The other day White House Press Secretary Tony Snow stirred the
Angry Left by saying that if polls had been taken back during the
famed World War II setback known to history as the Battle of the
Bulge, Americans of the day would have been pushing for change in
war strategy.
Faster then you can say “Internet” Snow was under attack by both
the AOL “news” division, which quickly featured the story and
provided a link to lefty blogger Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking
Points Memo website. As someone used to say: How convenient! There
— surprise! — Mr. Marshall assails Snow’s very sensible point as
“historically silly…morally obtuse and cynical.” A couple days
later, triumphant, Marshall says that he has been contacted by —
hold your breath! — a former graduate student! You can almost feel
the reverence for the term sighing from Marshall’s keyboard.
Graduate students are sooooooooo smart. The graduate
student, Marshall alerts the world with the assistance of AOL, has
discovered that way back during the Roosevelt administration one
“Hadley Cantril at Princeton, did secret polling for FDR throughout
the war on public support for the war, and specifically focused on
trendlines, noting shifts from event to event…” To make sure we
get the point of just how stupid Tony Snow’s reference was there is
— sitting down? — a “helpful chart.” Yes! Really! A “helpful
chart” to illustrate how dumb the newest Bush spokesman really is.
“As you can see,” sniffs Marshall in the tone of intellectual
superiority that seemed to blossom in the days when liberals
claimed the best and the brightest were running Vietnam policy,
“there was no downtick in public support for the war around the
time of the Battle of the Bulge. Approval for President Roosevelt’s
conduct of the war continued at around 70% where it had been for
years.”
My, my.
One always feels the need when debating the left to have Paul
Harvey along so we can get the Rest of the Story.
The Graduate Student got one thing, at least, right. Hadley
Cantril, who taught at Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton, was indeed
a very credible pollster. In fact, he was one of the founders of
modern polling as we know it today. Yet both Marshall and The
Graduate Student seem to have missed two…ahhh…small pieces of
information that one can suppose Dr. Cantril himself would never
have missed.
To get a really good understanding of what both Marshall and his
Graduate Student blithely ignore, one only has to read a very good
book called The Opinion Connection: Polling, Politics and the
Press. The author? No less than one Albert Hadley Cantril, the
son of Dr. Cantril. (For the record, the younger Mr. Cantril and
his collaborator, wife Susan Davis Cantril, are friends of this
writer.) In this book, published before the Internet factored in,
Albert Cantril makes the glaringly obvious point that Mr. Marshall
and The Graduate Student seem to have missed. To wit:
TELEVISION!!!!!
“An understanding of how television has affected politics is
essential to our consideration of the role of polling and of the
pressures under which pollsters often have to operate,” Hadley
Cantril’s son writes. No doubt Albert Cantril would throw in the
Internet as well were he writing his book today. In short, FDR did
not have to contend with 24-hour-a-day TV news. The dawn of the
television age permanently changed the way the presidency is
conducted. This particularly includes any modern president’s
ability to conduct a war.
Ironically, this point is made by no less than liberal hero
George Clooney in his recent film about CBS’s Edward R. Murrow. The
entire premise of the film, which lionizes Murrow, is that he was
able to undo Senator Joseph McCarthy with the astute use of
TELEVISION. Left unsaid in Good Night and Good Luck is the
obvious — no TV, no commanding forum to destroy McCarthy. The very
name of the film is taken from Murrow’s signature sign-off at the
end of his See It Now broadcasts. Note the name was
SEE It Now, not hear it or read it now. It is also no
accident that Murrow begins his famous show on McCarthy by telling
the audience CBS is presenting “a report on Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy told mainly in his own words and pictures.” Translation?
Murrow had film of McCarthy that was chopped up by a CBS film
editor to make McCarthy look and sound the way Murrow wanted him to
look and sound. One of the most powerful tools of the modern media
had been born.
How would FDR and his conduct have survived if television and
the Internet were around? We’ll never know. But even in Marshall’s
citations of Hadley Cantril there are hints of the problems FDR
would have faced in the age of TV and Internet. Dr. Cantril, it is
said, was doing “secret polling” for the Roosevelt White House.
Really? Secret? On whose dime? One can see the AOL News Banner now:
“Did White House Use Taxpayer Money for FDR’s Secret Polls?” The
Battle of the Bulge took place in December of 1944, a month after
FDR had defeated New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey, it was
discovered by his biographer, had been “asked to forgo a double
dose of election year dynamite” by no less than Army Chief of Staff
General George C. Marshall. The dynamite? That the U.S. had broken
the Japanese Code before Pearl Harbor — and that information on a
coming Japanese attack was available as early as three days before
the surprise attack on December 7. Dewey, the soul of patriotism,
swallowed hard and kept quiet. The idea of Al Gore or John Kerry
doing the same is laughable.
This kind of information today would be aired before you could
say “Fox News Alert.” And FDR’s 70 percent poll rating would, like
George W. Bush’s post-9/11 ratings, have begun a slow descent to
absolute bottom. Out would come the news of FDR’s secret Oval
Office tapings, revealed not only decades after his death but long
after Watergate and the presumption that Nixon was the first
president to do this. One now-public tape catches FDR’s
unmistakable voice musing about how to smear his 1940 GOP opponent,
Wendell Willkie, with the news of Willkie’s mistress. By the time
1944 arrived, news like this replayed over and over would have
shredded the Roosevelt presidency in the full glare of the TV
lights and angry bloggers, and so too public confidence in the
war.
And it would have been wrong, too. Like George W. Bush, FDR knew
the importance to both America and the world of what he was doing.
So did his opponents. And so did the press.
Those days are, sadly, long gone. Reading the musings of the
Angry Left’s Mr. Marshall and his Graduate Student — quickly
magnified by AOL — will help show why.
Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan White House political
director, is the author of The Borking Rebellion.
