There was a time when Ted Koppel was a well-regarded journalist. The longtime host of Nightline on ABC is now in his 80s and plying his trade on the CBS Sunday Morning program. He delivered a segment that shows how far he has drifted from the days of being a respected journalist, descending now into the familiar fever swamps of contemporary news outlets.
Koppel hosts his recent piece from the battlefield of Gettysburg, and yes - he does in fact frame a looming Trump presidency in the Civil War framework. But Koppel, while delivering his trademarked stern and derious delivery, presents what he describes as “A war on memory”, the hyperbole tempered by the fact he is at a wartime theater. Throughout his piece he is severely lacking in perspective as he fails to step back and analyze his premise. It is rather disheartening to see this once esteemed newsman operating like our contemporary activist journalists.
It takes no time for Ted to lapse into the melodrama. He opens with a shot of a statue of Robert E. Lee, which he describes with, “Despite his crushing defeat, Lee looms majestically over the battlefield.” Ted sounds clearly bothered by this seeming paradox, and he launches from there.
Next he speaks with a man with a curious title; Chris Gwinn, Gettysburg’s Chief of Interpretation Education. The local expert explains, almost angrily, that the persistent memory in the area is that the war had been a noble fight, and today a moral equivalency exists. Do not expect him to flesh out this concept, you just have to buy that people these days…I don’t know, want a return to slavery…we guess? But Mr. Gwinn, a glorified park ranger, is saying all of the proper things in regards to this war on memory, so he gets positioned here as a political expert.
Then Koppel segues to Virginia, where he spotlights that a pair of schools are in the process of being re-renamed. In Shenandoah County they are returning the names of Stonewall Jackson and General Lee to these schools after they had been removed during the emotional fervor of the 2020 Black Lives Matter “Summer of Love”. This decision is looked at with contempt by Koppel as another example of his “war on memory”, even as he misses that he is 180 degrees out of phase.
He laments the disregard of history, but those 2020 name changes were precisely that - a denial of history. The schools were renamed with non-triggering names, like so many other institutions that year, along with the ripping down of monuments commemorating that era, like the Lee statue that Koppel tsk-tsked at his opening. The attempt at that time was to whitewash history, where it went so far as to target monuments and namesakes of our Founders because some had been slave owners.
That reality interrupts Koppel’s main thrust in his segment, which is to ultimately tar Donald Trump with historical references. He turns back to Gwinn, who then goes on to mention seeing the Confederate flag brandished by some of the January 6 protestors: “They achieved something that Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia never even got close to. They`re physically in the halls of Congress with the same battle flag.”
And there we are – January 6 is on par with the Civil War, and thus so is Donald Trump. Koppel next equates celebrations seen at the start of the conflict with what has been seen at the rallies Trump holds on the campaign trail. Yes – he has devolved to this level of hysteria.
And yet, when the Civil War began with the surrender of Fort Sumter in 1861, there was throughout much of the land wild celebration and no inkling of the price to be paid. Wars rarely begin in a climate of foresight. So could the chest beating at a political rally provide real insight as to what could happen in the event of another Trump defeat?
By this point we have Ted Koppel going from a forced premise to a completely muddled conclusion. He mentions that Trump’s critics are fearful of what will happen to the country with a Trump victory, but then he also states there is a real danger to be had of violence if there is a Trump defeat. So…we are doomed either way? Then, supposedly, the only other solution would be incarcerating Trump so he cannot run for office, but then this will surely lead to a violent uprising, as he interviewed a man at a rally intoning that an armed reaction is likely.
It sure sounds like no matter what happens we are assured of falling back into a new civil conflict. This entire delivery from the newsman is astounding, as he pretty lays out a future in which we have no hope, based on a history he hoped to eliminate. One takeaway from this report is that Ted Koppel does not seem doomed to repeat his former journalism respectability.