Beyond Peace (28 page)

Nevertheless, the media bear a large share of the responsibility for the current loss of faith in American political institutions.
Although far more hostile to conservatives than to liberals, their institutional bias makes for excessively harsh criticism of all politicians and public officials. There is no easy balance between legitimate inquiry and sensational interest. But competitive pressures too often push the media past the limits of responsibility, destructively and unnecessarily undermining the authority and credibility of government. One egregious example was the attempt by the media to delegitimize Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980 by attributing it, falsely and without evidence, to a deal with the Ayatollah.

Some elements of the media even continue to give credence to the ludicrous notion that Lyndon Johnson and a host of other officials engaged in a vast conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. They gave serious treatment and positive reviews to the movie
JFK,
which blended historical fact with blatantly malicious fiction. If they were to be believed, it would follow that the United States has lacked any truly legitimate government since 1963. The character assassinations of Clement Haynsworth, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas, in which the media gleefully participated, were also disgraceful episodes that have had the effect of discouraging individuals of high merit from government service. The American press could make a major contribution to improving the American system by restoring perspective and balance to its coverage. Examining public figures with a media microscope is justifiable. Using a proctoscope goes too far.

Walter Lippmann put it best thirty-eight years ago in his classic
The Public Philosophy:
“The right to utter words whether or not they have meaning and regardless of their truth could not be a vital interest to a great state but for the presumption that they are the chaff with the utterance of true significant words. But when the chaff of silliness and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity that it cannot be preserved against the restoration of order and decency.”

Before the era of Vietnam and Watergate, the media's neglect of “kernels of truth” in favor of salaciousness and rumormongering was somehow more tolerable because it was at least not obscured by a veneer of sanctimoniousness. Journalists have always been an arrogant breed. Bert Andrews of
The New York Herald-Tribune,
who worked with me on the Alger Hiss case, once told me that the problem with some of his colleagues who covered the State Department was that “instead of writing about the Secretary of State, they write as if they were the Secretary of State.” A bygone era's ink-stained wretches, as depicted in the classic film
The Front Page
—amiable, scandal-mongering slobs sitting around the courthouse pressroom playing cards and waiting for the next hanging—have become our era's self-certified saviors of the republic. A productive evening spent peering through a politician's bedroom window can be the key to a prestigious editorship and even someday a shot at the Chair in the Media and Public Responsibility at any number of universities. The result of the media's appointing themselves as a de facto branch of government, a sort of non-taxpayer-supported team of surrogate special prosecutors, is that they have become even more immune to criticism than ever before, even less willing to admit their errors and excesses. And that will inevitably hurt a profession whose only restraint is what it manages to impose upon itself.

The media would not have physicians certify themselves, politicians investigate themselves, or even auto mechanics license themselves, but we are taught to expect that editors, reporters, and broadcasters have a unique capacity to ensure that they themselves act responsibly. The fact that they err just as often as other human beings but atone almost never cannot be good for their professional souls; and it has been demonstrably bad for their public standing.

The 1960s and 1970s brought about a profound change in the media's perception of their role in society. Rather than pulling an oar while occasionally speaking up about the direction in
which the boat is going, the prestige media now appear to observe the race from the shore, raising the occasional eyebrow at one another. Three-hour panel discussions can take place at journalism schools about whether an editor should withhold, at the government's request, publication of a story about an impending use of military power if American lives were at stake. I could name two dozen journalists from the 1950s, all of them competent pros, who would not have hesitated to come down on the side of the lives of our servicemen and women.

One reason for the change is that journalists have become even more cynical than before. Another is that they seem increasingly to have little if any conception that they share responsibility for building an atmosphere of common purpose in an increasingly fractured society. Like so much of the intellectual establishment, they seem animated by an instinctual negativity about America and its values and a sense of ambivalence about its power and stature.

If American renewal is to become a reality, the media will have to resolve to help the process along rather than to analyze and critique it so relentlessly that it dies aborning. Journalists will have to learn to look in the mirror and not be afraid their National Press Club cards will be revoked if they say, “I want America to be strong and free and fair and civil and to continue to grow and prosper.”

Free-market capitalism has triumphed around the world, but most liberals seem to have learned nothing from the experience. They are enamored of many of the principles the victims of communism and socialism have experienced and repudiated. Still, “economic freedom” is a slippery term. During our heated private conversations in 1959, Khrushchev repeated the argument communists always made to me in my travels around the world,
about why their system was better than ours. Whenever I mentioned free nations, free peoples, or free ideas, he would respond that the communists provided their people free education, free housing, and free health care. We stood for higher freedoms, I replied—freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, free elections, and political freedom. He rejoined that capitalism meant the freedom to be unemployed, to starve, to be homeless.

We both had a point. The freedoms he stood for were material. The freedoms I stood for were nonmaterial. In between these two concepts of freedom is the economic freedom of free markets. Khrushchev and other doctrinaire communists never accepted that principle. At this great turning point in history we must prove that democratic free-market capitalism can not only outproduce communist capitalism and provide for those in need but also provide the higher, nonmaterialist freedoms the communists denied.

This challenge requires that government finally master a delicate balancing act between opportunity and security—between growth and fairness. To grow, a democratic capitalist economy requires strong economic incentives for investment, including low taxes and minimum regulation. To be fair, it must provide some goods and services to those who cannot provide for themselves, which will inevitably take resources away from growth. Enacting too much social spending is a cruel policy, not a humane one, because it weakens the system's capacity to serve everyone. Further along this continuum is communism, which, by promising to fulfill every need, ultimately deprives an economy of the ability to fulfill any. Khrushchev was wrong when he told me housing, education, and health care were free in the Soviet Union. The price the Soviet people were paying for them was astronomical.

It is fashionable to say that communism and socialism have been discredited. But they will not be completely discredited until government overcomes its tendency to ignore the simple
fact that too much social spending saps an economy's ability to produce the funds necessary to finance the social programs. Too many of the present administration's policies are rooted in the reflexive conventional wisdom of traditional liberalism: higher taxes; suffocating regulation; a vast expansion in the size, cost, and scope of government; more entitlements; managed trade; and deep cuts in military spending. We need to lay aside some of the more persistent myths that for years have confused rather than clarified public debate.

In the late 1980s, Professor Paul Kennedy of Yale popularized the thesis that excessive military spending and imperial overstretch had caused the decline of all the great powers since 1500, and would do the same to America. Mounting trade and budget deficits, combined with the growing power of allies such as Germany and Japan, gave Kennedy's argument a resonance it did not deserve. He and other critics missed the essential point that the proportion of GNP consumed by America's defense spending in 1953 was twice the share of GNP spent at the height of the Reagan military buildup.

Nor is America's decline as irrevocable or precipitous as Kennedy portrayed it. The late 1940s and 1950s represent an artificial measure of America's relative might, because World War II had devastated much of the world. Using the 1920s rather than the 1940s as a benchmark, America's share of world manufacturing and GNP has remained remarkably constant. America's share of world manufacturing actually increased during the 1980s as the Reagan recovery created 18.4 million new jobs, compared with a net gain of zero for Western Europe during the same period. Our total GNP still exceeds that of Japan, our nearest rival, by a factor of two. In industrial productivity, technological innovation, and per capita productivity we still lead the world. Our economy attracts more foreign investment than that of any other major industrial power. With a GNP close to $6 trillion, we have ample resources to play our indispensable role as a global leader. We also have the resources to build a
stunning new prosperity at home, if government will become less grasping.

Liberals have vastly overstated the harmful effects of defense spending on the American economy and understated its positive impact internationally. The level of spending called for in the Bush administration's defense plan was approximately equal proportionately to what the United States spent in 1940, the year before Pearl Harbor, when we were vulnerable to aggression. This is hardly too much of a burden for the wealthiest nation of the world, especially when we consider the alternatives.

The most prevalent myth foisted on the public is that the eighties were, as some critics have gleefully labeled them, the “Decadent Decade.” By trashing the 1980s, they try to justify their own agenda of a vast expansion in government's role at the expense of the private sector, a substantial redistribution of America's wealth, the socialization of America's health care system, a relentless push for equality of result, and managed rather than competitive trade. The liberal lament is familiar. President Reagan, they chant, simultaneously doubled the defense budget, reduced taxes, and cruelly cut essential social programs, so that the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the country amassed an enormous debt that put the U.S. economy at a significant competitive disadvantage in the world economy.

This dire portrayal is wrong. The policy implications many liberals draw from it are even more wrongheaded. Dramatically ending a prolonged period of stagflation and slow growth, which were lingering legacies of the Great Society, Reagan's tax cuts and deregulation stimulated an economic boom, seven years of uninterrupted growth during which the American economy grew by nearly a third—or by the size of the entire West German economy. Runaway inflation rates plummeted and remained low. American productivity increased significantly. America's share of the world's GNP remained constant. America's percentage of world manufacturing increased. The increased
emphasis on competition and entrepreneurship rather than subsidy and regulation forced American business to take measures that would greatly increase its competitiveness for the 1990s.

While the federal budget deficit increased substantially during the Reagan years, it is crucial to keep this in perspective. On one hand, we must avoid the temptation of exaggerating the immediacy and severity of the danger. A deficit of 5 percent of GNP will not bring the apocalypse overnight. On the other hand, contrary to the claims of doctrinaire supply-siders, deficits do matter. They distort our economy over the long run by siphoning off for short-term consumption funds that could have gone toward long-term capital investment. They confer benefits on the present generation and burdens on future generations. While sustainable in the short term, and even justifiable in recession and war, deficits act like water, eroding the foundations of a strong economy.

It is wrong, however, to blame the combination of the Reagan tax cuts and defense increases for creating the deficit problem. Although defense spending doubled from $147.2 billion in 1980 to $290.2 billion in 1989, the increase in tax revenues—due in part to cuts in tax rates—exceeded the increase in defense spending. The Reagan administration's miscalculation lay not in its tax or defense policies, but in its and Congress's failure to control domestic spending, which continued to increase significantly during the 1980s and now consumes four fifths of the federal budget. The defense buildup was a bargain. It helped win the Cold War and saved both blood and treasure in the long run. Unfortunately, domestic spending has increased relentlessly over the past three decades. It is this relentless increase in domestic spending that is the curse.

The present administration has added revenues from its massive tax increases to the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War—which it has magnified through excessive cuts in defense spending—but despite its overly optimistic predictions, it
still faces an out-of-control budget deficit. Even the most deft political shell game cannot hide much longer the fact that the recurring deficits are largely the result of decades of unchecked spending on domestic programs and entitlements. Each program is tied by a titanium umbilical cord to a particular interest group or lobby, which in turn is fused at the hip to the powerful members of Congress who hold the purse strings. The genetic code of government commands it to grow and to expand its authority. Like all things that take on a life of their own, it will not cheerfully commit suicide or lop off an arm or a finger. As I found when I abolished the Office of Economic Opportunity early in my administration, any President who attempts to terminate a program or department, no matter how redundant or unnecessary, is accused of insensitivity to poor people, young people, sick people, or small animals. It becomes impossible to imagine how the nation survived before the threatened program existed.