¶ Matins: The story of McGeorge Bundy’s career as a presidential adviser, told now by Gordon M Goldstein (who worked with Bundy during the last year of his life on a collaborative project that had to be shelved when Bundy’s widow withdrew her support), promises to be a powerful cautionary tale about the limits of early brilliance. Dean of faculty at Harvard at the age of 34, Bundy was all but doomed by his precocity (and his impeccably WASP bloodlines) to trust his innate intelligence more than anyone else’s experience. That such a man counseled two presidents to forge ahead violently in Vietnam would hardly be more horrifying if we learned that Bundy was in fact a vampire who fed on soldiers’ blood.

Richard Holbrooke, who was in the room at the height of Bundy’s influence, reviews Mr Goldstein’s book, saying, “On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it.”

¶ Prime: Who’d a thunk it? According to Brian Stelter’s story, “A Generation of Local TV Anchors Is Signing Off,” just over half of Americans watch local TV news regularly, compared to the 34% who read newspapers and the (only!) 29% who watch network news.

¶ Tierce: Thanks to kottke.org, I’ve just discovered a very promising blog: A Historian’s Craft, kept by “fledgling historian” Rachel Leow. In “Only Collect,” she observes that the only way to become a good hunter of information is to begin voraciously and indiscriminately.

Oremus…

§ Matins. That very few prodigies continue to be exceptional into maturity is for some reason not widely recognized. We are inordinately dazzled by the spectacle of a young person’s achievements “ahead of time.” What’s interesting about Barack Obama is the impression that he gives of being “right on time.” So did JFK. I hope that the president-elect will show greater wisdom not so much in his choice of advisers but in his reliance upon them. American history would be quite different if Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had not shared a weakness for thinking that there were smarter people in their entourages.

§ Prime. And guess why local TV news programs are suffering budget cuts? Answer: Detroit!

The news departments are not alone in feeling the squeeze. Advertising is falling sharply, partly because of cutbacks in spending by automakers and car dealerships, which represent the single largest category of advertiser for broadcasters.

Until mid-November, a trade association for stations, the Television Bureau of Advertising, had expected total commercial revenue to be flat compared with 2007. It revised the forecast, however, and predicted a 7.1 percent decline. The group expects a 7 to 11 percent decrease in revenue next year. Already, the financial pressures are trickling down to newsrooms.

And while we’re on the topic of media madness, lets not overlook David Carr’s “Media Equation” column today, which connects “shopping strategy” stories appearing on television and in newspapers before Black Friday with the depravity that killed Jdimypai Damour. One thing that I take away from this sad and shaming tale is that police forces continue to appear to get their news from Mars, or at any rate from some media outlet no closer to Long Island. Don’t cops tune in?

§ Tierce. In other words, don’t try to think before you know anything.

Here, there’s one more point I could make: time fine-tunes your collecting habits. You are a predator of sources. Over time, things will start to jump out at you. For a lionness in the savannah on the hunt, the merest movement in the grass is a stimulus to action, but she has learned to distinguish between the random twitches of the landscape and the presence of prey. In the library and the archive, the hunt is as much a matter of skill as of instinct. In short, until you’re an adult lion, jump at everything — even if it turns out just to be a falling leaf, or a totally bizarre interview between George Bernard Shaw and a Saudi Muslim mystic in Mombasa in 1936, which I discovered amidst some otherwise entirely unremarkable magazine articles on the nature of Islam in Southeast Asia.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under The Hours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.