David Warsh: An old man against the world; don't eat WSJ baloney on Texas crisis

Rupert Murdoch

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper chose a good week in which to write about a leading skeptic of climate change. “For all the anxiety about fake news on social media,” Kuper wrote last weekend, “disinformation on climate seems to stem disproportionately from one old man using old media.”

He meant Rupert Murdoch, 89, whose company, News Corp., owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times of London, and half the newspaper industry in Australia. Honored with a lifetime achievement award in January by the Australia Day Foundation, a British organization, Murdoch posted a video:

“For those of us in media, there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential. This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful ‘woke’ orthodoxy.”

There is some truth in that, of course – but not enough to justify the misleading baloney on the cause of crisis in Texas which the editorial pages of the WSJ published last week.

Murdoch is a canny newspaperman, and since acquiring The WSJ,  in 2007, he has the good sense not to tamper overmuch with its long tradition of sophistication and sobriety in its news pages. He even replaced the man he had put in charge of the paper, Gerard Baker, after staffers complaints that Baker’s thumb was found too frequently on the scale of its coverage of Donald Trump.

Then again, neither has he tinkered with the more controversial traditions of the newspaper’s editorial opinion pages, to which Baker has since been reassigned as a columnist. The story has often been told about how managing editor Barney Kilgore transformed a small-circulation financial newspaper competing mainly with The Journal of Commerce in the years before World War II into a nationwide competitor to The New York Times, and worth $5 billion to Murdoch. A major contributor to it was Vermont Royster, editor of the editorial pages in 1958–71; and an occasional columnist for the paper for another two decades years after that. He was succeeded by Robert Bartley. Royster died in 1996.

In 1982, Royster characterized the beginnings of the change this way: “When I was writing editorials, I was always a little bit conscious of the possibility that I might be wrong. Bartley doesn’t tend to do that so much. He is not conscious of the possibility that he is wrong.”

Royster hadn’t seen anything yet. With every passing year, Bartley became firmer in his opinions. In the 1990s, his editorial pages played a leading role in bringing about the impeachment of President Clinton.  Bartley died in 2002, and was succeeded by Paul Gigot, who has presided over a continuation of the tradition of hyper-confidence. The editorial page enthusiastically supported Donald Trump until the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

Last week the WSJ published four editorials on the situation in Texas.

Tuesday, A Deep Green Freeze: “[A[n Arctic blast has frozen wind turbines. Herein is the paradox of the left’s climate agenda: the less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them.”

Wednesday, Political Making of a Power Outage: “The Problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather than before.”

Thursday, Texas Spins in the Wind: “While millions of Texans remain without power for the third day, the wind industry and its advocates are spinning a fable that gas, coal, and nuclear plants – not their frozen turbines – are to blame.”

Saturday, Biden Rescues Texas with… Oil:  “The Left’s denialism that the failure of wind power played a starring role in Texas catastrophic power outage has been remarkable”

Then on Saturday, the news pages weighed in, flatly contradicting the on-going editorial-page version of events with a thoroughly reported account of its own, The Texas Freeze: Why State’s Power Grid Failed:  “The core problem: Power providers can reap rewards by supplying electricity to Texas customers, but they aren’t required to do it and face no penalties for failing to deliver during a lengthy emergency.

“That led to the fiasco that led millions of people in the nation’s second-most populous state without power for days.  A severe storm paralyzed almost every energy source, from power plants to wind turbines, because their owners hadn’t made the investments needed to produce electricity in subfreezing temperatures.”

All three major American newspapers are facing major decisions in the coming year:  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos must replace retiring executive editor Martin Baron at The Washington Post; New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger presumably will name a successor to executive editor Dean Baquet, who will turn 65 in September (66 is retirement age there); and Murdoch will presumably replace Gigot, who will be 66 in May.

The WSJ editorial page could play an important role in American politics going forward by sobering up. But only if Murdoch – or, more likely, his eldest son, Lachlan, who turns 50 this autumn – selects an editor who writes sensibly, conservatively, about dealing with climate change.   

David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

Editor’s note: Both Mr. Warsh and New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, are Wall Street Journal alumni.

David Warsh: Mueller report, 4 newspapers and the table-turner crew

I read three papers on April 19, the day after the Mueller Report, redacted by Trump appointee Atty. Gen. William Barr, was released. The Washington Post gave over its front page to five stories, eleven bylines, with the best single story I read all day, by Dan Balz, as the centerpiece; an editorial (“The Opposite of Exoneration”), and eight op-ed columns arrayed across two full pages, plus a sixteen-page special section. Twenty pages altogether.

Likewise The New York Times – four stories and a lengthy graphic filling the front page, nine bylines; eight more full pages inside (nine stories, fifteen bylines, and a two-page graphic); a full-page editorial, a David Brooks column and an op-ed piece; plus a very effective special section – thirteen pages from the report reproduced full-size and lightly annotated below. Twenty five pages altogether.

The front page architecture of The Wall Street Journal was, I thought, the most compelling: two stories (“Trump efforts to block probe detailed” and “Congress grapples to find next step,” four bylines, and a large graphic above the fold; below, three more stories about other matters: Girl Scout cookie season, Boeing 737 MAX trainer disputes between the US and Canada, and years of deferred maintenance at Notre-Dame Cathedral; and with two more Mueller Report stories, two bylines, and some excepts on two full pages inside, plus a Gerald Seib column.

Three and a half pages altogether – and yet the Journal’s editors’ and reporters’ interpretation of the report was almost exactly the same as that of The Times and The Post teams, and nearly as complete.

Two things seemed clear from the coverage:

1. Consideration of impeachment proceedings may be about to turn serious, not those yeasty first-term House Democrats, but among the Democratic Party leadership – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler and their lieutenants. The standard wisdom has been that a bill of impeachment with no conviction from the Senate would be a distraction.

But as WSJ reporters Siobhan Hughes and Rebecca Ballhaus noted, some Democrats considered that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had delivered a broad account of misconduct that resembled the formerly secret “Road Map” that Special Counsel Leon Jaworski provided to Congress on March 1, 1974. Jaworski’s filing provided a series of guideposts for lawmakers contemplating the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. It may not eventuate, but as the breadth of Mueller’s indictment of the President’s conduct sinks in, Speaker Pelosi’s earlier judgment that impeachment is “just not worth it” will get a second going-over and a fuller discussion over the next several months. See this paper-leading story in today’s Post, by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky, to understand what Mueller was thinking.

2. Donald Trump’s re-election committee emailed supporters after the report came out that it is “time to turn the tables… [to] investigate the liars who instigated this sham investigation.” Would-be table-turners have three investigations underway or almost ready to go. Two of them have to do with the Steele dossier, a 35-page compendium of allegations prepared by a former British intelligence expert on Russia, which had been partly financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee though it had been started by Republican foes of Trump. The provenance and reliability of the document has been a matter of contention ever since.

The first such probe is that of Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. He announced a year ago that, at the request of then Attorney General Jeff Session, he would investigate whether the FBI’s application for court-authorized counterintelligence surveillance of “a certain person” had been adequately predicated. It has become clear since that the person was former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, for whom a surveillance warrant was obtained shortly after he left the campaign on the basis of information contained in the Steele dossier.

The second is the Justice Department task force that Attorney General Barr promised to form to investigate whether what he termed FBI “spying” on Trump campaign associates was undertaken for good reason. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Barr told a Senate subcommittee earlier this month, explaining that he wanted to look into both “the genesis and the conduct” of the FBI inquiry. “I think spying did occur,” he said. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

Meanwhile, ticking away somewhere in FBI headquarters is a third probe, a fully predicated investigation by several FBI field offices of the Clinton Foundation, the existence of which, in effect, started it all. Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired for revealing the existence of the probe to a WSJ reporter on the eve of the 2016 election. Inspector General Horowitz subsequently excoriated McCabe and recommended a criminal investigation. McCabe has insisted he was authorized to leak the news to protect the FBI’s reputation for disinterestedness; Horowitz concluded that he broke the rules to protect himself and then lied about it to fellow agents. Few details of the Clinton Foundation investigation have leaked out.

In February, in “Making Music Together,” I suggested that the four English-language newspapers I read were doing a good job of keeping track of the news, fashioning a narrative of U.S. politics in particular. I compared entering the worlds of their news pages to listening to a daily quartet: “The Times is a daily violin, exciting and emotional; the WPost resembles a viola, warmly supportive of The Times’ s themes, but less jittery; the WSJ is something of a cello, understated and lower-pitched; and the FT, a different voice altogether, is more like a piano.” Sometimes the composition they produce is not harmonious. Some days they don’t seem to be performing on the same page. But they are playing by the same rules of human curiosity. Each paper has contributed its share of major scoops.

The exceptions to this four-part narrative I find every evening are the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. (While I read their columnists, I don’t pay much attention to the editorials of The Times or The Post.) For two years, the WSJ editorialists have been at war with the leadership of the FBI. They are furious at former FBI Director James Comey for having let Hillary Clinton off the hook for her email transgressions. They consider the interest FBI and other US intelligence agencies took in the Russian dealings of Donald Trump, before and after the election, to have been unwarranted. I learn from them. I try hard to understand their point of view. But often they seem as scornful of the fair-play ideals of their own news pages as… well, Donald Trump. “Obstruction of Nothing” was their collective appraisal of the Mueller report.

WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins Jr., a fervent table-turner, confided to readers earlier this month, “I suspect at least one major news organization in this country will soon decide it can no longer afford to be dragged against its will to acknowledge the doings of US intelligence agencies in the 2016 election. It will want to get on top of the story.” Apparently he was right. An off-lead story in The New York Times was headlined “Renewed Scrutiny for a Disputed Dossier on the President” — three bylines, 1,750 words, a well-balanced assessment.

Meanwhile, The Times’s editorial page returned to a favorite hobby horse, intimating in the headline of “The Great Russian Heist of 2016” that Russian interference had somehow stolen the election. In “Targeting Bill Barr,” the WSJ rejoiced that “the country finally appears to have an attorney general who can take the heat.” The good news is that the story of the war against (and within) the FBI is headed for the cooler, more rational confines of the news pages of four great newspapers.

xxx

Andrew W. Marshall died last month, at 97. The Times, the WSJ, The Post, the FT, The Economist, and National Review published memorials. As the founding director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, his job for 42 years was seeing things through the eyes of others – not just those of America’s opponents, but those of American leaders as well.

Raised in Detroit, Marshall made hi way to the University of Chicago in the years after World War II – to the economics department and the Cowles Commission. He found himself listening to music with Tjalling Koopmans and playing bridge with Kenneth Arrow, but it was Frank Knight, the author of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, who made the most durable impression on him.

By then Knight was on his way out of what would become the “second” Chicago school, but Marshall acquired from him a life-long taste for the jiu-jitsu possibilities of dissenting views expressed in the presence of powerful orthodoxies. In 1949, W. Allen Wallis sent him to the Washington office of RAND Corp., where he remained until he joined the Pentagon under Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, in 1973.

Marshall’s appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China enhanced America’s strategic position for forty years.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran. He is based in Somerville, Mass.

David Warsh: With new editor, is The Wall Street Journal at a big turning point?

SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Ever since John Dryden turned the Roman poet Horace back on himself with a gentle aside, “Even Homer nods” has been a useful way of observing that the most accomplished story-teller occasionally loses the thread of the narrative.

The old saw came to mind last week when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. replaced the editor of The Wall Street Journal. 

The WSJ, for most of a hundred years, and especially after World War II, served as Homer to the Republican party – in particular the paper’s editorial page. Such was the deliberate and reassuring voice of Vermont Royster, chief editorial writer from 1958 to 1971, that the paper still reprints one of his editorials annually on the eve of Thanksgiving.

Starting with the appointment of Robert Bartley as its editor, in 1972, the editorial page began veering off course. Bartley was a complicated man, a Midwesterner, possessing many good instincts, including enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan. A sense of fair play, however, was not among his gifts. Three decades of increasingly bad sportsmanship began with the election of Bill Clinton, in 1992.

WSJ editorials proceeded in lockstep with Congressman Newt Gingrich throughout the 1990s; after they 2000 espoused the views of the faction led by Vice President Dick Cheney known as the “Vulcans”; and make common cause with the Congressional Freedom Caucus today. 

Meanwhile, the news pages remained on the same even keel under Paul  Steiger, managing editor from 1991 to 2007. After Rupert Murdoch bought the paper from the Bancroft family, that began to change. Murdoch replaced managing editor Marcus Brauchli (who had succeeded Steiger a few months before) with Robert Thomson, his fellow Australian, who was generally seen to move the news pages slightly to the right. 

Thomson was promoted in 2012 to take charge of a newly-formed publishing unit, some on whose executives had been tainted by Murdoch’s British newspapers’ phone scandal. He was succeeded by Gerard Baker, a conservative columnist for Murdoch’s Times of London.

It’s a commonplace that Fox News underwent a sea change after Donald Trump was elected, becoming something of an echo chamber, with the president tweeting commentary from its morning broadcasts and occasionally phoning in for interviews. Less noticed has been the struggle within the news pages of the WSJ. Several of its top political and investigative reporters have left in the past two years for other newspapers; Baker has been accused of showing excessive deference to the president, even as The Journal took the lead in breaking stories of hush money payments by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Meanwhile, the editorial pages led the campaign against the FBI, ultimately devising the counterattack against the Mueller investigation known as “Spygate,” that House Speaker Paul Ryan shrugged off last week.   

Murdoch himself had installed Baker by  by pouring champagne over his head. Now the British-born newsman will host a WSJ-branded television show on Fox Business Network and write a column for a weekend section of the paper.  Presumably the decision to replace him was that of Murdoch’s sons. The promotion of Matt Murray, executive editor and long-time staffer, was announced with much less ceremony. It is  hard to imagine a more poignant exemplar of traditional WSJ values than Murray’s  book,  The Father and the Son: My Father's Journey to the Monastic Life  (Harper, 1999).

It was late last month that former House Speaker John Boehner  told a policy conference in Michigan, “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

Indeed. And in the length of time between Homer and the present day, forty years of populist agitation from the pulpit of a formerly conservative newspaper is no more than forty winks. Still, it seems like a long time to me. The other big question, of course, is who will replace editorial page editor Paul Gigot, 63, who took over from Bartley in 2001. In the meantime, though, the GOP’s Homer has shown the first signs of waking up.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com

David Warsh: 50 years of the WSJ's supply-side quackery on taxes

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks triggered its ill-starred invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States finds itself engaged in a three-way contest for global influence with its old rival Russia and a surging China. Climate change is a growing threat around the world.  In response, the Republican Party is seeking a tax cut.

The heart of the undertaking is a reduction of relatively high U.S. corporate-tax rates.  That much is a measure on whose desirability experts right and left can agree. 

{Editor's note: Many large companies pay much less than the 35 percent top corporate-tax rate because of loopholes, etc. Indeed, some don't pay any taxes.}

But to compensate for revenue losses arising from various accompanying provisions in the 440-page bill (including inheritance-tax abolition, personal-income tax cuts), versions in both the House and Senate rely on an array of tax hikes and implicit spending cuts aimed squarely at the middle class.

The measure would add an estimated $1.5 trillion, or around 5 percent of its current level, to the national debt, over the course of the next decade, and, possibly, a good deal more. By the end of that time, either most tax cuts will expire, or further spending cuts will be required on virtually every government program but defense – especially Social Security and health care. The beneficiaries of the tax cut? Mainly the rich.

Martin Wolf, the respected economics columnist of the Financial Times, wrote the other day, “How, one must ask, has a party with such objectives successfully gained power?” Wolf identifies three main channels. Give disproportionate power to the wealthy. Foment animosity toward and among the less fortunate. And, first, and perhaps most important, tell a story:

"[F]ind intellectuals who argue that everybody will benefit from policies ostensibly benefiting so few. Supply-side economics, with its narrow focus on tax cuts, has been the main theory employed, because it directly justifies tax cuts for the very wealthy.''

As it happens, I have been reading George Melloan’s Free Markets Free Minds: How the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages Shaped America (Encounter, 2017) the better to remember where the tax cut obsession came from, long ago.

Melloan, 90, retired in 2006, after 54 years at the WSJ, first as a reporter, then as a foreign correspondent, and, for well over half of that time, an editorial writer. He joined the editorial board of the paper in 1970, under the beloved Vermont Royster, and, practically alone among then-current members, survived the transition to Robert Bartley, Royster’s successor, in 1972. (Interim editor Joseph Evans had died suddenly.)

For 30 years, Melloan served as Bartley’s deputy. He was 10 years older than his boss, an in-house “anchor” to counterbalance the effects of the “sail” of the younger man’s more extravagant enthusiasms. In 1987, after Daniel Henninger was named Bartley’s official understudy, Melloan and his wife lived in Brussels, while he edited the editorial pages of the European and Asian editions of the paper.

Victors write our history – at least they try to.  Melloan relates the official version. The way he tells it, supply-side dogma devised by Robert Mundell, of Columbia University, and elaborated on by University of Chicago Graduate School of Business assistant professor Arthur Laffer, supplanted Keynesian demand-side fiscalism, at least in the minds of Bartley and editorial writer Jude Wanniski.

Mundell and Laffer may have been academics, public intellectuals, but they had ceased to be economists, inasmuch as they no longer sought to persuade other professionals of the validity of their views. They appealed directly to the public instead. (Many years later, Mundell was recognized by a Nobel Prize for work he had done in the 1950s on currencies.)

In the beginning, in the 1970s, Bartley, Wanniski, Laffer, Mundell and their confederates in the Congress – quarterback-turned-congressman candidate Jack Kemp in particular – exhibited a raffish charm in an age that otherwise took itself too seriously, an appeal whose spirit I sought to evoke last week by reprinting a piece written long ago.  Bartley related the origin story himself, in 1992, in The Seven Fat Years: and How to Do It Again, a book whose message was blunted by seven even fatter years under President Bill Clinton, who began his term by persuading Congress to raise taxes.

Bartley responded with his crusade against “Arkansas mores,” a campaign not entirely misplaced, but memorable chiefly for its no-hold-barred bitterness and perverse effects.  Bartley died in 2003, at 66, months after the invasion of Iraq, an adventure he had strongly supported.

Melloan’s plain-spoken account of a hundred years of Wall Street Journal history is a pleasing exercise in nostalgia, displaying precisely the eyes-wide-open sophistication that the corps of Midwesterners of which he was a member brought to what had been a parochial Manhattan financial daily before World War II.  His version of the foundational story of how General Motors pulled its advertising after the Detroit bureau scooped the company’s annual-model pageant, only to later meekly return to the fold, is especially good.

Omitted from Melloan’s account is most of the story of how editorial writer Lindley Clark, a monetary economist who had been among Milton Friedman’s first students at the University of Chicago, was squeezed out of the editorial page by the choice of Bartley.  Clark returned to the news pages as a columnist for several years, and, with colleagues Alfred Malabre, Jr. and Paul Blustein, conducted guerilla campaign against the editorial pages’ extravagant claims.

Nor does Friedman himself come up, except in passing.  Friedman’s record as an economic forecaster wasn’t perfect, but he was a far better guide to the action than gold-standard enthusiast Mundell.  Nor is mentioned the role of Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein in straightening out Reaganomics.  Economist Bruce Bartlett’s early advocacy is cited approvingly—but not his long-running and trenchant apostasy.

The fact is that WSJ economics has been dominated by quacks in the nearly 50 years since Bartley turned its editorial page into the nation’s principal voice of economic reform. (Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The two parties which divide the State, the Party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world since it was made…. Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities….. Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.”)

For the most part the strategy worked, though mostly not for the reasons given.  Monetary stringency, deregulation, tax simplification, trade legislation, and budgetary discipline all had far greater influence. Tax-cutting itself apparently contributed relatively little to economic growth.

Thirty-five years after the “supply-side revolution,” the WSJ has little to show for it except books by its staffers and columnists. As far as I can tell, the GOP tax bill has no significant allies, no outside endorsers, besides the Republican congressional leadership and those who will benefit from (and repay) their largesse.

Those who write the editorials seldom display signs of having gotten wise to themselves.  I’ve read those pages every day for nearly 50 years, and, with the exception of regular forays into the microeconomics of particular situations, on which they (and Holman Jenkins, in particular) remain sharp,  today the editorials seem so cautious and hamstrung by their inconsistencies as to be interesting mainly when they contradict themselves.

No amount of back-channel complaints by professional economists, much less carping by the likes of me, is going to change things.  There is, however, a solution. When Old Man Rupert Murdoch finally loosens his grip on the newspaper he bought, in 2007, to serve as his flagship, his sons should hire back Bret Stephens, 44, to replace editorial page editor Paul Gigot, 62.

Stephens quit the WSJ last spring to become a columnist for The New York Times.  For months he had become ever more critical of Donald Trump’s candidacy – and of the surprising tolerance of it shown by his fellow editorialists.  Melloan judges Stephens to have been “no longer comfortable with the Journal’s traditions.”

In fact, the WSJ’s post-Royster traditions of innovative reform have deteriorated from their peak to the point of self-parody. Stephens at one point defined conservatism as “a principled commitment to limited government, free markets, constitutional rights, equal opportunity, personal responsibility, e pluribus unum and Pax Americana.” But Stephens, at least as I read him, is no originalist.  My guess is that he would renew the newspaper’s commitment to intelligent true conservativism – that is, defending the state of things as they are.

David Warsh, an economic historian, is a longtime economics and political columnist and proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first appeared. He is also a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

David Warsh: Robert Bartley's malign ghost at the GOP convention

There is no point in asking Donald Trump about his economists.  It hasn’t been that been that kind of a campaign.  In May the businessman reached out to Stephen Moore, of the Heritage Foundation, and CNBC television host Lawrence Kudlow, to help cut the $10 trillion cost of the tax cuts that he had proposed. Last week Moore and lawyer-turned-restaurateur Andy Puzder gave Trump a qualified endorsement in The Wall Street Journal: “A Trump Economy Beats Clinton’s.” Mark Skousen made the libertarian case against Trump here last spring.

If there is one man beside Trump himself whose spirit will inhabit the hall in Cleveland, at least metaphorically, it is Robert L. Bartley – not because Bartley himself approved of Trump – who knows if he did? – but because, as editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street  Journal,  Bartley spearheaded the creation of the say-anything, stop-at-nothing rules that ultimately led to Trump’s success in gaining the Republican Party’s nomination.

Bartley died in 2003. After taking over the editorial page in 1972, he became the most influential administrator of the rules of American public debate in the last third of the 20th Century. In that position, Bartley began the populist revolt that has since found its apotheosis in Trump.

Most influential journalistic umpire of an age?  How do you back a claim like that? Mainly by comparison, naturally -- in this case to the career of the most influential journalist of the middle third of the 20th Century, Walter Lippmann. As it happens, thanks to Craufurd Goodwin, of Duke University, dean of U.S. historians of economics we have a first-rate biography of Lippmann that concentrates on his role as a defender of market economics (Walter Lippmann, Public Economist (Harvard, 2014), as opposed to Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980).

Lippmann was the child of well-to-do German-Jewish parents, attended Harvard College, worked for Woodrow Wilson during World War I, was on friendly terms from then on with Franklin Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes and Felix Frankfurter.  Bartley was the son of a professor of veterinary medicine, attended Iowa State University, and, as editor of the WSJ (as the editorial page editor was and still is called), became a friend of Robert Mundell, of Columbia University; Albert Wohlstetter, of RAND Corp.; Edward Teller, of the University of California, at Berkeley; and President Ronald Reagan.

Bartley was 34 when he was appointed to the job. He had voted for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964, but by the time that he spent a year in Washington, in 1971, he had become conservative, and, according to former WSJ reporter Robert Novak, by then a syndicated columnist, he was ostracized by liberal reporters there as a right-wing “kook.” Upon becoming editor he built a staff that eventually totaled fifty writers and editors, creating a universe of conservative opinion parallel to the news side of the paper.  Among those he hired was Jude Wanniski, a flamboyant reporter for The National Observer, a weekly newspaper published in those days by Dow Jones.

In a level-headed appreciation in Slate, in 2003, Jack Shafer described an experience that was widely shared during the 1970s:

“[W]hat attracted me to the page when I first started reading it in 1973, fishing it out of a trash can each night as I cleaned an office building, was Bartley’s allegiance to the classical liberal values of free markets and free speech. Back then, Bartley was a minority of one among editorial-page editors in hewing to those views, tilting against the neo-Swedish worldview of The Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times editorial pages. So if Bartley overstated his case from time to time by shouting until his vocal chords hemorrhaged and his readers lost their hearing, well, that was OK by me.

“As a small-government libertarian, I never subscribed to the Journal edit page’s supply-side orthodoxy as formulated by Jude Wanniski, which didn’t seem to care about the growth of government as long as taxes got cut. Today, nearly everybody recognizes that the marginal tax rate of 70 percent when Ronald Reagan took office was at least twice as high as it should be. Cutting it down to 28 percent proved to be both a utilitarian and an individual boon. As economist Bruce Bartlett notes, the world took notice of the American tax revolution, and many nations followed our example to excellent effect. But back in the ’70s, when Galbraithism and Heilbronerism ruled, Bartley and his scriveners were the true intellectual radicals.

Wanniski introduced Bartley to a pair of refugees from the University of Chicago, Arthur Laffer and Mundell.  By 1975, Mundell was teaching international economics at Columbia. Wanniski described a “Mundell-Laffer hypothesis,” as revolutionary and mysterious as the prescriptions of Keynes 40 years before, all the more so for being confided in a series of restaurant lunches instead of conveyed as formal models in technical papers. The ideas eventually were encoded as WSJ  editorials and dubbed ‘supply-side’ economics: massive tax cuts that would pay for themselves by spurring growth.’’

Reagan won the presidency in 1980, and Bartley won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. The editorial page had become immensely powerful, and has remained so.  Bartley told an interviewer in 1981, about the time Wanniski was fired for train-station-electioneering for a supply-side insurgent candidate, “Jude had a tremendous influence over the tone and direction of the page. He taught me the power of the outrageous.” Wanniski struck out on his own as a political consultant but remained close to the page. By 1982, Vermont Royster,  Bartley’s processor as editor, had joined the critics. Novak later quoted him:   “‘When I was writing editorials,’ said Royster, ‘I was always a little bit conscious of the possibility that I might be wrong. Bartley . . . is not conscious of the possibility that he is wrong.’  Yet Bartley’s page “exerted more influence than Royster’s ever attempted,” wrote Novak.

By the end of the 1980s, Bartley had won. George H. W. Bush had succeeded Reagan as president, but the WSJ  editorial page refused to take yes for an answer.  Bartley vigorously opposed Bush’s decision to seek modest tax increases to pay for war in the Persian Gulf to expel Iraq from Kuwait.  And when Bill Clinton defeated Bush, in 1992, the editorial page began a series of attacks on Clinton and his wife that ultimately sought to overturn election results with an impeachment trial.

I can pinpoint the day the page lost me altogether. It was March 18, 1993, with a famous editorial, whose title, “No Guardrails,” has since become a WSJ battle cry. A physician who performed abortions in Florida had been ambushed and killed by a protester in Florida. The editorialist, Daniel Henninger, wrote:

“[T]here really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?

“We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won’t like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

“The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals –university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators – who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.

“With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance – against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.’’

There was something downright creepy about that editorial – like the moment in The Shining when a leering Jack Nicholson, peering over her shoulder, says to his wife, who has just discovered that his manuscript, on which he has been working obsessively, is repetitive nonsense, “How do you like it so far?”  Any relatively disinterested observer who lived through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s knew the extent to which those years had involved a calming down from the ’60s, of the restoration of rules of civility in the political realm, a process of equilibration.

From the short-lived administration of Gerald Ford to the zero-based budgeting and deregulation under Jimmy Carter, from disinflation under Paul Volcker to tax simplification and Social Security stabilization under Ronald Reagan, the signal events of those years constituted a retreat from the excesses of the ‘60s and a celebration of traditional values of order, credibility, ambition, and achievement. The one sphere in which pressure had continued from the Left was expansion of civil rights — of women, minorities, immigrants, gays, and specifically the rights of women to obtain abortions.  Which was, of course, exactly what the writer had in mind.

Shafer described the scorched-earth policies of those years:

“As many of Bartley’s ideas gained ascendancy, his page became shriller, unable to give Clinton proper credit for getting control of spending. There’s a thin line between hard-hitting opinion journalism and character assassination, a line that Bartley frequently erased. Instead of serving as a sophisticated and credible spokespage for classical liberalism—like The Economist—his page descended all too often into the dishonesty and hackery one associates with politicians.’’

By 2001, Bartley was ill.   He stepped down and began writing an occasional column.  The 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center temporarily forced the WSJ from its offices around the corner. The editorial page soon began a relentless campaign for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bartley died in December 2003, a week after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I hope that Bartley will find as wise and good-natured a biographer as did Lippmann in Goodwin.  The rise of paleo-conservatives has been the subject of at least one good book, George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (1976), and is soon to have another, a long-awaited biography of William F. Buckley, by Sam Tanenhaus.  Peter Steinfels and Jacob Heilbrunn, have chronicled the rise of the neoconservatives: The Neoconservatives: The Men who are Changing America’s Politics (1979) and They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (2008). Populist conservatives were the subject of Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations (1994), by Paul Krugman.  If paleo-con Buckley’s National Review provided the starting place for the careers of George Will and Garry Wills; if neo-con Irving Kristol’s influence extended to Allan Bloom, Francis Fukuyama, and Dinesh d’Souza (and influenced the views of broadcast journalists such as John McLaughlin, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck); then Bartley can be said to have furthered the careers of Wanniski, Michael Novak, George Gilder and Amity Shlaes. There’s plenty of material to work with there.

Is it fair to blame the chaos surrounding this year’s Republican nomination on Bob Bartley? Clearly I think so. No one in my lifetime systematically removed more of those guardrails, the norms governing good-faith political and economic discourse, than he. Trump is the downside of 40 years of WSJ ed page comment too often just like his: outrageous, sulfurous, and, all too often, half-baked.  Bartley is dead; long live Bartley: in his absence, the page was completely unable to steer the nomination toward a more viable candidate this year. The best that can be said is that its editorialists helped keep it away from Sen. Ted Cruz.

Paul Gigot, who succeeded Bartley in 2001, has steered a steady course, admitting more diverse opinion to its op-ed pages, coping with increasing disunity among the -cons mainly by proliferating columnists. Lee Lescaze, whom the WSJ hired from The Washington Post in 1989 and who founded its Weekend section, laid the foundation for a humane and sophisticated new wing of the paper before he died, in 1996.

Rupert Murdoch bought the paper from Dow Jones heirs in 2007. His sons, James and Lachlan, have their work cut out for them. Sometime in the next few years they must replace Gigot, 61, with an editor capable of restoring credible focus to a page that has become alternately ideological and diffuse. The decision of The New York Times in March to replace Andrew Rosenthal with James Bennett, hired back from The Atlantic, can only increase the pressure.

Two great heroes of the Republican Party in living memory were Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. To lionize Reagan is not enough. Until the similarities of roles of both are understood, the Republican Party is not going to regain the White House.

David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com and a longtime financial journalist and economic historian. He, like the overseer of New England Diary, Robert Whitcomb, worked for The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s.

David Warsh: Jeb Bush likely to be the next president

  The early stages of the presidential campaign are unfolding as expected.  Jeb Bush is irritating his party’s right wing by periodically praising President Obama. Otherwise he remains as elusive as possible, in view of the gantlet of Red State primaries he must run  to receive the Republican nomination. Then he can run to the center in the general election.

To make this point last week, Washington Post campaign correspondent Ed O’Keefe reached back to an interview that Bush gave Charlie Rose in 2012:

“I don’t have to play the game of being 100,000 percent against President Obama,” he said at the time. “I’ve got a long list of things that I think he’s done wrong and with civility and respect I will point those out if I’m asked. But on the things I think he’s done a good job on, I’m not just going to say no.”

In the same interview, Bush alleged that Obama was repeatedly blaming his brother for his own missteps and suggested it would be nice to hear Obama give “just a small acknowledgment that the guy you replaced isn’t the source of every problem and the excuse of why you’re not being successful.”

Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton is bogged down amidst increasing scrutiny of the philanthropic foundation her husband founded after leaving office.

Are the stories fair?  In New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s view, there is reason to be skeptical. He wrote last week on his blog, “If you are old enough to remember the 1990s, you remember the endless parade of alleged scandals, Whitewater above all — all of them fomented by right-wing operatives, all eagerly hyped by mainstream news outlets, none of which actually turned out to involve wrongdoing.”

In fact  the Clintons manifested a fair amount of slippery behavior once they got to in Washington,  most of it involving a series of appointments of cronies to sensitive positions in the Treasury and Justice Departments, including that of his wife and of his old friend Ira Magaziner to head a Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Little of the initial concern was fomented by “right-wing operators.”

But instead of simply monitoring the president’s behavior in office, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, under editor Robert Bartley, launched a campaign to, in effect, overturn the result of the election, by conducting an extensive investigation of the couple’s Arkansas years.

The result was the Whitewater craze —the name stems from a vacation development in the Ozark Mountains in which the Clintons had an interest.  Bartley’s inquisition found relatively little smoke and much less fire. Typical was the discovery of a futures trade, arranged by a favor-seeker, from which Hillary had benefitted in 1978, having put very little money at risk – at a moment in which her marriage hung in in the balance. Afterwards she backed away from the broker.

Mrs. Clinton’s healthcare reform initiative collapsed in 1994, amid heavy criticism of its approach (employers required to provide coverage to all employees) and its lack of transparency. Later that year Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) led the Republicans to control of the House of Representatives.  The struggle for power became more intense.

It reached a crescendo when impeachment proceedings failed to convict the president of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for having lied about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Democrats gained seats in the House after that.

Clinton served out his time in the White House with only one more memorable scandal – his pardon of Glencore commodities founder Marc Rich on charges of trading with Iran and tax evasion.

The case against Bill Clinton was sunk by the consistently unfair and ultimately deplorable way in which it was brought. But Hillary Clinton’s problems with the Clinton Foundation – possible conflicts of interest while serving as secretary of state, her husband’s lavish speaking fees – are there for all to see, 18  months before the election.  Politico’s Jack Shafer compares the scheme to the concept of “honest graft,” as enunciated long ago by George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

Shafer writes, “The Times story contains no smoking gun. As far as I can tell, the pistol isn’t even loaded. Hell, I’m not sure I even see a firearm.” But then Plunkitt never ran for president.

So it seems likely the next president will be Jeb Bush. He would be the third member of the family to serve. Is that a bad thing?

Not in my reading of it. Jeb Bush more nearly resembles his realist father than his idealistic brother.  The net effect of a Bush victory would be the marginalization of the populist wing of the GOP – and their fellow travelers at the WSJ ed page.  Remember, the editorialists there played a significant role in bringing about the defeat of the first Bush. Furious at him for having raised taxes slightly to finance the first Gulf War, they systematically forced Bush to the right.  Pat Buchanan gave the keynote address to the Republican convention in Houston, H. Ross Perot split the GOP vote and Clinton was elected with 43 percent of the popular vote. .

Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ in 2007.  Since then I have detected a gradual slight moderation of its editorial views (if not those of its more fiery columnists (Bret Stephens, Daniel Henninger, Kimberly Strassel). In 2014, Club of Growth founder Stephen Moore left the editorial board for the Tea Party’s Heritage Foundation, taking with him the portfolio of crackpot economics.  Due next for an overhaul is the page’s stubborn denial of climate change.

The WSJ editorial page and the Clintons have shaped each other to an astonishing extent over the past 25 years. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Disclosure:  I worked on the famously fair-minded news side of the WSJ for a short sweet time many years ago. In the name of fairness, I have to say that an awful lot of wise opinion and shrewd editorial writing appears on its editorial pages. .

WSJ reporters are still remarkably straight. I have the feeling that the disdain among them for the wilder enthusiasms of their editorial colleagues hasn’t changed any more than mine in all that time.

David Warsh is a Somerville, Mass.-based based economic historian, long-time financial journalist and proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.