Paul Nitze, RIP

The consummate Cold Warrior is dead. One of the best and the brightest is gone. We do not have a Paul Nitze today and we are poorer for it. If this is (fair & balanced) regret, so be it.

[x The New York Times]
Paul Nitze, Cold War Arms Expert, Dies at 97
By MARILYN BERGER

Paul H. Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms whose roles as negotiator, diplomat and Washington insider spanned the era from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and helped shape America's cold war relationship with the Soviet Union, died Tuesday night at his home in Washington. He was 97.

The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Elisabeth Scott Porter, said.

From the beginning of the nuclear age, whether in government or out, Mr. Nitze urged successive American presidents to take measures against what he saw as the Soviet drive to overwhelm the United States through the force of arms. Yet he may be best remembered for his conciliatory role in efforts to achieve two major arms agreements with the Soviet Union.

In one, he was successful in negotiating an agreement that would eliminate intermediate-range missiles from Europe. In the other, he hoped to cap his long career with a so-called "grand compromise" in 1988 that would have severely circumscribed work on President Reagan's cherished Strategic Defense Initiative in exchange for deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both superpowers. His efforts foundered when the negotiators ran out of time as the Reagan administration came to an end.

In a now legendary moment of the cold war, Mr. Nitze undertook a bold, but unsuccessful personal effort to achieve an earlier arms agreement with the Russians. In 1982, acting on his own and superseding his instructions, Mr. Nitze took a walk with his Soviet counterpart in the Jura Mountains, where he tried to strike a bargain on a package dealing with intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

In that episode, which became known as the "walk in the woods," Mr. Nitze tried to cut through the bureaucratic tangle but was thwarted when both Moscow and Washington repudiated the agreement.

Mr. Nitze refused an appointment in the first Bush administration as ambassador-at-large emeritus saying that such a post would leave him with no clear responsibilities. He retired to an office at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University — a school that was named for him in 1989 — where he continued to write articles in a continuing attempt to influence policy.

With that, his long career in government came to an end, a career that began in 1940 with a telegram that said, "Be in Washington Monday, Forrestal." The summons from James V. Forrestal, then a special assistant at the White House, lured Mr. Nitze from the lucrative confines of Wall Street to the first of many assignments in government that involved him in the supply of the Allies for the war effort, a survey of the impact of the bombing in Europe and in Japan after the atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the feeding of the hungry of war-ravaged Europe, the creation of the Marshall Plan and crises in Iran and Berlin.

In the aftermath of World War II, Mr. Nitze became part of that remarkable group of public servants — George F. Kennan, Charles E. Bohlen, Robert A. Lovett, John J. McCloy — that coalesced around Dean Acheson to develop foreign political and military policy as the United States took its place as a major world power.

He was a senior State Department official, and later a secretary of the Navy and deputy secretary of defense. By the time he became one of the chief negotiators on strategic weapons, Mr. Nitze had accumulated more experience in the field of national security affairs than anyone of his time, to the point that his critics began to think he believed he had a monopoly on understanding the political uses of nuclear weapons.

Ever since 1950, when as head of the policy planning staff of the State Department he was principal author of a study on the Soviet threat, Mr. Nitze took a dark view of Soviet intentions, seeing in the Kremlin a drive for world hegemony.

That study — known as N.S.C.-68 — which conceived of deterrence in military rather than diplomatic terms — warned against sole reliance on the nuclear deterrent and urged a buildup of conventional forces. Its precepts became a cornerstone of American policy. In succeeding years, when the American nuclear monopoly was broken, Mr. Nitze warned regularly that the Soviet Union was trying to achieve preponderant nuclear strength as a tool of blackmail, or, in the worst case, to win an all-out war.

Later, when Mr. Nitze took his walk in the woods near Geneva to work out an arms deal, he confounded his critics, who considered him too hard-line because of his pessimistic views of the Russians.

A man of intimidating intellect, Mr. Nitze could be warm and affectionate or cerebral and brittle. He was a formidable bureaucrat with a brilliant mind and a persuasive pen. Out of government — as he was during the Carter administration — he was an equally effective critic, as he showed in the late 1970's as the mastermind of the opposition to the second strategic arms limitation agreement. He used complicated charts and computer printouts to warn that the treaty would lock the United States into permanent strategic inferiority. Despite this vigorous opposition, once Mr. Nitze was back in government he urged President Reagan to comply with the terms of the treaty even though it was never ratified.

There were, among his colleagues, those who said Mr. Nitze was so embittered at being excluded from the Carter administration that he could not assess the treaty dispassionately. He had too often been passed over for the major jobs, always on tap but never on top, as his old neighbor, James Reston, once wrote.

He always seemed too conservative for the liberal administrations and too liberal for the conservative ones. In an interview in which he looked back at his long career in government, Mr. Nitze acknowledged that it was one of his life's major disappointments that he had never been appointed to a cabinet position — as secretary of state or defense or as head of the Central Intelligence Agency. "I sometimes think I would have liked to be secretary of agriculture," he said with a rueful chuckle.

While his considerable expertise was in the field of political-military affairs, his little joke was not far off the mark. For years, in addition to homes in Washington, Northeast Harbor, Me., and Aspen, Colo., he maintained a 1,920-acre working farm in Maryland on the banks of the Potomac, where he kept pigs and cattle and grew corn. It was here that he rode horses and sailed along the Potomac and practiced the piano, in a lifelong endeavor to understand, as one friend said, why Bach sounds like Bach. "Whatever he did," another friend said, "it had to be first rate."

For all that good life, Mr. Nitze — with a full head of white hair and still athletic and trim in his later years, well-educated, intelligent and wealthy — remained a confirmed pessimist, having been deeply affected by seeing first-hand the outbreak of two world wars.

Paul Henry Nitze was born on Jan. 16, 1907, in Amherst, Mass., where his father, one of the world's leading philologists, was a professor of Romance languages. The Nitze family did not live on a professor's salary, however. Mr. Nitze explained that "both my grandparents did very well." As a child, there were summers in Europe, mainly in Germany, and the family was in the Tyrol in 1914 when World War I broke out.

Mr. Nitze spent much of his boyhood in Chicago. His father taught at the university and he attended experimental schools before going on to Hotchkiss and Harvard. Generally a good student, he said: "I distinguished myself by getting the lowest mark ever given at Harvard, a zero, in a course on the history of economic thought. The most beautiful girl suggested that I go down to Newport for the weekend on the day of the final exam."

The zero left no permanent economic scar, for Nitze got rich on Wall Street despite the Depression, first at Dillon Read Inc. and then in his own firm, Paul H. Nitze Inc. He made one fortune from a company he started with other investors known as the U.S. Vitamin and Pharmaceutical Company.

The initial investment was $100,000. It was sold to Revlon in the 1950's for $100 million. Another fortune came from real estate investments in Aspen. In 1932, he married Phyllis Pratt, whose grandfather was a founder of the Standard Oil Company of New York and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Mrs. Nitze died in 1987.

In 1993, he married Elisabeth Porter. She survives him, as do his four children: Heidi and Peter, both of New York; William, of Washington, and Anina Nitze Moriarty, of Boston; a stepdaughter, Erin Porter, of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia; 11 grandchildren, 3 step-grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren.

Earlier this year, in one of his last public appearances, Mr. Nitze was present, in Maine, at the christening of a Navy destroyer bearing his name, only the eighth time the Navy has named a warship for a living person.

As the 1940 telegram recalls, Mr. Nitze was summoned to Washington by Mr. Forrestal, who had been president of Dillon Read, where Mr. Nitze was a vice president, before going to the White House to work for President Roosevelt.

Mr. Nitze, who had seen Hitler during one of his visits to Germany, opposed United States entry into the war. But he quickly became active in the American war effort. He helped draft the Selective Service Act and, in 1942, became chief of the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare.

Subsequently he became director of foreign procurement and development for the foreign economic administration. He was vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey — a study that years later caused him to question United States bombing strategy in Vietnam. After the war, he headed the billion-dollar global relief program.

In 1950, during the Truman administration, he succeeded George F. Kennan as head of the State Department's policy planning staff. It was then that Mr. Nitze started making his mark as a political-military strategist whose dark view of the Soviets surpassed those of Mr. Kennan and Mr. Bohlen, the nation's leading experts on the Soviet Union. Mr. Kennan found the language of N.S.C.-68 to be dangerously melodramatic and unhelpful.

Seven years later, although out of favor during the Eisenhower administration, Mr. Nitze was appointed to the presidential committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither that called for nationwide fallout shelters and warned of a "missile gap" that eventually proved to be illusory.

Mr. Nitze was a Democrat who changed parties to protest President Franklin D. Roosevelt's effort to pack the Supreme Court. He returned to the fold at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration. Squeezed out of office because of his close association with Mr. Acheson and discouraged at being on the outside, Mr. Nitze went back to his farm and, at the suggestion of his wife, who wanted to take his mind off his troubles, entered a horse race at the Charles County fair. When he won, he acknowledged, at least to himself, his longing for recognition.

In an oral history he made for the Air Force, he said he remembered thinking, "I had done a lot of really worthwhile things in the United States government and really never gotten any credit — and here I had a really public triumph."

President Kennedy offered Mr. Nitze several jobs and gave him 30 seconds to decide which one he wanted. He chose deputy defense secretary, but did not get the post until seven years later. In the intervening years, he was an assistant secretary in the Pentagon and then secretary of the Navy.

When President Nixon appointed Mr. Nitze to the United States delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union, he played an important role in negotiating the A.B.M. treaty, but he resigned in 1974, charging that the "depressing reality of the traumatic events" connected with Watergate was making the administration too anxious to cut a deal with the Soviets.

As an early supporter of Jimmy Carter, Mr. Nitze expected he would finally get a major appointment and was bitterly disappointed when he was passed over yet again. His views were too hawkish for the liberal foreign policy that President Carter wanted to pursue. Mr. Nitze mounted a spirited — some called it venomous — opposition to the confirmation of one of his old colleagues, Paul C. Warnke, as Mr. Carter's strategic arms negotiator, incurring the wrath of old friends who labeled him an ideologue.

When Mr. Warnke was confirmed and the Carter administration achieved a second strategic arms limitation treaty, Mr. Nitze became its most vocal and effective critic, the intellectual guru for the Committee on the Present Danger in its campaign against the agreement. It was never ratified. Mr. Carter did not submit it for ratification after Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, and Mr. Reagan wanted to renegotiate the whole thing.

Mr. Nitze's hard line on the Soviets found greater resonance with President Reagan, who put him in charge of the United States delegation to the intermediate-range nuclear forces talks. His mandate was to negotiate the so-called zero-zero option by which the United States would forgo future American deployment of new missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would remove the missiles it had aimed at Western Europe.

The two sides were far apart when Mr. Nitze went on that now famous walk in the woods to draw the Soviets into a package deal. When the proposal was rejected on both sides, Mr. Nitze, instead of being reprimanded, was appointed, in 1984, special adviser to the president on arms control matters. A few years later, the Soviet Union, which had originally rejected the zero-zero option, accepted a more comprehensive arrangement, the so-called "double zero" agreement that limited all medium-range missiles in Europe and shorter-range missiles as well. That agreement was signed on Dec. 8, 1987.

In November 1985, Mr. Reagan awarded Mr. Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet, that same year Mr. Nitze once again seemed to be going out on his own to raise serious questions about Mr. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. While insisting that he favored "Star Wars," he laid down such stringent terms for its acceptability — that it be "cost effective at the margin," that is, that the cost of the defense system not exceed the cost to the Soviet Union of adding units of offensive weapons or countermeasures to overwhelm that defense — that he seemed to be torpedoing it from the start, in effect handing useful arguments to its opponents.

At the same time, he was seeking to make a deal that would limit the elaborate new defense system in exchange for cuts in offensive weapons, a two-pronged ploy that once again provided evidence of his cunning and skill as a bureaucrat, and summed up a lifetime of survival in Washington.

"Some people say there are two policies in the executive branch," he said one day as he sat in his office on the seventh floor of the State Department, just before his 79th birthday in January 1986. "One is mine and the other is the president's, which is marginally so. Some of the things I've said are different from what the president has said, but all the things I have said have been approved by the president."

Marilyn Berger—a former NBC News White House correspondent and a former Washington Post diplomatic correspondent—is the chief obituary writer for The New York Times.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company

Bread & Roses

I taught U. S. history (mainly) at the Collegium Excellens for 32 years. For most of that time (except the last three years), I taught an overload. This meant that I taught six (6) courses each fall and spring term. If I did not actually teach six (6) classes, I worked the equivalent of six (6) classes. The standard load during my tenure at the Collegium Excellens was five (5) courses each term. In the argot of the workplace, each course carried 3 hours or units of college credit and so a teacher at Collegium Excellens typically had a 15-hour load (5 courses x 3 hours or units). An overload was an 18-hour load (6 courses). To the non-academic, a 15- or an 18-hour workweek sounds decadent. However, the rule of thumb for students was 3 hours of preparation outside of class for each hour in class. So, that meant a 9-hour week for students. Teachers should work as hard as their students. Thus the 3 hours of preparation for each hour in class meant 9 hours per course x 6 courses and the result was a very respectable (to a blue-collar worker) 54-hour workweek. A standard load of 5 courses meant a 45-hour workweek. Most blue-collar workers would expect overtime pay. Instead, at the Collegium Excellens, the prevailing attitude of the administration (especially the academic dean) was that it didn't matter how many classes a teacher met, it was all the same course. Similarly, this same administrative nincompoop believed that class size was irrelevant. Today, the teachers in the Chicago City Colleges want—in addition to a 12-hour load—the class-size ceiling lowered from 35 to 30. At the Collegium Excellens, the class-size ceiling was 45 (except Freshman Composition in the English Department: 25 students per class) and the academic dean would have never limited the size of the class. As I look back, I had no business with an 18-hour load. I had no business dealing with 50+ students in each class. The academic dean, who spent a brief time in the classroom in the mid-1960s, had no idea what amounted to a conscionable workload for his faculty. He should have faced—in my time—what his peers at the City Colleges of Chicago are facing today. ¡Huelga! If this is (fair & balanced) trade unionism, so be it.

[x The Chronicle of Higher Education]
Professors Walk Off Their Jobs in Workload Dispute at City Colleges of Chicago
By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

Full-time professors went on strike on Tuesday at the City Colleges of Chicago, prompting the cancellation of many classes at the seven-college system.

Administrators said that the colleges remained open and that 70 percent of the classes are taught by part-time instructors who are not on strike. But Perry J. Buckley, president of the striking union, scoffed at that number, saying that college officials must have counted every possible class -- "adult ed, yoga, candle making, GED, and ESL."

As he spoke from his cellphone while walking a picket line, Mr. Buckley said he had just met with a student who was told that six of his seven classes would not be held. "Then he went to the one, and no one was there," said Mr. Buckley, an English professor.

The City Colleges and the Cook County College Teachers Union Local 1600, which represents about 500 professors, have been negotiating for 16 months, including 5 months with the help of a federal mediator. The professors' previous contract expired in July.

While the sides have disagreed on several issues, the main sticking point is workload. Administrators want the professors to teach 15 hours per semester, or five courses, as community-college professors around the state do. At the City Colleges, about half of the full-timers teach 12 hours per semester, or four courses.

"This is a fairness issue," James C. Tyree, chairman of the colleges' Board of Trustees said in a written statement. "They should teach the same schedule as everyone else in our system and in the rest of Illinois. It's hard for us to make the case for greater funding from the state when half of our professors teach less than everyone else."

Newly hired professors already teach 15 hours a semester, Mr. Buckley said. "What they're saying is that they want everyone to be overworked," he said.

While some professors at the City Colleges of Chicago do teach fewer classes, they supervise more students than do other community-college instructors because of the large class sizes, Mr. Buckley said. The union is pushing to lower the class-size limits, from 35 to 30.

In the colleges' statement, Wayne Watson, the chancellor, said the institution has been "very flexible on salary and health care, and we've offered to compromise on workload."

Mr. Buckley suggested that the union, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, was digging in for a long strike. "We'll stay out a month if we have to," he said. But he also said that city officials, concerned about the disruption to polling places, would probably pressure the colleges to settle the contract before the November 2 election.

Mr. Buckley acknowledged that it was the union that had walked away from the bargaining table after the two sides had seemed very close to a deal over the weekend. He said he had given the chancellor his home and cellphone numbers.

"I have nothing to say to the man," Mr. Buckley said. "Whenever he's ready to talk, he can call."

Scott Smallwood is a senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

W Is An Idiot, But At Least He's Consistent!

Bush 41 likes to twit his eldest son by calling him "Quincy." John Quincy Adams was the first son to serve as President of the United States following his father (John Adams). Bush 41 ought to call his eldest son "Herbert." This is not a reference to Bush 41's first middle name: George Herbert Walker Bush. Instead, W deserves "Herbert" because he is more like Herbert C. Hoover than any of his predecessors. The one difference between W and Hoover is that poor Hoover was a helluva lot smarter than W. Despite all of his smarts, Hoover was paralyzed as a leader in the face of the Great Depression. W—without any intellectual talent (Smartass quips don't get the job done.)—is a dumb Hoover. Play what if and imagine what would have happened if there had been a second Hoover administration! If this is (fair & balanced) harsh reality, so be it.

[x HNN]
Can Bush Out-Hoover Hoover?
By Robert S. McElvaine

A young woman interviewed after the first presidential debate told the BBC that she was voting for Bush despite the fact that she thought he had "showed himself to be a complete idiot. "Why?" the perplexed reporter inquired. "Because Kerry is inconsistent," the American responded. "At least Bush is consistent."

The reelection campaign of George W. Bush has placed almost all its chips on a bet that "consistency" will prove to be this year's trump card. It hopes that a majority of voters will value consistency above even wisdom or common sense.

The whole Bush campaign seems to be centered on convincing American voters that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry is inconsistent: a "flip-flopper," the sender of "mixed messages." Bush strategists may yet succeed with this gamble, but they should beware of a well-worn card in the Democrats' hand. It's the Herbert Hoover Card.

Democrats have played that card in many presidential elections since 1932 by reminding voters that the economy plunged into the Great Depression during that Republican president's administration. Never before, however, has the linking of an incumbent Republican president with Hoover been as appropriate as it is this year. And the reasons go far beyond the one we keep hearing about, that George W. Bush is the first president since Hoover under whom there has been a net loss of American jobs.

The Kerry campaign's best bet to win the highest stakes presidential election since Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 is to call the Republicans' bluff by playing not one, but a pair of Hoover cards: "consistency" and Bush's economic record.

The 1932 election, like this year's, pitted an incumbent Republican who was a man of steadfast principles from which he would not deviate against a pragmatic Democratic challenger. Contemporary critics described Roosevelt in terms very similar to those the Bush campaign is using to label Kerry, such as "two-sided" and "volatile."

Bush's principles are certainly not those of Hoover, who, to cite but two among several major differences, was committed to balancing the budget and was uninterested in using military force to try to reshape the world in the image of the United States. Nor, the deep recession of 2001-2003 notwithstanding, are the critical issues today what they were in 1932.

Yet the basic question facing the electorate is the same in 2004 as it was seventy-two years ago: Should we continue on a course charted by an ideologue who is unaffected by evidence that his course is wrong, or should we switch to a leader who is willing to let evidence guide his decisions?

The most important difference between President Bush and Senator Kerry is similar to the crucial distinction between Hoover and Roosevelt. Bush, like Hoover, is committed to a worldview he is sure is correct. To such a mind, facts do not matter. If the evidence does not support what he "knows" is true, it is to be ignored. When asked, as he was again in the second presidential debate, to identify a mistake he has made, Bush cannot do it. The reason is that Bush, like Hoover, begins with certainty and so cannot conceive of being wrong.

FDR famously said in 1932, "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another." Hoover's approach, on the other hand, was to take a method that he "knew" to be correct and try it. If it failed, he would deny its failure and try it again. And again and again. Hoover, for instance, "knew" that a balanced budget was necessary to restore confidence, so he cut spending when the stimulus of federal spending was desperately needed. Bush takes the same approach.

The current president's father was criticized for not having what he termed "the vision thing." The son's problem is just the opposite. He has such a Vision that it blinds his vision. People such as Hoover and the younger Bush cannot see the trees for the forest. Their unwavering adherence to their ideal of the ways things ought to be prevents them from seeing the way things are.

Emerson's famous maxim about consistency is often repeated without its key term. The sage of Concord wrote not that consistency itself is foolish, but that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen . . . ."

Staying the course is fine when you're on the right course. Then positive terms are used to describe a leader's unchangeable character: consistent, tenacious, unshakable, steadfast. But when someone insists on maintaining policies that fail, the terms used to portray his inflexible nature become negative: stubborn, obstinate, pigheaded. Such a person matches Emerson's characterization of a little statesman.

Our strategy is succeeding in Iraq, President Bush keeps repeating. That sounds like Hoover repeating, as the Depression deepened, that prosperity was just around the corner. Indeed, Bush is saying almost the same thing about prosperity as well.

Archie Bunker used to sing, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again." If the Kerry campaign can get voters to see that we now have a man like Herbert Hoover again, the Republicans' bet on consistency will lose them the pot in the biggest electoral game since Hoover's defeat.

Robert S. McElvaine—who teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS—is the author of The Great Depression and other books dealing with the New Deal Era. He is a writer for the History News Service.This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both the author and the History News Service are clearly credited.

Copyright © 2004 History News Network

Why I Like Jon Stewart!

Jon Stewart appeared on CNN's "Crossfire" and gave the co-hosts—Paul Begala (Clintonista) on the Left and Tucker Carlson on the Right—what Patty gave the drum. When Stewart finished kicking the two pundits from one end of the "Crossfire" set to the other, the targets of his (well-justified) contempt whined that Stewart hadn't played fair. This AM on the "Imus in the Morning" show on MSNBC, the I-Man (Don Imus) was critical of Stewart for breaking the rules. The I-Man delivered an inappropriate roast of the Slickster and Hillary at a Washington, DC event that fell flatter than a pancake. No one laughed. Stewart wasn't trying to be funny on "Crossfire." The I-Man embarrassed himself. Today, Imus had the gall of accuse Stewart of inappropriate behavior. If Don Imus had any cojones, he would invite Jon Stewart on "Imus in the Morning" and take whatever Stewart dished out. If this is (fair & balanced) hypocrisy, so be it.

[x The New York Times]
No Jokes or Spin. It's Time (Gasp) to Talk.
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

There is nothing more painful than watching a comedian turn self-righteous. Unless of course, the comedian is lashing out at smug and self-serving television-news personalities. Jon Stewart could not resist a last dig at CNN's "Crossfire" during his monologue on Comedy Central on Monday night . "They said I wasn't being funny," the star of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" said, rolling his eyes expressively. "And I said to them: 'I know that. But tomorrow I will go back to being funny," Mr. Stewart said, adding that their show would still be bad, although he used a more vulgar expression.

And that is why his surprise attack on the hosts of CNN's "Crossfire" was so satisfying last Friday. Exchanging his usual goofy teasing for withering contempt, he told Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson that they were partisan hacks and that their pro-wrestling approach to political discourse was "hurting America." (He also used an epithet for the male reproductive organ to describe Mr. Carlson.)

Real anger is as rare on television as real discussion. Presidential candidates no longer address each other directly in debates. Guests on the "Tonight" show or "Oprah" are scripted monologuists who pitch their latest projects and humor the host. It has been decades since talk-show guests conversed with one another, yet there was a time when famous people held long and at times legendarily hostile discussions (Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. on ABC in 1968, Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1980).

Nowadays, live television meltdowns seem to be pathological, not political - Janet Jackson baring a breast during the Super Bowl or Farrah Fawcett babbling incoherently to David Letterman.

The fuming partisan rants on Fox News or "Real Time With Bill Maher" are aimed at the converted. And celebrities, like politicians, stay on message and stick to talking points, which may help explain the popularity of "Celebrity Poker" - it gives viewers a rare, unfiltered glimpse of stars' real personalities as they handle a bad hand or a humiliating bluff.

Mr. Stewart's frankness was a cool, startling, rational version of Senator Zell Miller's loony excoriation ("Get out of my face") to Chris Matthews of MSNBC during the Republican convention.

The transcript of Friday's "Crossfire," and the blog commentary about it, popped up all over the Internet this weekend. Mr. Stewart's Howard Beal (of "Network") outburst stood out because he said what a lot of viewers feel helpless to correct: that news programs, particularly on cable, have become echo chambers for political attacks, amplifying the noise instead of parsing the misinformation. Whether the issue is Swift boat ads or Bill O'Reilly's sexual harassment suit, shows like "Crossfire" or "Hardball" provide gladiator-style infotainment as journalists clownishly seek to amuse or rile viewers, not inform them.

When Mr. Carlson took the offense, charging that Mr. Stewart had no right to complain since he had asked Senator John Kerry softball questions on "The Daily Show," Mr. Stewart looked genuinely appalled. "I didn't realize - and maybe this explains quite a bit - that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity." When Mr. Carlson continued to argue, Mr. Stewart shut him down hard. "You are on CNN," he said. "The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls."

All late-night talk-show hosts make jokes about politicians. What distinguishes Mr. Stewart from Jay Leno and David Letterman is that the Comedy Central star mocks the entire political process, boring in tightly on the lockstep thinking and complacency of the parties and the media as well as the candidates. More than other television analysts and commentators, he and his writers put a spotlight on the inanities and bland hypocrisies that go mostly unnoticed in the average news cycle.

Mr. Stewart is very funny, but it is the vein of "a plague on both your houses" indignation that has made his show a cult favorite: many younger voters are turning to the "The Daily Show" for their news analysis, and are better served there than on much of what purports to be real news on cable.

And of course it was fun just to see television pundits who think they are part of the same media version of the Algonquin Round Table as Mr. Stewart lose their cool when he tore off the tablecloth and shattered the plates. "Wait,'' Mr. Carlson said querulously. "I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny." Mr. Stewart was funny. And it was at their expense.

Alessandra Stanley is a television critic for the New York Times.


Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company