The final paragraph of the story in the Friday morning newspaper regarding the previous evening’s much-ballyhooed White House “beer summit” well summed up the deal.
“Journalists were summoned to take pictures of the staged event, but not to ask questions or listen to the conversation,” it reported. In other words, the “high-profile happy hour that brought together an elite black professor, a white cop and the nation’s biracial president and white vice president” after an ugly racial incident in Cambridge, Mass., last week was one grand photo opportunity.
Designed to tamp down racial tensions and salvage reputations after Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley arrested Harvard professor Henry Gates Jr. at the Gates home, prompting President Barack Obama to comment that Crowley had “acted stupidly,” the meeting was probably a good idea.
But whether the Cambridge incident was a “teachable moment,” as Obama has suggested, remains to be seen. Sometimes these things work out; sometimes they are a crapshoot at best.
One that didn’t work out particularly well involved Independent Maine Gov. Jim Longley and the Maine press corps in the mid-1970s. It was vividly recalled by author Willis Johnson — a former Associated Press writer who had covered the Longley administration — in his book “The Year of the Longley,” published in 1978 by Penobscot Bay Press of Stonington.
Not long after his election in 1974, Longley found that his standing with a press corps he had ardently courted during his election campaign had gotten wobbly. In Johnson’s view, the governor seemed to have little or nothing in common with reporters whom he believed spent far too much time practicing “gotcha” journalism and not enough time citing the accomplishments of the Longley administration.
Still, the governor “realized that he needed the press if only as a means for putting his face and his words before the voters,” Johnson wrote. At the urging of media coordinators who sensed a teachable moment at hand, Longley put away the Blaine House sherry, stocked up on hard liquor and invited the press to dinner. On a mild evening in the merry month of May the guests arrived, “and, as brash as ever, headed straight for the liquor,” Johnson reported.
After dinner Longley chatted up individual reporters and eventually wandered into the pool room, where by this time a number of his guests were in good spirits. Bill Frederick, United Press International’s man in Augusta and one of those reporters whom Longley felt had treated him unfairly, challenged the governor to a game of eight ball.
Longley easily won the match, but by one o’clock in the morning “it was harder to shake the voices for social justice. Somehow the conversation, onto which a third reporter [Johnson] now had leeched, had moved outdoors to the Blaine House driveway,” Johnson recalled. “Frederick had stashed a bottle of the governor’s gin in the inside pocket of his sport coat. As he and Longley held forth, the social significance of their conversation deteriorated somewhat.”
Because this is a family newspaper, I won’t replay the verbal jousting between the two antagonists. Suffice to say it was a colorful and frank exchange of views with lots of descriptive suggestions thrown about — an exchange I highly recommend to readers in need of a good laugh. The gist of the deal seemed to be that Longley was unhappy with Frederick for being unrelentingly critical of the governor, and Frederick was unhappy with Longley for not appreciating what an outstanding service to mankind his tough reporting had been.
Despite pressure that the Longley administration allegedly put on Frederick’s UPI bosses in Boston to muzzle him, Frederick would keep on Longley’s case for a while longer. Eventually he would tire of the game, quit his job and move away.
In recalling that surreal scene in the Blaine House driveway, Johnson wrote that after Longley had retreated to his living quarters three reporters remained in the warm spring rain critiquing the performance. When a female member of the trio began to cry, “Frederick put his arm around her and patted her tenderly,” Johnson re-ported. “The third reporter had nothing to do but to watch his shoes soak up the rain.”
What remained of the evening’s teachable moment — this contemplation of rain-soaked shoes — may not have been much to write home about, I suppose. But in these things one works with what one has.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.