[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 149 (Friday, September 22, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14129-S14131]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      A TRIBUTE TO DOUGLASS CATER

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to mourn the death of a 
great friend and great American, S. Douglass Cater, Jr.
  A native of Montgomery, AL, Douglass Cater traveled north to school 
at Exeter and Harvard, interrupting his education to serve as a Russian 
specialist in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. After 
the war ended, he remained in Washington, writing eminent prose on 
Washington and national affairs for The Reporter. His articles, along 
with his first-rate books ``The Fourth Branch of Government'' and 
``Power in Washington'' brought him to the attention of Lyndon Johnson. 
In 1964, he joined the Johnson 

[[Page S 14130]]
White House as the President's education specialist, assisting in the 
development of programs that established Federal aid to education as 
the national policy. He also oversaw much of the work that went in to 
the creation of the Public Broadcasting System.
  Always a dedicated educator, Douglass Cater became the President of 
Washington College after stints at the Aspen Institute and The 
Observer, the great English newspaper. As president of Washington 
College, Douglass moved to a new plateau above that of Chester Dana, 
the title character of his masterful 1970 fiction book, ``Dana: The 
Irrelevant Man.'' I reviewed that book back when it was first published 
and wrote the foreword to an upcoming edition. That brilliant novel 
remains as true today as ever, even though the climate and culture of 
this city and government have drastically changed.
  Douglass Cater gave new meaning to the terms ``gentleman'' and 
``scholar.'' He brought a thoughtfulness and intelligence to all his 
work, and continually preached the value of civilized discourse over 
political bickering. His faith in reason was much appreciated by all 
those who came to know him.
  Douglass Cater was, in the words of Edwin Yoder, ``one of the best of 
a fine generation.'' And so we will remember him, even as we offer our 
condolences to his beloved wife Libby, and all his children and 
grandchildren.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of the 
articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post be printed in 
the Record.
  There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1995]

      Douglass Cater Is Dead at 72; Educator and Presidential Aide

                      (By Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.)

       Douglass Cater, a soft-spoken student and practitioner of 
     government power who began his working life as a journalist 
     and ended it as a college president--after a heady detour 
     through Lyndon B. Johnson's White House--died yesterday at 
     the guest house at Washington College in Chestertown, Md.
       He was 72 and had lived in Montgomery, Ala., since his 
     retirement as the president of the college in 1990.
       His wife, Libby, said that her husband, who was stricken 
     during a visit to the college six weeks ago, died of 
     pulmonary fibrosis.
       By the time he went to the White House in 1964 at age 40, 
     Mr. Cater was already an old Washington hand. An original 
     editor of The Reporter magazine, he had spent 14 years 
     covering Washington and national affairs, with occasional 
     time off to write books or serve as a Government consultant.
       Indeed, he began his stint as a special assistant to 
     President Johnson two months after the publication of his 
     third book, ``Power in Washington.''
       It was a measure of Mr. Cater's evenhandedness that five 
     years before his journalist's examination of Government 
     power, he had given his own profession the same treatment in 
     ``The Fourth Branch of Government.''
       Mr. Cater, who had written admiringly of Johnson's use of 
     power as Senate majority leader, had been asked to join his 
     Vice Presidential staff in 1963, but had demurred.
       At the time, Mr. Cater was on a leave from his magazine 
     working as associate director of the Center of Advanced 
     Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and wanted to 
     finish his book.
       The second call--this time from the White House--``got his 
     attention,'' Mrs. Cater recalled yesterday.
       Mr. Cater, who was given a vague mandate to ``think ahead'' 
     and had been told by other Presidential assistants that they 
     ``made it up'' as they went along, took a while to find his 
     niche.
       The breakthrough, his wife said, came when he noticed that 
     Johnson's face lit up whenever he read a memorandum on 
     education. Taking the Presidential visage as his guide, Mr. 
     Cater became the resident education specialist, with far-
     reaching results, among them the first legislation 
     establishing Federal aid to education as a national norm.
       ``It was one of his proudest achievements,'' his wife said, 
     recalling that another was the spadework her husband did in 
     creating the Public Broadcasting System.
       Mr. Cater, who left the White House in 1968 to join Vice 
     President Hubert H. Humphrey's Presidential campaign staff, 
     later worked as an executive of The Observer and joined the 
     Aspen Institute, which became his base as a freelance writer 
     and political gadfly before taking the Washington College 
     post in 1982.
       A native of Montgomery, Mr. Cater, whose full name was 
     Silas Douglass Cater Jr., came by his interest in government 
     naturally. His father, Silas Cater, was a politically attuned 
     lawyer who served in the Alabama Legislature and later became 
     Montgomery City Clerk.
       After attending Exeter, Mr. Cater went on to Harvard, 
     interrupting his education during World War II to serve as a 
     Russian specialist with the Office of Strategic Services in 
     Washington, an experience he found so dull, his wife said, 
     that he vowed never again to work as a specialist but to 
     operate as a generalist.
       By most accounts he did that brilliantly, earning a 
     reputation as a civilizing influence who brought 
     thoughtfulness to both his extensive writings and his other 
     work.
       Resorting to reason when others might rail, Mr. Cater was 
     forever preaching the value of civilized discourse.
       In 1984, for example, he persuaded two former Presidents 
     and six former Secretaries of State to endorse a bipartisan 
     statement urging Presidential candidates to moderate their 
     comments on foreign affairs.
       Mr. Cater, who wrote widely, including a number of Op-Ed 
     articles for The New York Times, had less success a campaign 
     to persuade the news media, particularly television, to 
     moderate their voices in reporting on Government.
       Although his published works on Government were widely 
     praised, perhaps his greatest achievement as a writer was his 
     lone and daring venture into fiction, his 1970 novel ``Dana: 
     The Irrelevant Man.''
       There have been many excellent factual accounts of 
     Washington, of course, but in his review in The Times, 
     Christopher Lehmann-Haupt suggested that Mr. Cater had pulled 
     off something of a miracle in a well-abused genre, proving 
     ``That wise reporters can write fiction after all.''
       In addition to his wife, Mr. Cater is survived by two sons, 
     Silas 3d, of San Rafael, Calif., and Ben, of Baltimore; two 
     daughters, Sage, of Montgomery and Morrow Scheer, of San 
     Rafael; a brother, William, of Millburn, N.J., and four 
     grandchildren.
                                                                    ____


             [From the Washington Post, September 16, 1995]

        S. Douglass Cater Dies at 72; LBJ Aide, Writer, Educator

                            (By Bart Barnes)

       S. Douglass Cater, 72, a top aide to President Lyndon B. 
     Johnson, a Washington journalist and author and the former 
     president of Washington College in Chestertown, Md., died 
     Sept. 15 at his quarters on the college campus. He had 
     pulmonary fibrosis.
       Mr. Cater served as special assistant to Johnson from 1964 
     to 1968. In that period, he was a principal draftsman for 
     much of the Great Society legislation, including programs on 
     education, health and medical care, labor and welfare. He 
     also wrote speeches for Johnson and was instrumental in the 
     formation of the Public Broadcasting Corp. and the Teacher 
     Corps.
       As a journalist, he was Washington editor and national 
     affairs editor for the Reporter magazine in the 1950s and 
     early 1960s, then in the late 1979s was vice chairman of The 
     Observer in London. He wrote occasional political commentary 
     on the op-ed pages of The Washington Post.
       From 1982 until 1990, Mr. Cater was president of Washington 
     College, a small liberal arts institution on Maryland's 
     Eastern Shore. He was said by friends to have had a deep and 
     abiding belief in the value of education, and a conviction 
     that an educated citizenry could be sensible and responsible 
     in matters of public policy. He also was a senior fellow, 
     funding member and trustee of the Aspen Institute for 
     Humanistic Studies.
       He was the author of ``Power in Washington,'' a 1964 book 
     that he described as an attempt ``to define what was 
     happening to the political process as America moved toward 
     its bicentennial.'' In a 1958 book, ``The Fourth Branch of 
     Government,'' Mr. Cater criticized the media, observing that 
     the presence of television cameras at White House press 
     conferences ``make unpaid actors of the entire Washington 
     press corps.''
       He also wrote a political novel, ``Dana, the Irrelevant 
     Man,'' which was published in 1970.
       After stepping down as president of Washington College, Mr. 
     Cater returned to his native Montgomery, Ala. He died while 
     on a visit back to the college.
       During World War II, Mr. Cater served in the Office of 
     Strategic Services. He graduated from Harvard University and 
     came to Washington in 1950 as Washington editor for the 
     Reporter.
       Not until he retired from Washington College did Mr. Cater 
     return to live in the South, but he retained his Southern 
     identity all his life and sometimes came across as the 
     epitome of the cultivated Southerner.
       He was inventive--with a seemingly endless stream of 
     ideas--humorous, warm and sometimes crotchety.
       ``He had an acute sense of history, a gift for clear prose 
     and excellent contacts in the universities, medical schools, 
     foundations and education associations. He helped to draw up 
     and put through most of Johnson's programs for aid to 
     education and better medical care,'' said Harry C. McPherson 
     Jr., who also served in the Johnson White House, in his book, 
     ``A Political Education.''
       For 13 years, Mr. Cater was Washington editor of the 
     Reporter. He then served two years as national affairs editor 
     before joining the Johnson White House in the spring of 1964. 
     On Election Day 1964, Mr. Cater wrote a one-page memorandum 
     to the president suggesting that Johnson seize the 
     opportunity in what was beginning to look like a major 
     electoral victory to become the ``education president.'' 
     Among the measures stemming from this suggestion were the 
     Elementary 

[[Page S 14131]]
     and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act and the 
     International Education Act.
       Mr. Cater left the Johnson administration in October 1968 
     to work as a domestic adviser on the unsuccessful 
     presidential campaign of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
       Later, he did writing and consulting and in 1970 became a 
     founding fellow of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic 
     Studies. He was a principal planner in designing the 
     Institute's Center for Governance at Wye Plantation on the 
     Eastern Shore.
       In the late 1970s, he became vice chairman of the Observer, 
     England's oldest weekly newspaper.
       He took the job as president of Washington College in 1982, 
     he said, ``because I wanted to do something to make my own 
     mark. In the White House, one could feel many heady things, 
     but you were just part of a process. It didn't really matter 
     if it was you or someone else. Although I was a high level 
     staff man, I had never been in a job where the buck stopped 
     with me.''
       During his years at the college, Mr. Cater raised more than 
     $43 million to revitalize the academic program and add major 
     new facilities. He also became a national champion of 
     independent liberal arts colleges, waging a running verbal 
     battle on the op ed pages of The Post and the New York Times 
     with then-Education Secretary William J. Bennett, who had 
     accused private colleges of being too greedy.
       Mr. Cater's books also included ``Ethics in a Business 
     Society'' (1953); ``Politics of Health'' (1972); and ``TV 
     Violence and the Child'' (1975).
       Survivors include his wife, Libby Anderson Cater of 
     Montgomery; four children, S. Douglas Cater III and Libby 
     Morrow Cater Sheer, both of San Francisco, Rebecca Sage Cater 
     of Montgomery, and Benjamin Winston Cater of Baltimore; a 
     brother, William B. Cater of Milburn, N.J.; and four 
     grandchildren.
                                                                    ____


               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 20, 1995]

                  Douglass Cater's Rules of Journalism

                        (By Edwin M. Yoder, Jr.)

       Even perceptive newspaper obituaries rarely capture the 
     flavor of a man. The notices of Douglass Cater's death at 72 
     conveyed only a hint of what made him an original.
       I knew of Cater, and had read a good bit of his writing 
     (mainly in the old Reporter magazine), long before our paths 
     crossed in the mid-1980s. By then, he was assailed by 
     excruciating physical debilities, including chronic back pain 
     that he managed by a curious regimen of flexing exercises, 
     rhythmically twisting his torso in a way vaguely suggestive 
     of an exotic dance. But far from complaining, he observed his 
     frailties as a journalist and wrote about them--
     interestingly.
       Meeting him one could see how he had by then accumulated a 
     larger stock of interesting firsthand institutional memory 
     than just about anyone you ever met, beginning with World War 
     II service in the legendary Office of Strategic Services. 
     That was just the beginning. When communists took control of 
     the world student movement, he and others organized the U.S. 
     National Student Association. Later, he was a Washington 
     magazine correspondent and editor, a White House aide to 
     Lyndon Johnson, the editor of a venerable English newspaper 
     (the Observer of London, which with the help of Robert 
     Anderson's philanthropy, he rescued from the brink of 
     oblivion), a writer, philosopher of higher education, 
     godfather to public broadcasting and president of an old 
     liberal arts college on Maryland's eastern shore (Washington, 
     in Chestertown), which he also helped rescue and was visiting 
     when he died.
       Cater's old friends knew him as a man of dramatic 
     loyalties, reinforced by a sharp tongue.
       After we had seen Cater take someone's hide off at a forum 
     one summer night, an old friend told me a story. It happened 
     when Cater was working for Lyndon Johnson in the White House, 
     at the height of the national quarrel over Vietnam.
       His friend had flown to Washington on business and planned 
     to stay with the Caters. Cater picked him up at National 
     Airport. As they drove south on the GW Parkway, Cater asked, 
     in his Alabama drawl: ``John, are you one of those goddam 
     academics who're always carping at the president about the 
     war?'' His friend admitted that he was. ``I'm sorry,'' Cater 
     announced, ``but we will have to stop speaking.'' Cater 
     withdrew to this study, skipping dinner, and it was years 
     before friendly relations were restored. He took his 
     loyalties seriously.
       Douglass Cater's monument, however, apart from many 
     inventive good works, is a small book he wrote in the late 
     1950s called ``The Fourth Branch of Government,'' one of 
     those seminal books that say all that needs saying about a 
     subject. Cater wrote the book when many journalists were 
     uncomfortably reviewing the press's dubious performance in 
     the rise and fall of the 20th century's most disruptive 
     American demagogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin.
       McCarthy's dark ascendancy was in part an expression of the 
     anxiety generated by the Cold War. Cater's analysis focused, 
     however, on one of its proximate sustaining causes: the cult 
     of reportorial ``objectivity.'' By the rules of objectivity, 
     if an official of note made a sensational charge, even one 
     that seemed patently bizarre, the press's duty was to report 
     it straight, put it out unspun for public consumption. If it 
     proved to be a lie, it would presumably be answered; and the 
     answer would be duly reported.
       Cater demonstrated that this rosy theory took inadequate 
     account of McCarthy's unscrupulousness, or of the speed with 
     which a resounding lie tends to outrun humdrum truth. Whether 
     as an original perception or as the articulation of a 
     consensus, Cater's book helped kill the cult of journalistic 
     ``objectivity''; and it was good riddance. If, today, a U.S. 
     senator asserts that the sky was blue on Labor Day, a 
     diligent reporter will check the back weather reports. And if 
     it was actually gray, you can bet that fact will be reported 
     early in the story, under the convention that Stephen Hess of 
     the Brookings Institution calls ``corrective journalism.'' 
     And even the excesses of corrective journalism are a vast 
     improvement over the abuses of the rules of ``objectivity.''
       In short, it was Douglass Cater, more than anyone else, who 
     changed the rules of American journalism, and very much for 
     the better. And that was only one of perhaps a dozen 
     distinctions that made him one of the best of a fine 
     generation.

                          ____________________