PASSAGES
posted on August 27th, 2009 - Filed in Uncategorized - 1 comment »It may be some of you have wondered about the emptiness of late in this space, and I immodestly speculate you perhaps did so with mild feelings of disappointment. Conversely, my absence may have caused some rejoicing, but either way, a combination of vacation time followed by a couple of weeks at the assignment desk obviated the customary weekly posts.
And so I resume. The death two days ago of Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy brought to mind two other recent onward journeys, both of which connect with matters I’ve declaimed in earlier essays. Those topics would be contemporary journalism/media and the world of entertainment.
I’ve written about the quantum change in political journalism, in America especially, over the past decade or so, not so much as a lament but as acknowledgement the business has been irretrievably altered by technology and by the premise that political news is dedicated to the pursuit of scandal, controversy, and for men and women in public life, subsequent embarassment. Political journalism has little or nothing to do with detailing competent governance, and almost everything to do with the so-called “gotcha” moment.
WALTER CRONKITE (1916-2009)
At the zenith of his not inconsiderable influence as anchor of the CBS Evening News, from 1962 to 1981, Walter Cronkite was regarded as “the most trusted man in America.” They called him “Iron Pants,” because of his inexhaustible capacity to remain seated at the helm as circumstances required: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, for example, following which Cronkite presided over a full week of national grief: the long and often arduous assignments covering successive American space missions in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Apollo 11 flight to the moon almost exactly 40 years ago. Cronkite very nearly adopted the space story as his exclusive journalistic territory.
But Walter Cronkite’s indelible seal was fixed on American journalism, and by extension on American life, when he returned from a tour of Viet Nam in early 1968. He wished, he said, to offer a television commentary on the war, and there was a great deal of discussion, debate, argument to and fro in the high echelons of CBS about whether an anchor, a reporter, a straight-ahead newsman should venture into the realm of opinion.
In the end it was decided one anchor, one reporter, one straight-ahead newsman named Cronkite could do that, and should. So on February 27, 1968, he looked directly into the CBS Evening News camera, said it was only realistic to declare the United States was mired in stalemate and then concluded with the following paragraph.
“But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
Carefully written words, to be sure, but their impact was profound. Then President Lyndon Johnson was reported to have said following Cronkite’s editorial “if I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Just five weeks later, Johnson – worn, weary, dispirited, increasingly isolated, hopelessly ensnared in a war from which, as Cronkite judged, America could not emerge as “victors” – announced he would not run for another term in the White House.
In his later years, Walter Cronkite frequently worried aloud about the descent, as he saw it, of television journalism, in particular American, into a morass of flighty infotainment on the one hand, and pointless drive-by gawking on the other. Nobody paid any attention to him, and the fact is U.S. television will never revert to the days of Cronkite, the power of the written and spoken word, and the authority of a single man at a single anchor desk at a single network.
To say that is to merely accept reality. It would have been better, perhaps, had Cronkite done so too, but that doesn’t for one moment diminish his enduring stature as one of the two or three great originators and architects of television news.
We need to keep that in mind, because after all, our judgement of the present is, or should be predicated on our view of the past.
Walter Cronkite died on July 17. He was 92.
You’ll recall that upon a rather stern rebuke from a colleague I leavened my distaste, slightly, about the lunacy following the death of Michael Jackson. There is, I was obliged to recognize, a generation gap which causes me to be out of touch with modern musical styles and tastes. Trouble is, the Jackson gong show continues without respite: police, coroners, doctors, homicide, drugs, possible indictments, possible arrests, probable family disintegration. There’s no end to it and my umbrage has been restored to full flight.
ZEKE ZARCHY (1915 – 2009)
The legendary big band leader Woody Herman once said if he had an exceptional lead trumpet player and a hard-swinging drummer on the payroll, hiring the other 10 to 12 men would be pretty much pro forma.
Zeke Zarchy, who died not long ago in Los Angeles, was the last living member of the Glenn Miller band. He was born Rueben Zarchy in Brooklyn, New York, and by his early twenties had developed a reputation as a powerful and accurate lead trumpeter. He had a prodigious range, was an expert sight reader, and as Master Sergeant Zarchy from 1942 to 1945 was one of two driving forces – the other was drummer Ray McKinley – with the great Miller army/air force band in Europe.
After the war Zarchy became a first-call studio musician in LA. It”s mostly anonymous, but incredibly demanding work, which is how Zarchy preferred it. It didn’t matter what was put in front of him: he travelled with ease through any key signature and his tone was brilliant, like hammered silver.
Zarchy was a well-schooled, masterful trumpet player, one of the very few able to carry the lead chair on his own. He worked with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, among others, and the next time your late night movie turns up West Side Story or Doctor Zhivago, listen carefully to the soundtrack. Same with TV reruns of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. That’s Zarchy in the lead trumpet chair, matchless, playing music so difficult, so complex, and so superbly crafted as to be well beyond the capacity of Michael Jackson and his like to even imagine, let alone perform.
Zeke Zarchy died on April 12. He was 93 and it took the Los Angeles Times, where obituary notices are normally prepared in advance and very well researched, five days to notice he’d gone.
