Steve Goddard's History Wire

The Shrinking Fourth Estate

Back in the day, Edward R. Morrow sneezed and Washington caught a cold. But journalism has lost much of its clout since the 1950s, as The Hartford Courant documents in reviewing two new DVD journalism documentaries:

"To watch "The Edward R. Murrow Collection" and "The Robert Greenwald Documentary Collection" is to be struck by a contrast. Whereas Murrow's documentation of the deceitfulness of U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign helped lead to McCarthy's downfall, Greenwald's chronicles of misdeeds by the George W. Bush administration have been futile."

Women Pilots Remembered

Marie Michell Robinson co-piloted a plane shot down in wartime. Sad, yes, but not so memorable until you reflect on the fact that her tragedy happened in 1944, when women pilots were scarce as hen's teeth.  Her death, along with those of other WWII female pilots, inspired the poem, "Celestial Flight," read today at Memorial Day celebrations across the nation. The Los Angeles Times reports:

'She is not dead — But only flying higher, Higher than she's flown before," begins the soulful elegy read at the funerals of America's last-remaining members of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots program, known fondly as the WASP. The poem is also recited at the funerals of many other female pilots. This Memorial Day, the woman whose death inspired it is being honored again by her family members as they await the return of a few last personal belongings recovered in February at the Mojave Desert site where the B-25 bomber she was co-piloting crashed in 1944."

McCain Cranks it Up Again

"For those who watch it, I hope that this is not just another war story," said Arizona Sen. John McCain. "It also points out that I am less than a perfect person, and I think that's important." An interesting way to kick off a presidential campaign, if you subscribe to the belief that McCain is in the hunt for the 2008 GOP nomination, as McCain promotes A&E's showing of the dramatization of the senator's book, Faith of Our Fathers:

"The movie, based on McCain's autobiographical 1999 book of the same title, chronicles his ill-fated mission and grim captivity in the notorious prison complex known as the Hanoi Hilton, with flashbacks to his youth. Actor Shawn Hatosy, 29, plays McCain from his arrival as a teenager at the U.S. Naval Academy to the 37-year-old who is freed from prison. "I knew he had been shot down, but I didn't know he was there five and a half years," Hatosy said. "This was a physically taxing role, not only because of the age range. Because it's a TV movie, we had a very fast and furious filming schedule, so the pace was very quick."

The Enduring Nation

Look, if you want to start a political magazine that will last decades, it's axiomatic that you've got to trim your sails from time to time to accommodate your advertisers or backers, right? But not if you're the iconoclastic Nation, which observes its 140th anniversary this year. Who better to chronicle its history than throw-caution-to-the-wind Victor Navasky, former editor and now publisher of the journal, in his new book, A Matter of Fact: The Fate of The Nation," as reviewed in The New York Times: 

"A HOST of demons followed close on the heels of Victor S. Navasky during the anxious decades when it was his responsibility to maintain life support for America's oldest journal of opinion. Born in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, brainchild of New England abolitionists looking for new wrongs to right, new oppressed classes to raise up, new errors in public policy to admonish and correct, The Nation magazine in its first century and a half has never been far from spending its last dollar. More than once in this lively memoir, Navasky reminds the reader that the magazine lost money in all but three years, but even so it was not the specter of bankruptcy that haunted Navasky most. Nor was it meddlesome patrons who covered the losses, viper-tongued columnists who attacked him in his own publication, touchy readers who cancelled subscriptions when the editor had been too radical or too timid; it wasn't even the queasy apprehension, like a perpetual threat of rain, that someday emerging from the archives of the old Soviet Union there would finally appear an official document offering clear, unambiguous, incontrovertible evidence that the accused Soviet spy, Alger Hiss . . . had lied.

The Troubled World of an Early Photographer

At the dawn of photography in the 1850's, Robert Fenton was to British cameracraft what Matthew Brady was to the art in America. But by the early 1860s, the promising photography market had softened so much that Fenton was losing money and decided to retire, according to The New York Times, which reviews a "handsome but emotionally-conflicted" exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum:

"The last straw seems to have come in 1862, when the organizing committee of the London International Exhibition announced its plans to exhibit photography in the section reserved for tools and machinery rather than art. That year, Fenton sold his equipment and negatives and returned to the practice of law. By 1869, at 50, he was dead."

Another Good Reason to Read the Papers

Two Japanese soldiers, who hid in the Philippine jungles for 60 years for fear of being charged with desertion in World War II, have been found. Pravda.ru reports:

"The found soldiers did not even know that WWII was over a long time ago. Local authorities are currently holding the two elderly deserters, aged over 80. In the near future the Japanese military men will have a meeting with spokespeople for the Japanese embassy in the Philippines, Tokyo newspapers write. Several other former servicemen of the Japanese army might be hiding in the out-of-the-way place in the south of Mindanao, Itar-Tass reports. Agents of the Philippine counterintelligence incidentally found the former Japanese lieutenant, 87 and the former lance-corporal, 83, during an operation in the area."

Burt Reynolds Returns But in New Role

Remember Burt Reynolds in the 1974 box office smash, The Longest Yard? Well, since remakes are a conservative but effective way to pad producers' bank accounts, the movie is back -- and so is Burt Reynolds but in another role. The New York Times report:

"In "The Longest Yard," the crummy remake of the 1974 film of the same title, Adam Sandler stars as the former N.F.L. quarterback Paul Crewe, who years earlier was booted out of the league for shaving points. In the original film, directed with seriocomic facility by the great Robert Aldrich, Crewe was played by Burt Reynolds with effortless charm, tufts of visible chest hair and the tightest pants this side of Tony Orlando. Finding a perfect groove as the fallen hero, Mr. Reynolds didn't attempt to ingratiate himself with the audience or make nice; he knew that we would fall for him anyway.

"Mr. Reynolds is also on hand for the remake, and here's hoping he snagged a nice fat paycheck for his trouble and ours. This time, the actor plays the role of a former college ballplayer, Nate Scarborough, who has been kicking around a dusty Texas prison yard for decades and wants to lend Mr. Sandler's character a helping coaching hand."

Zooming In on The Chrysler Building

Every now and then, do you tire of reading about history and wish someone would just read you and show you a story? The New York Times comes to the rescue with a lush visual tribute to Manhattan's art deco Chrysler Building, inside and out, with audio accompaniment.

A Cat With Many Lives

Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one of most enduring and successful stage productions in American history, celebrates its silver anniversary this week with the opening of a new version at the Hartford (CT) Stage Company, directed by the gifted Michael Wilson, according to The Hartford Courant.

A pantheon of the nation's greatest actors have played Brick or Maggie or Big Daddy, among them Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, Burl Ives and Jessica Lange. In the latest production, Alyssa Bresnahan stars as Maggie the Cat, opposite James Colby as Brick. Tony Award winner Elizabeth Ashley, who played Maggie in the Broadway revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play in the mid-'70s, plays Big Mama, and Tony nominee William Biff Maguire is Big Daddy. Michael Wilson directs.

Gold Medalist of the Chatting Olympics

One could argue that daytime TV would look very different, for better or for worse, had it not been for Merv Griffin, who introduced the daytime talk show and enjoyed great popularity with it from 1963 to 1986. Now the 79-year-old Griffin, who The New York Times says is "richer than Croesus," is being honored for his achievements by the Museum of Radio and Television:

"My greatest legacy is that I never asked an actor, 'How did you prepare for the role?' or 'Do you have any hobbies?' " Mr. Griffin said in an interview on Tuesday morning. "That's when you know that the interviewer is in terrible trouble."

"Dressed in white pants and a navy blue pullover, Mr. Griffin, 79, looked ready to spend an afternoon sailing. Instead, he sat at a table in his sprawling hotel suite overlooking Central Park and dusted off tender memories. There was the 90-minute interview with Charles Schultz, the creator of the "Peanuts" comic strip, and his chat with Salvador Dalí, who brought along paintings to Mr. Griffin's show. "I said, 'Mr. Dalí, I don't understand your work,' " he recalled, "and he said: 'Yes, that is it! Dalí is confusion!' " While interviewing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he said he thought, "Wow, this is the most peaceful man I've ever met."