Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, 1992 by Tom Rosenstiel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"But more dangerous than ideological bias in the media is hysteria. The press has become so large, conducts so many polls, examines so many trivial details, that to audiences on the other end context and nuances are lost. And television compounds the problem by compressing everything into the grammar of two minutes."

Continuing my reading project that could be entitled Politics and the media in the US, having read and reviewed here H.R. Haldeman's The Ends of Power, which deals with the early 1970s, and Lesley Stahl's Reporting Live, which spans the period from the early 1970s to very early 1990s, I have now read Tom Rosenstiel's Strange Bedfellows (1993), which focuses on the 1992 presidential campaign.

Tom Rosenstiel, now a well-known author and journalist, worked for the Los Angeles Times as a reporter and media critic. The book offers an inside, extremely detailed account of the campaign, mainly from the point of view of the ABC news network. The author writes:

"For twelve months, I had access to the editing bays, the assignment editors, the story meetings, and the thoughts of the principal people deciding how the network would cover the campaign. I traveled with ABC's correspondents and producers as they followed the candidates. I watched how ABC's nightly newscast was assembled by the senior producers and editors [...] I had access to budget meetings and internal memos. I saw the struggles over personnel and money."

Chapter 1 describes the events and atmosphere of the Election Day, November 3, 1992, when Bill Clinton, the candidate, defeated George H.W. Bush, the incumbent, and Ross Perot, the independent candidate. Next, the author rewinds to the fall of 1991 and, from then, the book can be read as a chronological collection of well-captured vignettes of hundreds of campaign events being covered by the network. The amount of detail the reader can learn from this book is incredible. The book also delivers many interesting syntheses, summaries, and conclusions. Let's mention several of them:

"Ted Koppel, the anchor of ABC's Nightline, even had a theory he called the 'Vanna-tizing' of American culture, in honor of Vanna White of TV's Wheel of Fortune. Vanna remained enormously popular, the theory went, precisely because she was seen but not heard."

Note how well it matches Ms. Stahl's observations from Reporting Live about the primacy of images over words. Or consider the "expectation game":

"[...] the fragile game in which the media set expectations and then interpreted the vote by watching who succeeds or fails to meet them."

The author also notes that while at the beginning the network was determined to provide a serious, issue-based reportage of the campaign, at the end it devolved into quite a chaotic, event-based coverage.

The reader may enjoy the discussion of how the new technologies and the competition from other news sources, including the emergence of CNN, affect the coverage of the campaign. Finally, the angle, which I find the most fascinating. How much does the coverage of the campaign change the campaign itself and, possibly, its outcome? I would love to see a more detailed study of this issue. The author mentions it a few times, for instance:

"Policing what candidates said changed the relationship between reporter and politician. By labeling a candidate's statement as distorted or false, the press went from being a color commentator up in the booth to being a referee down on the field. Implicitly, this role acknowledged that the press not only reflected political events, it shaped them."

Overall, a very good read, perhaps lacking a slightly higher degree of cohesion. Highly recommended, though!

Three-and-a-half stars.

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Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'You gonna cry again, Frankie? What is it? Did your Momma toilet-train you funny? Is that why you're such a goddamned freak-o?'"

When I read dialogue like this, the images of Humphrey Bogart taunting Edward G. Robinson in a 1940s black-and-white movie come to mind. But the words come from a 1975 Spenser story by Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes, so the author seems to be back to parodying the dated hard-boiled genre. Luckily, the dated feeling is not as strong as in The Godwulf Manuscript , so hopefully Mr. Parker is on his way to outgrow the pastiche mode, as I keep reading Spenser mysteries in chronological order.

A baseball manager hires Spenser to check whether the best pitcher in their organization has gambling connections:

"'[...] I heard something peculiar about him. The odds seem to shift a little when he pitches. I mean, there is some funny money placed when he's scheduled to go.'"

Spenser begins his investigation, meets with the pitcher and his wife, and realizes that something that the wife has said bothers him. Then, a couple of low-life hoods visit Spenser: they tell him, "you're only a goddamned egg-sucking snoop, a nickel-and-dime cheapie," and suggest that he should cease the investigation.

Making numerous phone calls and using help from his police contacts, Spenser quickly manages to get to the bottom of the case. The plot is implausible, particularly as to how easily Spenser gets all the needed information. But who cares about the plot if we can enjoy wise-cracking hard-boiled detective in his full glory. Oh, and the romantic Spenser! Both Brenda Loring and Susan Silverman return in this novel. Which one will Spenser choose? Stay tuned.

I am usually able to find a nice fragment of prose, even in weaker Spenser novels. No such luck here.

One-and-three-quarter stars.


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Reporting Live by Lesley Stahl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"So what had I learned in 20 years in Washington? I learned that it's not only 'the economy, stupid.' It's also television, stupid. Television had become the center not only of campaigning and governing but also of diplomacy and decision making. I also learned to have enormous faith in our system. Democracy works. It even intrudes on the way the media functions."

Reporting Live (1999), Lesley Stahl's memoir of her 20 years at CBS, covers all the major events of American politics. Ms. Stahl began working at CBS in 1972, as an affirmative action hire for women and minorities in broadcasting. Among her numerous top reporting positions, she served as a co-anchor of the CBS Morning News, the White House correspondent since 1978, and the moderator of Face the Nation between 1983 and 1991. She was able to watch five US presidents in action, from up close: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush (George H.W.)

Ms. Stahl reported on the Watergate burglary, the impeachment hearings of President Nixon, the Ford presidency, the so-called "malaise" times of President Carter, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the assassination attempt on President Reagan. She reported on all the elections and major party conventions. Even if nothing else counted, the book would be a valuable refresher on the American politics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet, the reader will find a lot more in Ms. Stahl's book. First of all, the fascinating thread of juggling the duties of one of the top reporters and television personalities in the country and her responsibilities as a mother - the author's daughter was born in 1977 - shows her drive and extreme hard work ethic.

The mechanisms and machinations of the highest-level office politics in the leading broadcasting company of the time constitute another interesting thread. The account of the incessant jockeying for more important positions and duties among the top reporting staff at CBS might read sort of funny if not for the fact that it seemed to take away too much energy from all the people involved.

In Reporting Live the reader will also find numerous details of political events and background observations that are hard to find elsewhere. For instance the following about the tax-cut-loving President Reagan:

"Reagan went on television with a brawny statement about his commitment to cutting taxes but then signed a bill for fiscal 1983 that raised them. [...] Over the course of his presidency he would raise taxes 13 more times, but each time he convinced everyone he'd never do such a thing."

The insightful personal observations of President Carter are deeply biting, yet somehow they help humanize his image.

To me, the single most important lesson from Ms. Stahl's book are her observations about the primacy of pictures over words. She reminisces about her piece for the CBS Evening News, where she harshly criticized President Reagan's campaign. However, her critical words were accompanied by images from the President's "morning in America" campaign, designed to make the viewers "feel good: about America, about themselves, and about him." The piece was universally considered "an ad for the Reagan campaign or a very positive news story." Virtually no one noticed the strong critique. Indeed, understanding words requires a degree of intellectual effort, while pictures effortlessly evoke feelings.

In the same vein, Ms. Stahl points out how the presidential elections in the US are won and lost on likeability of the candidates and on their image rather than on issues. I love the question she once asked Jim Baker:

"'You don't think Hollywood can create a president?'"

Recommended read!

Three-and-a-half stars.


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God Save The Child by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"She said, 'Come in, Mr. Spenser. I'm Susan Silverman.' [...]When she shook hands with me, I felt something click down back of my solar plexus.
I said hello without stammering and sat down. "

Probably the most exciting thing about Robert B. Parker's God Save the Child (1974), the second novel in the Spenser series, is the first appearance of Susan Silverman, who will become one of the mainstays of the series. Other than that, I find the novel quite weak; in a most generous mood, I would call it utterly unremarkable. However, I have accidentally found the website https://www.ranker.com/list/best-robe..., where God Save the Child is ranked as the very best Spenser book. Huh? HUH? What's wrong with me? Is there a therapy to straighten my understanding of reading material?

Mrs. and Mr. Bartlett, a well-to-do people from Boston suburbs, hire Spenser to find their 15-year-old son, who disappeared from home, along with his pet guinea pig. The Bartletts are pure caricatures, they are as far from real people as I am from youth. I wouldn't think it possible, but the portrait of Chief Trask is even less realistic - a cartoon of a corrupt, stupid, bad cop. Spenser himself? Well, the author is working too hard on making the detective a uniquely insolent wise-ass. This does not jibe with Spenser's inner sensitivity, intelligence, and charm. Only the character of Susan Silverman exhibits some semblance of realism.

The novel escapes the very bottom rating because of several well-written or funny passages. For instance:

"She laughed. Her laugh sounded like I'd always imagined the taste of mead."

Mr. Parker can write well, but this early in the series he has not yet mastered the craft of characterization.

I laughed out loud when I read

"Two sailors went by with a fat barelegged girl between them. One of the sailors said something I couldn't hear and slapped the girl on the fanny. Both sailors laughed. The girl said, 'Oh, piss on you,' and they went by. Ah, to be young and in love."

Indeed. I am in a generous mood now so I will rate the novel with

One-and-three-quarter stars.


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Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do."

Atul Gawande's Complications (2002) strongly resonates with me in at least two ways. My favorite field of mathematics is probability, and one of the topics that excite me the most is how bad most people (including myself) are in dealing with uncertainty, i.e., with practical consequences of randomness. Dr. Gawande dedicates quite some space to this issue in the book, as promised in the snippet from the Introduction, quoted in the epigraph above. Furthermore, when I teach software engineering, I emphasize the topics related to quality assurance. Dr. Gawande's book makes it absolutely clear that the best way to improve medicine is to put a stronger focus on quality assurance in the medical process.

The book contains many fascinating stories of medical cases, often from the author's own practice as a surgery resident. We read about the physiology and psychology of blushing, gastric-bypass surgeries, persistent nausea, evolution of theories of pain, cases of "flesh-eating bacteria" infection, sudden infant death syndrome, and several others. As captivating as these cases are, being in the math and computer science fields, I am more interested in issues of uncertainty in medicine, medical errors, and the potential method of reducing the uncertainty and the number of errors.

The existence of medical error is normal, and I am using the word in two different meanings: normal as 'expected,' 'regular,' 'frequent,' but also normal as in the mathematical term of "normal distribution" that can be illustrated by a bell-shaped curve. Very informally, the so-called Central Limit Theorem, one of the magnificent achievements in the mathematical theory of probability, states that when the outcome of an experiment or event is affected by many, many independent random factors, then the value of the outcome follows the bell-shaped curve: most outcomes are in the fat middle of the graph (these are the average, expected outcomes), and very few in its tails (these are the unexpectedly bad or unexpectedly super successful outcomes).

Consider the author's example of a fairly routine operation of laparoscopic cholecystectomy ("lap chole"). The extreme complexity of human physiology, the complexity of activities in the operating room, the complexity of psychology of the doctors and nurses on the team, etc. result in thousands, probably millions of independent random factors that influence the outcome of the operation. So the outcome must be normal (as in bell-shaped). There will always be the tails of the distribution, and one of these tails may mean the patient's death from a routine surgery. The author writes:

"[...]studies show that even highly experienced surgeons inflict this terrible injury [cutting the main bile duct] about once in every two hundred lap choles. [...] a statistician would say that, no matter how hard I tried, I was almost certain to make this error at least once in the course of my career."

One of the most fascinating fragments of the book deals with the human inability to choose the right decision when randomness and catastrophic results need to be considered. Suppose (this is my example) a patient has a condition that severely imperils the quality of life. Suppose there exists an operation, with a recorded success rate of 99%. But in the remaining 1% of cases the patient will die during the operation. We do know the probabilities but how can we estimate the numerical value of the patient's life relative to the value of their life with the debilitating condition and relative to the value of the healthy life? If we could, the mathematical problem would be simple but, of course, we can't! The additional complication is the natural human inability to understand the difference between probabilities of, say, 0.001 and 0.00001 of something very bad happening. Both events are unlikely to happen, but don't forget that both will eventually happen. To someone, maybe even us.

Dr. Gawande quotes a lot of statistic in Complications. Here's probably the most scary of them:

"How often do autopsies turn up a major misdiagnosis in the cause of death? I would have guessed this happens rarely, in 1 or 2 percent of cases at most. According to three studies done in 1998 and 1999, however, the figure is about 40%."

So is medicine doomed to fail in a high percentage of cases? Or is there a chance for the medical success statistic to improve? The author's answer is positive and he repeatedly offers his suggestion of the best medication for the ailing medicine. In the last chapter he writes:

"[...] to shrink the amount of uncertainty in medicine -- with research, not on new drugs or operations (which already attracts massive amounts of funding) but on the small but critical everyday decisions that patients and doctors (which get shockingly little funding)."

Reduction of uncertainty is the crucial step. It could be achieved by following the quality assurance guidelines from other fields of science and technology. Dr. Gawande mentions various methods and processes that are used to improve aviation safety as recommendations that could easily be adapted for the medical field; I would add the engineering disciplines in general, including software engineering and systems engineering. Standardization, uniformization, "routinization" of medicine are strongly recommended.

A highly worthwhile book! I am sure that also the readers, who are not particularly interested in the issues of uncertainty and error in medicine, will find the medical case stories captivating and valuable reads. Well-written book, accessible, and convincing!

Four-and-a-half stars.


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The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Around ten-thirty the doorman called upstairs to tell her that there was a police officer on his way up. [...] He wouldn't say anything until they were inside the apartment, but by then she already knew. The look on his face said it all."

Lawrence Block's The Devil Knows You're Dead (1993) is the eleventh novel in the Matthew Scudder series, and the sixth one that I am reviewing here on Goodreads. The readers who are into conceptual continuity of Matthew Scudder's life story will appreciate the book even more than I do. There are three main threads in the novel: the criminal plot, the thread focusing on Matt's sobriety, the AA meetings, and his daily struggles, as well the storyline about the women in his life, Elaine and others. I have the feeling that the emphasis on the two "personal" threads is more pronounced than in other novels in the series. Anyway, back to the plot.

A man leaves the luxury apartment in the evening to take care of something, promising his wife to come back soon, and then... The wife learns that he has been killed in an apparently random attack. The Holtzmanns were acquaintances of Matthew Scudder and his significant other, Elaine. A near-homeless Vietnam veteran is charged with the murder; all circumstances of the attack point to him. Yet his brother does not believe he is the killer and hires Matt Scudder to find out the truth. The plot is quite plausible and devoid of ridiculous twists and clichés, perhaps except one: the author resorts to a common literary gimmick:

"Something was playing hide-and-seek in my memory, something I'd heard or read in the past day or two. But I couldn't quite manage to grab on to it..."

To me, the best thing in the novel are three conversations that Matt has with various people. The first one, with the victim's boss, touches on various extraneous topics, such as publishing business and office politics; yes, it could be cut out, yet I learned a lot reading it. The conversation between Matt, the victim's wife, and Matt's lawyer is hilarious: it illustrates various clever ways of making obviously illegal activities appear legal. And, to me, the highpoint of the novel is when Matt's ex-lover explains her decision in the closing section of the story - a desperately sad, yet somehow uplifting paragraph.

On the negative side, despite my supposed wisdom accumulated with old age, I have never been able to understand the author's fascination with Mick Ballou, a recurring character in many Scudder novels and "a boring, stupid creep," to borrow language from Gen Z: Sure, people like this exist and need to appear in fiction, but why come back to the same person time and time again?

Three-and-a-half stars.


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The Ends of Power by H.R. Haldeman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The original plans, apparently, were aimed toward the Democratic convention wherein the prostitutes and kidnappings would flourish, as well as electronic bugging of candidates' suites."
"Then the rest of the money went to CRP in a bizarre way: a man wearing gloves furtively receiving the briefcase full of cash and handing over no receipt."
"'Let me ask you this, to be quite candid. Is there any way you can use cash."

I recommend H.R. Haldeman's The Ends of Power (1978) to anyone who does not believe that politics is the dirtiest area of human activity. Being an old geezer, I am pretty cynical about humankind, yet I still felt soiled reading this book. The author, a long-term Chief of Staff in Richard Nixon's White House, arguably the closest to Nixon member of his cabinet, shows people in the very highest echelons of government constantly busy lying, cheating, covering-up, bribing, entrapping, and figuring out how to most efficiently destroy other people. How do they find the time to achieve successes in, say, foreign policy, as Mr. Nixon undoubtedly did? How do they find time to think about improving the lives of American citizens? Yeah, right...

The book is focused on the Watergate drama. In the Author's Note, he writes:

"In my view, all of us at the White House involved in Watergate did a lot of things wrong. Some criminal, some harmless, some willful, some accidental, some shrewdly calculated, some stupidly blundered, but each wrong."

The Watergate affair that lasts from June 17, 1972, when burglars are apprehended in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in Washington, DC, to August 8, 1974, when president Nixon resigns, is such an incredibly complex mesh of events, motivations, causes and effects, human errors, and random happenings that even though I have read several books on Watergate, I still have only the most rudimentary understanding of the affair. Haldeman's book makes some things clear for me, but - at the same time - it brings so many new aspects and factors to light, that I can't say my understanding has increased much.

I find the later chapters more clear and much more readable than the earlier ones, which intimidate the reader with an abundance of details; the chapter Beginning of the End is most captivating and seems better written than the rest. The Conclusion helps in that it provides a "big picture" overview of the entire scandal.

Recursion is my favorite motif in mathematics, computer programming, and also in art, so I particularly like that at one point in the book the author most likely uses the content of the tape recordings of his conversation with president Nixon, which was about the content of the tape recordings of his much earlier conversation with president Nixon. This could provide a fascinating setup for a thriller.

I recommend this 43-year-old book without hesitation - a worthwhile, if depressing read.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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