Let's say you own a candy store. For years, the store has been a viable enterprise. It was worth holding on to through cycles of bust because the boom times always returned sooner or later. Part of what made the store worth hanging on to was the fact that it had become so much a part of people's lives that it was half a commercial and half a civic institution. That comforting familiarity was one reason you knew the store would pull through hard times. That, and the certainty that hard times always came to an end.

Sure enough, another bad stretch hits the store. But this time, economic recession is compounded by a new trend: Rival candy stores are giving away treats and other stuff for free! All the neighborhood candy stores are hit. They all lose money and customers to the new "free" candy stores. Your certainty that the cycle will come to an end is being assaulted by loud local gossip to the effect that this crisis is unprecedented, and that the free stores are a revolution in candy.

What do you do? Do you close a store that during its almost 80 years of existence has become a neighborhood institution? Do you try to sell it at precisely the moment when the very fact of putting it up for sale is the strongest argument against buying it? Do you ignore decades of experience of cycles of boom and bust and believe the hysterical cries announcing the end of retail as you know it? Or do you calm yourself, take a look around and notice that all the nearby stores are doing badly but that yours is doing the worst of all? In that case, instead of closing the store, you might replace your brother-in-law, whom you hired to run the store because you've known him forever, because you appreciated his ingratiating style and felt flattered by the fact that he sounded so smart in public and had lots of glamorous friends. So what if your sister won't talk to you for a while; she'll get over it.

It is scandalous that the Post Co. has decided to sell Newsweek before replacing the editor under whom the magazine has foundered so badly. Can you imagine the Sulzbergers doing that? Murdoch? Can you imagine any group of people who have, as the Grahams are legendarily said to have, journalism running through their veins preserving an individual over a valuable and viable journalistic institution?

Newsweek is bleeding money. By every law of capitalism, Jon Meacham should have been replaced. And yet rather than replacing him, Mr. Meacham's overlords allowed him to strip the magazine, precious component by precious component. They stood by while he bought out and laid off some of the magazine's best editors and writers, reduced the magazine's guaranteed circulation base in order to attract a more exclusive class of advertiser-a fancy accounting gimmick that had the effect of  alienating advertisers looking for a large, guaranteed circulation base-and completely transformed the magazine's decades-old identity, a gimmick that had the effect of bewildering advertisers eager to match their product or service with a magazine's familiar identity.

AS NEWSWEEK WENT under, Mr. Meacham went higher. The quarterly financial reports brought news of impending ruin, and yet there he was, night after night, beaming before the cameras on every talk show and comedy show you could think of. It was as if Mr. Meacham had decided that rather than save the ship from going under, he would turn it into his own private submarine. His editorial policy mostly amounted to his publishing famous friends and acquaintances, whose shopworn names did nothing for the magazine's fortunes but everything for Mr. Meacham's expanding quid pro quo. There is nothing wrong with being a political animal: on the contrary. But Mr. Meacham's deft maneuverings reaped him recognition and acclaim while his magazine tumbled toward irrelevancy.

Full disclosure: My wife worked at Newsweek for many years and she was one of the two dozen or so people Mr. Meacham laid off. The fact that she worked at Newsweek was why I never took after Mr. Meacham, as was the fact that he laid her off. But another reason I never criticized Mr. Meacham in print was that I had high hopes for the new format he introduced last May. The instant denunciations of him when he explained that he, in effect, wanted to create a counterpoint to the Internet and run longer, more reflective essays in the magazine made me bristle. The American public is restless by definition. It is only a matter of time before people flock to the Internet to find an antidote to the worst and most undeveloped aspects of the Internet, one of them being amateurishly written "news" that is as inaccurate as it is superficial. What appeared to be Mr. Meacham's daring seemed right on the mark.

Indeed, in light of The Atlantic's rising profitability, Mr. Meacham's vision for Newsweek now seems prescient. The Atlantic, borrowing in part from The Economist, has turned itself into exactly the right blend of long-form and short-burst journalism that Mr. Meacham seemed to want. And Mr. Meacham once had more resources than The Atlantic. He hit the ground with overseas bureaus, and seasoned Washington reporters like Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, and established commentators like Jonathan Alter and Fareed Zakaria. For a while, even Mr. Meacham's boyish poise on camera seemed to bode well; his self-effacing thoughtfulness fit the anti-intellectual atmosphere even as it seemed to elevate the discourse. The guffaws that greeted him when he threw down the gauntlet to the new-media age struck me as automatic responses to a successful media personality and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

But Mr. Meacham proceeded to hamstring his own vision and create the magazine in his own image. He hobbled Newsweek with star-struck careerism on the one hand and self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectuality on the other. In his lead essays, Mr. Meacham babbled inexplicably on about religion while the world burned and churned around him, or flaunted "contrarian" positions-e.g., America is essentially a conservative country-that had been tested countless times before and were uncontroversial in the extreme. (His most recent adventure in thinking: "America's failure to commemorate the war dead has a corrosive effect on our country." Wild.)

At the same time, Mr. Meacham was dropping names left and right. You scratched your head when Mr. Meacham informed readers in the Newsweek issue guest-edited by Stephen Colbert that he knew Mr. Colbert's in-laws in South Carolina. If there is anything that puts off the contemporary reader, it is the feeling that rather than being invited into something, he is being waved at from an exclusive cocktail party on the other side of a wall. By the time you read Mr. Meacham's fawning review of Christopher Buckley's latest book, in which Mr. Meacham proclaimed his intimate friendship with Mr. Buckley, you began to fear that Newsweek was disappearing into its editor in chief's head. He seemed to be running his own private dinner party, publishing only his famous pals. What James Baker was doing in the magazine was anybody's guess. Mr. Meacham even commissioned an essay from his friend Barbara Bush extolling the movie Precious. Yes, Barbara Bush. She loved Precious.

IT TURNED OUT that the slower, more reflective pace of the magazine actually just gave Mr. Meacham more time to spend trimming his sails outside the office. You began to see that the boyish poise on camera was actually an opportunistic blankness, interrupted by "thoughtful" pauses and punctuated by an occasional smug smack of the lips, as though he could not resist planting one on himself in gratitude for being ... himself. And that earnest cock of the head! It recalled a seabird listening for the next half-eaten loaf of bread to fall off the media garbage barge. Such eager intellectual servility is no doubt why Jon Stewart enjoys having Mr. Meacham on his show. Mr. Meacham performs seriousness the way Mr. Stewart performs a pundit performing seriousness. And why in heaven's name did Mr. Meacham think that allowing Mr. Stewart to mock his magazine when it was on its knees was going to help it? The truth was that allowing Newsweek to be mocked was Mr. Meacham's ticket to The Daily Show. 

In his Monday Times column, David Carr presented the conventional wisdom about Newsweek, which is that time has passed it by. The very idea of a news "weekly" is obsolete, people want instantaneous news, etc. (On its Tumblr account, Newsweek misread Mr. Carr's article as an attack on Mr. Meacham and defended him, in the process endorsing Mr. Carr's argument that Newsweek is fated to fail.) The fact is that in the midst of the worst advertising recession in perhaps 80 years, and the worst general economic circumstances in about as long a time, any kind of prediction about where any type of business is going is irresponsible. In the case of The New York Times, I would pay several hundred dollars a year to read it, but one aspect of the paper that I cannot take seriously is its reporting on other news entities. At a time when The Times is nearly hysterical over The Wall Street Journal's competition, when the paper has anxiously postponed the implementation of a paywall again and again, when panicking editors are driving their reporters crazy, the expectation that The Times can report objectively on the economic side of the news business is irrational. On the unconscious level, The Times wants every competing news organization to fail. And by this point, even the smallest news Web site is The Times' rival.

So much proclamation of print media's imminent doom is driven by self-interest, whether on the part of rival news organizations, threatened establishment journalists, established journalists who just want to stay in the game or jealous bloggers. What is truly happening is much less certain. Almost two years ago, the banks were sinking, the automakers were sinking, the country was sliding into a second Great Depression. Well, the banks are flourishing, the automakers are doing fine, more and more people are managing to get by. One man's hysteria, it seems, is another man's stock option.

But the Grahams, like just about everyone else in journalism, have succumbed to the loudest voices. Never mind that Newsweek still has the vast resources of a storied magazine that has operated effectively for nearly a century on several continents. David Carr, The Times' very own Oswald Spengler, says that according to history, the magazine is dead. Therefore, it is dead. Would it have made a difference if the Grahams had, for example, not bought Slate and then proceeded to blur Slate into Newsweek by blending the tone of the two magazines and sharing writers between them? Or if they had had the cojones to beg Tina Brown to take over Newsweek? (She would've doubled its paid circulation in six months.) It doesn't matter. Don't ask questions.

Strange how the mainstream news business is the only realm in American life where the Calvinist doctrine of predestination is alive and flourishing. That must be the secret of Arianna Huffington's success. She believes in free will! On the other hand, a neighborhood candy store makes more money than the HuffPo. In love and business, the fundamentals still apply. What a world-historical shame. By the time the media moguls realize that they have been listening to Chicken Littles driven by ulterior motives, there will be nothing left in the media world worth either buying or selling.

editorial@observer.com

"Anthony and Kevin put politics aside and focused on the City's needs in DC," Weiner's spokesman John Collins said via email.

The meeting came to light after Sheekey’s schedule was made public earlier this week.

On a related topic: Tom Robbins of the Village Voice went through the schedule and noted that Sheekey met with Lally Weymouth, the daughter of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, three times.

Robbins also noted that during the buzz about Bloomberg possibly running for president, Sheekey met with Michael Whouley, a “Democratic get-out-the-vote great,” and David Norcross, who at the time was head of the Republican National Committee’s rules committee.

Ms. Felsenthal started reporting her unauthorized biography of Graham in the early '90s, while Graham herself was working on the memoir that would become 1998's Personal History. According to Ms. Felsenthal, many of the people she interviewed for her book—Power, Privilege and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story, published by Putnam in 1993—said that Ms. Graham had recently stopped by to do the very same thing.

Ms. Felsenthal's interview subjects—folks like Time magazine bigwig Richard Clurman, Washington Post exec Mark Meagher, and Newsweek editor Lester Bernstein—told her that Ms. Graham had come to them with a full crew of research assistants and asked them questions about her life.

Based on what they told her, Ms. Felsenthal concluded that "it was as if she were not confident of getting the facts of her own life right, as if she did not trust her memory or her interpretation, or her insights."

Ms. Felsenthal, whose most recent book, Clinton in Exile, is about Bill Clinton's life after the presidency, said in an interview this afternoon: "I knew I was talking to the right people because they were also people that Kay Graham was also interviewing about her own life."

Here as I gleaned them are the secrets of Buffett's genius:

1. Simplicity. He learned when he was young that he had a highly circumscribed "circle of competence," as he likes to say—basically, the love and study of good businesses. He stayed within that circle, forever. His judgments are filled with homespun simple analogies. "Leave yourself a margin of error. Don't try and drive a 9800 pound truck over a bridge that can only support 10,000 pounds."

2. Study, concentration. The thing Buffett likes to do most is read. He spends 80 percent of his time reading, company reports and journalism. He is a kind of luftmensch. Indeed, 45 years ago, his neighbor turned down an opportunity to give him $10,000 (a stake now worth $400 million) because he couldn't see giving money "to a guy who doesn't get up and go to work in the morning."

3. Humor. He loves to laugh at himself. He grabs every opportunity Rose gives him to do so.

4. Generosity. Many times Rose shows Buffett reaching out to others. He offered the neighbor an in on his investment company because he likes the guy's kids. He offered Katharine Graham companies he would have bought himself because he adored her so much. The third show, tonight, is about Buffett's recent gift to the Gates foundation. So brimming with generosity—and life has repaid him. "The gift is to the giver," as Whitman said.

5. The worship of women. Though psychologically incurious himself, he has, per the Jungian phrase, a "highly developed anima." He seems to respond to women more than men. This has led him to close relationships with some of the most sophisticated women on the planet. He seems to have fallen in love with Kay Graham, and made it his project to build her confidence as a manager—and his $10 million stake, picked up in the Nixon years, when the Republicans declared war, is now worth $1.5 billion. His late wife Suzie reveals herself—Rose says he got the only interview she ever did on TV, in 2004—as a woman of enormous depth and sensitivity (now reflected in her daughter) who had the wisdom to nurture Buffett when he chose to sit in his room and read all day long, and could make fun of him. The best line in the first show is when she tells Rose that her father told her when Buffett came a-wooing, "He has a heart of gold." Then she throws in, "No pun intended."

6. Pleasure-seeking. Buffett has always done what he most liked to do, and avoided all things that he disliked. "I knew what I enjoyed." Everything from delivering newspapers as a boy to hobbies of playing the ukulele and bridge and telling corny anecdotes.

Adding all this up, the one word I'd choose for Buffett is childlike. There is a naive and wondering quality to his statements. As his late wife says, he couldn't take care of himself. His humor is often cornpone, his psychological judgments seem credulous and boyish. And the joy he derives from his work, it's like a kid in a sandbox.

This past week, almost every female journalist alive (all 12 of them), as well as Howard Kurtz, face-masked Maureen Dowd and her new book, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. There have been profiles, reviews, links, excerpts, items and personal reminiscences of Ms. Dowd; most of them took care to note the flames on her head. Fiery redheaded flamethrower that she is, Ms. Dowd also miraculously timed a devastating Judy Miller column with the book’s release, sending Andrea Peyser into a tizzy and inspiring feline-on-feline fantasies for lads across the land (or across the five boroughs). It’s been MoDo’s month.

At this saturation point, it’s nearly impossible to separate Maureen Dowd, woman and columnist, from Maureen Dowd’s book on women and men. Or at least it’s hard to keep in mind that Are Men Necessary? isn’t the cry “Men won’t screw smart women—shout-out to my girls Michi and Alessandra!” scrawled over and over and over again.

The line that bloodthirsty critics have jumped on is “being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.” It’s actually just a throwaway in a very odd, occasionally entertaining mish-mash of politics and sex, biology and Cosmopolitan-ology, gravity and wit, insight and carelessness.

Ms. Dowd begins, “I don’t understand men”—and despite the easy belief that she’s angry at them, the book remains true to that befuddlement. She discourses on dating and feminism, switches to the Bush administration’s feminized (read: catty) governing methods, segues to white men on TV, then to alpha women, Desperate Housewives and Enron, and back to alpha women who write newspaper columns. Suddenly, two lovely tributes: Katharine Graham and Mary McGrory.

She spirits us away from these grande dames to the gray, dingy halls of sex-chromosome researchers, who argue that men will soon become extinct in maybe 8,000 years (hence Are Men Necessary?)—which only rivals in tedium the whole theory that modern men are whores because of some biological, animal need to spread their seed, and women are faithful doormats because they’re just trying to get pregnant. Ms. Dowd writes about that too, as well as bonobo monkeys. I don’t understand why anyone finds this helpful (comforting?) in the age of Google-stalking and trans-Atlantic marriage, but maybe that’s my underdeveloped scientific lobe talking—I am a woman, after all.

A stopover passage on orgasms, Marilyn Monroe, etc., is very amusing. Interspersed are baroque speeches on love and sex from The New Republic’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. They’re kind of amazing. (“The simplifications of the Darwinists take all the fun out of promiscuity,” he muses, and probably sits down to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) Then we’re flying off to Hearst Tower, women’s magazines, Helen Gurley Brown, men’s magazines, Ed Needham, the Catholic Church, Saudi Arabia, Barbie, plastic surgery, more plastic surgery, drugs and—thankfully!—politics.

What lingers, perhaps because the last section is the strongest, is the conclusion that even despite her rants on The Rules, this columnist is essential as a political writer in these dark times. One may wish she’d be more serious, but there’s no denying the significance of her polemics, the emotions aroused by her lacerating, mocking wordplay, or the secret pleasure readers take in a writer getting as worked up as they have after sludging through the anxiety of page 1 to what is by then the melancholy of the Op-Ed page.

She doesn’t have it easy: “I’m often asked how I can be so ‘mean’—a question Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn’t get.” Ms. Dowd isn’t attacked simply because she’s the only woman on the Op-Ed page, as she suggests—though I’m sure she’s treated differently in not-so-subtle, creepy ways. She’s attacked because her humor and vulnerability open her up to emotion-based criticism—some of it unfair, some of it unsurprising. When anyone bares herself so publicly, the public is going to feel hunky-dory about giving it right back.

And while women’s writing has trended toward the personal and self-absorbed, Ms. Dowd’s public airings of her private concerns in a serious publication are more jarring. She’s confused, not about Condi and Rummy and Iraq and North Korea, but about dating. She’s supposed to be the one who makes sense of things! readers grumble, blowing bubbles in their cold morning coffee.

So what exactly is she perplexed about? She claims that girlfriends have called to borrow her old copy of How to Catch and Hold a Man. (How old are these girlfriends?) She claims that in the 80’s, after feminism and all the failures of love that came with it, women realized they needed to brush up on their Scarlett O’Hara. She talks about a young friend who “tests” men on first dates. One chap says, “Now women are perfectly happy to be patronized.” “Girls are doing everything girls did prefeminism and post-feminism. No wonder everybody’s bumfuzzled,” Ms. Dowd writes.

Who’s she talking about? Is it forty- and fiftysomething women who are dating, such as herself? Or twentysomething women who are dating, such as some of her friends? Aren’t these two different generations? What’s bumfuzzling is that, though she’s attempted to make distinctions, she’s lumped together women raised with totally different expectations and ideals.

When she writes that a guy didn’t ask her out because he found her too intimidating, that’s perfectly believable. When she writes that young women play down that they went to Harvard, I find that surprising. Doesn’t elitism trump everything else these days? “Deep down, all men want the same thing: a virgin in a gingham dress,” some “famous man” tells her. I’m not sure many young men know what gingham is. What’s also disappointing is that Ms. Dowd doesn’t distinguish between intelligence and economic power. It’s convincing that a guy doesn’t want to make less than his partner, but it’s less persuasive that men wouldn’t ultimately want to be with someone they could actually talk to.

Generalizations, speculation … who knows? Not unlike the biological basis for bad relationships, all of this male-female analysis ultimately inspires a sort of anti-intellectualism well suited to the Bush years. Or at least a throwing up of hands. Because the real, deep, refreshingly gender-neutral stuff in Ms. Dowd’s book—narcissism as the cancer of our age, the idea that fear of intimacy comes down to a fear of infidelity—gets shoved aside for obvious cues and old barbs. Bachelorette-party T-shirts with “Mrs.” printed across the chest. Monica Lewinsky. Botox. Picking up the check.

Where is all of this—along with the “Modern Love” columns, He’s Just Not That Into You and much of chick lit—really getting us? The problem with Are Men Necessary? isn’t that Ms. Dowd didn’t do enough super-serious social research to get a coherent idea of the State of the Sexes. It’s that ultimately, because it feels better and reads funnier, what’s left are Men and Women, stick figures in their giant, glib, restrictive categories, with real humans and real ideas presumably somewhere else.

This entire over-generalized, gender-based-writing genre—massive enthusiastic stews of all-inclusive but aimless ideas—is exhausted, even if we keep looking to it for something illuminating. And so it makes sense that Ms. Dowd’s stunningly detailed passages about Mary McGrory and Katharine Graham so transcend those that are merely theoretical. McGrory and Graham were insecure and brazen, stylish and boyish, smart, kind, funny, shy, daring. They destroyed men, and were destroyed by them. They were like men, and unlike men. And vice versa.

In other words, McGrory and Graham possessed a whole bunch of particular qualities and flaws, even some that Ms. Dowd bemoaned in pages past. I don’t think she would dare to shove these dear friends into any category other than their very own. One wishes that the similarly complicated and venerable Maureen Dowd would always write about real people—stick to Hillary and Condi and Laura and Harriet—rather than phantom men and women, modern myths.

Suzy Hansen is a senior editor at The Observer.

Much of the media commentary on the late publisher fell into the category of "I knew Mrs. Graham, and let me tell you what she said to me the last time I was at her house for dinner–lest you, dear reader, have the slightest doubt how much she liked me." This sort of thing isn't very helpful, although in slobbering puppies it is at least endearing. As one big-time media personality observed to me, "There were times when I wondered whether Kay Graham's death wasn't all about whether she liked Diane Sawyer better than Barbara Walters." For those of us who admire neither, the question is moot–and uninteresting.

Not having known Mrs. Graham, I can't comment except to say that, from this distance, she seemed an admirable, balanced person who handled inherited responsibility and advantage just about as well as could be. All in all, I would have to venture the opinion, strictly personal, that Washington has been more fortunate in the proprietorship of its newspaper of record than we in New York have been in ours, certainly in the last decade. Considering how little it has to work with in the way of material, all in all, by comparison with The New York Times –namely the infinite variety of New York versus the limited menu on offer in quotidian D.C.– The Washington Post is a remarkably good and interesting paper. If you don't believe me, read The International Herald Tribune for a couple of weeks and compare the stuff from The Post with the stuff from The Times .

This may change, of course. Indeed, I bet that it will. I'm a big fan of Howell Raines, who I expect will restore some of the old-fashioned Southern gumption that, for whatever reason, has been an important part of The Times ' legacy. One thing I hope Mr. Raines will do is restore some sense to the obituary page, which has fallen victim to Little Arthur Sulzberger's strategy of becoming a "national newspaper." As things now stand, a person can lead a long, full New York life, with a real impact for good or not on his or her fellow Gothamites, and receive not a tittle of recognition in The Times . But let such a person have participated for 10 minutes in 1967 in a political rally in Kuala Lumpur, and lo and behold–three column inches!

Mrs. Graham's obituary in The Times was, of course, lengthy and memorable, as was her memorial service in Washington's National Cathedral. Being a student of obsequies, I followed it on the Internet and noted much of interest. The seating was especially peculiar–Mayor Rudy right up front!–and did not speak well for the placement skills of whoever will succeed Mrs. G. at the head of what all agree is, and presumably will continue to be, Georgetown's most coveted dinner table.

I thought the choice of hymns interesting, because it dovetailed with other funerals that, sadly, I have attended recently and suggests the presence of a sort of osmosis in funeral programming–an extension of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," if you will, that seems to say a good deal about society's state of mind at a given moment.

For example, a couple of years ago, when the Dow Jones was steaming north–when "dot-com" was the rubric of the day and money grew on trees in a nation barreling ahead on the back of the sovereign dollar like a cowpoke busting into town on Saturday night–every funeral I attended featured the Parry-Elgar setting of Blake's "Jerusalem," with its stirring closing affirmation: "I shall not cease from mental fight / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land."

I found this an interesting choice, especially since, in the preponderance of the decedents whose lives we were celebrating with lusty voice, the closest they'd come to the unsleeping sword was the pen with which they'd endorsed the trust-fund checks that furnished their Palm Beach villas. But it was a bully, confident time, remember, and people were full enough of themselves to program "Jerusalem" without feeling a bit hypocritical. It was a time when we felt ourselves to be quite up to the task of doing God's work, thank you very much. Hence: "And did those feet in ancient time … ," etc., etc.

Nowadays, you don't get "Jerusalem." Things are different now. Layoffs. Retirement plans under water (the revelation that there are widely distributed man-in-the-street 401(k) mutual funds buying into loans syndicated by the likes of Chase's Jimmy Lee is a notion that is absolutely appalling to me, or to anyone else with enough knowledge of the securities business to grasp that the public must be treated with a modicum of ethical decency if the great, greasy Limpopo River that carries fat fees and bonuses to Wall Street is to continue to flow unchecked). Collapse in the telecom and dot-com sectors. The Florida electoral hangover. So many 1998 constituents of American exceptionalism are now in a headlong tumble from their financial and psychological highs that it reminds one of that famous graphic presentation of Napoleon's advance on, and retreat from, Moscow.

Not a good time for "Jerusalem," really. Time instead for "America the Beautiful," which is the funeral hymn of choice these days. "God shed His grace on thee"–meaning America. Three years ago, the people singing that verse would have been mentally paraphrasing it "God shed His grace on me," and I'm sure some still do. But fewer. Times have changed. When we feel we can handle ourselves, we sing "Jerusalem." When we think we need help, we go to "America the Beautiful," which affirms that we are blessed among nations, but admits that we could use a little help.

Such reflections were interrupted by one of those rare moments that connoisseurs of contradictions-in-terms live for. Within the compass of the same service, Ben Bradlee, Mrs. Graham's Watergate editor, spoke of how a great newspaper shines light on the darker corners of society … which is all very true. But–whaddya know!–within the same quarter-hour there slithered out of exactly such a dark corner none other than Henry Kissinger, to eulogize the woman whose proprietorial forthrightness had been the instrument responsible for bringing down the anti-Constitutional regime near whose evil-oozing epicenter Henry the K. lurked like a Miltonic succubus. To be exposed to a speech by Mr. Kissinger is to be coated with an aerosol of self-serving moral and political hypocrisy, so naturally there were many brows being wiped as he went on in his characteristic coarse, egotistical fashion ("Intimacy did not end with the exercise of power"), although the brow-swabbers will doubtless say it was the heat.

Kay Graham was a leader. She created, she begat and underwrote initiative. She instilled confidence in her troops to get on with the job.

Her passing reminds us of how short a supply of leadership we have in this country right now.

On May 3, 1945, the writer Dashiell Hammett wrote to Lillian Hellman: "My elderly statesman advice to you on the new President and international, as well as domestic, affairs is to wait and see before you start shivering. He's not likely to be a great man … but he could turn out to be an able one."

Hammett was speaking of Harry Truman, just as this column has counseled the same with respect to George W. Bush. But I am beginning to worry, quite seriously. It has nothing to do with Mr. Bush's policy vs. someone else's; the nature of politics today has made that pointless. It's about leadership, about those collective emanations of presence and eloquence and character and intelligence that leaders display, but that the new President has shown scant evidence of possessing in his six months in office. Like others, I had hoped to find another Truman, but I fear that all there may be is just another Bush, and one of those was already plenty.

It wasn't the first time someone had said this sort of thing to my wife, but it left her unsettled. On the drive home she thought that the entire universe–or our universe of the privileged and cultured, anyway–could now be divided into two great camps. You were either a suckup or a fuckup. She was forever a fuckup, penalized for opening her mouth, doomed to underachieve.

Of course there have always been suckups and fuckups. Long before my wife discovered this divide, Jane Austen and Highlights magazine did, with Sense and Sensibility and Goofus and Gallant. What's new is how sharp this break is. In Sense and Sensibility , Elinor is the sensible sister noted for her "coolness of judgment," and Marianne is the romantic sister who gives herself over to her grief.

Marianne, who was sensitive, made out all right in the end. But in the new climate of everyone being a freelancer, of giant media corporations, of political correctness and good times, good times, good times, it seems like all the white marbles have rolled to one side of the box and all the black ones to the other side.

As Miramax did last year with Shakespeare in Love , and Dreamworks did this year with American Beauty , sucking up has never been so vital to moviemaking. There was something sad about the fact that Alan Ball, the American Beauty screenwriter, couldn't just put his dark vision out into the world. Instead, he was compelled by Dreamworks to put on a fake smile in the weeks leading up to the Oscar vote.

"I took him up [to a Santa Barbara festival] the night before to go to the tribute, got him seated in the front with all the board members, then took him to a private dinner [for Anthony Hopkins] at Citronella, where for two hours it was, 'This is Alan Ball from American Beauty ,'" publicist Bruce Feldman told the Los Angeles Times , estimating that 30 to 40 academy voters reside in Santa Barbara. "Look, if you show up at a dinner, it doesn't make anybody vote for the guy. But it's human nature to be influenced by personal contact. We figured five, 10 or 25 votes could make a difference. Who's to say that it wouldn't?"

There was something equally sad about the judgmental response in the media the night of Super Tuesday, after John McCain flared, "Please get out of here," to MSNBC correspondent Maria Shriver after she asked him an inane question. Aren't people allowed to be unpleasant now and then? Even to a celebrity? Sadder still was the nodding acceptance when Major League Baseball ordered Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker to undergo psychological treatment for his outburst about the No. 7 train. Yes, Mr. Rocker's comments were corrosive, even offensive. But some of his statements were also amusing, and in mandating tolerance, the cultural establishment seemed to have lost its own sense of tolerance, its respect for the dissatisfied mind with its crotchets and prejudices.

The division had worked its way down into the language. You could always tell a suckup from the line, "Sure, you can use my name with So-and-so's." But fuckups elicited a different cliché, a polite way of telling them to shut up: "I don't know if you want to go there."

My wife's idea settled over me like a black cloud.

Partly it was trying to figure out which side of the divide I fell on. I scored high on the suckup scale. I'd gone to Harvard (10 points for Princeton, 8 points for Harvard, 7 for Stanford and Brown, 6 for Yale, 2 for Penn, my wife's alma mater, and 0 for SUNY Stonybrook). I'd never smoked, didn't have a chemical problem. I knew how to do a hustler's lunch, had done some fawning to powerful editors in my time. But I also got major fuckup points. I undermined my fawning with uncomfortable comments (-3). I had never won a prize or fellowship that would get me to England (-8). At key moments in my career I'd seemed to sabotage myself by speaking out (-15). I often thought my boss was a moron (-8), I spent too much of my day thinking about how many kids died at Waco and the Administration's refusal to take any responsibility for them (-10).

You couldn't really be integrated. The heart of the idea was that suckup (seeing the glass half-full) and fuckup (half-empty) had once coexisted, fitfully, in the cultural bosom. But now they were being sorted out harshly.

There had been a time, for instance, when Bob Woodward, the Harvard Law School grad who had a suckup's view of power, and Carl Bernstein, the wildly undisciplined fuckup who had an imaginative understanding of power, had gotten along great, but now they had been sorted out sharply. Mr. Woodward occupied a prominent place in Washington society, was a ceaselessly hard worker still employed by The Washington Post , and wrote not-very-thoughtful bestsellers dependent on respectful relationships with powerful sources. Mr. Bernstein was a chronic screwup, bumping along on reputations both of his brilliance and his roving eye, a freelancer making money from talks about his days of yore at Sweet Briar College, UNLV, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, the University of Southern Mississippi, etc., and now and then putting out books that were completely off the radar screen.

That division was desperate and lamentable: Mr. Bernstein's view of the world was actually more interesting than Mr. Woodward's, but he had been cashiered. All the fuckups had been cashiered, and they knew it. When Mr. Rocker got a standing ovation this spring from 10,000 people at his first pitching appearance, it was pure resentment, us-against-them, silent majority versus meritocracy. The fuckups' backlash.

What has brought this about? Part of it was obviously the restructuring of employment. It used to be you could be a lifer; even if you were a weirdo you could take home a paycheck. Now people moved from job to job, there was tons of trained talent, and employment was an endless audition where you crowded the boss' door, hoping to stay on. How many people do you know who are gifted and competent but have trouble getting work because they are thought to be office poison or they don't smile, or are likely, in the choice words of one media mogul I know, to commit an auto-da-fé?

In the good old days there had also been more humility about work. People had other things in their lives–religion, community, counterculture. But for adults schooled in the wind sprints of the S.A.T.'s, work was everything. Ambition and success were wholly sanctified. This explains one of the most puzzling suckup phenomena of the Clinton years, the fact that virtually no one resigned from the Administration on principle, despite a hard rain of ethical and human-rights abuses. Taking a stand would mar your résumé, make you a doubtful hire. One man who has sought, retroactively, to derive credit for a principled walkout, George Stephanopoulos, actually made sure that he was safely employed by at least three prestigious institutions before opening his mouth.

Mr. Stephanopoulos had found work in the world of media-business-entertainment. A terrifying machinery seems to govern success in that world, and the sensitive person's heart shrivels at the prospect. The most extreme example of suckup and fuckup is Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Kurt the incredible talent and fuckup who understood that he was forever trapped by a world of celebrity and marketing, and opted out, choosing to annihilate himself rather than ride around in fancy cars forever. And Courtney, a tougher creature, who knew how to make herself over and clean herself up and could do the fake smile–Courtney whose brilliant, Kurt-influenced breakthrough album, Live Through This , gave way, in his absence, to a lusterless, overproduced second album whose name I forget.

The same changes have trickled down to the rest of us. Lately I ran into an Ivy League friend who is now a major editor. He said that he had recently faced a distinct choice between marketing his publication or putting more time into making it a better publication. He went to his publisher, who told him to do the marketing. Or there is Lillian Ross' shameful book about the New Yorker, Here But Not Here , which included fatuous passages about how Tina Brown was the second coming of William Shawn and what a warm and friendly family the Newhouses are. Few commented on these passages when the book was published (focusing instead on her love affair with Shawn). One who did pick up on them, former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, writing in The Observer , went on to excuse her because she was, after all, trying to keep her contract. Is that really any excuse for lying to a reader?

The most vivid description of the cultural transformation is contained in John Seabrook's new book, Nobrow, the Culture of Marketing–the Marketing of Culture . Mr. Seabrook is a writer for The New Yorker (and a friend), and his wry and surprisingly detached scenes of the brokering between editorial and advertising under former editor Tina Brown are so outrageous this book should be on the bedside tables of fuckups and suckups alike. For instance, there is the meeting between Mr. Seabrook, Ms. Brown and Steve Wynn, in which Ms. Brown is trying to get a conference scheduled at Mr. Wynn's Bellagio hotel even as she gets Mr. Seabrook to write a profile of the casino operator.

Mr. Seabrook turned that assignment down, but saw the suckup in him rise when he helped pull off a New Yorker "Next" conference, the bald purpose of which was to cultivate Michael Eisner, then of Disney, and various movie stars. "Whether you were a theater artist working for Disney, … a young computer artist working for Lucasfilm, or a writer for The New Yorker , your creative independence would no longer be staked on your resistance to the marketplace," Mr. Seabrook observes. "Your independence depended on your ability to attract a corporate patron. That's what we were doing here–patron whoring."

Still, Mr. Seabrook was somewhat appalled, and on the ride to the airport, he asked another writer what he thought of Mr. Eisner, expecting the man to say he's the Antichrist. When the writer said that Mr. Eisner is "brilliant," Mr. Seabrook notes, "My head snapped backward as though I'd been struck by a whip."

Mr. Seabrook purports to come to peace with this new arrangement of power and content. There are more artists than ever … the old idea of the independent artist is itself a romance … the business of America is now art …

I'm not convinced. And anyway, Nobrow only glances on what to me is the most surreal and sinister aspect of this transformation, the political one. Editors and publishers will tell you that there has never been so much good news in memory. The economy is strong, the stories on the front page are generally upbeat. But that observation is a tautology. The reason there's so much good news is that the culture industry is now dominated by glass-half-full people who look on the world in positive terms. The media bosses don't want troubling news, and they've hired people who respect that desire–suckups who see their bosses as good people to work for, and who are themselves deeply invested in the new economy.

The more critical faculties have been farmed out of town, to perform their autos-da-fé out of sight. Indeed, Bill Hillsman, the Minneapolis adman behind the victories of fuckups Paul Wellstone and Jesse Ventura, says that Governor Ventura's win came as such a giant surprise because the two establishment political parties, in Minnesota and nation-wide, have tried to make the independent vote invisible through polling methods that write off or misrepresent the fuckup segment of the population.

I don't mean to ride the suckups. They can surely take credit for the surging economy and widespread prosperity. They are probably more healthy and well adjusted than the fuckups. Mr. Woodward looks about 45, Mr. Bernstein looks like he's pushing 60. Suckups possess that angst-free ability to look on their self-promotion as something that is good for everyone. Just read Cokie and Steve Roberts' book, From This Day Forward . Their marriage and careers move along in a warm, filthy bath of connections and promotion. Her mother, a powerful Congressman's wife, gives him the recommendation to get his job with James Reston … The President and everyone else they will ever cover comes to their wedding … Steve trots around in Harvard sweatshirts … She covers events that her mother and daughter are both involved in … And all this they narrate with pride! Everyone is happy. Everyone in the establishment, down to Terry Lenzner, their friend and Mr. Clinton's defense artist.

That's why we need fuckups. Because suckups lack critical intelligence about their world. The Robertses both possessed that quality once, in the 60's. But now it's been suppressed. Criticism is self-destructive.

And it knocks down the stock. In Katharine Graham's splendid autobiography, Personal History , she describes the terrible cost to The Washington Post of taking on the establishment in Watergate. A White House spin machine vilified the Post as crazy, for months the newspaper felt lonely, and the publisher prayed that her reporters–driven by a theory that today would be written off as a conspiracy–were right. Now and then even Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein made errors that gave the Administration ammunition.

Most important, the Post suffered as a business. The Nixon Administration challenged licenses on Post television stations, and the assault on the paper's credibility sent the stock price tumbling from $38 to $16. Today it is simply impossible to imagine a major media company sticking with a story that was costing the company half its value. It wouldn't happen. The suckups wouldn't let it begin to happen. Yet back then Ms. Graham did not change course.

My wife told me that profile in courage, she has Ms. Graham's book. She even met Ms. Graham once, at a corporate retreat. She played tennis with her. Nothing came of it, of course.