Excerpt: 'My Turn at the Bully Pulpit'
Aug. 26 -- In her new book, My Turn at the Bully Pulpit, Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, who hosts On the Record with Greta VanSusteren, gives her straightforward take on the issues of the day, from patriotism to medical malpractice. The following excerpt is about loyalty and conflict, and how meanness in politics cheapens debate.
Here is an excerpt from My Turn at the Bully Pulpit:
Chapter 4: On Loyalty and Conflict
People who like each other — even love each other — can disagree. They can fight. What is better than spirited debate? But it doesn't need to get personal, and it should never become mean. Also, mistakes happen; it's people who make them. It's critical to admit your mistakes, pay the piper, and move on. As for the rest of you — get over it!
I don't think there are many subjects as dear to my heart as the topic of a good fight. Come on, I'm a lawyer — I'm paid to argue. But for me the ability to disagree with people and maintain respect and affection is a fundamental value. I believe in good strong aggressive debate.
The writer Annie Lamott wondered aloud if people who are cruel get sent to the mean-people's room in heaven. I wonder too. Why do we have to be mean and call each other names when we disagree about something, whether it is abortion, the death penalty, tax policy, or homeland security? Why the finger-pointing and the challenging of other people's patriotism? Why has good old-fashioned disagreement suddenly turned into a question about moral character and patriotism?
I don't think we have to be cruel and personal. I'm not naive, and I am not the sweetest person in the world. But I think the level of rancor we see in politics today cheapens the quality of our national debate. And it is exactly this quality — we Americans can disagree and fight with each other, hold fierce electoral campaigns, and yet not shoot and kill each other — that distinguishes our two-hundred-year history of democracy from the rest of the world. That's not the way it is in Iran or North Korea. If we do not protect that open quality of our public life, we are finished.
Let's start with a major national nonissue: my arrival at Fox News. A lot of people flew out of their skins when Fox hired me. Wasn't I a liberal Democrat over at CNN? Hadn't I defended Bill Clinton and O.J. Simpson? How could I possibly go to Fox, the conservative cable network? Leaving CNN was one thing, Greta, but going to Fox?
Everybody went nuts. The conservatives hated me before they even knew me, and the liberals felt betrayed. Even people who had never seen me on television seemed to have an opinion.
Now wait a minute. Let's put aside the fact that nobody really knew my personal opinions on anything. I had never taken any big public political positions, so how did people form these ideas? And who says I have to agree with everyone I work with or they have to agree with me? I didn't agree with everything said at CNN. I don't agree with everything said at Fox. I don't agree with everything my husband thinks either, but I still love him.
What I need to worry about is what I think, not what somebody else thinks. What I say on my show are my words, my thoughts, my opinions, and my ideas. Frankly, from time to time, as I rethink matters and as the facts change, my ideas and opinions change. Nobody tells me what to say; nobody tells me what my views are. They didn't do it at CNN when I was there, and they haven't done it at Fox.
When I first met Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News Channel, I wanted to see if he was serious about being "fair and balanced," which is the famous Fox motto. We talked for many hours, and I got it that Roger meant what he said. We all have our personal political views — anybody who says journalists and broadcasters don't have views is just plain lying — but the key issue is what you put on the air.
People have opinions on talk shows — that's the point. They are opinion shows. The best examples are The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity and Colmes. The news shows are about the news, and opinion plays no role. Of course, there are occasions on all networks when opinion does slip into the presentation of the news, but the viewers are smart and can discriminate between fact and opinion. And the viewers are bright enough to decide for themselves where they stand on an issue.
I have lived in Washington, D.C., for more than twenty-five years. This place is all about politics. That's the business of Washington. Conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans have fought each other for decades, but often they have been personal friends. They can stand on the Senate floor and give passionate oratory about the North American Free Trade Agreement and then go out and enjoy dinner with their opponents. George McGovern says Bob Dole is a good friend. Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch reportedly play tennis. That's the way it should be.
Over the last few years that I've been in television I've met some hard-core conservatives, some of whom have challenged me, assuming I was a stereotypical white-wine-and-Brie liberal.
I like to listen to some of them really step deep into it for their assumptions about me and my political ideas. I can see them thinking, Hmmm, educated lawyer in her forties (late, late forties), all those years on CNN, criminal defense lawyer-her position on Clinton's impeachment must have been because she is a liberal Democrat. (In fact, I thought the Starr investigation was constitutionally misguided! High crimes and misdemeanors relate to professional, not personal extramarital, conduct. I never said I was in favor of his personal conduct — I was not — but merely that it did not meet the constitutional standard for removal.)
I have never publicly defined myself as a liberal Democrat or conservative Republican, but of course others believe they know what I think about every issue. I have seen both sides and had fun debating both sides.
Pat Buchanan once told me that he nearly fell over when he was reading a book and discovered my background. He was stunned that my father, who I adored, was Joseph McCarthy's campaign manager in 1946. People in Washington often make wrongheaded assumptions about your background, your education, everything you believe in. The fact is that nearly everybody in Wisconsin knows about my family's background, but the Beltway is a long way from the Midwest.
It's the truth. Appleton, Wisconsin, is famous and infamous for several things, not just Willem Dafoe and me, and one of them is Joe McCarthy. He was born on a farm near Appleton in 1908, a few years before my father, who was also born near Appleton. Joe was the fifth of nine children, and his parents were devout Roman Catholics. My father was one of thirteen children and was also from a Catholic family.
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