Phil Donahue died last month. The king of daytime talk television, he hosted a show for about three decades. I watched his show once.
At home one day, I thought I’d tune in to find out what this celebrated personage was all about. What I saw was Donahue with his microphone parading up and down the aisles of the theater, eliciting comments from the audience. Suddenly he stopped! “We have a phone call,” he proclaimed (or words to that effect). Who could be on the line to stop the action in its tracks? I wondered; surely Henry Kissinger—or a reasonable facsimile thereof. After a few seconds, a woman’s voice was piped into the studio. And the air was filled with a vicious racist rant.
Needless to say, I turned off the set and never ventured into that moronic swamp again.
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If Phil Donahue was a personage I never took a liking to, Eric Severeid, a grave and sober newscaster, was always worthy of my respect. However, it is now, many decades later, that I have discovered something that has made me evict Severeid from my newscaster hall of fame. I print below a complete item from The New Yorker of June 26, 1965:
OF all the recent attempts, public and private, to justify the American intervention in the Dominican Republic, none sounded more ingenious to us than a contribution by Eric Sevareid that was reprinted as a public-service advertisement in the Times by A. N. Spanel, founder and chairman of the International Latex Corporation. With admirable candor, Mr. Sevareid wrote, "I fail to understand the editorialist who points out with disdain that after all, there were only a few handfuls of communists present [in Santo Domingo]," and, under the provocative subheading “Their Lethal Numbers,” went on to argue, "In a very real sense their lack of numbers is their strength. It was because they were few that President Bosch had not bothered to deal severely with them. It was because they were few that they could act with rapidity when the explosion came." He then outlined the danger that such minuscule groups of Communists as the fifty-four Dominican conspirators identified by our government represent to other Latin-American nations. But it would seem that Mr. Sevareid is unaware of the far-ranging implications of his argument. It is not merely that we have unwittingly strengthened the hand of the Dominican Reds by helping to reduce their lethal numbers to smaller, and therefore still more lethal, numbers. There is also an increasing danger from the enemy within our own borders. If memory serves us, J. Edgar Hoover issued a report not long ago in which he stated that while the membership of the Communist Party in the United States had fallen off drastically since the Second World War, the Party's potential for mischief was greater than ever, because the remaining members were obviously the most dedicated and fanatical. Taking this Hoover-Sevareid-Spanel argument one more step, we may conclude that the ultimate danger is a Communist Party with no members at all—a peril that the United States, fortunately, has not yet had to face.
The magazine nailed the absurdity of the argument that less is more. How Severeid could have advanced the proposition is beyond me. I also looked up A. N. Spanel, imagining him as a ultra-right-wing plutocrat, only to discover that he was quite the opposite. In fact, he sued the right-wing crank Westbrook Pegler, who called his views “pro-Red” and his editorial advertisements, including support for Roosevelt’s New Deal, ‘'Communist-inspired.'' Pegler withdrew his slanders.
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If some people imagine that less is more when conspiring, there are others who can’t resist the siren call of “more-is-more.” Consider the movers behind the following two products:
“Ultra Max”
“Extra Super”
Hyperbole on overdrive!
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Then there’s this:
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Let’s end on a positive note.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”
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