A Casualty of the Digital Age

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

In case you missed it, starting January 22, the postal service will increase by one cent its first-class postage to 45 cents.

Meantime, the day when you can put a check into the mail to pay a bill due the next day is nearly over.

In its drive to save billions  (in the last three years it lost nearly 30% of its first-class business to the Internet), the U.S. Postal Service has decided to shut down half of its 487 processing centers nationwide. The move, the New York Times reported, is expected to do away with some 28,000 jobs and “increase the distance that mail must travel between post offices and reprocessing centers.” It would be the first time in 40 years that the post office has cut back on its deliveries.

The baseline for delivering the mail is one to three days within mainland United States. Sooner or later you’ll probably have to add two or three days to the delivery time.

I take it most people would not notice the loss of postal service since they’ve long been accustomed to doing their business online.  But this is not the case with all of us.

There are people, both young and old, in good health and ailing, who have neither the desire or the means to do their business online. A large number depend on the public library. I’m sure you’ve seen them.  They’re either at the computer or waiting for their turn.

“Am I supposed to make a special trip to the library every time I need to pay a bill?” a reader asked in a letter to the New York Times. “Not a very practical solution.” And she added, “The post office is still a valuable government service.”

And there are people – like the Lady Friend and me - who depend on the letter-carrier (and may even know his or her name). I should add that no mail is more welcome than a personal letter on genuine stationery in a friend’s handwriting, dispatched with a stamp pleasing to the eye.

In its planning, the post office has called for closing up to 3,700 of the nation’s 32,000 post offices, reducing deliveries to five days week from six and cutting the work force of 653,000 workers by more than 100,000.

The contemplated changes, especially a five-day-a-week delivery, would require congressional action. With many of the lawmakers among the “1 percenters” (reportedly  about 250 and the gap in wealth between them and the people they represent growing), don’t be shocked. Whatever they do about the post office, it will not be in the public interest.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

But We Didn’t Call It Christmas

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

(Every December I feel a little guilty taking the day off to recycle a story I’ve told before. But I think of it as a carol for Christmas and for auld lang syne.)

My mother came to this country in the early years of the last century from Lithuania where Jewish people lived pent-up in ghettos and where she knew little of the outside world. Her worst nightmares, which continued into old age, were of the Russian police swooping down on her neighborhood on horseback, ransacking stalls, shops and houses and attacking innocent people.

She was eleven when she arrived here, speaking no English, knowing nothing at all about the strange, new land called America. The third of eight immigrant children, she was inspired by the progressives of the day, led by Theodore Roosevelt, a man ahead of his time, and perhaps of our own as well.

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans,” Theodore Roosevelt said. We were all one people, newcomers and native-born alike.

The openness of the new country won her confidence. She was eager to be accepted, taken as just another American.

When her boat docked at Ellis Island she had no birth certificate, no legal document attesting to a date of birth. 

The world was a lot looser then. People moved about with far fewer restrictions than they do today. The immigration officers could not spell most of the strange names, let alone pronounce them; so they gave people new names.

Once she was settled in Boston with her family, my mother took note of the fuss made over the Christmas holiday, saw the world around her take on new life with evergreen trees decorated with lights and ornaments, department store windows a profusion of color and fantasy, people singing carols, and on Christmas morning children setting out in a town blanketed in snow, with shiny new boots ands coats, caps and sweaters and skates and sleds, and all because of Christmas.

But my mother’s family didn’t celebrate Christmas. Her father was ultra orthodox, a fan of Teddy Roosevelt to be sure, but he would have raised hell, fire and damnation if my mother or any of his children dared commit such a sacrilege.

And so my mother faced a quandary. She wanted to honor her father but she wanted to be in step with the rest of her splendid new country, especially on this most wondrous of days.

And so it came to pass that my mother resolved her problem by taking December 25 for her birthday. That’s how she got around the taboo, and got her presents and parties on this special day. But we never called it Christmas. Not even after my grandfather died. Not ever, not in all my mother’s years, and she lived to a ripe age of eighty-seven.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Where is President Huckabee?

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

In September 2010 when Newt Gingrich was considering a run for the presidency, he ripped President Obama as a “Kenyan, anti-colonial thinker.” In an interview with the National Review, he said he believed Obama was operating from within a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” view of the world. It is a mindset, he added, which was “authentically dishonest” and “factually insane.”

Never mind that Obama hardly knew his Kenyan-born father, and was born in Hawaii, and raised by a white mother who was born in Kansas. As Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman pointed out, Gingrich was playing the birther card – appealing to a fringe of people who don’t think the president was born in this country.

To the best of my knowledge, the onetime House speaker, who is leading the Republican pack in Iowa, has yet to take back his false, racially-tainted rhetoric.

Debra  J. Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle reminded us that his career was “capped with dazzling successes – followed by easily avoidable disasters stroked by Gingrich’s super size ego.”  She cites a quote from a Republican congressman in Politico. He said that when Gingrich was speaker (1995-1999), members would have to check the morning news  to see what he “had said that you have to clean up in your own district.”

Karen Tumulty, of the Washington Post, and formerly of Time, a long-time Gingrich watcher, characterized him in an interview on NPR with Terry Gross, as not structured, a loose cannon, shoots from the hip. When, as speaker, he led the move to impeach President Clinton, he was himself involved in an extra-marital affair with a female staff worker.

He was disciplined for unethical behavior in 1997 by the House of Representatives but, according to the record,  a full hearing was avoided.

When Republicans lost seats after the 1998 elections, Gingrich resigned  from the House under pressure from his Republican colleagues.

In the years since, he denounced Freddie Mac’s lending practices in the housing crisis, yet was on the agency’s payroll as an adviser, and has become a highly paid political consultant. But, as Karen Tumulty noted, “Destiny saved a seat for him on the bus” in 2012.

Polls show him surging, taking a clear lead in several early voting states, notably in Iowa ,which holds its caucuses first  on January 3. The media has been focused on Iowa to a deafening degree. So much so that one might assume that Iowa is the defining hour of the election year. So what happened in Iowa the last time? An underdog won in an upset. My question is: So where is President Huckabee today?

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

December 7, 1941

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Seventy years ago on Sunday, December  7, 1941, I was attending a club meeting with a group of other young boys when an older brother burst into the room and announced, “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor!”

We looked at each other questioningly. “Pearl Harbor?” we said. “Where’s that?”

Ever since I have asked contemporaries what they remember of that day. Where were they? How much of the news did they comprehend? I just asked a friend in my exercise class such questions the other day.

He remembered he was at the movies in his hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The feature  was “All That Money Can Buy,” a film produced in 1941 based on the Stephen Vincent Benet classic, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”

“They stopped the film,” he said. The manager came out and announced that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we are now at war.” My friend can’t say if they continued with the movie, or whether people got up and left.

I wondered if he’d heard President Roosevelt’s speech the next day asking Congress for a declaration of war upon Japan. He has no recollection. But he thought his mother heard the speech on the radio.

She idolized him, he said. Remembering what a Roosevelt fan she was, he sang a few words of the lyrics of a popular song of that day: “I’m mad about new books, can’t get my fill, and Franklin Roosevelt’s looks give me a thrill...”

My Republican mother, I said, voted for him once.

The day after the attack, Mr. Taylor, our school principal, summoned all classes to the auditorium to hear the president. We kids and our teachers, too, were on pins and needles until Roosevelt spoke. His commanding voice assured us of victory.

The Lady Friend, who was eight, my junior by five years, was at home with her family in New Salem, North Dakota. She remembers her father, who was in France in the First World War, predicting, “This isn’t going to be easy.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor was the fifth and last time a president actually asked Congress for a declaration of war as prescribed in Article I section 8 of the Constitution.

Earlier proclamations were declared  for the War of 1812 against the British; the Mexican-American War, 1846; the Spanish-American War, 1898; and the Declaration of War against Germany on April 6, 1917 during World War I.

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and lesser conflicts were, for the most part,  legitimized by other acts of Congress, according to what I’ve read.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Thoughts While Shaving

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Has Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation? Some Democrats apparently believe that “We Are the 99%” is a catchword that will resonate in 2012.

Take Charles E. Schmuer of New York, a key Democratic strategist in the senate. “The whole battleground has changed,” he said in an interview with John Harwood of the New York Times. Schumer contends there has been “a major shift in public opinion,” in part because of the consequences of the Occupy Wall Street movement, even after many of the protesters and their tents are gone from parks and other sites.

According to Schumer, as the rich get richer and the 99% fall farther behind, the movement  has handed the Democrats a gut issue even as the weak economy is taking its toll on President Obama’s standing in the polls.

But as Harwood points out, the Democrats have to prove “that they can harness the sort of political energy Republicans reaped from the Tea Party in 2010.” Schumer does not disagree.

In fact, the senator says, “This is our challenge.”

*   *   *

A friend of mine who sometimes monitors the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh says they have been telling the Occupy Wall street protesters to quit whining and get a job. I can’t confirm they actually said it but I still can believe it.

*   *   *

Newt Gingrich, we hear, is emerging as the alternative to Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination. But, as Debra J. Saunders reminded us in the San Francisco Chronicle, Gingrich may be carrying too much baggage on the long road to the election. In 1998 he was forced out as House Speaker. The year before he was reprimanded in a bipartisan vote – 395-28 – for ethics violations connected to a course he taught on American history. He professes to be a model for family values. I’ll let you fill in the blanks. There’s also the windfall that Gingrich, a Washington insider, reportedly reaped from Freddie Mac, a mortgage company he’d cited as an example of government incompetence.

*   *   *

Selwyn Raab, an old journalist pal, reminded me that there’s been talk of a candidate in the wings if delegates fail to unite behind, say, Gingrich or Romney. The name is a most familiar one, Jeb Bush, the recent governor of electoral rich, must-win Florida. But, as my newspaper uncle used to say, “Remains to be seen.”

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Handicapping 2012

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

The New York Times ran a piece in its Sunday magazine on November 3 pointing out that Jon Huntsman  is the one Republican candidate who stands the best chance to beat Barack Obama a year from now.

Hunstman’s time in the limelight has been almost below the threshold of consciousness. But a key factor in his favor is that he is a moderate, not a fanatic on either the right or the left. Conventional wisdom this time around is that presidential candidates perceived as too liberal or too conservative will not fare well in next year’s election cycle.

A two-time Republican governor of Utah, Huntsman won re-election with more Democratic and independent voters than his Democratic opponent. He’s also served  in high posts in the administrations of both parties. He was Obama’s ambassador to China.

The Times article is by Nate Silver, who runs a blog called FiveThirtyEight and is writing a book about forecasting and prediction. He placed the 2012 contest on a scale pegged to Obama’s performance in general, and the president’s economic performance, and, of particular importance, “the ideological positioning of the Republican candidates and that of past opposition-party nominees ... and other indicators like Congressional voting records and surveys of presidential historians.”

The historical approach sometimes falls flat. In 1944 and 1948, Thomas Dewey, a moderate, lost both times. In 1980, the very conservative Ronald Reagan “won ... because voters could find few positives in Jimmy Carter’s record.”

But Silver says the theory holds up in the majority of cases. “When the incumbent party faced an opposition candidate with an extremism rating of 50 or higher, it won re-election in six out of eight cases. When it faced one with a rating of 50 or lower, meaning a more moderate nominee, it won just three times out of nine.”

Thus he handicaps the current crop: Huntsman 40; Mitt Romney 49; Herman Cain, 60; Gary Johnson, 63; Rick Santorum, 64; Rick Perry, 67; Newt Gingrich, 68; Michele Bachmann, 83; Ron Paul, 96.

“As you can see,” Silver says, “Romney’s score of 49 is to the left of every Republican candidate except for Huntsman. But the G.O.P. as a whole has moved to the right, so Romney is about average in the broader scope of history.” In recent polls against Romney, Obama’s lead is 1 percentage point – but he leads Herman Cain by 8, Rick Perry by 11 and Michele Bachmann by 14, according to Silver.

As for Huntsman, in last Saturday’s debate he and Representative Ron Paul were the only Republicans on the stage to denounce waterboarding as torture. Huntsman, who is in agreement with Obama on this issue, declared, “We diminish our standing in the world and the values that we project, which include liberty, democracy, human rights and open markets, when we torture. We should not torture. Waterboarding is torture.”

Huntsman spoke with a recognition of history. But Democrats need not panic. The last I looked Huntsman’s numbers in the race for his party’s nomination were still in single digits.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Andy Rooney

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

In my time at CBS I saw a lot of Andy Rooney around the network but I didn’t know him. A nod in the hallway or street, a word in the elevator was about it, except for a chance encounter and the time he took me and a reporter to dinner.

The encounter was just outside the Broadcast Center on 57th Street. I was returning from lunch with a colleague and Andy was leaving the building.

“Say, fellers,” he stopped us. “Is your show (Sunday Morning) going to repeat yesterday’s segment by the new culture editor?” He was referring to the review of a new book or movie or TV show (I don’t remember which it was) by the intellectual John Leonard, formerly a book critic at the New York Times.

“Repeat?” we asked ourselves. “What’s he talking about?” The show never recycled reviews, certainly not so soon after a broadcast; unless in extraordinary circumstances, but we knew of none in this case.

So we shook our heads in bewilderment, and said, “Why are you asking?”

“Well,” said Andy in the manner of the national curmudgeon he was, ”if you did run it again I might understand what he was talking about.”

The second time was in San Francisco when I was editing a piece for Sunday Morning at the CBS News bureau with the correspondent Terry (Terrence) Smith. A disgruntled Andy Rooney walked in. A blizzard back east grounded his New York flight. He couldn’t get out until morning. Hungry and tired, and, I suspect, a little lonely, he invited Terry and me to join him for dinner at the trendy, now long gone Washington Square Bar and Grill in North Beach.

I learned in the obits (Andy died last Friday at 92 in New York City “after developing ‘serious complications’ from an unspecified operation,” according to the New York Times), that he avoided autograph-seekers and the attention lit by fame. No doubt, but when we entered the North Beach establishment, people stood up, amazed and excited to find him in their midst, and eager to shake his hand. I’m not sure but he may have even signed an autograph or two.

Andy had come up to San Francisco from Bakersfield that night where he’d attended a convention of ranchers. I remember little more of that night other than his telling us he was paid $20,000 for the talk. In the same breath he said his great friend, Walter Cronkite, had addressed the same group for $40,000. But he wasn’t grumpy about it. Andy knew Walter’s was a bigger name than his, and rightly so.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

On Civil Disobedience

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Give me a minute. The Occupy Wall Street movement reminds me of a story.

Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century American essayist, poet, naturalist and philosopher, was asked by his hometown constable, Sam Staples, to pay his poll tax which he hadn’t paid for several years. Thoreau declined, leaving Sam no choice but to lock up his friend. The next morning someone, believed to be an aunt, paid the tax. Thoreau wasn’t happy getting out so soon, but he reasoned one night in the cooler may have been enough to make his point.

Now the moral. While he was behind bars, his good friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist and poet, paid Thoreau a visit and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” To which  Thoreau replied, “Emerson, what are you doing out there?”

Sure, the story about Thoreau and Emerson may be apocryphal but it makes a point.

The choice Thoreau made on that July evening in Concord, Mass. in 1846 was to protest against a government in Washington that sanctioned slavery and waged a war of aggression and expansion against Mexico.

His outlook on the relationship between the citizen and the government was expressed later in a famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849.  It failed to make an impression when it appeared but by the end of the 19th century people began paying attention. By the middle of the 20th century, “Civil Disobedience” was recognized as a classic in political thought..

An article on Thoreau in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1991) explains its significance:

“To many, its message still sounds timely; there is a higher law than the civil one and the higher law must be followed even if a penalty ensues. So does its consequences.” The article quotes a well-known line from the essay:  “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

In a piece in Sunday’s New York Times, Eduardo Porter, a member of the New York Times editorial board, took note of criticism of the occupiers of Zuccotti Park in New York and other sites around the country for the “fuzziness of their goals.” But he went on to point out that despite the hard times the top 1 percent  in the U.S. are reaping “a disproportionate share of the nation’s prosperity.” He says the protesters are on target and “might even aim a bit higher: the real income growth is happening in the top 0.1 percent. There are lots of bankers there, too.”

The Wall Street protests may be a mix of issues and messy, but protests against a ruling class going back to the Boston Tea Party in 1773 have been as  American as apple pie.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Robert Pierpoint (1925-2011)

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

I got the news that Robert Pierpoint, the CBS News correspondent, had died in Santa Barbara at 86 on Sunday morning from a friend in Florida. She had just heard it on the TV from Bob Schieffer in a tribute at the end of “Face the Nation.”

It was 8 a.m. in my house when the phone rang. The Lady Friend and I were still in bed. Not quite awake, I couldn’t understand what the friend in Florida was saying and then it was painfully clear.

I’d known Bob Pierpoint so long it didn’t seem true. We’d kept up over the years, long after we’d both been gone from the network. It was hard to imagine him gone for good. I knew he had health problems (don’t we all after a certain age?) but he always bounced back or seemed to. The cause, the network said, was complications  from hip surgery.

Bob’s career in reporting the news for CBS on radio and television spanned more than 40 years. He broadcast many of the top stories of his time, notably the Korea War, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate.  One of the longest-serving White House correspondents, he covered six presidents, from Eisenhower to Carter. He was a regular for many years  on the team of reporters working with Walter Cronkite on “The CBS Evening News.” As best I remember,  Bob moved to “Sunday Morning” with Charles Kuralt; sometime around 1980. Anyway, that’s where he and I met and began working on  stories together.

Bob had been at CBS since 1949, hired by Edward R. Murrow, the great news broadcaster and commentator. That Bob had no newspaper experience mattered little to Murrow. Young Pierpoint had a natural gift writing for the ear, and this is what  counted a lot with Murrow.

I didn’t sleep very well Sunday night. It wasn’t just because I missed Bob, and that yet another friend had taken his leave. I worried because I knew I would  have to do a piece about him, and I was trying to figure things out in my mind..

Funny thing, Bob’s death brought some people back in my life.

One of my old bosses at CBS called. We hadn’t really spoken in a long time. I’d done a sketch of him in a memoir a few years ago. It was critical in parts but true; still I’ve always felt lousy and maybe a little guilty about it because he’d done me some good turns. But I had to write what I wrote. Sunday night he was on the phone. And we talked about Bob and had some great laughs, the kind of laughs you miss when you’re gone from a world you once knew so well.

The death of friends can fool you. They take a lot away but they can also give some life back.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The Making of a President

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Believe it or not, the Republican debates are a hot ticket on TV. Last month’s debate on Fox in Florida attracted 6.1 million viewers. That’s nearly double the numbers posted four years before in September 2007. In that debate in New Hampshire, the contenders were Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. At the time McCain was given next to no chance to win the nomination.

The GOP debate on Oct. 11 was on Bloomberg TV, a small cable network. Nonetheless a media study reported  a sharp jump in the ratings as soon as the argument got underway.

How to account for the growing popularity of presidential debates?  Cable news executives can’t say for sure but their hunch – no surprise – is the economy and unhappiness with the political system. Think Occupy Wall Street.

After last week’s debate, Rick Perry, who performed poorly,  put a bewildering spin on American history. When a reporter asked him a question about states’ rights, the governor replied: “Our Founding Fathers never meant for Washington D.C. to be the fount of all wisdom. As a matter of fact they were very much afraid of that because they’d  just had this experience with this far-away government that had centralized thought process and planning and what have you, and then it was actually the reason that we fought the Revolution in the 16th century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown, if you will.”

Before Tuesday night’s debate in Las Vegas, Herman Cain, the former pizza executive and motivational speaker has been up there with Mitt Romney in the  polls. He’s admitted in an interview with David Gregory on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the hallmark of his economic plan, 9-9-9, would in fact raise taxes for many poor and middle-class families.

But although experts pointed out those people “pay little to no taxes under the current tax structure and would now pay both income and additional sales taxes under the plan,” Cain insisted in Los Vegas that the plan was sound, but misunderstood. Not one of the others criticized the part that would lower taxes for the affluent.

In that “Meet the Press” interview, he said he was only joking about killing people trying to  cross the border from Mexico with an electrified fence. “That’s not a serious plan,” he told David Gregory. “I’ve always said America needs to get a sense of humor.”

The subject was raised by the moderator Tuesday but the topic was overshadowed by the chorus of ridicule focused on 9-9-9.

The most incendiary clash of the night was, predictably, between Perry

who has been faltering of late and Mitt Romney, the presumed front-runner. It remains to be seen whether this was a do-or-die moment for the Texas governor. But Romney got in the last word when he warned Perry, who kept challenging his every word, “Governor, if you’re going to be president of the United States you’ve got to listen to people.” The audience roared approval.

Just before the Republican candidates gathered in Las Vegas for their eighth debate on CNN,  a poll found that  two-thirds of Republican voters have yet to make up their minds about whom the party should nominate to challenge President Obama.

Las Vegas was a brawl. Who won? Maybe Romney, but it’s still too early in the game. The next disputation is in November.

So lighten up and enjoy the show.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Thoughts While Shaving

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

FDR’s was one of the great voices on radio. Credit, too, his skill as an actor. (He once told Orson Welles that he and Welles were the best actors in America.) In his “Fireside Chats” he explained complex issues in everyday language as one would chat with a neighbor across the backyard fence. On almost any night when I was a kid and he was on the air, you could walk the quarter mile of Beals Street and not miss a beat.

In contrast to today’s angry mood toward Washington, it seems the majority of Americans during the Great Depression were less cynical about government than they are today – and yet the country in the 1930s was in much worse shape. A reason was advanced in a little book I just came across. Called “Dear FDR,” it was written by Leila A. Sussmann and published in 1963. It is an analysis, in part, of how Roosevelt made use of his mail which came in day after day by the thousands for years, some of it critical, even abusive, but in the great majority of cases most favorable, even affectionate.

The man in the street believed that the man in the White House was their friend and champion. In their outlook, Roosevelt battled the rich and powerful for the welfare and security of the ordinary person. Reviled by the great industrialists and bankers, Franklin Roosevelt rejoiced in their hatred. John Q. Citizen admired the president’s chutzpah.

Of course, even then the polls gave a more accurate picture of opinion than the mail ever did. But as Louis Howe, FDR’s closest adviser, pointed out after FDR moved into the White House:

“When letters are received from the small merchant or the country storekeeper or the workman in a city factory, or the farmer...they are always read carefully.” When they shed light on a problem with a New Deal program, “the whole letter or at least a summary reaches the president’s desk.”

In searching for solutions, Howe maintained that Roosevelt “attaches chief importance, not to what the experts think is good for the man but what the man himself feels he needs most to help him out of his troubles.”

How much of this was window dressing  one can’t say. But the man in the street trusted Roosevelt and elected him president four times.

*  *  *

A journalist friend recently returned from Europe says that if you are caught speeding in a luxury car in Finland the ticket could cost you a lot more than $100,000.

“That’s because,” Henrik Krogius writes in the Brooklyn Heights Press and Cobble Hill News in New York, a paper he edits, “in Finland  traffic fines are graded according to income.”

“Where a $100 fine could cause pain to someone trying to make ends meet, it would be pocket change to a multimillionaire. As Finland sees it, the offense should cause a somewhat comparable level of pain all along the line.”

And he adds: “Such an idea would of course be unthinkable to Republicans in the U.S.” As an example, he cites the refusal of  Republicans “even to eliminate tax breaks on corporate jets.”

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

A Day Fit for a President

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Some of our friends fancy sailing on cruise ships. Over time we contracted a case of cruise ship envy. Luckily, a ship was at hand, in Jack London Square. (Full disclosure, a noble friend, perhaps taking pity, made us a present of a couple of tickets ($80 apiece,  box lunch included) aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, Franklin Roosevelt’s famous yacht.

For Roosevelt, during the Depression and World War II, cruising down the Potomac into the sea  was the perfect escape from the heat of Washington and the telephone. He loved the water – an exuberant and skilled sailor since childhood. His notion of paradise was “sitting on the deck in an old hat shading his head from the sun, a fishing rod in his hands,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in “No Ordinary Time.”

Our destination aboard the president’s yacht last week was Angel Island, the largest island in San Francisco Bay. It was a day fit for a chief of state. The water was smooth, the sun strong, fanned by a welcome sea breeze.

Angel Island figures prominently in the history of California. For thirty years – from 1910 to 1940 – Angel was the major entry point for  perhaps  100,000 Asians and others from Pacific lands. Some refer to it as the West Coast’s Ellis Island. But that’s a wild stretch.

Ellis Island  in New York Bay, was the principal immigration center in the U.S. from 1892 to 1943. Its history is gilded as a haven for 17 million, mostly European immigrants. Angel Island’s story is not so pretty.

Many of the immigrants – mostly Chinese – were not welcome. Exclusion laws kept them and other Asians penned up in overcrowded and filthy barracks until their cases were decided. Most gained entry into the U.S. but others were turned away and sent back to the poverty and disorder from which they’d  fled.

Some of the immigrants held captive put their rage in words carved on the barrack walls. One translated “poem” says, in part:

“Detained in this wooden house for

several tens of days

because of the exclusion laws.

It’s a pity heroes have no place

To exercise their prowess.”

Angel Island was also where detained civilians were held during World War I and World War II. It was also where prisoners of war were confined in World War II. During the Cold War, the island was the site of a Nike missile base. But today its 740 acres are a beautiful state park. I must add the views on the trip over and on the return aboard the Potomac – seascapes of San Francisco and the Marin hills are astonishing. The same goes for the sail under the new Bay Bridge under construction.

Who needs a cruise to the Riviera when you have it as good in your own backyard?

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .