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["J B" <jtbridgers AT earthlink.net>]

Yes, an inspiring editorial.
Here is some background information I have on Gordan Sinclair and the 
editorial.

----
It was 1973, and the United States of America probably appeared closer to 
crumbling than it had at any time since the War Between the States. 

After nearly 10 years of fruitless combat, the U.S. was bailing out of the 
Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the influence of the Soviet Union was growing 
throughout the Third World. 

Fueled by defense spending for the war and the country's increasing 
dependence on foreign oil, inflation wrecked the value of the American 
dollar. Unemployment rates soared. 

The U.S. Senate's Watergate hearings almost daily revealed new and ever-more 
convincing evidence of crimes and cover-ups within the administration of 
President Richard Nixon. In an unrelated, but no less disgusting, scandal, 
Vice President Spiro Agnew faced income tax evasion charges. 

Revolted by news out of every place from Saigon to the Oval Office, Americans 
became increasingly disenchanted with their own country. The counter-culture 
of the late 1960s took hold in the popular media. 

Anger at the war came back upon returning service people. Veterans were 
described as baby burners and were harassed at their work places, when they 
could find a place to work. In the halls of Congress, draft dodgers were 
described as the real heroes of Vietnam. 

Drug use was commonplace. Some intellectuals advocated drugs as viable 
alternatives to organized religion and as reasonable ways to cope with the 
demoralizing effects of living in this country. 

In their media and in international confabs, other industrialized nations 
alternately laughed at and excoriated the U.S. 

That was what it was like on the morning of June 5, 1973 when veteran 
Canadian broadcaster Gordon Sinclair awoke and turned on his radio. He was 
greeted by the voice of a fellow media pundit predicting the end of U.S. 
influence over international affairs. 

Sinclair turned off the radio and flipped on his television. He turned to a 
U.S. channel and heard reports about tornadoes wrecking the Midwest, then 
more about Watergate, Vietnam and bad economic indicators. Next, he opened 
his local Toronto newspaper and read more reports about the decline and fall 
of the U.S. 

He mulled over the various doom-saying media as he ate breakfast and drove to 
work at Station CFRB, where he broadcast a five-minute editorial called Let's 
Be Personal and a news program. 

The more he brooded on reports about the U.S., the angrier he became. 
Sinclair, then 73, had been around the world five times between 1922 and 1948 
as a newspaper and radio reporter. It seemed that wherever he went, there 
were people from the United States doing something for somebody else. 

Grain shipments from the U.S. got the Soviet Union through a famine in the 
1920s. After leading the allies to victory in World War II, the U.S. helped 
rebuild war-ravaged Europe and Asia in the 1940s. U.S. aid restored the 
economies of former enemies Germany and Japan. 

Less than 30 years later, the U.S. was in a Cold War with the Soviet Union 
and China while the rest of its former allies sneered as American political 
and economic influence in the world seemed to be sliding into history's trash 
heap. 

But Sinclair wasn't ready to broadcast an obituary for his neighbors to the 
south. He'd spent too many years watching and reporting on the U.S. bouncing 
back from catastrophes like the Great Depression and the attack on Pearl 
Harbor. 

And, when Americans came back, they not only did it by themselves, but they 
pulled along anyone else who was in the same fix. 

Admiration for the U.S. and anger at the world's attitude towards it 
continued to build within Sinclair as he sat down at his desk and put fingers 
to his typewriter keys. Then, the admiration and anger started his fingers 
working. Within 19 minutes of furious typing, he had the script for his 
editorial written. He went into the broadcasting booth and began the 
editorial at 11:45 a.m.



At first, his baritone voice was modulated in the slow cadence common among 
newscasters. But, his voice picked up speed as he talked. Near the end, by 
the time he got to the sentence, "I can name you 5,000 times when Americans 
raced to the help of other people in trouble," he all but spat the words into 
the microphone. 

"Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in 
trouble?" he asked sarcastically. "I don't think there was outside help even 
during the San Francisco earthquake." 

Twice, he predicted that the U.S. would overcome Watergate, Vietnam and the 
economic woes and rebound into world leadership. 

"When the Americans get out of this bind, as they will, who could blame them 
if they said 'the hell with the rest of the world,''' he barked. 

In less than five minutes, the editorial was finished. After completing the 
newscast, Sinclair gave the editorial's script to his secretary and asked her 
to file it under an appropriate heading. She read it over, wrote The 
Americans across the top and put it in a file. 

Reaction from the other side of the border was growing by the time the 
two-page editorial was filed. Sinclair's words led demoralized Americans to 
take another look at themselves. For the first time in years, many of them 
liked what they saw. 

Within minutes after the broadcast, a radio station in Buffalo, N.Y., just 
across the border from Toronto, was calling CFRB to get permission to repeat 
the editorial. Other stations throughout the U.S. quickly picked up on the 
Buffalo broadcast. By the next day, Sinclair, a legend in Canadian 
broadcasting but little known beyond the southern shore of Lake Erie, was a 
U.S. celebrity. 

"The phones just kept ringing," recalls J. Lyman Potts, a co-worker and 
friend of Sinclair. "Nothing like this had happened before or since." 

Potts acted as Sinclair's agent as the requests for rebroadcasts and personal 
appearances began coming in from the U.S. Unauthorized, pirated records of 
the editorial circulated throughout the country. Singing cowboy and 
conservative political activist Tex Ritter called for permission to make an 
authorized version. Ritter's version included a prologue in which he credited 
Sinclair. 

Eventually, Sinclair recorded his own version, with the Battle Hymn of the 
Republic as background music. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but 
Potts contends that the pirated versions cut into the potential sales of the 
real one. 

Sinclair died after a heart attack on May 17, 1984. He lived long enough to 
see the U.S. begin to rebound, but not long enough to see such events as the 
breakup of the Soviet Union and the record highs on the U.S. stock market. 

Again, Americans are bracing up the weak Asian economies. Again, U.S. troops 
are crusading to protect Europeans. Again, relief workers from here are 
helping victims of everything from a Central American hurricane to an African 
famine. 

If he were still alive, Sinclair would have lots of reasons to say "I told 
you so" in another editorial. "He just might have done that," Potts says. "I 
know he'd still be standing up for Americans." 

About the only paragraph of Sinclair's editorial that didn't prove to be true 
was the last one. In his conclusion, the broadcaster complained that the U.S. 
Red Cross was broke after disaster relief efforts during the first six months 
of 1973. "and nobody, but nobody has helped." 

Sinclair belied that sentence himself. He donated the profits from his 
recording to this country's Red Cross. Then, he backed off from suing the 
producers of one of the pirated versions of the editorial, because the 
producers agreed to also donate their profits. Like the rest of the nation, 
the American Red Cross got Sinclair's help when it was needed the most.

-- 

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