The First Amendment; Robert Manning

The First Amendment and the Free People Weekly examination of civil liberties in the media and the like and seventies produced by WGBH radio Boston cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. The host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Rubin. On this edition my guest. I'm very happy to say is Robert Manning the editor in chief of The Atlantic. Robert Manning was for some years with Time magazine and was the bureau chief in London. He was the assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Kennedy administration and for about six months into the Johnson administration. He was then with the Atlantic since 964 as executive editor and then a 1966 editor in chief Robert Manning the the Atlantic has if any. Any magazine that fits the definition of Penn Arch it's got shit has got stars got grace it's it's it's keeping vital

and alive. And one of the things that you said at the institute's conference on media ethics intrigues me when you were on one of the panels. Somebody mentioned that The New York Times publishes by its own propaganda everything that's fit to print. And you you lean back in it with a wry sense of humor said Well that may be all right for that kind of a newspaper or any other journal but I decided as the editor what goes in the Atlantic. And I thought that was a vital statement on behalf of an American journalist. Would you go into a little bit while I was just dealing with the language as a fact of life or magazine journalism particularly for a monthly magazine where you have only 12 cracks a year of the audience and the entire world a torrent of events to deal with. It can be put together only by someone arbitrarily at a certain point saying this is all that we will try to encompass this month. And these are the writers we will have in and these are the subjects. Invite them to discuss.

It's arbitrary perhaps but an absolutely essential arbitrariness a newspaper like The Times has got to move beyond that and try indeed to prevent it or to present us as full a picture as it can on a given day of what it thinks the important events it seems to me that it is a package is there a deliberate effort to create a certain imagery that is definitely in the Atlantic. Well there is a sense of month to month composition too but it's so magazine it's more now and it's now in its hundred twentieth year you know and it has always had a sort of literary reputation but in fact it's its journalism and always has been with a sort of literary literary and then here to it plus certain literary ambitions even started under a political impulse that was formed started here in Boston by a group of distinguished New Englanders primarily because of their interest in abolition. And and while it's as I say it took on a literary fiber because most of the founders were literary

men. It is always been a magazine engaged very heavily in political and social affairs academic affairs and it's trite at the same time to have a decent amount of fiction and in and of poetry particularly to find new writers in fiction and poetry today that I think the proportions of change depending on the various interest of the various editors. I being the twelfth. I'm more of a political than a literary animal somewhat that perhaps is reflected in the magazine not so much. And any change in the proportion between straight literary sayings and political thinker perhaps and how close to the current We try to hit. Well what's upcoming. For example when you when you look across your desk. And you say I want to look down the road a little bit. What are some of the issues that you think face American society that the Atlantic ought to address for the for the next year for the next decade.

Well I mean we do try to do two things we try to look at. Phenomena that we think have been going on and we feel haven't been covered at much depth and that could include many things have been dealt with from day to day week to week in magazines and news magazines or the newspapers but which no one has had the time of Simon to step back and look at isn't the whole I think just this cover story in this current issue which we call soldiers of misfortune. There's been a lot of short and feature stories and interviews on Vietnam veterans but this was an attempt on our part to send out a young man who himself was about nine bedrooms and got a picture of how 1078. The people who fought in that war and no fair and it's a pretty pretty disturbing story. The There's a case of looking at something has been with us quite a while the other sort of saying a magazine of this sort has to do is to try to anticipate. I don't mean I'm not talking about getting scoops in the

old fashioned newspaper sense but try to get some sense of what is important now what six nine months from now where we have to be because we've got lead time we have to fight here. We can move very fast. After we know what we're after but we've got an interest paid and what we run usually should be worth reading three four five months later if it isn't then we're not rising enough beyond the weekly news magazines or the well-done newspaper stories. So now I suppose I find myself trying to think ahead. Well one of the basic things that's going on now is that they were they are stealing all our money I mean inflation is just getting to be a one world crisis situation. I'm sure that between you know sometime now in the next three or four months we ought to be able to fasten on someone who can try to take this on in understandable terms and project ahead as to. What

we should be anticipating now is going to be the situation had it was no no one can predict this with any degree of certainty but it can be taken on in a provocative way by someone who isn't afraid to be proven a wrong prophet. That's one issue I think. I find myself puzzling a little bit now about what I did in the economic issue is the overriding thing the Atlantic should be looking at. Another thing that I've found there's a great deal of interest in Americans as I think we're trying to demonstrate in the forthcoming issue of the April issue which is just going into the mail. Americans are more interested than they ever have been about reading about their own country. We looked outward after World War 2 for a long time went out into the world became the leader of the world and we had more international reputation and many cases than we did. Q Coverage of our own country and Vietnam got us looking inward again and we

discovered things suddenly like Watts and then the liquid and the and the volatile situation in places like Detroit those were not covered by the press we knew more about many foreign countries including obscure ones than we knew about our own country. So I'm running occasionally. Large supplements now in various parts of the country we've done Texas we've done the Pacific Northwest. We've just we're just coming out with Rocky Mountain country. We're sitting around in my office now trying to figure well what's another region that Americans maybe don't know as much about as they'd like to and we can we can. And a case of Rocky Mountain country we got two separate writers Wallace Stegner and his son Paige dagger and it's I think a quite rewarding 40 some pages of what's going on out there and in Colorado and Wyoming and Utah and Montana and Idaho. Well there certainly has been a tremendous spread of magazines that cater to that kind of an interest ranging from the Smithsonian magazine which is not in your field at

all to do all sorts of magazines that are that bring Americans closer to their country closer to their own lives closer to their own situation. Would you say that that there is a new parochialism that there's an cynicism about the past or maybe have been too much with international affairs as a people and it's been too unrewarding. Well I think there's a danger that again this is a this is one of the dire results of Vietnam that suddenly turning inward. And as with many reactions that sort of tend to be an over reaction and an impatience with the rest of the world and impatience with the notion that we are out there to solve any problems. It's been noticeable when I think and obviously editors in many places have found a way they are doing much more. The overseas coverage in the York Times I was cut way back from what it was five 10 years ago and there is more domestic news. That's been true I think with with the news magazines

and. Certainly with television news. This again is another thing. Magazines like the Atlantic can and should take advantage. We still try to run at least one or two reports from overseas every issue plus a longer text pieces too. We don't find as much interest in those but it's a part of the charter. And you've been running these days since 1945 in one of these reports from overseas so-called Atlantic reports. And I sometimes get a little discouraged but then every time I flirt with the notion of turning them in word and I do once in a while have a domestic section instead of foreign. I get enough reader reaction to make me realize that. That a certain percentage of our audience at least wants very much to read these things. I like to turn to Robert Manning to your views on the field of journalism and I know that you have some

very cryptic thoughts about some of the attitudes taken about the First Amendment by the professional journalists. Well there were certain things that came out during that conference that you referred to earlier where anyone who was there can observe a variety of attitudes toward toward the First Amendment and journalism I found myself disturbed since since Watergate with the kind of self-absorption and sense of self righteousness verging on self canonisation that has taken place in the craft. I've perhaps been guilty of it myself but I I think it's become apparent I think that. Out there when I remember when I go mate has made his attacks on me on the media in America than they can 69. That's right. You know a lot of people were chilled by that not because I guess it was attacking but that's the alarming discovery that a lot of people out there who didn't didn't share agonise

views and most everything else sort of shared she had this when they didn't like it as a piece we have an E I think is this issue by Louis banks memo to the press that and I guess it's one coming out. We got a piece a member of the press they had you out there. Well hate is a strong word but it's worth using a strong word in this case and the reason that's happening is that I think that after that show. Agnew saying. Came the Pentagon Papers case and then Watergate and that caused a lot of people in our trade who were alarmed and should have paid attention to this reception at the Agnus going out to forget it and the elation that's replaced that sense over-the over the achievements that journalism property can claim in the Pentagon Papers case and particular Watergate that donation has cost I think a kind of arrogance to take place and it worries me because

not a day passes when there is not a legitimate reason for the press to seize on the First Amendment and protect its function. And if I may say so it's prerogatives in the pursuit of obligations the First Amendment was written for the press but it was written to protect the public and and to protect the public by allowing among other things to have as much freedom of press as was possible. I want to be asked to have it seized on for what to me seem to be specious reasons and we couldn't have a better example than this recent furor over the closed him of the Haldeman book and The Washington Post getting its hands on a part of the manuscript from the printing plant. And quote scoping unquote the New York Times which as publisher that book own that manuscript. And then that and the times striking back saying this is using Watergate phrase nothing but a third rate burglary and then the post pompously pompously saying we were just protecting the rights of the public to know in the First Amendment they weren't protecting and public right to know and invoking the First Amendment and

this bit of either petty thievery or dealing in stolen goods I don't know which it is. Didn't the public wasn't served by this in any way to get scrappy front page story based. On a reading of only part of the heart of the manuscript which build it into something more important it was it's a bogus and it's a species book. Then the New York Times making a fool of itself by advertising it as the one book that tells the entire truth the whole truth about Watergate. When The Times own news columns and review column say the opposite tack it to their credit they they call it. For the trumpery it was in their in their judgment columns but they're the publishers of the book too. Now they're involved in the Nixon book are they not just they're not publisher the Nixon book in this case they have bought the right they're the they're the proprietors of the first Syria right. And they in turn will sell a syndication rights of other newspapers in this country and around the world. That's a form of checkbook journalism I guess you're caught and I want to bring that up with you I know

that right after World War 2 when I was on my way to graduate school every day I pick up the New York Times and used to be great series such as Winston Churchill's books World War 2 spread out every day on the first page I thought that was just glorious. It wasn't history it was marvelous literary technique. But now I'm beginning to worry a little bit about this constant effort by great newspapers to get into the book business and as you say be at war with themselves somewhat. Well there are two notes that sink should be made in the case of the Haldeman book The New York the branch the New York Times and publishes books. New York Times. Well I don't know what I forgot but maybe other times books I think the New York Times books now that they are the publishers of that book. Then the New York Times a newspaper has the obligation to deal with it the way they would you know any book by any other public would you're suggesting that they don't really. Well I think there's a conflict here because they had in addition to that they had to among other things to protect their

financial interests dates they had sold they had sold first serial rights to many other newspapers and even to Newsweek for a hundred twenty five thousand dollars. Newsweek being owned by the watching very Washington Post that by printing this undercut Newsweek's investment saw the Times in addition to having a stake in publishing a book had a stake in it. Almost a million dollars in the syndication rights. So there was not really there was not something I mean by having the first member of the public's right to know that was really at the heart of this. It was a pure commercial interest in the book and to have it turned into that as the sort of thing I think makes people outside impatient as they see examples of newspapers that are asserting First Amendment rights or claiming to represent the public's right to know when it really is for purposes of just getting in there and getting getting stories that don't really relate seriously to or to get. There are sometimes legitimate so-called invasions of privacy in dealing with

public officials and so on. And there there was that I think are questionable. Dealing getting invading the privacy of Hamilton Jordan in the way he conducts his office has one saying whether it's whether it's a legitimate invasion of his privacy to go into his off off duty activities is questionable in my mind if he were or became known as a falling down drunk or got caught in a men's room somewhere and. Endangering and danger and no security. No that's another matter but you know times on the other Nixon book which it has serial rise for I think has a right to to let those rights begin. Those to the second degree and I think they announced that they were keeping those to 60 or 70. Yes I'm still there. But some would love to have 50 clients 50 clients and they want to maintain but the thing that intrigued me was

they want to keep the security of it. And for newspaper people to talk that way they want to keep it secure if there is an irony there isn't there isn't there isn't room. Why would Heywood Broun have said I mean they would Bruna found out that his first New York editor had been a famous Western gunfighter. And it was now the editor in chief who found that the boys liked him because he could play poker and his editor could borrow from him. That the fact that he went out and got a story and you wrote it up as best you could what would somebody like Haywood Broun that big sloppy shuffle the controversial man have said if he walked into a modern newspaper office today and looked at what we call checkbook journalism and vested interests and security of the story of a book and. Well I don't know I have read much of Robert Brown I'm sure he would express his distaste for very colorful crimes in question right. There is an awful lot of quite interesting journalism is being done now in book form

instead of a magazine or newspaper long as you are contributing editor is a roster Ryland one of the masses that are putting in to book for. Well if this is an event in there but his money's put into book form started as you need I started this piece in The Atlantic. But we find ourselves as do many other magazines monthly and even some weekly. We find ourselves looking very avidly at forthcoming books before they're published four for excerpts from them that give a kind of well I'll give you some examples of it coming out this fall. There's a biography of MacArthur by William Manchester. There's a biography of Bobby Kennedy by a messenger and there's the RH White's autobiography. None of these are any of these persons could have been in the old days been commissioned to write a very good magazine piece on any part of any of those subjects these days. Economically it's foolish for them to say magazines can't pay them anything like what they

can get by getting a big contract to do a book of this sort. So when these books come along an editor like myself before going to ask to see them and see if we can arrange for a fee to run an excerpt from one of these books and it turns out to be a reading and something of the magazine could we could have afforded to commission. So this has been a post-war world war to famine and this kind of. There's a distinction between history books and biographies and the kind of thing I'm talking about the you say this is it's a coded phrase that is not original in any way. Barbara still is Barbara Tuchman the talk when isn't her book on still well in the mind of China. It seemed to many people at the time that people like Barbara Tuchman wrote better history than the professional historian right. I think in some cases I mean some of the things she's taken on it's been demonstrated and really the Guns of August certainly is the best book I've ever read about the period of lead up to World and absolutely just. But I'm talking here and I've

mentioned some things that are like the MacArthur biography is a traditional biography in a way now but I an awful lot of things that deal with. Just the sort of Affairs magazine like The Atlantic is trying to be on top of are being done now by journalists in book form. I mean a book like Jules Witcover book on the Carter campaign only the 76 campaign that came out almost in the speed of the magazine almost. That's a huge volume and huge volume of any of that. And you know this will pass in coming to terms on the tip of my tentative. But I never thought on merit and right and proper A proper time for a book at the right time I think. But some of the some of the big trials that have taken place the Manson trial the sheep the Chicago members in the 60s and 70s sick I assume some of the best treatments of these have been have been done by

writers who've been commissioned to do books and they race read. Sometimes you said where the money is and that's where the money. Yes I think the amounts involved in a book like this. Let's take the size of your biography of Bobby Kennedy. I don't know what kind of advanced publisher paid him but he had heard at the Literary Guild was offering over $700000 guarantee. To take that as a literary guild selection and it means that the author and the publisher get that as a minimum. No matter how many were going to regular cells and then they get an amount above and beyond that wants to see you rightly so with this prompts licensure to try to become the Robert Ludlum of. After I know him you're going right on to his eleventh as Ludlum's him for having a back who's going to have this great success in regard to the lack of self-effacement on behalf of

so many journalists speaking about themselves and their lack of of anything short of elevation in their own minds about the profession. Do they really understand that the profession is not as equipped in so many fields as it ought to be I think you call it a profession I'm not. I could I would act a crime like singer but a craft verging on art occasionally. The eyes. I think it isn't this isn't all brought on individually by a journalist it's that we live in an age where where the major publishers and editors and the Major and the water Cronkite's and David Brinkley's they're treated as sort of as potentates and when you're treated as a potentate unless you've got very strong willpower you've got you might find a stop acting like one. And also the people who work for them. I mean and perhaps a lower level and those

newspapers and television are apt to get that. They get some of that same treatment sometimes the temptation is I was there to forget that one is a narrator the presenter presenter instead of a participant and and human affairs and just been in a sense but and so. It's sort of losing sight of this and becoming performers and celebrities and. It's apt to cause a journalist to forget to craft for the most part is made up of people. Each of us who knows a little bit about a lot of things but not enough about one important especially to make a living at that. And when you forget that. You aren't trying to find a soft you can talk about it as a profession and thinking of oneself as being perhaps more knowledgeable more. What's the word I want. Wiser

than one in fact. Maybe maybe the whole wood profession has been given a bad name by doctors and lawyers who are really also artists. Well craftsman verging on the artist and don't realize it they like to think of themselves as the holders of certain specialized knowledge which altogether adds up to one package. Well they are but I think one thing they do too to do earning the word professional professional is that whether even though it may be inadequate it isn't here to each of them has it a generally agreed code of ethics that's now in journalism for many reasons that I think are good not all but many I think are very valid refuses to have an eye and I think I would join the refusers in that in that regard. But when you are when you don't have a code. You don't have a code or an agreed code which certainly Madison has and which the law has by what it is frequently as it may be it's still a code and there are

penalties that can be imposed disbarment. Losing one's license to practice medicine. There was just there's none of that and none of that in journalism and I think as I say it's justified. But in refusing to have one we provide another reason why we don't think we call ourselves an organized profession. And I would I would want to see it organized and I like to see it as ramshackle and diversified and scrappy and competitive as it is. Even though I found the recent competition in the Post and The Times on the How about distasteful and unnecessary while the competition produces pretty useful results. What sort of in the final few moments what magazines do you read as the editor of The Atlantic Do you read things like encounter regularly look at them. Yes I know I can see that in their many magazines I read from front to back. And I'm probably the only person including even my own adult fellow editors who literally read every word of the

Atlantic but I don't know the tremendous number of magazines mostly English language I don't have enough familiarity with foreign languages but I had to try to read to keep up with what's in various European journals and I read and read The New Yorker I read. Either monthly magazines I read the Economist in London Observer and a packet o and a dozen others Smithsonian Scientific American a lot of magazines in the many areas my Which I know nothing. We get a lot especially magazines and when I can try to split them up among the editors. But it seems to me Robert Manning the editor in chief of The Atlantic that one of the reasons the Atlantic is what it is is that each of its editors and you know the twelth know you say Mr. Weeks and yourself and all the others had a sense of mission which is in our 20th century lost with so many people you know where you going you know where you've been and you have your hopes. Well I know where I've been and I'm not sure I know where I'm going but I need to have you hope sense of regrets of Gazza really end each month as a refreshing challenge and each month I look back and say

there was a lot we should have done that we didn't maybe next month maybe next month that's a good ending line. Thank you. Robert Manning the editor in chief of The Atlantic. This is Benadryl been saying for this day. Tonight. The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties in the media. In the 1970s the program was produced in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. I w GBH radio Boston which is solely responsible for its content. This is the station program exchange.