Word: macarthur
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This is the plausible premise of John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's. But his book, which might have been valuable scholarship about how things went wrong, self-destructs from the opening page because of his obsessive rage that the war ever took place. To MacArthur, good journalism is by definition antiwar journalism. He cannot credit that anyone of intelligence and good faith might view the gulf conflict as politically necessary, let alone morally just. At most he acknowledges that the war was popular, but only so he can scorn as "commercial" and "cynical" any posture other than a lonely, unyielding...
AUTHOR: JOHN R. MACARTHUR...
...fury at what he sees as Pentagon duplicity, MacArthur virtually demands that chief executives of large news organizations insult the government with defiance rather than hear its case. He seems not to grasp that the perception of just such behavior by reporters has alienated a large percentage of the public these news organizations are meant to serve. Although many readers complain that journalists do not seem patriotic, MacArthur thinks reporters should be neutral about whether their country's forces win or lose. He also dismisses in a sentence or two some practical reasons why the war was covered almost entirely...
...MacArthur quotes many leading journalists gloomily appraising gulf war coverage. But he has few revelations. By far his most striking was unveiled last January in a New York Times op-ed page piece. He debunks the headlined story that Iraqi invaders took Kuwaiti babies out of incubators to die. The star witness in a congressional investigation of this supposed episode was a teary 15-year-old using a pseudonym. She was, in fact, the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S., and MacArthur implies that the whole episode was concocted by Kuwaiti officials and their public relations agency, Hill...
...Teddy Roosevelt in Mornings on Horseback and for the Panama Canal in The Path Between the Seas -- is a sense of historic sweep. The onset of the cold war, the Marshall Plan, the seizure of the steel mills, the Korean War and the sacking of General Douglas MacArthur all read like chapters from an epic novel, and best of all is the wild whistle-stop campaign of 1948, where "Give 'Em Hell" Harry defied the pundits and drew tumultuous crowds to win the most famous upset in American history. McCullough also lovingly captures Truman's sparkle by drawing...