Bryce Zabel's INSTANT HISTORY

Time & Newsweek: McCain's Makeover

The Eyes Have It

Is John McCain ready for his close-up?  There's been a lot of talk about how eyebrows were raised over the Sarah Palin selection.  Now it appears that her running mate (remember him?  the McCain guy?) is having to play catch-up to compete for attention.  In the issues of Time and Newsweek that just came out (September 8 cover date), there's a fine full-page picture of the Senator inside Newsweek and his mug gets the full cover treatment on Time.  Here they are: take a good look before we continue...

As a producer out here in Hollywood, I've studied my share of head shots while considering actors for parts.  While I was looking at McCain to see if he seemed up for the role, it hit me.  The man had all the grey hairs plucked out of his eyebrows. 

Now we always knew that McCain was a gutsy warrior but we never would have thought to apply the adjective plucky but there it is.  Somehow, John McCain got his picture taken for Newsweek and then must have gone off to Time to be photographed for the cover shot.  Along the way, somebody got rid of all those pesky white hairs because they are gone, baby, gone.  Take a look yourself and you tell me if we have a Brow-gate on our hands or not?

Above: Newsweek | Below: Time

Look, I'm all for sartorial striving and all, but there is a little irony here.  Isn't John McCain the guy who "approved" the ads that tried to make Barack Obama seem like a lightweight by branding him with the "celebrity" brush and running pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton next to his?  Then this same candidate runs out and plucks his brows for his big Time cover?

Did one of his consultants tell him that the grey in his eyebrows made him look, well, a little old?  Especially compared to his much younger new running mate?  Did the famously irritable McCain fuss and fume before agreeing?  Did the Secret Service have to inspect the tweezers first?  We just ask the questions, you decide.

Here's the biggest question.  If Barack Obama had done the exact same thing before his recent cover shoot, would any of the Republican speakers last night have missed the opportunity to use that against him in dismissive and contemptuous sound-bites?

Yeah.  Probably not.

Oh, well.  It's just another trivial issue that probably won't even make it past a news cycle.

Hair today, gone tomorrow...

Bobby Kennedy - Gone Forty Years Now

Sadly, we're coming up on the anniversary of that time nearly forty years ago when hope was crushed by another assassin's bullet. This picture you see is done by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and originally debuted as the cover of Time magazine the week before Robert Kennedy's untimely death.

Bobby Kennedy was a pop star as Lichtenstein portrayed him,  but he was more complicated than that, too. As Time noted in that last article before his death -- "The Politics of Restoration" --

"They pronounce his boyish name with fear and derision or else with adoration and awe. To many enemies, he is more his father's son than his brother's brother."

During his lifetime, Robert Kennedy was widely seen as his brother's hatchet man, and the word "ruthless" followed him everywhere. By 1968, when he died, though, he had grown. Pat Moynihan said of him, "Much has been given him and taken from him in life, and somehow he has been enlarged by both experiences."

Although Bobby (RFK) has won the California primary on the day of his death, he had also just concluded a slugfest with Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic presidential nomination where the result had hardly been pre-ordained. Kennedy had had to fight McCarthy across the entire nation. When Kennedy triumphantly claimed victory here in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, he had settled the issue of who would be the anti-war candidate at the upcoming Democratic convention. Then he was murdered. He was 42 years old, even younger than his brother when he was murdered five years earlier.

I've always loved this Newsweek cover about RFK's death ("Once Again...Once Again," June 17, 1968). The photo, taken by Phil MacMullan, captures not only Bobby Kennedy's more soulful, empathetic side but also how the ghost of his brother and that previous assassination hung over him. If you CLICK on this cover, you can see it in even better detail.

Back then, I was living in Oregon where only the week before Kennedy had lost the Oregon primary to McCarthy. It was the first election any Kennedy had lost since their family got into politics. Kennedy desperately needed a win in California to get the momentum needed to take out Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention that summer. Our family supported McCarthy, but we liked Kennedy a great deal, too. It was a tough choice. I remember seeing him speak in the auditorium at Hillsboro High School right before the election. He was three hours late but we waited because he was a rock star quality politician.

Anyway, Oregon is in the same time zone as California, so it was just after midnight when my dad came and woke me up. "Kennedy's been shot in California," he said. We went downstairs and watched the TV for news and kept up the vigil until he succumbed to his wounds the next day.

This issue, of course, is dominated by news of the murder. The lead article begins, "Once again, the flags slid down to half-staff." They also noted:

"In the last few years, Bobby had emerged dramatically from the shade of his murdered brother. He became increasingly concerned with the quality of of U.S. life in general, and in particular with the plight of the poor and the downtrodden, black and white alike."

That's probably why he lost Oregon. It was not a hugely diverse state population back then and the simple passion of McCarthy's anti-war crusade played better in a place where there were no huge urban cities.

On the Table of Contents page, they usually would have a short piece of writing setting up the pieces to follow. In this issue, they broke with their form and printed a long excerpt from a speech ("Ripple of Hope") RFK had given on June 6, 1966 in South Africa. That was exactly two years to the day before he was murdered and now, in 2008, we should celebrate that speech's importance at the same time we mourn the 1968 murder. Here it is, as they presented it:

"Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road that history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history.

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideas and great enterprises of American society."

Maybe our politicians today should consider those words and take them to heart. There is an entire web-site devoted to this speech and you can even download it and listen to it. Check it out.

Here is the full speech, by the way, that Robert Kennedy delivered only two months before his own death. It was given the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.

I loved the complexity that RFK brought to the scene. A decade ago, on the NBC series "Dark Skies", my partner Brent Friedman and I made Bobby a continuing character who had aided our main character John Loengard in getting proof of the Roswell UFO crash to his brother, shortly before his own assassination. In our twisted historical romp, Bobby was running for President in 1968 largely to finish the business of telling the American people about the alien invasion. He was played in four episodes by the wonderful actor James Kelly who had also played him in a TV movie.

I know, I know. Putting Bobby into a sci-fi film is completely insane. The sad part of the story, though, is that we felt like it was okay to play this historical subversion because both JFK and RFK had been gone so long from the scene that they had slid into that zone where they were iconic characters who could be used in literature. Like Lincoln, gone so long that novelists are hardly afraid to use him in their literature.

Robert Kennedy might still be alive today had he not been shot. He would have been 83 years old. My own father lived within a year of that.

The Best Inaugural Speech Ever

In less than a year now, a new president will stand before a crowd in Washington, D.C. and take the oath of office. At this point we can say with certainty that it will be historic. It might be a woman, an African-American, or even a former POW. One thing is already pretty clear and that's the simple fact that after this barn-burner of an election, whoever gives their first inaugural speech is going to be speaking to an entire world that is poised to listen.

48 years ago, the inaugural was similarly a piece of history. Not only was it jeopardized by bad weather, but it brought generational change to the White House. It was at that tiime that newly elected President John Kennedy spoke those words we still remember.

"Ask not what your country can do for you..." We've heard this so many times, we can finish JFK's words in our sleep.  That speech, delivered on a brutally cold January day in 1961 where a blizzard threatened to shut down the entire affair, still goes down as the best inauguration speech, probably ever, certainly of the 20th century.

This is actually my favorite newsmagazine cover -- the day that John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency.  It's a color photograph that Time's editors had decided two weeks earlier should be taken at the precise moment when he raised his right hand and took the oath as the nation's 35th President.  Just possibly this was the last inauguration where Americans were absolutely filled to the brim with the possibilities that life would be getting much, much better.

Time -- with coverage coming from 17 correspondents -- led with the speech itself -- definitely getting right that it would become the classic speech, the one by which all others have been measured.

A blizzard threatened to turn the whole momentous occasion into a farce -- but President John Kennedy, delivering his inaugural address, more than saved the day.  Kennedy's inauguration speech went beyond mere rhetoric derived from the U.S. past; it has profound meaning for the U.S. future.  In lean, lucid phrases the nation's new President pledged to the U.S. to remain faithful to its friends, firm against its enemies but always willing to bring an end to the cold war impasse.

Sometimes, like the JFK coverage, they got the story just right.  That's the fun of the Instant History blog.  There will be other times where the writing of the moment was swayed by being too inside the story to see clearly.  And there will be other times still where you will see that issues of political correctness and other bias have twisted the honest reporting of the moment into something that the original journalists would never agree with.

Reaction to the speech was immediate.  From all shades of political outlook, from people who had voted for Kennedy in November and people who had voted against him, came a surge of praise and congratulation. Even so partisan a Republican as Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen described it as "inspiring" and as "a very compact message of hope."

The Time reporters here got the speech just right.  Who knew when President Kennedy delivered that address that he and his presidency would end in such a tragic manner that it would affect Americans' sense of trust in their own government and that, as the years passed, he would be revealed to have had such huge personal flaws in terms of his risk-taking behavior?

One thing that impressed me in re-reading this article was how close we came to never hearing that speech delivered in the stirring way it was given.  Snow had started to fall the night before and kept falling. 

By nightfall on inaugural eve, confusion was complete.  At least 10,000 cars were stalled and abandoned.  Airplanes stacked up over the airport, then flew away; Herbert Hoover, winging up from Miami, had to turn back, never got to the inaugural.  It took Pat Nixon 2 1/2 hours to get from her Wesley Heights home to the Senate Office Building, where her husband was holding a farewell party for his staff. . . At the White House, 30 members of President Eisenhower's staff were snowbound for the night.  Determined partygoers struggled through the storm, some of the men in white ties and parkas, some of the women wearing leotards under their gowns.

Eventually, though, on that terribly cold day, the story was all about hope... a time when a leader could challenge us to "...ask what you can do for your country" without getting in a big political debate.

One year until the next inaugural day.

Grace Under Pressure - Al Gore Concedes in 2000

On December 13, it will have been seven long years since the tied election of 2000 was un-tied by the patriotism of Al Gore, a man who has just been given the Nobel Prize.

On that December day in 2000, though, Gore gave up his battle to be president and conceded the race to George W. Bush.

Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy... Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.

With that, Al Gore said it was time for him to go and for a while, he left the stage, grew a beard and debated his new plans while, across the nation, we saw the clear emergence of the whole concept of red and blue states and a divided America.

This November 20, 2000 Newsweek cover ("The Winner Is..."), by the way, was voted #31 on a list of the "Best Magazine Covers" of the past 40 years by ASME, or the American Society of Magazine Editors. Did anybody else notice that when the two men's faces were merged for this Newsweek cover that the result looks a whole lot like a grown up Alfred E. Newman from Mad magazine?

Remember what it was like back then right after the vote? Even Bill Clinton got off a great one-liner saying, "The American people have spoken, but it's going to take a little while to determine what they said." Newsweek's cover article this week was called "A Whiff of Victory...But Now It's War." They began with describing one of the most surreal moments in American politics ever.

Bill Daley was in the motorcade, frantically calling Al Gore upfront in the lead car. It was 2a.m., and raining in Nashville, Tenn. The vice president was at the head of what looked like his own political funeral procession. He'd called George W. Bush to concede, and was on his way to a stage outside the War Memorial to thank his soaked supporters. But Daley, his campaign chairman, had just gotten new numbers from Florida -- the state that seemed to have put Bush over the top. Bush's lead was dwindling rapidly there: from 50,000 before the motorcade left the hotel, to a couple of thousand, dropping by the minute. It wasn't over, Daley instantly understood. But he also realized that his suddenly undefeated candidate didn't know it, and might make the wrong move once he got out of the limo. Mobile to mobile, Daley quickly got Gore on the line. "Whatever you do," he shouted into the phone, "do not go out on that stage!"

Daley, by the way, was the son of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago who many people believe helped put John Kennedy over-the-top in Illinois in 1960 with some questionable votes. He would be asked to perform the family electoral miracle a second time but Florida was not Illinois and in 2000 lawyers from both parties were already on their planes to the next battleground.

We know what happened next. Lawsuits, court challenges, endlessly squinted at ballots, a month and a half of insanity, punctuated and ended by a 5-4 Supreme Court decison to force the counting stop where it stood -- with George Bush ahead. Finally, in December, it was over. But that was a long way off when this magazine was written. Newsweek sussed out the stakes with accuracy:

Both sides claimed a noble objective: to bestow legitimacy on whoever would be judged the ultimate winner. But the candidates' transparent posturing and legal maneuvering reminded voters of just what they disliked about each one: Gore's merciless hunger, Bush's smirking arrogance. And that, in the end, could lower the standing of whichever one lands in the White House. Each would be seen by his foes -- half the country -- in the worst light: Bush, the Accidental President, elevated by the miscast ballots of elderly voters in Palm Beach condos; Gore, the Ruthless Prince, propelled to power by spinners, lawyers, and his own guile.

We know more today than we did then, of course. We know that Bush finally got the office, that Gore gave the best speech of his life when he conceded, and that Bush Jr. was considered an "accidental" president of sorts until the events of September 11, 2001 made all that seem petty and gave him the chance to stand on his own. We also know that Ralph Nader sucked votes aplenty from Al Gore's campaign, and that Pat Buchanan's position on the Florida butterfly ballot sucked possibly crucial votes from Gore as well. But Nader was about ego and the staggered ballot was about stupidity -- and neither one of them is illegal in presidential politics.

As far as the election itself went, we know that in the popular vote Al Gore actually won by some 550,000 votes. We know that in the electoral college that George Bush actually won by a vote of 271 to 266. As for the dispute in Florida, after the Supreme Court ruling, several journalistic organizations went back and re-counted all the Florida ballots in multiple ways -- the way Gore wanted them counted, the way Bush wanted them counted, and a few others variations -- and Bush always won. Not by much, but he won Florida for real (unless we wanted to interrogate senior citizens about who they thought they were voting for). Since our constitution awards the presidency based on what happens in the Electoral College, that's advantage Bush whether you liked it or not. Photo-finish, but a finish, of sorts.

Let's close with one of Gore's final lines in that concession speech:

As for the battle that ends tonight, I do believe as my father once said, that no matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.

Maybe, crazy as it sounds, there was a glory to be let out in Gore's loss. His destiny was not to lead a divided nation but to help heal an endangered planet. For everybody's sake, let's hope so...

Sex, Lies & Politics: Thomas V. Hill

Instant History "Flashback" by Bryce Zabel

Just this month, the autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather's Son, was published and set off a new round of "He Said, She Said" in the media. In the book, Thomas gives his side of the nomination hearings of 1991 which, of course, led to a rebuttal by Anita Hill in the Op-Ed page of the New York Times and on and on.

Discriminating readers and historians have ample evidence on both sides of the story to decide who they want to believe. In that respect, nothing at all has changed in the 16 years since October of 1991 when America had a normally not-so-compelling Supreme Court nomination hearing process hijacked into something that felt like it came out of the tabloids.

If you think the current nomination and confirmation process surrounding Supreme Court nominees was rough during the last few years, just remember that it's almost impossible for it to get as awful as the Clarence Thomas hearings. We will probably never see anything quite like this again.

Although it's more on the level of the O.J. Verdict and not JFK's murder or 9/11, for those who lived through it, the Thomas Hearings still have a "where were you?" quality to them. Where were you when Anita Hill went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and publicly claimed that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had compared the length of his penis to an actor in a pornographic film by the name of Long Dong Silver? I was in a hotel room in Hawaii -- there to research an NBC pilot I was writing -- and even though I was surrounded by paradise I spent two days glued to a TV set.

Time devoted a great deal of space to this controversy in its October 21, 1991 issue, starting with an opening essay titled, "An Ugly Circus" and moving into the main article, "She Said, He Said."

It was clear that the differences in the Hill and Thomas versions on what transpired a decade ago were not a simple matter of differing sensibilities -- oversqueamishness on her part vs. bad taste on his. If Hill's description of Thomas' words and actions was truthful, then the Supreme Court nominee was guilty of sexual harassment in the past and perjury in the present. If Hill's account was a flight of fantasy, then she was delusional and a candidate for medical attention.

Notice on the cover that Time sub-titled the issue: "America's watershed debate on sexual harassment." That's my main nitpick on this issue. If both parties had agreed on what was said and done but disagreed on whether or not it was sexual harassment, well, then we could have had a watershed debate. This wasn't a debate on the issue of sexual harassment. It was a public spectacle where two incredibly bright, articulate and seemingly honest people told starkly different stories. One of them was a complete liar of epic proportion and the other wasn't. Today, 14 years later, we still do not definitively know the answer.

Cool and unflappable, Hill looked the Senators in the eye and handled every question without hesitation...No less poignant, searing or believable, however, were Thomas' anguished statements and adamant denials.

The hearings gave up lots of memorable moments. One of the "oddest episodes", according to Hill, involved an exchange in Thomas' office when he reached for a can of Coke and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" After Hill's testimony about this and numerous other incidents which included descriptions of Thomas discussing porno with women with large breasts engaged in a variety of sex acts with animals, Thomas came out swinging, calling the hearing "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." The article concluded:

...everyone who had witnessed Hill's and Thomas' dramatic testimony knew for certain only what they had known at the start: one was telling the truth, and the other was lying. There was no way to imagine a happy ending to this very sad confrontation. For both Hill and Thomas, it was the hardest ordeal of their lives. But one of them was shouldering the burden unfairly -- and it may never be known which one. While both had been sullied and injured by the proceedings, only one had been dragged through the mud on the strength of a very convincing lie.

So, who was telling the truth? Thomas had more to gain by lying -- a Supreme Court seat. But he also had excellent witnesses from his previous staffs who had worked with both of them saying that such behavior was never seen by them and would have been totally out of character. And it did appear that Hill initially thought her testimony to the FBI would be sufficient to derail his nomination without her having to speak to the committee. No one has definitively answered this question.

What do I think? First and foremost, I think that if Thomas did those things to Anita Hill then he's an asshole of extreme proportions (and I'm not talking about his Long Dong Silver either). And I also think that if it could be proved, even today, then he should be impeached and thrown off the court. But as I've pointed out earlier, this case isn't about sexual harassment, at least not until you can tell who's telling the truth.

I watched all the testimony on TV and whenever either Hill or Thomas was speaking, I believed them and knew the other was lying. It was maddening then, and it's maddening now. They were both brilliant witnesses. If I absolutely had to choose, I would take Thomas' denial to be the truth, but only by a very, very slim margin. Here's why. A tiny voice tells me that -- knowing know how high the stakes are over these nominations and how Democratic activists believe now (and believed then) that a woman's right to choose is literally at stake -- well, that voice tells me that it's possible Anita Hill was recruited to derail Clarence Thomas, things got out of hand, and she was basically told by a lawyer that she could either stick by her story or go to jail for perjury. But I wish I knew with more certainty...

State your own opinion in the comments. Who's the scummy liar and who's the victim? Tell it the way you feel it.