June 14, 2024 • 65 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 194: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) Trump and Mike Johnson are plotting for House Republicans to somehow "overturn" Trump's convictions in the Stormy Daniels Election Interference trial.
That was what they were SUPPOSED to talk about when Trump met with the House GOP yesterday but amid all the threats and terrorism and dictatorship and violence we forget that at his core, Trump is a moron. Whether he and Johnson actually got around to conceive some extra-constitutional scheme to enact ex post facto measure, before or after the election, who knows. All we do know is that Trump wound up insulting and enrages Milwaukee, a month and a day before the Republican Convention is supposed to open there.
The blowback was a welcome respite. Three different Wisconsin Congressmen made up four different excuses for Trump calling Milwaukee "horrible." One of them, Bryan Steil, first said Trump said no such thing, then in a local TV interview contradicted himself and said Trump did say it, but was referring to "specific things."
The upshot of all of this - and Trump's word salads - and Trump's manic blinking at his news conference where he couldn't handle any questions - is the ever-increasingly obvious reality that Trump is currently losing his mind. And that means for all its bravado and fealty the Republican Party is shackled to a corpse.
B-Block (24:30) TRUMPDATE: Late breaking news about Trump's fear of going to prison and the likelihood that if he goes it'll be in a place that is halfway between New York City and ESPN (huh?) (26:14) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Rishi Sunak explains he grew up deprived because he didn't have the British equivalent of HBO. The downward spiral of ex-human being Mark Penn gets worse. And Lauren Boebert is caught vaping in public again and you know WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME!
C-Block (34:00) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: For the first time, a chapter from Thurber's only non-fiction book "The Years With Ross." It includes a quote from a New Yorker Magazine writer that to me is one of the five or ten greatest things uttered by anybody in the history of the world.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Because
of the danger, because of the threats, because of his
mental illnesses, because of his terrorism, because of the hate
(00:28):
he has enabled and validated in this country, we sometimes
forget that at his core, elderly first offender J Trump
is a moron. The headline from his first return to
the scene of the coup crime on January sixth was
quoting Punchbawl News, Trump to House Republicans, Milwaukee, where we
(00:52):
are having our convention is a horrible city. More on
Trump's extraordinary self inflicted cluster f momentarily. But there was
actually something bigger at those meetings in Washington, or at
least there was supposed to be. Trump and Speaker Mike
Johnson are cooking up a plot to somehow nullify Trump's
(01:18):
thirty four convictions in the Stormy Daniels election interference case.
What Trump intended to talk to them about, and who
knows if he remembered, and who knows if the whole
Milwaukee stuff and the Hannibal Lecter stuff and the rest
of it was just a smoke screen to provide cover
for this weight. I'm giving Trump way too much credit
(01:42):
aren I. What Trump intended to talk to the House
Republicans about was summarized by a May thirty first phone
call reported by Politico. It took place hours after his
conviction here in New York, in which he screamed and
swore F bombs and S bombs and MF bombs into
the phone that quote, we have to overturn this unquote
(02:06):
At the other end, little mister holier than thou himself,
the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, if that is
your real name, and Johnson agreed with Trump, we have
to overturn this. House Republicans are developing a series of
schemes to somehow have the legislative branch retroactively overrule the
(02:31):
judicial branch. Whatever the actual plan turns out to be,
it will translate as somehow making Trump's conviction illegal and
erasing it whatever they have in mind. That was what
the Washington meeting yesterday was supposed to be about. Trump
cannot be guilty because to be guilty is to be wrong,
(02:53):
and Trump cannot accept that he is wrong. He cannot
ever accept that he cannot function. If he tried to
accept that the back of his head would blow off.
There is no constitutional way to quote overturn this, none
if the rest of the Constitution does not prevent such
a thing. Article one, section nine makes it illegal to
make a federal law that is ex post facto, that
(03:16):
makes something retroactively illegal. Article one, section ten makes it
illegal to make such a state law retroactive. That's not
stopping them political reports. Johnson and Trump have spoken repeatedly
since May thirty first about we have to overturn this,
and Johnson is trying. Not only did holding the attorney
(03:38):
general and contempt of Congress barely pass on Wednesday, but
a bill to allow presidents charged at the state level
to move their cases to federal court is still in
committee after fifteen months. And anyway, it could not be retroactive.
And even if it theoretically applied to the Georgia prosecution,
(03:58):
guess what, it would not pass the Senate and it
would not avoid a presidential veto. Oh, and it's un constitutional.
A defunding of the special prosecutor is still being proposed,
as if the DOJ couldn't get around that, and as
if the special prosecutor in Washington has anything to do
(04:19):
with the state case in New York, all of which
would ordinarily be reassuring. They are tilting at windmills, except
for the implications. For now, the implications are mostly a
mental image of Trump and Johnson pinioned to a butterfly
display arms and legs flailing in mid air, touching nothing.
(04:43):
But the implications for a Trump Napoleonic return to power, well,
those are far more ominous. If Trump is elected for
Congress or the White House or somebody to overturn Trump's conviction,
even then, his conviction in a state court, his conviction
(05:04):
from last may to do that, they would have to
overturn the Constitution. But of course they'd never try that.
(05:24):
So now the fun stuff again. Punch Bowl News quote
Trump to House Republicans, Milwaukee, where we are having our convention,
is a horrible city, CNN. The former president called Milwaukee
quote horrible. New York Times. Trump repeatedly disparaged the city
of Milwaukee. Wisconsin Congress and Glenn Groffman, who was in
the room. He was concerned about the election in Milwaukee.
(05:49):
Groffman is wrong, says Wisconsin congresson Derrek van Orden, the
one with the brain problem. Trump was specifically referring to
the crime the crime rate in Milwaukee. You're both wrong,
says Wisconsin congress and Bryan's Style. I was in the room, Trump,
Tump did not say this. No, Wisconsin Congressman Brian's Style,
you're wrong, he did say it, says Wisconsin Congressman Brian Style.
(06:14):
He wasn't talking about the city. He was talking about
specific issues in the city that Republican congressmen. Brian's style
is a liar, says Brian Style. By the way, his
name is spelled steel, as in stop the steel, stop
the style. Three Wisconsin congressmen, four different stories, none of
(06:37):
which successfully cover up what Trump said about Milwaukee. And Trump, well,
he held another news conference, the kind where you don't
take questions, so it's not really a news conference, is it?
The kind where you simply blink so fast and so
uncontrollably that it looks like you're sending Morse code. And
Trump made it easy to figure out what he really
(06:59):
told House Republicans. He said America is a bad democracy.
He said the world scorns us. He said America is
not special. So he trashed Milwaukee while trashing the rest
of us.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Right now, it's not special. Right now, it's being scorned
and being used as an example of when they look
at the crime on the streets, when they look at
all of the problems that we have, they're using us
as a bad example of democracy, and they're getting away
with murder, and we're not going to let it happens.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Back to the Milwaukee part Milwaukee, where Trump's fascist Republicans
begin their convention a month from tomorrow, even if he
is unavoidably detained at Rikers Island at the time. Milwaukee's mayor,
Cavalier Johnson, responded by metaphorically kicking Trump in his tiny
(07:52):
little cavalier Donald Trump, let's talk about things that he
thinks are horrible. All of us live through his presidency.
So right back at you, buddy. Good work, Mayor Johnson. Now,
please can't until the Republican Convention's permits. Seems like a
simple solution. It is very possible that Trump crapping over
(08:14):
Milwaukee was not the worst thing he said, and not
the most insane thing he said, and not the most
self damaging thing he said yesterday. Also from a source
in the room to punch bowl from Trump to House Republicans,
close to exact quote, Nancy Pelosi's daughter is a wacko.
Her daughter told me, if things were different, Nancy and
(08:35):
I would be perfect together. There's an age difference, though, Well,
he's right about that. There is an age difference. Pelosi
is eighty four, and Trump has begun to act like,
you know how old he is. He's two hundred and six.
Christine Pelosi, one of the Pelosi daughters, says, none of
this is true. Nobody said this to him, Nobody's talked
(08:55):
to him. I'm shocked. I'm shocked he had another hallucination,
or he's lying about it, or he had a hallucination
and is lying about it. I'm shocked, I tells you.
But cutting through this, what did Trump actually just tell
us here? Nancy Pelosi's daughter is a wacko. Her daughter
told me, if things were different, Nancy and I would
(09:16):
be perfect together. What he tells us he wants to
sleep with Nancy Pelosi, that he wants to make her
the fourth Missus, elderly first defender Jay Trump? What is
the message? Why was that message delivered to Washington Republican leaders? Sir,
this is a Senate. Also on a dryer topic, a
(09:40):
series of reporters advise that Trump is now obsessed with
tariffs on imported goods, all imported goods, and that he
told Republicans in Washington yesterday at at least one of
those meetings, that he wants so many tariffs that they
could then discontinue all income taxes. Apart from the fact
(10:04):
that that would turbocharge inflation, it would shift the tariff
or tax burden to low income Americans. The economist Paul
Krugman calculates that in order to bring to the Treasury
the equivalent of what it now gets from income taxes,
the average tariff would be the average would be one
hundred and thirty three percent, So like a four dollars
(10:29):
Swiss toboler owned bar would cost nine dollars and thirty
two cents. Could Trump's return to the scene of his
coup crime have gone any worse yesterday? You bet. Trump's
bizarre remark I played about how bad our democracy is,
how other countries point to us as an example of
bad democracy, his almost daily insistence that the Democrats are
(10:53):
the threat to democracy, but He's not a threat to democracy.
Clearly he did not get the memo. San Ansdannie O'Sullivan
reported at the exact hour Trump was in with the
House hostages that the Republican Party is trying to de
emphasize the word democracy and to try to start getting
(11:14):
people to call this country not a democracy but a republic. Now,
this started years ago as an actual kind of philosophical debate,
with of course, a voting suppression subject. I mean, the
commoners do not get to vote in a republic. But
as O'Sullivan notes, it has become now solely about neutralizing
(11:35):
the claim that Trump is a threat to democracy. If
there's no democracy, how could somebody be a threat to it?
So Trump keeps saying the word democracy, and he's doing
the opposite of what his enablers are trying to protect him.
With the protectors who do not realize that the rest
(11:56):
of us can also say Trump is a threat to
the republic or and hear me out on this. I
know it's outlandish, open your minds for just a second,
hear me out. We could say Trump is a threat
to America and one more of all the things in
(12:20):
the world. For what's left of Trump's mind to fixate
on how is this his choice? Sin? And reporting that
to the Republicans, Trump once again invoked Hannibal Lecter. Nice guy,
he said again he even had he said again a
(12:42):
friend over for dinner, and that friend's name was Electro Shark. Seriously,
there is an all encompassing reality at play here, and
it comes into focus more clearly with every passing day.
It is incumbent upon the Biden campaign and every legitimate
(13:04):
new organization in this country to make this a central
issue of this campaign. It may have no choice, but
it does need to push the point to whatever degree
he had not already done so previously. Donald Trump is
losing his mind, and that means that metaphorically, the Republican Party,
(13:29):
in the immortal and immortally terrifying phrase of the World
War One General Eric van Ludendorff, the Republican Party is
shackled to a corpse. Back to Trump and the courts,
(14:09):
in this case, the Supreme Theocratic Court. Hey, it's our
summer sale now accepting bribes at twenty percent off. It
did not rule on Trump's imaginary Hannibal Lecter told me
while we were in that horrible city Milwaukee yesterday, idea
of presidential immunity. More Supreme Court rulings today. They did
(14:30):
go nine nothing on the no brainer mifipristone case, ruling
that the people who sued had no standing to sue.
But the coverage of this that the Court protected the
abortion pill yesterday again underscores how little American news organizations
and employees understand about the topics they are covering. I
(14:50):
understand how to edit the tape, and they understand how
to light the shot correctly, but they don't understand to
read past the third paragraph where it says there is
a more substantial case again Smith of pristone coming to
the Supreme Court within weeks, and there is, of course
the prospect of using the nineteenth century Comstock Act to
(15:13):
prevent shipping that drug, to say nothing of what a
Trump dictatorship would do to it. On the other hand,
in an irony of timing, as the court ruled, Gallup
was issuing new polling showing that nearly one third of
all American voters identify as single issue abortion voters. One
third they will vote only for candidates who share their
(15:36):
views on the legality and regulation of abortion. And guess what,
eight percent will only vote for anti abortion candidates, but
twenty three percent will only vote for pro choice candidates.
Mister President, you should be able to do something with that.
(15:57):
And you know what else, happened while the court was
pretending it was some kind of I don't know, what's
the term, to be, some kind of oh yeah, yeah yeah.
While the court was pretending it was some kind of court,
Harlan Crowe narked on that giant pile of shit with glasses.
Clarence Thomas. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, who still
(16:22):
won't do anything about this, announced that in exchange for
his committee ending its investigation as it pertains to Harlan Crow,
Crow has turned over seven years of documents and information
about Clarence Thomas, and in that info was revealed at
least three more private jet trips that Crowe provided to
(16:43):
Thomas that Thomas did not report. May twenty seventeen Missouri
to Montana to Texas, March twenty nineteen, Washington to Georgia
to Washington, June twenty twenty one, Washington to San Jose,
and of course don't forget June twenty twenty four private
bus provided by Harlan Crowe for Harlan Crow to throw
(17:05):
Clarence Thomas under and two campaign notes. Quinnipiac polling, Trump
leads Biden by a point among registered voters between the
ages of eighteen and thirty four. According to exit polls,
Biden won the young vote younger really it was eighteen
(17:27):
to twenty nine's. In twenty twenty, he won that group
by twenty four points. He is losing to a roughly
equivalent group by one point. So where is the Biden ad?
Based on the Washington Post story we headlined here the
other day that Trump is floating a military draft, floating
a mandatory military prep class and a mandatory military aptitude
(17:50):
exam for every high school student for everybody eighteen or
nineteen or twenty, or you don't graduate and your school
doesn't get federal funds. We dropped this story because Trump
lied and denied it. Secretary of Defense proposed this a draft.
He proposed it under his own signature Inside Project twenty
(18:12):
twenty five, the Trump planned to turn the country into
his dictatorship. Where are the other news stories about this?
Where are the ads and comic relief? To save the moment?
Newt Gingrich, who was basically celebrating his twenty sixth year
of unemployment, went on Sean Hannity's propaganda prostitution show and
(18:37):
announced that Vice President Kamala Harris is quote really shallow,
uneducated and uneducatable person. I just want to double check here.
Is that the same Newt Gingrich who once claimed five
six years ago that the New York City subway system
was used only by quote, elites said, the same Newt
(19:00):
Gingrich who, before he got run out of Washington by
the members of his own political party, back when he
was still Speaker of the House, once decided that the
following sequence of events would occur and let that be
revealed to the veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew, who then mentioned
it on Meet the Press that he would impeach Bill Clinton,
and then the new president Al Gore, would pardon Bill Clinton,
(19:23):
and then he would impeach Al Gore for pardoning Bill Clinton,
and that would make guess who President of the United
States the Speaker of the House. Oh, by the way,
you know who the Speaker of the House was Newt Gingrich.
That Newt Gingrich, And instead he impeached Clinton, and the
impeachment lost by a landslide in the Senate. And the
(19:44):
only person, after all of the impeaching business, the only
person in the whole thing who wound up actually losing
his job, was Newt Gingrich. That Newt Gingrich, the idiot,
white trash, unemployable Nut Gingrich, That Newt gingriche calling the
(20:08):
Vice President of the United States, calling anybody else in
the world shallow and uneducated, that Newt Gangridge. Okay, just checking.
Also of interest here, Oh no, Lauren Bobert's been caught
(20:29):
illegally vaping in public again. Oh no, miss Bobert. This
is exactly the way it started last time. Get a
hold of yourself, or at least of some guys sitting
next to you. That's next. This is Countdown. This is
(20:52):
Countdown with Keith Obleman still ahead of us on this
all new edition of Countdown. An excerpt from James Thurber's
(21:16):
only non fiction book, his profile of the founder of
the New Yorker magazine, Harold Ross, which includes in the
chapter I will read you a quoach from a New
Yorker writer that is one of the five or ten
best things I have ever heard said in human history.
(21:37):
I hope I didn't oversell it first. That rarest events
on a recorded program A. This just in from Puck News.
It came in after I finished up the A Block.
It reports that Trump has suddenly started taking prison as
a serious possibility, dovetailing with what I did mention in
the A block about this desperate plot to get Congress
(21:58):
to overturn his conviction. Trump, quoting Puck News, has been
peppering friends and as with more specific questions. In particular,
I've been told he's been asking what kind of jail
do you think they'll send me? To say? Is Shawshank
still open? Tuck quotes CNN's Ellie Honig, who is wrong
(22:21):
about forty to fifty percent of the time, that he
Trump would literally go upstate, possibly at the Putnam County
Correctional in Carmel, New York, near the Connecticut border between
Mayopack and Brewster. My folks and I used to go
to some kind of lake at Mayopack, possibly late Mayopack.
Putnam Correctional is like halfway on the drive between here
(22:46):
and ESPN. Hey wait, I never thought of that before.
(23:16):
Halfway between here in ESPN. A new Thurber ahead, but first,
as ever, there are still more new idiots to talk
about the daily roundup of the men and women we
celebrate as the miscreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens
who constitute today's worst persons. In the world, the Bronze
(23:43):
the worst British Prime Minister Rishie Sunak well until July fourth,
anyway or earlier, not one day, not one event in
his snap election campaign has gone without disaster for him.
Remember he announced the snap election and the moment he
said it, it started to rain and he didn't even
(24:04):
have a hat. Anyway. He was interviewed by the network
ITV and he brought up how his parents had made
a lot of sacrifices when he was a child to
guarantee their priority for him education. And the interviewer knowing
that Sunac went to a private boarding school and then
another private school, and that his father was a doctor
(24:26):
and his mom owned a pharmacy, and he did not
grow a poor really middle class and the interviewer said like,
what did you give up? And Sunak did not answer. Quote,
we used to live in this tiny, old tumble down
house with the great big holes in the roof. House.
You were lucky to live in a house. We used
to live in one room, all twenty six of us,
(24:47):
no furniture off the floor was missing. We're all uttle
together in one corner of for fear fool And you
were lucky to have a room. We used to have
to live in the corridor. We used to dream of
living in a corridor. I had to get up in
the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour
before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison,
work twenty nine hours a day down mill and pay
(25:08):
mill owner for the permission to come to work. And
when we got home, our dad would kill us and
dance about on our graves singing allelujah. Oh and you
try to tell the young people of today that they
won't believe you. No, Rishie Sunac did not say that
he did not do the famous Monty Python Marty Feldman
comedy sketch, which is probably funnier in the original English.
(25:30):
The Prime Minister instead explained that he was deprived as
a child because quote, they will be all sorts of things.
There'll be all sorts of things that I would have
wanted as a kid that I couldn't have. Famously, sky TV,
so that was something that we never had growing up. Actually,
sky TV when Sunak was growing up was kind of
(25:52):
like the British HBO when HBO had a lot of
sports on it. Still, oh, you poor poor man, you
must still cry yourself to sleep every night, Noice Guy TV.
As a kid, did you sue your parents? Have you
cut them off without any contact for the entirety of
(26:12):
your adult life? Oh no, no, Sky TV. It's like
they didn't feed you for five years. Oh, it would
have been better if what dad would kill us in
duns about our graves singing anelujah. I'll stop now, the
runner up worser, Mark Penn, Oh no, I won't stop now.
(26:35):
Mark Penn the one time human being who now runs
the Harvard Harris Pole and is a Trump deep state psychopath.
So the next time you see the Harvard Harris Pole,
you will understand what crap it is, because you'll understand
what crap he is. After Jim Jordan weaponized the Judiciary
Committee to smear the Attorney General Merrick Garland. As if
(26:57):
one needed to smear Merrick Garland, this idiot and former
human being, Mark Penn wrote quote is the most political
and partisan attorney general in history. You know Bill Barr
is still alive, He's going to be really offended by this.
Garland is the most political and partisan attorney general in history.
He's in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer a lawful,
(27:18):
a legitimate subpoena for an audio tape that the transcript
has been released, but he will likely throw it in
the wastebasket while he prosecutes former Executive Department officials for
less his response attack Congress. He should simply turn over
the tape as the country has a right to see
and hear it. Well, it's an audio tape, so you
can go see it if you want to. Penn, Holy cow,
(27:38):
We actually used to let this guy advise people like
Bill Clinton and Ed Koch crying out lod I hope
he's gotten a cat scan recently. Of course, Penn is
just angry because everybody still blames him for blowing Hillary
Clinton's lead in the two thousand and eight Democratic primaries,
largely because he did that by adopting a Republican style
(28:00):
ad campaign that turned everybody off but our winner. Good
Old Lauren Bobert, the most famous audience member in the
history of the live stage version of Beetlejuice, was spotted
on Wednesday night at the Annual Congressional Baseball Game. Was
she playing? Oh no, she only goes bowling? No. Bobert
(28:21):
was in the stands at Nationals Park in DC, wearing
a maga hat to keep her brain from falling out,
and vaping, vaping in the stands, which is against the
smoking policy at Nationals Park. You might just recall I
think I may have mentioned it. I don't think I
cut it out of the show. That night that miss
(28:42):
Bobert was escorted out of the live performance of Beetlejuice
in Colorado for vaping during the performance and then for
checking her dates performance. Evidently, at the Congressional ball game
she was alone, although I hear that she attended because
somebody told her there would be a lot of pine
(29:04):
talk are at the game, which she could use to
improve her grip. Lauren, what a pair of hands? Bobert?
Two days, worst person. And it's Friday, so time for
(29:32):
Fridays with Thurber. And it's interesting that, like many of
the great writers in American and other nations histories, James
Thurber never really wrote a book. Certainly not a novel,
certainly not a comedic novel. His My Life in Hard
Times is a series of embellished anecdotes. It's great, it's
(29:53):
a great read, it's book length, it's not really one narrative.
And when I say he never wrote a book. I mean,
he never wrote a real fictional book. He did write
a book, The Years with Ross, his profile, his interpretation
of Harold Ross, who was the founder of the New
(30:15):
Yorker magazine, and probably even with the perspective of an
additional sixty years that James Thurber did not have in
his life, still probably the least likely person you would
have picked out of world history to have founded the
New Yorker magazine. The book is called The Years with Ross.
(30:36):
It was serialized in the Atlantic magazine, and the best part,
including one of my favorite quotations in history in human history,
was in the May nineteen fifty eight issue of The Atlantic,
the seventh part of James Thurber's series The Years with
Ross by James Thurber. So many people have told me
(31:02):
that Harold Ross was a simple mechanism, and so many
others have assured me that he was a complex character.
It is small wonder that I dreamed the other night
that he was both complified and simplicated. There are those
who contend that the multiple editor of The New Yorker
never stepped off the elevator on his office floor without
(31:22):
putting on an invisible military uniform. He was accused of
having a secret respect for rigid military discipline in spite
of his waggish and scallow waggish experiences in the AEF.
His frequent and profane denunciations of all top brass were
supposed to cover a sneaking admiration for General Headquarters Red Tape.
(31:46):
I can't go along with this, if only because I
am unable to dispel the image of Ross as the
jittery skipper of a schooner out of Coleridge, a ship's
master with more than a dash of mutineer in him,
When he is not that figure in my nightmares. He
is an awe shocks farm boy from Colorado trying to
land a nineteen hundred biplane in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
(32:09):
When as Private H. W. Ross he was editor of
The Stars and Stripes, the situation was more Comeric Opera
than American Army. He was once put in the guardhouse
for some insubordination by Captain Guy T. Visnisky, but he
had to be released or the newspaper could not have
been got out. As editor, he could give orders to
(32:33):
Captain Franklin P. Adams and to Sergeant Alexander Wolcott, who
once called him in Paris the best editor in the world.
Where and how he finally learned his obsessive reverence for
order and organization, nobody will ever know for sure. Although
he was always scornful of American big business and big
(32:54):
business men, he talked constantly of running this place like
any other business office. He was vociferous in his contempt
for the way most metropolitan newspapers were run by. And
I always felt that his urge to tear down walls
and set up a central desk was an unconscious tendency
to create a vast city room with everyone in full
(33:15):
sight of everyone else. I go on feeling this in
the face of his continual scoffing at all things intramurally
journalistic in any writer's copy. He didn't want any stories
by reporters and ex reporters about their work on newspapers.
It makes me self conscious, he would say. And he
went so far once as to insist when I used
(33:36):
city room in a talk story, that it'd be changed
to the room where the reporters write their stories. Whatever
the origin of his driving desire for order and organization
may have been, it's satisfied two of his deepest needs.
Something to keep trying for and something to keep grousing about.
(33:58):
When I was in Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of
nineteen twenty seven, on vacation and on my way out
of job of running the magazine, I got a six
word note from Andy White that read Thurber the new
passing system. White the new passing system, typed on an
(34:19):
enclosed piece of paper, went like this. White passes to Levick,
who passes to Ross. I have no copy at hand,
and it may be that I have left out one
of the passes. Perhaps it went like this. White passes
to Barnes, who passes to Levick, who passes to Ross.
If there was a Barnes, he has long since passed
(34:40):
and been forgotten. Sometimes I wake up at night and
chant to myself. White passes to Tinker, who passes to Evers,
who passes the Chance who passes to Ross. This old system,
indicating the official route for notes and comment from White's
typewriter to Ross's desk, was one of one hundred similar
(35:00):
systems devised by distraught executive editors in a feudal effort
to set Ross's organization conscious mind at rest. These systems
formed what Stanley Walker who later got involved in them,
called the rigmaroles. The man who had thought up a
(35:20):
way to reroot comments so that Ross wouldn't worry about
it's getting lost between Andy's office and his was named
William Levick. He lasted about as long as I had
in the untenable job of mastermind and whipping boy to
Harold Ross. Levick's final frantic response to the editor's demand
(35:40):
for a method of keeping track of everything was an
enormous sheet of cardboard six feet by four divided into
at least eight hundred squares, with fine hand lettering in
each of them, covering all phases of the scheduling of
departments and other office rigmaroles. This complicated caricature of system,
(36:05):
this concentration of all known procedural facts, hung on a
wall of the talk meeting room until one day it
fell down of its own weight. Ross had stared at
it now and then without saying anything. When it crashed,
he told his secretary, get rid of that thing. I
(36:27):
suppose this was also what he said about a sign
I made at the time and hung on a wall
near the elevators. Alterations going on as usual during business.
Bill Levick, one of the few men Ross always called
by his first name in the office, had been a
friend and colleague of the editor in his San Francisco
(36:48):
newspaper days. He had greatly impressed Ross at that time
by his calm and efficient direction of a staff of reporters.
One night, when some disaster struck the city, Levick, as
I remember it, had been night city editor of the paper.
His calmness and efficiency, which had stood up under disaster,
did not long stand up under Ross's continual badgering and heckling.
(37:12):
After he gave up the hopeless task of trying to
please Ross in the big job, he did not leave
like most of the others, but became the art makeup man.
He was unhappy in that role too, because he didn't
like artists and thought most of their drawings were silly.
You're the only cartoonists that can spell, he once told me. Sourly.
(37:36):
A new Tottery Graybeard says he saw Levic one day
in the office with tears in his eyes. Tears of
fury or frustration were not infrequent in some of the
men who worked for Ross, but Levick could be tough too,
and his faint, gentle smile could turn cold when Ross
backed him into a corner. One day, the editor went
up in flames because of the similarity and proximity of
(37:59):
two drawings in the front of the book, But instead
of bawling Levick out himself, he sent his secondcretary to
the makeup man with a sharp reprimand Levick took a
swing at the fella, and when Ross sent the young
man back with an even sharper message, knocked him down, resigned,
went away, and was not seen again. Bill Levick died
(38:23):
a few years later, somewhere in New Jersey, out of
work and down on his luck. And I told Ross
about it. He was genuinely saddened, and the news depressed
him for days. I didn't treat him right, goddamn it,
he told me. But he kept calling me sir, and
standing there mocking me and grinning at me. He called
me that sur thing. He called Wolcott foolish. He would say,
(38:49):
foolish is late with his copy this week for shouts
and murmurs. He kept saying, skeed for schedule and picks
for drawings. All he cared about was his goddamn pianola rolls.
He had millions of them. Anything else in his house.
You don't play the p andol every night unless there's
something the matter with you. He even edited the damn rolls,
(39:13):
pasting them up with tissue paper, collaborating with guys like Beethoven.
He was a good man. Now. I was fond of him.
They didn't belong here. I thought of asking him, who does?
But I just went away and left him with his
memories and miseries. When a system fell down, Ross was
(39:33):
usually dejected until he or somebody else thought up a
new one. But once in a while the mutineer in
him took over. He was gleeful if the falling down
or pushing over of a system disturbed or tangled up
the business department, those guys upstairs. Once, when a rebuilt
typewriter I've been using broke down, I phoned the Underwood
(39:55):
company at noon, ordered its most expensive machine, and charged
it to the New Yorker. The typewriter, delivered at the
office two hours later, was held up by the alert
business office, and a deputy was sent to Ross with
the complaint that I had got the machine without authorization
or the signing of any requisition slips. The typewriter had
(40:17):
been hidden from me in the art stock room, but
an office boy told me where it was, and I
went and got it. The whole illegal procedure delighted Ross.
It's the only direct action there's been around here in years,
he yelled at the nervous man from the business department,
I'll okay it, and he grabbed pencil and paper and
(40:40):
okayed it. When he found out that I was in
the habit of going to the supply stock room, getting
in with a pass key, and taking whatever I wanted paper,
paper clips, typewriter ribbons, pencils, and wire baskets, he sauntered
into my office and asked, how do you get your supplies?
(41:00):
I told him, and he went away grinning. A monthly
checkup by the business office had shown a discrepancy in
supplies on hand, and again someone had complained to the editor,
and he had suspected me. I was thwarted for a while,
and the guys upstairs installed new locks on all the doors,
But I smuggled the master key to a locksmith and
(41:22):
had a dozen keys made from it. I told Ross
about that myself, adding that I had given a few
of the extra keys to girls I knew for souvenirs.
Ross didn't believe that, even though it was true. The
heartiest laugh of the mutinous Skipper came from the day
I found out and told him that the master key
(41:44):
to the former system of locks had been retained and
hung on a hook beside the new one. I showed
it to him. Attached to it was a small wooden
plaque on which someone had printed in India ink master
key and under that doesn't work. Ross told the story
(42:05):
all over town. It represented to him not merely the
bewilderment of some office boy, but the total inefficiency of
the business department, which had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
After Levick came Arthur Samuels, out of an advertising agency
(42:26):
with previous experience as a newspaper reporter and a magazine
promotion man. Art Samuels, who had been a member of
the Cottage Club and the Triangle Club in his Princeton days,
was a close friend and idol of another Princeton man,
Raoul Fleischmann. By the way, that was Ross's business partner.
I Olderman should add, Raoul Fleischmann put the money up
(42:49):
for the New Yorker to continue, and any friend and
idol of Fleischman, who was the chief backer of the
magazine was a target for Ross's slings and arrows and
doomed from the start. Raoul once told me Art is
one of the funniest men in the world on two martinis.
When I mentioned this praise to Ross, he said, I
(43:09):
guess I always got to parties when he was on
his third or left before he finished his first. Samuels
had taken over one of the largest New Yorker offices
and furnished it with rugs, large handsome bridge lamps, and
other fancy appointments that must have brought Ross's disapproving tongue
out of his mouth when he first beheld this change.
(43:33):
He himself liked a plain newspaper type office. I don't
want to look like the editor of Vanity Fair. Samuels
lasted until just after he came back from a six
week leave in Europe. I learned later that Ross had
intended to fire him while he was abroad, but he
put it off until Art's ship was back in the
harbor of New York. Then, just before Samuels disembarked, he
(43:56):
got a telegram from Ross telling him he was through.
Late that afternoon, the editor called me into his office.
He was sitting with his head in his hands, and
he said, Samuels was just in here bawling the holy
hell out of me. No man would have fired him
the way I did. I guess I could tell he
had taken quite a verbal lashing, and he was to
(44:18):
get others later. Hell and High Voices broke loose in
his office when Jeffrey Heilman gave him a verbal going over,
which no doubt Ross had coming to him. Some weeks
after that, Ross held up a Hellman piece so long
that Catherine White said to him one day at a
talk meeting, why haven't you put the Heilman piece through?
We all think it's very good. Ross turned this over
(44:41):
in his mind for ten seconds and then said, he
called me a liar, picking one of the least provocative
of Jeffrey's descriptions of him. He bought the Heilman place
that day. It was a basic fact of Ross's nature
that he really respected. No man who didn't at one
time or another fight back and yell him down. I
(45:01):
had many a yelling bout with him in his office,
but we always ended up on good, even affectionate terms.
One day, ten years ago, he and William Shawn were
trying to explain to me what they thought was the
matter with a couple of pieces I had written in
a series on soap operas, and Ross snapped out of
his heart, no, out of his ulcers. Yes, if you
could see, you would know what we mean. That sent
(45:26):
me rocketing into the higher reaches of lurid damnation of
all editors. He said he was sorry, and he was,
but he never immediately got over the effects of one
of our yelling spells. That noon, I was having lunch
at the Algonquin with my wife and daughter, then sixteen,
when Ross came over to our table. We talked amiably
(45:46):
for a while, and then he spurted something happens to
Jim once a month that makes him carry on like
a woman. This indelicate illusion was remarkable in a man
as self conscious as a choir boy in the presence
of women, and embarrassed to death if anyone then made
(46:07):
a reference to the functional. My daughter had met him
first when she was only nine, and he was in
one of his most blustery moods. I asked her afterward
what she thought of him, and she said, he's gruff,
but I'm not afraid of him. She might have been
speaking for her sex. In general, thorn Smith doesn't properly
(46:31):
belong in any New Yorker, or for that matter, any
other category. But he underwent a stretch of torture, both
give and take, as a member of the staff. During
the winter of nineteen twenty nine nineteen thirty. I had
brought him in and introduced him to Ross, saying that
he had given up an advertising job to write a book.
It must have been the stray lamb and found himself
unable to get work. Thorn Smith, straight out of Wonderland,
(46:55):
looked like a cousin of the White Rabbit and completely befuddled.
Harold Ross, the editor, took him on, though mainly I
am sure, because he had ed did a service magazine
during World War One, a Navy publication called Broadside. The
two men disparate, if there were ever a disparity, talked
about the stars and stripes and a mutual acquaintance who
(47:18):
had been on the wartime army gas attack. Everything went
wrong though, between Ross and thorn who once didn't show
up for a week. You ought to know where he is.
Ross told me he's your responsibility. I said that Smith
was God's responsibility. Not mine or any man's. When he
finally did appear, Ross said, why didn't you telephone and
(47:40):
say you're sick. Thorn had a lovely answer to that.
The telephone was in the hall, and there was a
draft The New Yorker had in a special file at
that time, a snack of profiles that needed editing before
they could be used, and Smith had been given an
office and told to try his hand at fixing them up.
(48:03):
It didn't work out. He can't use a typewriter, or
if he can, he won't, Ross told me. And then,
with dramatic voice and gestures, he sits out there writing
on fool's cap with a quill pen by candlelight. I asked,
you have me there, said Ross, Where the hell did
(48:26):
you find him? Anyway? I didn't find him, I said,
God sent him to you. Smith departed soon after that
to join the other poor little lambs who had gone astray.
It was only the other day I found out that
he had once written on fool's cap, but with modern
fountain pen, an entire talk department which was never used.
(48:49):
Ross must have put him up to that. Secretly, I
counted among my sorrows and literature's losses that his talk
department is nowhere to be found. James m. Kin was
a puzzle to Ross, who all men puzzled him to
some degree, but thorn Smith and jim Kin were much
too much for his understanding. We called him dizzy Jim.
(49:13):
An old timer told me recently, you were daffy Jim.
It seems that Cain liked to work on the floor
where there was a lot of room, and used to
put the talk department together down there. He once lifted
high the hearts of Andy and Catherine White at a
Thanksgiving Day dinner at his apartment by putting the turkey
(49:34):
platter and all on the floor and carving it blandly,
going on with the story he was telling, and he
told stories exceeding well. Jim Kaine was not at The
New Yorker long, only a few months, but the memory
of him has not dwindled there. When he got the
hell out, he didn't want to see Ross or The
New Yorker ever. Again, I don't blame him for leaving
(49:55):
any mention of it out of the piece about him
and Who's who he had been on The Baltimore American,
The Baltimore Sun, The New York world, and he was
at on one time a professor of journalism at Saint
John's College in Annapolis, where he had been born. Cain
must have known Ross in France when he was editor
of the seventy ninth Divisions Lorraine Cross. Jim is a
(50:20):
big man, and Ross was always a little wary of
big men. Once, when he got into a hassle with
Joel Sayer over a projected profile on Ross's detective friend
Raymond Schindler, they editor said to me, Jesus, your friend
Sayir is a big guy. My researches and reflections have
turned up the interesting truth that of all the miracle men,
(50:43):
all were short of physical stature, except Cain and Ralph Ingersoll,
and maybe one or two others out of the more
than thirty. I am over six feet myself, but when
Ross and I tangled, I weighed only one fifty. I
have reached one eighty six. Now, await alas, I'll never
be able to throw around in Ross's office during a
monthly yelling spell. In nineteen thirty one, my daughter had
(51:07):
about seven months to go before she was born. When
her mother and I bought a house a mile outside
Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and Ross pretended to be frightened when
he heard about my plans to live in the country. Timid,
as usual about taking up personal matters with a man
face to face, he assigned Cain the task of trying
(51:27):
to dissuade me from moving out of the city. Jim
had approached the subject gingerly in my office, saying only
a couple of sentences that I recognized at once as
bearing the stamp of a Ross panic. When he suddenly
stood up and said, this is none of my business
or Ross's either. I'm sorry I mentioned it. Live where
(51:48):
you want to and the way you want to. One
day Jim had sent on to Ross some manuscript of
which the editor could make neither head nor tail. He
sent it back to Cain with a memo attached that
is still in existence. It read, what is the signifigance
(52:10):
of it all? Anyway? That is the misspelling of significance
as I remembered it for twenty five years. But as
you will see, I was wrong. Just before Jim left,
he had the memo framed in leather and presented to
his successor, Bernard A. Bergman, who still has it. I
wrote him a few weeks ago to check the spelling
of the big word, and got this reply sign ig
(52:36):
if a and ce sick. Harold Ross's spelling was often grotesque.
He was always looking up words, he questioned in copy
he was reading, but he never seemed to doubt his
own accuracy. In all the years I knew him, he
never got prodigal right. He spelled it prodigal and pronounced
(52:57):
it as if it were spelled prod goal. It was
in nineteen thirty four, to get back to Jim Caine
that he brought out The Postman Always Rings twice. I
once asked Ross if he had read it, and he said,
wouldn't be my kind of stuff. I have no doubt
that if he had started reading it, he would have
put it down, thus becoming the only reader in the
(53:18):
country able to do that. He didn't even try to
read a Farewell to Arms and dismiss that novel with
I understand the hero keeps getting in bed with women,
and the war wasn't fought that way. I have a
recent letter from Bernard Bergmann about Ross that ends he
was a great man. I wish I could have been
(53:39):
close to him, but I never was. Bergmann lasted almost
two years beginning in nineteen thirty one. He quit because
Francis Bellamy had appeared on the scene, and Burgee was
wise enough to realize the newcomer was to become the
new genius. The old ritual firing and hiring was about
to begin once more after Bellamy disappeared in his time
(54:00):
and turn he smoked cigars was Ross's epitaph for this victim.
The editor phoned Bergman, who had just left the Philadelphia Record,
and tried to get him to come back. He rambled
on in his loud voice about the job of editorial
publishing whenever that meant, and the rebirth of his conviction
that Bergmann could handle certain tough problems in the office.
(54:22):
Bergmann said, that's just what I was doing, and he laughed,
and Ross laughed too, and they both hung up laughing. Bergmann,
like me, went to Ohio State, helped edit the Daily Lantern,
and was a reporter on the Columbus Dispatch. We had
been friends since nineteen fifteen, and I persuaded Ross to
(54:43):
hire him to supervise the talk of the town. Ross
had finally found out after years of hit and miss
what manner of man and writer I was. But I
don't think he ever knew anything about Bergmann. A man's
past dropped away and his life began anew when he
went to work for the New Yorker. Bergie had been
a regimental sergeant major in World War One, a newspaper
(55:07):
reporter and editor, and a New York press agent. In
high school in Chillicothe, Ohio, nearly fifty years ago, Bergmann
organized a four piece orchestra to play for Saturday night
dances at the Knights of Pytheas Club. His clarinetist Bergmann
played the violin and played it well, was a youngster
named Theodore Friedman, whom Bergmann paid two dollars and a
(55:29):
half a night until he let him go because he
jazzed up everything, did funny things with a plug hat,
and disconcerted the other boys. A decade later, Theodore Friedman,
alias Ted Lewis was earning one hundred and ten thousand
dollars a week the Palace, the Zigfield Follies, the Zigfield Roof,
(55:50):
and Bergmann was his press agent for a long time.
Starting about nineteen twenty eight, Bergie had contributed to Talk
of the Town the best items and suggestions of any outsider,
and when Ross asked me, after the vanishing of Ingersoll,
Raymond Holden, Ogden, Nash and several others, if I knew
a good man for talk. I brought Bergmann in and
(56:11):
he was hired. I had asked Ross to promised me
that he would not elevate Bergmann to the Genius chair,
and he said he wouldn't, but he did. I'm gonna
give Bergmann a crack at that job, he told me.
I think he can run the magazine. Don't say anything
about it, though, cause I haven't told him yet. I
(56:32):
left the room, giving the door a good slam. I
hated to lose the man who had brought to talk
facts and anecdotes about a dozen New Yorkers whose careers
fascinated Harold Ross, the g whiz guy. They included Jake Volk,
the building wrecker, Lewis Marshall, an eccentric millionaire lawyer who
rode to work on the L train and back home
(56:53):
on the subway, George and Ira Gershwin, and George Grause,
the German artist with whom Bergmann and I once had dinner. Grasse,
I told Ross wanted to meet the New Yorker artist
whose work began where the other cartoonists left off, well
did he, Ross asked, He meant me, I said, shyly, hogwash,
(57:18):
said Ross, who didn't believe a word of it. The
day that Ross promoted Bergmann, I sat outside his office
and eavesdropped. Bergmann got the works, the whole rigmarole from
you gotta hold the artist's hands through. I'm, by god
gonna keep sex out of this office to I want
to run this place like any other business office. I
(57:42):
got up in disgust, went to the men's room and
put up the window because it was a hot day.
I heard the door open and closed behind me, but
I didn't see what it was. Then I went out
and met Bergmann coming down the hall. Ross's secretary just
came in and said, you were going to kill yourself
in the men's room, he told me. Ross turned to
me and said, that's my life. Do something about it.
(58:06):
Bergmann had one great failure and at least one great
triumph at the New Yorker. His failure lay in his
inability to build a fake partition by means of which
Ross could get to the men's room unseen and ungreeted
in the halls. Nobody else could have designed such a
crazy partition either, and the dilemma wasn't solved until someone
(58:30):
suggested he have a lavatory built just off his office. Well,
I'll be damned, Ross must have said when this simple
way out of embarrassment was presented to his astonished mind.
The lavatory was installed, and it not only saved Ross
the torture of being spoken to by employees, but it
(58:52):
eliminated uncomfortable dialogue with writers and editors in the men's room.
As an aside, here comes the line I mentioned one
of my favorite quote in human history. I hope you're
ready to resume. Once standing trow to trow with John Mosher,
(59:14):
Ross grumbled, why aren't you writing any more casuals? Because
I have lost the slight fancy that sustained me. Mosher
explained it was the kind of Mosher retort that left
Ross flabbergasted, and he was miserable when he had nothing
(59:34):
to say. Bergman's great triumph was the hiring of Alvid Johnston,
and I'll let him retell that story himself. When I
first took over the me job managing editor, Ross said
he had been trying to get Alva Johnston to come
full time to the New Yorker for a long while,
but Alva always refused, said he was too old to
change his field. He was a reporter and he didn't
(59:56):
want to take a chance on magazines. Ross said to
me that if I could get Alva to come to
the New Yorker, that's all I'd ever have to do.
How much did you offer him, I asked, Oh, we
never discussed salary. Ross said, well, let's offer him three
hundred dollars a week. I said, uh, that's double what
(01:00:19):
he's getting on the New Harold Tribune. And I said,
if we offer him a lot of money, he just
won't be able to turn it down. Bergmann, you're a genius.
Ross said, I never thought of offering him money. So
I made a date with Alba. I told him we
(01:00:40):
guarantee him three hundred dollars a week. I can still
see Alba turning pale, standing up and saying, gee, I
have to think that over. I went back to Ross
and told him we got Alva. We had to That incident,
certainly important in the history of The New Yorker, showed
Ross's occasional naive and charming impracticality. Although he was the
world's greatest quoted words are Bergmann's. Harold Ross's laws of
(01:01:05):
Bergmann was William Randolph Hurst's gain, where the former New
Yorker editor was hired to build up the New York
Americans Daily March of Events page, known to the printers
as the Highbrow Page. And build it up he did.
A Few months later, Ross ran into him somewhere and said,
you're causing a lot of excitement at the New Yorker
and worry too, I guess, but keep it up. I
(01:01:26):
like it. I don't see how he could have liked it,
because Bergmann had signed up, among others, for one or
two columns a week, Bob Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Clarence Day,
Ogden Nash, and Jim Kaine. He also got stuff from H. L.
Menken and Oliver Herford, which Ross would have liked for
The New Yorker. I did some columns for the Highbrow
(01:01:47):
Page and quite a lot of drawings. The appearance of
my drawings there caused Ross to pass the buck to
someone who passed someone else, who passed it to Catherine White,
who wrote me a note asking me if I had
not broken my New Yorker contract by not first letting
the art meeting see my drawings for the New York American.
(01:02:07):
The New Yorker, in fact, had seen them all and
turned them all down. I passed this fact to Catherine,
who passed it to someone else, who passed it to
someone who passed it to Ross. My drawings ceased appearing
in The American when Bergmann got a note from old
Hurst himself which read, stop running those dogs on your page.
(01:02:30):
I wouldn't have them peeing on my cheapest rug. In
nineteen thirty four, the Old Man stopped Cane's columns too,
over Bergmann's protest that Jim was one of the best
and most popular American writers. Hearst's final note on this
matter read, get rid of Cain. I thought Abel had
done it. Sorry he failed the years with Ross, wherein
(01:02:58):
I learned that someone in the same millennium in which
I lived said the phrase I had lost the slight
fancy that sustains me. I've done all the damage I
(01:03:25):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown. Musical directors
Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel arranged, produced and performed
most of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass
and drums, and mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards, and
it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some
of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Ulderman theme from ESPN two,
(01:03:47):
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer was my friend
Larry David, and everything else was pretty much my fault.
So that's countdown for this, the one hundred and forty
sixth day on till the twenty twenty four presidential election,
and the two hundred and fifty fifth day since convicted
(01:04:11):
fell in first time elderly offender Donald Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing, use the mental health system,
use presidential immunity if it happens, to stop him from
doing it again while we still can. The next scheduled
(01:04:33):
countdown is Tuesday. I'll leave a caveat that it might
not happen. Two of the dogs are going in for
dentals on Monday, and I may be focused entirely on
them for the whole day, but I'll try to put
something out on Tuesday morning. Boltons is the news warrants
till the next one. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and I have lost the slight fancy that
(01:04:55):
sustains me. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:05:15):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Because
of the danger, because of the threats, because of his
mental illnesses, because of his terrorism, because of the hate
(00:28):
he has enabled and validated in this country, we sometimes
forget that at his core, elderly first offender J Trump
is a moron. The headline from his first return to
the scene of the coup crime on January sixth was
quoting Punchbawl News, Trump to House Republicans, Milwaukee, where we
(00:52):
are having our convention is a horrible city. More on
Trump's extraordinary self inflicted cluster f momentarily. But there was
actually something bigger at those meetings in Washington, or at
least there was supposed to be. Trump and Speaker Mike
Johnson are cooking up a plot to somehow nullify Trump's
(01:18):
thirty four convictions in the Stormy Daniels election interference case.
What Trump intended to talk to them about, and who
knows if he remembered, and who knows if the whole
Milwaukee stuff and the Hannibal Lecter stuff and the rest
of it was just a smoke screen to provide cover
for this weight. I'm giving Trump way too much credit
(01:42):
aren I. What Trump intended to talk to the House
Republicans about was summarized by a May thirty first phone
call reported by Politico. It took place hours after his
conviction here in New York, in which he screamed and
swore F bombs and S bombs and MF bombs into
the phone that quote, we have to overturn this unquote
(02:06):
At the other end, little mister holier than thou himself,
the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, if that is
your real name, and Johnson agreed with Trump, we have
to overturn this. House Republicans are developing a series of
schemes to somehow have the legislative branch retroactively overrule the
(02:31):
judicial branch. Whatever the actual plan turns out to be,
it will translate as somehow making Trump's conviction illegal and
erasing it whatever they have in mind. That was what
the Washington meeting yesterday was supposed to be about. Trump
cannot be guilty because to be guilty is to be wrong,
(02:53):
and Trump cannot accept that he is wrong. He cannot
ever accept that he cannot function. If he tried to
accept that the back of his head would blow off.
There is no constitutional way to quote overturn this, none
if the rest of the Constitution does not prevent such
a thing. Article one, section nine makes it illegal to
make a federal law that is ex post facto, that
(03:16):
makes something retroactively illegal. Article one, section ten makes it
illegal to make such a state law retroactive. That's not
stopping them political reports. Johnson and Trump have spoken repeatedly
since May thirty first about we have to overturn this,
and Johnson is trying. Not only did holding the attorney
(03:38):
general and contempt of Congress barely pass on Wednesday, but
a bill to allow presidents charged at the state level
to move their cases to federal court is still in
committee after fifteen months. And anyway, it could not be retroactive.
And even if it theoretically applied to the Georgia prosecution,
(03:58):
guess what, it would not pass the Senate and it
would not avoid a presidential veto. Oh, and it's un constitutional.
A defunding of the special prosecutor is still being proposed,
as if the DOJ couldn't get around that, and as
if the special prosecutor in Washington has anything to do
(04:19):
with the state case in New York, all of which
would ordinarily be reassuring. They are tilting at windmills, except
for the implications. For now, the implications are mostly a
mental image of Trump and Johnson pinioned to a butterfly
display arms and legs flailing in mid air, touching nothing.
(04:43):
But the implications for a Trump Napoleonic return to power, well,
those are far more ominous. If Trump is elected for
Congress or the White House or somebody to overturn Trump's conviction,
even then, his conviction in a state court, his conviction
(05:04):
from last may to do that, they would have to
overturn the Constitution. But of course they'd never try that.
(05:24):
So now the fun stuff again. Punch Bowl News quote
Trump to House Republicans, Milwaukee, where we are having our convention,
is a horrible city, CNN. The former president called Milwaukee
quote horrible. New York Times. Trump repeatedly disparaged the city
of Milwaukee. Wisconsin Congress and Glenn Groffman, who was in
the room. He was concerned about the election in Milwaukee.
(05:49):
Groffman is wrong, says Wisconsin congresson Derrek van Orden, the
one with the brain problem. Trump was specifically referring to
the crime the crime rate in Milwaukee. You're both wrong,
says Wisconsin congress and Bryan's Style. I was in the room, Trump,
Tump did not say this. No, Wisconsin Congressman Brian's Style,
you're wrong, he did say it, says Wisconsin Congressman Brian Style.
(06:14):
He wasn't talking about the city. He was talking about
specific issues in the city that Republican congressmen. Brian's style
is a liar, says Brian Style. By the way, his
name is spelled steel, as in stop the steel, stop
the style. Three Wisconsin congressmen, four different stories, none of
(06:37):
which successfully cover up what Trump said about Milwaukee. And Trump, well,
he held another news conference, the kind where you don't
take questions, so it's not really a news conference, is it?
The kind where you simply blink so fast and so
uncontrollably that it looks like you're sending Morse code. And
Trump made it easy to figure out what he really
(06:59):
told House Republicans. He said America is a bad democracy.
He said the world scorns us. He said America is
not special. So he trashed Milwaukee while trashing the rest
of us.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Right now, it's not special. Right now, it's being scorned
and being used as an example of when they look
at the crime on the streets, when they look at
all of the problems that we have, they're using us
as a bad example of democracy, and they're getting away
with murder, and we're not going to let it happens.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Back to the Milwaukee part Milwaukee, where Trump's fascist Republicans
begin their convention a month from tomorrow, even if he
is unavoidably detained at Rikers Island at the time. Milwaukee's mayor,
Cavalier Johnson, responded by metaphorically kicking Trump in his tiny
(07:52):
little cavalier Donald Trump, let's talk about things that he
thinks are horrible. All of us live through his presidency.
So right back at you, buddy. Good work, Mayor Johnson. Now,
please can't until the Republican Convention's permits. Seems like a
simple solution. It is very possible that Trump crapping over
(08:14):
Milwaukee was not the worst thing he said, and not
the most insane thing he said, and not the most
self damaging thing he said yesterday. Also from a source
in the room to punch bowl from Trump to House Republicans,
close to exact quote, Nancy Pelosi's daughter is a wacko.
Her daughter told me, if things were different, Nancy and
(08:35):
I would be perfect together. There's an age difference, though, Well,
he's right about that. There is an age difference. Pelosi
is eighty four, and Trump has begun to act like,
you know how old he is. He's two hundred and six.
Christine Pelosi, one of the Pelosi daughters, says, none of
this is true. Nobody said this to him, Nobody's talked
(08:55):
to him. I'm shocked. I'm shocked he had another hallucination,
or he's lying about it, or he had a hallucination
and is lying about it. I'm shocked, I tells you.
But cutting through this, what did Trump actually just tell
us here? Nancy Pelosi's daughter is a wacko. Her daughter
told me, if things were different, Nancy and I would
(09:16):
be perfect together. What he tells us he wants to
sleep with Nancy Pelosi, that he wants to make her
the fourth Missus, elderly first defender Jay Trump? What is
the message? Why was that message delivered to Washington Republican leaders? Sir,
this is a Senate. Also on a dryer topic, a
(09:40):
series of reporters advise that Trump is now obsessed with
tariffs on imported goods, all imported goods, and that he
told Republicans in Washington yesterday at at least one of
those meetings, that he wants so many tariffs that they
could then discontinue all income taxes. Apart from the fact
(10:04):
that that would turbocharge inflation, it would shift the tariff
or tax burden to low income Americans. The economist Paul
Krugman calculates that in order to bring to the Treasury
the equivalent of what it now gets from income taxes,
the average tariff would be the average would be one
hundred and thirty three percent, So like a four dollars
(10:29):
Swiss toboler owned bar would cost nine dollars and thirty
two cents. Could Trump's return to the scene of his
coup crime have gone any worse yesterday? You bet. Trump's
bizarre remark I played about how bad our democracy is,
how other countries point to us as an example of
bad democracy, his almost daily insistence that the Democrats are
(10:53):
the threat to democracy, but He's not a threat to democracy.
Clearly he did not get the memo. San Ansdannie O'Sullivan
reported at the exact hour Trump was in with the
House hostages that the Republican Party is trying to de
emphasize the word democracy and to try to start getting
(11:14):
people to call this country not a democracy but a republic. Now,
this started years ago as an actual kind of philosophical debate,
with of course, a voting suppression subject. I mean, the
commoners do not get to vote in a republic. But
as O'Sullivan notes, it has become now solely about neutralizing
(11:35):
the claim that Trump is a threat to democracy. If
there's no democracy, how could somebody be a threat to it?
So Trump keeps saying the word democracy, and he's doing
the opposite of what his enablers are trying to protect him.
With the protectors who do not realize that the rest
(11:56):
of us can also say Trump is a threat to
the republic or and hear me out on this. I
know it's outlandish, open your minds for just a second,
hear me out. We could say Trump is a threat
to America and one more of all the things in
(12:20):
the world. For what's left of Trump's mind to fixate
on how is this his choice? Sin? And reporting that
to the Republicans, Trump once again invoked Hannibal Lecter. Nice guy,
he said again he even had he said again a
(12:42):
friend over for dinner, and that friend's name was Electro Shark. Seriously,
there is an all encompassing reality at play here, and
it comes into focus more clearly with every passing day.
It is incumbent upon the Biden campaign and every legitimate
(13:04):
new organization in this country to make this a central
issue of this campaign. It may have no choice, but
it does need to push the point to whatever degree
he had not already done so previously. Donald Trump is
losing his mind, and that means that metaphorically, the Republican Party,
(13:29):
in the immortal and immortally terrifying phrase of the World
War One General Eric van Ludendorff, the Republican Party is
shackled to a corpse. Back to Trump and the courts,
(14:09):
in this case, the Supreme Theocratic Court. Hey, it's our
summer sale now accepting bribes at twenty percent off. It
did not rule on Trump's imaginary Hannibal Lecter told me
while we were in that horrible city Milwaukee yesterday, idea
of presidential immunity. More Supreme Court rulings today. They did
(14:30):
go nine nothing on the no brainer mifipristone case, ruling
that the people who sued had no standing to sue.
But the coverage of this that the Court protected the
abortion pill yesterday again underscores how little American news organizations
and employees understand about the topics they are covering. I
(14:50):
understand how to edit the tape, and they understand how
to light the shot correctly, but they don't understand to
read past the third paragraph where it says there is
a more substantial case again Smith of pristone coming to
the Supreme Court within weeks, and there is, of course
the prospect of using the nineteenth century Comstock Act to
(15:13):
prevent shipping that drug, to say nothing of what a
Trump dictatorship would do to it. On the other hand,
in an irony of timing, as the court ruled, Gallup
was issuing new polling showing that nearly one third of
all American voters identify as single issue abortion voters. One
third they will vote only for candidates who share their
(15:36):
views on the legality and regulation of abortion. And guess what,
eight percent will only vote for anti abortion candidates, but
twenty three percent will only vote for pro choice candidates.
Mister President, you should be able to do something with that.
(15:57):
And you know what else, happened while the court was
pretending it was some kind of I don't know, what's
the term, to be, some kind of oh yeah, yeah yeah.
While the court was pretending it was some kind of court,
Harlan Crowe narked on that giant pile of shit with glasses.
Clarence Thomas. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, who still
(16:22):
won't do anything about this, announced that in exchange for
his committee ending its investigation as it pertains to Harlan Crow,
Crow has turned over seven years of documents and information
about Clarence Thomas, and in that info was revealed at
least three more private jet trips that Crowe provided to
(16:43):
Thomas that Thomas did not report. May twenty seventeen Missouri
to Montana to Texas, March twenty nineteen, Washington to Georgia
to Washington, June twenty twenty one, Washington to San Jose,
and of course don't forget June twenty twenty four private
bus provided by Harlan Crowe for Harlan Crow to throw
(17:05):
Clarence Thomas under and two campaign notes. Quinnipiac polling, Trump
leads Biden by a point among registered voters between the
ages of eighteen and thirty four. According to exit polls,
Biden won the young vote younger really it was eighteen
(17:27):
to twenty nine's. In twenty twenty, he won that group
by twenty four points. He is losing to a roughly
equivalent group by one point. So where is the Biden ad?
Based on the Washington Post story we headlined here the
other day that Trump is floating a military draft, floating
a mandatory military prep class and a mandatory military aptitude
(17:50):
exam for every high school student for everybody eighteen or
nineteen or twenty, or you don't graduate and your school
doesn't get federal funds. We dropped this story because Trump
lied and denied it. Secretary of Defense proposed this a draft.
He proposed it under his own signature Inside Project twenty
(18:12):
twenty five, the Trump planned to turn the country into
his dictatorship. Where are the other news stories about this?
Where are the ads and comic relief? To save the moment?
Newt Gingrich, who was basically celebrating his twenty sixth year
of unemployment, went on Sean Hannity's propaganda prostitution show and
(18:37):
announced that Vice President Kamala Harris is quote really shallow,
uneducated and uneducatable person. I just want to double check here.
Is that the same Newt Gingrich who once claimed five
six years ago that the New York City subway system
was used only by quote, elites said, the same Newt
(19:00):
Gingrich who, before he got run out of Washington by
the members of his own political party, back when he
was still Speaker of the House, once decided that the
following sequence of events would occur and let that be
revealed to the veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew, who then mentioned
it on Meet the Press that he would impeach Bill Clinton,
and then the new president Al Gore, would pardon Bill Clinton,
(19:23):
and then he would impeach Al Gore for pardoning Bill Clinton,
and that would make guess who President of the United
States the Speaker of the House. Oh, by the way,
you know who the Speaker of the House was Newt Gingrich.
That Newt Gingrich, And instead he impeached Clinton, and the
impeachment lost by a landslide in the Senate. And the
(19:44):
only person, after all of the impeaching business, the only
person in the whole thing who wound up actually losing
his job, was Newt Gingrich. That Newt Gingrich, the idiot,
white trash, unemployable Nut Gingrich, That Newt gingriche calling the
(20:08):
Vice President of the United States, calling anybody else in
the world shallow and uneducated, that Newt Gangridge. Okay, just checking.
Also of interest here, Oh no, Lauren Bobert's been caught
(20:29):
illegally vaping in public again. Oh no, miss Bobert. This
is exactly the way it started last time. Get a
hold of yourself, or at least of some guys sitting
next to you. That's next. This is Countdown. This is
(20:52):
Countdown with Keith Obleman still ahead of us on this
all new edition of Countdown. An excerpt from James Thurber's
(21:16):
only non fiction book, his profile of the founder of
the New Yorker magazine, Harold Ross, which includes in the
chapter I will read you a quoach from a New
Yorker writer that is one of the five or ten
best things I have ever heard said in human history.
(21:37):
I hope I didn't oversell it first. That rarest events
on a recorded program A. This just in from Puck News.
It came in after I finished up the A Block.
It reports that Trump has suddenly started taking prison as
a serious possibility, dovetailing with what I did mention in
the A block about this desperate plot to get Congress
(21:58):
to overturn his conviction. Trump, quoting Puck News, has been
peppering friends and as with more specific questions. In particular,
I've been told he's been asking what kind of jail
do you think they'll send me? To say? Is Shawshank
still open? Tuck quotes CNN's Ellie Honig, who is wrong
(22:21):
about forty to fifty percent of the time, that he
Trump would literally go upstate, possibly at the Putnam County
Correctional in Carmel, New York, near the Connecticut border between
Mayopack and Brewster. My folks and I used to go
to some kind of lake at Mayopack, possibly late Mayopack.
Putnam Correctional is like halfway on the drive between here
(22:46):
and ESPN. Hey wait, I never thought of that before.
(23:16):
Halfway between here in ESPN. A new Thurber ahead, but first,
as ever, there are still more new idiots to talk
about the daily roundup of the men and women we
celebrate as the miscreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens
who constitute today's worst persons. In the world, the Bronze
(23:43):
the worst British Prime Minister Rishie Sunak well until July fourth,
anyway or earlier, not one day, not one event in
his snap election campaign has gone without disaster for him.
Remember he announced the snap election and the moment he
said it, it started to rain and he didn't even
(24:04):
have a hat. Anyway. He was interviewed by the network
ITV and he brought up how his parents had made
a lot of sacrifices when he was a child to
guarantee their priority for him education. And the interviewer knowing
that Sunac went to a private boarding school and then
another private school, and that his father was a doctor
(24:26):
and his mom owned a pharmacy, and he did not
grow a poor really middle class and the interviewer said like,
what did you give up? And Sunak did not answer. Quote,
we used to live in this tiny, old tumble down
house with the great big holes in the roof. House.
You were lucky to live in a house. We used
to live in one room, all twenty six of us,
(24:47):
no furniture off the floor was missing. We're all uttle
together in one corner of for fear fool And you
were lucky to have a room. We used to have
to live in the corridor. We used to dream of
living in a corridor. I had to get up in
the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour
before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison,
work twenty nine hours a day down mill and pay
(25:08):
mill owner for the permission to come to work. And
when we got home, our dad would kill us and
dance about on our graves singing allelujah. Oh and you
try to tell the young people of today that they
won't believe you. No, Rishie Sunac did not say that
he did not do the famous Monty Python Marty Feldman
comedy sketch, which is probably funnier in the original English.
(25:30):
The Prime Minister instead explained that he was deprived as
a child because quote, they will be all sorts of things.
There'll be all sorts of things that I would have
wanted as a kid that I couldn't have. Famously, sky TV,
so that was something that we never had growing up. Actually,
sky TV when Sunak was growing up was kind of
(25:52):
like the British HBO when HBO had a lot of
sports on it. Still, oh, you poor poor man, you
must still cry yourself to sleep every night, Noice Guy TV.
As a kid, did you sue your parents? Have you
cut them off without any contact for the entirety of
(26:12):
your adult life? Oh no, no, Sky TV. It's like
they didn't feed you for five years. Oh, it would
have been better if what dad would kill us in
duns about our graves singing anelujah. I'll stop now, the
runner up worser, Mark Penn, Oh no, I won't stop now.
(26:35):
Mark Penn the one time human being who now runs
the Harvard Harris Pole and is a Trump deep state psychopath.
So the next time you see the Harvard Harris Pole,
you will understand what crap it is, because you'll understand
what crap he is. After Jim Jordan weaponized the Judiciary
Committee to smear the Attorney General Merrick Garland. As if
(26:57):
one needed to smear Merrick Garland, this idiot and former
human being, Mark Penn wrote quote is the most political
and partisan attorney general in history. You know Bill Barr
is still alive, He's going to be really offended by this.
Garland is the most political and partisan attorney general in history.
He's in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer a lawful,
(27:18):
a legitimate subpoena for an audio tape that the transcript
has been released, but he will likely throw it in
the wastebasket while he prosecutes former Executive Department officials for
less his response attack Congress. He should simply turn over
the tape as the country has a right to see
and hear it. Well, it's an audio tape, so you
can go see it if you want to. Penn, Holy cow,
(27:38):
We actually used to let this guy advise people like
Bill Clinton and Ed Koch crying out lod I hope
he's gotten a cat scan recently. Of course, Penn is
just angry because everybody still blames him for blowing Hillary
Clinton's lead in the two thousand and eight Democratic primaries,
largely because he did that by adopting a Republican style
(28:00):
ad campaign that turned everybody off but our winner. Good
Old Lauren Bobert, the most famous audience member in the
history of the live stage version of Beetlejuice, was spotted
on Wednesday night at the Annual Congressional Baseball Game. Was
she playing? Oh no, she only goes bowling? No. Bobert
(28:21):
was in the stands at Nationals Park in DC, wearing
a maga hat to keep her brain from falling out,
and vaping, vaping in the stands, which is against the
smoking policy at Nationals Park. You might just recall I
think I may have mentioned it. I don't think I
cut it out of the show. That night that miss
(28:42):
Bobert was escorted out of the live performance of Beetlejuice
in Colorado for vaping during the performance and then for
checking her dates performance. Evidently, at the Congressional ball game
she was alone, although I hear that she attended because
somebody told her there would be a lot of pine
(29:04):
talk are at the game, which she could use to
improve her grip. Lauren, what a pair of hands? Bobert?
Two days, worst person. And it's Friday, so time for
(29:32):
Fridays with Thurber. And it's interesting that, like many of
the great writers in American and other nations histories, James
Thurber never really wrote a book. Certainly not a novel,
certainly not a comedic novel. His My Life in Hard
Times is a series of embellished anecdotes. It's great, it's
(29:53):
a great read, it's book length, it's not really one narrative.
And when I say he never wrote a book. I mean,
he never wrote a real fictional book. He did write
a book, The Years with Ross, his profile, his interpretation
of Harold Ross, who was the founder of the New
(30:15):
Yorker magazine, and probably even with the perspective of an
additional sixty years that James Thurber did not have in
his life, still probably the least likely person you would
have picked out of world history to have founded the
New Yorker magazine. The book is called The Years with Ross.
(30:36):
It was serialized in the Atlantic magazine, and the best part,
including one of my favorite quotations in history in human history,
was in the May nineteen fifty eight issue of The Atlantic,
the seventh part of James Thurber's series The Years with
Ross by James Thurber. So many people have told me
(31:02):
that Harold Ross was a simple mechanism, and so many
others have assured me that he was a complex character.
It is small wonder that I dreamed the other night
that he was both complified and simplicated. There are those
who contend that the multiple editor of The New Yorker
never stepped off the elevator on his office floor without
(31:22):
putting on an invisible military uniform. He was accused of
having a secret respect for rigid military discipline in spite
of his waggish and scallow waggish experiences in the AEF.
His frequent and profane denunciations of all top brass were
supposed to cover a sneaking admiration for General Headquarters Red Tape.
(31:46):
I can't go along with this, if only because I
am unable to dispel the image of Ross as the
jittery skipper of a schooner out of Coleridge, a ship's
master with more than a dash of mutineer in him,
When he is not that figure in my nightmares. He
is an awe shocks farm boy from Colorado trying to
land a nineteen hundred biplane in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
(32:09):
When as Private H. W. Ross he was editor of
The Stars and Stripes, the situation was more Comeric Opera
than American Army. He was once put in the guardhouse
for some insubordination by Captain Guy T. Visnisky, but he
had to be released or the newspaper could not have
been got out. As editor, he could give orders to
(32:33):
Captain Franklin P. Adams and to Sergeant Alexander Wolcott, who
once called him in Paris the best editor in the world.
Where and how he finally learned his obsessive reverence for
order and organization, nobody will ever know for sure. Although
he was always scornful of American big business and big
(32:54):
business men, he talked constantly of running this place like
any other business office. He was vociferous in his contempt
for the way most metropolitan newspapers were run by. And
I always felt that his urge to tear down walls
and set up a central desk was an unconscious tendency
to create a vast city room with everyone in full
(33:15):
sight of everyone else. I go on feeling this in
the face of his continual scoffing at all things intramurally
journalistic in any writer's copy. He didn't want any stories
by reporters and ex reporters about their work on newspapers.
It makes me self conscious, he would say. And he
went so far once as to insist when I used
(33:36):
city room in a talk story, that it'd be changed
to the room where the reporters write their stories. Whatever
the origin of his driving desire for order and organization
may have been, it's satisfied two of his deepest needs.
Something to keep trying for and something to keep grousing about.
(33:58):
When I was in Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of
nineteen twenty seven, on vacation and on my way out
of job of running the magazine, I got a six
word note from Andy White that read Thurber the new
passing system. White the new passing system, typed on an
(34:19):
enclosed piece of paper, went like this. White passes to Levick,
who passes to Ross. I have no copy at hand,
and it may be that I have left out one
of the passes. Perhaps it went like this. White passes
to Barnes, who passes to Levick, who passes to Ross.
If there was a Barnes, he has long since passed
(34:40):
and been forgotten. Sometimes I wake up at night and
chant to myself. White passes to Tinker, who passes to Evers,
who passes the Chance who passes to Ross. This old system,
indicating the official route for notes and comment from White's
typewriter to Ross's desk, was one of one hundred similar
(35:00):
systems devised by distraught executive editors in a feudal effort
to set Ross's organization conscious mind at rest. These systems
formed what Stanley Walker who later got involved in them,
called the rigmaroles. The man who had thought up a
(35:20):
way to reroot comments so that Ross wouldn't worry about
it's getting lost between Andy's office and his was named
William Levick. He lasted about as long as I had
in the untenable job of mastermind and whipping boy to
Harold Ross. Levick's final frantic response to the editor's demand
(35:40):
for a method of keeping track of everything was an
enormous sheet of cardboard six feet by four divided into
at least eight hundred squares, with fine hand lettering in
each of them, covering all phases of the scheduling of
departments and other office rigmaroles. This complicated caricature of system,
(36:05):
this concentration of all known procedural facts, hung on a
wall of the talk meeting room until one day it
fell down of its own weight. Ross had stared at
it now and then without saying anything. When it crashed,
he told his secretary, get rid of that thing. I
(36:27):
suppose this was also what he said about a sign
I made at the time and hung on a wall
near the elevators. Alterations going on as usual during business.
Bill Levick, one of the few men Ross always called
by his first name in the office, had been a
friend and colleague of the editor in his San Francisco
(36:48):
newspaper days. He had greatly impressed Ross at that time
by his calm and efficient direction of a staff of reporters.
One night, when some disaster struck the city, Levick, as
I remember it, had been night city editor of the paper.
His calmness and efficiency, which had stood up under disaster,
did not long stand up under Ross's continual badgering and heckling.
(37:12):
After he gave up the hopeless task of trying to
please Ross in the big job, he did not leave
like most of the others, but became the art makeup man.
He was unhappy in that role too, because he didn't
like artists and thought most of their drawings were silly.
You're the only cartoonists that can spell, he once told me. Sourly.
(37:36):
A new Tottery Graybeard says he saw Levic one day
in the office with tears in his eyes. Tears of
fury or frustration were not infrequent in some of the
men who worked for Ross, but Levick could be tough too,
and his faint, gentle smile could turn cold when Ross
backed him into a corner. One day, the editor went
up in flames because of the similarity and proximity of
(37:59):
two drawings in the front of the book, But instead
of bawling Levick out himself, he sent his secondcretary to
the makeup man with a sharp reprimand Levick took a
swing at the fella, and when Ross sent the young
man back with an even sharper message, knocked him down, resigned,
went away, and was not seen again. Bill Levick died
(38:23):
a few years later, somewhere in New Jersey, out of
work and down on his luck. And I told Ross
about it. He was genuinely saddened, and the news depressed
him for days. I didn't treat him right, goddamn it,
he told me. But he kept calling me sir, and
standing there mocking me and grinning at me. He called
me that sur thing. He called Wolcott foolish. He would say,
(38:49):
foolish is late with his copy this week for shouts
and murmurs. He kept saying, skeed for schedule and picks
for drawings. All he cared about was his goddamn pianola rolls.
He had millions of them. Anything else in his house.
You don't play the p andol every night unless there's
something the matter with you. He even edited the damn rolls,
(39:13):
pasting them up with tissue paper, collaborating with guys like Beethoven.
He was a good man. Now. I was fond of him.
They didn't belong here. I thought of asking him, who does?
But I just went away and left him with his
memories and miseries. When a system fell down, Ross was
(39:33):
usually dejected until he or somebody else thought up a
new one. But once in a while the mutineer in
him took over. He was gleeful if the falling down
or pushing over of a system disturbed or tangled up
the business department, those guys upstairs. Once, when a rebuilt
typewriter I've been using broke down, I phoned the Underwood
(39:55):
company at noon, ordered its most expensive machine, and charged
it to the New Yorker. The typewriter, delivered at the
office two hours later, was held up by the alert
business office, and a deputy was sent to Ross with
the complaint that I had got the machine without authorization
or the signing of any requisition slips. The typewriter had
(40:17):
been hidden from me in the art stock room, but
an office boy told me where it was, and I
went and got it. The whole illegal procedure delighted Ross.
It's the only direct action there's been around here in years,
he yelled at the nervous man from the business department,
I'll okay it, and he grabbed pencil and paper and
(40:40):
okayed it. When he found out that I was in
the habit of going to the supply stock room, getting
in with a pass key, and taking whatever I wanted paper,
paper clips, typewriter ribbons, pencils, and wire baskets, he sauntered
into my office and asked, how do you get your supplies?
(41:00):
I told him, and he went away grinning. A monthly
checkup by the business office had shown a discrepancy in
supplies on hand, and again someone had complained to the editor,
and he had suspected me. I was thwarted for a while,
and the guys upstairs installed new locks on all the doors,
But I smuggled the master key to a locksmith and
(41:22):
had a dozen keys made from it. I told Ross
about that myself, adding that I had given a few
of the extra keys to girls I knew for souvenirs.
Ross didn't believe that, even though it was true. The
heartiest laugh of the mutinous Skipper came from the day
I found out and told him that the master key
(41:44):
to the former system of locks had been retained and
hung on a hook beside the new one. I showed
it to him. Attached to it was a small wooden
plaque on which someone had printed in India ink master
key and under that doesn't work. Ross told the story
(42:05):
all over town. It represented to him not merely the
bewilderment of some office boy, but the total inefficiency of
the business department, which had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
After Levick came Arthur Samuels, out of an advertising agency
(42:26):
with previous experience as a newspaper reporter and a magazine
promotion man. Art Samuels, who had been a member of
the Cottage Club and the Triangle Club in his Princeton days,
was a close friend and idol of another Princeton man,
Raoul Fleischmann. By the way, that was Ross's business partner.
I Olderman should add, Raoul Fleischmann put the money up
(42:49):
for the New Yorker to continue, and any friend and
idol of Fleischman, who was the chief backer of the
magazine was a target for Ross's slings and arrows and
doomed from the start. Raoul once told me Art is
one of the funniest men in the world on two martinis.
When I mentioned this praise to Ross, he said, I
(43:09):
guess I always got to parties when he was on
his third or left before he finished his first. Samuels
had taken over one of the largest New Yorker offices
and furnished it with rugs, large handsome bridge lamps, and
other fancy appointments that must have brought Ross's disapproving tongue
out of his mouth when he first beheld this change.
(43:33):
He himself liked a plain newspaper type office. I don't
want to look like the editor of Vanity Fair. Samuels
lasted until just after he came back from a six
week leave in Europe. I learned later that Ross had
intended to fire him while he was abroad, but he
put it off until Art's ship was back in the
harbor of New York. Then, just before Samuels disembarked, he
(43:56):
got a telegram from Ross telling him he was through.
Late that afternoon, the editor called me into his office.
He was sitting with his head in his hands, and
he said, Samuels was just in here bawling the holy
hell out of me. No man would have fired him
the way I did. I guess I could tell he
had taken quite a verbal lashing, and he was to
(44:18):
get others later. Hell and High Voices broke loose in
his office when Jeffrey Heilman gave him a verbal going over,
which no doubt Ross had coming to him. Some weeks
after that, Ross held up a Hellman piece so long
that Catherine White said to him one day at a
talk meeting, why haven't you put the Heilman piece through?
We all think it's very good. Ross turned this over
(44:41):
in his mind for ten seconds and then said, he
called me a liar, picking one of the least provocative
of Jeffrey's descriptions of him. He bought the Heilman place
that day. It was a basic fact of Ross's nature
that he really respected. No man who didn't at one
time or another fight back and yell him down. I
(45:01):
had many a yelling bout with him in his office,
but we always ended up on good, even affectionate terms.
One day, ten years ago, he and William Shawn were
trying to explain to me what they thought was the
matter with a couple of pieces I had written in
a series on soap operas, and Ross snapped out of
his heart, no, out of his ulcers. Yes, if you
could see, you would know what we mean. That sent
(45:26):
me rocketing into the higher reaches of lurid damnation of
all editors. He said he was sorry, and he was,
but he never immediately got over the effects of one
of our yelling spells. That noon, I was having lunch
at the Algonquin with my wife and daughter, then sixteen,
when Ross came over to our table. We talked amiably
(45:46):
for a while, and then he spurted something happens to
Jim once a month that makes him carry on like
a woman. This indelicate illusion was remarkable in a man
as self conscious as a choir boy in the presence
of women, and embarrassed to death if anyone then made
(46:07):
a reference to the functional. My daughter had met him
first when she was only nine, and he was in
one of his most blustery moods. I asked her afterward
what she thought of him, and she said, he's gruff,
but I'm not afraid of him. She might have been
speaking for her sex. In general, thorn Smith doesn't properly
(46:31):
belong in any New Yorker, or for that matter, any
other category. But he underwent a stretch of torture, both
give and take, as a member of the staff. During
the winter of nineteen twenty nine nineteen thirty. I had
brought him in and introduced him to Ross, saying that
he had given up an advertising job to write a book.
It must have been the stray lamb and found himself
unable to get work. Thorn Smith, straight out of Wonderland,
(46:55):
looked like a cousin of the White Rabbit and completely befuddled.
Harold Ross, the editor, took him on, though mainly I
am sure, because he had ed did a service magazine
during World War One, a Navy publication called Broadside. The
two men disparate, if there were ever a disparity, talked
about the stars and stripes and a mutual acquaintance who
(47:18):
had been on the wartime army gas attack. Everything went
wrong though, between Ross and thorn who once didn't show
up for a week. You ought to know where he is.
Ross told me he's your responsibility. I said that Smith
was God's responsibility. Not mine or any man's. When he
finally did appear, Ross said, why didn't you telephone and
(47:40):
say you're sick. Thorn had a lovely answer to that.
The telephone was in the hall, and there was a
draft The New Yorker had in a special file at
that time, a snack of profiles that needed editing before
they could be used, and Smith had been given an
office and told to try his hand at fixing them up.
(48:03):
It didn't work out. He can't use a typewriter, or
if he can, he won't, Ross told me. And then,
with dramatic voice and gestures, he sits out there writing
on fool's cap with a quill pen by candlelight. I asked,
you have me there, said Ross, Where the hell did
(48:26):
you find him? Anyway? I didn't find him, I said,
God sent him to you. Smith departed soon after that
to join the other poor little lambs who had gone astray.
It was only the other day I found out that
he had once written on fool's cap, but with modern
fountain pen, an entire talk department which was never used.
(48:49):
Ross must have put him up to that. Secretly, I
counted among my sorrows and literature's losses that his talk
department is nowhere to be found. James m. Kin was
a puzzle to Ross, who all men puzzled him to
some degree, but thorn Smith and jim Kin were much
too much for his understanding. We called him dizzy Jim.
(49:13):
An old timer told me recently, you were daffy Jim.
It seems that Cain liked to work on the floor
where there was a lot of room, and used to
put the talk department together down there. He once lifted
high the hearts of Andy and Catherine White at a
Thanksgiving Day dinner at his apartment by putting the turkey
(49:34):
platter and all on the floor and carving it blandly,
going on with the story he was telling, and he
told stories exceeding well. Jim Kaine was not at The
New Yorker long, only a few months, but the memory
of him has not dwindled there. When he got the
hell out, he didn't want to see Ross or The
New Yorker ever. Again, I don't blame him for leaving
(49:55):
any mention of it out of the piece about him
and Who's who he had been on The Baltimore American,
The Baltimore Sun, The New York world, and he was
at on one time a professor of journalism at Saint
John's College in Annapolis, where he had been born. Cain
must have known Ross in France when he was editor
of the seventy ninth Divisions Lorraine Cross. Jim is a
(50:20):
big man, and Ross was always a little wary of
big men. Once, when he got into a hassle with
Joel Sayer over a projected profile on Ross's detective friend
Raymond Schindler, they editor said to me, Jesus, your friend
Sayir is a big guy. My researches and reflections have
turned up the interesting truth that of all the miracle men,
(50:43):
all were short of physical stature, except Cain and Ralph Ingersoll,
and maybe one or two others out of the more
than thirty. I am over six feet myself, but when
Ross and I tangled, I weighed only one fifty. I
have reached one eighty six. Now, await alas, I'll never
be able to throw around in Ross's office during a
monthly yelling spell. In nineteen thirty one, my daughter had
(51:07):
about seven months to go before she was born. When
her mother and I bought a house a mile outside
Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and Ross pretended to be frightened when
he heard about my plans to live in the country. Timid,
as usual about taking up personal matters with a man
face to face, he assigned Cain the task of trying
(51:27):
to dissuade me from moving out of the city. Jim
had approached the subject gingerly in my office, saying only
a couple of sentences that I recognized at once as
bearing the stamp of a Ross panic. When he suddenly
stood up and said, this is none of my business
or Ross's either. I'm sorry I mentioned it. Live where
(51:48):
you want to and the way you want to. One
day Jim had sent on to Ross some manuscript of
which the editor could make neither head nor tail. He
sent it back to Cain with a memo attached that
is still in existence. It read, what is the signifigance
(52:10):
of it all? Anyway? That is the misspelling of significance
as I remembered it for twenty five years. But as
you will see, I was wrong. Just before Jim left,
he had the memo framed in leather and presented to
his successor, Bernard A. Bergman, who still has it. I
wrote him a few weeks ago to check the spelling
of the big word, and got this reply sign ig
(52:36):
if a and ce sick. Harold Ross's spelling was often grotesque.
He was always looking up words, he questioned in copy
he was reading, but he never seemed to doubt his
own accuracy. In all the years I knew him, he
never got prodigal right. He spelled it prodigal and pronounced
(52:57):
it as if it were spelled prod goal. It was
in nineteen thirty four, to get back to Jim Caine
that he brought out The Postman Always Rings twice. I
once asked Ross if he had read it, and he said,
wouldn't be my kind of stuff. I have no doubt
that if he had started reading it, he would have
put it down, thus becoming the only reader in the
(53:18):
country able to do that. He didn't even try to
read a Farewell to Arms and dismiss that novel with
I understand the hero keeps getting in bed with women,
and the war wasn't fought that way. I have a
recent letter from Bernard Bergmann about Ross that ends he
was a great man. I wish I could have been
(53:39):
close to him, but I never was. Bergmann lasted almost
two years beginning in nineteen thirty one. He quit because
Francis Bellamy had appeared on the scene, and Burgee was
wise enough to realize the newcomer was to become the
new genius. The old ritual firing and hiring was about
to begin once more after Bellamy disappeared in his time
(54:00):
and turn he smoked cigars was Ross's epitaph for this victim.
The editor phoned Bergman, who had just left the Philadelphia Record,
and tried to get him to come back. He rambled
on in his loud voice about the job of editorial
publishing whenever that meant, and the rebirth of his conviction
that Bergmann could handle certain tough problems in the office.
(54:22):
Bergmann said, that's just what I was doing, and he laughed,
and Ross laughed too, and they both hung up laughing. Bergmann,
like me, went to Ohio State, helped edit the Daily Lantern,
and was a reporter on the Columbus Dispatch. We had
been friends since nineteen fifteen, and I persuaded Ross to
(54:43):
hire him to supervise the talk of the town. Ross
had finally found out after years of hit and miss
what manner of man and writer I was. But I
don't think he ever knew anything about Bergmann. A man's
past dropped away and his life began anew when he
went to work for the New Yorker. Bergie had been
a regimental sergeant major in World War One, a newspaper
(55:07):
reporter and editor, and a New York press agent. In
high school in Chillicothe, Ohio, nearly fifty years ago, Bergmann
organized a four piece orchestra to play for Saturday night
dances at the Knights of Pytheas Club. His clarinetist Bergmann
played the violin and played it well, was a youngster
named Theodore Friedman, whom Bergmann paid two dollars and a
(55:29):
half a night until he let him go because he
jazzed up everything, did funny things with a plug hat,
and disconcerted the other boys. A decade later, Theodore Friedman,
alias Ted Lewis was earning one hundred and ten thousand
dollars a week the Palace, the Zigfield Follies, the Zigfield Roof,
(55:50):
and Bergmann was his press agent for a long time.
Starting about nineteen twenty eight, Bergie had contributed to Talk
of the Town the best items and suggestions of any outsider,
and when Ross asked me, after the vanishing of Ingersoll,
Raymond Holden, Ogden, Nash and several others, if I knew
a good man for talk. I brought Bergmann in and
(56:11):
he was hired. I had asked Ross to promised me
that he would not elevate Bergmann to the Genius chair,
and he said he wouldn't, but he did. I'm gonna
give Bergmann a crack at that job, he told me.
I think he can run the magazine. Don't say anything
about it, though, cause I haven't told him yet. I
(56:32):
left the room, giving the door a good slam. I
hated to lose the man who had brought to talk
facts and anecdotes about a dozen New Yorkers whose careers
fascinated Harold Ross, the g whiz guy. They included Jake Volk,
the building wrecker, Lewis Marshall, an eccentric millionaire lawyer who
rode to work on the L train and back home
(56:53):
on the subway, George and Ira Gershwin, and George Grause,
the German artist with whom Bergmann and I once had dinner. Grasse,
I told Ross wanted to meet the New Yorker artist
whose work began where the other cartoonists left off, well
did he, Ross asked, He meant me, I said, shyly, hogwash,
(57:18):
said Ross, who didn't believe a word of it. The
day that Ross promoted Bergmann, I sat outside his office
and eavesdropped. Bergmann got the works, the whole rigmarole from
you gotta hold the artist's hands through. I'm, by god
gonna keep sex out of this office to I want
to run this place like any other business office. I
(57:42):
got up in disgust, went to the men's room and
put up the window because it was a hot day.
I heard the door open and closed behind me, but
I didn't see what it was. Then I went out
and met Bergmann coming down the hall. Ross's secretary just
came in and said, you were going to kill yourself
in the men's room, he told me. Ross turned to
me and said, that's my life. Do something about it.
(58:06):
Bergmann had one great failure and at least one great
triumph at the New Yorker. His failure lay in his
inability to build a fake partition by means of which
Ross could get to the men's room unseen and ungreeted
in the halls. Nobody else could have designed such a
crazy partition either, and the dilemma wasn't solved until someone
(58:30):
suggested he have a lavatory built just off his office. Well,
I'll be damned, Ross must have said when this simple
way out of embarrassment was presented to his astonished mind.
The lavatory was installed, and it not only saved Ross
the torture of being spoken to by employees, but it
(58:52):
eliminated uncomfortable dialogue with writers and editors in the men's room.
As an aside, here comes the line I mentioned one
of my favorite quote in human history. I hope you're
ready to resume. Once standing trow to trow with John Mosher,
(59:14):
Ross grumbled, why aren't you writing any more casuals? Because
I have lost the slight fancy that sustained me. Mosher
explained it was the kind of Mosher retort that left
Ross flabbergasted, and he was miserable when he had nothing
(59:34):
to say. Bergman's great triumph was the hiring of Alvid Johnston,
and I'll let him retell that story himself. When I
first took over the me job managing editor, Ross said
he had been trying to get Alva Johnston to come
full time to the New Yorker for a long while,
but Alva always refused, said he was too old to
change his field. He was a reporter and he didn't
(59:56):
want to take a chance on magazines. Ross said to
me that if I could get Alva to come to
the New Yorker, that's all I'd ever have to do.
How much did you offer him, I asked, Oh, we
never discussed salary. Ross said, well, let's offer him three
hundred dollars a week. I said, uh, that's double what
(01:00:19):
he's getting on the New Harold Tribune. And I said,
if we offer him a lot of money, he just
won't be able to turn it down. Bergmann, you're a genius.
Ross said, I never thought of offering him money. So
I made a date with Alba. I told him we
(01:00:40):
guarantee him three hundred dollars a week. I can still
see Alba turning pale, standing up and saying, gee, I
have to think that over. I went back to Ross
and told him we got Alva. We had to That incident,
certainly important in the history of The New Yorker, showed
Ross's occasional naive and charming impracticality. Although he was the
world's greatest quoted words are Bergmann's. Harold Ross's laws of
(01:01:05):
Bergmann was William Randolph Hurst's gain, where the former New
Yorker editor was hired to build up the New York
Americans Daily March of Events page, known to the printers
as the Highbrow Page. And build it up he did.
A Few months later, Ross ran into him somewhere and said,
you're causing a lot of excitement at the New Yorker
and worry too, I guess, but keep it up. I
(01:01:26):
like it. I don't see how he could have liked it,
because Bergmann had signed up, among others, for one or
two columns a week, Bob Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Clarence Day,
Ogden Nash, and Jim Kaine. He also got stuff from H. L.
Menken and Oliver Herford, which Ross would have liked for
The New Yorker. I did some columns for the Highbrow
(01:01:47):
Page and quite a lot of drawings. The appearance of
my drawings there caused Ross to pass the buck to
someone who passed someone else, who passed it to Catherine White,
who wrote me a note asking me if I had
not broken my New Yorker contract by not first letting
the art meeting see my drawings for the New York American.
(01:02:07):
The New Yorker, in fact, had seen them all and
turned them all down. I passed this fact to Catherine,
who passed it to someone else, who passed it to
someone who passed it to Ross. My drawings ceased appearing
in The American when Bergmann got a note from old
Hurst himself which read, stop running those dogs on your page.
(01:02:30):
I wouldn't have them peeing on my cheapest rug. In
nineteen thirty four, the Old Man stopped Cane's columns too,
over Bergmann's protest that Jim was one of the best
and most popular American writers. Hearst's final note on this
matter read, get rid of Cain. I thought Abel had
done it. Sorry he failed the years with Ross, wherein
(01:02:58):
I learned that someone in the same millennium in which
I lived said the phrase I had lost the slight
fancy that sustains me. I've done all the damage I
(01:03:25):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown. Musical directors
Brian Ray and John Phillips Chanel arranged, produced and performed
most of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass
and drums, and mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards, and
it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some
of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Ulderman theme from ESPN two,
(01:03:47):
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer was my friend
Larry David, and everything else was pretty much my fault.
So that's countdown for this, the one hundred and forty
sixth day on till the twenty twenty four presidential election,
and the two hundred and fifty fifth day since convicted
(01:04:11):
fell in first time elderly offender Donald Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing, use the mental health system,
use presidential immunity if it happens, to stop him from
doing it again while we still can. The next scheduled
(01:04:33):
countdown is Tuesday. I'll leave a caveat that it might
not happen. Two of the dogs are going in for
dentals on Monday, and I may be focused entirely on
them for the whole day, but I'll try to put
something out on Tuesday morning. Boltons is the news warrants
till the next one. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and I have lost the slight fancy that
(01:04:55):
sustains me. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:05:15):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Host
Keith Olbermann
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