Adam Clayton Powell III

Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is an author and syndicated columnist who has made a number of award-winning documentary films. His ninth book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, was chosen by Time magazine as the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1993. His other best-selling books include Convention and American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America. His twice-weekly column has appeared for the past nineteen years in more than 160 newspapers in the United States including The Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore Sun.

Reeves' most recent books are A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (2007), President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (2006), President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001). He is currently working on a book on the Berlin Airlift.  He is the 1998 recipient of the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association for significant contributions to the understanding of American politics. Reeves is also the author of What the People Know: Freedom and the Press, 1998; Family Travels: Around the World in Thirty Days, 1997; The Reagan Detour, 1985; Passage to Peshawar, 1983; Jet Lag, 1981; and A Ford, not a Lincoln, 1975.

A former chief political correspondent of The New York Times, Reeves has been an editor and columnist for New York Magazine and Esquire. For six years, he wrote a column from Europe for Travel & Leisure magazine. He was named the Regents Professor of Political Science at UCLA in 1992. He has taught political writing at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Reeves has also made six television films and has won all of television's major documentary awards, the Emmy for "Lights,Camera...Politics!" for ABC News; the Columbia-DuPont Award for "Struggle for Birmingham" for PBS; and the George Foster Peabody Award for "Red Star Over Khyber" for PBS. He was the co-host of NBC magazine show "Sunday" from 1971 to 1976. He is married to Catherine O'Neill, director of the Washington office of the United Nations and founder of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. They have five children.

Communication Leadership Blog Entries
by Richard Reeves

An Audience Of One

 


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Most of what you read, see and hear about Afghanistan is not meant for you. The words, optimistic and pessimistic, right and wrong, all the leaks, all the numbers of troop estimates, costs and polls are aimed at an audience of one: the president.

It is very hard to get to chat with any president. But any president has to know what is in the big three of American newspapers (or their Web sites): The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. And those papers right now are filled with shouting and whispering to President Obama. The latest shout, a big one, is the leaking to the Times of cables to the State Department from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who also happens to be a former military commander of American troops in the country.

The last time I saw Ted Kennedy he was, in Tom Wolfe's phrase, "A man in full." It was Labor Day, 2007, on Cape Cod, and he was singing and laughing hugely through one of those parody songs that folks compose for friends' birthdays. He was great. He lit up the place.

He was free at last, I thought.

The late 1830s and early '40s were a bad time in Missouri and most everyplace else in the U.S. People were broke and in debt after a boom in land speculation along the routes of new canals and railroads. In the bust that followed—what became known as the Panic of 1837—banks failed or cut off credit. One Missourian, a 36-year-old storekeeper and self-educated lawyer with a sick wife (a malaria epidemic had swept the Midwest) announced on a day in 1843 that he wanted to start over in the Oregon Territory: "I am done with this country," he said. "Winters it's frost and snow to freeze a body; summers the overflow from the Old Muddy drowns half my acres. Taxes take the yield of them that's left. What say, Maw? It's God's country."

Another year, another graduation. But, of course, this is not just another year. For the graduates themselves, it is one of the most important times of their lives. For many of them, their parents and millions of ordinary Americans, it is a very, very tough time.

My graduation was last Friday — not as a student, but as a teacher at the University of Southern California. For me it was a great year because I had great students.

Early in this year's primary election season I did a study on bipartisanship for the Center on Communication Leadership of the University of Southern California. I'm afraid I was not very optimistic that Republicans and Democrats would be able to get together on much of anything after the Clinton and Bush years of what some call "hyperpartisanship."

Now I'm not so sure.

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