Abstract
This is a book about a love affair, about the author’s lifelong fascination with the United States, its people, its places and, above all, its politics.
We start in 1972, when Naughtie goes for the first time as a 23-year-old university student. It is the time of Nixon, of Watergate, and a divided country in political crisis. The book ends as we turn to the presidential election of 2020, with Donald Trump seeking a second term from a country divided by his tumultuous first one. Along the way, we crisscross the country and the years in Naughtie’s amiable company, meeting the people – some famous, some not – who have shaped his views of America.
His claims for the book at the outset are modest: “no history, no polemic, just the contents of a reporter’s notebook.” Too modest. It is much more than that. It is a richly entertaining read, full of good stories, funny anecdotes and fascinating characters. But interlaced with the easy reading are some shrewd social observations and, throughout, a reminder of what a sharp political journalist Naughtie is.
Though never a resident correspondent there, Naughtie has been covering America for more than 50 years, first for The Scotsman, then The Guardian, and most recently for BBC radio. On the front cover of the book are the campaign buttons from those years; the one for Obama and Biden in 2008 says simply “I was there”, and that’s the point. We are in the excellent company of a man who, for election after election, has been there, met the people, seen the sights, smelt the action.
Along the way, he also encounters some of the legends of American journalism: David Broder, doyen of Washington political reporters, whose work desk piled to the ceiling with cuttings became a tourist attraction; Carl Leubsdorf of AP, for whom, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Watergate was more than a great story, it went to the heart of his now-American identity. Then there was Joseph Mitchell, who achieved the remarkable feat of staying on the staff of The New Yorker for more than 30 years without producing any copy. Most of all, there was Ben Bradlee, the inimitable executive editor of The Washington Post through Watergate. Naughtie first met him while working on the Post on a Laurence Stern fellowship. A story he filed had caused a row. Bradlee invited him to breakfast. Naughtie feared he was about to be fired. Bradlee opened the conversation: “Let me tell you something. This is the table where I took Woodward and Bernstein when they screwed up one of their Watergate stories, about the money. You’re annoying the right people. Enjoy yourself.” It ended up a happy breakfast after all.
In surveying the changes in the American media in the timespan covered by his book, Naughtie rightly draws attention to the ending in 1987 of the fairness doctrine under the Reagan administration. Few spotted the importance of this at the time, but it was a move that was to have enormous implications. Previously, broadcasters had a duty to air contrasting views on controversial issues. Now it was no holds barred. The result was the rise of the extreme right: a surge in shock jock radio, later Fox News on TV. The polarisation of American politics followed. Thankfully, Britain has retained its fairness rules.
Towards the end, the book gets darker. Naughtie lays out clearly the rise of the modern-day right, starting with Reagan (“The trick with Reagan’s unfailing geniality was to understand that it was a carapace”) to Newt Gingrich (“You chose your side and fought for it, knowing that the others were the enemy”) to the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and then Trump. Laid out as clearly as this book does, Trump’s victory no longer looks like a surprise.
The last chapters look at the sort of country America has become under the Trump presidency. He reminds us of some basic truths which have got rather lost over time – the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the sheer chaos and decadence of this administration, the unblinking mixing of business and private interests. He explores the parallel universe which so many on that side of the argument inhabit. A woman from rightwing think tank the Heritage Foundation, when asked why she calls climate change a myth, blithely replies: “Of course. Why do so many scientists swallow the myth? I’d love to know!” As Naughtie remarks with a shrug, such conversations rarely get very far.
He looks forward to the coming presidential election with trepidation: a creaking political system, an electoral college skewed towards the sparsely populated conservative rural states, determined efforts by Republicans to disqualify African-American voters, the gerrymandering of electoral districts, the risks of electoral fraud.
But just when you think the book is going to end on a note of total gloom, he goes back to his first visit to America: then, as now, it was a country angry with itself, riven by a war of cultures. Today, as then, he does not believe the American dream will die: “For all its problems, this is a country where idealism still thrives.” The optimism survives. The love affair is not over.
