In the depths of Watergate The Observer cruelly reprinted a picture taken a dozen years earlier: the President and his wife on the steps of Airforce One; JFK tanned and grinning broadly, Mrs Kennedy uncharacteristically demure. A movie star couple and a brutal contrast with the muttering, beleaguered, dark-featured Nixon.
Godfrey Hodgson, journalist and historian, begins his book In Our Time with the same Kennedy/Nixon contrast and the words from the celebrated Shakespeare play: “Look here, upon this picture and on this.”
Arthur Schlesinger wrote mockingly of Mayor Lindsay, “who was very tall, very handsome and filled with what girls call charm and journalists charisma”.
So what is charisma? Divine grace or political sex appeal?
New Journalism
RH Did you have any opinion about New Journalism? People like Hunter Thompson and Norman Mailer’s approach?
GH Hunter Thompson I think is basically a joke, he’s certainly extremely talented and very amusing. Norman Mailer - when we were doing this coverage of the 1968 [for the Sunday Times] Norman Mailer did his book about the Pentagon [Armies of the Night] and it was really rather childish, he was fantasising about the Pentagon levitating. That’s fine, he was a well known chap and he was very good at self-promotion and it didn’t really tell one anything about the Pentagon one didn’t know before.
I inherited a desk at the Washington Post from Tom Wolfe and in some ways Tom was the most serious of those people because although he did use a fictional technique in writing he did also find out a lot of stuff that you weren’t getting from anybody else and that it seems to me is the test of reporting.
Martin Luther King
RH You mentioned meeting him [Martin Luther King] as a student.
GH I did. I travelled to Montgomery [Alabama] with John Anderson, an African-American who’d been a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford and on the Sunday we went to church. The guest preacher was Martin Luther King, so after the service I went up and shook his hand and talked to him and, you know, ‘If you’re ever round here again you must get in touch’ so of course when I did come back whatever it was, six years later, as a journalist, the first thing I did was to go down and renew this connection. Every time I went to cover some incident, episode or crisis in the South I would go and see Martin and I interviewed him and he was very helpful and more than that his people thought that they should take my enquiries rather more seriously than they would’ve done any other young English reporter.
RH And did you get to know him as a person? You saw beyond the slightly ponderous -
GH No, his oratorical, his preaching style was a very elevated mixture of Biblical rhetoric and American patriotic rhetoric, but he was much more down to earth.
RH He was a smoker, wasn’t he?
GH Yes. He was a considerable drinker and he certainly had lots of girlfriends. It was customary in liberal circles to say how outrageous it was that the FBI saying he had lots of girlfriends, the fact of the matter is that I did once walk into a motel room where he’d asked me to talk to him and he was in bed with a young woman.
I realised that however unpleasant it might have been for the FBI to use this to try to discredit him, as a matter of factual truth.. He himself later said, his exact scientific language, he said that, ‘Fucking is a great pressure-reliever’.
I knew him well enough. I wouldn’t claim to be very close: I wasn’t an African-American, I wasn’t from the South and I wasn’t a Baptist minister. Most of his close friends were all of those three things. But I did know him fairly well and certainly he got me very much engaged [in the civil rights struggle] pace Professor Nicholas Bosanquet, he [Martin Luther King] did get me very much involved emotionally in the civil rights cause - it was just that I didn’t think it was my job to join it.
RH So how would you sum him up as a person? Behind the public façade?
GH Oh, he was a great man. There’s no question he was a great man. He was a man of the truest kind of courage, which is the kind that doesn’t come very easy. He was frightened a lot of the time and he went and did the things that he was afraid of doing. He had enormous charm, charisma, he was an absolutely brilliant orator and I think more than any one person he made it disreputable everywhere in the world to be openly racist. Of course there are people who play the race card but they’re generally regarded as at best disreputable and at worst contemptible and I think King had more to do with that the any other single person.
I do think he was probably the greatest man I ever met. At the same time he wasn’t an archangel, he certainly was no angel - his private life was chaotic - and he treated his wife pretty badly, including being strangely insensitive sometimes.
RH Did you find anything out writing the book about him later on that you hadn’t been aware of at the time?
GH In the end I wrote a biography of him which nobody took much notice of, quite recently, three or four years ago. Yeah, I did find out some things, for example the thing about the way they were trained with these various reach-me-down speech techniques.
Clayborne Carson of UCLA has been editing the Martin Luther King papers. One of the best editing jobs I’ve ever seen. There’s an enormous amount of material about his family, his origins. One of King’s ancestors was literally a stud -
RH Oh God!
GH - that’s to say he was a slave who was employed to engender other people’s slaves.
RH Dear dear!
GH That’s interesting, isn’t it?
RH I don’t know how many generations in slavery his ancestors were. Probably about three I suppose. He looked rather like a friend I knew who was a Nigerian who was a Kanuri.
GH Well they would all have been from West Africa.
RH Did his ancestors always live in Georgia?
GH I’m not sure, there was a James King -
RH They must’ve been named after the slave owner.
GH Of course, yes. Absolutely. Well let me see, King’s father was a minister, King’s grandfather kind of educated himself. The stud was the great great grandfather. I suppose it must have been five or six generations.
The Kennedys
RH So we were talking about charisma, the charisma of the Kennedys, you say King had great charisma -
GH Of a quite different kind.
RH The charge against the Kennedys is that there was a degree of contrivance, it was sort of engineered, you describe the setting up of the meeting in the airport [for Robert Kennedy in 1968].
GH Yes, it was the best public relations that money could buy. But Jack Kennedy also had enormous personal flair and he had a wonderful sense of humour too, which was at least superficially self-deprecating. I think he actually had a pretty high opinion of himself. Understandably. He was also quite ill, in severe pain a lot of the time.
Jack lived in a world of, among other things, Eurotrash. That’s what Jackie’s sister married this man -
RH Radziwill.
GH Radziwill - who was a public relations man in London, the definition of Eurotrash actually and they were terrible snobs.
I think the Camelot thing was remarkable.
RH That was Jackie Kennedy’s contribution. After he died.
GH It was. It was.
RH She gave the interview to -
GH Teddy White [Theodore H. White]. But Teddy White was the eager recipient of any such -
RH Oh, he said he was rather reluctant. You don’t think he was?
GH Joke. He drove in pouring rain a hundred miles when she said come on over [on 29 November 1963]. I knew Teddy White, he was a creep. You see a lot of the coverage of the Kennedys by people like Teddy White and Joe Kraft and others was very obsequious, which is not to say that Kennedy was a bad President, what he was was essentially a foreign policy President who was very reluctant to get involved in civil rights. There’s a rather good book by a man who is the BBC UN correspondent Nick Bryant which is called The Bystander and it’s a pretty deadly account of how reluctant the Kennedy people were to get involved in civil rights.
Dick Neustadt [professor and expert on the presidency] who was a charming man, subsequently married to the sainted Shirley Williams, who was very nice to me in many ways, he actually advised Kennedy not to do anything in his first term. Dick’s memos to Kennedy have been published.
I had a different relationship with Bob [Kennedy]. I didn’t become a bosom friend, for example I was never invited to the famous parties at Hickory Hill, but when I went back in ‘68, I got a message saying Bob was going out to California to test the waters really and he was going to take a few journalists with him, would I like to go? So I did go and I saw a lot more of him then. I was actually present when he was killed. I saw quite a lot of him in that campaign, again just as a reporter that he knew and recognised rather than as a close buddy.
RH I remember reading in the Sunday Times when I was looking at it on microfilm as a student the description of Robert Kennedy as ‘the candidate closest to the zeitgeist’ -
GH That was me.
RH Which you may well have written.
GH I might have done. Actually we went to cover the [1968] election with a team of folks and I was the only one - well not quite - I was the only one who knew the United States very well; the one other person, Lew Chester, had actually been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard for a year, but he’d also had a breakdown and he wasn’t at that time able to contribute that much. They - our team - the boys and the girls were very attracted by [antiwar Senator] Gene McCarthy; they saw him as a kind of pure leftist alternative and they saw Bob Kennedy as someone who came out of the cynical ancien régime and was not as pure in his commitments. Well I’d been there long enough to know that Gene McCarthy had been in bed with the oil and gas industry and although he was the most attractive figure he was not quite the knight in shining armour that my colleagues thought.
I was split three ways really, because I had some sympathy for the Johnson people because it seemed to me they’d achieved a very great deal and I wasn’t sure the answer to the Vietnam War was to simply [withdraw].
I didn’t have any strong feeling that any particular group had a monopoly of wisdom and I also, it comes back to this view that I have that our role was to tell people what in the most sophisticated way we could - what was really going on. Why it was happening. Rather than to promote a particular campaign.
RH I think when you’re talking about the charisma of the Kennedys - when Robert Kennedy appeared on the streets in California and was mobbed by huge crowds - was that spontaneous?
GH Yes. I wrote a piece which I remember quite graphically about seeing how he jumps on a flatbed truck and the people around him put their arms up -
RH Yes.
GH - like that, so you had a kind of pyramid of arms and I wrote a piece describing this, saying that anybody who could sense what the onus of the arms really wanted could really understand what was happening in America, the implication of which was that I didn’t think I did.
The Sixties
RH The Sixties is seen as a specific period, obviously the Kennedys were assassinated, but you had other figures like Mayor Lindsay who wasn’t, Cesar Chavez in California who wasn’t. So there were some of these people who were icons at the time who survived and yet that particular period came to an end.
GH Yes. I’ve thought a good deal about that. I have two thoughts: one is that I’m very sceptical of this business of lumping periods together, for example people talk about the 1920s as though it was a time in which everybody drank martinis out of triangular-shaped glasses and danced the Charleston. But if you actually look at the social history of the 1920s it was actually a darkly conservative period, it was a period of regular lynching, socialist immigrants were literally rounded up and sent back to the Soviet Union; it was a period when people furnished their houses with dark wood not with Art Deco furniture.
And in the same way, to see the 1960s as a period of Peace & Love in which everybody smoked themselves insensible with dope and went in for recherché sexual practices, I mean I lived there and there was indeed a certain amount of dope, some of which I smoked myself, and there was indeed a fair amount of sexual freedom because this was the brief interval between the spread of the Pill and the arrival of the fear of AIDS and it was a time in which there was a good deal of sexual activity, but you can’t just say ‘the Sixties’ as though it predicted the behaviour of 180 million people.
And the second point, which I’m increasingly clear is right is that people stressed the Sixties attitude quote unquote, the idea of liberation, the idea of a rebellion against all forms of authority and we failed to notice that the reaction against those trends was actually much stronger than the trends themselves and that when it came to the point that Richard Nixon arrived he was able to appeal to traditional atavistic attitudes, including racial attitudes, in quite subtle ways and to demonstrate that there was essentially the alliance between black people and graduate students [that] was not nearly as strong as the alliance against them.
I do think that that’s what happened, in 1968 people who had been distressed and frightened and shocked by the social changes we think of as ‘the Sixties’ turned out to be more numerous than the people who wanted to go further than this. Another thing that happened is that Watergate delayed the arrival of the conservative revolution or conservative ascendancy or whatever you like to call it, by some half a decade.
A decade and a generation
RH We’ve had three progressive Presidents [since the Sixties], Carter, Clinton and now Obama and in this country obviously Blair’s picked up a lot of ideas from the States, the whole Third Way -
GH The idea that Blair picked up from the States is ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful to be President of the United States and not to have to bother about Parliament’.
RH It’s difficult to know what the intentions of politicians are going to be, especially as they’re always going to juggle [constituencies]. I was asking George Edwards when he was here ‘was Clinton really a liberal?’ and he thought that he [Clinton] was.
GH I think Clinton is a liberal. I think black people are not wrong in sensing that Clinton is one of the white politicians who does ‘get it’ about what it’s like to be black in America. I’m not saying that Clinton wasn’t a genuine liberal, what I am saying is that Blair and his chums, simply, like so many people in Britain, simply didn’t realise that Congress is at least as powerful as the White House.
I think it is true, there is so much glamour attached to the White House, it’s Camelot, it’s also The West Wing. People simply don’t realise that if you look at the American Constitution the Congress comes first, before the executive.
Barack Obama
RH I’ll just ask you what’s your opinion of Barack Obama?
GH Well, I and my friends, including Harry McPherson and others, were in Tennessee on the day of his inauguration, and I think we felt rather as Wordsworth felt about the French Revolution, ‘Bliss was it in that day to be alive’. We felt this was the culmination of our hopes and for a long time after that I think I and most of my friends in America were very disappointed in Obama. I think we felt he had a tendency to reach across the aisle without realising that the people on the other side were going to stamp on his hand.
He seemed curiously uncommitted and that he was not a particularly gifted politician - he might be a very gifted intellectual politician - but he didn’t seem really to be very good at operating the Washington system. My impression is that he’s getting much better at that. I want to see him succeed. At the same time I think that background that he shares something with much of the American Left means they de-emphasise economic issues and to stress group equality: feminist issues, racial issues, sexual identity or whatever you call it [orientation] and think in fact what the United States could do with is some rather robust attention being paid to acute and growing economic inequality.
Journalists
It was true then [in the Sixties] and possibly is still the truth that journalists do have more access and are more accepted [in America]. I don’t believe it’s a matter of the First Amendment to the Constitution, I think it’s more of a kind of First Amendment culture that American politicians accept that journalists are important, that what they do is valid and respectable and that it is in any case prudent, in one’s own self interest, to try to get journalists on one’s side rather than telling them to bugger off, which many British politicians do.
Actually Stan Karnow and I started a syndicate. It’s quite funny, we got 200 newspapers paying us - it didn’t last very long - and what we had was basically some good journalists that we’d encountered in our travels around the world, you know, two in Israel, three in India, somebody in Japan, several in Britain, in Germany and so on.
RH Why didn’t your syndicate last?
GH Oh, I was trying to write books and came back to England and Stanley was writing the Vietnam book and it was more hassle than it was worth.
The future of the media
RH How about the media? Do you have any feelings about the Leveson [enquiry] and the future of the newspaper industry?
GH In this country?
RH Yes.
GH Well, I think the newspapers are dying. I think the function of good journalism is important and will survive, the basic institution that we think of as journalism is the city-based newspaper, essentially supported by advertising, display and classified advertising. That model, that business model, has collapsed really. The Guardian for example is in a parlous state - although the website is popular, almost as popular as the Daily Mail, but I don’t think they’ve understood how to monetise websites.
RH Do you see Rupert Murdoch as representing a complete overthrow of [the Insight style of investigative journalism]?
GH No, I don’t actually. I’ve had some personal dealings with Rupert, I disapprove of much of what he stands for, most of his ideology - both the advertisers and the readers have gone to the web. Rupert may be a little bit shrewder in dealing with that and may have greater advantages because of cross-subsidisation, which he always denies of course, but actually his profitable businesses subsidise his less profitable ones. He also plays the game of tax avoidance in a pretty ruthless manner.
We may just be in a transitional period. It may be that new institutions will arise which are rich enough. I remember Bruce Page and I were invited to lunch by Kay Graham [proprietor] of the Washington Post. It was basically; ‘This investigative journalism business’ - this was before Watergate - ‘what is it about? What are the costs?’ And I said, ‘Well, the costs are that you have to pay the salaries of people to work for quite a long time before you get any copy out of them and that you have to pay a lot of lawyers when you get libel actions, but otherwise,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t cost any more than lots of other things you do.’
Godfrey Hodgson interviewed Oxford, 31 October 2013. His latest book is JFK and LBJ: The Last Two Great Presidents.
© Roger Howe 2013