Freedom of the press – and your private thoughts

Recent hype about “fake news” and blocking the press make this essay as relevant as ever. Harry wrote it in 1991 and eventually filed it on his computer in a folder he titled “BOOK 1”. I believe he collected essays for a potential book on the media. 


Freedom of the Press

The United States is the only country in the world that grants its people freedom of the press. This freedom is specifically spelled out in the First Amendment to the Constitution, under which nobody – not the Congress nor the states and especially not the courts – can take that freedom away. All of them have tried from time to time with varying degrees of success, but this unique and most precious freedom of ours remains largely intact, despite the fact that it is constantly under attack. These attacks, however, do not represent the greatest threat to freedom of the press.

The greatest danger, in my view, comes from the press itself. It is the performance of the press that poses the danger. The problem is that the press is comprised of a huge variety of publications, a publishing output that is so huge, in fact, that it cannot be encompassed in one glance. The newspapers, the magazines, the newsletters, the pamphlets, the books, the studies, the circulars, etc., etc.; all the many thousands of publications that confront the reading public, are the press. And some of those publications are undoubtedly scurrilous, scandalous, abusive, vulgar, obscene, gross, insulting, malignant, libelous, and any other descriptive adjective you can think of.

In the eyes of the courts, any individual element of the press is equal to any other element. That is to say that the National Inquirer, say, and The New York Times, say, are both newspapers, subject to the same rules of conduct as can be applied to all elements of the press alike. It may be blasphemous to mention those two publications in the same breath, but they are both newspapers and every time the former gets sued, the latter also suffers. In fact, every time any newspaper loses a court case, all the other newspapers lose a piece of their freedom.

The real strength of the press lays not so much in the guarantee of freedom provided in the Constitution as it does in the credibility it enjoys in the eyes of its readers. Thus, if one newspaper prints lies and distortions which bring about lawsuits and court proceedings, the notion that all newspapers are guilty of the same kind of conduct pervades the public consciousness. There is no way to separate the performance of one newspaper from that of another in the courts or in the public mind. It doesn’t even matter if a newspaper wins or loses in court. The mere allegations of malice and lies that are aired in court impinge on the public perception of newspaper conduct. And the more that the public comes to believe that the performance of the press is not worth protecting, the less freedom the press will enjoy.

In the end, therefore, the performance of the press itself will determine the degree of freedom it has to report and comment on the news. I don’t know if there is any solution to this problem of separating the various elements of the press, but it worries me.

  
Journals
  
My dad’s musings from 1994 seem to give us permission to share his writings, however personal. What do you think? He saved this with other essays on the media.

I have mixed emotions about a journal – for myself, that is. I have, on a few occasions, kept a journal with respect to a specific event or act in which I was involved on a daily basis, or a periodic basis. I tried to record all my actions and reactions to that subject over the time that it lasted. This worked only moderately well. So long as I continued to record events as they transpired, I was okay. But then, I started to record my feelings about these events, my emotions and reactions to them, my thinking and my decision-making processes, and inevitably, I got bogged down. I found myself trying to write a book every night, and it started to overwhelm me. 

If I confined myself to what I did, what others did, and what I did in response to what they did, it worked and, in fact, became a useful resource for me. But, like I said, when I tried to record too much, it did not work.

Everybody has to work things out for himself (or herself), and a journal may very well work for you no matter how much you try to pour into it. So, consider this: Someday you’re going to be famous, and the biographers and historians will study everything you ever wrote in order to define and redefine your character. In that light, think of your journal as a public document that will disclose your most private thoughts and feelings. And act, or write, accordingly.

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Harry's blizzard ballad

My brother took this photo of our house in Silver Spring, MD. I believe it was the 1966 blizzard.

Who remembers the Blizzard of January 1966? (This news video might spark your memory.) As snow began falling, my dad left work at the Pentagon to drive a few staffers home in Virginia suburbs before heading back to Maryland. However, by the time they arrived at the first residence, conditions worsened, leaving four women plus Harry stranded in an apartment. 

We kids were home from school for a week or more (yay!), while our dad called daily with an update. Once the train was up and running, he traveled back to Maryland, but left his car snowed in. What I didn’t know until my recent discovery -- Harry wrote a poem about his little, winter adventure and attached it to the Feb 3, 1966, edition of the Current News, his Defense Department publication.
 

The Ballad of Harry and Four

Here and there the snow lay fallen,

Evening nigh and home was calling.

Work was finished, labors over,

They all began to run for cover.

On Saturday.

Ursula, Carol, Jean and Harry,

Hied to supper, stayed to tarry.

And onward, upward piled the snow,

So far as Jeannie’s could they go.

On Saturday.

There stayed Harry, Top Banana,

Urse, Carol, Jean and Anna!

Stayed the evening, spent the night,

The five of them – and all was right.

Till Sunday.

Sabbath came – true paradise,

With Harry center of all eyes.

The four fair maids and Harry rested,

Made helpless by the snow invested.

On Sunday.

There our Harry stayed and dreamed,

While the fair maids pampered, preened.

What mortal has the luck of me,

Who hasn’t dreamed this reverie?

On Sunday.

So passed the night; a new day dawned.

The dreamer’s dream was over.

There may be snow upon the ground,

But Harry was in clover.

Then came Monday.

Alas the news: the road is clear!

Elysium fields turn brown and sere.

Serene, we hope, our Harry slumbers,

Chaste not by virtue, but by numbers.

Seminars and such, also in rhyme

Occasionally my dad was away on other (pre-planned) work-related trips. He attended seminars, conferences, and speech-writing expeditions with the Secretary of Defense -- you know, the usual. And, what did I recently discover? Right! He documented each event with a poem. However, I'm not sure I found a poem for one particular seminar. You see, in November 2013, Harry and my husband were watching a TV program commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination. "I know that guy," said Harry, nonchalantly, pointing to the Dallas police chief in the 1963 video. He explained to my husband that shortly after the assassination, the pressure of the investigation got to the chief, so his department sent him to training for a few weeks. Harry and the chief were partnered as roommates. I imagine they had interesting talks!

Here's an example of a poem from a different seminar:


Executive Seminar Center
Kings Point, NY
February 1965 

Sunday, February 7

So the students came together,
On a grey and rainy day,
Summoned here despite the weather
Some from very far away!

Harry at a mid-'60s work-related event

So they hearkened and they listened
To DeVore and Beck (his boss),
Marked their words with eyes that glistened,
Some were at a total loss.

Gathered and recalled past glories,
Met and got acquainted, too,
Swapped some yarns and told some stories
Learned to know just who was who!

Monday, February 8 

First, the furnace clanged and pounded,
Through the night, before the dawn,
Then the bugle loudly sounded
Like a banshee on the lawn.

Came two speakers here to see us,
Tried to get their message through,
Coffee breaks were timed to free us,
But we grasped a thought or two.

Toured the campus, hit the club,
Found the bar and did some loops,
Then, confound it, here's the rub,

Presenting a retirement poem in 1975

Organized five working groups.

Tuesday, February 9

Now we know who runs the Center,
Who administers the works,
Not DeVore or Beck, his mentor,
They are just the working jerks.

Mrs. Lester, first name Mabel,
She heads up the Center staff,
Rose and Pamela, they're able,
They cut donuts up -- in half.

Listened to a rousing lecture,
On the people "in the know",
Made us think and then conjecture
What would happen if we "go".


The poem goes on to chronicle each day of the two-week seminar, plus a lengthy goodbye poem that mentions all attendees. Another of his "poetic journals" goes for three weeks! Now I understand yet another reason Harry was dubbed the Pentagon Poet Laureate.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman

The value of learning and journaling, according to this self-educated man

In his elderly years, Harry mentioned in an email to someone close to him that their regular correspondence "gives me an excuse to write about my life, at least bits and pieces of it." He also said that he would save some of those emails in a file, like a journal. The excerpts below are from those saved emails. For me and other family members, they offer formerly unknown bits and pieces of my father's life.

I've always had a thirst for knowledge, so I read a lot and even studied subjects that interested me. So, in some ways I became what is usually called a self-educated man. That may be satisfactory to some extent, but it's not the same as the education you get in a formal way – in school. For one thing, in school you're forced to study some subjects that hold no interest for you. That in itself, disciplines you, forces your mind to work in ways that you don't like. Just doing that is valuable exercise for your brain.

The greatest value of a college education is the discipline it instills. And, the truth is, that while you may learn a little bit about the basics of a few things, you don't really start getting an education until you're out of school and working at your chosen profession. I missed that for myself. Now, I have to work very hard at trying to learn something that does not interest me.

It's easy for me to learn about things that I'm interested in. There's no end of information on the internet on almost every subject you can name. The trick is to distinguish between good information and bad or phony information. There's plenty of untrue or false info on the internet, too. So you cannot rely solely on what you find there – you also have to look elsewhere if you're doing research.

A little enterprise
Anyway, for a few years, in order to make some extra money, I started a little enterprise called "Articles on Demand." Believe it or not, there is a demand for people who can write articles on any subject. So, I was asked to write articles on some very weird things – for example, a 750-word piece on the number of fresh-water lakes in the world, where they are, how much water they contain, how they were formed, etc. Did you know that Canada has more fresh-water lakes than all the rest of the world combined?

That one went over so well that I was asked to do another on fresh-water rivers in the world. Did you know that the Amazon River in South America has more fresh water flowing in it than all the rivers in the rest of the world combined? Well, to do the research for those two pieces required more than just browsing the internet and, since I had no interest in it, I found it hard to concentrate on it, but I forced myself and ultimately found it interesting. It's the compiling of figures and statistics that I found hard to put together, but the final results after a lot of hard work, I found fascinating. 

At home in 2011, Harry pointed out to dear friends his name in Years of Upheaval, by Henry Kissinger. Could this be the book that Harry discovered his name in while auditing a university course after he retired? Harry refers to those college days in the paragraphs below. The tribute in Kissinger's book: "I owe a belated thanks also to Harry Zubkoff, whose news clipping and analysis service based in the Department of the Air Force has been of enormous value to US government personnel for years and has been an invaluable research aid for my staff in the preparation of White House Years and this volume." 

From mingling to keeping a journal
The year after I retired, I started taking courses at the U. of Maryland – subjects that interested me or that I thought I knew something about and just wanted to see what was being taught in school. Each semester I took one or two courses, and I did that for the next 15 years, from 1987 to 2003.

Now I found myself mingling with students from 18 to 25, because I was taking some undergraduate courses and some graduate school courses. And once again, I found myself treated by my fellow students like an ancient ancestor – or a wise old man who knew everything (that’s what grandchildren think) and someone they could come to for advice and counseling.

[Harry was referring to an earlier reflection, included in the previous post: “The art of listening and consoling”]

And again, I found myself being consulted about all kinds of problems as though I had all the answers. And again, I found that I was most helpful to these young people just by listening to them and asking some pertinent questions – which forced them, in a way, to clarify their own thinking.

And I learned something else – that if you want someone to think clearly about whatever problem he/she has, get him to write it down. Put it on paper. Nothing concentrates your mind on a specific problem or issue as writing it down on paper. That’s why I would urge everyone – including you – to keep a journal and put your thoughts and reactions to events and situations you encounter in that journal, not necessarily daily, but certainly regularly.

By a journal, I mean a loose-leaf notebook, so you can move pages around, rather than a bound book where the pages are fixed in place. I don’t mean a diary, which is simply a daily record of your activities, but a journal, in which you record your thoughts and feelings about people and events. And try to use words and adjectives that convey precisely what you are thinking.

For example, if someone upset you by a thoughtless remark, try to describe your reaction. Were you resentful? Furious? Enraged? Embarrassed? Astounded? Disappointed? Confounded? Disgusted? In other words, it’s not enough to be upset. Try to pinpoint exactly how you feel. You will find, when you do that, that you understand yourself better and you actually are either more or less upset than you thought you were. And maybe even more understanding of the person who upset you in the first place. What exactly did you dislike about the remark? See what I mean?


Harry's little black notebook 
Well, guess what else we found in the smartly cluttered office Harry left behind? Right – a loose-leaf notebook filled with brief, handwritten entries. However, rather than a journal containing his personal thoughts and feelings, it appears he jotted fictional musings that he could go back and grab for his story-writing hobby. Or, had he grabbed these musings from the stories he'd finished? Could the blurbs be factual, not fictional? Or, maybe, based on fact? You decide. See some samples from his notebook below this photo.
 

Harry's little black notebook is undated, though he may have 
kept it while he was attending U of MD classes after he retired 
(1987 - 2003). Future generations of our family should enjoy the
 look and feel of an ancient handwritten journal.

• Why do I fly? I thought. For space? Might as well ask why I breathe. I guess, I thought to myself, sounding pompous in my own mind, it’s because I like the feeling of being part of a huge and powerful machine that’s been tuned to perfection but that takes its direction from me. The feeling of independence and linkage, operating in unison.

• She had large (gray) eyes, a straight narrow nose, a nicely rounded chin, and a determined mouth with lips that looked eminently kissable.

• The flickering fire threw pictures on the wall, shadows chasing each other around the room.

• You probably don’t realize it yourself, but you have a look – well, when you look at someone like that, I think you scare them. They suddenly realize that you are … could be … dangerous?

• I had grown adept at instilling confidence in people – usually a few kind words would do it. And after all, what does that cost?

• He looked harmless; a short bald-headed, mild-mannered man, but behind that bland exterior was a mind as agile and sharp as any I’d ever known.

• Once on the trail of something or someone, there was no turning back. Impossible to quit with the job undone, the chase not concluded.

• The expression on her face mirrored her uncertainty, her doubts, her nervousness. Still half child, part woman, she did not yet know how to deal with men like me – too old to be a boy-friend beau, too young to be a father figure or uncle!

• He saw the funny side of everything, and his lips twitched, continuously, as though he were about to break into laughter.

• Everything we did was a sort of river, just rolling along like the song says, through time and through generations, with new people just like us coming along while the old ones floated slowly away, transients on the water’s surface, passing from view and from memory. No matter how well known, how celebrated and honored, in a short period of time as history goes, we’re all forgotten, nobody caring that we lived and accomplished and died and scarcely made any difference at all to the current crop of newcomers. Not good for the ego, is it?

I haven't read Harry's unpublished stories, still piled in old cardboard boxes. When I do, I'll keep an eye out for the musings from his little black notebook. He may have shared stories with friends or relatives; did he share any with you?