Notable Quotables - 03/20/1989
Unemployment
"Some analysts said
that the country's now close to full employment, the point at which the
available labor pool dries up. That's not the same as saying that everyone who
wants a job has a job. But business correspondent Ray Brady reports the high
employment rate is causing problems."
- CBS Evening News Anchor Charles Kuralt, March 10.
Lee Atwater
"At the same time,
Atwater - who cut his political teeth as a protege of South Carolina's once
segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond - downplayed his role in devising the
crypto-racist Willie Horton ads that helped Bush win the White House. 'That's
in the past,' he insisted."
- Time reporters Jacob V. Lamar and Alessandra Stanley in the March
20 issue.
Soviet Psychiatric Hospitals
"U.S. officials in
Moscow said today they have been unable to determine, after meetings with
patients in Soviet mental hospitals, whether they are being held because of
their political beliefs."
- NBC Nightly News Anchor Connie Chung.
"U.S. PSYCHIATRISTS
FAULT SOVIET UNITS: Team Finds Inmates Are Still Held for Political
Reasons"
- New York Times, next morning.
Mikhail Gorbachev
"For Gorbachev at
the end of four years, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
There was triumph at the Moscow summit, when cold warrior Ronald Reagan said
the Evil Empire belonged to a time now past. Bittersweet triumph when Soviet
troops came home from Afghanistan. The Soviets did not win, but Gorbachev did.
He had the courage to end Soviet involvement."
- CBS reporter Barry Petersen on the March 11 Evening News.
"On the
international stage, he's a superstar. The toast of the Wes. He reached a
precedent setting arms control agreement with the U.S. and pulled Soviet
troops out of Afghanistan. At home he's opened up the political process. The
first contested elections since Lenin's day are scheduled for later this
month."
- Rick Inderfurth on ABC's World News Tonight, March 12.
Economy
"Currently, our
entire economy is like one of those pathetic small towns desperate to keep,
say, a chemical plant operating regardless of the hazards...The Solar Age
still awaits its Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or even its Gorbachev, someone to
realize that the U.S. economy, too, needs its own perestroika."
- U.S. News and World Report Associate Editor Arthur Levine in the
March Washington Monthly.
Bush Ethics
"President Bush
says now that he's in charge there are higher standards....Others argue that
all this ethics talk is merely a diversion, a way to avoid tough problems,
like drugs, homelessness, and poverty."
- Susan Spencer on the CBS Evening News, March 5.
Eastern Strike
"Even if Eastern
Airlines goes out of business and its 30,000 employees have to find work
elsewhere, there are those who say the strike could still be considered a
success because it would show employers that they cannot ignore their workers
and expect them to give in."
- Stephen Aug on World News Tonight, March 8.
"It makes you long
for the good old days, the days before deregulation, you never had this kind
of problem at all. The airlines were required to give you the tickets: they
had to accept the tickets of a bankrupt company."
- Erin Moriarty on CBS This Morning, March 10.
Motherhood
"This question goes
out to all us parents. What would you do if one day your teenage daughter came
home to you and said, 'Mom, I'm gay'?...The trials, the tribulations, the
triumphs of lesbian teens and their mothers. That's the focus of this edition
of Geraldo."
- Geraldo Rivera, opening his March 3 show.
Pat Schroeder
"Some have labeled
her flaky, but she has always spoken out of a common-sensical awareness few of
her colleagues share: that, as she writes here, 'our society is still, to an
overwhelming degree, governed by upper-class white men who know little of the
family balancing act because their wives have insulated them from it.' Those
of us who wrote about her exploratory presidential campaign saw, again and
again, that this working mother connected powerfully with audiences when she
showed how well she understood their acquaintance with a harder reality."
- Washington Post staff writer Marjorie Williams on Pat Schroeder's
book, Champion of the Great American Family, March 7.
Time Magazine
"'[Time
Managing Editor] Henry Muller wants us to speak with a voice and to make
judgments,' says Walter Isaacson, a former Nation editor and now a [Time]
Senior Writer. 'We're using the news as a springboard, a jumping-off place to
get to things readers can't get elsewhere.'"
- From a March/April Columbia Journalism Review article.
Afghanistan
"Since their
capture by Afghan guerrillas late last year, the once impressive state-run
model farms in this province have fallen into dereliction."
- Edward Girardet reporting in the March 14 Christian Science Monitor.
- L. Brent
Bozell III; Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham, Marc S. Ryan; Editors
- Jim Heiser, Jay Marois, Patrick Swan, Dorothy Warner; Media Analysts
- Cynthia Bulman; Administrative Assistant
