Drop Everything: What to Watch and Read

The movie is Deadline — U.S.A. (1952) starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, and Kim Hunter; written and directed by Richard Brooks. At the time of its release it was called “crime noir”. Watching it now, it is as good as any newspaper picture ever made.

The book is Richard Ben Cramer’s classic What it Takes: The Way to the White House published in 1992 about the 1988 presidential race. It is more than 1000 pages long and deliberately does not have an index to encourage reading it in full. It is a truly brilliant portrait of the character of the men — and they were all men — who ran to be the president of the United States in 1987.

I came upon Deadline — U.S.A. which I had never heard of before in a reference on Facebook. It is available for free on YouTube. The point of highlighting this provenance is that in the coronavirus age, whatever your reservations about social media, it does provide much material to explore in this endless stream of WFH days and isolation.

Humphrey Bogart is Ed Hutcheson, managing editor of a respected, family-owned New York City newspaper called The Day. It is about to be sold by the heirs, two daughters, of the founder, John Garrison, to a tabloid publisher who will shut it down after paying off the staff with two weeks’ severance. The first thing you notice in the style and script is that Bogart is Jason Robards playing Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men. His gruff crispness of manner is the editor flexing his abiding belief in the role of the press. Tough except when it comes to his stalwart ex-wife, Nora, played by Kim Hunter whom he still loves, but not as much as the newspaper, which is why she left him.

Garrison’s widow Margaret (Ethel Barrymore, who is the near doppelgänger of Katherine Graham in a 1950s hat) is challenging her own daughters’ urge to sell the paper for cash. They are 2–1 against their mother.

There is a tangled — to be honest — hyperbolic story of political corruption, murder, and sex, that is implausible. It is there to essentially provide grist for Bogart and Barrymore to go about saving the paper. The newsroom denizens wear fedoras and all look much older than the rank-and-file journalists seem now. There is a great supporting cast including Ed Begley as city editor and Jim Backus as an ace reporter. There are women reporters who only bark their last name in introduction — as in “Willebrandt!” when on the phone with cops or their editors. The news department’s “librarian” is mousy and can out-search latter day Google or Wikipedia on demand.

The atmosphere reflects the reporters’ tradition of a love-hate relationship with the worlds they cover and a penchant for liquid-driven wakes when their jobs and papers are in jeopardy.

Brooks’ script is in keeping with his other more famous work: Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and In Cold Blood. He manages to capture realities of the news business which are just as true today as they were when the film was made 70 years ago. Lines like, “A free press can’t be taken for granted,” or, “Newspapers are in the public interest,” certainly resonate. There are forever forces determined to undermine robust news coverage. Advertisers can still determine the fate of the publications they need to reach their customers. And readers enjoy reading about dead nudes in a mink coat found in a river.

I have seen a bunch of newspaper movies: The Front Page, His Girl Friday, Citizen Kane, Spotlight, and The Post — and this one should be in the canon. Bogart as Robards as Bradlee and Ethel Barrymore as Mrs. Graham are recognizable stand-ins for the Sulzbergers, Chandlers, Binghams, Knights and others who owned newspapers and struggled to support them in hard times. The movie is only 87 minutes long, and most of us have that kind of time to spare these days.

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I knew Richard Ben Cramer but was surprised to see myself acknowledged as one of the people at Random House who he credits with supporting his book there. His editor was David Rosenthal, who like me came to publishing from journalism and apparently was able to give the intense and meticulous Cramer what he needed. The agent was Philippa “Flip” Brophy whose commitment to Richard went far beyond their business relationship.

There are six main characters in the book: Vice President George H.W. Bush, Sen. Robert Dole, Gov. Michael Dukakis, Sen. Joe Biden. Sen. Gary Hart and Rep. Dick Gephardt. In its way, 1988 was the first modern contest in that preppy Bush hired Lee Atwater to run a brutally dark race against the earnest Dukakis, who made the mistake of wearing a helmet on a tank for a photo that made him look irreparably foolish. Bush, of course, won. On his death bed, Atwater regretted what he had done.
Having read the book as it was being written and published, I decided to focus on Biden as I reread it today — at last set to be the 2020 Democratic nominee — ,and for a different reason, Hart — who was bounced from the campaign because of a fling with a young woman who was not his wife on a boat called “Monkey Business”. Politics has never been the same. FDR, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson could never have endured that scrutiny. Hart might have made an excellent president.

In 1988, Biden was in his 40s. His wife and little daughter were killed in a car cash in the weeks after he was elected to the Senate in 1972. Both his sons, Beau and Hunter, were badly hurt. Biden almost gave up, but he did not. In 1988, his campaign team were mostly political pros, some of whom are still in the game today. They gave him what seems to me to have been too much advice although they were right to tell Biden that if he wanted to be president, he would have to make that goal more important than anything else in his life.

Then and now, Biden finds that very hard to do. His deeply embedded grief over the loss of a wife and child, and more recently, Beau to cancer and Hunter to dissolution, doubtless clouds his mind and vision. He has a close partner in his second wife, Jill, and, what appears to be at least a natural and sincere empathy for others. Consider the fact, however, that it was only in his third run for president in 2020 that he won his first ever primary, in South Carolina. Staying at it at 78 and having been a popular two-term vice president shows preternatural determination to get to the pinnacle.

That is the brilliance of What it Takes. Cramer comes closer than anyone has before or since to the motivations and interior of people — now men and women — who say, not merely, “I could be president,” but, “I should be”. Read the whole book or listen to the audio which is 54 hours long. I have a digital edition which allowed me to search for the material about Biden and Hart. On the audio, I still have 50 hours left to enjoy.