Op-Ed Columns

How was your Fourth?

Ours was pretty good at our place in the cool North Carolina mountains: Daughter Margaret was with us, feeling better after a bad health patch, and her leggy cousin Julia's excitement about entering Appalachian State charmed us.

We passed up the party at the club, wincing at the thought of being packed with 600 or so gregarious owners of multi-million-dollar houses, shouting to be heard by people with whom we have little in common.

So I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs on the deck. I must tell you that hot dogs with bratwurst beat Ball Park every time, and Josephine's peanut-butter pie would have made the gods on Olympus envious.

After dinner we went to a friend's house to watch the fireworks from their deck. A 2-year-old grandchild captivated me with a virtual slide show of animals and vehicles. He's at the age of joyously filling his mind; face alight with pleasure at showing off new knowledge for the approval of big people.

He was a star, but the fireworks were a disappointment. They ended with a whimper, not a banging, streaking exploding finale. As it turns out, the director was slightly burned and the show came to an immediate, anti-climactic end.

The thought occurred to me that the unhappy end of the fireworks might be a metaphor for the glum, last days of George Bush's presidency and his war, but I thought better of pursuing that line. I have satellite TV, and thus have watched with deep displeasure as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and their tribe dissect single sentences of newsmakers as if their show was "CSI Politics."

TV newsmen as pathologists examining the body of a newsmaker's work to find a cause for controversy is as appealing to watch as is a real pathologist at work, and their explosive biases undermine popular trust in the hard, careful work of mainline journalists.

No candidate has said anything so blatantly reprehensible as Olbermann, who at the end of an on-air rant against the president concluded with this advice, "Mr. Bush. Shut the hell up!" And here's Matthews' "objective" analysis of a Barack Obama speech, "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg."

Add to that the contagion of bloggererhea and the bombast of opinion on the Web's Huffington Post, Drudge Report, etc., and you have popular distrust of all media, which is undermining the bonds of trust necessary to a democracy.

Happily, there are still sentinels of good news judgment such as NBC's Tom Brokaw to call the lines on big mouths like Olbermann and Matthews as he has done recently.

And speaking of calling the lines; wasn't Wimbledon fantastic this year? The Williams sisters, despite their different physiques, know each other's game so well that they were playing against mirror images. How could either one lose?

A dejected Serena, who had worked so hard and played so well, had to admit that her older sister was just one stroke better. As good as that match was, the Nadal-Federer contest of muscle and speed versus poetry and grace was a classic of such beauty that it brought tears to the eyes of John McEnroe.

Nadal was a white blur of muscle against the fading green of center court, smashing a forehand at 100 miles an hour (how heavy would such a missive be when it struck), and Federer, so light his feet never seemed to touch the court, was there with effortless grace to return the shot at an angle unknown to geometry.

Sport played as well as the Wimbledon finals has an authenticity, beauty and purity that have no match in the attention-craving excesses of some TV commentators, but more often is found in the written word.

On one hand, I give you Ted Sorenson, whose spare, unassuming memoir, Counselor, details his intimate, 11-year friendship and partnership with John F. Kennedy. On the other hand, I give you Rick Sanchez, weekend anchor for CNN News.

Let's deal with Sanchez first to give this piece a happy ending. Sunday night he concluded his broadcast by congratulating himself on his "analysis" of former NATO commander Wesley Clark's comment that John McCain was a "hero," but that getting shot down and tortured weren't precise qualifications for the presidency.

Sanchez reminded viewers that he called Clark's remark "the swift-boating of John McCain," and went on, preening, "that got a lot of (national) attention." His pride in attention given an inflated, inaccurate analysis was so craven that I felt a flush of embarrassment for him.

Ted Sorenson made a career of self-discipline that was the exact opposite of Sanchez and company; he suppressed his own ego in order to benefit his friend and collaborator the senator, candidate and ultimately president.

Opening Ted's book is a gift to myself because, though I've known him for more than 25 years, I never asked him about JFK or their relationship because I felt it was terrain where I did not belong uninvited.

So, thanks for the invitation, Ted.