In many ways, Robert Scheer’s career encapsulates the long march of progressive journalism in postwar America. After an early stint at Ramparts, he moved from Playboy to the Los Angeles Times (from which he was defenestrated in 2005, after nearly three decades at the paper). More recently, he has co-founded an online magazine, Truthdig.com, and published a collection of interviews, Playing President: My Close Encounters With Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton—and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush (2006), as well as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (2008). In a conversation with CJR’s James Marcus, the seventy-two-year-old contrarian mused over good and evil and the Internet, and revealed some surprisingly nonpartisan preferences. Who would have thought that this supposed pinko and hale companion of Eldridge Cleaver would have such a soft spot for Dwight David Eisenhower?
You’ve been associated with print journalism for more than forty years and are surely one of the few reporters to have gotten married in the city room. Yet you’re now editing Truthdig.com, an online magazine. What’s that transition been like?
Let me give you more information than you need. I originally studied engineering, because I had pretty serious dyslexia; until computers came along, I really couldn’t have been a writer. I was always a good reader, but I couldn’t do cursive script, and nobody could read my handwriting.
But you did lots of journalism in the pre-computer era.
That was mostly due to going out with women with good editing skills. But I’ve never had a Luddite mentality, that’s what I’m saying. I’ve always loved computers.
So you go way back with this stuff?
I did my graduate work in nineteen-fifty-nine on one of those big IBM machines, the kind that took up a whole room. And I was using the Internet when it was three-hundred baud, reporting from Moscow and everything. So I love the technology. I find it very liberating—it lets you edit, run long pieces, avoid cutting down trees.
But does the Web dictate any difference in approach for journalists?
No. Ever since I was at Ramparts, where I started, I never really made a decision about whether I
was alternative or mainstream. I assume you’re going to do the same kind of work whether you’re writing for Hustler or Esquire or the L.A. Times. I try to hold on to my own voice, even when I have to lose the first person. I always feel that the readers are getting me. I also try to be fair, to keep an open mind—although not so open, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, that your brains fall out.
You’ve worn a lot of hats in your career: reporter, correspondent, columnist, editor. Is there one in particular that you prefer?
I’m not a good editor, I won’t make that claim. My twenty-six-year-old son Peter is running Truthdig, and I don’t tell him what to do. I never wanted it to be my blog or my Web site or something that was particularly identified with me.
But do you set the political tone?
We don’t have a political tone. My only guideline is that we won’t be homophobic or anti-Semitic—beyond that, we’re going to let people have different views. There will always be things in the magazine that I don’t agree with. And look at the irony in The Pornography of Power. In my chapter on the Boeing air-tanker scandal, which I researched pretty well, John McCain is a kind of hero. And Barbara Boxer, who I really like, doesn’t come off so well.
Look, I never had a revolutionary notion. I’ve always believed in limited government and respect for the individual, which set me apart from people with a more cavalier attitude toward state power.
Come now, you got to be shitting me. A guy who idolized the North Korean regime has also been a believer “in limited government and respect for the individual”, and you just let that one fly?
Posted by TDC on Tue 19 Aug 2008 at 11:01 AM
TDC - Source on that, please?
Posted by D8N on Tue 19 Aug 2008 at 01:42 PM
Scheer's comment that the conservatives "got really nasty" deserves challenging, too. The left got really nasty in the '60s and early '70s when they attacked members of the military for fighting in Vietnam. The left got really nasty when people like Bernadine Dohrn were blowing up things. The left got really nasty when they called for ex-President Richard Nixon's head and then deserted Jerry Ford for pardoning him. Did his coverage of all that "get it right"?
Posted by Carol Frey on Tue 19 Aug 2008 at 02:33 PM
Hilarious - like Marx interviewing Lenin, only with about 1/2 the IQ.
I wonder if these pompous arses' ever realize how they come-off to the public. Boy, too bad the public doesn't check out these guys personal lives - like say if the Enquirer follwed them around for 6 months?
Oy, VEY-AWAY.
Great interview - I am sure you both loved it, and after all, nobody loves you more than that look in the mirror eh dudes?
(Guess it's too depressing to mention the election eh? The DEMS blow another lay-up).
Enjoy guys - and to the investing public: DON'T TAKE A CHECK FROM EITHER ONE OF THESE GUYS.
Gene Wiley
seeing is believing.
Posted by gene wiley on Tue 19 Aug 2008 at 03:45 PM
There are many sources that Scheer was a complete DPKR-o-phile. Here is one of the more interesting, its from Ron Radosh:
Our interview went on and on, and Scheer absolutely refused to discuss any other topic except for Kim and North Korean communism. At one point I asked him incredulously, “Bob, do you really believe this crap?” Scheer responded with complete earnest that he did – that Kim had charted out a path that other nations should take as an example of the art of the possible. When I returned to New York and played the tape for the producers at Pacifica-WBAI, it was too far out even for them, and they refused to air it.
Or, for Scheerin his own words: Black Panthers Open Office in Algiers, NY Times, Sep 14, 1970
Lots more if you want them.
Posted by TDC on Tue 19 Aug 2008 at 03:50 PM
Carol Frey's comment makes me laugh. Whether the left has gotten nasty doesn't refute the fall of the civility of the right. It's when the right started trolling the trailer parks for votes, insisting to print the graphic sexual details of a President's affair to embarrass the left (which Clinton handily did all by himself), and push some of the crudest and unfunny jokes of the modern political era that conservatives got nasty. The invisible curtain of morality fell in words long before the actions of Mark Foley and Larry Craig.
Too bad everything that everything conservatism stands for is now represented by a guy holding the American flag backwards in the middle of China.
Posted by Circusboy on Tue 19 Aug 2008 at 07:56 PM
The biggest error that I made is that I exaggerated the strength of the political center in America
Well that and the whole DPKR is the land of milk and honey thing .... but lucky for you your gutless interviewer forgot about all that.
Posted by TDC on Wed 20 Aug 2008 at 04:18 PM
I'm always happy to see a lively comment thread--proof that at least one human being read the piece. And let me respond in brief, as the Marx to Scheer's Lenin (either the worst or best thing anybody has ever said about me). The debate over Scheer's attitude toward North Korea circa 1970 has been going on for a long, long time. Why write another article bludgeoning him for his convictions of forty years ago, assuming he really held them? I'm more interested in what the succeeding decades have taught him. As for "getting nasty," I think we can call that a non-partisan habit. As for Nixon--in this very article, Scheer's mother chews him out for writing a sympathetic portrait of the beleaguered president. And finally, I believe the National Enquirer has a tail on me at this very moment.
Posted by James Marcus on Thu 21 Aug 2008 at 01:38 PM
I am very surprised to see Mr. Scheer refer to Graham Greene as a person of the right. Wasn't the English literary giant known for his left-wing sympathies? Or does he have in mind a different Graham Greene?
Posted by PJT on Thu 28 Aug 2008 at 07:09 PM
The debate over Scheer's attitude toward North Korea circa 1970 has been going on for a long, long time.
Because it goes directly to the credibility of this statement:
Look, I never had a revolutionary notion. I’ve always believed in limited government and respect for the individual, which set me apart from people with a more cavalier attitude toward state power.
There is a difference between being respectful during an interview and rolling over and submitting like a loyal canine. To not have even chuckled at a response as preposterous as the one above makes you look more like some partisan hack from Pravda or Granma than it does any sort or respectable journalist.
Posted by TDC on Fri 29 Aug 2008 at 10:26 AM
You want to rehash Scheer's 40-year-old infatuation with North Korea because that makes it easier to ignore his subsequent career. This is the sort of juvenile nonsense that has poisoned the political conversation in this country. It's no more useful than endlessly dwelling on George W. Bush's youthful interlude as a drunken frat boy. Why don't you read the two recent books I mentioned in my introductory paragraph? If they strike you as knee-jerk, partisan nastiness, then go ahead, rake the author over the coals. But at least give Scheer the courage of his convictions, which is exactly what he does in his encounters with Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41.
Posted by James Marcus on Sat 30 Aug 2008 at 01:46 PM
You want to rehash Scheer's 40-year-old infatuation with North Korea because that makes it easier to ignore his subsequent career.
Its still relevant for several reasons. While many 60’s era radicals have either repudiated their former totalitarian beliefs, and make no mistake, they were totalitarian dogmas these people prescribes to, Scheer lied in this interview and continues to lie about his former political beliefs. Its not a matter of interpretation, the record on what he believed is very clear and very black and white. I don’t “ignore” his subsequent carrier, because there is very little of real substance. The only reason his career didn’t plateau with the end of the Black Power movement is because he got lucky enough to hook up with Zacchino, otherwise he would have spent the remainder of his career writing two bit pieces for “The Nation” or the “The Progressive”.
It's no more useful than endlessly dwelling on George W. Bush's youthful interlude as a drunken frat boy.
Then why, exactly, has the liberal community, for the large part, not dropped that?
Why don't you read the two recent books I mentioned in my introductory paragraph?
I read “Pornography of Power”, and it was , to put it mildly, a tired polemic.
If they strike you as knee-jerk, partisan nastiness, then go ahead, rake the author over the coals. But at least give Scheer the courage of his convictions, which is exactly what he does in his encounters with Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41
I give no one “the courage of his convictions” when his convictions and the convictions of his ideological comrades and fellow travelers unleashed the most repressive form of totalitarianism this world has seen. Need proof, book a trip to Pyongyang and take an “unguided” trip through the North Korean countryside. Or better yet, read all about when Scheer went to protest the US Army from the North Korean side of the Joint Security Area. Classy.
Posted by TDC on Sat 30 Aug 2008 at 09:33 PM
Thanks for responding. Whether Scheer lied or not is a matter of debate. Most of the discussions on the Web pertaining to his alleged infatuation with North Korea cite exactly one source--the very same paragraph you cited, from Ronald Radosh's "Commies." Needless to say, Radosh can't produce the tape, nor has a transcription surfaced, so it's his word against Scheer's. That is not what I would call airtight evidence. Even David Horowitz was forced to play the guilt-by-association game, noting that a Ramparts copyeditor who had traveled with Scheer's delegation was gaga about North Korea when she returned--pretty pathetic. I think we can agree to disagree about the value of Scheer's subsequent career. He has certainly been ahead of the curve when it comes to certain issues, including the mendacious marketing job that got us bogged down in Iraq. Now, I can't speak for the "liberal community," but I brought up the harping on Bush's youthful follies because it seems idiotic and cowardly to me. Two final points: you may disagree with much of The Pornography of Power, but do you really endorse all of the pork-flavored defense spending that is the object of Scheer's scorn? And finally, I'll say it again--even if Scheer was gullible enough to admire North Korea in his youth (and the evidence is far from clear on that point), it would not invalidate the rest of his career. Understanding that point does not require a trip to Pyongyang.
Posted by James Marcus on Sun 31 Aug 2008 at 07:55 PM
Whether Scheer lied or not is a matter of debate
Whether Scheer lied is most certainly not a matter of debate. I would like to think that objective truth does still exist in the world.
Needless to say, Radosh can't produce the tape, nor has a transcription surfaced, so it's his word against Scheer's. That is not what I would call airtight evidence.
Radosh has a much better reputation both for his academic and polemic work then Scheer does. I realize that he may have alienated you and the fellow travelers when he dared come to the conclusion that the Rosenberg’s were guilty and that the Sandinistas were totalitarian thugs, but the quality of his work has never been credibly challenged, unless you count doctrinaire Stalinist like Grover Furr. I don’t recall when Radosh was asked to produce either a transcript or a tape, so that sounds a bit like a poorly constructed straw man. But, for the sake of argument, you want to ignore Radosh and Horowitz (a fellow Ramparts editor who was very familiar with Scheer), there are also all of these guys who directly quote Shceer’s oogling of Lil Kim and power of Juche. Permanent records are a bitch.
He has certainly been ahead of the curve when it comes to certain issues, including the mendacious marketing job that got us bogged down in Iraq.
Hey look at that, a broken clock can be right twice a day. Was he also “above the curve” when he wrote that the US was giving tactic approval to the Taliban by giving it $40million in aid? A story that later turned out to be total bullsht?
do you really endorse all of the pork-flavored defense spending that is the object of Scheer's scorn
Of course not, its my tax money too, but many of the examples and arguments Scheer used stem more from his lack of understanding about how large projects are proposed and executed, especially when dealing with a large government bureaucracy, and his own biases about the “military industrial complex”. And with as much as Scheer objects to defense “pork” I would think that he would be just as critical of the bloated education budgets in this country that produce less and less each year… or does a question like that cross some kind of PC lefty gobbledygook taboo? At least you can say this about the DOD, they do produce an effective product.
even if Scheer was gullible enough to admire North Korea in his youth (and the evidence is far from clear on that point), it would not invalidate the rest of his career.
And I’ll say it again, he didn’t just “admire” the land of prosperity and freedom that the DPKR was, he was in love with it. His refusal to either admit that he was not just a fan but one of the founders of the I heart lil Kim fan club and his continued, all be it more subtle, apologetics for the regime certainly does call his integrity and reputation into questions. He’s like a contemporary Paul de Mann.
The fact remains that Scheer always take the, oh sure he packages it a lot better than many left writers, but there’s nothing uniquely insightful or original in any of his work. He is what Radosh likes to call the “leftover” left.
Posted by TDC on Mon 1 Sep 2008 at 11:32 AM