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| Chris Powell |
This sort of thing
should happen more often.
Early in June,
someone asked Chris Powell, a fierce defender of open government, to
address the annual general meeting of the Connecticut Council on Freedom
of Information. Powell is one of those newsmen with a sense of humor, rare
these days, who really does believe that the distribution of knowledge is indispensable
to a flourishing democracy. And public intelligence involves unimpeded access
to the organs of government, an access routinely threatened by hegemonic,
one-party government.
Governor Ella Grasso
was the guiding light of Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission,
revolutionary in her day when government was inclined to insularity, and good
government was made better by politicians operating behind closed doors in
smoke filled back rooms; Attorney General Dick Blumenthal had not yet thrown Big
Tobacco to the ground. Now, of course, the backrooms are smoke free, but no
less insular and no less a threat to good government. Connecticut celebrated
Grasso’s 100th birthday last May.
Powell’s talk, spiced with gobs of humor, was
unexceptional. Powell and the Journal Inquirer had, on and off for 20 years,
been poking fun at the Democrat Party’s apparent love affair with bad-boy
politician T. Frank Hayes, a stalwart Democrat who had managed to get
himself arrested for massive embezzlement in the late 1930’s.
It was the
Republican-American in Waterbury that had opened the prison doors to Hayes. As
a result, the paper had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public
service, this at a time when the prize was much sought after by news reporters
mindful of Joseph Pulitzer’s indispensable advice – “a good editor has no
friends.”
Times certainly
change, don’t they?
Powell’s address was
a handsome tribute to the Freedom of Information Council in general and to the
Pape family in particular: “While Bill [Pape], who had died recently, “was
editor and publisher nobody in the Waterbury area had an easy time trying to
keep the public out of its own business. The Republican-American used exposure,
editorial suasion, freedom-of-information complaints, and dogged reporting to
remind government agencies and officials that they were not the law unto
themselves. And Bill always supported this council's work.”
And then, touching
off a fuse, Powell added “That battle will not be completely won until the
state Senate's Democratic caucus removes Hayes' portrait from the gallery of
portraits of Democratic lieutenant governors on the walls of the Democratic
caucus room at the state Capitol. Apparently the Democratic senators still look
to Hayes for inspiration. But that's just one of many items remaining on the
agenda for accountable government in Connecticut.”
President Pro Tem of
the Senate Martin Looney quickly responded that Powell’s column
may have been an instance of “fake journalism.” The offending picture of Hayes,
having graced the walls of the Democrat’s inner sanctum for a goodly number of
years, had been removed more than a year earlier. Looney’s sharp retort – “It
is ironic [of Powell] to speak so boldly on the need for accountability and
transparency and yet fail on both counts in one’s written work in this case”–
was printed in the Journal Inquirer. It may have been an ironic act of overkill
to drag President John Kennedy into the affair, but there he was: “President
John F. Kennedy said,” Looney wrote, “'The great enemy of truth is very
often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth —
persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés
of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of
interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of
thought.'”
Powell’s response to the overkill was gentle.
He might have stormed that journalists, rarely invited into the Democrat’s no
longer smoke-filled caucus room, could hardly be expected to keep a close eye
on an honored Democrat political crook. Powell asked, “Why was the Hayes
portrait removed from the caucus room gallery at last? Apparently not because
of the dishonor it brought there. Rather, Looney explains, he ordered the
portrait and a few others replaced with pictures of notable Connecticut scenes
and a portrait of Constance Baker Motley, a New Haven native who was the first
black woman appointed a federal judge. The changes might have interested
civic-minded people around the state, even if announcing them might have risked
being construed as vindication for a bitter old crank. But congratulations to
Looney and the Senate Democrats anyway, whatever their motives, since doing the
right thing accidentally beats not doing it at all, and better late than never,
even 80 years after Hayes' conviction.”
An “accidental”
expression of moral rectitude then -- just perfect.
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