There Were Two Gerald Fords: John Hersey and Richard Reeves Profile a President

Abstract

On the eve of the 1996 election, The New Yorker magazine’s Sidney Blumenthal offered a bitter assessment of Washington’s leading political journalists. “Skepticism,” he wrote, “has curdled into cynicism without substance; ‘attitude’ substitutes for purpose; an antipolitical reflex parades as understanding” (236). Blumenthal was no disinterested observer. He greatly admired Bill Clinton and believed too many of his colleagues were chronically corrosive about his presidency. He soon left The New Yorker to join the Clinton administration. Yet other, less politically committed journalists shared his concern about the direction of political reporting and commentary in the last decade of the twentieth century. Joseph Nocera decried a “journalism of nihilism . . . [that] doesn’t really believe in anything except itself” (27). Something had happened to political journalism in the preceding years. Journalists underwent a series of casting changes. They had played stenographers, even cheerleaders. Then many became something else again. A few assumed the role of E. K. Hornbeck, the Menckenesque character in Inherit the Wind (1955). An older, intense skepticism, inhibited by the exigencies of the Cold War, slowly returned. Journalists had handled political leaders respectfully, a few even reverentially. But such treatments proved less commonplace. By the 1970s, there were competing models for political reporting, one of which will largely prevail.