I think I was about nine when I visited a newspaper office for the first
time. It was the editorial department of the Wapakoneta Daily News, my hometown paper. I can’t recall the
occasion, but I clearly remember the scene—a small office bay crammed with
standard desks. It was an off-hour when one shift was over and the new one had
not yet begun. The desk-tops were littered with notes and typed sheets as well
as paper cups stained with black coffee, some still half-full, the coffee gone
cold and oily. There were ashtrays jammed with butts on some desks. Utilitarian
manual typewriters were the centerpieces of each work post, some with pages
still in the roll. Windows at the back let in slats of light through Venetian
blinds, and the stagnant coffee and stale tobacco combined with the
all-pervasive and pungent smell of printer’s ink to create what was, for me, a
fragrance more delightful than that of any fine Parisian parfum. It was instinctive. A very clear thought that this was
where I wanted to be.
 |
On assignment with Argentina's Coast Guard, 1987
|
Even before I started delivering newspapers when I was twelve, I had
been reading them for several years—the WDN
and the Sunday edition of The Lima News,
published in the nearby industrial city of Lima, Ohio. I was also delighted
when our teachers introduced the Weekly
Reader into our school curriculum as a current events aid to our social
studies courses. This was a news magazine for children in glossy newspaper-like
format—an Ohio invention, as it turns out—designed to open a window to the
world for kids through compelling stories developed for a variety of age
groups.
I eventually would read the papers that I delivered—first the Dayton Journal Herald, and later, The Lima News. On Sundays I was treated
to the weekend editions of some of Midwestern America’s most traditional
dailies—The Toledo Blade (for which,
as fate would have it, I would write op-eds about South America for a couple of
years in the 1980s), The Columbus Dispatch,
and the Chicago Tribune among others—as
a member of a motley crew of newsboys working for Russell McLean, who owned
Wapakoneta’s only newsstand (which, because of its unique nature in town, was
called just that, The Newsstand). I would read a few pages while stuffing
supplements in the backroom of The Newsstand before starting my Sunday route,
and finish my perusal of this paper or that sitting on the porch steps of one
or another of my customers’ houses, when I knew the family to be away at church.
My interest was piqued still further by the fact that, from the time I
was nine until I was twelve, we lived on the west end of Wapakoneta’s main
drag, Auglaize Street, and our big old turn-of-the-century house in the seven
hundred block was cattycorner across from another large house from about the
same period, half of which was rented by the then-managing editor of the Wapakoneta Daily News, Mr. Summers. His
daughter Mitzy was friends with my sister Darla, so if I accompanied Darla
across the street to see her friend, I might see Mr. Summers coming or going
(he always seemed to be working). But although I wanted to be able to corner
him and ask him what it was like to earn a living writing and reporting, I was
too shy to ask—a problem I would have to overcome even as an adult when I actually
got my first job in big-city journalism. And Mr. Summers was, himself, a quiet,
rather taciturn man who limited his response to a perfunctory greeting whenever
I waved and said, “Hi, Mister Summers!” Plus the fact that Mitzy mostly came
over to our house rather than the other way around.
Despite my shyness, it wouldn’t have been above me to make friends with
older people. Already from a very young age, I had gathered a collection of
friends from my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ era, like a
septuagenarian couple called John and Pearl who had moved to town but still
lived a country lifestyle in their little house across from the place where we
had lived before moving to West Auglaize Street, or an elderly retired justice
of the peace whom everyone knew as Judge Kent, or another lady in that
neighborhood whose name was Bonnie, and who, so I thought, was as beautiful as
movie actress Loretta Young and just as distinguished. They were all adults with
whom I could while away hours asking endless questions and listening to their
anecdotes of other times, since I was always a sucker for a good story, which
made me a natural for writing and reporting.
“My little brother Danny,” Darla told her.
“Brother?” she said to my sister. “Huh, he sounds like a little girl
with mush in her mouth!”
So scratch that contact. However, I did end up inheriting a typewriter
from Mr. Summers. What the circumstances were, I have no idea, but my mother,
Reba Mae, who was a really deft typist and perhaps wanted to practice so as not
to lose her skill, bought a used Smith Corona portable that Mr. Summers was
selling for five dollars, and I almost immediately commandeered it to write
stories on. I was still using that bulky “portable” typewriter in high school
and my first and only year at Ohio State before I joined the Army and, only after
Basic Combat Training, bought myself a more modern Olivetti because I needed a
much more portable-portable to drag around the States and Europe with me.
Murrow already had a reputation as the unofficial “dean of American
newsmen” by the time he reached television due to his high profile as a war
correspondent during World War II. His first glimpse at fame was largely a
fluke since until the outbreak of war, he was not on-air personnel. His job at
the time was to develop contacts for the CBS Radio news division that was
trying to expand its influence in competition with NBC. He had been doing this
job since 1937, when, in March of 1938, Adolf Hitler led Nazi Germany’s
annexation of his native Austria.
 |
| Edward R. Murrow during World War II |
Murrow had by that time hired a reporter,
William Shirer, who would be the first of a group of newsmen dubbed “the Murrow
Boys” to develop CBS coverage in Europe. Shirer was in Austria but the Nazis
were censoring any information being reported through state radio facilities,
so Murrow sent him to London where he was able to report on what he had seen.
Shirer also received news from other reporters in Austria and read their
stories over the airwaves from London in an innovative pool type operation.
In the meantime, Murrow chartered a plane on CBS’s dime and traveled
from Warsaw, where he had been working, to Vienna and there found a way using
short-wave technology to make a live broadcast. In a style that was novel for
its day and immediately popular, Murrow’s first lines from Vienna were: “It’s
now nearly two-thirty in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.”
From that point on, and based in London, Murrow, Shirer and the rest of
the Murrow Boys newsmen would provide some of the most dramatic coverage of the
major events of World War II. Murrow would begin his broadcasts with, “This...is London...” and ended them with
what was to become his signature sign-off, “Good night, and good luck,” something
Londoners often said to each other in the days of Hitler’s blitzkrieg on that city, since with constant bombings they never
knew if they would see each other again once they parted.
 |
Pulitzer Prize-winner Marguerite Higgins
|
As an aside, let me just say that I use the term
“newsman” advisedly. Like in just about every other field, women would have to
strive harder than any man before them to make their mark in hard-news journalism.
In TV news, they would have to wait decades for professionals like Susan
Stamberg, Jessica Savitch, Barbara Walters, Leslie Stahl and Katie Couric to
smash through the glass ceiling of what was basically a boys’ club up until
then. And while women war correspondents like Pulitzer laureate Marguerite
Higgins—who reported authoritatively on World War II, the Korean War and
Vietnam—or Martha Gellhorn rank among some of the most courageous, professional
and incisive of writers on twentieth-century wars, one is hard-put to find a
list of Greatest American War Correspondents that includes them. Indeed,
Gellhorn is much better known for her tempestuous five-year marriage to
novelist Ernest Hemingway than for having covered virtually every major world
conflict that took place during her sixty-year writing career. Hemingway,
meanwhile, had no problem creating a veritable legend around his stints as a correspondent
during the Spanish Civil War, or during World War II, which, by all accounts,
Gellhorn shamed him into covering.
But when I was fantasizing about my future as a writer growing up, those
who reached national stardom were indeed “newsmen” and while “journalist” would
have been a far more politically correct and inclusive a term, those who ran
the show still clung to Mark Twain’s alleged dictum that “a journalist is a
newspaperman who’s out of work.”
 |
Veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn
|
Walter Cronkite also first made his name as a World War II correspondent.
Not, however, in broadcast journalism. He was a writer—a fact that shone through
when he later wrote the scripts for his documentary programs, You Are There and The Twentieth Century. Throughout the war he was a correspondent for
United Press International (UPI). And it was during this time that he and
Murrow had their falling out.
It seems that Murrow had become aware of Cronkite’s extraordinary skill
as a reporter and craft as a writer and decided to try and recruit him for the Murrow
Boys. He offered Cronkite considerably more money than he was earning at UPI
and, at first, the reporter agreed to join the CBS team. But the UPI management
wasn’t willing to give up a reporter of Cronkite’s talent and stature without a
fight. They offered him a raise, not equivalent to the CBS offer but apparently
the best that a news agency could do, and Cronkite, a writer at heart, backed
out of the deal with Murrow and decided to stay at United Press. Murrow never
forgave him for it. Even less so when, after the war, Cronkite finally came
into the CBS fold and became Murrow’s rival for the top billing among the
network’s viewers. Their clashes are legendary among broadcast historians.
Nevertheless, both men had similar reputations and styles—paragons of
truth, ethics and right-mindedness. Although I was quite young, I remember
watching Murrow’s deadpan yet drama-charged editorials and his grave delivery.
It was radio-turned-television, austere, honest, bereft of props.
Unfortunately, by the time I was old enough to understand the issues he talked
about, Murrow’s See It Now show was
already suffering from slipping ratings as TV turned to entertainment over
information in the post-war years and a quiz show called The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar
Question started knocking his prime time slot for a loop.
 |
| Murrow in the fifties. |
But I never missed documentary re-runs of his best reporting and found
him the quintessential newsman. As soon as I was old enough to understand the
phenomenon of McCarthyism, I gained even greater respect for Murrow, since, at
a time when everyone in the media was terrified of being touched by the “red
scare” and being branded a “communist” by the then-all-powerful Un-American
Activities Committee, Murrow did what was right and systematically opposed
political and ideological persecution as being against everything that the United
States stood for.
Although many brave people took a stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy
and his political witch-hunt that ruined the lives of so many Americans, and
particularly of those in the arts, no one did it more effectively than Edward
R. Murrow. He hammered away at the topic and at McCarthy until he was able to
swing the tide of American sentiment from an unreasonable degree of fear of a “communist
takeover” toward an even greater and entirely logical fear of the loss of civil
liberties in the face of Orwellian state intervention in people’s right to
freedom of conscience and expression. Murrow saw it for what it was—a
modern-day version of the Salem witch trials. And he had the moral authority to
take McCarthy down.
When I was about ten, Murrow resigned from CBS. I didn’t know it then,
but President Kennedy offered him a job that he considered “a timely gift”.
This was in January of 1961, as soon as JFK took office and the post was as the
head of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which would later be
renamed the United States Information Service (USIS). Kennedy had first offered
the job to the president of CBS, Frank Stanton. Stanton turned it down and
suggested the president offer the post to Murrow. In the Cold War era, it was a
smart suggestion and a smart move to have a tried and tested newsman at the
head of the agency instead of a corporate executive, and may well have been the
difference between having a government news agency that was really about news
gathering and having one that was merely an American version of the Soviet
Union’s Tass, which at the time served merely as a propaganda mill.
The USIA had gotten a bad reputation during the McCarthy era of
persecution and false patriotism, and Murrow was seen as a breath of fresh air
to get it back on track. To show that he knew why he was there, one of the
first things he did was to re-hire veteran journalist and writer Reed Harris,
who had been sacked during the McCarthyite purges. His passage through the USIA was clearly
transformational and long-lasting. His “regal” reputation in the world of
journalism additionally gave the agency a higher profile and garnered it more
government funding for improved coverage.
But Murrow’s stay was short-lived if durably influential. A chain-smoker
who had averaged three packs a day throughout his career, he was already
suffering the symptoms of lung cancer, and although Lyndon Johnson asked him to
stay on at the agency following JFK’s assassination, he was already too ill to
continue, resigning in 1964 and dying in 1965, two days after his fifty-seventh
birthday.
I had the good fortune to work on several occasions as a special
correspondent for the now-defunct USIS in the late nineteen-eighties and early
nineties. The influence of Murrow and other news professionals who followed him
was still in evidence. When I was first approached about an assignment, it was
by Andrew Lluberes, who accumulated a four-decade long career in state
communications under presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. But despite
his long government service, Andrew was more newsman than bureaucrat and it
showed in his treatment of the reporters who worked for him.
Lluberes said that I had come highly recommended by a former boss, the
award-winning journalist and editor, Robert Cox. He understood that I’d left my
post as managing editor of the Buenos
Aires Herald and was now free-lancing. Would I be interested in doing some
work in South America for the USIS? I told him that I appreciated the call but
that I didn’t do government work. A guy who was nothing if not straight-forward—he
began the conversation by asking if Cox “had taught me to drink”, to which I
answered that, after three years in the Army, I had come to Cox with an already
well-developed elbow—Lluberes asked me why the hell not?
“Because I’m a newsman, not a government agent,” I said.
“Dan,” he said, “take my word for it. It’s just like working for any
other news agency.”
I was dubious. “You mean, if I write a story that might put the country
or the administration in a bad light, you guys won’t censor it?”
“As long as you’ve got your facts straight and are doing the assignment
we sent you to do, your story will stand. We don’t do censorship,” he said.
The per diem rate that the agency paid was better than any private media
firm had ever offered me for free-lance reporting, so I decided to believe him.
It was good money. Mostly it was very straightforward reporting: a press
conference by some US dignitary in Buenos Aires, an inter-American
drug-enforcement conference in Montevideo hosted by the president of Uruguay,
and so on. It was only on my last assignment for the USIS that I got to test
what Lluberes had told me. At an international conference of defense ministers,
held in 1994 at a luxury hotel, just across the lake from the home I had just
moved into in Patagonia, I asked US Defense Secretary William Perry about news
that had recently broken regarding a chapter on torture—and how to perform
it—that was included in a training manual at the country’s military School of
the Americas. This facility was already known in South America as “dictator
school” since many of the leaders of coups in the region had, at one time or
another, trained there.
Perry was taken by surprise, especially since the question came from a conference-accredited
USIS correspondent. He said that he had only recently heard reports about this
and that the matter was being investigated. (Subsequently, both the manual and
the training program were revamped under the Clinton administration). I wrote a
terse, facts-only news story, quoting Perry and detailing the nature of the
controversy, and submitted it, figuring that it would never go on the wire. I
was wrong. Just as Lluberes had promised, the story ran. And the only reason
that it was my last reporting assignment for the agency was because Lluberes
was tapped to run its radio operations at Voice of America, and no longer was
assignment editor for the print division.
 |
Walter Cronkite as UPI war reporter
|
Unlike Murrow, who, for my generation, was a
legend from the past, Walter Cronkite was a household word, and a guest in our
home throughout my childhood and youth. After his stint at UPI as one of
America’s top reporters on World War II, Cronkite had all the credentials he
needed to land a major post at CBS. He had made a name during the war by
delivering some of the most trenchant copy available on Operation Torch on the
Northern Africa front. He was one of only eight war correspondents chosen to
fly on bombing raids over Germany with the US Army Air Corps. He boarded a
glider to land with the 101st Airborne during Operation Market
Garden launched in The Netherlands and also covered the history-making Battle of
the Bulge. Following the war, he continued working for UPI, first covering the
Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals and later serving as the agency’s bureau
chief in Moscow.
His career at CBS began in 1950, when he took a job reporting for the
network’s affiliate TV station in Washington DC. From 1951 to 1961, he anchored
a fifteen-minute Sunday night newscast that followed the wildly popular quiz
show, What’s My Line, hosted by John
Charles Daly.
But already in 1952, his face and voice were connected with major US
events. He anchored coverage of the 1952 presidential election for CBS. And he
handled election coverage for the network for the next decade. In the 1964
elections, CBS decided to try some new faces and handed coverage over to a team
formed by Roger Mudd and Robert Trout, but ratings proved it to be an error of
judgment. People trusted Cronkite and he was once again the iconic face of CBS
coverage for many elections to come.
I vaguely recall—just flashes of scratchy black and white images—some
episodes of Cronkite’s You Are There,
which ran until 1957, when I turned eight. And I remember how at the end, he
would always say, “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with
those events that alter and illuminate our times ... and you were there.” But
that’s about it. What I recall much better was his Sunday evening program
called The Twentieth Century. It was
an historical series made up almost entirely of documentary film footage with Cronkite
scripting and narrating the stories. It was a hit for nearly a decade, and I
tried never to miss it, unless it meant fighting Whitie for control of the TV
because he was watching some sporting event. If Jim Brown was Whitie’s favorite
quarterback, Cronkite was mine, but the TV belonged to the ol’ man.
 |
Cronkite announces JFK's death
|
When President Kennedy was assassinated, it was
Walter Cronkite who told us that he had been shot in Dallas, and he too who
broke the news that Texas Governor John Connally had also been wounded. And
when the president was pronounced dead, it was Cronkite who, in his clear,
authoritative voice broke the news, before stopping, swallowing hard, wiping
his eyes and only then putting his glasses back on and continuing with his
ever-detailed and professional reporting. It was in his clear and distinctive
voice too that we learned that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had also
been felled by assassins’ bullets. He added nothing new to the extraordinary
reporting in Washington Post and New York Times coverage of the Watergate
scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation, but Cronkite pulled all of
the reports together, boiled them down and made sense of them for Americans who
depended on prime time news for their understanding of current events. But
perhaps the hardest truth ever for the US also came from Walter Cronkite’s
lips, when, after traveling to Vietnam himself and finding a very different story
there than the one the government was trying to sell us, he returned home and
told Americans on nationwide television that the war was unwinnable and that
perhaps it was time to bring American boys home.
 |
Cronkite reporting from Vietnam
|
I had a local hero as well, Don Wayne of Dayton’s
WHIO TV. WHIO was owned by the Cox media empire, begun by James M. Cox, owner
of the Dayton Daily News and WHIO
Radio, who governed Ohio in the early part of the twentieth century. Cox also
famously ran for president in 1920 with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his vice-presidential
running mate. He lost to fellow newspaperman and Ohioan Warren G. Harding of
Marion.
Wayne was a former dance band drummer who had later become a WHIO Radio
personality. When James Cox Jr. (son of the former Ohio governor) first opened
WHIO TV in 1949, his news team was headed up by an anchor who insisted on
reading the news with a pipe in his mouth, thinking, perhaps, that, like Murrow’s
ever-present Camel cigarette, this prop was his trademark. The management told
him that viewers were having trouble understanding him and that he would have
to lose the pipe during newscasts. The anchor refused and Cox fired him and his
team. Don Wayne’s increasingly popular radio personality made him a shoo-in.
So at the turn of the decade, Wayne found himself being the “entire team”
at WHIO TV News, Dayton. And he would continue to be the sole representative of
the TV station’s news department for nearly a decade. Like all newsmen of old,
Wayne wasn’t a “news reader” but a jack of all news trades, reporting, writing
and delivering the news to his audience.
 |
Don Wayne on WHIO Radio
|
As it turned out, he was a natural, and quickly
became a newsman that locals trusted. He was, furthermore, a TV pioneer in Ohio
since, when he took over the news anchor’s spot at WHIO, there were hardly more
than four thousand TV sets in the Dayton area and surrounding counties.
Fortunately, in TV culture, Whitie, my dad, was also a pioneer and had one of
the first sets in town. I never remember a time when we didn’t have TV news,
since I was born the same year that WHIO began transmitting, and Whitie already
had a television set by then.
Cheryl McHenry, who would years later be part of the WHIO news team—by
then well-established under Wayne’s leadership—once said that Don Wayne’s voice
was “equal to Cronkite’s” in the minds of local viewers. “Just the way he
carried himself, there was something very reassuring while being very credible,”
McHenry said. “He asked questions when he felt something wasn’t clear and he
wanted to make sure his delivery was clear.” Wayne’s pioneering honesty and
straight-forward delivery helped mold WHIO’s news team into one of the most
respected in the state and the region.
I remember when I was about ten or eleven my father coming home from
work at the Teddy Bear restaurant that he and two of his brothers owned and
saying, “You’ll never guess who came in for lunch today. Don Wayne!”
We couldn’t have been more surprised if he had said Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne. It was as if he had served
lunch to royalty, and I was upset that I hadn’t been there to witness it and
was only getting the story second-hand.
Wayne was WHIO’s news
department until 1958, when the station started building a full news team.
Wayne was first accompanied by Chuck Upthegrove, with whom he covered not only
local stories but also traveled to Europe and Vietnam on special assignments.
Upthegrove became another veteran of the WHIO team, remaining at the station
for thirty-eight years.
 |
Don Wayne (left) hosting a visit from Cronkite
|
For two years, Don Wayne was accompanied on the WHIO news desk by Phil
Donahue, who would later go on to boast a long career as one of network
television’s most popular daytime TV talk show hosts. Wayne retired in 1988
after nearly forty years as the face and voice of WHIO News.
Over the long years of my own career as a journalist and writer, in
which I’ve had the honor of writing for some major US and British publications
and reporting for national network radios in both countries as well, the
lessons that these and other great newspeople have shared by their example have
helped me to forge my own code of ethics and my own democratic principles. They’ve
imbued me with an insistence on putting facts before “beliefs” and the story as
it is above the story as I might rather it would be. Thanks to them, and to
other great journalists that I’ve met along the way, doing the right thing as a
news professional has never been hard. You either do what’s right in describing
current events to your readership or audience, or you find something else to do
with your life.
In a broadcast that was to prove the death knell for the McCarthy era,
Edward R. Murrow left Americans with this thought:
“We can deny our heritage and
our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no
way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation
we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves,
as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the
world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
That was his credo, and as a journalist and
writer, I’ve always made it my own.
Never has that been truer than it is
today.
