Passover and Presidents

The homemade Haggadahs for a Passover Seder were on two dining tables in a large East Side Manhattan apartment decorated in gold and white. The text referred to “The President” instead of “The Leader” as the one who guides the traditional explanation of the commemoration of “our forefathers flight from Egypt to freedom”.  Was that mention of “the President” why I had a sudden realization that the ancient Egyptians’ fear of burgeoning numbers of Jewish immigrants paralleled today’s right-wing nationalists’ fear of refugees around the world?  The Pharaoh wanted to preserve the domination of his Egyptian people — and did so with decrees designed to punish immigrants.  This was not my traditional view of the event that insired the song, “Let My People Go.”

I hadn’t heard mention of the current President attending a Passover Seder though his son-in-law is Jewish and his daughter converted to Judaism. It’s commonplace to invite a stranger — or a non-Jew — to a family Seder.  But the ceremony ought to have some meaning for the participants.  In families sundered by divorce, attendance at family Seders is at best an alternate year occurrence. Attending the Seder with us this year was a woman in conflict with her daughter over a desire to support her grandson’s college dreams.  She had planned to give $100,000 in tuition money directly to her grandson, but her daughter, his mother, objected, and told her, “This is not how it’s done in Westchester.” Taken aback, she repeated her daughter’s distancing comment and wondered, “Is there a tribal custom in Westchester that I didn’t know about? Really?”

The Seder had special meaning for President Barack Obama who held an annual White House Seder as a private dinner from 2009 to 2016. Obama said in 2013, “To African Americans, the story of the Exodus was perhaps the central story, the most powerful image about emerging from the grip of bondage to reach for liberty and human dignity – a tale that was carried from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement into today. For me, personally, growing up in far-flung parts of the world and without firm roots, the story spoke to a yearning within every human being for a home.” 

On our way home I noticed a signed framed 8 x 10 photograph of President Richard Nixon on the bookcase by the apartment front door.  What? I didn’t have time to ask for an explanation. In 1960 when I was a student at Dartmouth College, I went to Manchester, NH to attend a Nixon rally. I had already met John F. Kennedy, heard him speak with extraordinary wit and intelligence and photographed him outside Dartmouth Hall. I was appalled by Nixon’s speech and satirized or mocked what I felt was Nixon’s insincere appeal to “the good and the true”. I wrote a poem about Nixon’s political appeal that we published in THE DARTMOUTH, the college newspaper of which I later would become the Editor in my junior year.

When we got home from the Passover Seder I saw 93-year-old former President Jimmy Carter on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert asked Carter him if had been too nice to be president. “Does America want kind of a jerk as president?” Colbert asked. Carter replied, “Apparently, from this recent election year. I never knew it before.” Colbert then asked about the one quality a president must have. “I used to think it was to tell the truth,” Carter said, “but I’ve changed my mind lately.” Carter, promoting his new book, Faith, told Colbert that he prays for Trump. “I pray that he’ll be a good president and that he’ll keep our country at peace and that he’ll refrain from using nuclear weapons and that he will promote human rights,” Carter said. “So, yeah, I pray for him.”

My scariest image of President Richard Nixon came in 1972 at a CREEP rally — CREEP stood for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, you’ll recall. At Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, pro-Nixon enforcers physically surrounded protesters and pushed them out of the arena. The turmoil in the seats surpassed the usual uproar on the ice during Islanders’ hockey games. Yet my favorite image of Nixon is of his outstretched arms and two handed V-salute as he enters a helicopter to depart from the White House after he’d resigned the presidency.  

I knew that President Gerald Ford, under his birth name, Leslie Lynch King Jr, had been born in Omaha, so on a visit home I went to see the memorial site that marks his connection to the city where I grew up. When later I had the opportunity, I visited the Gerald R. Ford museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I saw a copy of the famous NY Daily News cover, “FORD TO NYC: DROP DEAD”.   

When Jimmy Carter was running for President in 1976, I decided to visit an old Omaha friend who’d moved to Columbia, South Carolina.  Together we drove to Plains, Georgia to see the hometown of America’s most famous peanut farmer.  I remember seeing a frustrated Judy Woodruff, reporting for NBC News at the time, repeatedly muff her TV standup on the main street of Plains across from brother Billy Carter’s gas station. My friend and I decided our presidential tour should also include Warm Springs, Georgia where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was treated for his paralytic disease beginning in 1924 and where he died in 1945.  As a teenager I had collected stamps and had visited FDR’s home overlooking the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York and saw some of his stamp collections. I was especially delighted to include footage of Roosevelt in his car in Warm Springs that was filmed by actor/comedian Sid Raymond in my 2003 documentary SID AT 90. FDR wanted to know if Sid’s camera was on, and when assured that it was, he said emphatically for the silent camera, “Nice Work! Nice Work!” 

When Ronald Reagan ran for President, I went to Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California, where as a radio announcer in March 1937 Reagan had covered Spring Training with the Chicago Cubs and made a screen test for Warner Bros. Pictures; a month later he signed a movie contract. In 1980 for Bill Moyers’ Journal I produced a half-hour film titled “The Essential Reagan” that was paired with “The Essential Carter.” But my real up close and personal experience with Reagan came after he was elected President. At a neighborhood party, a photographer told me that Reagan’s White House Photographer Michael Evans was a good friend of Gerald Ford’s White House Photographer David Kennerly but that he had to take a different approach to do his job. Intrigued, I found out more and pitched a story to CBS Sunday Morning where I was on staff at the time.  Both men had been Time Magazine photographers, but as Evans famously said, “If David Kennerly was like Gerald Ford’s son, I was like Ronald Reagan’s nephew.” Kennerly had free access to the Oval Office and to the President.  He photographed history as it happened. Evans had to wait to be called for a formal portrait after critical meetings had taken place. Evans had arranged for the Armenian-Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa to pose President Reagan.  Karsh had taken a cigar out of Winston Churchill’s mouth before memorably capturing his image. How would he pose Reagan? The President’s image-conscious aide Michael Deaver said we could film Evans photographing Karsh photographing Reagan in the Oval Office for three minutes. Reagan was about to sit for a second pose next to a bronze Frederick Remington sculpture of a bucking horse. But after only about 30 seconds elapsed, Deaver indicated our time was up.  “Are we done?” Reagan asked. Deaver replied, “No, Mr. President, that’s just the CBS crew leaving.” 

I first heard Bill Clinton speak at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House at a literacy event arranged by First Lady Barbara Bush when I was producing a PBS Project Literacy U.S. special for WQED-TV Pittsburgh. I was quite impressed by this Oxford scholar and Yale Law graduate – the most articulate politician I had heard since Kennedy. I later arranged for Bill Moyers to interview Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas when I was Executive Producer of Listening to America with Bill Moyers — a 27-week series of hour programs during the 1992 election year that The New York Times praised for “having elevated the dialogue of democracy”. Clinton’s staff wanted us to interview him in the basement of the unimpressive split-level house that served as the Governor’s residence in Little Rock. I knew he wouldn’t look well in this low ceilinged room with his back close to the wall. In order to get some depth of field, I suggested that we go upstairs to the higher ceilinged living room. We opened the double doors leading to the central hallway and beyond to the dining room; we moved the furniture and our production manager bought flowers that my wife arranged on tables in both rooms. After the interview, we filmed Moyers and Clinton walking outside under a veranda as a way of introducing their conversation. Then Clinton invited us into the basement family room to meet his wife, Hillary, who came downstairs from the family quarters to chat.

At some point during the Clinton presidency, I traveled to Kennebunkport, Maine to interview his predecessor George Herbert Walker Bush and his wife Barbara Bush at their summer home. A former reporter from The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and a friend of hers enlisted my help in producing a biographical documentary of the 41st President for his library on the campus of Texas A & M University in College Station that would open in 1997. I don’t recall much about the film though I found them an editor and an editing facility, but I do remember that Bush Republicans were impatient that too much time in the rough cut of the film was spent on Bush’s role as Reagan’s Vice President and on Reagan himself. “He had his turn,” they said about Reagan. Factionalism isn’t limited to the parties themselves.

I had previously made the documentary “What’s a Party For?” for Bill Moyers’ Journal.  I went all over Maine to cover Democrats and Republicans at party primary events, got to meet Senator George Mitchell, and arranged for Moyers to interview Senator Edmund Muskie in the Governor’s Mansion. Soon after our program aired, Muskie became President Carter’s Secretary of State in 1980. In 2004 for New York Times Television and the Discovery Channel, I co-produced “Unraveling of a Candidate” – a look at campaign disasters inspired by what became known as “The Dean Scream”. We included Muskie’s alleged crying as the snow fell in the 1972 New Hampshire primary, Michael Dukakis wearing a helmet and driving a tank, and of course Gary Hart photographed with model Donna Rice on his lap on the yacht appropriately named “Monkey Business”.  

Suddenly I’m reminded of the words of Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed who railed at the political cartoons of Thomas Nast: “Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures!”  I included Boss Tweed’s story in a 10-part mini-documentary series that I produced with Eyewitness News Correspondent and writer Milton Lewis: Scoundrels! Scalawags! & Saviors! — The Good Old Days at New York’s City Hall.  Nast created the political party symbols of the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. In 1980 I invited the widely syndicated political cartoonist Patrick Oliphant to update Nast’s party symbols for a poster to promote What’s A Party For? – Moyers kept the framed poster in his offices until it had faded years later.  Our WABC-TV series won a 1971 New York area Emmy Award and I re-edited it into an hour documentary that we screened at Gracie Mansion at the invitation of Mayor John Lindsay.  When I learned that Boss Tweed was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, I had to gain access for us to film. I decided to hire a limo, buy flowers and drive into the site of William M. Tweed’s grave as if we were paying our respects to a loved one. There we filmed Milton Lewis telling part of the Tweed story of political corruption and we also filmed a standup in the Tweed Courthouse directly behind City Hall — an elegant monument to extraordinary economic extravagance.    

I suppose it’s inevitable that a television journalist covering national stories would have some interaction with major American politicians. I met George W. Bush in his Governor’s office in Austin, Texas, before he ran for President. I met Al Gore at Columbia Journalism School after he’d lost to Bush. l met Jesse Jackson on an airplane going to Chicago. I shared an airport limo with Senator Ted Kennedy and CBS White House correspondent Bob Pierpoint. Earlier I had ridden in a press bus that followed Ted Kennedy when he campaigned for President. I remember Pierpoint saying that the youngest Kennedy brother was “a great guy to have a beer with” but not sure he’d be the best choice as President. Oddly, that was the phrase many used to endorse George W. Bush.  I covered Tricia Nixon’s wedding at the White House with Eyewitness News correspondent Melba Tolliver. A Life magazine correspondent who briefly grumbled about her assignment said,  “At least, today, this is the place to be”.  

Without a news crew, I went to Monticello to see the home of Thomas Jefferson and one Presidents’ Day my wife and I went to Mount Vernon to tour the home of George Washington, our First President.  There I learned about Washington’s “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.”  By age sixteen, Washington had copied these rules by hand that seemed to have originated with French Jesuits in 1595.  This may have been a penmanship exercise. But it is evidence of the power of the young to influence behavior. They proclaim our respect for others and how we must behave in order to live together for the good of all. The first rule is “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.” The fiftieth rule is “Be not hasty to believe flying Reports to the Disparagement of any.”  The 110th rule is “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” Remember that Washington was the man who would not be King. The Founding Fathers would be appalled at our lack of a belief in some form of civic religion or rules of behavior that would bind us together. Maybe the students at Parkland, Florida will galvanize us to do what our constitution proclaims — promote the general welfare.  For too long the rewards have gone to those who have gamed the system, who’ve put individual profit above the common good. Let’s hope that we have the resilience to face the onslaught of offenses that seem like a modern version of the Ten Plagues.

Our Seder service this year was spare. But for many years I have participated in updating Haggadahs to reflect contemporary “plagues” such as war, hatred, and disease. The Jewish Council on Urban Affairs’ Immigrant Justice Haggadah, for example, counts as plagues “the detention of immigrants, unwarranted deportations, hate crimes, the denial of drivers’ licenses and other services to undocumented immigrants, hopelessness, apathy, and fear of speaking out.”  Feminist Haggadahs add plagues such as sexism and violence against women; environmental Haggadahs mention the destruction of natural resources. Every modern application of the story of slavery and liberation necessitates the creation of a new list of “plagues” to be eradicated. In designing the Haggadah our family has used for the last several years, I included two passages from books by Rabbi Eli Louis Cooper, who was my wife’s father and also a lawyer. His words seem especially relevant this year. Rabbi Cooper wrote: “Never has there been as much information poured into our homes and schools, offices and legislative halls as we have today. We are lulled by the euphemism of calling it public relations. One must be alert against eloquent falsifiers on the rostrum, the air and television, in newspapers and magazines, on the floors of Congress and in the halls of government. It is a defense and a duty to be intelligent. There is also the duty to practice equality. It is no accident that the Haggadah begins the Seder service and ritual with a call to 'all who are hungry to come and eat, and all who are needy to come and join in celebrating the Passover.'  Freedom cannot be complete without equality.”    #

? 2018 Howard Weinberg

Howard Weinberg is working on a memoir of his career in television journalism. He is also currently fundraising to complete a feature documentary about the 1970’s digital revolution that changed the face of television. https://fiscal.ifp.org/project.cfm/289/Nam-June-Paik--TV-Lab-License-to-Create.   Weinberg is a script-doctor and an award-winning documentary filmmaker (Sports for Sale, First Things First, One Plus One, net.LEARNING), television journalist (Founding Producer, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Executive Producer, Listening to America with Bill Moyers; Producer, CBS News Sunday Morning & Sixty Minutes) and President of Priority Productions, Inc.   He mentors documentary students privately and has taught documentary history and production at NYU, Dartmouth and Columbia Journalism School, where he also developed courses in video profiles and newsmagazine production, organized documentary screenings and moderated panels of filmmakers. The Daily News called the subject of his film Sid at 90 the “undisputed star” of the 2003 New York Jewish Film Festival.