• Knight Fellowships

1996 Knight Lecture: Ellen Goodman

Politics: Up Close and Too Personal

Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe columnist, author

• Lecture Transcript

Whenever I'm introduced I always think of my favorite credentialing story. This happened to me the morning after I won the Pulitzer. I opened up the New York Times, and the Times had pictures of all of us, and under my picture it said that I had graduated from college summa cum laude. And I thought it was very nice of the New York Times to give me a summa, since Radcliffe had neglected to.

So I wrote a letter to the managing editor of the Times, thanking him very much for my summa. And he sent me back a telegram, saying, oh, it is our pleasure; you are now the first person in American history to have won a Pulitzer and a summa on the same day.

So, particularly for my students who are here, the possibilities for grade inflation are never over.

With these rather dubious academic credentials, I tried to decide why was I asked to deliver the Knight lecture .

I never went to journalism school. I never took a single journalism class. I did not deliver newspapers as a child, nor did I dream of growing up to be William Allen White. I knew more about Lois Lane and Brenda Starr than about Walter Lippmann as a child. Indeed, when I was growing up the most obvious role models for women were comic figures in more ways than one.

I am here, then, as someone who got on-the-job training, here as a member of the profession that I joined some 30 years ago, and here in the quintessential journalist role, as an observer of change.

Let me start by saying something about my own job. I was described a few minutes ago as a columnist. I remember many years ago overhearing my daughter having a conversation with a friend. The friend said, "What does your mother do?" And my daughter said to her, "Well, my mother is a columnist." And her friend quite logically said, "What's that?" And Katie thought for a while and finally said, "Well, my mother gets paid for telling people what she thinks."

Well, "Telling People What You Think" is also the name of my class here at Stanford, and when I came in January to teach, I discovered to my dismay that my course was listed in the catalogue as "Telling People What To Think." This is most certainly not what I do. It was then changed to "Telling People How They Think," which made me sound like a neurologist.

To be a columnist, however, you need two qualifications, nerve and endurance: the egocentric confidence that your view of the world is important enough to write and to be read, and the endurance to write day after day, year after year.

I have a colleague from Pennsylvania who dropped out of this endurance contest some years ago and he explained the business this way: "Being a columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac. Every time you think you are through you have to start all over again." This is a rather unenlightened but fairly accurate analogy.

But newspapers in general do two things. They tell people what has happened and they tell them what it means. I am in the what-it-means end of the business.

Over the last years, as our personal lives and our public life have become more complex, as we have been force-fed more and more information, it has become much more important to wrest some meaning from daily events.

So as a bona fide member of what-it-means journalism, I have the unenviable task of trying to make some sense out of the world we live in.

Making sense is not easy when the news in front of us is O.J. Simpson, or the politics of anger. It's not easy when the media dialogue in America has been reduced to opinion-hurling contests on television in which people compete for the most extreme position; in which we fight, rather than reason.

What I decided to do tonight is to try and make sense of a major change that we're going through as journalists and as Americans, a change in the way we think about and write about the relationship between private and public life, between the personal and the political. And what that change means for the way we do and don't deal with our problems in this country.

Let me begin by telling you a bit about my own history. When I first became a columnist, first started telling people what I think for a living, newspapers still divided life into neat sections.

Politics, foreign affairs, public policy were out front. Families, homes, women, children, relationships, they were all put "back there," as we used to call it, in the women's sections.

Journalism packaged and separated the world into nice neat little parts, into genders and into subjects. But men and women didn't stay put and neither did life. Life, real life, has a way of spilling over the retaining walls.

I deliberately set out to write about life as we experience it. We are, after all, people who get up in the morning worrying about nuclear warfare and our weight, about the state of the new world economy and whether there are any clean socks. I always wanted to make connections between the private and public, to write across the walls, to write about life as it is lived.

I also began writing columns just at the time that the women's movement slogan filled the air. That was the slogan that said, "The personal is political."

That slogan meant many different things. As a young mother, it meant that the decision about who did the dishes and changed diapers in a family could also be a political statement about power relationships between men and women.

As a young journalist, it meant that as long as we wrote about child care or about breast cancer or about abortion as problems for individuals, to be solved one by one, we would have to struggle to deal with them all on our own, and separately. We would have no public discussion, no sense of how widespread these problems were and no political solution. And yet these were private and public, personal and political, issues.

In the past 20 years, many of the stories that were kept "back there," have landed on the front page. Certainly stories about breast cancer, certainly stories about abortion, certainly family, divorce, sex.

But that slogan the personal is political also suggested something about the way we should cover our political leaders. It implied that someone's character was fully understood only by knowing about someone's private as well as public behavior: that a leader's personal life carried within it some meaning for everyone's political life. How they behaved to their families, their office staff, had some message about how they would treat their constituents. Where they came from said something about where they were going and where they were leading us.

It seemed to me that we couldn't exclude the personal man or woman when we wrote about the political. I was an advocate of change, of personalizing, privatizing our coverage.

Well, be careful what you wish for.

A half century ago, Americans knew their President almost solely by his public behavior. In Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Roosevelt presidency, she reminded us that Americans almost never saw FDR in a wheel chair.

There was an understanding among the small Washington White House press corps not to take pictures of him as he struggled in or out of the wheel chair. If a new photographer tried to take his picture that way, the others would circle the President, protectively, to form a shield around him. Imagine that today.

When I was in school and JFK was in the White House, there was essentially a gentleman's agreement among the small and nearly all-male press corps that they wouldn't tell "the little woman" in this case the public about his private sexual behavior.

Slowly that agreement cracked as women cracked into the gentleman's business, as we brought with us the view that the personal was political, as we convinced our colleagues that the public should have a wider and deeper view.

It wasn't just women, of course, that changed this perspective. Nor was it just feminists.After all, feminists have had a wide range of opinions on this. Susan B. Anthony, the mother of us all, and I might add a good friend of the Stanfords, had once written: "If a man's public record be a clear one, if he has kept his pledges before the world, I do not inquire what his private life may have been." I suspect that Bob Packwood would have tested Ms. Anthony quite sorely.

The intimacy of the up-close-and-personal television lens was also a big part of the story. So was the freedom of the rebellious new babyboomer journalists, the babyboomer irreverence for authority and their passion for spotting hypocrisy all of this had an effect in changing my profession.

By 1987, the splintering of the gentleman's agreement was complete. In that year, Gary Hart became the first presidential candidate of the modern era to commit character suicide. In a national presidential campaign he dared the press to follow him and prove what many already knew.

Adultery became a national issue. The media went through a period of soul-searching as well. This affair of the Hart Gary Hart raised questions about what private infidelity means about someone's fitness for office.

Something? Nothing? Does it mean that the wandering husband hates women or loves them? Is someone who is unfaithful to his marriage vows likely to be unfaithful to his campaign promises? Does it say something about his capacity for deception, or for risk-taking? Or not?

Does the whole thing say something about American culture? Imagine Americans looking at the scene the French saw recently at the funeral of their late leader, François Mitterand, with his wife, and his mistress, and their children.

It raised questions about journalism as well. Was journalism just giving the facts, or some meaning? Were we gossiping or informing?

In the Gary Hart case, we saw an odd coalition emerge, not just between the serious and the sleazy media, but between the religious right and the secular left, between puritans and feminists. One may have been concerned with relationships and the other with commandments, but they became an odd set of allies.

By 1992, five years later, Bill Clinton ran for office and the Gennifer Flowers story broke, and the media went through another one of these feeding frenzies. But the story was different this time, and so was the outcome.

This time the husband talked about causing pain in his marriage. This time the wife was a partner, not a victim. Not Tammy Wynette. The statute of limitations on infidelity was surely up. They had been through a bad patch, and, it had been patched.

When Clinton survived the primary, many of us in the media became more comfortable. There was the sense that the public was able to put the "A" word back into the alphabet soup of character. He survived.

But since then, the truth is that we haven't really achieved some sophisticated balance of the public and private side. It has become harder and harder to figure out when writing about private behavior is a matter of serious character investigation and when it is an invasion of privacy.

If anything, today, we seem less concerned with public morality and more with private ethics. We have news stories coming from The Globe not the Boston Globe, I assure you and news entertainment.

In 1993, an illegal nanny was enough to end Zöe Baird's nomination to the attorney general's office. Kimba Wood was next. Henry Cisneros became better known for having an affair than having a cabinet post.

And what on earth would William Allen White make of the investigative character reporting, on serious issues, that ended up with Paula Corbin Jones telling the American public that there were distinguishing characteristics on the president's genitals.

I believe that Bob Packwood's so-called private behavior was indeed a public abuse of power. But are we still able to distinguish between Packwood's abuse of power and someone else's troubled marriage? Indeed it seems that in the past we counted divorce against candidates, say, Adlai Stevenson, while in the present some counted against the Clintons for staying together.

And how do we begin to accept the coverage of Hillary Clinton, who receives more attention for each change of hairdo than her policy initiatives, and who is asked on one show whether she hurled a lamp at her husband, and who is called "a congenital liar" by a columnist who once wrote speeches for Richard Milhous Nixon?

As the first lady said, "there have got to be boundaries."

How do we measure those boundaries? And should we?

In 1884 Grover Cleveland, who had fathered a child out of wedlock, ran for president against James Blaine, who had been charged with mishandling his office. A political wag wrote: "We are told that Mr. Blaine has been delinquent in office but blameless in private life, while Mr. Cleveland has been a model of official integrity but culpable in his personal relationships. We should therefore elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office which he is so well qualified to fill and remand Mr. Blaine to the private station which he is admirably fitted to adorn."

In 1994, the year of the angry white man and the Contract on America, the character issue was more layered and complex than ever. In Virginia the contest was between Charles Robb, who had an extra-marital massage, and Oliver North, who was true to his wife and false to the Congress. Which is worse, to lie to your wife or to Congress? Each side regarded the other as a flawed character, attacking American values, and each side ran ads calling the other a liar.

Meanwhile in California, in the last days of a wildly expensive campaign, the whole election hinged on whether Huffington or Feinstein had the real "nanny" problem.

There has been as well much use of the word "character," but little serious discussion about how to assess the complex and often conflicting parts of a human life, or the relative importance of public values and private.

We are just at the beginning of this election cycle, believe it or not, and at the moment the personal issues seem to be muted. But I have no doubt that they will rise again, in the national campaign, in state or local campaigns, and it will be again the errant sound bite, the small human flaw that gets blown out of all proportion.

Already we have seen this endless attention on wives, what my niece likes to call "wifegate": certainly on Hillary Clinton but also on Liddy Dole and Honey Alexander, all attacked for making money or being fiscal partners.

I want to add that politics has become personal in other ways.

Political reporting has become more a matter of psychology and less a matter of policy. Today we know that both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were born fatherless children. But we cannot really explain why those profiles produced such different politicians, or politics.

We have become more familiar with our leaders and in this democratic process of bringing them close we have also brought them and their institutions further down. Institutions have become so thoroughly personalized that the Congress seems to us to be nothing more than the dubious sum of its flawed members.

And in the past decade, a final piece of the puzzle has fallen into place as journalists ourselves become what the television producers always call on-air personalities. We too have become part of the new cult of personality. We are not just observers but participants in the new, high-decibel politics of the yell.

Imagine, if you can, Walter Lippmann on the McLaughlin Group, or on Crossfire, on the gangs and groups and roundtables that are dotted across the journalistic landscape now. The places where our own stars hurl opinions at each other, food fights breaking out over ideas. Television journalism has become a performance, entertainment. The shtick trumps the insight.

The worst of this is not a lack of decorum. We were never a very decorous profession. The worst of it is that issues are discussed in largely personal terms. Who's up, who's down? Was it a good week for Bill Clinton, rather than, say, for America?

The worst of it is also that everyone, including journalists, is required to be so certain. No ambivalence need apply to perform on these shows. They only do ambivalence by dividing the issues and having two certain advocates duke it out.

I must tell you that I myself have learned how to get out of doing some of these shows. I shouldn't confess this, but I don't do Nightline on the East Coast I can't stay up until 11:30; I can't speak at 11:30 and I don't do the Today show on the West Coast I definitely don't get up at 4 a.m. So when the booker calls to ask what I think about an issue, I have found that the easiest way to get out of it is to say, "Well, I have mixed feelings about this." You can hear the phone going back on the hook.

In his new book, called "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy," James Fallows puts it this way: "In real life people disagree but consider the possibility of consensus; in polarized talk show life, they score points off one another and don't even pretend that there's a possibility one combatant might change his mind." Journalism has indeed become a contact sport.

The ultimate media creation of this era, the product of this problem, is now the candidacy of Patrick Buchanan President of the United States of America. In Boston we would say he can't run a two-car funeral.

Pat Buchanan is, however, a charter member of the punditocracy, an original member of the McLaughlin Group, the true Crossfire candidate.

His qualifications? As he said, "People mock the McLaughlin Group and Crossfire, but the training I got there and on the radio is extraordinary for a candidate. Extraordinary."

Well, I will drink to that.

He is a creature of the talk-show culture that scorches the middle ground. I regard Pat Buchanan as the petri-dish conception, the embryo created from the sperm of sound-bite politics and the egg of food-fight journalism.

Today much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

Yes, be careful what you wish for.

I began by describing how people's real life concerns were often left out of the political, public media dialogue in those not-so-good old days: how many of us thought that the personal ought also to be cast as political, how instead politics has become so personal, in every sense of that word intimate, gossipy, humanized, trivialized, polarized.

I've also described how much of this process was originally driven by some of the impulses behind the movement of women, who were less inclined to maintain the fence between these two worlds. In no way do I think we should go back.

But in some ways we have come full circle.

For all the humanizing of politics, and despite the attempt to bring the process up close and personal, to put a face on it, more people than ever feel that politics has little to do with their real lives. We may have brought our politicians into our readers' and viewers' homes but we haven't brought our audience into political process.

We haven't even closed the gender gap. Indeed in the past few years, a new gender gap of sorts has occurred in the new media. In the radio, we have seen the strong emergence of talk radio as a political force. The hosts from Rush Limbaugh to G. Gordon Liddy are almost entirely men, so are the callers and so are the listeners.

The subject of these shows is politics high-decibel, dysfunctional politics and the tone is high-volume outrage. During the last election indeed, talk radio was a kind of electronic male consciousness-raising circuit for angry men.

At the same time, we've seen the enormous increase in what you would call "talk television." There, the hosts are often women, from Oprah to Ricki Lake to Jenny Jones, and the audience is overwhelmingly female, largely women at home.

The subject of these shows is private life dysfunctional private life broken families, soured relationships, an endless parade of hapless, hopeless souls discussing their most intimate problems on the public airwaves. Or, as my grandmother would say, airing their dirty linen in public, turning the private public with abandon.

In the mostly male talk-radio world the subject is politics. In the mostly female talk-television world, there is no political content, no political direction or solution. What, after all, can a politician do about sisters who steal your boyfriends or daughters who striptease for a living two recent subjects. The personal is apolitical.

These two most lively new worlds of communication are not only divided by gender but by perspective. The female world is, again, personal; the male, political: As segregated as ever. When in the summer I drive from Boston to our home in Maine, I have a personal act of penance, and I listen to talk radio. And I have certainly come to the conclusion that women are driven away from this forum by the sound of it: the hostile kind of winner-takes-all, vindictive, angry sound of it.

But the only forum that is designated as ours is a highly traditional world of relationships, in which life is disconnected from public policy.

These may not be what we would like to think of as journalism. But all are part of the new world of communications, and the distinctions are getting much harder to make, from the television talk show to the radio talk show to the virtual reality re-enactment shows to the news magazine shows to the round-tables to the editorial pages.

You will notice that I got through nearly this entire speech without mentioning O.J. Simpson. I suspect that is a record of sorts. In covering the world it is much easier to report on the Bobbitts, the Menendez brothers, the Simpson trials. In covering politics it is similarly much easier to report on adultery.

As James David Barber once said, everybody knows what adultery is and nobody knows what the word deficit means.

It's sexier in every sense of the word to cover character than policy. Surely more people today know that Newt Gingrich brought his divorce agreement to his wife's bedside to his cancerous wife's bedside, a charming moment than know what's in the Contract With America.

Granted, you know something about Gingrich from his bedside manner, but you know more about America from the contract.

It's the connections that are missing, still missing: misfiring, although perhaps in a different direction.

Now, John Kenneth Galbraith likes to say that journalists are the only professionals who flagellate themselves in public and enjoy it. In looking back over articles written on this subject, it seems to me that we constantly refer to ourselves as journalistic cannibals, media lemmings, all kinds of negative names.

But at this point in any speech, we are expected to offer a perspective for the future. The truth is that journalists are terrible at this. We don't do windows, we don't do futures.

Many of us struggle on a daily basis with the pieces of this puzzle. We struggle too with a public that wants to know and doesn't want to want to know about the private lives of public figures. A public that wants to want to know about public policy, but passes over the fine print of health care policy for details of O.J.'s sorry DNA.

But there are some principles to uphold and some guidelines to keep in our pocket next to our press pass. They may be violated from time to time, they may get bent and mangled, but they are there.

We can uphold the principle that asks whether this piece of personal behavior is relevant to the performance of someone's public duties. What is, after all, the reason for the public's right to know? Did we have more need to know about Ronald Reagan's health than Bill Clinton's underwear?

We can uphold the principle of self-restraint. While that may seem a laughable concept, we have been restrained, for example, in reporting on the life of Chelsea Clinton. Someone at least is off-bounds. That's a fair model.

The people we cover also have the right, even the obligation, and I say this with a lump in my throat, not to answer our questions. To not cross the line between respect and distance. I would call this the Supreme Court justice approach, though not to such a degree. The President, for example, was asked by MTV about his underwear. With all due respect, indeed in search of due respect, it was a question he should not have answered.

We can also be somewhat less hasty, somewhat more layered in our analysis. We can try and fit one event into the context of a life or a career far more sensitively than we do now. Indeed, let us remember that some people survive scandal because they are better known than the Zöe Bairds, have more to offer, and are seen whole. Barney Frank survived a scandal. So apparently has Henry Cisneros. So did Ted Kennedy.

Fundamentally we have to encourage people to know more, not less, so that we are not at the risk of being a bumper sticker society.

Finally, of course, we can learn to make character judgments the way porcupines make love: very, very carefully.

In the past, most journalists lived in a small community, in which everyone knew everyone else. Today we don't. We are more likely to live in the global community. We know less about our neighbors and much, much more about our public figures. We gossip about them the way we used to gossip about the people next door.

But at the same time we have lost that sense of connection, that public policy has much to do with our lives, that politics matters.

As the pendulum swings back, and it will, it must, that is the connection we have to restore. That is the unfulfilled meaning of the phrase, "the personal is political and the political is personal."

Restoring that connection is as hard a task as any serious journalist ever encounters. It is more likely to happen at the local level where people can see the school, the waste dump, the programs, but it has to happen as well in our nation.

That's a tall order for us as journalists, and for those of you who read and watch us, and demand more. In fact, sometimes I think that Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation writer, may well have written the best motto for journalists in the 1990s way back in the 1950s, when he warned us all, "walking on water wasn't built in a day."

Thank you.