Wednesday, April 25, 2007 |
Time To End The Silence: The Penultimate Word On Dodger Stadium Parking
Halberstam and his colleague Neil Sheehan had filed a string of highly negative stories about the war to date, with the consequence that then-President John F. Kennedy asked the Times' editor to pull him from the theater. Once, after a round of particularly hard fighting in the Delta, he and his fellow journalists had been prohibited from entering the battleground. Repeated requests to U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and General Paul Harkins for access yielded no results. The ensuing reaction by the military was startling, to say the least:
In those days, the military had a daily late afternoon briefing given by a major or a Captain, called the Five O'clock Follies, because of the generally low value of the information.I bring this all up because of an exchange I had with Dodger spokesman Josh Rawitch nearly two weeks ago in which he flatly refused to allow me to publish an unedited version of his response to my request to publish portions of an e-mail exchange I had with him over the Dodger Stadium parking situation. In particular, he refused to acknowledge at all the reports in the Los Angeles Times of individuals displaying Disabled Person license plates or placards being routed away from appropriate parking stalls.On this particular day, the briefing was different, given not by a Major but by a Major General, Dick Stilwell, the smoothest young general in Saigon. It was in a different room and every general and every bird Colonel in the country was there. Picture if you will rather small room, about the size of a classroom, with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.
General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again. Period.
And I stood up, my heart beating wildly -- and told him that we were not his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.
I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150 American soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins, but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we were being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into battle. That was certainly his right.
So: Never let them intimidate you. Never. If someone tries, do me a favor and work just a little harder on your story. Do two or three more interviews. Make your story a little better.
I don't pretend to be a real journalist; quite the opposite. But what has been eating at me for some time now has been the utter refusal of the Dodgers as an organization to publicly recognize that they have flaws and could, maybe, learn a thing or two. I have since heard from several people that the parking situation is indeed improved, even in relatively heavy traffic. That is certainly all to the good, and I applaud that, I really do. But what I find appalling still is the team's refusal to deal with what seems like starkly obvious defects. We can see; we can read; why can't they?
I intend to go to several games at Dodger Stadium this year, partly because I enjoy it and partly to find out first hand how well the parking really is working out. Stay tuned.
Labels: dodger stadium, dodgers, parking
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