BRATTLEBORO — I have been re-reading Hitler's secret diaries lately. Just excerpts - I never had the chance to see the whole volume of work. But they really exist. I have the issues of Newsweek International in which they were touted.
Three cover stories. The first one all red and black with a long-running story quoting all kinds of excerpts, the most poignant his concern about Eva Braun's miscarriage. Then a second one proclaiming “the storm over Hitler's diaries.” The last cover, week three, says, “Forgery” in big red letters.
It was all a hoax. Of course, Hitler never had any diaries - he didn't like to write. He dictated Mein Kampf.
It was 1983, and I was a cub researcher and reporter in the Manhattan newsroom of Newsweek's international edition. I was given an assignment on that nice April day: I had to accompany a fellow researcher - a young woman who spoke fluent Russian and had way more skill that I did in the craft - to a building a few blocks down Madison Avenue. There, I was to wait outside while she would go in and do something that no one would tell me about.
I realized later that I was a bodyguard in this enterprise, but at the time it was just bewildering. The enterprise, it turned out, involved her picking up some information regarding the authentication of Hitler's secret diaries. I guess she got assurances that they were real, because the following week we ran that first cover story.
That main story ended with an archetypal newsmagazine kicker, saying that Hitler's diaries, whether real or not, still taught us something about ourselves and about the arc of history that he had infected.
It wasn't put like that, of course, and I am not going to quote the thing, since it all was total bullshit. But it was a classic kind of news ending to a story designed to sell magazines: we don't know whether this story is true or not, but you should read it anyway.
* * *
This episode took place at a point in Newsweek's history when the business side had taken over leadership from the editorial side.
My father, who had been the chief of correspondents at the magazine for more than a decade, had quit the place just a couple of years before. He was high enough on the masthead that they gave him the newsroom for a farewell address.
I still have the speech - he saved it. In it, he warned that when the business side controlled the news side, dictating how many journalists could be in the field and what a story could cost, real journalism would die.
It was a sort of prophecy. He saw what was coming.
A year or so later, Kay Graham, owner of Newsweek and The Washington Post, abruptly fired the editor, Lester Bernstein, who had been with the magazine through its glory days, and she brought in William Broyles Jr., who had achieved some renown in bringing Texas Monthly into notice.
Broyles was overmatched by the old-timers at the magazine - our running joke in the hallways was to say, “Oh, no, Mr. Bill!” But his job was to shift our focus toward entertainment, and he made us all read the Los Angeles Times every day.
He was still editor when the Hitler's diaries caper occurred. Nothing was hotter than Hitler's diaries that month, and he bought the U.S. rights to them.
It was sort of sad, really, since the managing editor at the time, Maynard Parker, was a great journalist - probably the best bureau chief Newsweek had in Saigon during that era, and a hard news guy all the way. I'm not sure why he was duped so badly, except perhaps that the pressure on all of us to make the news sexy was very strong at this inflection point in the history of journalism.
There was a time when journalism was a somewhat-honored profession; the early 1980s marked the tail end of that era. As a young guy in his 20s, I found the life of a young journalist in Manhattan was pretty cool, as I hung out with folks who had covered the war in Indochina or who had interviewed Gaddafi.
I got in at the tail end of a great era in American journalism, and I left too soon to see its demise. But the cracks were already in the wall then.
A couple of years later, Broyles was gone, and Graham put Rick Smith, who had been the editor of the international edition, in charge of both the editorial and business side.
The carnage was complete.
My father was dismayed when I got into the business just after he had left it. He saw what was coming. I didn't see it.
* * *
I have been thinking about this period of my life - let's call it the Hitler diaries period - in recent weeks for a couple of reasons.
One was that an old friend of my dad's, Lester Sloan, came to visit my mother, and I came over to see him for a couple of nights.
He was Newsweek's staff photographer in Los Angeles and a protégé of my dad's - he got picked up covering the 1967 riot in Detroit, one of the black guys my dad hired when he was integrating the newsroom in the 1960s. We got to talking about old times and all those old Newsweek characters, most of whom are dead now.
We talked a lot about the civil rights era at the magazine, when Newsweek was in front of that story. The next day, I gave him copies of two full-magazine cover stories, one from 1963 and one from 1967 about “the Negro in America,” and he said, “so this is the first Black Lives Matter.”
And in a way it was.
We also talked about the diaries fiasco and why Maynard might have gotten it so wrong. He told me that in 1986 my dad had counseled him to leave the profession - much as he had me at around the same time.
The other reason I've been thinking about this time is that Donald Trump is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in the general election for the presidency this fall.
For anyone who grew up in Manhattan and paid attention to the news in the 1970s and 1980s, the Trump candidacy is a nearly unimaginable event - as real as Hitler's secret diaries.
* * *
No one who actually knows about Donald Trump could possibly have imagined that he would ever be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. Every pundit I read in the mainstream press has presented some sort of mea culpa for not getting it right with Trump, and Nate Cohn in a recent New York Times piece had a particularly humble and insightful take on why he missed it.
But everyone got it wrong, and I think it is mainly because of three factors.
My own main take is that Trump is Hitler's secret diaries writ large. I'm not making the claim that he is a fascist, though others have done so, but rather that he was invented by the press, and now we have to live with him for a while until the final cover story declares the whole thing to be a hoax.
My take on Trump begins with the national news media, which is centered in Manhattan and its environs. Other cities used to have real news outlets. The Philadelphia Inquirer had one of the best investigative teams around. The Boston Globe used to be an independent paper with some really great reporters and writers. If you lived in New York and were a journalist in the 1980s, it mattered that you read the Los Angeles Times. The Chicago Tribune was a great paper. The Washington Post vied with the Times for supremacy for a little while. Newsweek and Time used to have meaning as sources of news.
But all of that is gone now, and all of our news comes from New York, except for a little bit from D.C. And the thing is, if you are a journalist working in New York, you just cannot take Trump seriously.
Everyone in the city who has been following his career lo these many decades knows that he is a joke, a loser, a blowhard, a serial adulterer. He is the most nouveau riche of all the new rich, one who hijacked any sense that wealth and class have some connection with each other.
So, of course, in a field of 17 candidates, he was a good joke - and, of course, with his blowhard bullshit, he sold papers and brought ratings.
So why not cover the hell out of him and make him front-page news every day?
But the main problem is that only sales matter these days, and Trump sells - it is his special gift. Even while the mainstream press despised him and did a decent job, though a bit late, on covering the reckless career we already had read on Page 6 of the New York Post, they still gave him all the airtime he needed to knock off his lackluster and antiquated political competition.
And that's what happened. He has barely had to spend a penny of the frayed fortune he inherited from his father and has struggled to sustain. Trump remains a joke. He got a free ride to the top. And now, we have to deal with him.
* * *
In the end, I feel fairly confident that we will reject Donald Trump, that he will be identified as the hoax he is in the same way that Hitler's diaries were ultimately discredited.
But there is a third factor involved behind his rise, and I worry about it.
I was rewatching that scene in the 1976 movie Network, in which Peter Finch, in his last movie before he died, gave a brilliant performance as a network anchor who has gone quite insane.
Shabby and disheveled, he talks directly into the camera, exhorting his viewers to say, “We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.”
He's crazy, of course, but the network producer, played beautifully by Faye Dunaway, makes sure the cameras stay on him while she calls the various network outlets to see whether people are starting to shout on the streets. And of course they are.
People are mad as hell, and in certain ways the press missed that part of the story because the people who control the press live in the same bubble of privilege that those they cover do.
So no one expected that Trump's campaign would have legs, any more than anyone thought that Bernie Sanders would still be winning state ballots in May.
In a press world focused on entertainment, where actually curating the news and getting things right is something of a dying art, it makes sense that the anger and discouragement afoot within the United States is reflected through the media lens as entertainment and then magnified.
And this makes me worry a lot.
What if Hitler's secret diaries turn out to be real in some invented alternative universe? What if Trump, engineered by media malfeasance, by the trump of the business side over the news side, turns out to be real?
If he takes the oath of office next January, it will entirely be because of the press's failure to cover him accurately until it was far too late to prevent the hoax from turning into reality.
Each semester, in the journalism class I teach, I show an Onion news video clip called “Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere.” It is a brilliant spoof of how cable news creates its own news in order to attract eyes. (“After a short break we will return with aerial coverage of a car chase while we free associate about what might be going on,” one fake newscaster says.)
I also show Walter Cronkite's coverage of John F. Kennedy's assassination - that moment when he announces the president's death, the five minutes of coverage that preceded it, and the brief moment when Cronkite wipes away a tear and then gives the hard facts, the date, the time, the fact of the death, and the facts of what will happen next.
“Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere.”
That's all the Trump nomination is.
And now we have to live with it.