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Truth vis-a-vis experience

Thursday, April 5, 2007

The older and more experienced that people in the public eye get, the better we often expect them to become. Perhaps even at telling the truth. The oldest serious contender for the Presidency at seventy, Senator John McCain, trades on that expectation, not least by cultivating a “telling it like it is” reputation among his many friends throughout the media - and by his proud banner on the McCain campaign bus: “The Straight Talk Express”.

Well, the media are now having some trouble with McCain’s less than totally straight talk. It’s one thing to be, this time around, energetically supporting the war policies of a Commander in Chief he once appeared to despise, but he must have known what difficulty he would encounter when he delivered a very re-quotable soundbite on the morning radio show hosted by Bill Bennett, the 63-year old moralizing author of “The Book of Virtues” (whose own credibility took a knock four years ago when he was exposed as a high-rolling Las Vegas gambler).

With an audio-only medium it’s hard to tell definitively, but it seemed that both men’s faces were straight when McCain proclaimed the current peacefulness of Baghdad’s neighborhoods to Bennett.

He said: "You and I could walk through those neighborhoods today".

Next day New York Times reporter Kirk Semple did a helpful service to the truth when he covered McCain’s visit to Shorja, one of Badgdad’s older neighborhoods and home to its central market. (Semple has been doing a lot of valuable truth-checking since being stationed in Iraq, following in the admired footsteps of his father Bob Semple, a veteran Times writer).

McCain at market (pictured above, in baseball cap and flak-jacket, with General David Petraeus, left, and close military escort) hardly resembled a walk in the park, and the younger Semple made a point of talking with Shorja merchants as well. They stressed, of course, how deadly a place it still is for them to live and work, as they close their stalls well before dusk most days, all too accustomed to attacks from snipers, bomb-planters and grenade-throwers.

McCain also appeared on a live link with host Wolf Blitzer for CNN’s afternoon show “The Situation Room” and claimed that Baghdad is actually safe enough for General Petraeus, as head of all the US forces, to now drive through the streets without armor.

This was just too much for my ex-CBS colleague John Roberts, who these days is enjoying, thank goodness, a whole new lease of life at CNN - as both an authoritative anchor and a cool, dogged field-correspondent. He got McCain on the network’s morning program and assertively reported:

“I checked with General Petraeus’ people overnight and they said he never goes out in anything less than an up-armored Humvee.”

McCain blustered a bit and eventually tried to deny he’d ever made his exaggerated claim. He maintained:

“I’m not saying they could go without protection.”

Well – judge for yourself. Here’s what he had actually said, verbatim (on video too, if you'd like to click here - courtesy, as often, of YouTube):

“General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee.”

LONG EXPERIENCE CAN MESS WITH REALITY in other ways too.

Sixty-seven year-old Ted Koppel has topped off his distinguished career anchoring ABC’s Nightline with some steady, serious work at the Discovery Channel, and as a commentator for NPR News.

But his take on the seizure of British military personnel by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has been overly influenced by the formative events that 1979’s hostage-taking of Americans in Teheran proved to be for him. It essentially created the Nightline franchise, after all.

On radio Koppel tried to force an almost fanciful parallel with three decades ago – prophesying:

“Iran may wait until Tony Blair’s tenure as prime minister comes to an end in a few months. That’s what they did to Jimmy Carter – waiting to hand over the US hostages until the very moment that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. This time, Iran may simply wait to hand over the 15 Brits as a thumb in the eye to Blair and a token of good will to the new prime minister.”

There wasn’t a shred of evidence for that Koppelian speculation. By contrast indeed, there were plenty of diplomatic straws in the wind, in London, Baghdad, United Nations headquarters here in New York, and in Teheran, to indicate that what would most likely happen was what actually did – an early release.

LAST NIGHT I BENEFITED FROM EXPERIENCE by the bucketload. Seventy-six year-old Alfred Brendel performed Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart sonatas, plus two Schubert impromptus, at Carnegie Hall. He provided a memorable treat for my darling wife Melissa Bellinelli and myself on our 16th wedding anniversary.

Brendel has always been an enviable artistic prodigy from the beginning, exhibiting well-regarded watercolors at the age of seventeen alongside his piano recital debut. Now, having along the way put his stamp - at Carnegie Hall itself - on the entire canon of Beethoven sonatas, and much, much more, he has the power to render many a discerning listener speechless with his simultaneously thoughtful and emotion-laden interpretations.

I was encouraged too, in the presence of this hoary virtuoso, to see just how many youthful heads helped to fill that legendary Hall (I even saw a sometimes restless but still determinedly attentive African-American girl who could not be over 11 or 12). Maybe the best word to apply to Brendel's hold over the span of ages is one drawn from the Millennium Generation's vocabulary: awesome.