CHAPTER 1

NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANTArguing America

A lot of things are important, but in the context of this week, nothing is more important thangetting that done, this week.

—Edwin Meese, March 16, 1986

ALMOST SEVENTY YEARS AGO, on a Sunday evening between the surrenders of theGermans and the Japanese in World War II, two visionaries of the public spirit named MarthaRountree and Lawrence Spivak launched a radio program in the basement of a Washington, D.C.hotel that would change the world. Like so many inventions that emerged from the chaos of thatgreat conflict, Meet the Press was something genuinely new. Their idea was to argue America, tosubject national decision makers at the peak of their influence to critical and probing questions infront of the mass public, thereby bringing the representative and the represented into closerdiscursive contact. Every week, Spivak and Rountree assembled a panel of ace reporters to firepointed questions at the week's most salient decision maker in order to get "the story behind thestory"—the strategic focus of the policy discussion without the technical dross. It is not that thiswas the first political talk show—other public affairs programming had been on the radio yearsbefore Meet the Press—but Spivak and Rountree had found the magic formula: they would useelite print reporters to stage a mass broadcast of a press conference in a conversational style. Theywould bridge the democratic divide by asking what was described as "the questions you wouldask if you were here" and dream big, as it was only possible to do in that pregnant moment afterWorld War II. Martha Rountree imagined that she might one day interview figures like WinstonChurchill, Joseph Stalin, and Henry Wallace, thereby transforming the way democracy was livedand performed. As we look back over the astonishing record of the program, which critiquedevery major news event from the establishment of the United Nations, hosted every presidentafter Eisenhower, and showcased the more memorable efforts of the world's popes, philosophers,poets, and kings, Rountree's dream has become our reality.

Center Stage of the National Conversation

In a book celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of Meet the Press, the official chronicler ofthe program, Rick Ball, made a claim about the show's first driving presence, Lawrence E.Spivak, that sounds hyperbolic but is really only descriptive: "Larry Spivak dared to ask the directquestion on behalf of the American people. He made Meet the Press part of the democraticprocess." It is fascinating to imagine that there was a time when one could not expect thesecretary of state or the winner of the Iowa straw poll to appear before an attentive and suspiciousaudience of more than three million people to justify her views and actions. Through a clevercombination of insider intrigue and mass appeal, Meet the Press muscled its way onto centerstage of the national conversation. Now, not only is it possible to use the intimacy of the cameralens to facilitate character assessments of our national leaders but leaders are also expected toreveal themselves to this kind of interrogation in order to reach the pinnacle of American politics.Through diligent commitment to its original format, Meet the Press has become the mark oflegitimacy in American politics. To avoid a Meet the Press appearance is to admit defeat.

On June 15, 2008, in a tribute program to the show's most famous host, Tim Russert, DorisKearns Goodwin, a celebrated historian and one of the most ebullient and devoted of theprogram's guests and commentators, responded to a question about Russert's legacy that holdsfor the program as a whole.

Tom Brokaw (NBC News): And it seems to me, Doris, that in the future, historians will have a rich archive in theMeet the Press recordings of the people who have passed through these studios—who they were, how theyevolved, and what they became.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: No question about that. I mean, think about the nineteenth century. We had diaries; wehad letters. That's what allows historians to re-create those people who lived then. In this broadcast world,what these recordings will show people years from now is not just the questionshe asked, not even just the answers he got, but which people were able to acknowledge errors, which peopleruffled under his questions, which ones could share a laugh. You'll get the temperament of these people.They're going to come alive.

As Goodwin recognized, these old shows are important records through which to satisfy our idlecuriosities and are also social science data that promise to reveal how American elites narratedhistory as it happened, revealing how they thought, felt, and spoke about their country, the valueson which they based their decisions and policies, and the historical examples and guiding imagesthey used to make their cases come to life. If Meet the Press is the mark of legitimacy inAmerican politics, the analysis of its archive is the study of legitimate American arguments. Forthose who did not live through these events, the Meet the Press archive reveals deep channels ofpolitical thought and culture, time out of mind of man. For those who did live through them, Meetthe Press is a systematic record of the state of the elite core of national conversation as it waslived rather than as it is remembered.

Meet the Press is the longest-running television series; there have been more than thirty-fivehundred episodes of the program over sixty-seven years of regular operation, and they continueeach week. Apart from innovations like adding a roundtable and reducing the number...