The Passing of a 'Giant' Among Journalists

---

---

"Before politics was fed into computers and moveable maps came out, Jack Germond had it all in his head."

Walter Mears
Former Associated Press reporter

---

Journalist Jack Germond, who died last week, was, in the words of colleague Jules Witcover, "a giant" of American journalism.

Many years ago, I read — for the first time — "Marathon," the book Witcover and Germond co–authored on the 1976 presidential campaign. I have read it several times since, each time with greater admiration.

The task was something of a marathon itself. The campaign was legendary at the time because the eventual winner, Jimmy Carter, had been running for a couple of years and, in that time, had risen from virtual obscurity to the presidency.

But you couldn't really tell the story of that campaign without going into a certain amount of detail on the Watergate scandal and the resignation of the man who won the previous presidential election, Richard Nixon.

So, whereas historian Theodore White had the luxury of writing about a single year — and, perhaps, a portion of another — in his groundbreaking accounts of presidential elections from 1960 to 1972, Witcover and Germond had to write about virtually the entire four–year period between the 1972 and 1976 elections.

They also had to write about something that was new in presidential politics at that time. Carter rose to prominence in large part because, unlike previous presidential hopefuls who chose to enter some primaries but not others, Carter ran everywhere. Germond and Witcover chronicled that development meticulously.

Nixon probably was the last president to take the traditional route to the White House. His campaigns in 1968 and 1972 were the transition from old–style presidential politics, in which nominations were decided by delegates who were handpicked by party elites, to modern presidential politics, in which the popular vote in primary elections tends to determine how a state's delegation will vote at the national convention.

And Witcover and Germond were there to report on it — for their contemporaries and the generations to follow.

"Jack was a truly dedicated reporter and had an old–fashioned relationship with politicians," Witcover told the Baltimore Sun. "He liked them, but that did not prevent him from being critical when they did bad things and behaved badly."

Journalists like Germond achieved a new influence on American politics during the transition of which Germond wrote. He was, in the words of NPR's David Folkenflik, "one of the reporters who helped to determine presidential winners and losers."

Howard Kurtz echoed Witcover's sentiment.

"Germond ... was a throwback in more ways than one," Kurtz wrote for Fox News, "a poker–playing, racetrack–dwelling, Falstaffian figure who would close down the bar at New Hampshire's Wayfarer Inn, then be up at 7 the next morning interviewing county chairmen."

Ah, yes, the horse racing thing. That is another passion I shared with Germond. I don't know how Germond came by it.

I've always enjoyed horse racing, but I discovered a true passion for it when I worked as a copy editor for the Arkansas Gazette's sports department.

I don't know if Germond ever did any better than I did at the track. I hope he did.

I do know that he achieved things in journalism I probably will never achieve. And I'm all right with that.

Because there aren't many Jack Germonds — maybe one or two — in a lifetime.

Read More

The Footsteps of a Pioneer

---

---

"I don't speechify. I know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that's what I ask. But they get mad at the straight line. I just want to ask a tough question."

Helen Thomas

---

Helen Thomas died yesterday.

Many things were said about her during her lifetime. Many things have been said in the hours since her death at the age of 92.

To me, she has always been one thing — a journalist. You could modify that, I suppose. Make that a trailblazing journalist, a pioneer.

And, by the way, that is journalist in what I consider to be the truest sense of the word — a print journalist. Not a talking head — although young Americans can be forgiven for knowing her only from those televised presidential news conferences.

Lots of folks probably do associate her with those news conference — even though there really haven't been many of them in the last four years, and the memory of them tends to fade — until the current incumbent of the Oval Office decides to interrupt a news briefing and seize the lectern for as long as he cares to speak.

She was there from the start of the evolving presidential relationship with television, in the Kennedy administration. Actually, she was there before Kennedy — in the last months of the Eisenhower presidency.

And she did, indeed, ask tough questions.

But she seems to remain an enigma to many of the new generation of journalists — non–journalists, too, for that matter — which may explain my appreciation for what Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor had to say about her: "In the news cauldron that is Washington, there are journalists who are loved, there are journalists who are respected, and there are journalists who are feared. Over the course of a long, remarkable and ultimately controversial career, Helen Thomas was all of those."

Actually, though, I kind of preferred what the Monitor's Jimmy Orr wrote about her five years ago. Thomas, he wrote, was "outspoken, blunt, demanding, forceful and unrelenting."

My kind of journalist.

---

---

The longevity of her career was not its only distinguishing feature.

She was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents' Association and the first female member of the Gridiron Club.

Thomas was the only female member of the press corps to travel to China with Richard Nixon in 1972. Not long after that, she was frequently on the receiving end of Martha Mitchell's phone calls in which she complained that the Nixon administration was setting up her husband to take the blame for Watergate.

She often encouraged young journalists to "Get into the game!" but the game can be rough.

In 2010, when asked to comment on Israel, Thomas replied, "Tell 'em to get the hell out of Palestine."

When asked for a followup, Thomas, who was of Arab descent and said so, said, "Remember, these people are occupied, and it's their land, not German and not Poland's." Where should they go? she was asked. "They could go home." Where is home? "Poland. Germany."

She was labeled anti–Semitic, and her career was over. It was unfortunate that this brief — and, frankly, ill–advised — segment of the interview sparked a controversy that ended an otherwise distinguished career.

I was especially disappointed that the Society of Professional Journalists, a group with which I was affiliated as both a student and a professor, chose not to consider the accomplishments of Thomas' lifetime and, on the basis of the interview, discontinued its Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement.

That can't erase the many achievements of her lifetime nor should it change the fact that she continues to inspire young people of both genders to get in the game.

Read More

The Iron Lady Dies

---

---

"She was a tigress surrounded by hamsters."

John Biffen
The Observer December 1990

---

Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of Great Britain, died earlier today after a stroke. She was 87.

They called her "The Iron Lady." They called her a lot of things — "Attila the Hen," for example.

The names reflected the fact that, as I said to my father only a few weeks ago, she was a tough old bird. And she found a philosophical soulmate in Ronald Reagan, who was also a tough old bird.

As the Washington Post's "Five moments that show why Margaret Thatcher mattered in American politics" demonstrates, they were frequently of the same mind — although Thatcher, as I recall, did not agree with Reagan's decision to invade Grenada 30 years ago.

---

---

Many people have credited Reagan with the toppling of the Soviet Union, but I've always felt that Thatcher played an important role in that as well. It was the vice–like grip of Reagan and Thatcher policies on both sides of the Atlantic that crushed the Soviet Union. That, I think, is Thatcher's true legacy to the world.

In the wake of her death, tributes have been pouring in from around the world.

Barack Obama focused on her contribution as a role model. "[S]he stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can't be shattered," Obama said in a statement released through the Office of the Press Secretary.

There was more to her than that, though.

She had certain principles by which she lived, and they weren't for everyone — but she did express the way most people feel (or, at least, felt at the time) when she said, "You know, if you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything, wouldn't you, at any time? And you would achieve nothing!"

Not everyone agreed with her when she said, "Socialists cry 'Power to the people,' and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean — power over people, power to the state."

Or when she said, "A world without nuclear weapons may be a dream but you cannot base a sure defense on dreams. Without far greater trust and confidence between East and West than exists at present, a world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us."

But such positions stemmed from the principles upon which she was raised.

"My policies are based not on some economics theory," she said in 1981, "but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police."

She will be missed.

Read More

Daniel Inouye

---

During the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, the attorney
for H.R. Haldeman called Daniel Inouye "that little Jap."

---

When I think of Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who died yesterday at the age of 88, I think of his soft–spoken dignity during the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings.

As Emma Brown observed in a Washington Post obituary, Inouye "rarely sought the media spotlight" in more than half a century of service in Congress. That seemed especially true during the days of Watergate,

In an age when bipartisanship is a popular buzzword, though, Inouye's absence is likely to be felt. He didn't just give lip service to such concepts, he lived them.

I didn't grow up in Hawaii, where Inouye was a well–known figure before Hawaii became a state in 1959. If I had, I would know more about his life than I do. But I still know quite a bit about him.

He served with distinction in World War II and was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Clinton. He was a member of Hawaii's first congressional delegation as its representative in the House, and he became a senator in 1963. Only Robert Byrd of West Virginia served in the Senate longer.

When Byrd died in 2010, Inouye, by virtue of being the most senior member of the majority party in the Senate became its president pro tempore, a title he held until his death. Constitutionally, that made him third in the line of presidential succession behind the vice president and the House speaker.

Most of what I know about Inouye I learned from watching the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. As a Democrat investigating the campaign activities of a Republican president and his staff, Inouye may have felt additional pressure to be fair, but my impression was that it was a genuine aspect of his personality.

Anyway, there were times when the testimony of the president's men offended him, and it showed. Another thing that showed was his eagerness to see the best in people.

"You are a wise man," I remember Inouye saying comfortingly to Watergate burglar Bernard Barker.

"If I were a wise man," Barker replied, "I probably would not be sitting here right now."

Inouye was the last surviving Democrat from the Senate Watergate Committee. Two Republican members survive him — Howard Baker of Tennessee and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut.

Read More

Memories of a Mentor

It is my understanding that the word mentor has its roots in Greek mythology.

It was the name of a contemporary and friend of Odysseus (also known as Ulysses) who befriended and advised Odysseus' son. Because of Mentor's relationship with the younger man, over the centuries his name has come to mean someone who shares what he has learned with a younger and less experienced comrade.

Well, that's my understanding, anyway. I really have only a modest background in mythology, and I could be wrong.

Nearly everyone has a mentor, I suppose — to some degree. A few of us thrive in spite of growing up in adverse conditions — including not having an older and wiser influence to keep us grounded and focused — but, thankfully, for most of us, there always seems to be a teacher, a minister, a professional role model.

Someone. Usually several someones.

In my case, it was a man named John Ward. He was the editor of my hometown newspaper, the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway, Ark. I met him through my mother, who must have known nearly everyone in my hometown. I'm not sure when that was, but it was long before he actually became my mentor.

He actually became my mentor, I guess, when I was in high school. I had always been interested in writing, and my mother encouraged me to apply that interest to newspaper writing. As a result, she prodded me to seek John's counsel, and he was quite obliging.

Many were the days I spent in his newsroom office as a teenager, learning from him and soaking up the wisdom he had acquired. My memory is that John was a large, gregarious man, larger than life in many ways — although perhaps he only seemed so to me.

I know he was a presence in the community, helping to establish Toad Suck Daze, an annual festival in my home county that gets its name from an actual town along the Arkansas River. He was an accomplished musician and probably performed at the early Toad Suck Daze festivals although that would have been after I left Conway.

He was an admirer of Winthrop Rockefeller and played important roles in both his gubernatorial candidacy and statehouse tenure. John wrote two books about Rockefeller, the first of which I bought and gave to my mother. She enjoyed it so much that she asked me to get him to sign it, which I did.

After Mom died, I kept that book. John's inscription read, "To Mary Goodloe, a wonderful friend and a lady I admire very much. ... Glad you enjoyed this. I wish now I could write it all over again."

Those weren't empty words. When John said something, he meant it.

John gave me my first freelance assignments and showed me, when I brought him my earliest journalistic efforts, what I needed to do differently. Somewhere in some musty microfilm room — or wherever such data is stored these days — you can see (if you want to, that is) my first bylines.

Shortly thereafter, I got my first bylines in my high school newspaper followed by my first bylines in my college newspaper — and, after that, my first bylines as a professional writer. I like to think that the stories that followed those early bylines got progressively better; and, if that is so, it is in large part because of John's influence on me.

A life in writing had been launched, for good or ill, and John had been the one to smash the champagne bottle at its christening.

John died a week ago, and I have been trying to think of a way to honor him.

And I have concluded that the best way is what I've been doing.

For the last 2½ years, I have been an adjunct journalism instructor in the local community college system, sharing with my students what I learned in my years of newspaper work.

But I have come to realize that my students are getting more than that. They are getting the benefit of wisdom I acquired from John — and it is often shared, I have discovered, in the same words he used when he shared his wisdom with me.

Such are the often subtle ways a mentor influences.

For all I know, they may have been the same words that were shared with John many years before that. Who knows the lineage of a pearl of wisdom? My students don't know it, but what I tell them is never something that I was the first to discover. Journalism is like anything else. There are truths about it that remain constant.

Sometimes, I must admit, I feel like a bit of a plagiarist when I share things with my students that John or my college mentor, Roy Reed, told me — but I guess that's a reflection of my training. I always feel compelled to attribute that knowledge to my source (even if it wasn't the original source of the knowledge).

I feel I learned from the best. There are/were others almost as good — but none was better.

Thanks, John. Vaya con Dios, amigo.

Read More

Death of a Good Guy

---

---

I knew when I heard that George McGovern was in hospice care that he was not long for this world.

According to reports Wednesday afternoon, the 90–year–old was "unresponsive" at a hospice center in South Dakota, the state he represented in Washington.

He lingered for a few days — never, to my knowledge, regaining responsiveness — and died earlier today.

History — or destiny or fate or whatever you want to call it — had an unusual plan for George McGovern's life. He was a real long shot to win his party's nomination, but he did — albeit with the help of Richard Nixon's "dirty tricks" squad.

But then he went down in flames in the 1972 general election. He lost every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia for a total of 17 electoral votes. It was the most one–sided election in 36 years — and, frankly, I doubted I would ever see its like again.

Twelve years later, though, Ronald Reagan trounced Walter Mondale. Reagan didn't receive as much of the popular vote (percentage–wise, that is) as Nixon did, but he held Mondale to fewer electoral votes than Nixon did against McGovern.

I heard that Mondale spoke to McGovern after the 1984 election and asked McGovern how long it took to get over a landslide loss. "I'll let you know when I get there," McGovern assured him.

(I don't know if McGovern kept that promise, but Bob Greene writes at CNN.com that he did overcome that massive landslide loss — although perhaps not in the way one might expect. Greene covered McGovern's 1972 campaign as a young reporter. His assessment of the man? "[H]e was an awfully good guy.")

Whenever I heard about McGovern over the years, I always thought of Mom. She was a diehard supporter of McGovern — in part because she agreed with him and admired his stance against the Vietnam War but also in part, I'm sure, because she despised Nixon.

In the fall of 1972, Mom went door to door in our county in central Arkansas, ringing doorbells for McGovern. I went with her on several occasions. Many doors were slammed in our faces so I guess she wasn't surprised when Arkansas voted better than 2–to–1 against McGovern that year.

Mom followed the news so I'm convinced she knew McGovern wouldn't be victorious. She had seen the public opinion polls.

(And, even though Greene recalled that McGovern confessed to being baffled by the discrepancy between what the polls were saying and what he was seeing on the campaign trail, I always thought McGovern must have known. My memory of that time is that everyone knew how the election was going to turn out.)

Mom never spoke to me about it, but I'm quite sure she knew what was coming. Hell, even I knew what was coming, and I was just a young boy.

I've been reliving those days this year. 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break–in and McGovern's improbable march to the Democratic nomination.

I shook hands with McGovern twice that year. He made airport stops in Little Rock a few weeks before the Democratic convention that summer and again a few weeks before the general election that fall, and Mom and I were there on both occasions.

I worked my way up to spots where I was sure to be able to shake his hand when he came through — and I did, both times, but we didn't exchange any words other than cursory greetings.

Twenty years later, though, we did. I was in my first semester of teaching journalism at the University of Oklahoma, and McGovern came to the campus to deliver a speech about two weeks before the 1992 election.

When he finished speaking, I practically sprinted from my seat to greet him as he stepped from the stage.

"Senator," I said to him, "I'm sure you don't remember me, but I shook your hand at the Little Rock airport in 1972."

McGovern smiled and nodded. "I remember stopping in Little Rock," he replied, "and I remember that your governor, Dale Bumpers, told me we were going to carry Arkansas in the election!"

And we chuckled. We both knew how far he had been from even thinking about the possibility of winning Arkansas — much less actually winning it — even if he never said so publicly. Bumpers was one of McGovern's colleagues for the last six years of his Senate career. We both knew what a spin artist he was.

At that point, McGovern's attention was drawn away from me to others who wanted to shake his hand and speak with him briefly. I never spoke to him or shook his hand again.

As an adult, I didn't always agree with McGovern, and, on the occasion of his death, it has been mostly the notable figures from McGovern's own party who have offered tributes to him, but even Newt Gingrich had something nice to say.

McGovern was, he said, "[j]ust a great guy."

Read More

Man on the Moon

---

---

"He was the best, and I will miss him terribly."

Michael Collins
Apollo 11 command module pilot

---

There may be no more vivid memory from my childhood than that of Neil Armstrong taking his first step on the moon in July 1969 and declaring it "[o]ne small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Before his historic moon walk, I don't recall hearing Armstrong's name. I think he flew in space once before — one of the Gemini missions in the mid–'60s, I believe — but I don't think he did anything that was especially noteworthy.

Certainly not when compared to being the first man to walk on the moon.

Armstrong was an inspirational figure then, and he continued to be an inspirational figure throughout his life, largely because of the values he acquired in his youth in Ohio and carried with him as an adult.

He did not seek the spotlight and often appeared uncomfortable discussing his role in the space program. When the subject of his moon walk came up, as it inevitably did, Armstrong always seemed eager to give credit to all the folks at NASA whose collective efforts had made it possible.

"Those who know him say he is a smart and intensely private, even shy, man determined to live life on his own terms despite having floated down that ladder into the public domain," wrote Kathy Sawyer in the Washington Post Magazine on the 30th anniversary of the first moon landing.

I knew Armstrong was getting old, but I didn't realize just how old (82) until I heard the news yesterday that he had died of complications following heart surgery.

As many have already said, he was a genuine American hero. Forty–three years ago, he was the first man to walk on the moon, inspiring millions of American boys to dream grand and glorious dreams.

But I always believed Armstrong would have happily piloted the command module on that trip and never even walked on the moon if that had been what was asked of him. Instead, Michael Collins was asked to perform that solitary task while Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps on the moon.

Armstrong was a team player — not unlike another pioneer from America's space program who died recently, Sally Ride.

Armstrong and Ride were good foot soldiers in the quest to conquer space. If they had been called upon to sweep up or fetch coffee, they would have done so.

But fate had much bigger things in store for them. Armstrong would be the first man to walk on the moon, and Ride would be the first American woman to fly in space.

At a time when positive role models are in shockingly short supply, we've lost two in the span of a single month.

We are much poorer for it.

Read More

Farewell, Eleanor

I was looking at the obituary section of my hometown newspaper's website, and I saw that an old friend of the family passed away this week.

Her name was Eleanor Opitz, and she was one of my mother's closest friends. They were community activists together in the central Arkansas town where I grew up. They frequently supported the same political candidates and volunteered in the local campaign headquarters, giving out pamphlets and bumper stickers and buttons and answering phones.

Even though I was quite young, I put in some time with them at the campaign headquarters. I learned a lot from both, and it was from Eleanor that I learned much about people and politics.

I have always thought Mom was the most knowledgeable person I ever knew, but Eleanor was a close second. And I'll tell you something that is funny.

My mother died more than 17 years ago (that isn't the funny part). But ever since I saw Eleanor's obituary, I've had the same thought bouncing around in my head. I have to tell Mom that Eleanor has died. She would want to know.

And then I remember that, of course, I can't tell Mom.

I haven't had that feeling since the Christmas after Mom died, when I went through the stores and saw all kinds of things that I would have given Mom if she had still been around. And I had to remind myself that, of course, she wasn't around anymore.

There aren't many people in this world — outside of my father and brother — I associate that closely with my mother.

Once, I recall chatting with Eleanor on a primary day.

In those days, you practically had to have sworn affidavits in your possession affirming that you really would be out of town on Election Day in order to cast what was known then as an absentee ballot. Otherwise, you had to vote on Election Day. No exceptions.

Today, early voting periods are commonplace, and no one has to jump through hoops to vote early.

Anyway, Arkansas held its primary in June in those days so I was out of school and I had gone early that day to the headquarters for whichever candidate it was that Mom and Eleanor and I were supporting.

Eleanor wasn't in the office when I got there around 9 a.m. She showed up a few minutes later and explained that she had been voting. I didn't think much about that, and I didn't ask her why she had gone to the polling place in the morning, but she told me, anyway.

"I always vote early in the day," Eleanor told me. "That way, if I get hit by a bus or something in the afternoon, I know my vote will be counted!"

The more I think of it, she may have told me that on the day in 1974 that Bill Fulbright lost the primary for his Senate seat to Gov. Dale Bumpers. Mom and Eleanor and I were supporters of Fulbright, and the outcome wouldn't have been affected if Eleanor had been prevented from voting. My memory is that Bumpers won by a 2–to–1 margin.

But Eleanor impressed on me the importance of showing up. On one of my favorite TV shows, The West Wing, the point was often made that "decisions are made by those who show up." Eleanor was a believer. She made me a believer, too. It's probably why I always vote in the early voting period.

The other memory of Eleanor that stands out probably was from around the same time.

Mom and I were visiting Eleanor one day, taking advantage of her swimming pool on a hot summer day. I brought along a book I had just started reading — a paperback copy of the edited White House transcripts that Richard Nixon hoped would satisfy congressional investigators who had been trying to gain access to the tapes of Oval Office meetings and telephone conversations.

And I read it between dips in the pool.

When Nixon released the transcripts, they only succeeded in re–igniting a debate over executive privilege, supplemented by discussions about the content of the transcripts. A lot of people criticized the frequent "expletive deleted" labels that were inserted to hide Nixon's private swearing from public view, but many others read them more critically — including Eleanor.

Eleanor compared the transcripts to what had been said in congressional hearings and took a pretty even–handed approach to it all. Mind you, she loathed Nixon, but she was nothing if not fair. She wouldn't kick a man when he was down unless she had been given ample reason.

"There are times," she told me, "when I read the transcripts and I am inclined to say, 'Hang him!' But then I will read something else and I will think that, just maybe, his story is plausible."

If you are old enough to remember Nixon, you may agree that that is about the fairest thing anyone could say about him.

(I learned something ironic from Eleanor's obituary. Her birthday was August 10 — which was the day after Nixon resigned.)

I don't know what caused Eleanor's death. Her obituary didn't mention a cause, but my guess is that she had some sort of illness — and that, at some point recently, she knew that she was going to die.

I say that because the obituary explicitly stated that Eleanor asked that anyone who would be attending her graveside service wear casual clothing. She wanted everyone to "be comfortable," the obituary said.

That really was typical of Eleanor. It's supposed to be 104° in my hometown Saturday. The graveside service will be in the morning, but it is sure to be in the 90s by then.

Yet, even with her own mortality staring her in the face, Eleanor's thoughts were of those who would be left behind.

Eleanor was a remarkable woman, an inspiration to me when I was young and I'm sure she was every bit as inspirational to others in her last years.

Rest in peace, Eleanor.

Read More

R.I.P., Sally Ride

---

---

Sally Ride.

Twenty–nine years ago, it seemed like the ideal name for America's first woman in space. Well, it seemed that way to me, anyway.

And I didn't even realize it had already been immortalized in a song, "Mustang Sally."

---

"All you want to do is ride around Sally, ride, Sally, ride.
All you want to do is ride around Sally, ride, Sally, ride.
All you want to do is ride around Sally, ride, Sally, ride."

---

(I'll admit, it doesn't seem like much without the music.)

She joined NASA in 1978 and, in 1983, she rode on the space shuttle Challenger, becoming America's first woman in space.

She wasn't the first woman of any nationality to travel in space. That distinction belonged to Valentina Tereshkova of Russia, who flew in space 20 years before Ride.

But she was a pioneer — an American pioneer.

It would be a perfect narrative, I suppose, if it could be demonstrated that Ride's parents named her after the song. But that isn't possible. Ride was born in 1951. The song was first recorded in the mid–1960s.

Ironically, Ride's historic trip into space came almost 20 years to the day after Tereshkova's.

And Tereshkova and Ride had something else in common. As young adults, neither woman seemed destined for space travel. Tereshkova worked in a factory; Ride was an aspiring tennis player.

But Tereshkova was recruited for the Soviet Union's space program. Ride was among thousands of people who answered an advertisement seeking applicants for NASA.

So their groundbreaking stories, while similar, were not identical.

In fact, there were times back in the 1980s when I thought Ride's achievement was overshadowed by other, higher–profile advances for females — almost two years before Ride went into space, Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice. And the year after her trip into space, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be on a major party's national ticket as Walter Mondale's running mate.

There are certain ironies connected with Ride's death at this particular time. Ride died of pancreatic cancer yesterday at the age of 61.

For one thing, it is ironic that she should die less than a year before the 30th anniversary of her first space trip. What a tragedy it is that she will not be here for that.

It is also ironic that Ride's death should coincide with the renewed search for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's plane. That search, incidentally, ended recently with more new questions than answers.

Ride's death came the day before the 115th anniversary of Earhart's birth. Another irony. Both women were pioneers in aviation.

It is even more ironic, I think, that Ride's death and the search for Earhart's plane should happen at a time when the national conversation has been centered on Barack Obama's remark about how entrepreneurs did not build their businesses alone.

No man is an island, the president and his supporters contend.

But, if anything, Ride and Earhart did the things they did in spite of the resistance they encountered. It was probably more pronounced in Earhart's day because few women attempted to succeed in any field that was regarded as the domain of men — but little had really changed in 50 years.

I have a vivid memory of the men in the central Arkansas community where I was working at the time dismissing Ride's accomplishment and earnestly wondering why she would want to do what men had been doing since the dawn of America's space program.

So I know that misogynistic attitudes were alive and well when Ride flew in space.

It may not fit with the president's election–year narrative, but that entrepreneurial, risk–taking spirit isn't limited to the business world.

And, while Ride got her opportunity with the help she received along the way, as we all do, her success as an astronaut was entirely her own doing.

Rest in peace, Sally Ride.

Read More

Nixon's 'Evil Genius' Dies

In the Nixon White House, Charles Colson was known as an "evil genius," a master of "dirty tricks," the guy who (reportedly) said he would walk over his own grandmother to ensure the re–election of Richard Nixon.

He was more than 18 years younger than Nixon so, I suppose, it was appropriate that he should die nearly 18 years to the day after Nixon did.

And, to many, I suppose, his story is an inspiring one, even if Nixon's is not — a man who spent the first half of his life exploiting the weaknesses in the system and the second half of his life trying to repair them.

It is a story, I guess, of one man's quest for redemption, and that is something I can appreciate. Once, when I was filling out a job application, I had to answer the following question — "What is your favorite word and why?"

My answer was that my favorite word was redemption because it suggests that no mistake or bad decision a person makes in his/her life is permanent, that a second chance is always possible.

And, in hindsight, it is clear Colson's life — well, the first half of it, anyway — was loaded with mistakes and bad decisions.

He was involved in the decisions to develop and fund the infamous White House Plumbers unit to gather intelligence on the Democrats, and at least one recording of a conversation he had with Nixon in June 1972 indicates his early involvement in efforts to obstruct justice in the Watergate investigation.

Colson was in prison when Nixon resigned the presidency, and he emerged about five months later with a new purpose in life.

It is understandable, I presume, that those who had been the targets of his wrath were skeptical, but Colson apparently was a changed man. And, on the occasion of his death, that unwillingness to acknowledge that Colson turned over a new leaf offends his defenders.

"Prison opened his eyes not only to God," writes Fr. Johannes Jacobse in The Observer, "but the desperate conditions of other prisoners."

He points out that Colson founded Prison Fellowship, a Christian outreach program for prisoners and ex–prisoners and their families.

"The world has lost a good man," asserts Fr. Jacobse.

In the South Florida Sun–Sentinel, James D. Davis laments the overemphasis in the media on Colson's political career and under–emphasis on his faith–based activities.

"Even in reporting his death, not everyone grasped the spiritual side of Colson," writes Davis, observing that "[o]f the 57 paragraphs in the Washington Post's obituary, only seven or eight dealt with the faith that steered his life for more than 38 years — and three of the paragraphs mentioned the 'skepticism and even hilarity' from many columnists who heard of his conversion."

Personally, I always felt Colson was sincere in his expression of faith. I was still young when he was released from prison, and I was no more certain then than I am today that I shared his beliefs, but the things he said seemed genuine to me.

I was brought up in the buckle of the Bible Belt, so when I say Colson's words and actions seemed plausible to me, you can believe it. I think I know the real article when I see it.

That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible for someone to fake the "born again" experience.

And, to be sure, I have seen my share of people who fooled others with some well–chosen words and phrases. Sooner or later, their deceptions were exposed.

But Colson matched the words with deeds for four decades.

If he started out as a phony, a disbeliever, he must have become persuaded at some point. It would take a remarkably skilled hypocrite to pull off such a charade for that long.

Colson was always true to his conservative beliefs, which he reconciled with his religious beliefs. He opposed homosexuality, and, although he never (to my knowledge) contended that Hurricane Katrina was some sort of judgment or punishment from God, he did say it was a "warning" from God and implied that there would be worse to come if it was ignored: "[O]ne lesson I learned from Katrina is that we had better win the war on terror and resolve to prevent another 9–11. Katrina exposed how easy it would be to take a city out."

Ironically, it seems to me, Charles Colson, who spent a significant portion of the first half of his life driving wedges between people went on to spend a significant portion of the second half of his life trying to bring them together.

And Sarah Pulliam Bailey of GetReligion.org wishes more of the writers who seem to remember only the first half of that life would move on.

"It's clear that some reporters are stuck in the 1970s," Bailey writes, "apparently unaware of how the state of evangelicalism was shaped by Colson's complex life and legacy."

Maybe that is Colson's real legacy. Perhaps, in Colson's own story of redemption is a cautionary tale for the rest of us about our relationships with each other.

Read More

The Art of the Interview

---

---

Mike Wallace died yesterday.

He was 93 years old so his death, while sad for his survivors, cannot be considered either unexpected or tragic. But his loss is considerable for anyone who appreciates the art of the interview.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Wallace interviewed just about everybody who was anybody — presidents, kings, newsmakers of all kinds. I suppose most of his interviews were conducted in his work for CBS' 60 Minutes. He did some interviewing as a staffer for the University of Michigan's student newspaper, but a lot of the work he did in his youth would be better classified as entertainment.

He did some announcing, even some acting, on radio in the 1940s and hosted some game shows in the 1950s. The latter is not as unusual as it might seem today. In those days, newscasters, as they were called, did it all. In addition to announcing, they did commercials and hosted game shows.

And that generated most of Wallace's income for awhile.

But it was his interview work in the late 1950s and early 1960s that led to his job with 60 Minutes.

In that capacity, he really did interview just about everyone, all the movers and shakers of the late 20th century, but he did say about six years ago that he regretted the one that got away — former first lady Pat Nixon.

I have conducted many interviews in my life, and I can assure anyone who has never done one that it is much more difficult than it may appear. Most people who get interviewed tend to feel that they are somehow doing the interviewer a huge favor by sitting down and answering a few questions, which really puts the interviewer at a disadvantage.

There are some interview subjects who do not think that they are above the likes of any interviewer, but they are rare (and, my experience is, the bigger they are, the more likely it is that they will feel this way).

I've seen more than one interviewer come away with a poor interview because the subject seized the psychological high ground. It takes someone with confidence in himself and the validity of his questions to walk into an interview setting and treat his subjects as equals — and be treated as an equal in return. That was the amazing thing about Mike Wallace.

I share little tricks with my students, and I hope those tricks will help them conduct better interviews, but I often wonder if being a great interviewer isn't one of those things one is born with, sort of like when Stan Musial was hired to coach batting.

Musial was one of the greatest hitters ever to play baseball, but no one, not even Musial himself, could teach his unorthodox batting stance to others. It worked for him. It didn't work for anyone else.

Similarly, I wouldn't encourage young reporters to emulate Wallace — except, perhaps, to study the kinds of questions he asked. He always tried to develop a rapport with his interviewees, but he was tough, and he got right to the point. Sometimes it got him in trouble. Most of the time, it got him great stories.

Broadcasting isn't what it used to be. Wallace's death is a reminder that the practitioners of high–quality broadcasting are just about gone now.

"There simply hasn't been another broadcast journalist with that much talent," said 60 Minutes' executive producer Jeff Fager. That's pretty high praise coming from the chairman of CBS News, a network news division that has been graced by the presence of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr — and many, many more.

Rest in peace, Mike Wallace.

Read More

Charles Percy and the Old GOP

Death is unavoidable. What is uncertain is when each of us will die.

Sometimes, given the way an individual lived his or her life, the timing of death may be seen as ironic. So it is, I think, with the death of Charles Percy, a former Republican senator from Illinois.

If you are too young to remember Percy, you may be inclined to think, when I say that he was a Republican, that he was a Tea Party type, like Michele Bachmann and some other prominent Republicans from the Midwest. But, in fact, Percy was a liberal Republican (aka a Rockefeller Republican) in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller and Teddy Roosevelt.

(Percy was a Rockefeller Republican who actually supported Rockefeller. He backed Rocky's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1968.)

It's important to understand that, within the Republican Party, liberal really meant left of center in Rockefeller's and Roosevelt's days — not extreme left. Rockefeller Republicans opposed communism, promoted American business interests in foreign markets, advocated a strong defense, rejected socialism and redistribution of wealth, just like the other members of their party, but they supported regulatory measures that nearly all 21st–century Republicans simply would never tolerate, and they were advocates of things like federal funding for environmental protection, health care and higher education.

Actually, many Republicans in those days — but especially the Rockefeller Republicans — were progressive on social issues like civil rights, even moreso than their Democratic counterparts, many of whom held office in the South (and would be more comfortable in today's Republican Party than the Democrat).

Without a doubt, that was part of the legacy of the party's first nationally elected president, Abraham Lincoln, and the posture it had taken against slavery.

There was a time in fairly recent American history when the Rockefeller Republicans wielded considerable influence within their party. Their preference didn't always win the presidential nomination, but he was usually competitive if he wasn't successful.

Things really began to shift, I suppose, when Dwight Eisenhower was nominated for president and spoke of "modern Republicanism," which meant a movement toward the center. And, although they nominated essentially political moderates like Richard Nixon (who created the Environmental Protection Agency) and Gerald Ford (who actually chose Rockefeller to be his vice president — much to the dismay, I might add, of the Republicans of that time) in the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans continued to move to the right, nominating Ronald Reagan twice, the two Bushes twice each and Bob Dole once.

In 2008, of course, many Republicans complained that their standard bearer, John McCain, was not a true conservative — but he was much more conservative than many of the Republicans who were on the political scene half a century earlier.

Percy came along at the back end of the Rockefeller Republican era, I suppose. He was something of a wunderkind — president of Bell & Howell before the age of 30, elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of 47.

He was encouraged to enter politics by Eisenhower and narrowly lost his first bid for office when he ran against Illinois' incumbent governor in 1964. A political novice, Percy found that he had to make certain compromises if he hoped to be successful and hesitantly endorsed the Republican standard bearer of that year, Barry Goldwater.

The next election year, 1966, was, by historical standards, clearly a Republican year, and, although Percy faced another incumbent when he ran for the Senate, he won. Perhaps the lessons he had learned in '64 paid off; perhaps he just benefited, as many Republicans did, from a backlash against Democrats. But he was re–elected in 1972 and 1978, losing his bid for a fourth term in 1984 even though a Republican president was re–elected in a landslide.

Today, you simply don't hear someone called a liberal Republican. Even those who would have qualified — albeit barely — as liberal Republicans in Percy's day won't admit to it. They prefer to be called moderate Republicans — but, even under that banner, many find themselves on the defensive against the more extreme factions of their party.

They are a vanishing breed although you do still find some in places where they once thrived — primarily in New England, the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. As the modern Republican Party swung farther to the right, though, most of the Rockefeller Republicans became Democrats or independents.

Which brings me to the ironic aspect of Percy's death.

The fact that he died today at the age of 91 could hardly be considered surprising, but I do find the timing of his death to be, as I say, ironic. No other word seems appropriate to me.

---

---

You see, yesterday was the 35th anniversary of Rockefeller's one–finger salute to hecklers at a campaign stop in Binghamton, N.Y.

(And today, as I observed earlier, is the 15th anniversary of the death of Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first vice president.

(In an unrelated irony, tomorrow will be the 45th anniversary of the still–unsolved murder of one of Percy's daughters.)

In a way, I guess, that gesture foreshadowed the growing antagonism and, ultimately, truly unavoidable split between the conservatives and the Rockefeller Republicans.

Someone had to go. That tent just wasn't big enough for both of them, and, in hindsight, Rockefeller's gesture can be seen as a rather eloquent message to those who had seized the controls.

Read More

Rest in Peace, Betty Ford

I always admired Betty Ford.

When her husband became president in 1974, the initial consensus (at least, until he pardoned Richard Nixon) was that he was a "breath of fresh air." And, compared to Nixon, he was.

But Betty Ford really was, as I observed on her birthday last year.

And it was with sadness that I learned of her death at the age of 93.

I didn't support her husband when he ran for a full term on his own — which didn't matter, I guess, since I wasn't old enough to vote, anyway. I thought he was a decent guy, but I had Democrats for parents, as I have written here before, and we couldn't forgive him for pardoning Nixon.

Besides, I was brought up in the South, and I was enthused about the prospect of having a fellow Southerner in the White House.

Anyway, for that and many other reasons, the clear choice for me in 1976 was Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford.

But if the choice had been between Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter, I might have had to think about it for awhile longer.

I liked them both.

Betty Ford was honest and down to earth. She saw things the way they were, not the way she wished they were. I found that refreshing. So did lots of other people.

She could be outspoken at times — like when she said that she thought her children had tried marijuana and, if she had been their age, she would have, too. She was who she was, and people admired her for that.

"I figured, OK, I'll move to the White House, do the best I can and if they don't like it, they can kick me out, but they can't make me somebody I'm not," she wrote in her 1978 memoir, "The Times Of My Life."

She mostly disappeared from public life in her post–White House years. The Fords appeared at Republican conventions, but that stopped after President Ford suffered a mild stroke.

Then, in late December 2006, President Ford died — and the nation admired Betty Ford all over again as it observed her dignity during the state funerals in Washington and Michigan.

Her declining health prevented her from attending Lady Bird Johnson's funeral almost exactly four years ago. I believe her daughter went in her place.

As I say, Betty Ford was honest. Perhaps part of that stemmed from her experience of having been married briefly before she married the future president. Perhaps it gave her an insight into life and how things often do not turn out as we expect.

She knew that disappointments and setbacks were part of the bargain we all make. Perhaps it made her more appreciative of some things.

When she wrote her memoir, she had been married to President Ford for three decades. She observed that there had been "a great deal of whooping and hollering" when her husband became president "because I'd said Jerry and I were not going to have separate bedrooms at the White House and that we were going to take our own bed with us."

Her first marriage hadn't soured her. It made her more appreciative of what she had found.

"Even now, after all those years of married life, I like the idea of sleeping with my husband next to me," she wrote — and when you read it in 1978, you could almost see her sly grin.

It wasn't as controversial as when she said it wouldn't surprise her to learn that her 18–year–old daughter was in a sexual relationship. My memory is that a chastened Susan Ford denied being in such a relationship.

Maybe she had a greater influence on people than she imagined. That wouldn't surprise me, either.

She was one of a kind among first ladies.

Read More

Bin Laden Is Dead

---

---

It occurred to me this evening, as I watched the news reports of Osama bin Laden's death, that this must be how Americans felt in the spring of 1945 when they heard that Hitler had died.

I've been watching the spontaneous gathering of jubilant Americans outside the White House, chanting "U–S–A" and singing the national anthem.

It's appropriate, considering that the 9–11 attacks were widely compared to the attacks on Pearl Harbor, that bin Laden should be killed almost on the anniversary of Hitler's death.

And, in a way, bin Laden's death is more satisfying. He did not take his own life, as Hitler did. Instead, he apparently was killed by the actions of American forces.

We will never have the satisfaction of bringing him into a courtroom and making him answer for those thousands of deaths. But what happened today may have always been the closest we could ever have expected to get to justice in this case.

Bin Laden's death does not mean the end of Muslim terrorism. That war will continue, probably indefinitely. Because of where it occurred — Pakistan — I would expect that his presence in that country will raise new questions and issues. It may also affect America's relationship with Afghanistan, which can reasonably claim that it was right all along, that bin Laden had not been hiding there.

That may or may not be the case. And tonight, it isn't really important.

Sure, there are things that demand our attention. Many Americans who are living abroad will be at risk of being targeted by terrorists for retaliation in the days, weeks, even months ahead.

But this is a rare time of celebration for a nation that is weary.

Read More

Gerry

---

---

I didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I understood what many of his young supporters were feeling.

I understood it quite well. It was the enthusiastic fervor that comes with being on the same side as a trailblazer, a pioneer, and that is a feeling that, I truly believe, every generation in America should experience at least once — because it is really the essence of what it means to be an American.

America has always been about pioneers — the pioneers who braved the ocean and the unknown to come to this continent centuries ago, the pioneers who explored and charted it, the pioneers who took their search for answers into space.

Obama was a pioneer, the first black to be nominated by a major party for president or vice president. Whatever history ultimately says about the successes or failures of his presidency, he will always be the first black nominee, the one who made it possible for others to follow.

In 1984, then–Rep. Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be nominated for a spot on a major party's national ticket, and I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Democratic ticket that year.

Ferraro's death today at the age of 75 has brought back a lot of memories of that time for me.

I guess my experience in 1984 more closely mirrored the experience of Republicans in 2008, though, because, as you undoubtedly recall, the Republicans nominated then–Gov. Sarah Palin to be their first female vice presidential candidate.

(In fact, I observed in 2009 that the parties' first female vice presidential nominees had lived parallel lives since their historic campaigns.)

Like the Democrats in 1984, the Republicans went down to defeat in 2008 — so that year I did not have the experience of supporting a barrier–breaking nominee who was successful in the general election.

Well, that may not be entirely true. I wasn't old enough to vote in 1976, but I supported Jimmy Carter, who was — I was told at the time — the first president elected from the Deep South in more than 100 years.

Carter was kind of a pioneer in that sense — although, frankly, I always had my misgivings about that. Lyndon Johnson was from Texas, which I always considered a Southern state (if not a Deep Southern state), and Dwight Eisenhower was born in Texas, although he grew up in Kansas. Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia, but he spent his adult life in New Jersey.

As a product of the South, I felt a great deal of pride in seeing a fellow Southerner elected president — even though he wasn't the first.

Then, in 1984, I really did get to support a political trailblazer, and, when I think of that time, I have to conclude that I was more carried away with the symbolic nature of Ferraro's nomination than her relevant experience.

It was, frankly, comparable to the experience levels that Obama and Palin brought to their tickets in 2008. Far from impressive.

I don't remember giving much thought to Ferraro's experience level at the time. I was influenced by other things, and one certainly was the historic symbolism of her candidacy.

I never really thought the ticket had a chance to win — and I was living in Arkansas, where the numbers were running pretty heavily against the Democrats (on the national level, anyway). It was hard for someone supporting the Democratic ticket there to get much of a sense that victory was really possible.

A few weeks before the election, Ferraro came to speak in Little Rock. I'm still not sure why she came to Arkansas, what she hoped to gain, but I went to hear her speak with some friends of mine, Mike and Jane, anyway.

About five or six months later, the three of us went to Dallas to see Eric Clapton in concert. The atmospheres at both events were just about the same.

In 1984, a Geraldine Ferraro event was like a rock concert without the music, just the star on stage. She would stand up there and wave, and folks would shriek and holler like they did at the Beatles shows 20 years earlier.

I clearly remember that day. It was a kind of drizzly October morning. I was working nights at the time. Can't recall if the event was on a day that I had off anyway or if it was just an ordinary weekday morning, but it really doesn't matter, I suppose. In those days, I was always off duty in the morning.

Nor does it really matter why Mike and Jane also were able to attend that event on a weekday. The fact remains, the three of us went to see "Gerry" — as her supporters tended to call her affectionately — and my memory is that the place was packed.

And everyone cheered wildly at anything she said. She could have been reading to us from the classified ads in the morning paper, and it wouldn't have mattered.

Personally, with my lifelong interest in history, I was just pleased to experience this brush with history. I have no specific memory of anything she said.

(It was doubly historic, in fact, as I recall. Then–Gov. Bill Clinton attended that rally. He was always a vocal supporter of the Mondale–Ferraro ticket, even though the voters in Arkansas were not as enthusiastic about the ticket as he was.)

I'm sure she spoke critically of Ronald Reagan and his record in the White House. That's one of the main jobs of a vice presidential candidate. But even when she was critical in that campaign, Ferraro was dignified and respectful. She was often subjected to indignities by the opposition, but she never repaid them in kind.

1984 was groundbreaking in another way. It is the first campaign that I can remember that utilized popular music from the politically charged 1960s in its advertising.

---

---

That reminds me of the closing days of that campaign. It was truly a memorable time for me.

Even though it was early November, my memory is that it was unseasonably mild, and my friend Sheila and I decided to do our own form of "campaigning" for Mondale–Ferraro.

The evening before the election, we decided to just go out driving in Little Rock. I had some Mondale stickers on the back of my car, and we thought — naively — that we might drum up some support for Mondale by just cruising around and letting the other cars see the stickers.

What the heck? Gas wasn't too expensive in those days — at least not compared to what we pay today — and my car got good mileage. But there was simply no way that I was going to sway enough voters to my side to change anything in Pulaski County, let alone the state of Arkansas, through mere exposure to the bumper stickers on the back of my car.

I don't think either Sheila or I had any realistic expectation that we could influence the outcome that night — and it didn't matter, I guess. We were experiencing the "Yes we can" moment of our generation.

It turned out that we couldn't — but, in a way, we did.

Because of Gerry Ferraro, women could dream of something of which only little boys were encouraged to dream before. Blacks can do more than dream today — and, I suppose, someday in the future, Hispanics and Asians and gays will join them, if they haven't already.

I had heard little of Ferraro before Mondale chose her to be his running mate, and I heard relatively little from her after that campaign — except for 2008, when she was part of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

For the most part, she played her role on the national stage in 1984, then stepped back to let others take the spotlight.

Gerry Ferraro blazed the trail. She played her role in American history.

She fought the good fight.

Read More

Stop All The Clocks

---

---

When I was a child, it was almost fashionable to say the Kennedy name and the word "tragic" in the same sentence.

No matter where one stood on the political spectrum, it was a conclusion with which everyone seemed to agree.

President Kennedy and his brother both had been assassinated. Their oldest sister died young in a plane crash, and their oldest brother died in World War II. And over the years, it seemed that tragedy continued to visit the Kennedy family disproportionately. It didn't always take young lives; sometimes it merely left them in shambles.

That is certainly tragic.

But the truth is, in a family that large (there were nine children in Joe and Rose Kennedy's family, and most of those children produced children of their own), there are almost bound to be a few cases of premature and/or tragic death.

I'm sure there have been other large families in America that have suffered such losses, but they didn't exist in a public spotlight. The Kennedys, of course, were and, to an extent, still are politically prominent. Their influence is reduced now, but they remain the closest thing America has to a royal family.

When I was growing up in Arkansas, a politically prominent family lived just down the road from mine. It wasn't what I would call a royal family, but there were times when it seemed to me that it aspired to be.

I have written about this family, off and on, for about 2½ years now. I first mentioned it (briefly) in the days following my high school class reunion (which I was unable to attend but I got on the class' e–mail mailing list). It was at that time that I learned that the mother in the family had died the year before.

I wrote about it here again slightly more than a year ago when the patriarch of the family, a man known as Justice Jim Johnson, died of a self–inflicted gunshot wound. He'd been suffering from serious medical problems and apparently lost all hope.

Justice Jim, as I observed at that time, was an old–fashioned segregationist who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Arkansas when his twin sons and I were in first grade. I was too young to pay attention to a politician's speech at the time, but I have heard that his rhetoric was, to put it mildly, fiery.

He hadn't really been a prominent figure in Arkansas for at least a couple of decades when he died. Nevertheless, I was stunned by the vitriol I encountered when I tried to find out more about the circumstances at Arkansas–based web sites.

I was even more stunned a few months later when I heard that one of Justice Jim's sons, David, had lost his own son in an accident.

It was the kind of pain I couldn't imagine, and I said so to David in a letter I wrote a few days after learning of his son's death from one of the members of our high school class who has taken it upon herself to notify the rest of us whenever someone dies.

At the time, it really seemed to me that the Johnson family had been visited by more tragedy in a short span of time than any family should have to face. But there were two truths, one of which was obvious (Mrs. Johnson had been in her late 70s and Mr. Johnson had been in his mid–80s when they died; I was sorry that those two people were gone, but they both lived longer than most people of their generation) and the other had yet to be revealed, even though it was partially revealed last summer when David's son died.

I don't know if that truth has been fully revealed yet, but I got at least a hint today that it is continuing to unfold.

Today, I received another e–mail from Dianne — who has done a remarkable job of keeping us informed of these developments these last few years — reporting that David has died.

I hoped that Dianne was wrong, but, in my gut, I was sure she was right. I haven't known her to be wrong about any of these deaths in nearly three years, and she wasn't wrong this time, either.

I have confirmed that, yes, my friend is dead. I don't know what happened, but I have heard that he died of liver failure or kidney failure. I suppose I will learn the details in the days ahead.

It's funny the thoughts one has at a time like this.

• I was remembering, for example, when I was in first grade. David and I were the only ones who had the same first name. Everyone else — Larry, Susan, Lisa, whatever — could be identified by their first names only, but there were two Davids and that was a bit of a problem.
  
  As an adult, I understand the dilemma the adults of that time faced. There had to be a way to distinguish between David Johnson and David Goodloe. And it was decided that David Johnson would be known as "David" and I would be known as "David G."
  
  Now, in the 1990s, having an initial attached to your name was cool. But, when I was a child in the 1960s, I didn't care for it. Being the only one in the class whose identity couldn't be expressed in my first name alone made me feel like I was being singled out.
  
  It's hard to explain any better than that.
  
  But it just didn't seem fair — or necessary — to me. Everyone called him Davy, anyway. I never understood why I couldn't simply be called David.
  
  Later in life, I called him David, and he was always gracious about it, but he seemed to prefer to be called Dave.


• It's a funny thing, too, about "identical" twins.
  
  I've never understood why people often experience a kind of confusion over the identities of twins. They look so much alike, people say.
  
  And Hollywood has done what it could to promote that concept of mistaken identity with some successful movies over the years.
  
  Well, I've known a few sets of identical twins in my life, but I can only think of one set of twins who looked so similar that it was challenging for me to tell them apart.
  
  I never had any trouble with Danny and Davy. I always knew which one was which. Their voices weren't the same at all. And one of them had a birth mark on his face, not nearly as pronounced as the one that actor Richard Thomas had but clear enough to me.
  
  No, I never had any trouble telling them apart. They were alike in many ways, but they were always two individuals to me, not parts of the same person.
  
  When I got older, I mused about that very thing. Why was it so easy for me to tell Danny and David apart? I saw a picture earlier today of the Johnson family that was probably taken around the time of their father's gubernatorial campaign.
  
  (I'm guessing it was printed originally in campaign pamphlets. Politicians often circulated photos of their families in their campaign brochures in those days.)
  
  Anyway, I couldn't tell from looking at the picture which twin was which. It was in black and white, and I couldn't see a birth mark on either of the twins. They were dressed the same and had crewcut haircuts (I remember those haircuts).
  
  So I wonder if maybe the fact that the three of us were so young when we first met played a role. It's been my experience that children are often more perceptive about things than adults think.


• And, in sort of a random, general kind of way, I've been remembering my childhood on a manmade lake outside the city limits of Conway, Ark.
  
  David, his twin brother Danny and I shared many of the same likes and dislikes. We loved the same popular TV shows, like Batman, and we incorporated them into the games we would play.
  
  David and Danny had a toy that was popular in those days called "Creepy Crawlers." You would pour a liquid substance (which you would get at a toy store, and these goops, as they were called, came in a variety of colors, which kept the toy new and interesting) into a mold and heat it on a hot plate. When it cooled, you had a rubbery spider or some other similar creature.
  
  We would combine those rubber bugs into our version of the Batman series and invent adventures of our own superheroes — Bugman and Buggy instead of Batman and Robin.
  
  Well, what do you want? We were only about 6 years old! The names we gave ourselves may not have been very creative, but I think our games were.
  
  I don't remember who was Bugman or who was Buggy. Maybe we alternated. I mean, this was kind of our version of Cops 'n' Robbers, and someone had to be the bad guy. My memory of our games is that we were always fair. We always took turns — and we probably took turns being Bugman, Buggy and the bad guy.
  
  Perhaps that is why, when I think of David and Danny and our childhood on the lake, I think of us as a threesome — the Three Musketeers, with a group identity — and not as individuals like Bugman, Buggy or the bad guy.

I'm sorry my friend is gone, I really am, but I wonder if maybe I'm grieving as much for the knowledge that that chapter in my life truly is over now. Forever.

Realistically speaking, it has been over for a long, long time. But it lived on in my memory, along with images of three little boys swimming in the lake or riding bicycles on a country road on hot summer days.

Or sitting in a sweltering Arkansas schoolroom trying to focus on multiplication tables while beads of sweat rolled effortlessly down our faces.

We experienced all things together — on occasion, we even got into trouble together — and, for some reason, I thought we always would, but now David has experienced something that Danny and I have not.

If there is an afterlife, perhaps we will speak of it some time in the future.

Read More

Sargent Shriver Dies

Sargent Shriver died today, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention it.

When I think of Sarge Shriver, I remember the summer of 1972, when Tom Eagleton was forced from the Democratic ticket because he had been treated for depression.

I wasn't very old that summer, and many of the details were really over my head. But I remember how star–crossed George McGovern's presidential campaign seemed. We later learned that much of that was the work of Richard Nixon's "dirty tricks" operatives, but, in truth, McGovern brought much of it on himself. In the Eagleton matter, McGovern asked him to be his running mate without doing a thorough job of conducting a background check, and he paid a price for it.

When McGovern started winning presidential primaries (and there were far fewer of them then than there are now), the other Democrats in the race seemed to gang up on him. As I got older, I came to understand that that was the usual behavior of politicians who realize they were not the people's choice but are reluctant to throw in the towel; at the time, it struck me as unfair, which it was — but that was beside the point.

McGovern survived the challenges to his campaign, but the nominating convention, which should have been his moment in the sun, was acrimonious, and his choice of a vice presidential nominee — for reasons that my young mind could never quite grasp — was hardly treated to the kind of rousing endorsement that presumptive running mates can depend on today.

That convention, conducted in the shadow of the 1968 campaign, when so many things seemed to be done behind closed doors, was wide open, supposedly in the spirit of true democracy, but it wound up being mostly a televised exercise in pure disorganization, utter chaos.

Under the new rules, a few legitimate candidates for the vice presidential slot were allowed to have nominating and seconding speeches made on their behalf; then, during the balloting, delegates were free to cast their votes for anyone they pleased, which led to a circus atmosphere.

As I recall, about three dozen other people received votes from the delegates. Some of the nominees were rather frivolous — both foreign (Mao Tse–tung) and fictional (Archie Bunker) — and no single "candidate" ever seriously threatened to take the nomination away from Eagleton. It was a waste of time and did not give Americans who were watching the proceedings during prime time the impression that the Democrats were organized enough to find solutions to the nation's problems.

By the time Eagleton had been officially nominated and McGovern started making his acceptance speech, it probably wasn't even prime time in Hawaii. Very few people saw McGovern deliver a speech that drew praise from historian Theodore H. White in "The Making of the President 1972."

Anyway, shortly after the convention, the Democrats were rocked by the revelations that Eagleton had been treated for depression and that his treatment had included electroshock therapy.

McGovern insisted that he was standing by his running mate. He was behind Eagleton "1,000%," I believe he said. But the pressure became too great, and, in spite of his public pledge, McGovern asked Eagleton to withdraw, which he did.

And, for awhile there in the summer of 1972, the Democrats had a presidential nominee but no vice presidential nominee. It became a running joke that McGovern was offering the spot to everyone — and everyone was turning it down. The prospect of taking on President Nixon, whose lead in the public opinion polls seemed to be ever growing, was daunting at best.

Accepting the role of running mate was seen as comparable to accepting a ticket on board the Titanic with full knowledge that the ship would strike an iceberg and sink.

But Shriver accepted the role and took on the challenge with considerable gusto — even with the knowledge that Nixon was likely to carry all 50 states, which he very nearly did.

It was Shriver's opportunity to be the "political bride" — he had always regarded himself as a bridesmaid, Teddy White wrote, even though he had done some important things in his life.

At the request of his brother–in–law, President Kennedy, he was the first director of the Peace Corps.

Then, under Lyndon Johnson, he crafted the administration's war on poverty and was responsible for founding several initiatives that I remember my mother particularly appreciated including Head Start.

In fact, between Shriver's work and his wife's work with Special Olympics, they may have been the most successful socially activist couple in modern American history. And now, of course, they're both gone. Eunice Kennedy Shriver preceded Sarge in 2009.

They left behind quite a legacy.

Read More