DOWN FROM THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

Such Absolute Beginners –a Memoir by Ian Cross published by David Ling Publishing

No journalist these days could seriously imagine that they possessed or even ever could posses sufficient influence to change however slightly the general direction of the nation.

Yet when Ian Cross joined The Dominion during World War 2 times were more malleable and such dreams and such outcomes were in fact possible. Nobody could deny the memoirist. the claim that in this book he does not in fact make. Namely that if he failed to avert the unbridled entry into the broadcasting channels of the nation the toxins of lowest common denominator commercialization, he at least for some time obstructed and delayed them.

The story of Ian Cross' transformation from adventure seeker and ideologue through to belle lettriste and finally mover and shaker begins with Cross doing office boy chores for The Dominion reporters room. He chums up with his lifelong alter ego he refers to in his novelists way as just Keith.

Rather later in the book, Keith turns out to be Keith Berry who many will recall as a brisk commercial operative during the heyday of the Murdoch-INL era.

The two tyros at war's end set out for Brazil to broaden their experience. Along the way they become sidetracked in Panama by an engaging former Evening Post report er, Ted Scott, who is steeped in links with covert organizations.

Scott puts the two into his own line of business which is gun running and along the way the two lads encounter elements of Panamanian society in the form of Tito Arias, famous as being the subsequently paralysed and wheelchair-bound husband of Margot Fonteyn.

The romance of this derring-do always clung to Cross in a way that it didn't to Berry .

Back in Wellington and back now at The Dominion, Cross takes up the reins once more and does so in tandem with a new buddy. He is Barney Dawson, a most recognizable figure from the not-to-distant past whose career as The Dominion's finance editor was overshadowed by a crusty and misanthropic retirement characterized by regular letters to the editor pinpointing societal backsliding.

The Southern Cross newspaper beckons and Cross is assigned to the Parliamentary Press Gallery. He perceives though that the newspaper's socialist dream is becoming a “journalistic nightmare,” and crosses the road and returns to The Dominion where he reports on the waterfront strike, observing the predominance of British seaman with their strange accents.

It is now that Cross begins to hit his straps in his own chosen sector of expertise which was his understanding that what really presses the buttons of the national character is the moral cause. His first curiously enough was about animals. He campaigned to close Wellington Zoo for its inhumane treatment of its captive species

Ten years after joining The Dominion as copy boy he became the chief reporter. He is also Harvard – bound. Once again his destiny intertwines with the Americas , this time via the Nieman Foundation fellowship, in those days the Fulbright of journalism.

His relationship with institutions that would alternate at times between a smooth glissando and a graunching series of crunches, had begun.

His eventual return to New Zealand found him listless. Instead of iced martinis it was beer slopping at the Britannia Hotel and with its denizens chundering on the pavement outside.

It was now that Cross conceived the idea of The God Boy, and wrote the book that was swiftly published in the United States .

Never again would his colleagues ever get a level look at him. He had filled an aching void in the nation for a new writer of the very front rank and had done with a book whose title would be engraved on the mind of every baby boomer much as John Mulgan's Man Alone had seared into the consciousness of their parents.

With The God Boy, Cross had hammered into the ground a stake of totemic proportions and it would follow him always like a crazy wind.

He had become eminently respectable, always dangerous for a journalist. New institutions beckoned . The University of Otago awarded him its first fellowship.

Yes his homing instinct took him back to Wellington where the always flexible Cross takes up a new career entirely, this time in corporate life as a public relations man. He encounters Bill Sutch, the quirkily mysterious head of the Industries & Commerce department.

Sutch will later become the centerpiece of one of Cross's key moral campaigns, the one to cleanse the nation of what he sees as neo McCarthy-ism in New Zealand public life. In the meantime he makes good use of his years at Feltex, giving Barry Crump a help along the way by acquiring for the Feltex radio show A Good Keen Man. He writes After Anzac Day, just as evocatively titled in its way, as The Good Boy.

He was now very much on the list for government bodies. For someone who until just a few years had been a professional journalist, chief reporter of The Dominion, this was an extraordinary achievement. It demonstrated Cross' unusual deftness for combining so many seemingly irreconcilable roles: working journalist, literary figure, corporate figure, rebel, family man, to name just a few.

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He became a member of UNESCO.

Then came the advent of television. He pioneered and became the defining face of Column Comment launched in 1964 and a local adaptation of the British newspaper review format What the Papers Say.

He was made for television. Suave, wry, biting, conciliatory all in the same sound byte as it wasn't known then, Cross became required viewing exactly at the moment that the television set had taken over from the hearth, the piano, and the radio as the centerpiece of the household.

Cross does not talk about this but it is easy to forget in this era in which larrikinism represents humour, and bombast becomes analysis, that television here started at the top with Cross and several others like him as its public face. It had of course quite a distance to fall, as indeed had Cross himself, as we shall see.

His own eventual decline rather later had much to do with his trying to shunt television from away from what he saw as its own precipice.

Now though he still has quite some way to go. A new moral cause beckons. It is for the recompense for New Zealand authors from libraries. It is successful. Over 33 years it returns to local authors so the publishers claim, $22 million.

It is now though that his career takes a tack that is familiar yet unfamiliar and is very much the guts of this book. He left Feltex to become the editor of The Listener. At that time The Listener was quite simply he pre-eminent pulpit of the nation. Cross was to demonstrate that he was the preacher that would fill the church by doubling its circulation.

But there were signs, as he acknowledges, of trouble ahead. Cross' skimpy treatment of the Macleod Affair, as it was known, that presaged his own appointment, may well be a response to Cross' own dulled perception of the party political minefield he was now entering, so unlike his previous habitats in which he had so mightily thrived.

Macleod, a haughty anglicized New Zealand , had savoured rubbing up the wrong way anyone who sought to criticize him. When he was finally brought to book, he stratospherically declined to attend upon the state-funded kangaroo court assembled for his benefit by begging off on the grounds that he had more pressing business at the Institute of International Affairs . A rather more eminent affair all round, as Macleod inferred at the time.

Almost from the moment he took over, Cross too began hitting the political tripwires, doing so far more spectacularly eventually than even the saturnine Lex Macleod.

At issue was Cross' championing of Tom Scott.

Scott, like Cross himself, was a country boy with a Roman Catholic hardscrabble background, and who, like his mentor, possessed an instinct for the centre.

Under Cross's tutelage, Scott became a dual purpose colour writer and cartoonist. Such a hybrid required of course a foil, an object to lampoon. The target of choice was Rob Muldoon. He would ignite the fuse that blasted Cross out of being an effective force in the life of the nation; yet, curiously would power Scott into becoming a much more enduring, if slightly less luminescent orbiting supernova.

Premier Rob Muldoon banned Scott from his press conferences on the grounds that Scott was not a proper reporter, but a satirist. The image of Scott being escorted out of the Muldoon press conference is one of the signature events of the Muldoon regime.

Cross stood by Scott. But the seeds of what was to follow were sown.

All this was not evident at the time. The Cross meteor was to continue its upward descent before not all that far into the future, it dipped and began its sharp fall.

Ian Cross now though had it all. More was to follow. He left The Listener to become full time chairman of the state broadcasting apparatus. Here he is once again skimpy on detail, perhaps because much of the events surrounding this episode in his long and useful life have already been explained in his book The Unlikely Bureaucrat.

Cross knew what he had to do which was to carve out from the by now heavily milked television broadcasting cash cow, a single non-commercial channel that would be free from what we now refer to as dumbing down..

Yet now, with his manifest destiny in his hands, his touch became uncertain. For reasons that have never been fully explained, Cross dropped the protective above-the-battle mantle, in his case aura would be a more apt description, and appointed himself as head of operations as well.

He became his own sitting duck and was duly potted. As he wryly puts it, he was doubly fired. First by Muldoon, and then by David Lange who had declared that one of his first tasks as Prime Minister would to make Cross “history.”

Cross in a sketchy way makes light of all this. His touch continued to falter. He kept fluffing more shots, some of them fat catches. He failed to grab an olive branch extended by David Lange whose soul mate he almost certainly would have been in a way that he was never meant to be Muldoon's buddy.

He became disconsolate. Like a suburban Cincinattus he retired to the golf course near his long time Raumati home. Fluffing the real as well as the figurative shots, he damaged his sinews, and had to drop even golf.

Paul Holmes dismissed him as a “sullen old fuckwit.”

And yet…..and yet….there remains the man in full. Those who dealt with Cross during his long ascent found him helpful, pleasant and courteous to those of lesser station; affable to his equals; and measured to those above him. These are the marks of the gentleman, and, curiously enough, of the journalist also

One of Cross' trademarks is to leave you wishing for more, as he did on Column Comment. Such Absolute Beginners is a slim volume of only 50,000 words, and has characteristics about it of a book of atonement.

Though there were sporadic attempts, including a National Press Club address, to reverse the full-throttle ratings-driven commercialization of television, Cross' last 20 years or so have been for the most part seen him as a brooding presence in which in his craggy upbeat way he so evidently from time to time wonders about what happened and what might have been.