The National Interest/Joe Klein

McDIPLOMACY

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Do the Russians deserve a break today?

GEPHARDT'S BIG IDEA

SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, DICK GEPHARDT—EA-
gle Scout and majority leader of the
House of Representatives—made a fairly
classic American political speech and
nearly got his head torn off. Gephardt's
subject was American policy toward the
Soviet Union. His outrageous thesis was
that America should have one. The hubris
now passing for policy, he argued, was
insufficient.

This was, in fact, no more nor less than
Czech president Vaclav Havel (a far bet-
ter politician than playwright, if the truth
be known) had asked in his moving ad-
dress to Congress in February: "You can
help us most of all if you help the Soviet
Union on its irreversible but immensely
complicated road to democracy."

But Gephardt wasn't nearly as deft. He
made two "mistakes." First, he lashed the
Bush administration for pursuing a policy
"without vision, without imagination,
without a guiding light save precious pub-
lic-opinion polls." Then, as one of a series
of suggestions for helping the Soviets, the
majority leader sidled up to the notion of
direct aid—"foreign aid to the hated Com-
mies," as Senator Alan Simpson, the oc-
casionally too colorful senator from Wyo-
ming, put it.

Actually, all Gephardt proposed was
lifting trade restrictions and, if the hated
Commies needed food, donating some
American grain to the cause. This wasn't
exactly opening the Treasury or handing
over the "peace dividend" to the Russ-
ies, as some charged—the administra-
tion already subsidizes the sale of

grain to the Soviets; it's a small step from
subsidy to charity—but the near-unani-
mous reaction within the Beltway was
ballistic.

The White House quickly was on the
phone, searching for a hit man—and
found one in the reliable Simpson. He
took to the Senate floor in a nearly un-
precedented, and decidedly personal, at-
tack on a member of the lower House.
Gephardt, he said, was still running for
president. He was "suffering from burn-
ing-bosom syndrome."

Simpson—who was even more murky
and vituperative several nights later on
the MacNeil/Lehrer show—soon had
company from the usual suspects. Marlin
Fitzwater called Gephardt “the Maxwell
Smart of politics.” Lee Atwater promised
“a surprise in store” for “the little man.”
Senator Bob Dole noted that the Demo-
crats’ solution to most problems was to
throw money at them, “but this is going
pretty far, even for a Democrat.”

Apparently, it was.
There was near-total si-
lence from Gephardt's
colleagues (but for some
friends in the House). Not
one Democrat rose to de-
fend him on the Senate
floor; indeed, the normal-
ly prudent Bill Bradley
snapped off a widely used
sound bite: "Unless they
reform the economy, any
economic [aid] is going
down a rathole."

Now, let us acknowl-
edge that Senators Simp-

son and Bradley both have points. Gep-
hardt does suffer from a bad case of
White House fever (even though he's
vowed to abstain in 1992). In the 1988
presidential campaign, he was the candi-
date most guilty of the sort of poll-watch-
ing and pandering that he now finds so
disturbing in the president. His willing-
ness to bash the Japanese and Koreans
was particularly unseemly—and a far cry
philosophically from his more recent,
statesmanlike internationalism.

Also, Bradley is right on the macro poli-
cy level: Any foreign aid that eases the So-
viet economic crisis, that makes the tran-
sition to a market economy less
compelling, would clearly be money
thrown “down a rathole.”

It may be a small step from subsidy to
charity, but sending CARE packages is
probably a step too far. The proud Rus-
sians may find such unrequested gifts pa-
tronizing, in any case.

Still: None of the critics actually seems
to have read Gephardt's speech. The
food-for-peace business was only one line.
The real news was that the majority leader
had dared to express an essential Ameri-
can characteristic that has been absent
from this country's foreign policy for a
quarter century: an ad hoc, informal, in-
vigorating idealism—the sort of impulse
that led John F. Kennedy to create the
Peace Corps (and intervene in Vietnam,
but that lesson may have been learned).

In the most important section of the
speech, Gephardt proposes a "Freedom In-
ternational . . . a modern-day Berlin Airlift
bringing planeloads of people across the At-
lantic in both directions." He calls for mass
exchanges of students, teachers—and busi-
nessmen: "How wonderful it would be if
we could encourage experienced Ameri-
cans—as part of a Free Enterprise Corps—
to return to the nations from which their
parents came to help a new generation have
a new birth of freedom."

Such gosh-and-golly en-
thusiasm stands in
marked contrast to the
Bush administration's
studied passivity and quiet
skepticism. No doubt, the
president's natural cau-
tion has worked to his ad-
vantage over the past
year: He hasn't done any-
thing silly with regard to
the Soviet Union. He
hasn't gloated. He hasn't
attempted a grand com-
promise—as Henry Kis-

GEPHARDT: Under fire.

16

NEW YORK/APRIL 2, 1990

Photographs: top, AP/Wide World; bottom, Jean Louis Atlan/Sygma.

Kissinger suggested—a Yalta II that would have conveyed the cynical message that the U.S. and USSR had the right to cut a deal to determine the fate of Eastern Europe. As it happened, Gorbachev was ready to move far beyond Kissinger's cramped geopolitics. In fact, he may have been mocking such Metternichian statecraft when he proclaimed the Sinatra Doctrine: The Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and the rest were free to sing a chorus of "I did it my way."

And yet, Kissingerism lives on in the Bush administration. It lives through his protégés Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger, and, yes, George Bush. It lives in the cool, almost bloodless nature of the president's response to the rush of history in Eastern Europe. It lives in the quiet debate now consuming foreign-policy wonks—should we be for or against the dissolution of the Soviet empire? (The Kissingerian position is *against*: "Henry would always rather see repression than chaos," says one expert.)

Such debates will keep the wonks busy and may produce some elegant policy nuances in time, though I suspect that even George Bush won't have much to say about the final shape of the Soviet Union. Gephardt's very un-Kissingerian agenda, which seems so naïve to the foreign-policy priesthood, may actually be more relevant. It has the right body language (a quality that's been missing from the Bush playbook). There's something profoundly—and attractively—American about saying to the Soviets, "Hey, we *like* what you guys are trying to do, moving toward democracy, a free market and all. We want our folks to meet your folks."

As it happens, the Russians—those fearsome, distant, hated Commies—are suckers for this sort of stuff. They love the relentless *cheeriness* of McDonald's more than the food; they may go for McDiplopacy as well. "It could be our greatest asset," says Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. "The Russians identify with us. They sense that Americans—the people, not the government—*like* them. They know that Europeans, by and large, don't." Actually, more than a few Europeans—and certain Asians—have tended to regard both Russians and Americans with similar disdain in the past: as semi-civilized, mongrel peoples. "The Russians are very emotional," Mandelbaum says. "Friendship means a lot to them. And the American informality, the ease with which we accept people, could really work to our advantage down the road."

Gephardt may or may not understand this, but he certainly *senses* it. And he senses another thing, too: By rediscovering the callow, can-do, almost embarrassingly banal brand of American idealism, we may rediscover some of our greatness as a people as well.

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SPORTING
CHANCES

GAMESMAN: Is CBS's Larry Tisch a "smart sports guy"?

BALL-PARKINSON'S LAW

WHAT MORE COULD A FAN WANT?

This week, CBS will carry the NCAA basketball championships, and next week, cable will broadcast the first round of the Stanley Cup hockey playoffs. Now that the lockout is ancient history—as forgotten as the Peloponnesian War—there’ll be Major League Baseball, too, on broadcast and cable stations, starting April 9. The NBA playoffs begin on April 28, also on CBS. Then there’ll be horse racing’s Triple Crown, three Grand Slam golf tournaments, and the Indy 500—all on ABC—and NBC’s coverage of the Wimbledon tennis championships.

By then, it might as well be October—
time for the World Series (CBS) and the
pro-football season, a TV package so
plummy it’s to be shared by five net-
works—ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN, and
Turner Broadcasting System. To accom-
modate them all, the National Football
League has obligingly expanded its season
from sixteen to seventeen weeks through
1991, and to eighteen weeks starting in
1992, and the number of teams eligible
for its playoffs from ten to twelve. After
the playoffs, there’s the Super Bowl, in
late January . . . almost time for the
NCAAs again.

In seeming defiance of
economic law, all this
sports-programming ex-
pansion hasn't brought the
networks' cost per show
down. The five sports-ori-
ented networks will pay a
total of $3.6 billion over
the next four years for the
rights to the NFL seasons.

But by now, financial-
page accounts of the busi-
ness of sports have become
sleep-inducing. The far
better game to follow is
sports programming's re-
shaping of the networks—
and the way it is changing
the composition of the au-
dience as well.

It's clear, first of all, that
a kind of ball-Parkinson's
law has taken hold: Sports
events expand to fill the
time TV allots for them.
Last week, CBS blanketed
prime time on Thursday
and Friday, as well as Satur-
day and Sunday afternoons,
with NCAA basketball

games: nineteen hours of slam dunks,
three-pointers, reverse lay-ups, commen-
tary, crowd roar, and cheerleaders shaking
their pom-poms. And these were only semi-
finals and regional finals. It was coverage
ESPN-style, more like an all-sports net-
work's production than like that of one of
the old-line broadcasters. CBS savvily
picked up on ESPN's practice of switching
to other regional games, particularly those
where the scores were close and only sec-
onds of game time remained. Venerable
CBS, in short, looked like a cable channel.

These days, that's meant as a compli-
ment, for the coverage made excellent pro-
gramming sense. The marathon NCAA play
attracted good ratings, as expected, among
males—and, significantly, younger women
made up a third of the audience. Certainly
the ratings figures were respectable com-
pared with those CBS's usual prime-time
shows have been getting. As the third-place
network in the prime-time Nielsens, and
with the Fox network closing in, CBS must
look for attractive programming wherever
it can find it.

All the established networks share the
same problem. "Right now, there's this des-
perate search for product," says Merrill
Brown, editor-in-chief of *Channels* maga-
zine, a monthly (soon to be biweekly) that
follows TV trends. "Everyone wants the

sports rights, and so everyone overpays
and overextends, writing bigger and big-
ger checks." Less than a decade ago, the
big money and energy were going into
comedy and dramatic series. "You could
always buy Grant Tinker," says Brown.
But even Grant Tinker isn't Grant Tinker
anymore. "If Tinker's shows bomb, if he
can't do it, then people figure, Who can?"
Brown says. "Sports is the answer."

The biggest spenter by far has been CBS's Larry Tisch. Over the past eighteen months, his sports division paid out $1.1-billion to Major League Baseball, $1 billion to the NCAA, and $543 million for the next two winter Olympics. The CBS strategy resembles what ABC did fifteen years ago, when Roone Arledge and ABC Sports helped lift the No. 3 network out of the basement. ABC was the sports network of the seventies; in the nineties, the title will belong to CBS. "CBS has become so high-profile in sports that the Tisch years will be judged by the network's sports performance," says a broadcaster who asked that his name not be used. "If it works, the line will be 'Oh, boy, is that Tisch a smart sports guy.' Anything less than big success, and the line will be 'Oh, that Tisch—what a sports fiasco.'"

The standard CBS argument is that
Tisch is behaving in character: The net-
work is investing, not gambling—the
World Series will help the CBS fall season
(new shows can be promoted during the
broadcasts), while the winter Olympic
games will boost ratings during the Febru-
ary sweep weeks.

Yet there's always an element of risk:
American viewers have yet to find the luge
or the cross-country biathlon gripping TV
fare. True enough, large audiences like to
watch the major leagues in action during
the season and the World Series; but will
people want the sound up? The members of
the CBS broadcast team—Brent Musburger
for play-by-play and Tim McCarver for the
analysis—have not been tested together.
Musburger has been doing network sports
for sixteen years in every conceivable for-
mat, pregame to post-game. But despite all
his exposure, as well as his obvious enthusi-
asm for the work, he has had a curiously
muted impact—"one man bland," *The Na-
tional* called him this month. Perhaps be-
cause Musburger is so "eminently forget-
table," the sports daily reported, CBS
sports executives are now stressing the
role of McCarver, the sophisticated insid-
er, in the broadcasts.

The true fan understands that an ana-
lyst's patter is central to the enjoyment of

NEW YORK/APRIL 2, 1990

Illustration by Mark Hess.