zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — a mixed week for the scythe-man ]

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h/t Log 24

[ Steve Jobs obit — posted by CC]
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Steve Jobs, February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

— from Steve Jobs‘ Commencement Address at Stanford University, June 2005

Robert D. Novak, 1931 -2009

During the Reagan era, two conservatives shared the title “the Prince of Darkness” as an epithet from liberal Democrats and Washington insiders. The first was nominal Democrat turned Reagan administration assistant secretary of Defense Richard Perle, a neoconservative activist who was castigated for his ultra-hardline anti-Soviet views and skepticism about the value of arms control. The second was veteran Chicago Sun-Times reporter and columnist Robert “Bob” Novak, who passed away today at age 78.

While Novak shared many of Perle’s foreign policy views regarding the malevolence of the Soviet Union and Henry Kissinger and was (with Jude Wanniski) a firey media advocate for the emerging school of  Supply-Side economics, what made him and the Evans & Novak column a political force to be reckoned with was that Bob Novak was a dogged, old-fashioned, working reporter who regularly unearthed new information from his vast collection of sources. Most people under thirty only know of Bob Novak from the Valerie Plame affair, which began in Novak’s column,but Robert Novak had been creating havoc for politicians, and not just liberal ones, for decades:

The fact is that Novak, as he would disclose in his autobiography, actually admired very few politicians. He wrote that he found the first politicians he covered less impressive than the athletic coaches he had covered as a young reporter — “an impression of the political class that did not change appreciably in a half-century of sustained contact.”But then, many big-time politicians didn’t like Novak. Pat Buchanan relates a priceless story of being with Richard Nixon in the mid-’60s in a high-school gym in Indiana. Nixon peeked through the stage curtain, finding Novak in the first row of the press section. “Look at him,” Nixon commanded. “That’s Bob Novak. That’s the enemy.”

Not only did I read Novak growing up ( later I realized that Novak would shoehorn his pet theories on to the facts he uncovered regardless of whether it made any sense, the facts though, were always useful) but I watched him pioneer the Left vs. Right shoutfest template on CNN’s “Crossfire”, first sparring with Tom Braden then, more famously, with Michael Kinsley. When Novak did it, the concept was refreshing because the whole idea of a show that actually had political balance by including conservatives on equal terms with liberal talking heads was revolutionary at the time. Unfortunately, when Crossfire went from a clever niche on a feisty cable news station to a transmogrified, dumbed-down, infotainment as an industry standard, a lot of damage was done to public discourse and reportedly, Novak shared that view to an extent ( though he also cashed the checks – CNN helped make Robert Novak exceptionally wealthy).

Robert Novak represented the last of a generation of hard-nosed reporters who learned journalism as a craft rather than as a product of graduate school theories, who could come from any ( but usually modest) background rather than having a distinctly “bicoastal” cultural worldview and a ranking system based on what “good school” you attended. The news business, I note, has not prospered from becoming more insular.

The media could use more Robert Novaks.

ADDENDUM:

I see Lexington Green beat me to the punch with his obit post.

COURT HISTORIAN: ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. 1917-2007

Historian and public intellectual, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. passed away the other day at the age of 89. Dr. Schlesinger was an author of extensive scholarship, I myself recall reading his Age of Jackson as an undergraduate and I have a number of his Kennedy books, where Schlesinger veered into hagiography, on my shelf. It is difficult to separate the man from most of the subjects on which he wrote, the New Deal and the Kennedy administration seemed to be part and parcel of Schlesinger’s very identity.

Schlesinger used his vast knowledge of history as much to shape public debate as to inform the public about history. His “Vital Center“, published in 1949, helped separate American liberalism from its myopic indulgence of international Communism that was a de rigeur attitude among intellectuals in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Schlesinger’s career was one of defending liberalism, which he equated with the values of the New Deal and Camelot, and it’s icons, from the attacks of conservatives and leftist radicals alike. Schlesinger, like his contemporary and nemesis, Richard Nixon, stayed ” in the the arena” of the battle of ideas until his last breath.

I often disagreed with Schlesinger’s take on historical interpretation, moreso his politics, but one must acknowledge that as a historian, Schlesinger was a giant.

LINKS:

David Greenberg

Jonathan Zimmerman

Alonzo Hamby