You can meet Sam yourself by going to www.prorev.com. Make sure you sign up for his daily e-mail list. You may not agree with everything Sam says, but it will sure enlighten you.
And, you can enjoy some of the nuggets Sam Smith routinely churns out: “Things have not been going so well on Planet Potomac. The two most powerful subcultures here consist of the Clingons and the Process People. The former got their name from their skill in hanging onto various branches of power with one hand while speaking on the phone with the other, valiantly ignoring the laws of gravity, ecological factors, common sense, and non-Clingons grabbing at their feet and trying to pull them to the ground…”
Smith is clearly a word-man, perhaps best defined between the lines of his insightful tomes of social criticism, but on the surface he is a self-described “big guy,” who at 65 years of age, six feet-one inch and 250 pounds, looks like the weightlifter he has been most of his adult life.
Although perennially caught up in serious topics, he clearly does not take himself seriously.
Far from a cerebral George Will type, he gives the immediate impression of being very down-to-earth.
He is also distant from Mr. Will’s conservatism. Sam Smith is, in fact, an old-fashioned liberal who can make his point without angst.
To wit: The proud native of Washington’s analysis of the class dimensions in the D.C. community as captured in his “Captive Capital,” a significant work that Bill Raspberry of the Washington Post styled as “one of the few efforts I have seen that manages to deal with black people and white people without insulting either, and without appearing to be written for one or the other.”
Despite a catalogue of accomplishments and a collection of left-leaning friends, the Harvard grad and former Coast Guard officer is probably best remembered for his tough coverage of Clintons and their scandals. For Smith, public corruption transcends political ideology.
Along the way, Smith morphs from a tolerant-of-Clinton guy to an anti-Clinton guy – a process that once compelled an interviewer to inquire how such a nice man could get mixed up with “those Republicans.”
The answer then is the same he delivered to NewsMax: “I never let ideology stand in the way of a good story. I mean, if I happened to see Ralph Nader driving a SUV...”
When he tells NewsMax offhandedly that former President Bill Clinton is like a “white Marion Barry” (the infamous former D.C. major who was packed off to jail in a cloud of cocaine dust), you just know he’s not the type to mince words. “I used to be Barry’s PR man,” he says by way of explaining the novel comparison.
Of course, that was back in the old days when Barry was an activist and not yet the mayor of the nation’s capital.
Lots of what Smith is about is defined by the long ago.
He told NewsMax that his famous career probably had its roots when he was 13 and hammering out a household newspaper for his large family. He has five siblings.
But discounting journalist endeavors at school, he points to 1957 as his breakout year – when he managed to get a job as a reporter for Washington’s WWDC radio station.
Prolific even then, writing two newscasts a day, Sam Smith never looked back. By 1964 he began his first alternative journal, the Idler – when there were just a handful of such publications in the U.S., such as IF Stone's Weekly, the Realist, the Carolina Israelite, and the Village Voice.
In 1966 he started the Capitol East Gazette, a community paper that morphed into the DC Gazette in 1969 and the Progressive Review in 1985.
The bottom line is that Smith has been editing alternative journals longer than anyone in the country, and has been covering Washington for almost as long as anyone in the capital.
Listening to him is as entertaining as it is informative. And there’s not much he hasn’t probed or advocated – from the building of bikeways, to urban planning practices, to nixing the punitive approach to drug addiction, to the breakup of the Soviet Union, to the savings and loan scandal, to the hawkish corporate media...
NewsMax couldn’t resist asking Mr. Smith to share an anecdote or two about those frenetic halcyon days of his Clinton beat:
“One of the funny things about that story was that among my early contacts were liberals in Arkansas. The best book on Clinton was by Roger Morris, a liberal, who gave me a lot of encouragement. So much for the right-wing conspiracy.
“I was stunned one day to get a critical e-mail from Billy Bear Bottoms, who had been a key pilot for the notorious drug trafficker Barry Seale. I had never been criticized by a drug pilot before, so I decided to take advantage of it and got an interesting e-mail interview.
"As a former Coast Guard officer I was particularly fascinated by the fact that they had their own private search and rescue operation set up in case one of the planes went down. That's big business.
“I've never done a story before where people outwardly expressed fear for my safety about a score of times. The strange thing is they would defend Clinton and ask me whether I wasn't worried about my safety in the same conversation.”
“I've come to think it is genetic. I started a family newspaper when I was 13, came in third in a citywide high school journalism contest, almost flunked out of Harvard because I was spending so much time as news director of the college radio station. My roommates made fun of me because I would dash out of the dorm if I heard fire engines nearby.
“I also had three great English teachers at my Quaker high school in Philadelphia and I was a teen-aged fan of Elmer Davis and Edward R. Murrow, with Sam Chapman of the Athletics coming in a poor third. Later, I got hooked on the Initials, as I call them: A.J. Liebling, I.F. Stone, and H.L. Mencken. Plus James Thurber.
“I also got a lot of encouragement from older journalists like Charlie McDowell and Chuck Stone.”
“My wife, a local historian, has been my guardian angel. Kathy got a local history curriculum into the DC public schools, has written several books and once put up a 120 foot long outdoor history exhibit on a major urban street that lasted two years with hardly any graffiti and only a handful of photos taken (perhaps by people who recognized someone). Today she runs an organization promoting cultural tourism in DC that has around a hundred members ranging from the Black Fashion Museum to the National Park Service.
“A long time ago we worked out a deal: she would handle everything before 1960 and I would take everything after. Little did she realize that she was boxed in while my territory was expanding by the day.
“We do different things and think different things. Once we even stood out in front of our precinct handing out flyers for different candidates. But we don't let politics interfere with life.
“My sons are lovingly tolerant of their father in a manner that could be a model for other multicultural relations in this country. One is a social worker-therapist who works with mentally ill addicts and is married to a doctor, and the other, in the words of one of his San Francisco buddies, ‘has gone corporate on us’ and works as an event planner for a major company.
"He has also taken his father's avocation of music – some 40 years of gigs on my part, first as a drummer and then as a stride pianist – and really done something with it, including two CDs featuring his own songs and band.”
“I liked what Inspector Morse said on TV the other evening: the first rule of detection is to ask why. The same applies to reporting.
“Unfortunately, too many journalists in Washington, like the people they cover, come to the capital crammed with theories learned at universities and learn too little thereafter. They have been taught to be deductive thinkers working from grand principles down. They become prisoners of their premises.
“Reporters, like detectives and anthropologists (my college major by the way) should start the other way, inductively working from the particulars to the general.
“After all, if all our premises were correct there wouldn't be any need for news.
“I'll give you an example. On a number of occasions, in discussing the Vince Foster death, I would say, ‘I wish I could figure out how Foster got to that park without any car keys.’
“The logical comeback to such a comment would be to point out some factual error on my part, but usually I would get something like this: ‘You don't believe that Republican crap do you?’”
“I don’t enjoy political campaigns as much as I used to. They were more fun when politics was a theatrical and social event more than a procedure that has all the soul of a corporate takeover. I really don't want to hear what George Bush or John Kerry have been programmed to say.
“Still, since someone eventually does take over the corporation, you have to pay attention. A few things I've noticed:
“Whatever happens I suspect that Bush's popularity has peaked and is on the way down. This is primarily because con men always need new marks and he's running out of them. (For much the same reason I don't expect Hillary Clinton to do as well as some have predicted. In fact, in the few polls in which she has been included she was doing better before her book came out than after.) Besides, I think at some point, the public is going look in its wallet and realize that Bush is the Washington Gray Davis.
“In the long run I don't expect Democrats to share John Kerry's high opinion of himself. Besides, Republicans are so mean about people from Massachusetts it probably wouldn't be such a good idea anyway.
“I share Jon Stewart's view of Lieberman, the candidate for those who would like to vote for Bush but don't think he's Jewish enough.
“Dean is interesting because he engages in the sort of crossover politics that I think the Democrats need. For example, his hands-off approach to gun control. Why is he doing well? For one thing, if you watch him you realize that, whatever his faults or your disagreements, he's a real human. That's nice and kind of rare in politics these days. Second, I think a lot of people are looking for a different sort of candidate and are expressing their alienation from Democratic politics as much as they are their support for Dean. In a sense, Dean may be just the excuse for the meet-up.
“My hunch is that the strongest candidate the Democrats can field is Gephardt. He's one of the few you'll still like on Election Day. He's sort of a Democratic Jerry Ford. You can't come up with many good reasons to support him, but you can't think of anything really wrong, either. And he will have been saying all the right things if either the economy or Bush tank.
“As for my own party, the Greens, I find myself drifting towards no candidate or a token one. It's a complicated issue, including the fact that Greens need to run in some states just to stay on the ballot, but ever since I helped start the party I've felt its future lay in working from the bottom up.”
“I think it is interesting that three of my four books – at the choice of the editors, not me – have the American flag on the cover in some form. That pleases me because I like to think of myself as being part of a long American rebellious tradition that has made our ideals something more than just words on paper. I have strong progressive, populist and ecological values, but I also want things to work.
“And I believe deeply in the idea of reciprocal liberty – that I can't have my freedom unless you have yours. This is something we constantly have to negotiate. It comes in part, I suspect, from being from a large family where you learn that politics is really a matter of who gets the window seat, when, and for how long.
“And finally, I subscribe to Walt Kelly's great principle: the right of all Americans to make a damn fool of themselves.”
What are his biggest disappointment/grandest success in his many crusades?
“My biggest disappointment is watching American growing tired of being America and my biggest success is having started out at young age to do something crazy and fun and having gotten away with it.”
“First, I work on IF Stone's principle that most of what the government does wrong it does out in the open.
“Second, I favor the two most underused sources in Washington: the printed word and numbers.
“Third, I try to follow Harold Ross' dictum that if you can't be funny you should be interesting.
Interesting, Smith is.
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