[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
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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.
____________________