Sublime

And while Moses went to the top, he did not stop there, wining and dining reporters as well as publishers, inviting key ones to his elaborate opening-ceremony luncheons, to an annual swimming and dinner outing at Jones Beach, to more intimate, and elaborate, luncheons at Belmont Lake State Park, to the Park Department’s Christmas party at the Arsen

THE JOHNSON SUBCOMMITTEE had far less impact on the defense effort than the Truman Committee had had, and not only because the police action in Korea was not the Second World War but because, unlike Truman’s work, so much of Johnson’s was based not on original research—on-the-spot inspections—but on previously compiled documents simply reworked in

He was fat. He wore jogging suits. He wore a medallion and gold chains. And the unforgivable of unforgivables, he had processed hair. The white media, perhaps not consciously, said, “We’re going to promote this guy because we can point up the ridiculousness and paucity of black leadership.” Al understood precisely what they were doing, precisely. A

We hold that democracy demands equal access to goods, services, and knowledge. The culture of knowledge in America has been a servant of democratic governance. This instrumental view of knowledge meant that three principles would become fundamental to American-style democracy: The press must be free, the government must be open and accountable to t

what the New York Times recently referred to in a book review as the “traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government”—in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningf

he is one of the most important political thinkers on earth today.

His office produced weekly phonograph albums to send to Wisconsin stations that dutifully aired them. As described by the journalist Edwin R. Bayley, who obtained some of these recordings, interviewers posing as journalists would ask McCarthy congenial questions that led to senatorial disquisitions on the iniquities of the mainstream press, the Dem