Yes, I called him an icon, and I am damned proud of it. Sam Donaldson is icon of my youth, someone I remember watching as a kid. This back before my time in the political world. Back before I even knew the difference between a Liberal and a Conservative. A man who can be traced back to the days of Television, when there still an ounce of integrity.
The Washington Post reports:
Whatever else he accomplished in his 41 years at ABC News, Sam Donaldson knows he’ll be remembered mainly for his bellowing voice.
“I guess it’ll be on my tombstone: ‘He yelled at Ronald Reagan,’ ” Donaldson says.
Now, with little fanfare, the 74-year-old newsman is retiring from full-time work next week. “Some people leave the business bitter, feeling they’ve been cast out, or they hang on too long,” he says. “And I don’t ever want to get in that position.”
There was one thing in this story, that I really wanted to comment on:
Donaldson’s detractors viewed him as a liberal blowhard, and there were certainly times when his mouth outran his brain. Donaldson encouraged Colin Powell to run for president in 1996 and kept predicting that he would. Five days after the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted, Donaldson said of Bill Clinton: “If he’s not telling the truth, he’s done. . . . I think his presidency is numbered in days. This isn’t going to drag out. We’re not going to be here three months from now talking about this.
You might be shocked to know this, but I never noticed Sam Donaldson acting like a “Liberal Blowhard.” If he ever did when I was watching, he was not very obvious about it. Unlike the anchors of today; like Keith Olbermann, who bellows his political opinion out, like it is the Gospel according to St Luke or something to that effect. For the record, I never heard or saw Sam Donaldson getting on National Television and screaming, “Shut the Hell up!” Like Keith did.
I think it goes back to a word that I used in the beginning of this Blog Entry; Integrity. It is something that the America Media needs to get back to, in a very big way.
Others: Michael Calderone’s Blogs and The New Republic