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Ladies and gentlemen that notorious member of the south elected eastern establishment Mr Eric Sevareid of velvety North Dakota Eric. Baker. Thank you for all those kind words thank you for having us. Taken the climax of my speech. There for abbreviating you know. We're all here because of Elmer and we're here for Elmer. And we all wish he were still around. And not just for our own fellowship and relaxation. But because he would be busy and his deceptively easy going way relaxing. Some of these tensions of this turgid and humorless period the American story. Elmer would probably admit that he wasn't young enough to know everything but he would acknowledge that Armageddon and the pocalypse are just around the corner right where they've been for centuries. And the reason in the first place that. C.B.S. hired. That are least looking fellow that Indiana country boy classical scholar was it really did seem to be turning that corner a great war and started. And the few men like get clobbered and marrow and Paul White. Saw immediately that among the potential casualties of war were truth and the language. And we needed somebody who knew in his bones that the only way to confront a wild world was as Churchill later put it with tolerance a riot he and calm. The country needed their armor then you need to now if you keep alive his memory his example maybe that will help a little. My own devotion to this man began in the spring of one thousand nine hundred months before I ever met him he got me there a young and with just a spoken line or two. Before the Nazi blitz hit into France and the Low Countries at Spring I'd sent a letter to Paul by the New York containing a kind of amateurish code. So that if later they got a cable from me containing one senseless line in it would mean a big allied battle victory of another. Big German breakthrough and so on. And the day came and a night. When I was stuck in a French train crammed with refugees working down from the town of Cambray toward Paris. And Ralph Hines and the U.P.A. next door boy I was with us on that that awful journey and during one stop we saw the flashes of big guns off to the northeast and heard that then heard there thunder. We timed the interval between sight and sound and figured out that this is the map show the direction so I set the silly sentence in the cable after reaching Paris and as it turned out later lay on Mr White's desk for quite a while that day puzzling and irritating everybody. Until I remembered and found that earlier letter and that night Elmer took the plunge or risk. Arrest because I was a kid and. None of them abet me and they have no way of double checking but he went on the air and said as I and exactly recall it that C.B.S. had learned from and usually well informed sources that the Germans had broken the main defense line inside friends that was the end run around imagine a lot so that history repeated. So I kept my job that for a broadcaster that I was and I acquired a personal hero. And I went through those Joe McCarthy days in Washington was with Elmer Davis rougher days and now I think that maybe not quite so ominous. Because a senator is not a vice president. Or even an attorney general but the pressures were terrible from the under silent majority and the chart was trees and all that. Some people in our business were intimidated the men were driven off the air and out of the press. I remember another very powerful senator the chairman of the committee that could do the most direct damage to free broadcasting who wishes an ultimatum to Frank Stan to. Get rid of merlin that fellow Several had or else and I didn't know about that at the time because Stanton never mentioned it to him he still has. And many remember the climactic and winning battles when the Army issued its challenge to McCarthy and simultaneously a quite independently morrow and friendly drove their ten ton tank into the narrow salient of freedom still open but it had been kept open. If just barely for a long time and I feel lonely half exhausted guerrilla warriors of all none was more battle scarred than Elmer Davis. We are told now. That this country is. Being run by minorities and that the president is going to put an end that this I don't fully understand. Minorities have always wielded the cutting edge of history. It is the conflict of minorities that make history that is changing not always well or wisely to be sure. But that is a process that we are bound to report. And by a higher law than the law of habit or the law of the box office. Now my Davis was a minority. They always reminded me of the one nine hundred centuries commentator William has slipped once wrote a kind of political credo for himself he said I am no politician and still less can I be said to be a party man but I have a hatred of tyranny and a contempt for its tool use and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit down quietly under the claims of bare faced power and I have tried to expose the little arts of Sophos tree by which they are defended that. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms. Perhaps Hazlitt and dissipated Hitler Stalin and PROFESSOR MARK WILLACY. That right and wrong truth and false and plenty and famine are matters of perfect indifference. That is all I know of the matter but on these points I am likely to remain in cordial. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and two make four but to persist in maintaining this obvious position. If all a fashion authority hypocrisy in venality of mankind were arrayed against it. Would require a considerable effort of personal courage. And with chillingly the man in a very formidable minority. Davis was a formidable a major minority. I think there really is and then greedy and called common sense. It is born of experience it takes some living. I think Davis knew that the older cannot transmit experience to the younger which is nature's secret arrangement. For man's creativity by trial and error. And that the young cannot transmit their agonies to the old which is nature's secret arrangement for man survival. The generation gap in viewpoint would have seemed perfectly natural to Elmer Davis. But he would have doubted that men and women grow progressively more ignorant from the age of eighteen on. And what else would he be saying now we're here on. The risk of taking liberties with his name one could make at least a few rough guesses. And I would guess that he would be saying about this war and that nations are like persons in some respects. At that when a big nation makes a big mistake it cannot expect to avoid paying a big price and it had better face up to it and stop the posturing and the pretending. He would have said yes dissent is right and good but doubted that therefore the more dissent the better. He would have said that an increase in personal political passion does not equate with an increase in personal virtue he would have questioned the social logical idiology. Which states that all those who are poor or in the slums or in a state of addiction or in prison are the innocent. And that everybody else do their work and protect their children and obey the law or the guilty. He would have observed that public apathy as a trouble source is mostly a myth that the difficulties come from the very an apathetic indeed the fierce conflict. Of intensely alert individuals groups and interests. I think it would have suggested that our freedom is in danger but only in the second instance. That there's never been so much freedom it is our public order that is in the immediate danger. And if that breaks down in a massive way both freedom and justice will surely found. Davis was saturated in history. You know it was no certain guide but one of the few we have. And he would have noticed. That people given no other choices always prefer tyranny over an icky because anarchy is the worst tyranny of all. And I suspect it would have pointed out to certain among the impassioned young. Who are so contemptuous of the past as any kind of guide. That an individual cut off from his memory goes mad and then a society so amputated will also lose all sense of direction. He would surely have pointed out that what both successful and unsuccessful revolutions do is to increase the power and out of the individual but of the state the power they hate the most. And some among his hearers. If he were with us would surely sneer at Elmer Davis as a tired liberal as a moderate. And he would have said yes he often did get tired. And among the things that tired him was a repeated phenomenon. The fact that it is not only the old who perpetuate worn out ideas but often the young. Who confuse their own newness with the ideas. And yes he was a moderate. Because he had figured out that the Greeks were right that ultimately no personal or collective life is worth living in the absence of moderation. And he had come to agree with Burke that minute in temperate minds cannot be free the passions forge their fetters. Was supposed Davis were a network broadcaster today caught in these present alarms an excursion. Goes without saying that he would refuse to be intimidated. And he would even manage a chuckle or two at the very idea of professional political propagandist telling him that he was a propagandist. And that some in the printed press who said we were overreacting when we hit back immediately and hard at the Agnew speeches. Which not only constituted a threat of censorship but constituted an attempted act of censorship. Those in the press who then turned right around and said we were intimidated. But they offered no serious evidence to that effect. Elmer might have had a little dry fun with this assault from the right wing. To the effect that broadcast journalism is much too preoccupied with minorities and conflict after years of assault from the left wing to the effect that broadcasting is simply reflecting mirror for comfortable established middle class values and interests. And he might have concluded that maybe were we weren't doing so badly after all. I think he would have failed to see the logic in a legal situation. Which holds that the most pervasive is not necessarily the most persuasive medium of information and ideas is not protected by the First Amendment where less pervasive media are so protected. That he would have said to his colleagues act always as if you were still protected if you act otherwise it will be other. Liberties can be defended only as long as we still have them and he would have wondered that a few in the printed press. Said to him watch out your end of our boat is sinking. I think you would have agreed with Gallagher's law. This was formulated by the Associated Press and West Gallagher as follows. Criticism by the government rises in direct proportion to the amount of news printed or broadcast which reflects unfavorably on government policy. Criticism by the public rises in direct proportion to the amount of news read or heard that does not fit the reader or listeners preconceived ideas of what the news should be. And Elmer might have added something. Which because he is gone will hereafter be known as the several stipulations. We will consider alteration of our adversary relationship when two things begin to happen. When political leaders complain when they are over praised and when they admit policy mistakes of a serious nature that will be the day. Davis had a skeptical not he says suspicious nature. Mine is less virtuous. I profoundly suspect that the reason for the sudden assault by the vice president last fall was not merely to write what he was entitled to believe were imbalances in the new. Not merely to meet the ad he was criticism and when some domestic elbow room and time for his president's policies this president had carefully studied his predecessors credibility gap and understood its fatal nature. And I deeply suspect that the deepest reason for this assault on the press had to do with that. What better way to forestall your own credibility gap in advance than to assign it elsewhere. And if that is it as I believe then it is exceedingly clever but it will not work in the long run. In the long run most people will place the blame for policies gone wrong and those who make the policies I don't those who report and try to explain them and a great many people know the vice president does not and in the last generation it has been the power of government that has grown the greatest up the power of the press and within government the power of the presidency. We know that we have reached that chilling point where the more faithful the decision to be made the fewer the men who make. Davis was quite aware that journalism like war and generals and politics and politicians is too important to leave to journalists. And you know that broadcast journalism never has been and no medium of human communication has ever been so scrutinized monitored criticised by government business academicians and private people. And you know that to be a regular reporter or commentator on a nationwide network. Is so different in the green from writing for a publication that coterie of leaders who read it because they find it generally a real bill. So different and agree as to be almost different in kind. It's the difference between writing inside the stagecoach however hot and bumpy and riding shotgun exposed to the hail stones and the and the cell. Is lifeless too short for our common need but long enough for him to know broadcast journalism like printed journalism as a mentally improved in scope knowledge ability in responsibility over his earlier days in the twenty's or the early thirty's. But he would have been the first to acknowledge that this process is by no means complete it. Those who would improve our practices and questionable ways come not only from the outside in the form of powerful politicians. Some come from the inside. Militant young men and women both newspapers and broadcasting who are you that even the quest for objectivity is a myth. That the prime purpose of the press is not to report the world but to reform it and of course in the direction of their ideas. We have already learned out of the tell us objective news accounts in the hard news columns or broadcasts and merely to deceive the reader or here and obscure in our truce that the reporter perceives must therefore personalize the hard news infuse it with his own troops. It would not leave this to the editorial writer columnist commentator whose work is clearly marked away from the hard middle. They believe quite sincerely that this would give a true integrity to news columns in those broadcasting I believe it will ruin them. There is nothing though about this idea in fact this is the way it was done in the days of the yellow press and the screamers of radios first faltering years this is the way it is still done in many countries and the result there is one must read many papers here many broadcasts and then try to piece together what really happened in any given occurrence. Inevitably this becomes the journalism of polemic. What Kingman Brewster said is true for university is true for the press. Cynical disparagement of objectivity as a myth he said seems to me both naive and irresponsible and a claim of novelty to the observation that men are fallible at best and corruptible at worst is naive. It's your responsibility lies in the conclusion that since the ideal is unattainable it should not be held up as a standard to both practitioners and critics. Now I have sounded up to now I'm afraid a little complacent and Elmer would hate that. It may be that the best defense is a strong offense but that is not really good enough in this realm of the press which makes the community whether sounds the notes of the day. I think I know about our failures and blind spots because I live with them all the time. And I've been raising my voice among my colleagues and bosses long before Mr Agnew kindly offered his own expert assistance. And the news is presented in both broadcast and newsprint does tend to give a startling not a balanced presentation of the day's events James Reston put it. The television camera and the newspaper headline. Focuses like a flashlight beam in the darkness at what is just move and all else is lost in the little. So three campus demonstrations simultaneously give the impression that American higher education is collapsing but two thousand other colleges are going about their business. And to get a riotous and a whole nation seems to be going up in smoke. These things are no important knows they have to be reported. Think for a moment what would happen to our credibility if people came to believe that we were not reporting any of these things because they are. And it is true that people are so constituted they will remember the new is that has excited or enraged them long after forgetting all the rest of the day's reporting that's routine and moderate or constructive. But nevertheless we do have a severe practical problem. And it is to put these events into better perspective as they happen whenever possible. Judgement on the information and explanation. Cannot run as fast as the information that they need not legs so far behind. It is not. Precisely our fault that everywhere in the world human problems are being created faster than human institutions can solve them. Even the smallest and most remote African societies are producing more history now than they can domestically consume. So we cannot really help much of the most important it tends to be a nose of violence. It is our physical formats perhaps as much as anything that not adjusted to these realities. Consider the brief evening news programs of the major networks in which many millions of people get most of their information. Those instead of T.V.. They were just three national newspapers. With that same level of readership. And suppose they consist of PAGE ONE only tabloid size. One can imagine a popular pulling and hauling they would get. Every living soul would know exactly what should not have been printed and what should have been printed and constricted space. I do not quite see how we are to do markedly better job of it how to get the better balance unless these programs can go to an hour's length. Many of us have wanted this work for it for some time. Now or we can do what we should be always doing in my own long sustained opinion we could provide room for rebuttals to our practices from ordinary less letters to the editor if you wish. For years a situation is cried for this. And had we been doing it for these years perhaps much of the accumulating gas of resentment would have escaped from the boiler in a more normal fashion. Where we can think free and write and speak free. We cannot act free in all respects because of this anonymous legal position. The federal government apparently is about to make a full hour of network even Evening News a practical impossibility. With a new rule removing a half hour of evening time from network using. I very much wish local stations had the resources to report the whole nation and the whole world but they do not. So here we stand and will stand twisting about in our strait jacket doing the best we can. Remains a question. Of whether a press form that is not fully free can long endure I believe it will but it depends upon others even perhaps more than upon ourselves who work in this forum. It depends upon whether or not the society to surrenders to what has been called the politics of hysteria the social curse of this astounding century and that depends very much upon our constituted leaders. They choose to divide the people for short run political gain or try to draw other people together and to heal some of these divisions. I said I think most people will apportion credit and blame where they belong in the long run if you don't get a chance for the long run unless you survive the short run. We are all in this together so we had better stick together. We can all remember that trying in salty voice from India. The first and great commandment is don't let them scary thank you very much and it was a.