WHEN WE LOOK BACK NOW on the excesses of the Cold War decades-- those few of us inclined to look back--it is commonly with some combination of contempt and derision. Or we simply marvel, without wondering why, at the spectacle of a nation tipped inexplicably into a terrible foolishness. Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist inquisitions, the fallout shelters and civil-defense drills, the loyalty oaths and compulsive patriotism, the blacklists: We presume that we hold the wisdom of the decades as we consider those intemperate times: the past was evil but the evil has passed; they did things differently back then. I lived through the Cold War but for its very first years, and my memories remain vivid. It is the hysteria in the press and over the broadcast waves that lingers most in my mind. These things have left scars that do not fade with time, and in this I cannot be alone. This hysteria was at its highest pitch during the nineteen fifties and some of the sixties. The major dailies and the broadcasters gave that time its texture and timbre.

They delivered the Cold War to our doorsteps, to our car radios, into our living rooms. They defined our consciousness. They told Americans who they were and what made them American and altogether what made America, America. A free press was fundamental to this self-image, and Americans nursed a deep need to believe they had one. Our newspapers and networks went to elaborate lengths to give this appearance of freedom and independence. That this was a deception--that American media had surrendered themselves to the new national security state and its various Cold War crusades--is now an open-and-shut matter of record. I count it among the bitterest truths of last seventy-five years of American history. I do not think, and haven't for a long time thought, that we have any ground to recall our media's Cold War derelictions from a position of distanced superiority--as if its current state has significantly improved since then.

To the contrary. Our press and broadcasters remain in crisis, and it is startling to find how faithfully they repeat the lapses and betrayals of those earlier decades. From Jefferson's day to ours it has been well understood that a democratic polity requires an informed public and an informed public requires a vital and genuinely free press. We no more have such a press now than we had one during the worst of the Cold War years. Many Americans, still possessed of the need to believe they have.