And still we laughed. There might be some backpedaling, some soft-
soaping, some ameliorating, even some compromise…but freedom of speech could not be killed. After all, it’s been 236 years since John Peter Zenger’s trial. What asses we were.
Agnew didn’t slacken his pace. He kept it up…speeches, press interviews, rigged tv confrontations with militants, solo and massed attacks on the media and its front men, the commentators.
Culminating a month or so ago with a Sunday press interview show on which he seriously put forth the concept of television commentators going before a Joe McCarthy-style committee to state their political views and leanings. He assured viewers and interviewers (even as he had assured us before) that this was not intended as censorship, that these gentlemen of the video press would be “invited to volunteer to appear before such a committee” even as McCarthy’s victims were “invited,” and when asked to whom he was specifically referring, he demurred prettily. However, he did vouchsafe as how men such as, well, uh, er, like, say, Frank Reynolds of ABC might be required to state precisely where they stood.
I saw a film clip of that interview on the ABC Evening News the Monday following, and I saw the tiny smile Frank Reynolds allowed himself as he said, “And now, here’s the other news.”
Sock it toward them, Frank baby, I caroled. He isn’t the most outspoken critic of the Monsters of Capitol Hill, but Reynolds has always tempered his sane and reasonable analyses of the news with a faintly radical air tinged by humanity. Thank god for Frank Reynolds, I thought. He offsets the Administration’s rubber-stamping of his co-anchorman, Howard K. Smith, a man who patently loathes the young and outspoken troublemakers of this fair country.
Hallelujah for Frank Reynolds.
In January, Frank Reynolds vanishes from the ABC Evening News, to be replaced by Harry Reasoner, CBS’s version of Howard K. Smith.
It may be that, as Cecil Smith of the LA Times says, working for the Free Press tends to make even moderate writers hysterical; and I’m falling prey to the paranoia of the conspiracy reaction-formation. But I cannot help seeing a direct correlation between Agnew’s singling out of Reynolds as an Enemy of the People, and ABC’s decision to boot the man off his nightly podium.
Which speaks to the recent comment by (I wish I could remember exactly who it was) who said freedom of speech is not served by an “equal time” proviso if one spokesman addresses 204,000,000 Americans on primetime and his opponent has a soapbox on the corner.
Similarly, I see a direct relationship between Agnew’s scare rhetoric of the preelection days, and the networks’ decision to quash all “relevant” drama addressing itself to contemporary problems. I see that relationship in the terrible polarization Agnewization has brought to the middle classes. Frightened, confused, sick to death of cries of revolution by longhairs and students and blacks, the scuttlefish have stayed away from “youth oriented” shows in droves. And—demographics be damned—the 18- to 36-year-old consumers recognized the shows as emerging from the same pit of cynicism and venality from which had emerged all those previous years of programming that turned them anti-tv. So ABC killed seven hours of primetime shows, most of which had the word young in the title, and silently cursed Nixon (who had ordained that the first shows of the new season would deal with drugs to combat the “dope problem”), and screwed many good men out of their jobs by refusing to accept the blame for its own hypocrisies, and, quite incidentally, as a by-product, shelved my script for The Young Lawyers.
Now, I am told by network mufti and various producers around town, they want nothing relevant, they want nothing youth-oriented, they want nothing controversial. They want shows that are familiar to the Middle Americans. Ideas tried and true. Spin-offs from accepted films: Nanny and the Professor is Mary Poppins; Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple and The Interns are based on popular films; debuting in January on ABC will be something called Alias Smith and Jones which, from its pilot script, is a sad-supposed-to-be-funny takeoff on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
I could suggest that those who read “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” for the last five weeks in this column write to the president of ABC, Elton Rule, and suggest they go ahead and shoot the script, since they laid out $4500 to have me write it, but to critics of me and this column (such as Laird Brooks Schmidt of 5485 Fernwood, and Bill Kerby of 908 S. Sycamore, the former who suggested I try writing something funny intentionally, and the latter who summed up his critique of my script by calling me a perfect asshole) that would obviously be self-serving…and they’d be right. So I won’t bother making such an appeal.
I’ll only point out that we can look forward to many years of timid, frightened, noncontroversial programming of The Partridge Family variety, and any attempts on our part to change matters will be met with blank stares and the instant descent of the thumb on our gnatlike selves.
Because, frankly, in a time and a place where the President says quite boldly he will not be moved by the appeals of people in the streets, what strength or purpose or courage or help can we expect from men who fear the loss of advertising revenues if they displease the Gorgon God of the Silent Majority?
A “punk” is a bully, and since this is not Middle Earth or Narnia or Erewhon or even a Charles Atlas ad in a comic book, wherein bullies get their comeuppance, since this is the most imperfect of imperfect worlds where bullies who are grown-up punks become Vice President of the United States, men like Elton Rule and his cohorts will continue to kick sand in the faces of men like Matthew Rapf, and will look for approbation from the Gorgon God. They know what happens to bad little networks who don’t toss out the required ration of scapegoat meat.
Frank Reynolds is all too obvious an object lesson.
88: 11 DECEMBER 70
Among other things, this is a column in praise of Baxter Ward.
Ah! Baxter, twit thou never wert. Or bird thou never twit. Or something poetic.
In a city where one could boast of crusading, muckraking newscasters like Britt Reed of The Green Hornet or J. Jonah Jameson of The Incredible Spider-Man or Perry White of The Daily Planet or even Big Town’s Steve Wilson of The Illustrated Press, Baxter Ward would be pretty small potatoes. But Los Angeles has George Putnam (transcendentally laughable), Tom Reddin (Boob J. Boredom wearing the threadbare long johns of Captain Charisma), Ralph Storey (whose voice alone makes you long for the sound of fingernails on blackboards), Robert K. Dornan (microcephalic heir to the Joe Pyne mantle), and a gaggle of look-alike newsies named Marlow, Brokaw, Roberts, Sanders, Fishman, Bonds, Snyder, and Dunphy—all of whom report what’s handed to them with no more concern for good or evil than an LAPD secretary typing up one of those “subversive reports” that find their way into CIA, U.S. Army, and Reagan Secret Police files.
With a field of winners like that, Baxter Ward stands out front like Simon Bolivar or Nat Turner. Or maybe even the Lone Ranger.
When he was running for mayor of our fair city, against Tom Bradley and Yorty the Berserk, he looked worse than the former but light-years better than the latter. That he didn’t win says very little about Ward the man, I suspect, but provides us with some small reassurance that the day of selecting public officials by tv mien is not quite with us yet.
His recent stands on some topics of pressing interest, however, demand a closer scrutiny and a solid pat on the back: if for no other reason than to say well done thou good and faithful, and some of us are behind you. It makes it a little easier to be courageous, particularly when Agnew-assassinated examples like Frank Reynolds make it safer and saner to lie back as all but the obviously right-wing newscasters do these days. For a man standing out there all alone, it can be terribly chilly. So a vote of confidence is in order.
More, Baxter Ward seems to me a marvelously sane and rational human being. In these lunatic times that is very probably the highest accolade one can bestow on another human being. Where you or I would use a video perch of such preeminence to espouse our philosoph
ies night in and night out, till whatever polarization we offended most had its way (as it did with Reynolds) and we were booted out on the street, Ward saves his shots till they count. That is the method of an honest man with gobs of common sense. He is scrupulously fair and remains uninvolved through most of the teapot tempests of day-to-day news reporting, holding back his fusillades for the meaningful encounters.
His personally offered positions, clearly labeled “comment,” are uniformly interesting and informed. And the positions he defends in those comments are far and away the bravest of any newscaster working in the arena currently. Take for instance his November 4 statements about the election loss of Judge Alfred Gitelson, a man quite clearly defeated by racism for his decision in the Los Angeles School District integration matter.
Without going into the merits of Gitelson’s decision in the affair—integrate at once, bus if necessary—Ward struck to the core of the matter with these words:
“One of the consequences of the Gitelson loss is bound to be a stirring within the Bar Association and the California judiciary. Both groups presumably will begin swift discussions on how to provide more security for judges—for their political protection.”
And while a coven of insulated jurists, totally free of the checks and balances of public opinion or censure (as well as approbation), can be an unsettling concept—potentializing an elite cabal above recall or expulsion—as Ward points out, “Judges should judge as they see fit. They should not put self-preservation above duty. In fact, they should be prepared to sacrifice self-preservation for duty.” And to this end, they should be protected from the racist or “neighborhood” pressures of the day.
This position, in a time when the uninformed lay audience feels courts are being too liberal, is heavily weighted by courage and conviction.
But it is only one of Ward’s solid stances of recent memory.
Here are a few more.
July 14: “In the [state] legislature it is impossible to find one single legislator who says he is in favor of smog. But it is very easy to find a lot of legislators who vote for more smog, no matter what they might say. And just recently 14 from Los Angeles County alone voted to continue the smog created by lead in gasoline. We have been giving their names and their districts and towns each night, in case anyone wishes to write them, to suggest the legislator change his mind and his vote.
“Tonight we list the last five of the Los Angeles County Assemblymen who either voted to continue that kind of smog, or who failed to vote at all.
“Assemblyman Wakefield…Assemblyman Warren…Assemblyman Waxman…Assemblyman Unruh…Assemblyman Arklin…”
May 7: “…television has been receiving some blame for contributing to violence—it was charged that the presence of the cameras would encourage a crowd.
“And for us there was one final element this morning. Our newsroom received an invitation to be present at a campus difficulty. Violence was promised, and we were advised that our people would be safe from rocks if situated in a certain spot. We declined the invitation.
“We will continue to film assemblies, marches, speeches, or other public events up to the point of violence or ugliness. If the scene turns to destruction or tumult, we simply will stop our cameras and leave. And we will not show one frame of newsreel film of that kind of violence.
“And we realize that in this, we run some risks. We will be accused of deleting fact. To this, we reply—it will be only a visual deletion. We will report whatever damage information we have. But we will say it, only. We will not show it happening.”
And though Ward’s almost pathological drive to be fair leads him into occasional positional cul-de-sacs as embarrassing as Putnam’s present-tense delivery leads him into syntactical foot-mouthings (such as Ward’s comment of September 17 in which he expected the Chicano community to disavow the preceding night’s riot, occurring as it did during the Salazar inquest, amid violent emotions charging the East Los Angeles barrio), his comments of September 10 and 11, and October 14 and 31, in re the Salazar matter, offer unarguable evidence that Baxter Ward is the only LA newscaster with the balls, heart, and integrity to offer what snipers and Walt Hickel call a “high profile.”
September 10: “There were several opportunities for…impatience today. One came [during the Salazar inquest] when [the presiding officer: Norman] Pittluck failed to ask a deputy sheriff why he thought Salazar could be found at the Silver Dollar Bar when Salazar was said to be missing.
“Another came when Pittluck did not press a lieutenant for details on tear gas equipment, or did not ask a captain who authorized the projectile-type device….
“Pittluck’s gentle questioning has followed mainly points apparently made available to him by the authorities. He was leading his witnesses through a path that had been carefully marked.”
On September 11, Ward expressed further impatience that neither Salazar nor the death spot, the Silver Dollar Bar, was mentioned throughout a morning’s testimony, and he expressed some astonishment that a witness who had previously granted tv interviews as well as full taped statements to the sheriff’s department and the LA Times refused to be filmed, and later tried to disown the taped record of his statement with the plea that the hearing had put his life in jeopardy.
And on October 14, Ward summarized—with that Solomonesque fairness bristling—the community’s dissatisfaction with the inquest and DA Younger’s decision not to prosecute:
“The inquest disclosed that sheriff’s officers receive no training in firing tear gas weapons. That failure cost Salazar his life, perhaps. A sheriff’s department official explained it would cost the taxpayers $8000 a day to permit deputies to fire these weapons in practice sessions.
“For the sheriff to lay this lack of training on the dollar situation is an affront to the taxpayer. The taxpayer provides Sheriff Pitchess with a Fleetwood Cadillac car. And it costs $8000. No taxpayer has ever asked the sheriff to walk. And no taxpayer has ever asked the sheriff to hold back on gas gun training, either.
“Neither of the deputies who fired into the Silver Dollar Bar had any idea that the other deputy was in the area. The point is, both deputies thought it appropriate to fire into the doorway, without knowledge as to what they might hit.
“Both men were trained, apparently, to fire into a bar they felt was filled with people, regardless of the consequences. Apparently, neither officer was trained to consider the possibility of just surrounding the place and waiting awhile to see what happened. Just because a place is considered to be barricaded is no reason to immediately blow it up or risk immediately killing someone who does not have a gun.
“The inquest did not reveal why deputies did not respond decently and with humane concern to the insistence of those persons who told them Salazar had been hit. Because when the deputies were told he was hit, nobody was sure he was dead.
“The inquest did not reveal why the deputies who received that information never did act on it. They hung around for two and a half hours but never once permitted themselves to be concerned about the report of an injured or possibly dead man in the bar.”
There was more, much more, to Ward’s October 14 comment. Questions as to why the deputies hung around so long when it had been reported much earlier that the bar situation was clear, questions as to why the sheriff’s department failed to respond to frequent and insistent calls to them from the manager of KMEX, inquiring about a possible accident to Salazar, questions as to obvious perjury by whole batches of witnesses.
And his October 31 comment went even further to cast doubt on the rationality of the sheriff’s department ever having declared a “barricade situation” at the Silver Dollar.
All this, and much more in a time when Pitchess—a man despised in both the ghetto and barrio as the architect of destruction on the scene not only in East LA, but in Isla Vista as well—went unchallenged in the primaries and (as one newswoman put it) “will be our demigod for another four years, shooting every black, Me
xican, and student he sees.” It took some spine to speak out as Ward did.
It is appropriate this week’s column should pay respects to Baxter Ward, for, even as I was writing it, he won his fourth Golden Mike award…for the October 14 comment.
It should mean more to him than even the tv Academy’s Emmy as the Best Newscaster of 1967 in Los Angeles.
I have been able to discover very little about Baxter Ward personally. He is either terribly shy or terribly paranoid about publicity. Either way, if we are to judge a man by any yardstick, it should not be that he was born in Baltimore, or that he was responsible for creating Rona Barrett, or that he lost an election for mayor. It should be by his words and deeds. And on that scale, Baxter Ward clearly stands out as the best this terrified little hamlet has to offer.
KHJ deserves applause for giving Ward his head, and Ward deserves our support for having the head to use it.
With a half dozen more Baxter Wards, and one less George Putnam, licensed killers like Peter Pitchess might be forced to walk a trifle more carefully.
89: 18 DECEMBER 70
What with one thing and another, I’ve left all sorts of odds and ends unresolved in these columns for too many months, so with your indulgence I’ll use this week as a shotgun session and take care of as many loose ends as I can before getting to some of the heavier items on the upcoming agenda.
•Several weeks ago the brilliant “Senator” portion of The Bold Ones on NBC aired a two-parter written by David Rintels (the mad dissident of the scriptwriting game), produced by David Levinson, directed by Robert Day and showcasing the consummate artistry of Hal Holbrook as the Senator. The name of the two-parter was “A Continual Roar of Musketry,” and it purported to parallel the Kent State massacre and the hearings that followed therefrom.
It’s a trifle late to suggest you watch it first run, but not too late to urge you to catch it in summer rerun. Aside from its expertise as fine drama, it is as close as we will come in the foreseeable future to a no-copout, sincere, honest representation of responsible High Art in the video medium. Yes, it was a trifle simplistic; yes, it managed (like Patton) to present the moderately far-left and far-right views, which may be a plus, I’m not sure; and yes, it was far from as explicit an indictment of the National Guard and the Authorities as, say, I. F. Stone’s report on police and Guard collusion in fabricating testimony…but it did not end with one of those “we are all at fault” numbers. It said: this one seems guilty, and this one seems guilty, and they must be brought to task for it.