The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Amnesia in the Garden

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Amnesia in the Garden: "September 5, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Amnesia in the Garden
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Manichaean Candidate sees the world only in terms of good and evil, black and white.
He scorns gray, nuance, complexity, context, changing circumstances and inconvenient facts. Real men make their own reality.
Trying to match John Kerry, who roused the base at his convention with a line bashing the House of Bush-House of Saud coziness, George W. Bush roused the base at his convention with a liberal-media-elite-bashing line.
Painting himself as the noble agent for 'the transformational power of liberty' abroad, he said 'there have always been doubters' when America uses its 'strength' to 'advance freedom': 'In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to Allied forces, a journalist in The New York Times wrote this: 'Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. European capitals are frightened. In every military headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.' End quote. Maybe that same person's still around, writing editorials.'
She isn't. Anne O'Hare McCormick, who died in 1954, was The Times's pioneering foreign affairs correspondent who covered the real Axis of Evil, interviewing Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Patton. She was hardly a left-wing radical or defeatist. In 1937, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, and she was the first woman to be a member of The Times's editorial board.
The president distorted the columnist's dispatch. (download a PDF of the original column)The 'moral crisis' and failure she described were "