinator for International Association of Machinists Local Lodge 1018 from December 1989 to December 1990. The Eastern Airlines Strike is copyright (c) 1991 by Pathfinder Press, and reprinted with permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

After 686 days on strike against Eastern Airlines, rank- and-file members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and our supporters registered the final piece of our victory against the union-busting drive of the employers when the carrier folded at midnight on January 18, 1991....

Eastern strikers from coast to coast, from Puerto Rico to Canada, reacted by calling to congratulate each other and going out to airports to celebrate.

Mark McCormick was one of the Eastern strikers who made his way to New York's La Guardia Airport the night of January 18. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world," he said, as he stood watching management personnel walk out. With a big smile on his face, he suggested to the managers that they "take tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow off."

Over the next few hours, strikers and our supporters showed up - many with handmade signs - at rowdy picket lines. The sign I think expressed our feelings the best was the one at the Miami airport that read, "We said we'd last `One day longer.' "...

The twenty-two-month strike of the IAM had defeated Eastern's attempt to create a profitable nonunion airline and set an example for all bosses who want a "union-free environment" if they can get away with it.

What the strikers were up against

To strikers and other working people, the scope of the accomplishments and victories scored in the Eastern strike are measured by what we were up against.

In 1981 U.S. president Ronald Reagan tried to set in motion union busting on a national scale when he broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). A pattern soon developed of union-busting drives by the employers in major industries, with Frank Lorenzo's destruction of the striking unions at Continental Airlines in 1983 spearheading the assault.

Takeback contracts, permanent replacement workers, and union busting itself became the order of the day. In the airline industry, nonunion airlines were established and strikes, such as that of the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants at TWA in 1986, were crushed.

On March 4, 1989, when we went on strike at Eastern Airlines, we looked back on almost a decade of many more defeats than victories for labor - defeats that more often than not came without a real fight by union members.

We faced Frank Lorenzo, the number one union buster in the United States. We faced government agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, that continually backed Eastern management in the face of massive union documentation of safety violations at the airline....

Despite this, we decided it was time to fight, rather than accept our only other choice: letting Lorenzo destroy our union and set an example for every other boss like him.

When we walked out on March 4, 1989, most of the rank and file of the IAM sensed our strength for the first time. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and Local 553 of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), which organized the flight attendants, also recognized our strength and our fighting determination. They joined our picket lines. The unity we had achieved between the unions and the pilots' association greatly increased our initial strength, and, in turn, our confidence.

The huge rallies at airports across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico -many held in cities with only a few strikers - showed us the broad support and identification our fight had evoked among working people. Many, having gone through years of concession contracts and union busting, saw the fight as their own....

The unity of the Machinists, flight attendants, and pilots in a major national strike, over a period of eight and a half months, is something that had not been seen in the airline industry before.

Winning the support of the pilots for that period of time allowed us to begin to put our stamp on the battle and step forward as a rank-and-file leadership. In addition, we became seasoned enough to understand and weather the later treachery of the pilots' officialdom....

The joint work we were able to do with the United Mine Workers, backing its strike against the Pittston coal company through the spring, summer, and fall of 1989, also played a big role in our gaining experience and confidence. From Los Angeles, to Buffalo, to Pittsburgh, to Miami, the striking Machinists and miners learned from each other. Sometimes this took the form of joint tours; other times it meant collaborating to figure out how best to rally support for both our strikes within the unions.

These organizing experiences helped show us that we could affect the battle. The dealings in the courtroom, conflicts among competing investor schemes, and debates in Congress - all these reflected the pressure brought to bear when we exercised union power and reached out to the broader ranks of labor.

Our slogan became that we would last "one day longer" than Frank Lorenzo. This meant that we would never let Eastern run a profitable airline as long as it operated with scab labor. We knew that by achieving that goal, we would help set an example for every other working person in the United States and internationally - our real family, not the "Eastern family." On April 18, 1990, in a victory for all labor, our slogan became a reality. On that day the federal government, through its bankruptcy court, removed Lorenzo from control of Eastern....

After Lorenzo was removed, our slogan remained "One day longer," but it became "One day longer" than Eastern....

Fight went far beyond fight for jobs

The fighting Machinists and our supporters accomplished huge things that go far beyond the struggle for the jobs that we had at Eastern. We showed that unlike the Lorenzos and the rest of the boss class in this country, who are motivated by greed for profits, workers will step forward and put themselves on the line in the interests of working people everywhere. This also came through in thousands of examples of other unionists pitching in to support our strike - not only here, but in New Zealand, Britain, Bermuda, and other countries....

Thousands of us are now working in other IAM-organized jobs, as packinghouse workers, as aerospace workers, or in other industries. We take the lessons of the strike with us, and one lesson we will never forget is "An injury to one is an injury to all."

It is important to remember that our fight against Eastern and other companies like it not only improves the relationship of forces for other unionists. It also creates a more encouraging environment for all those who fight against social injustices - from racist attacks to Washington's criminal wars, such as the slaughter recently unleashed against the people of Iraq.

Because of our fight at Eastern, a boss who is considering forcing his workers out on strike so he can break their union and lower their wages and benefits will think a little longer before making such a move.

As important as that is, even more important is the impact we have had on the thinking of working people who are inspired by our fight and will come to follow our example.

http://www.themilitant.com/1998/6233/6233_26.html

Ukraine and the petty bourgeois left: Reading notes

This week I have been reading the 1946 document "Revolutionary Marxism or Petty Bourgeois Revisionism? A Demarcation of the Programs of the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party. Statement by the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party."

The document can be read here.

While reading, I was also following events in Ukraine, and commenting on them on Facebook.

Notes I made turned out to be clarification of issues relating to Ukraine today as they are misinterpreted and obscured by the petty bourgeois left.  

To borrow a phrase from the 1946 SWP document, "along with abstentionism.... [they have] raised eclecticism and inconsistency to the level of guiding principles.  Nor is this an accidental phenomenon.  There is one class in modern society that cannot be consistent in its politics.  This is the petty bourgeoisie."

 

Who wants a 'man on horseback'?

Petty bourgeois left today internationally: a miasma of capitulation to Putin concerning Ukraine.

*

"Popular Front" today? Defense of capitalist regimes that are supposedly objectively anti-US.  But such regimes are unwilling and incapable of organizing the working class in their own countries to fight Washington.  They fear calling masses together for any reason.

*

It is true that the US today is trying to encircle Russia [and China.]

Must the working class in Russia and Ukraine subordinate all to Putin's pragmatic and supposedly consistent anti-Americanism?

Should workers in Russia, Ukraine, [and the US, for that matter] be told [in the name of communism or radicalism or "anti-capitalism"]  that Putin is their ally?

*

European Union is not a "capitalist United States of Europe" with one nefarious program orchestrated by Washington.

*

Presenting Russia today as objectively anti-imperialist and anti-fascist is dishonest to the point of treachery.  The line breeds demobilization and defeatist consciousness. 

Some workers and middle class elements taught to look to Russia as a progressive anti-US pole in [bourgeois politics] will [in the absence of a growing communist movement] be attracted to rightist solutions out of demoralization and concomitant cynicism.

*

Petty bourgeois left and Stalinist organizations and individuals today dishonestly present Putin as [albeit an inconsistent] fighter against US imperialism who must be defended.  They present social explosions that oppose interests of the Russian ruling class as nefarious conspiracies organized by Republican politicians and the CIA.

This endorsement of Putin can mislead and divert initial motion toward independent working class political action and class consciousness.

*

The "lesser evil international" - anti-US "coalition" of bourgeois states [Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela] must be defended [so the middle class left declaims].

For the middle class left, Putin must be defended at all costs. Russian workers and farmers, it is assumed, have interests in complete consonance with Putin's regime. 

*

Workers in Ukraine are told to wait to defend their living standards and democratic rights because these actions supposedly coincide with Washington's "anti-Moscow" line.  It is "too dangerous" now to begin the slow and contradictory awakening political life and class consciousness.]  Hence the fascist-baiting of inevitable capitalist-bred social explosions.

[n.b.: Imagine telling Fannie Lou Hamer not to oppose LBJ in 1964 because the most important issue was "defeating Goldwater at all costs"?]

[n.b.: Must workers at VW or Walmart wait until they have Simon-pure class consciousness before they begin their struggle?]

*

The "Russian Question today"

Organizations like Workers World Party [which I take to be emblematic of this international trend - JR] enjoy the luxury of condemning the "dictatorship of capital" in Russia in the abstract, while providing left-cover [and disorienting the working class internationally in the process] with concrete rationalizations for specific Russian policies.  They slur-over and obscure the class line when it suits them.

[n.b.: supporting Russia and its Ukrainian cats-paws like Yanukovych today in the name of defeating "US/EU-backed Ukrainian fascism."]

*

Ukraine - workers and middle class elements in the streets fought [using their own mass methods] austerity, the growing capitalist social crisis [an international phenomenon], the Kiev government's anti-democratic and oppressive laws, and the Kiev government's latest capitulation to Moscow [yet another chapter in 300 years of national oppression by Russia in Ukraine.] 

This mass action was not a de facto endorsement of any program or banners or slogans of any self-identified "leaders" of the Maidan protests.

*

There is no "third way" between the dictatorship of capital and the Leninist strategy of building proletarian communist parties, the "road to workers power."

[n.b. Germany and Spain in the 1930s, Indonesia in 1965 are tragic confirmation of this.]

Capitalist Putin is not a stand-in for working class leadership today because the Russian bourgeoisie finds itself cross-wise to Washington  today.

*

n.b.: Mass action opposing austerity, national oppression, capitulation to Russian suzerainty, and attacks on democratic rights
is progressive.

*

As a friend on Facebook summed up:

For the defeat of U.S. imperialism everywhere! And Stalinist and proto-Stalinist great nation chauvinism and national oppression as well!

Jay
3 March 2014

World World Party defends Great Russian chauvinism in Ukraine

Workers World Party's unconditional defense of Great Russian chauvinism against the oppressed Ukrainian nation continues. Again they liquidate the national question of the Ukrainians. Not even lip service is paid.

Can anyone imagine this party talking about the class struggle in the United States and not mentioning the oppressed Black nationality?

But for Workers World Party politics begin with support for any regime that for whatever temporary or episodic reason finds itself opposed to  Washington's policies. They do not follow the class lines on these questions. Instead they promote a pragmatic geopolitics of "great powers."

This is not an academic question.  Rather, it is the kind of unprincipled politics that led to workers and peasants to defeat in Indonesia in 1965. [Not to mention Germany in the early 1930s.] Workers, farmers and oppressed nationalities must rely on our own class forces, whatever the level of their leadership or consciousness.  The Putins of the world will not defend us any more than the Assads, Obamas, or DeBlasios. 

The Ukrainian national question was never "solved" for all time during the lifespan of the USSR.  No wonder there are people in Ukraine willing to die for their oppressed nation and fight (with whatever illusions and whatever caliber of leadership) for its liberation,  just like Kurds and Palestinians.

[Previous generations' communist leaders understood the social weight of the Ukrainian national question very well, as can be seen here and here.]

Diary 08/26/2011

Not sure why this political diary entry never got posted, but whatever was said here about Libya goes double for the anti-anti-imperialists on Syria and Iran today.

Jay
20120423

The last five days of imperial triumphalism around the outcome [positive for Washington, Paris, and their imperialist allies] of the Libyan civil war have further revealed the tendencies and directions of two "middle class radical" organizations. I would refer to them as "petty-bourgeois" but why get bogged down in the nomenclature when the fauna are so fascinating?

Excerpts from a letter to a comrade in New York:

....Recent articles on MR Zine and Kasama that I wrote are generally WWP brand Marxism-Leninism, and [as far as looking to join another socialist organization in Cleveland after breaking ties with Workers World party] I cannot take RCP seriously any more than I can the ISO.

I think this renewed Christian fascism rant by the RCP re Bachmann and Perry is creating a situation which will, objectively, allow many middle class radicals who follow them to really believe BHO is a lesser evil. I mean, if you think there is a Christian fascism stalking the countryside, voting for Democrats can be rationalized if the only other alternative is sitting in bell jar reading excerpts from BAsics out loud.

There is a real convergence in the left's baby boomer demographic to be seen toward the ISO's no-fly-zone socialism-from-below revealed by opinions about recent events in Libya. Proyect's Marxmail list provides a minute by minute justification for the NATO-TNC side as being a lesser evil. Many former SWPers of his generation [Paul LeBlanc] have already joined ISO, and others in the Marxmail orbit have stated they think ISO will soon drop their historic state capitalist analysis of the USSR and China. It sounds to me like they are saying in a partially hidden way [hidden from themselves as much as others] that once the asylum gets a new paint job, they will be glad to rent a room.

.

A moral marielita: Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was the kind of left traveller most in the US Marxist movement know only too well. At the flood tide of mass action, showing up at our bookstores or public events with her chums to see what the party [In my case, the SWP] had to say about China, then flitting off again; playing a useful if not a permanent or consistent role in the struggles that went to shape a generation.

When the tide began to recede, circa 1980-1981, her tourism down among the proletarian parties ended.. Instead of Maoistic [yes, I wrote Maoistic] opinions on Walt Whitman, we got pronouncementos on the fact that, let's face it, the PRC and USSR were not all they were cracked up to be. [Cracked up to be by whom, I wondered. And wonder still.] US SWP leader Jack Barnes referred to the likes of Sontag, Jerry Rubin, and others of their generation making such a retreat marielitos. A fitting epitaph.Like so many, from Wordsworth to Eastman to Hitchens, after the youthful enthusiasm for what was taken to be the final conflict, a more pragmatic career-building commenced when the not-so-youthful realized being a Marxist revolutionary [or a Marxist intellectual, for that matter], required a habit of perspective, seeing oneself as a citizen of time, to use the fine phrase of Farrell Dobbs.

Susan Sontag Being Arrested at Whitehall Induction Station Demonstration, December 5, 1967 photo by Fred W. McDarrah

Sontag after 1981 kept writing. Writing about herself and her milieu; mostly writing novels, the kind pretentious people never finish and busy people never begin.

She gave Reagan and the Bushes hell, and called for US/NATO to support the capitalist destruction of Yugoslavia.

The revelation of the published journals, the latest volume of which is reviewed below, is not her NYRB mental mapping or her unsung pomposity. Rather, it is the dramatic self-doubt that assailed her and the women of her generation. Now, this was not the first generation of women to strike out on their own as intellectuals, revolutionary and communist women had been doing that since the time of the French Revolution. But Sontag was part of the first generation of middle class left-wing intellectuals to make their public living as members of, not to coin a phrase, the commentariat. They wrote for liberal, left publications funded by foundations and private donations; they did not succumb completely to the comely quicksand of academic sinecure; they all moved to the right, and into the comforts of tending their own genres long before the cold war ended. Not even summer soldiers, but rather mayflies.

Susan Sontag's self-assassination

Leo Robson

'I must give up writing essays," Susan Sontag wrote in 1980. "I have become the bearer of certainties that I don't possess – am not near possessing." It's one of the last entries in this second selection of Sontag's journals, and the parting shot in an act of serial assessment that amounts to a kind of assassination. Susan Sontag represents nothing if not intellectual confidence, and yet here she is, writing at the height of her reputation as a critic and expressing uncertainty, bafflement even. Readers who have always found her work precious or joyless can now support their scepticism with words from the horse's mouth.

In an essay on Roland Barthes, Sontag praised the journal form as "that exemplary instrument in the career of consciousness". Elsewhere, she wrote that in its "rawness", the journal allows us to "encounter the ego behind the masks of ego in an author's works". The writer of the journal exists, she wrote in yet another essay, "solely as a perceiving, suffering, struggling being".

And so it proves here. The Sontag who emerges from these pages is not the Sontag we know from her essays or novels or television appearances. Strident in public, in her journal she portrays herself as fearful and shrinking. We meet Sontag the damaged daughter and Sontag the devoted mother. "What a burden for him," she writes of her son David Rieff, "all that admiration."

The burden hasn't lightened since her death – Rieff has done an unflinching, if under-informative job as editor of these journals, producing an ad hoc autobiography in which youthful hope gives way to midlife gloom. This new selection, a successor to Reborn, takes Sontag up to her late forties, by which point she had made many illustrious friends (Godard, Barthes, Brodsky, Jasper Johns) and published several path-breaking books (Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, On Photography, Illness As Metaphor) without ever shaking off a sense that what might have been would never come to pass.

"I intend to do everything", Sontag wrote in 1949. But intending to do everything can become an eternal goal. Throughout her journals, between the strong opinions ("Rothko – soft Mondrians") and abstruse pronouncements ("The Russians didn't have an 18th century"), she makes all kinds of lists. (A list of things she likes includes Bach, Venice, Maple sugar candy, aphorisms and tequila.) There are lists of books she has read or reread or wants to, but her speciality is a highbrow counterpart to the Post-it on the fridge: "Compare German romanticism (Holderlin, Novalis, Schelling) w Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand!" "Write a book about the body – but not a schizophrenic book. Is that possible?"

For Sontag, putting things off became a way of perpetuating dreams. "To think," she wrote in 1949, "that I always have this sensuous potentiality glowing within my fingers!" And whether she was talking sex or prose, within her fingers is where the sensuous potentiality stayed. She quotes Beckett to the effect that to be an artist is to fail – but does this include failing to be an artist? It is now possible to see a kind of wistful envy in Sontag's claim, in an essay, that Barthes "was not curious enough to let his reading interfere with his writing". Too much reading made her writing self-conscious.

When Sontag does allow her writing to interfere with her reading, she is disappointed with the result. At two points in 1965, she complains about the "thinness" of her prose. Again and again, this note is sounded: "My work is too austere"; "I have more than enough intelligence, learning, vision. The object is character, boldness"; "I want to fight my resignation – but I have only the tools of resignation to fight with." Barthes's later writing, she claimed, "took on the freedoms and the risks of the notebook". But Sontag's risks were mostly confined to her notebook. It is the only place where her passions take anything other than stringently discursive form.

Just as one "criticises in others what one recognises and despises in oneself", so Sontag most coveted what she didn't possess and had little hope of attaining. In 1975, she confessed that it was the prose of non-Jewish writers such as Elizabeth Hardwick and Wilfrid Sheed that "turns me on these days. No ideas, but what music." As a girl, she read Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood and declared: "That is the way I want to write – rich and rhythmic." But this wasn't just a matter of someone failing to meet her impossibly high standards; her essays could be forceful without ever being especially artful.

Sontag doubted whether a writer's journal could illuminate that writer's books, but in her case, it does, though not always flatteringly. The journal is where Sontag showed the intentions and instincts that never made it into her work; it was where she played out possibilities for herself as a freer, looser writer.

In a note written in 1964, she made a series of reflections about Marxist criticism and then decided: "(Use this as introduction to Lukács essay.)" But when she came to write the essay, she settled instead for the kind of opening – learned and assertive, bracing and bland – that she preferred: "The Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács is the senior figure living today within the borders of the Communist world who speaks a Marxism that it is possible for intelligent Marxists to take seriously." At one point, she dismisses the title I, etcetera as "too cerebral" for a book of stories – and then uses it anyway.

At such moments, Sontag appears to be cultivating imperiousness, and in the long term, she abandoned her dreams of being a bold, rhythmical essayist, in favour of being a sort of high-culture publicist. It was a role she had always enjoyed. "Needless to say," she wrote in the Lukács essay, "knowledge of him here is long overdue." "So far," she wrote in 1963, "Levi-Strauss is hardly known in this country."

Sontag was at her best when writing on subjects (camp, photography, Godard) that, through being either elusive or well covered, forced her to be distinctive – but she increasingly devoted her attention to forgotten figures, exercises in recovery which required little of her, and damned her to write prose that was either pallid or self-important. The afterlife of Macade de Assis "has not brought his work the recognition it deserves". Glenway Wescott's novel The Pilgrim Hawk is "still neglected". Her essay on Robert Walser is presented "to a public that has yet to discover him". An essay on Leonid Tsypkin's novel Summer in Baden-Baden begins with the reflection that "it seems unlikely that there are still masterpieces in major, intently patrolled languages waiting to be discovered" – and then pulls one out of the hat. The problem with being ahead of the curve is that people catch up with you eventually. You want them to. But then what happens?

"'What is it?' before 'Is it any good?'" Sontag wrote in 1964, by way of establishing her critical priorities, but here as elsewhere, it was a stance she admired because she was so temperamentally ill-suited to adopting it. Sontag was concerned not just with asking "Is it any good?" but "How good?" She was a "genius" fanatic who loved nothing more than a world-historical superlative. It was rare for her to look a subject dead in the eye and hit on that mixture of explanation and evocation needed if criticism is to retain its urgency long after its subject has lost our attention, or become famous all over the world.

The Militant on Miami, Florida: not immune to class struggle or battle of ideas

Well, The Militant is right again: Miami is no longer a totalitarian gusano stronghold as it once was, and as it is still caricatured.

The billboard for the 5 is a good example.

The statement of Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen is another example.

As the NYT reports it: "Guillen's comments appeared in a Time magazine article, in which he said he "loved" and "respected" Castro, the longtime Cuban leader. Time reported that Guillen said: "I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years," but Castro is still here, he added, referring to Castro as an expletive."

Guillen clearly admires Fidel from a "coaching" and "career" point of view, and not politically. To work as a relatively privileged sports executive in Miami and feel free to publicly admire Fidel for any reason is a step forward!

He ran into a wall on this issue, but the fact that he could make the initial statement without fearing or even expecting contradiction says a lot, too.

"A reporter with the presence of a performer" or vice versa

Before the advent of 24/7 Cable TV news, particular journalists were often considered worth paying attention to. Viewers and readers might come to trust their judgments, and so pay attention to what the journalist thought worth covering. My father was that way about Cronkite and Mike Wallace, which I realize today is like saying my father took Petroleum V. Nasby seriously. The only media talking head today with that old-style brand name loyalty is Jon Stewart, and all the obvious limitations of this kind of following or tailing are encapsulated in that fact.

But my father's view of Mike Wallace as a righter of wrongs was actually Mike Wallace's and CBS News' way of presenting the presenter, too. Wallace might be brutish to particular unpleasant characters in gray flannel suits or their directors, but he had no interest in portraying class reality in the US other than in terms of victims and crusaders.

With Wallace as the crusader.

Judging from the NYT obit I repost below, the important people whom Wallace made more important by his interest in them will be the ones to miss him. The obituarist cannot completely conceal the fact that most of Wallace's colleagues probably thought he was a egomaniacal backstabbing story thief and all-round double-dealer. But why should not journalists of capitalist enterprises reflect the values of the system within which they are incubated?

After all, CBS News for decades portrayed itself as free of corporate interference. What was there to interfere with?

[Mention of Mike Wallace cannot end without a shout-out to Harry Shearer, who has been doing Wallace on TV and radio for several decades.]

Jay
20120408

*

Mike Wallace, CBS Pioneer of '60 Minutes,' Dies at 93

By TIM WEINER
Published: April 8, 2012

Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of the nation's best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on "60 Minutes," died on Saturday. He was 93.

On its Web site, CBS said Mr. Wallace died at a care facility in New Canaan, Conn., where he had lived in recent years. Mr. Wallace, who was outfitted with a pacemaker more than 20 years ago, had a long history of cardiac care and underwent triple bypass heart surgery in January 2008.

A reporter with the presence of a performer, Mr. Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years, living for the moment when "you forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you're really talking to each other," he said in an interview with The New York Times videotaped in July 2006.

Mr. Wallace created enough such moments to become a paragon of television journalism in the heyday of network news. As he grilled his subjects, he said, he walked "a fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity."

His success often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received.

"Perjury," he said, in his staccato style, to President Richard M. Nixon's right-hand man, John D. Ehrlichman, while interviewing him during the Watergate affair. "Plans to audit tax returns for political retaliation. Theft of psychiatric records. Spying by undercover agents. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. All of this by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon."

Mr. Ehrlichman paused and said, "Is there a question in there somewhere?"

No, Mr. Wallace later conceded. But it was riveting television.

Both the style and the substance of his work drew criticism. CBS paid Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman $100,000 for an exclusive (if inconclusive) pair of interviews with Mr. Wallace in 1975. Critics called it checkbook journalism, and even Mr. Wallace conceded later that it had been "a bad idea."

For a 1976 report on Medicaid fraud, the show's producers set up a phony health clinic in Chicago. Was the use of deceit to expose deceit justified? Hidden cameras and ambush interviews were all part of the game, Mr. Wallace said, though he abandoned those techniques in later years, when they became a cliché and no longer good television.

Some subjects were unfazed by Mr. Wallace's unblinking stare. When he sat down with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, in 1979, he said that President Anwar Sadat of Egypt "calls you, Imam — forgive me, his words, not mine — a lunatic." The translator blanched, but the Ayatollah responded, calmly calling Sadat a heretic.

"Forgive me" was a favorite Wallace phrase, the caress before the garrote. "As soon as you hear that," he told The Times, "you realize the nasty question's about to come."

Mr. Wallace invented his hard-boiled persona on a program called "Night Beat." Television was black and white, and so was the discourse, when the show went on the air in 1956, weeknights at 11, on the New York affiliate of the short-lived DuMont television network.

"We had lighting that was warts-and-all close-ups," he remembered. The camera closed in tighter and tighter on the guests. The smoke from Mr. Wallace's cigarette swirled between him and his quarry. Sweat beaded on his subject's brows.

"I was asking tough questions," he said. "And I had found my bliss." He had become Mike Wallace.

"All of a sudden," he said, "I was no longer anonymous." He was "the fiery prosecutor, the righteous and wrathful D.A. determined to rid Gotham City of its undesirables," in the words of Michael J. Arlen, The New Yorker's television critic.

"Night Beat" moved to ABC in 1957 as a half-hour, coast-to-coast, prime-time program, renamed "The Mike Wallace Interview." ABC, then the perennial loser among the major networks, promoted him as "the Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition."

The show came under attack after a guest, the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, called Senator John F. Kennedy "the only man in history I know who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book that was ghostwritten." The book was "Profiles in Courage." The Kennedys' lawyers forced ABC to retract, though in fact the senator's speechwriter, Theodore C. Sorensen, was the book's undisclosed co-author.

Mr. Wallace's career path meandered after ABC canceled "The Mike Wallace Interview" in 1958. He had done entertainment shows and quiz shows and cigarette commercials. He had acted onstage. But he resolved to become a real journalist after a harrowing journey to recover the body of his first-born son, Peter, who died at 19 in a mountain-climbing accident in Greece in 1962.

"He was going to be a writer," Mr. Wallace said in the interview with The Times. "And so I said, 'I'm going to do something that would make Peter proud.' "

He set his sights on CBS News and joined the network as a special correspondent. He was soon anchoring "The CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace" and reporting from Vietnam. Then he caught the eye of Richard Nixon.

Running for president, Nixon offered Mr. Wallace a job as his press secretary shortly before the 1968 primaries began. "I thought very, very seriously about it," Mr. Wallace told The Times. "I regarded him with great respect. He was savvy, smart, hard working."

But Mr. Wallace turned Nixon down, saying that putting a happy face on bad news was not his cup of tea.

Only months later "60 Minutes" made its debut. The trademark ticking of the Tag Heuer stopwatch marked the moment.

It was something new on the air: a "newsmagazine," usually three substantial pieces of about 15 minutes each — a near-eternity on television. Mr. Wallace and Harry Reasoner were the first co-hosts, one fierce, one folksy.

The show was the brainchild of Don Hewitt, a producer who was "in bad odor at CBS News at the time," Mr. Wallace said in the interview.

"He was unpredictable, difficult to work with, genius notions, a genuine adventurer, if you will, in television news at that time," Mr. Wallace said of Mr. Hewitt, who died in 2009.

The show, which moved to Sunday nights at 7 in 1970, was slow to catch on. Creative conflict marked its climb to the top of the television heap in the 1970s. Mr. Wallace fought his fellow correspondents for the best stories and the most airtime.

"There would be blood on the floor," Mr. Wallace said in the interview. He said he developed the "not necessarily undeserved reputation" of being prickly — he used a stronger word — and "of stealing stories from my colleagues," who came to include Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Dan Rather and Diane Sawyer in the 1970s and early 1980s.

"This was just competition," he said. "Get the story. Get it first."

Mr. Wallace and his teams of producers — who researched, reported and wrote the stories — took on American Nazis and nuclear power plants along with his patented brand of exposés.

The time was ripe for investigative television journalism. Watergate and its many seamy sideshows had made muckraking a respectable trade. By the late 1970s "60 Minutes" was the top-rated show on Sundays. For five consecutive years it was the No. 1 show on television, a run matched only by "All in the Family" and "The Cosby Show." Mr. Wallace was rich and famous and a powerful figure in television news when his life took a stressful turn in 1982.

That year he anchored a "CBS Reports" documentary called "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception." It led to a $120 million libel suit filed by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. At issue was the show's assertion that General Westmoreland had deliberately falsified the "order of battle," the estimate of the strength of the enemy.

The question turned on a decision that American military commanders made in 1967. The uniformed military said the enemy was no more than 300,000 strong, but intelligence analysts said the number could be half a million or more. If the analysts were correct, then there was no "light at the end of the tunnel," the optimistic phrase General Westmoreland had used.

Documents declassified after the cold war showed that the general's top aide had cited reasons of politics and public relations for insisting on the lower figure. The military was "stonewalling, obviously under orders" from General Westmoreland, a senior Central Intelligence Agency analyst cabled his headquarters; the "predetermined total" was "fixed on public-relations grounds." The C.I.A. officially accepted the military's invented figure of 299,000 enemy forces or fewer.

The documentary asserted that rather than a politically expedient lie, the struggle revealed a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth. The key theorist for that case, Sam Adams, a former C.I.A. analyst, was not only interviewed for the documentary but also received a consultant's fee of $25,000. The show had arrived at something close to the truth, but it had used questionable means to that end.

After more than two years of struggle General Westmoreland abandoned his suit midtrial, CBS lost some of its reputation, and Mr. Wallace had a nervous breakdown.

He said at the time that he feared "the lawyers for the other side would employ the same techniques against me that I had employed on television." Already on antidepressants, which gave him tremors, he had a waking nightmare while sitting through the trial.

"I could see myself up there on the stand, six feet away from the jury, with my hands shaking, and dying to drink water," he said in the interview with The Times. He imagined the jury thinking, "Well, that son of a bitch is obviously guilty as hell."

He attempted suicide. "I was so low that I wanted to exit," Mr. Wallace said. "And I took a bunch of pills, and they were sleeping pills. And at least they would put me to sleep, and maybe I wouldn't wake up, and that was fine."

Later in life he discussed his depression and advocated psychiatric and psycho-pharmaceutical treatment.

The despair and anger he felt over the documentary were outdone 13 years later when, as he put it in a memoir, "the corporate management of CBS emasculated a '60 Minutes' documentary I had done just as we were preparing to put it on the air."

The cutting involved a damning interview with Jeffrey Wigand, a chemist who had been director of research at Brown & Williamson, the tobacco company. The chemist said on camera that the nation's tobacco executives had been lying when they swore under oath before Congress that they believed nicotine was not addictive. Among many complicating factors, one of those executives was the son of Laurence A. Tisch, the chairman of CBS at the time. The interview was not broadcast.

Mr. Wallace remained bitter at Mr. Tisch's stewardship, which ended when he sold CBS in 1995, after dismissing many employees and dismantling some of its parts.

"We thought that he would be happy to be the inheritor of all of the — forgive me — glory of CBS and CBS News," Mr. Wallace said. "And the glory was not as attractive to him as money. He began to tear apart CBS News." (Mr. Tisch died in 2003.)

Mr. Wallace officially retired from "60 Minutes" in 2006, after a 38-year run, at the age of 88. A few months later he was back on the program with an exclusive interview with the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"I hear this is your last interview," the president said.

Mr. Wallace replied: "What do you think? Is it a good idea to retire?" He won his 21st Emmy award for the interview.

And he kept working. Only weeks before his 2008 bypass surgery, he interviewed the baseball star Roger Clemens as accusations swirled that Mr. Clemens had used performance-enhancing drugs.

Myron Leon Wallace was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 9, 1918, one of four children of Friedan and Zina Wallik, who had come to the United States from a Russian shtetl before the turn of the 20th century. (Friedan became Frank and Wallik became Wallace in the American melting pot.) His father started as a wholesale grocer and became an insurance broker.

Myron came out of Brookline High School with a B-minus average, worked his way through the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and graduated in 1939. (Decades later he was deeply involved in two of the university's programs for journalists: the Livingston Awards, given to talented reporters under 35, and the Knight-Wallace fellowships, a sabbatical for midcareer reporters; its seminars are held at Wallace House.)

After he graduated from college, he went almost immediately into radio, starting at $20 a week at a station with the call letters WOOD-WASH in Grand Rapids, Mich. (It was jointly owned by a furniture trade association, a lumber company and a laundry.) He went on to Detroit and Chicago stations as narrator and actor on shows like "The Lone Ranger" and "The Green Hornet," along the way acquiring "Mike" as his broadcast name.

In December 1943 he enlisted in the Navy, did a tour of duty in the Pacific and wound up as a lieutenant junior grade in charge of radio entertainment at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station.

Mr. Wallace married his first wife, Norma Kaphan, in 1940; they were divorced in 1948. Besides Peter, who died in the mountain-climbing accident, they had a second son, Chris Wallace, the television journalist now at Fox News.

Mr. Wallace and his second wife, Buff Cobb, an actress, were married in 1949 and took to the air together, in a talk show called "Mike and Buff," which appeared first on radio and then television. "We overdid the controversy pattern of the program," she said after their divorce in 1954. "You get into a habit of bickering a little, and you carry it over into your personal lives."

Ms. Cobb died in 2010.

His marriage to his third wife, Lorraine Perigord, which lasted 28 years, ended with her departure for Fiji. His fourth wife, Mary Yates, was the widow of one of his best friends — his "Night Beat" producer, Ted Yates, who was killed in 1967 while on assignment for NBC News during the Six-Day War in Israel.

Besides his wife and his son, Chris, Mr. Wallace is survived by a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora; two stepsons, Eames and Angus Yates; seven grandchildren, and four great grandchildren.

Mr. Wallace and Ms. Yates were married in 1986 and lived for a time in a Park Avenue duplex in Manhattan and in a bay-front house on Martha's Vineyard, where their social circle included the novelist William Styron and the humorist Art Buchwald.

All three men "suffered depression simultaneously," Mr. Wallace said in an interview in 2006, "so we walked around in the rain together on Martha's Vineyard and consoled each other," adding, "We named ourselves the Blues Brothers." Mr. Styron died in 2006 and Mr. Buchwald in 2007.

Mr. Wallace said that Ms. Yates had saved his life when he came close to suicide before their marriage, and that their marriage had saved him afterward.

He also said that he had known since he was a child that he wanted to be on the air. He felt it was his calling. He said he wanted people to ask: " 'Who's this guy, Myron Wallace?' "

*

One of the few mentions of Wallace I could find from our movement, from the Young Socialist newspaper in 1958:

Youth Notes

RUSSIA—An interview conducted by Mike Wallace with Dr.
Goodwin Watson, Columbia University professor who recently returned from Russia, reveals a good deal about the Russian educational system that we in America could learn from. We reproduced part of it below:

Q. "Do the Russians really take education more seriously than we do?

A. "Yes, A real faith in education pervades the whole Russian society.

Q. "But this is true of the U.S. too, isn't it?

A. "Yes, taut there's a vital difference in the points of view of
the two countries. The Russians assume that everybody can learn foreign languages, mathematics, science, astronomy, psychology. In America, we've emphasized IQ's and intelligence tests, and in consequence, we decide that certain pupils can't learn difficult subjects. The Russians threw these tests out in 1934 because they felt that differences in performance were due more to differences in oppor-
tunity than to heredity.

Q. "Well, how does this work out practically?

A. "Every Russian youngster who shows ability gets a stipend
that pays for his education. And if he gets all A's in his work, he gets 20 to 25 per cent more rubles.

Q. "You mean it all depends on the individuals?

A. "Yes. The point of Russian education is to give everybody the kind of education that makes him stand on his tiptoes and stretch himself to the utmost.

Q. "Isn't Soviet education overbalanced on the side of science?

A. "No. That's a misunderstanding. Sixty per cent of the pupils' time is spent on the humanities. Pupils are expected to know Russian, a foreign language, plus history and economics, mathematics and science."