If I were a prospective juror in Trump’s trial over falsifying financial records to cover up his hush money to Stormy Daniels, could I be impartial? This is what I would say, when questioned by the lawyers.
Trump said in 2016 that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters. Based on that, I can see how the hush money might have been more about keeping Melania from learning about the affair.
When new hires seemed ready, they would go on a site visit with either myself or an experienced member of the group. The idea was the new person would participate in the technical work of a live field installation, and then conduct the training sessions with assistance from the experienced staffer.
The closer the customer was to the office the better, to keep travel expenses for two as low as possible. There were quite a few local customers back then, and those were ideal.
I preferred to trust an experienced member of the group, rather than going myself. It encouraged teamwork, while giving staffers who showed potential an opportunity to take a supervisory role.
The timeframe I’m talking about, by the way, was 1987, at the peak of the minicomputer era. In those days, an installation typically took an entire workweek, including travel. Leaving on a Monday and returning that Friday was the norm, with the more distant destinations requiring Sunday departures. Toronto? Leave Boston on a Monday morning. Seattle? Leave Sunday.
My group was always first in the installation schedule to go onsite at a customer. After the training visit a new staffer would fly solo and work alone. We were a System group, and we very rarely traveled with someone from an Application group in the company. This is an important point in Ted’s story, as will be explained later.
The upshot was that Ted did all right on his training visit. He managed the software installation and testing with minimal supervision, and he was a natural at conducting the training sessions. My boss and I were pleased with our new hire, and I forgot about my “little warning bell.”
I watched another one of the Firing Line videos, made available on YouTube by the Hoover Institution Library. Only one month before Nixon resigned the presidency, William F. Buckley, Jr. sat with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were promoting their book, All the President’s Men.
In hindsight, Buckley strikes me as a rather unimpressive pundit and debater. As I saw in the way he handled John Kenneth Galbraith, Buckley would bring up irrelevant and arcane ‘whataboutisms,” or he’d change the subject outright, or he’d resort to small personal digs. With Woodward and Bernstein he fell flat and clearly had trouble when attempting to articulate some inchoate thoughts.
In my post about the American Masters profile of Buckley, I said the only domestic major issue of his time that he got right was Watergate. Now I see that Buckley actually gave Nixon the benefit of the doubt right up to the end. All he really did was accept the inevitability of Nixon falling on his sword.
Woodward and Bernstein were very impressive on Firing Line. While remaining respectful of William F. Buckley, Jr., they held an unwavering advantage over him from the start. They masterfully handled Buckley’s various attempts at redirecting the interview onto irrelevant tangents. Buckley even brought up that favorite right-wing wet dream of Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia, of the necessity to torture someone who has threatened to blow up a city with a nuclear weapon. Bernstein quickly and directly put the conversation back on track, while Woodward strategically played up to Buckley with some cleverly tailored flattery. Their way of working together can be seen in the famous movie adaptation with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.
To Buckley’s credit, once he finally realized he was outmatched he mostly listened to Woodward and Bernstein. Perhaps it was because of the timeliness of the subject, or maybe Buckley allowed himself to consider the pair his journalist peers, at least for the moment. It’s revealed they turned down Buckley’s first request for a visit, and they almost rejected his second request.
We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of Tricky Dick going down the drain by flying away in a helicopter. Anyone who wants to be reminded of just how good Woodward and Bernstein were at their jobs, or for anyone who doubts their significance in what happened fifty years ago, this is a must-see hour.
As before, I am linking rather than embedding, because of the disclaimers at the start of the video. Clicking the picture will take you there. If the Hoover Institution were serious about their copyright claim, they would not allow their videos to be embedded.
Bruce Springsteen recorded “My Hometown” in 1983. By the time I heard the song, I had seen for myself what he was singing about.
I was familiar with the harmful competitive effect shopping malls had upon downtown storefronts in the 70’s. What I saw on in the 80’s, during my business travels to Ohio and Illinois, were formerly thriving company towns struggling with unemployment. I was reminded of the textile mill towns back home that had been devastated by the mills moving to Southern states.
What happened to the once mighty American steel industry, that declined so rapidly in the 80’s? Were foreign governments dumping steel on the market for less than the cost of production? Or were foreign competitors making steel more efficiently, while American steel manufacturers had failed to innovate?
There’s a comment at the end of the podcast, about the steel industry showing up in pop culture. Big Steel’s influence extended all the way to a galaxy far, far away.
The motivator behind finally telling this story is Martin Baron’s memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and THE WASHINGTON POST. In chapter 18, “Uprisings”, Baron explains what he considers to have been his failure, as the Post’s editor, at resolving the disconnect he felt with Black staffers in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder in 2020.
Ted was hired, and after attending a week of employee orientation he joined my group. The job required a decidedly mixed skill set. It was split between a lot of hands-on technical work and teaching classes on how to use the system. (My most difficult challenge in doing that was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C.)
Someone who wasn’t comfortable with frequent air travel, technical troubleshooting under pressure, or public speaking wouldn’t have been qualified. Ted seemed suited to the job. He liked electronics, he was well-spoken, and his personality reminded me of the DJ’s I’d worked with in radio. In fact, Ted had a side gig as a club DJ.
The technical aspects of the job required a lot of time to learn; one year for basic proficiency. So the goal for new hires was to get them up to speed as quickly as possible, to start traveling and to provide the onsite training.
Everyone in my group needed to be able to fill in for one another to do the traveling and the training. For the technical work, I tried to give each of them their own specialty.
For many years I was the go-to guy for customer data communications problems. Dealing with the confounding aspects of serial interfacing and data flow control in the Universal 7-Part Data Circuit model was a big part of my job. (Thank you Intel, for implementing unidirectional XON/XOFF flow control in your modems!)
Ted had an interest in, and aptitude for, data communications. Which made sense to me, because just as I had been a radio DJ, Ted was a gear head with his own DJ setup. I welcomed the chance to train Ted and offload some of that datacomm work.
