by James A. Bacon

The Virginia Military Institute Board of Visitors yesterday named Thomas “Teddy” Gottwald as interim president of the school’s governing body, succeeding former president John Adams who resigned for personal reasons last week.

Gottwald disclaimed any desire to continue serving as president beyond June. Although VMI has been embroiled in controversy — most recently the board declined to renew the contract for Superintendent Cedric T. Wins — the appointment does not signal a change in direction for VMI.

Of greater interest is how The Washington Post treated this routine story. The new reporter covering VMI, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff is… I can’t bring myself to say he is more “objective,” so I’ll say… less subjective than his odious, agenda-driven predecessor Ian Shapira. But he’s still a creature of the left, with all of its biases and preconceptions.

Let’s start with the headline: “VMI selects controversial Youngkin donor as new interim board president.” Sub-head: “Teddy Gottwald, who quit the board days ahead of its 2020 vote to remove a Stonewall Jackson statue, was reappointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2022. He will serve through June.”

The headline sets the Post’s narrative-driven context right off the bat. Gottwald, whatever his other attributes, is “controversial.” How so? He quit in 2020 days before a board vote to remove the Stonewall Jackson statue from post. Thus, for readers, the five-year-old Stonewall Jackson controversy becomes Gottwald’s defining characteristic — even though he never voted on the issue himself!

Also note how the headline writer describes Gottwald as a “Youngkin donor.” Rosenzweig-Ziff elaborates on the point lower in the story, noting that the Richmond industrialist had donated $50,000 to the Spirit of VMI PAC and $200,000 to Governor Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign. For good measure, Rosenzweig-Ziff tosses in the fact that Gottwald’s father, Bruce Gottwald, had donated $400,000.

Nowhere in the article does Rosenzweig-Ziff even try to tie Gottwald’s financial support for Youngkin to any VMI-related word or action taken by either man. The data points are utterly superfluous to the article. But they plant the seed in the minds of the Post’s loyal, woke readers that, aha, Gottwald is a partisan Republican.

To be fair, Rosenzweig-Ziff probably didn’t write the headline. On the other hand, the headline does parrot the elements that he seeded in the story: Gottwald as controversial; Gottwald as large donor to Youngkin; and Gottwald as defender of the Stonewall Jackson statue.

In the second paragraph, Rosenzweig-Ziff inserts a bland quote from Gottwald, which, until an equally bland quote in the penultimate paragraph, is the only exposition of the new leader’s viewpoint throughout:

“There’s a lot of work to do between now and the end of June,” Gottwald said during the meeting, adding that he would not seek the permanent presidency.

Next, Rosenzweig-Ziff frames the narrative of Wins as reformer and victim of reactionary alumni opposed to racial justice. He writes: “The vote comes weeks after the body chose not to extend the contract of its first Black leader, retired Army Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, a VMI graduate who served 34 years in the Army and led efforts to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at the 185-year-old institution.”

Got that? Wins served his country — just for the record, no one disputes his honorable service — and he led efforts at UVA to “improve” race relations. Oh, and he’s Black. The first Black superintendent at VMI.

Who, then, is this Gottwald person? Rosenzweig-Ziff provides some boilerplate about his long involvement with VMI, then elaborates upon the theme established in the sub-head by noting that Gottwald was one of two VMI board members to quit before a unanimous vote to remove the Jackson statue. That vote, he reminds readers, followed “revelations” — not disputed accusations during the peak George Floyd furor, but revelations — of systemic racism and sexism at VMI.

Do you see the sleight-of-hand? Gottwald didn’t actually vote against the statue removal. He resigned two days before the vote took place. Was anything else taking place at the time? Why, yes, there was. The day before Gottwald resigned, J.H. Binford Peay III had resigned as superintendent under pressure from then-Governor Ralph Northam! Just possibly Gottwald had other matters on his mind. Would he have voted against removing the Jackson statue if given the chance? Perhaps. But on the basis of no tangible evidence — he concedes that Gottwald never gave a reason for his resignation — Rosenzweig-Ziff links him to the statue controversy.

Rosenzweig-Ziff proceeds to describe the alumni opposition.

One of the most significant oppositions to DEI at VMI came from a political action committee of mostly White conservative alumni called the Spirit of VMI, which believes DEI programs teach Americans that White people are racist, according to one of its essays, and that it weakens VMI’s military training.

At last! Rosenzweig-Ziff tells the “other side of the story” — in 20 words. Note how, in contrast to his unqualified use of the word “revelations” to imply the unvarnished truth of the accusations of racism and sexism, he distances himself from the views of conservative defenders of VMI’s reputation by describing what they “believe” to be true.

The article continues by quoting Wins, who spoke during the board meeting in favor of an alternative to Gottwald for the president’s office. The board had spent too much time dwelling on “trivial” issues and had conjured a financial crisis “that doesn’t exist,” Wins said. He also criticized Gottwald, though not by name. In backing an alternative, he said: “It’s going to be valuable to have a leader as the board president who has the character and doesn’t do things that create compromises and violate the integrity of what you would expect for the leader.”

The article wraps up by tersely summarizing Gottwald’s priorities in his interim presidency: engaging with alumni leaders and trying to align their priorities with the board’s. One might think that an article about the election of a new board president would have something more to say about the new president’s priorities. But that’s all we get.

There’s a special irony in Rosenzweig-Ziff’s framing of Gottwald’s appointment as a racial issue by tying it to the decision not to reappoint Wins, VMI’s first Black superintendent. Here’s some context that he left out. Gottwald’s appointment also comes on the heels of the General Assembly’s rejection of Quintin Elliott — a Black man — as a Youngkin-appointed board member. Elliott dug aggressively into VMI finances and sided with Youngkin-appointed board members on other matters. The move to cancel him (and one other Youngkin appointee) came primarily from Black Democratic legislators.

There are some who believe that Black legislators singled out Elliott for his race because they cannot abide the elevation of a conservative Black man to a position of prominence in government. Whatever their motive, this is a side of the ongoing VMI controversy that does not fit Rosenzweig-Ziff’s narrative… and he does not deem worthy to address.

Democracy dies in darkness, proclaims The Washington Post tagline. Count on the Post to turn off the lights.