January/February 2001, Page 23

Special Report

Paper Trail: The New York Times From Mussolini to Gore

By Lenni Brenner

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the fourth generation of his family to publish The New York Times, and Howell Raines, its lead editorialist, condemn their predecessors’ brainless pontificating. Indeed, their paper is better. But its present politics, particularly regarding the Middle East and the U.S., nevertheless remain surreal.

In 1922, according to The Times, Mussolini’s Fascism was “the most interesting governmental experiment of the day....We should all be glad that he is going at it vigorously.” In 1933, the Jewish-owned paper had “qualms” about Hitler, but concluded that “national finances will be kept in strong and conservative hands....There is thus no warrant for immediate alarm.” It was not long before these Tories became terrified at the anti-Semitic tidal wave generated by Nazism.

The Times did nothing to attract attention to its publishers’ religion, running only Christian ads and burying Washington’s 1942 announcement of the Holocaust on p. 10.

Eventually the paper apologized for its imbecilities, and a new editorial persona was created. Columnist Leonard Silk described its would-be image as “disinterested, pure,” an “apostle of moderation.” It would teach enlightenment to greedy corporations, and respectability to the deprived. In 1967, it instructed Martin Luther King that linking “personal opposition to the war in Vietnam with the cause of Negro equality....could very well be disastrous for both causes.”

Pre-Holocaust Zionism was a no-no because it brought attention to Jews. Only when Truman’s patronage of Zionism in 1948 linked it to Americanism did The Times—at first reluctantly, then with enthusiasm—change. Now it is in Israel’s corner against Arab nationalism.

It is not, however, “Jewish-owned.” Arthur was raised by his Episcopalian mother. For him, Zionism is certifiably racist. On a1969 trip, an Israeli honcho declared that “‘no matter what happened...everyone around the table would always have a homeland in Israel.’ ‘Excuse me,’ Sulzberger exclaimed, ‘but I’m an Episcopalian! Is this still my country?’”

For Sulzberger and Raines, the Middle East is more than Israel. A 1998 piece on Saudi Arabia described “an absolute monarchy, where oil revenues lubricate corruption among royal princes.” Alas, “its policies, and its stability, are critically important....It is regrettable that the interests of the world’s most powerful democracy are tied to...narrow dynastic politics.” As of old, the gray lady proffered a timid suggestion: Clinton should “encourage Crown Prince Abdullah...to make Saudi Arabia more democratic.”

Everybody but The Times “should” do something.

Such ruminations tell us about their authors, not about Arabia or the U.S. True, there is no White House flunky assigned to carry out The Times’ wishes. Yet no one stops Raines from calling Abdullah, interviewing him on democratic reform, and denouncing the regime if it fails to change profoundly.

A 1999 Times treatise lectured Iranian students to “avoid violent street demonstrations. These discredit their cause and force Mr. Khatami to align himself with clerical conservatives.” Unfortunately, few Iranian students read The Times’ pleas for moderation—and only fools consider the students discredited by their demonstrations, all provoked by fundamentalist fanaticism.

Sulzberger’s pollsters say Times readers are cynics. Raines, therefore, can write that “Democrats and Republicans alike are slopping like hogs at the corporate trough.” But the paper instructed readers not to vote for Ralph Nader. Instead, voters were urged to support Gore as the lesser evil to Bush.

Similarly, in June The Times urged Israeli secularists to compromise, to “find ways to bridge the remaining gaps” on Orthodox corruption in education, “keeping Shas inside the Barak coalition,” and thus “maintaining the delicate momentum of peacemaking.” Then secularists and Shas, shoulder to shoulder, would face down the Palestinians—who, of course, must make “painful compromises.”

Sulzberger knows Israel is muscle-bound with discrimination against Palestinians. Raines writes repeatedly of America’s corrupt democracy. But they do nothing to organize and mobilize the people against the corruption they decry.

In an epoch of ethnic, religious and class explosions, The Times wheels its portable Maginot Line—compromise—from crisis to catastrophy. Middle Eastern moderates à la The Times show no capacity of getting equality for the oppressed—but nothing less than American-style equality before the law can produce lasting peace in the region.

The Times is in need of a changin’. “Should” is Raines’ favorite word. Everybody but The Times “should” do something. Like charity, however, doing begins at home. It is crucially behind the Los Angeles Times, which doesn’t endorse candidates. Sulzberger could do even better by not running editorials and printing more letters (which cost nothing). The Times gets some 100,000 a year, and runs about 2,000. Many by scholars more qualified than the resident mavens don’t get in at all.

The Horse’s Mouth

In-house columnists should be driven off the Op-ed page with whips. Each one’s last article sounds like the 10 before. Occasional guest pundits are OK, but there ain’t nothing like getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. A challenge to contenders in any Middle East political bout—Barak, the Likud, the PLO and Hamas, for example—to debate, back and forth, on the Op-ed page would educate Americans, who, Times polls show, know little and understand less about the region.

Bringing major Middle Eastern players directly to its nation-wide audience is the fastest way to educate Times readers. They then could more prudently assess the foreign policies of the contenders for power here at home. No serious movement abroad could afford to turn down such a chance to convince world opinion. All but the most fanatic eventually would understand that to lose that debate before America’s educated means, eventually, to lose before its own public.

Karl von Clausewitz, author of the classic “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” also insisted that the defensive side in war has a natural advantage in that the international public tends to support those it feels are victims of aggression. Opening its pages to debate, therefore, would create a democratic hurdle that all the Middle Eastern powers-that-be and wannabes, in politics as in war, must clear—or, eventually, come crashing to the ground.

Lenni Brenner is the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and The Lesser Evil: The Democratic Party.