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Whilst I was quite willing to see Australia contribute heavily to the operation, I wanted the Americans involved. It was an instinctive reaction. US involvement would send an implicit but clear deterrent signal to any in Jakarta who might have considered resisting the intervention force. Whenever the Americans had been involved in a major operation, they had always turned to Australia seeking a contribution. We had been willing to make it. It was this that I had in mind when I first spoke to Bill Clinton about the matter, also on 6 September. Clinton was sympathetic and offered plenty of logistic and other help, but it took me back a lot when he said that America would not be able to provide any troops, or ‘boots on the ground’ as it was depicted at the time. He really stunned me when he spelled out, in some detail, just how stretched the American military had become. His explanation made it clear that after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism, resources had been taken out of Defence, and the previously unquestioned capacity of the United States to provide men and materiel whenever and wherever sought was no longer there. Over the next few days it was obvious that our disappointed reaction had had an effect on the Americans. Alexander Downer was interviewed on CNN and expressed unhappiness with the US response. On seeing the interview Madeleine Albright telephoned Downer to complain about his tone. Downer’s response was to remind Albright that whenever the Americans asked for help, Australia was there, and now, on the one occasion that the boot was on the other foot, we felt a little put out that the Americans would not reciprocate.
Lazarus Rising
John Howard
After flirting with the idea for decades, Trump was ready to take the plunge on June 16, 2015. Unlike most of my colleagues in the media, I knew instinctively when Trump came down that golden escalator to declare his candidacy that he would be a formidable candidate. Every time Trump said or did something stupid, they would declare him to be toast, only to find him climbing higher. And the same cycle repeated itself during the general election. They were misreading both the man and the mood of the country. There was no middle ground. I was called a Trump sycophant when I argued that the billionaire shouldn’t be counted out, and when I criticized him on some issue, his loyalists would savage me as a Trump hater. Both were way off the mark. I don’t like either party. I believe even the best politicians can be self-serving hypocrites. My brand has always been fairness. I’ve been a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek. I’ve been an anchor at both CNN and Fox. I’ve got plenty of opinions but I don’t take political sides. And I’ve always tried not to be trapped in the airless bubble of establishment media types. My father sold shirts for a living. I grew up in a city-subsidized apartment building next to a sewage treatment plant in the non-trendy part of southern Brooklyn. I went to the state university in Buffalo, which is practically Ohio, though I did get a master’s at Columbia. My first job was working the night shift at a newspaper in Hackensack for $10,000 a year. So I may have been quicker than most of my colleagues to grasp that the country was fed up with the empty promises and utter dysfunction of Washington. I was sensitive to the fact that many Americans we blithely categorize as working class had lousy jobs, were bouncing between jobs, or worried about losing their jobs, and were brimming with resentment. I didn’t dismiss them as racist yahoos. This novice candidate, I thought, is connecting on a visceral level.
Media Madness
Howard Kurtz
The consequence of all this was a standard of living beyond the comprehension of the rest of the world. Nearly 60 percent of all American families were reporting wages in the middle-class brackets. Just since the late 1940s the median family income had risen from $3,083 to $5,657; even when corrected for inflation this meant a rise of 48 percent.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
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