When you know you're a reporter

Image result for nassau community college Mitchel

Robert Caro, the famous biographer (of Robert Moses, and more recently, continuingly, of Lyndon Johnson) recently published a memory of his own, about his early days in journalism, fresh out of college.

I'll paraphrase his article, with some direct quotes along the way.

Caro went to work for Newsday on Long Island, in 1959. The managing editor was Alan Hathway, an old-school fellow who didn't like the Ivy League. Caro, a Princetonian, had been hired despite Hathway not by him.

At that time, Newsday didn't have any Sunday issue. Which meant there was almost nobody in the office on Saturday, since such offices are always working on the next day's paper. What if something important happened on a Saturday? The low man on the office hierarchy would be there, would take the call and put the information in a memo, those higher up on the totem pole could act on it Sunday.

Aa the '50s ended and the '60s revved up, the future of Mitchel Field (an air force base in the middle of Nassau County that was about the be decommissioned) was a contentious matter for the region. There were twelve hundred acres of open land at stake -- no small prize. The FAA wanted to turn it into a civilian airport. Newsday's editorial position, though, was that it should be used to create a campus for Nassau Community College, which was then being operated out of the county courthouse in Mineola.

While manning the deserted fort one Saturday, Caro says, he took a call from a guy from the FAA, its Idlewild office. The guy said, "I really like what you guys are doing on Mitchel Field, and I'm here alone in the FAA offices, and if you send someone down here I know what files you should be looking at."

Caro says he wasn't able to reach anyone who could go down there immediately. This seemed like something that should be acted upon at once, not put in a memo. So he went himself. The FAA guy showed him a stack of folders and got out of his way.

I'll let Caro himself tell the next part:

"And somehow, in a strange way, sitting there going through them, I felt at home. As I went through the memos and the letters and the minutes of meetings, I could see a pattern emerging, revealing the real reason that the agency wanted the field to become a civilian airport: executives of corporations with offices on Long Island, who seemed to be quite friendly with the F.A.A. officials, wanted to be able to fly in and out of Long Island on their company planes without the inconvenience of having to drive to Idlewild or LaGuardia. I kept looking for a piece of paper on which someone came right out and said that, but I didn’t find one; everything I could find talked around that point. But between all the pieces of paper I found sentences and paragraphs that, taken together, made the point clear. There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself."

There are two happy endings to this meta-story. First, Caro's story about the efforts by corporate executives to persuade a govt agency to make their lives easier at the expense of a workable campus/ college for working-class kids effectively sank that effort. Sunlight disinfected. Nassau Community did get use of the land.

Second, Caro's reporting was a Hollywood-ish career break, like when the understudy in a Broadway play gets a chance at the leading role. Even Hathway was suitably impressed, and an investigative reporter was born.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog