War challenges virtually every other institution of society - the justice and equity of its economy, the adequacy of its political systems, the energy of its productive plant, the bases, wisdom and purposes of its foreign policy.
The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.
On the whole, it seems to me that probably the American press is doing a better job of this mediation, so to speak, between the people and the administration than the press of any other country.
The people have only a very vague direct power. They have the power of voting against the administration, again after its decisions have been taken; but they have no way of getting into the question of policy-making, decision-making, except insofar as the vague forces and pressures of public debate and public opinion have their impact on the President. The President still has to decide. He can't go to the people and ask them to decide for him; he has to make the decision. In that sense he was condemned to be a dictator.
Any two public institutions appealing to the same set of people are apt to appeal in the same terms.
President tends to feel that he cannot go beyond what the public will support him in doing. So he tries not to decide what is the best course so much as to decide what the people will support.
I think it's very difficult to make any single, generalized statements about the press, of course the press is such varied character and quality and to the different media and so on, so a generalization is very difficult.
If you go out to some of the big cities in California, and you look at some of the monopoly situations out there, the thing is just shocking. And the tendency, and I think it's bound to be, unless it is carefully combated by those who are managing the papers, the tendency of a monopoly situation is bound to be to damp everything down to a common level.
