The syndicated columnist and commentator on ABC’s Sunday morning news program This Week talked recently in his Washington office with Naval Institute editor Fred L. Schultz about several topics relating to military affairs and journalism.
Proceedings: A perennial favorite subject of discussion in this magazine is the civil-military gap—perceived or not. What can the military do to relate better to the civilian population?
Will: The beginning of wisdom is to understand that the gap is real, the gap is not necessarily bad, and the gap cannot and should not be closed. That is, military professionals are different, they have different functions, they have different demands, and they have different and—let’s be candid—higher standards than the ones generally applied to those of us who are just in journalism or selling insurance or filling teeth. The military is a more exacting profession, and the stakes are higher; they are life, death, and freedom. The idea that there should be no emotional or ethical or temperamental gap between those in that demanding profession and the rest of us is, it seems to me, silly. The gap, if anything, should be cultivated. The gap need not imply hostility or estrangement. It simply implies differences. And the differences are real.
Proceedings: Getting the average Joe walking down the street to appreciate that difference didn’t used to be as difficult as it is now.
Will: It didn’t used to be as difficult because for many years exposure to and experience with the military was normal for American males; and therefore, for their extended families, which meant, generally, for society. It no longer is. You can see the slow but steady decline in the percentage of lawmakers who have military experience.
Proceedings: And journalists.
Will: And journalists. Journalists who have military experience or who know people in the military. I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of the argument about gays in the military, other than to say this: Clearly, the journalistic coverage of that controversy was colored by the fact that more Washington journalists have friends who are gay than have friends who are in the military. That’s just the case.
Proceedings: How important is familiarity with military affairs to governing the nation?
Will: The previous administration was the first in history in which neither the President nor the CIA director nor the Secretary of State nor the Secretary of Defense nor the National Security Advisor, at one point, had any military experience. That has to color your basic sympathy with these institutions—which do exist across a certain cultural divide. And it just has to be dangerous to have policy being set—airy talk about revolutions in military affairs, of reorganizing the military—by people who’ve never done it. I don’t know how to say it any clearer than that. You know, it’s like taking a layman off the street and saying, “We want to know how to reform baseball.” No, you want baseball people to do that.
Proceedings: Should military people be feeling more confident these days, with the new administration?
Will: Sure, I think they ought to be more confident. Take the Secretary of Defense. Donald Rumsfeld has been there before. And before he was Secretary of Defense the first time, he was in the Navy. So he’s been in the culture. When he went back to the Pentagon, he was going back into a more complex culture—that building across the river—but he didn’t have to start from scratch. He wasn’t going to a foreign country; he was going home, in a sense. His learning curve has to be much better than anyone else’s recently.
Proceedings: Some editorial writers lately have deemed the Navy’s handling of the submarine Greeneville’s accident with the Japanese trawler a public-relations disaster. How do you feel about that?
Will: It’s hard to know what they mean by public relations.
Proceedings: I think it centers around the fact that journalists didn’t find out about civilians being on board until several days later, so that then became the story. This happens rather frequently, it seems.
Will: Well, it’s a standard—as you say, frequent—occurrence in government that when something unexpected, confused, tragic, or embarrassing happens, there are two imperatives, and they conflict completely. One is the imperative to answer all questions immediately. That becomes particularly pressing in an age of saturation journalism, when you have 24-hour news cycles, all-news cable channels, and all the competition and pressure that generates. That’s one imperative.
There’s another imperative: to get it right first, which is to take your time and not answer questions until you know. But the pressure to answer questions on the fly on the basis of partial information—simply to avoid the accusation that you’re stonewalling or covering up or being unresponsive—that pressure is enormous and irresistible. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be resisted. It seems to me that it ought not to be considered prima facie evidence of malfeasance for people to say, “We just can’t tell you yet.” Because unless you do that, wrong information is going to get out. And then speculation about motive begins.
Proceedings: That leads to my next question. How would you, as a journalist, draw the line between security and legal issues and freedom of the press?
Will: It’s hard to draw that line in the abstract. I would begin by saying journalists are citizens, too, and journalists are citizens first. It’s all very well for journalists to thump their chests and say we are in an adversarial relationship with the government. Lord knows, I’m as suspicious of bureaucracies and governments as the next libertarian-inclined conservative. But that becomes a kind of sterile dogma after a while.
It comes back to the question of whether journalists have a basic sympathy with the people they’re covering. By “sympathy” I mean no more than an understanding that people are doing difficult things. Training is difficult. Training is dangerous in the military, with young men and women doing things at high speeds, in the dark, with dangerous equipment. Just the training is an inherently risky business. A lot of journalists don’t understand this. Frankly, it would do journalists a lot of good to go out on submarines. I’ve done it twice. I’ve been out on a cruiser. I’ve been out on night operations on an aircraft carrier. Any journalist with an open mind comes back from an experience like that broadened, his eyes wider open.
Proceedings: So you think it would be a big mistake if that practice were canceled?
Will: I do. I don’t know all that was encompassed by that practice, and what all the aims of it are, or all the administrative details. All I know is that you do need an ongoing, systematic attempt to reach out—not just to journalists, but to other civilian leaders as well. The services need to say: “Look, this is what we’re doing with your tax dollars and your young men and women, in your name, and for your benefit.”
A few years ago—it must have been ten years ago, now—I went to Fort Bragg, I went to see the Strategic Air Command in the Midwest, and I went out on the aircraft carrier just for that reason. I mean, I’m a not-untypical American, in that I don’t have military experience. I did, subsequently, have a son become an officer of Marines, so I got that contact with the military culture. I felt it was a clear vacancy in my education as a journalist, not to mention as a citizen.
Proceedings: It often appears that people assigned to the Pentagon or as military-affairs correspondents stay in their jobs just long enough to figure out what it is they’re doing, and then they’re moved on. I know it’s inevitable to move on to different jobs, but that seems to be a shame.
Will: It is a shame. But journalists are generalists. That’s just the way it is. It’s a very rare news organization, in our country, that can afford to take a man or a woman and station him or her in the Justice Department, or Health and Human Services, or the Defense Department and tell him or her to stay there and become expert. Leaders of news organizations do get a little worried, perhaps, about going native, identifying too much, developing a kind of improper, journalistically dubious sympathy for their subjects.
But there’s a correct kind of sympathy, which is simply an understanding that men and women are trying to do their best at difficult tasks. Why not try to understand that?
It seems to me, a good journalist covering normal municipal affairs ought to understand what it’s like to be a policeman—ought to spend the night in a patrol car. I’ve done that, too. If you go through a few arrests and pull a car over at 2:00 a.m. in Miami, you’ll come away saying that’s a tough way to earn a living; they’re not overpaid, and they’re not callous, and they’re not looking for trouble, and they have to exercise discretion constantly. They understand that they’re going to be second-guessed by courts and by district attorneys and by defense lawyers and all the rest. And you begin to say, “That’s a craft.”
What I’m really saying is journalism is a craft, but it can’t be practiced properly until it appreciates the craftsmanship of others.
Proceedings: Are any of your Washington colleagues sympathetic, to use your word? You said that the whole gays-in-the-military issue got so much coverage because of the sympathy there.
Will: Not just so much coverage, but the kind of coverage it got. Look, I think that, by and large, with honorable exceptions, the journalistic community in Washington shared the view of the administration at that time, which was that the most important thing to be done with the military was to make it a laboratory for social experiments. That makes perfect sense, if you lose sight of the fact that the point of the military is to be prepared to inflict violence to defend our country. No one likes to have you say that, as baldly as that, but it needs to be said. That’s what they’re out there for.
Proceedings: The service academies occasionally come under scrutiny concerning whether they’re worth the expense, compared to other commissioning sources. How do you feel about that?
Will: They’re worth it. But the functions of the academies have changed over the years. West Point produced people who built railroads and protected westward expansion. That’s not the same West Point we have today. The nation’s needs change. The nature of military science changes. Science is a progressive enterprise, be it physics, biology, or military science.
Furthermore, I think there’s perhaps a better understanding now that military science doesn’t exhaust military studies; that there’s an art to the military. And that includes the art of leadership and being an educated officer. It means more than being a nuclear scientist in the Navy. There was some thought for a while, I know, in the Rickover and immediate post-Rickover years, that education at the Naval Academy became too engineering oriented. I was part of a group, with [Vice] Admiral [James] Stockdale, that looked at the curriculum. I was on the board of overseers for a while with Admiral Stockdale. He was our leader, and [former Secretary of the Navy] John Lehman put it together.
I know John Lehman said: “You need technically competent people, but that’s not all. They need to be technically competent warriors, and you can’t lose sight of that fact. At the end of the day, that’s what technical competence serves, which is a war-making capacity and all that that involves.” That was common with Meade’s people at Gettysburg and Wellington’s soldiers at Waterloo and the Roman legions. There are certain constants in military affairs, as well as a phenomenal change, from the development of the stirrup to the development of the nuclear submarine.
Proceedings: Compared with other institutions, the service academies can be a hard sell. Do you think the choice available at the academies for liberal arts majors—history, for instance—is a good thing?
Will: Absolutely. One of the things that made [General George] Patton a great military leader was he knew a lot of history; he’d read a lot of it. He looked at the landscape through the eyes of a historian. And it contributed not just to his effectiveness as a battlefield commander, it contributed to his ethos as a leader.
We need liberally educated doctors. Medical schools aren’t just looking for people who’ve mastered organic chemistry. They want someone who knows something about ethics; because that’s part of being a doctor nowadays, with the terrible biomedical dilemmas we confront because of new technology.
Good heavens, when you’re dealing with your own army or opposing another army, it helps to know something about military history. Otherwise, you wind up reinventing the wheel all the time; making mistakes over and over again.
Proceedings: What is your opinion regarding the way the Bush administration has handled the situation in Iraq?
Will: I think they’re feeling their way now. I think they came in understanding that the sanctions have become increasingly porous; that the sanctions have a lot of history behind them, and it’s not encouraging. It’s quite clear that Bush’s father, at the end of the Gulf War, had hopes that the regime would be more brittle than it has proven to be. We’re a decade on now and have to come to terms with the fact that Saddam Hussein has more staying power than we thought.
The President knows his father had a terrible decision to make. He was operating under a U.N. mandate that focused on liberating Kuwait, not changing the regime in Iraq. Iraq could have become three countries pretty fast, if the regime had fallen. He had to worry about that. Any student of history knows you can always make matters worse. You begin with that understanding. As bad as things are, they can get worse.
Proceedings: Other potential hot spots that have been identified are China and Korea. What is our biggest challenge, would you say?
Will: In the long term, the biggest challenge is China. It’s commonplace to make the analogy between the emergence of China at the turn of the 21st century and the emergence of Germany at the turn of the 20th century. The process of breaking Germany, as it were, into the saddle of civilization, of integrating it into the game of nations as a peaceful player, took two world wars or, if you prefer, one 30-year war. And that’s not something we want to experience with China.
The 19th century was a century of coming together: Germany came together; Italy came together; the United States, in a sense, came together. The late 20th century was a time of pulling apart: Yugoslavia came apart, the Soviet Union came apart. Ask yourself: How likely is it that a quarter of the human race is going to live in one country called China 50 years from now? It may not happen; it may come apart.
And, of course, China very soon will not be the largest country in the world; it will be India.
And we’ve got what we will smilingly call the country of Indonesia, a hot country of lots of islands with people driven by all kinds of ethnic problems, if anybody’s paying attention. We should all have been paying more attention to Senator [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan [D-NY], who lectured us for years on the role of ethnicity and religion. Karl Marx, who was wrong about everything, was most spectacularly wrong in saying that in the industrial age, industrial forces would be everything and that pre-industrial forces—religion and ethnicity—would lose their saliency. Not true. Religion and ethnicity are at least as salient in driving world conflicts today as they were a century ago.
Proceedings: So you think the tenor in China is similar to the one that started World War I?
Will: I wouldn’t say that. But I would say that holding China together is perhaps going to be all the Chinese government can handle on its plate.
Proceedings: Several times in your columns you’ve criticized other journalists for sensationalism and embellishment. How do you keep yourself from doing that and still make people want to read the George Will column?
Will: People read a columnist because they trust him, and they like to see the play of his mind on the world. They don’t pick up the column and say, “Oh, Will’s writing about X today, and I’m interested in that. Therefore I’ll read Will.” Generally, they’ll read Will because Will’s a good experience for them; or they won’t read Will because they’ve come to the conclusion, over the years, that Will is more trouble than he’s worth. And millions of people have come to that conclusion.
As a columnist, I don’t feel any incentive to sensationalize. People develop an ongoing, long-term, almost a kind of quasi friendship with a columnist. And you don’t need to entice them into the room twice a week; they’ll come. Or they won’t come.
U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE (DAVID HOFELING)
