Some of my public statements have been interpreted to mean that I believe television is an unmitigated disaster. In fact, it can be a source of inexpensive, provocative, and occasionally even worthy entertainment. Anyone who has visited a hospital or retirement home knows how much it means to patients and old people. For parents and grandparents, it is an inexpensive baby-sitter that can teach children their numbers and the alphabet by age four. Politically, it saved my career in 1952, set it back in 1960, and helped me come back in 1968.
On the other hand, television puts emphasis on appearance over substance. It has been disastrous for the age-old art of conversation. But its most negative impact is its contribution to the decline of reading, both for pleasure and enlightenment. The most dramatic impact has been on the newspaper business. Some cities that once supported three or four papers now barely support one. Why would a frequent critic of the press mourn the death of newspapers? Because a diversity of journalistic viewpoints in a community helps keep the press honest. In the media as in other big businesses, monopoly breeds arrogance.
I must admit to a lifetime personal prejudice for reading. My mother taught me to read before I went to school. I was fortunate to have had outstanding teachers who inspired me to love books. Except when my favorite teams are playing, I always prefer reading to TV.
More pleasurable than TV, reading is also more efficient than talking. While a good conversation is stimulating, seeing something in writing is the best way for me to assimilate, analyze, and understand ideas. I found this particularly true during the White House years. A decision maker must absorb massive amounts of information, and reading is the fastest and best means to do so. Requiring an adviser to submit his ideas in writing forces him to think them through more carefully. Bad ideas and superficial thinking are almost always exposed in the stark black and white of the typewritten word. Reading also negates the almost hypnotic impact of spoken eloquence. C. P. Snow observed that Trotsky sometimes swayed himself with his own eloquence. Orators who have that capability will have no difficulty swaying others.
Being briefed in writing rather than orally also takes less time. A person can read four or five times faster than he can listen. Most important is the mental discipline that reading enforces on both the reader and the writer. Those who say they are “thinking out loud” are not thinking very clearly. Most people think better when they put it on paper.
Presented with a pile of policy memoranda, I would organize them in order of least to most important. I would first skim the less important papers so that I could devote more time to the weightier ones—assessing them, taking them apart, analyzing their strong and weak points. The fact that I am not a speed reader was a liability in the sense that I could not get through as much material, but an asset in that it ensured I would thoroughly digest all of the issues on an important question before making a decision.
When Lyndon Johnson took me on a tour of the White House after the election in 1968, I noticed that he had three television sets in the Oval Office, three in the small private office next door, three in the office bathroom, and three in his bedroom in the residence. He also had a wire service ticker. While we were talking, I vividly remember him getting up and tearing the latest report off the ticker to see how some appearance or statement of his had been reported.
I had all this equipment removed, not because of a lack of interest but because of a lack of time. During my years in the White House, I hardly ever watched the evening news and never went through the ordeal of watching the Sunday talk shows. Instead, I read highlights of the programs. That way you save time and also avoid becoming obsessed with how the media is treating you. I always insisted on knowing what the critics were writing or saying. But reading it was far less disturbing than hearing them say it in my living room.
One of the best ideas I instituted in the White House was the daily news summary. A busy official with a multi-newspaper habit can waste an enormous amount of time reading essentially the same story as written by different reporters. It is also a mistake to read only the Washington and New York newspapers, which just reflect the consensus of Beltway thinking, or the news magazines with their mixture of sensationalistic but irrelevant cultural reporting and increasingly bland, homogeneous political and national coverage. A President should designate a competent staff member to summarize articles, columns, and TV reports on both sides of a question from all over the country, and for that matter from all over the world. Some of the best writing on the American political scene, for instance, appears in The Economist in London. What I considered most important was that the news summary present all points of view—from National Review to The New Republic. I might not have liked what my critics were writing, but I had to know what people were reading.
The summaries of the network news were most important. Sometimes one of a President’s more intellectual aides will come in on Monday and effuse about a highly positive article that might have appeared on page four of The Washington Post’s Sunday opinion section. The problem is that only a few thousand people will have read such an article through. Far more important is what the network news programs say about the same issue to 23 million people. A President may think as I do that TV news is generally trivial, sensationalistic, or slanted, but it is also most Americans’ principal news source. To know what people are thinking, he must know what they are seeing.
The dynamic of national news becomes even more complicated when you consider the extent to which television journalists take their cue from print journalists. A White House reporter like Fred Barnes of The New Republic reaches only 95,000 subscribers. But since he is widely respected among his colleagues for his accuracy and the quality of his secret sources in the White House, what he writes can be amplified three hundred-fold by TV reporters if they reflect it in their own reporting. A good news summary helps a President measure this effect.
I always resisted the temptation to read personal articles in their entirety, as distinguished from articles about issues in which I played a part. It didn’t matter if a profile was positive or negative. Reading the negative ones cannot help but distract you from the really important issues. Reading the supportive ones cannot help but trigger overconfidence.
In reading news stories, columns, or policy memoranda prepared by staff members, you should always consider the source. Every writer worth reading has a point of view. Whether he genuinely tries to be objective or not, his writing is bound to reflect his prejudices. That is why it is useful to have opposing points of view submitted along with the majority view so that you can make the decision rather than leaving that to a staff member, no matter how much confidence you have in him. Also, when a senior staffer submitted a policy memorandum, I insisted that he give me the names of those who worked on it. Nothing does more for a lower-level bureaucrat’s morale than to get a note or a call from the President thanking him for his work.
A President must spend many hours a day reading for work. He should not forget to read for pleasure. Theodore Roosevelt, the most prolific reader of all American Presidents, once said he would never go anywhere, “not even to the jungles of Africa,” without books to read. On safari he always had a book or two packed in his saddlebag or pocket so that no opportunity for reading would be lost. I did the same thing in the jungles of Washington.
When I visited Australia in 1965, Prime Minister Robert Menzies told me that he always set aside a half hour a day and an hour on Saturday and Sunday for reading for pleasure and urged me to do the same. I have never received better advice. A President should never be so burdened by what he has to read that he does not have some time for what he wants to read.
It might be argued that reading for pleasure is purely escapist and that leaders cannot afford to waste their time on it. But no one would disagree that a leader needs some relief from the heavy burdens of his office, and reading is one of the best ways to get it. Watching movies or television can also serve this purpose, but both are passive forms of entertainment. Reading is active. It engages, exercises, and expands the mind.
Reading can be particularly useful in times of crisis. It is then that a leader most needs perspective. If he is to keep his mind focused on his long-range goals, he must step back from the problems of the present. Reading helps him do that. He may not find an answer to his problem in what he reads, but new thoughts will refresh the mind and permit him to tackle his problems with renewed energy.
The purpose of a good college education is to expand the mind, widen the horizon, and provide perspective. A reading program should serve the same purpose. Most people stop that kind of reading when they finish college. They continue to read what they need to read to do the job. But otherwise their education comes to a halt. Their horizons become narrower. They lose their perspective. They end up knowing everything about some things and nothing about everything.
One of the most difficult questions to answer is to advise someone what to read. I happen to prefer history, biography, and philosophy. But I agree with columnist Murray Kempton, a prolific reader who recently told me that one should not rule out great novels. You can learn more about the revolutionary forces that convulsed Russia in the nineteenth century from Tolstoy and Dostoevski than from the turgid scholarly histories of the period. And some of the better current novels are a more accurate portrayal of real life than most of the narrow and biased tomes emanating from the ivory towers of academia.
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, two legendary Supreme Court Justices, were close friends. Court buffs have a favorite story about their reading preferences. Holmes liked mysteries. Brandeis felt his friend should improve his mind by reading more serious books. Once when Holmes went on vacation, Brandeis gave him some to take along. After a day, Holmes returned the books to Brandeis and went back to his mysteries. They clearly did him no harm. More than any other Justice he had the ability through his terse, clear opinions to dispel much of the mystery surrounding the complex cases argued before the Court.