Mark Fenster

Department of Telecommunications
Indiana University
fenster@silver.ucs.indiana.edu

 

Schudson, Michael. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

 

Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

 

“Best Evidence is the story of my journey in search of the truth about the autopsy [of John F. Kennedy]. When my literary agent first read this manuscript, he said, ‘You have written a book about authority.’ No, I said, I’ve written a book about the assassination. I didn’t understand, but he did. This is a book about authority because it delves into the process by which we–as individuals and as a society–decide what is true and what is false; what is to be believed and what is not” (Lifton 1992, xviii).

 

Michael Schudson’s Watergate in American Memory and Barbie Zelizer’s Covering the Body are quite removed from the often heady world of Kennedy assassination researchers, a world in which David Lifton is a lofty, though somewhat controversial figure. Schudson is a sociologist, Zelizer is in a rhetoric and communication department, and neither is interested in the minutiae of medical evidence and the geopolitical speculation that are at the heart of Warren Commission critics. However, they would both agree with Lifton that the debates around such “critical incidents” as the Kennedy assassination(s) and Watergate are indeed as much about authority as they are about “truth” and the never ending and seemingly impossible search for it. While Schudson and Zelizer have written very different books on these events and their implications in their own time and in the present, their projects are quite similar and are worthy of comparison for the study of social memory and contemporary culture.

 

Specifically, they share the purpose of attempting to use the very problematic events that they discuss in order to make arguments about contemporary American culture. Schudson is interested in “collective memory,” and how societies institutionalize memories, and particularly historical memories, in cultural forms and social practices. Zelizer traces the establishment of journalistic authority in and over the Kennedy assassination–the title phrase, “covering the body,” refers to the actual media “coverage” of Kennedy and his death (ironically, the term was used before the assassination to refer to those whose beat was following the President to Dallas or wherever he went). Both authors, then, are using these events as case studies for projects that seek to move beyond mere historical chronicles, and this movement beyond history and into memory and authority are among the main strengths and weaknesses of these books. These were and remain, as both authors document, important events in recent American history and memory, and their reverberations throughout politics and culture are still felt; in the past year, for example, the twentieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in was commemorated by a CBS documentary, while a “Director’s Cut” of Oliver Stone’s controversial JFK has just been released on video, with a number of scenes “restored” from the shorter version that met the time constraints imposed by Time-Warner. As powerful historical events that took place at crucial conjunctures in recent American history, Watergate and the Kennedy assassination can tell us much about such diverse topics as the function of memory and the practice of journalism; however, as such, these events can and often do exceed such attempts to “use” them. In other words, because there is far more to Watergate and JFK’s assassination than the rather specific theoretical and political interests with which these authors come to these events, their attempts to somewhat sharply focus, or to cut off a discursive slice of an “event” in order to examine “American Culture,” at times yields frustrating results.

 

* * * * *

 

Zelizer is most interested in the “interpretive community” of journalists, and how the “cultural authority” of (certain) journalists is asserted and maintained. “Journalism,” in this sense, refers to more than merely the printed page or the broadcast; it comprises the discursive practices authorized and legitimated in professional meetings of journalists, journalism textbooks, codes of professionalism, journalists’ folklore, memoirs, historical accounts, etc. Zelizer argues that the overarching narrative of journalism and the journalist is a structuring principle of journalistic discourse; the journalistic community constitutes itself, she argues, via the stories it tells about itself in order to legitimate itself and what it does.

 

Within this interpretive community and American culture in general, the Kennedy assassination serves as a “critical incident” (a moment ‘by means of which people air, challenge, and negotiate their own standards of action'[4]) in its historical position within the emergence of television news as a primary form of journalism, the chaotic circumstances of the assassination and the ability of the media to narrate and explain seemingly inexplicable information, and the close ties between the Kennedy administration and many members of the press. This was a story that was clearly “told” first and foremost by journalists–the trickling out of facts, the live coverage of the Oswald murder and the Kennedy funeral, and the early legitimation of the Warren Commission report were all dependent upon the reporting of the news media. And a number of prominent journalists, among them current CBS news anchor Dan Rather and Washington Post pundit David Broder, established themselves as important news figures while covering this event, and continue to keep the event alive within their own work and autobiographies (none more so than Rather, who seems to obsessively cover the story whenever it seems necessary for CBS to give it further prime time coverage). Zelizer is at her best when documenting and describing this obsessive use of the coverage by news organizations and journalists, and persuasively documents how journalists established themselves as “preferred spokespersons of the assassination story” (137).

 

In addition, her discussion of the struggles over journalism’s association with this story provides a good framework for understanding both the conflicts between journalistic and historical discourse, and those between “legitimate” explanations of the assassination and the explanations offered by Warren Commission critics, as exemplified by Stone and JFK. By asserting themselves as main spokespersons of the assassination story, journalists and news organizations were, and remain, poachers on the territory of historians; this was, after all, a presidential assassination, and can only be understood, so historians argue, within its proper historical context and with the “disinterested” and distanced care of the historian. Yet the assassination remains in the realm of the popular; the “explanations” of the event provided by Dan Rather or James Reston are more widely circulated and have greater purchase on social memories of the event than those of prominent historians (the recent “forum” in the American Historical Review on JFK [1992] was itself a rather problematic attempt to enable historians to engage in the popular debate about the popular film).

 

If historians represent one challenge to journalistic authority (or, more precisely, if journalists represent one challenge to the authority of historians), then Warren Commission critics represent a similar, though quite different struggle over the meaning of the event. Indeed, no group is more willing to provide an extended critique of the mass media and news organizations as instruments of propaganda than these “independent researchers,” who often come across as a poor person’s Noam Chomsky (this is intended as a compliment to the researchers). At the same time, the mainstream media view the work of these researchers with disdain, if indeed they view it at all. The incredible backlash against Stone and his film, which began before the film was even released, was, as Zelizer argues, as much an attempt to re-assert journalistic authority as it was an attempt to review a film; after all, if Stone was in any way correct, then journalistic accounts are willing or unwilling accomplices to a great cover-up. Thus the debate over the ethics of cinematic representation (i.e., which sequences and images were “real” and which were “fiction”?) was often a displacement of journalistic and mainstream political anxiety over who was telling the tale of the assassination and how it was being told. In this sense, this debate over the Kennedy assassination as a public event, no matter whether Stone is right, is very much about authority.

 

Yet a central problem of the book lies precisely in questions that arise in Zelizer’s definition of “authority,” as she seems reluctant to explain fully how she would define journalistic (and media) authority. On the one hand, she wants to emphasize what she sees as a “collective” set of knowledge and practices, and she seems to reject or at least to modify the classic left association of the media with the protection of and assistance to power and influence in the transmission of ideologically limited and distorted information (6-7). And yet she closes her book with a discussion of the importance of an “acquiescent,” “relatively uncritical and inattentive” American public in the crafting of journalistic authority. How “collective” is a media complex so removed from an invisible and seemingly powerless public and dependent upon electronic media and stars, and how does journalistic authority survive if not via the transmission of certain types of narratives and not others?

 

Despite these lingering political and theoretical questions, the book admirably meets its central objective of chronicling and critiquing journalistic discourses of authority. Yet it leaves me dissatisfied because of its inadequate recognition of what I would call the “excesses” of popular political/cultural events like the Kennedy assassination and Watergate. I’m referring here to both disciplinary and phenomenological excess: the assassination was “experienced” and continues to be remembered and “experienced” on a seemingly infinite number of personal, cultural and political levels, and can and has been argued over and “explained” by as many disciplinary authorities as have looked into it. This is why, in some ways, Don Delillo’s Libra can represent the event more powerfully than sociology of journalism can (or should be expected to); it is also why the vast and polymorphous corpus of pro- and anti-Warren Commission authors provides a fascinating, Joycean vision of virtually all aspects of the event.

 

This is not to say that Zelizer’s project is inherently flawed or that it tells us nothing; rather, it represents a good starting point for understanding the workings of discursive practices of authority in popular historical events such as this. It does, however, mean that in so tightly focusing her study on an event that needs a very wide screen, her argument at times becomes diffused within the broader implications of the murder of a president. Her very controlled academic prose and her staid sociological approach can explain the workings of journalists quite well; yet they can only describe one aspect of the event and the discourse that surrounded and still surrounds it. And at times, this excess seems to overwhelm the book’s premise–after all, if, as polls indicate, the American public disbelieves the findings of the Warren Commission and distrusts the media, then what exactly does “journalistic authority” over the event amount to? What is an authority that has a virtual monopoly on the circulation of information and the construction of historical narratives, and yet is so ineffectual that after thirty years of reiterating its official story of the Kennedy assassination almost nobody appears to believe what it tells them? Sociology of journalism such as Zelizer’s can help us to understand the attempt to control the excess of events like the Kennedy assassination. It remains for further work to explain the institutional and popular practices that attempt, sometimes successfully, to exceed this control.

 

* * * * *

 

Schudson’s book is more directly concerned with issues that are central to theorizing the practices of postmodernity: the construction, circulation and institutionalization of memory. Like Zelizer, Schudson is interested in authority, although his emphasis is less on the interests of any one specific group than on the use of and struggle over the events and meanings of Watergate. The book is written in engaging and, compared with Covering the Body, relatively informal and enjoyable prose; it is also neat and tightly constructed, beginning with a concise discussion of theories of social memory, a review of the central political elements of Watergate, and a series of case studies of the use of memory in post-Watergate reform politics, journalistic practice, and historical accounts, as well as in popular culture, language, autobiographies of Watergate participants, and in the self-serving Richard Nixon Library. Among other uses Schudson describes, memories of Watergate have been “mobilized” for the sake of political careers, “contested” in political practice, “ignited” in the discourse surrounding the revelations of and responses to the Iran-Contra scandal, and “besieged” in Nixon’s campaign to restore his personal reputation. In addition, Schudson argues that the revelations of Watergate were easily articulated with growing suspicions and distrust of government (which, as he cogently asserts, had begun prior to Nixon’s fall) as well as with the release of information about the sins of the American security apparatus at home and abroad. At the same time, he demonstrates how the discourse concerning Watergate generally ignores a central source for the conflict between Nixon, the Congress, and popular protest–the Vietnam War and the secret bombing of Cambodia.

 

Watergate in American Memory is particularly effective in its mapping out of the various reactions to Watergate by different political groups. Schudson divides and sub-divides such responses: first, in terms of whether the event was understood as a constitutional crisis (generally by liberal and conservative centrists) or a scandal (i.e., as a superficial “show” that covered up greater manipulation by elite groups, generally believed by what he terms “ultraconservatives” and the “radical left”), and then by virtue of whether the problem that Watergate represented was caused by systemic shortcomings within the American political system (liberals and leftists) or was peculiar to the Nixon presidency (centrists and conservatives of all stripes). Clearly, these differing reactions concern the construction of larger historical narratives and the placement of Watergate within these narratives; as Schudson argues, understanding and remembering Watergate is an ongoing process and struggle over identifying actors, motives and context.

 

In this sense, Watergate represents the process of contemporary historical knowledge and memory; it was, at once, a Historical Event, an object of intense media scrutiny, and a site of popular knowledge and debate. Against the tirades of academics and intellectuals on the right and left which posit an American culture that lacks any memory of itself and others, Schudson conceives of a United States that immerses itself in certain texts and practices of popular history, such as the memory of the historical in relation to the personal remembrance, “amateur” historical research, and the popular political discourse of the mass media and everyday life. Like the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate is both popularly “forgotten” (in the “properly” historical sense of the knowledge of specific facts and human agents) and obsessed over in the struggle to understand and define the implications of these events and their relationship to the present. To remember Watergate is to remember Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Ervin committee hearings, and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman–thus illustrating the continuing importance of popular narratives and memories in understanding contemporary political events and crises. For the study of contemporary culture, this emergent notion of memory as popular and (mass) mediated rather than as authoritative and mediated through “proper” historical channels is of considerable value.

 

My frustration with Schudson’s book is his tendency to set up a continuum of political and theoretical positions and to attempt to occupy what he constructs as a reasonable, yet transcendent, middle ground. This appears first in his validation and appropriation of virtually every political response to Watergate; he agrees, yet limits his own agreement, with those who see it as scandal and constitutional crisis, as peculiar to Nixon and as part of systemic problems with the Presidency. Unwilling to assume any one of these positions, he seems ready to occupy all at once. Yet taken to their logical conclusions, these positions are mutually exclusive: if Watergate was the successful resolution of a crisis through the removal of the constitutional threat and the reform of legislation and policy, then it could not have been a scandal constructed by the power or media elite to retain legitimacy for a corrupted system or to depose a conservative president. Similarly, while one might agree that Nixon’s was a singular presidency, the reign of Reagan was competitive in the breadth and fury of its domestic and foreign covert operations–and thus, clearly, Nixon’s singularity is far less significant than the systemic structures that allow for two such imperial presidencies in successive decades. While Schudson notes this, his apparent desire to remain above such “partisan” politics demonstrates an unwillingness to confront the issues of power that (what he might term) the “radical left” position would require of him. Because he chose Watergate as a case study of social memory, Schudson is obliged, it seems to me, to express a good deal more righteous indignation at the politics of the era and the treachery of the Nixon regime; this is neither a question of “objectivity” nor correct politics, but part of the terrain that comes with choosing such a controversial event for a case study of social memory.

 

This becomes more apparent in his lack of a satisfactory theory of memory. He provides worthy critiques of some of the problems with “interest” theories (i.e., critical theories of the ideological uses of memory), “cultural” theories (the symbolic logic of remembrance within specific cultures) and social constructionist theories (the construction of the past in the memory of present observers), yet seems to argue neither for a singular different theory nor for one that appropriates the best aspects of all of them. While he posits memory as a “scarce resource” that is “handed down through particular cultural forms and transmitted in particular cultural vehicles” (207, 5), he seems unwilling to note the degree to which, in his case studies, it is the power and media elite who construct the dominant, though not unchallenged, narratives of Watergate. While one would certainly want to qualify simplistic notions of ideology that would claim such discourse as all-powerful, the sheer dominance of certain ways of understanding and using Watergate for political ends demonstrates the viability of radical critiques of dominant discourse. Clearly, “American memory” is a site of struggle, but one in which certain groups and interests enjoy greater ability than others to manage what is remembered and how it is remembered.

 

If, as I would argue, an important dimension of postmodernity is the increasingly sophisticated array of strategies and technologies by means of which certain groups attempt to “manage” the construction and reconstruction of historical knowledge, then Watergate, as a text that was at its very core covert and opaque, seems a seminal example of the relationship between power, the realm of the political, and memory in contemporary American culture. As with the Kennedy assassination, memories of Watergate are aspects of the cultural struggle to construct and authorize certain narratives and explanations of the past. Zelizer and Schudson successfully document aspects of this process; the challenge for theories of postmodernity is to further map social memory within matrices of knowledge, power, and domination.

 

Works Cited

 

• “AHR Forum: JFK.” American Historical Review Apr. 1992: 486-511.
• Lifton, David. Best Evidence. New York: Signet, 1992.
• Stone, Oliver and Zachary Sklar. JFK: The Book of the Film. New York: Applause Books, 1992.