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Making the News, Taking the News
From NBC to the Ford White House
Sales Date: 2011-09-15
276 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in
Veteran reporter and Washington insider reflects on personal experiences and public events in the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s
For fifteen years, Ron Nessen enjoyed an extraordinary career covering the major national events of the 1960s and '70s for NBC News, and later serving as White House press secretary to President Gerald R. Ford. Making the News, Taking the News remembers the events and personalities that dominated national politics during Nessen's career, bringing a hard-won perspective to those tumultuous times. Through an interweaving of countless incidents and personal anecdotes, Nessen builds a story that captures the true grit of closed-door politics. Off-the-record briefings and strategy sessions, as well as descriptions of experiences with Vietnam troops in the field, provide a vivid illustration of the life of an on-the-road reporter. At the heart of the book is Nessen's White House years, as the veteran reporter gives a valuable eyewitness account of events both behind the scenes and in front of the cameras that shaped and altered America during two critical decades.
Introduction
The Mal Jaune
Golf in Palm Springs, Death in Saigon
"You Lied to Me!"
Weekends in Austin
"We Shall Overcome"
A Change of Plans
The Five O'Clock Follies
Baptism by Fire
Cindy and the Two Apple Troupe
Tet and Other Horrors
"I Don't Want to Die"
The Cease-Fire That Wasn't
Around the World in Eighty Stories
"Nattering Nabobs of Negativism"
"Our Long National Nightmare Is Over"
The President Next Door
Changing Sides
The First Days
The Ghost Who Wouldn't Go Away
The First Lady
"WIN" and Other Economic Disasters
Too Much Vodka, Too Much Nicole
Slippery Slopes
The CIA Did WHAT?!
Speech Writing or Speech Fighting
Kicking Around Ron
Testing the President's Resolve
Stumbles and Changes
To Helsinki and Beyond
Nine Lives
"Ford to New York: Drop Dead!"
State of the World, State of the Union, State of My Marriage
"Live from New York"
Ford vs. Reagan
"One Actor Is Enough"
Swine Flu and Other Maladies
Does the Soviet Union Dominate Eastern Europe?
The Race to the Wire
The End
About the Author
Illustrations follow pages 84 and 180
RON NESSEN is the journalist-in-residence at the Brookings Institution. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
"The politics of the 1960s-70s come to life in Nessen's recounting of the first 15 years of his journalism career from 1962-1977. ... Political junkies will love the details about the White House personalities and operations under Ford, and journalists and journalism scholars will appreciate Nessen's reflections on the role and power of reporting."
~Judy Soldberg, Library Journal
""A smooth, engaging, funny and serious jaunt through the 60's and 70's with Ron Nessen. All students interested in journalism, the Vietnam War, or politics will find this book a winner. It will hook the reader from the first word and is hard to put down.""
~Annemarie Roscello, AASL/PLR "Outstanding" University Press Books
""In this strongly written, evocative and at times very personal memoir Ron Nessen takes us on an intensely remembered journey through a unique period of American history, when it seemed the center might not hold""
~John R. Coyne Jr., Washington Times
""The politics of the 1960s-70s come to life in Nessen's recounting of the first 15 years of his journalism career from 1962-1977. ... Political junkies will love the details about the White House personalities and operations under Ford, and journalists and journalism scholars will appreciate Nessen's reflections on the role and power of reporting.""
~Judy Soldberg, Library Journal
""'Vietnam dominated my life for nearly a decade,' Nessen says in his new, sprightly written memoirNessen devotes about half of his book to his reporting in Vietnam and about half to an inside-baseball account of his life as President Ford's spokesman. He mixes in highly personal details of his life with solid, first-person reporting on the inner workings of the Ford administration.""
~Mark Leepson, VVA Magazine
"Thoroughly enjoyable, well written, filled with insights into journalism and government, remarkable for its candor. Want to know what happens to a good reporter when he becomes a White House spokesman? Read Nessen on Nessen."
~Marvin Kalb, Murrow Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, and former network correspondent
"Ron Nessen's story is a riveting and candid firsthand account of the personal and political dynamics inside the Ford White House and the personal challenges of covering the war in Vietnam.""
~Lester Crystal, former executive producer of the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
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