EXCERPT 12 – VOICES IN THE STORM: THE NIGHT DESK

This is the latest excerpt from my as yet unpublished memoir about my early days in journalism in Buenos Aires, with the Buenos Aires Herald.

It was just when things were heating up in Argentina, with the imminent return of General Perón, after over seventeen years in Spanish exile, that James Neilson decided to leave his post as night desk editor at the Herald and to take what I can only imagine was a better-paying job as media chief for the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina, the job he was doing when I first joined the paper. Years later, when I had gotten to know Jim a lot better, I would find that career move completely out of character for him, since Neilson was proudly—almost arrogantly—British and tended to show open disdain for almost anything American. Furthermore, he must surely have considered the post at AmCham Argentina, a lackey’s job (as I would a decade later when I held that same post and was more intellectually miserable there than in just about any other job I ever had). But I reasoned, in the end, that it was all about making a better living. After years of appearing to be a confirmed bachelor, Jim had married and taken on the immediate responsibilities of a family since his wife had children by a previous marriage. Providing well for them was a clear priority, I’m sure, and, like most journalists at the Herald, he not only did a full-time day job but also moonlighted (or “sun-lighted”, as it were, since the Herald was a night job) as a free-lance correspondent for numerous international publications.

James Neilson

Whatever the case might have been, however, his nine-to-five gig at the Chamber coupled with the notoriously low rates the Herald paid to contributors meant that he could only provide op-eds to Cox on an occasional basis. These high-quality pieces Cox happily published in the center-page op-ed editorial section under a special slug called As I See It  and under Jim’s pseudonym, Clive Peterson—the pen name to protect Jim’s identity in his new AmCham post, and the slug, evidently, so that Cox could keep Neilson’s opinions separate from the general editorial line of the paper.

My boss on the Night Desk, then, was Nicolás Meyer, who had worked for some time as Neilson’s assistant in that department, and seemed delighted to share with me numerous anecdotes about what it was like to work with such a difficult personality as he seemed to consider Jim. In fact, he kept a typed list in the filing cabinet behind him of Jim Neilson quotes. Things such as, “My baldness is a clear testimony to my superior masculinity,” by way of example.

In his own intentionally jaundiced and disdainful style, it seemed clear to me that Nicolás admired Neilson as a journalist, but having been on the receiving end of Jim’s own well-developed cynicism and disdain while working for him, preferred to compliment him only in a sort of backhanded fashion, by immortalizing his most outrageously egotistical quotes. But having been a target of such contempt didn’t keep him from treating others the same way. He seemed to delight, for instance, in presenting me to other people as “Dan Newland, a musician who wants someday to be a journalist.”

Cox working at home

Despite all of his hardcore newsman talk, however, unlike Neilson, Cox and his brother-in-law, Andrew Graham-Yooll, Nicolás was not a hard-news hound at all. Atypical of those who occupied the news desk anchor post before and after him, Meyer tended to be less of a newsman and more of what was known in the trade as a “stone man”, an editor who is more interested in how the news is organized than in the news itself. In this sense, he turned out to be an excellent teacher for me, since before I sat on that desk with him, I couldn’t have cared less what news “looked like”. I was only interested in the story as such.

What I learned from him straight off was that you could have the best stories in the world but if they were presented in a way that was more mixed up than a dog’s breakfast, no one was going to read them. The whole idea of a newspaper or magazine was not only to select, prioritize and present news in such a way that it was eye-catching and attractive, but also to choose the news in a way that would appeal to a particular readership. You couldn’t report all of the news, unless you were a news agency churning out arid copy by the yard through a teletype machine twenty-four/seven. Newspapers—and news magazines to an ever greater extent—had to be highly selective and had to put the publication together in accordance with a “news schedule” on which there was a consensus among the publication’s editors.

Nicolás was very clear about this when he was teaching me the ropes. It was the old idea of The New York Times’ nineteenth-century owner, Adolph Ochs that was to become a Times motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.” For his part, Graham-Yooll, who headed up the local news desk, had modified this phrase to more closely fit his idea of what a city editor did every working night of his life. He referred to it as “all the shit that fits.”

Nicolás taught me all about column widths (measured in units called “picas”), active headlining, page-diagramming, text-cutting, re-writing to fit space, the basic symbols of copy-editing, and some hard and fast rules about what you could and couldn’t do: no tombstoning (placing one head next to another), no widows (single words left all by themselves at the top of a column), no labels (heads that give news a generic name rather than actively telling a story), no points after Mr, Mrs, Ms, etc., or between letters in initials or acronyms (USA, for instance, instead of U.S.A.), since otherwise, the news page ended up looking like it had taken a load of buckshot, and no key data in the last few paragraphs of an article, which might be lopped off in eleventh-hour attempts to make everything fit with the shop breathing down your neck to just get the damned thing to press. In fact, he explained, news should be written in ever widening concentric circles. Meaning, you wanted to pretty much tell the entire story in the lead and second paragraphs. From that core, you widened your circular net, adding more and more details designed to flesh the story out and provide all available information to the reader. But if a story needed shortening, it should be written so that it could pretty much be cut from the bottom up...and still be a story. 

What was of apparently capital importance at six p.m. might be of miniscule importance at eleven or twelve, he indicated. So a carefully crafted fifty-line news story handed in at seven or eight o’clock, might well be chopped down to one or two succinct paragraphs at eleven or twelve and inserted into the Around the World briefs section on the back page of the paper. This was the other thing I learned from Nicolás: Don’t fall in love with your own copy, because, at the end of the day (literally), it’s all expendable.

The other thing I learned from him was, and I quote: “You can never have enough specific instructions on a diagram sheet. Draw as many eyes and arrows and exclamation points as necessary to bring attention to things when you need to demonstrate what to watch out for. And if there’s something that could possibly be interpreted as a mistake when it isn’t, then you need to write next it, ‘¡Ojo! ¡Esto va así!’ (meaning, Attention! This goes like this!) so that some good Samaritan who knows a bit of English doesn’t change it and screw it up.”

And one major point he made repeatedly in the time that I worked with him was this: “In creating your diagrams and giving instructions to the print shop, always assume that you’re working with imbeciles—because more often than not, that’s precisely the case.”

If Meyer sought to diminish my incipient reputation by portraying me as a wannabe newsman musician, the truth of the matter was that he was a wannabe cinema critic news editor. While the rest of us escaped our night-time desk jobs by reporting during the day on politics, social issues and human interest stories, Nicolás’s by-line went almost exclusively in the Herald on pieces about the “Seventh Art”, of which he had developed vast knowledge. He left most of the mainstream cinema stories to the “owner” of the stage and screen section, Fred Marey (whose real name was Fritz Mayer).

Herald editorial department in the mid-1970s, Fred Marey

left foreground at his typewriter.

Fred always had abundant material he wanted to get in on new Hollywood movies, concerts and opera performances at the city’s world famous Colón Theater, and other stories about musicians he knew personally or about new releases in classical, jazz and popular records. He directed a show on Radio Nacional (Argentina’s public radio) called Pot Pourrí Musical and his pages in the paper, which also carried the cinema schedule and other regular items of interest, was more of the same, an eclectic entertainment section in which just about anyone visiting it could find something of their taste and interest.

As such, Fred experienced every attempt of contributors to gain access to his section as an invasion. But as night desk editor, Nicolás outranked him and was, ultimately, the one who diagrammed the section, so there was little Fred could do to sidestep Nicolás Meyer reviews. The tension between them was, however, palpable. Fred—a German Jew, who, along with his also musician brother had managed to escape the Nazis and settle in Argentina, while much of the rest of their family had perished in the death camps—would protest under his breath, handing the copy to me for his section before retiring for the night, “Diss Nicholas zinks he’s die cat’s viskas,” whenever he was asked to hold space for something Meyer had written.

Nicolás, for his part, kept a folder in his filing cabinet behind the night desk, right next to the one that bristled with James Neilson quotes, in which he also recorded “The Best of Fred”. Things like sayings that Fred turned inside out: “You’re getting die horse before der apfel cart.” Or hilarious lines from his critiques: “In this film Paul Newman will be not only starring but will also double as producer-director. It has been some time since Newman last hyphenated himself.”

“And a word to the wise regarding Fred,” Nicolás warned me early on. “It’s unlikely he’ll ever offer you a biscuit from that stash he has in his second desk drawer, because he’s tight as a wedge. But if he ever does, a polite ‘thanks but no thanks’ is a good idea, because I think he brought them over with him in thirty-eight when he emigrated from Germany.”

So while Nicolás was a pioneering fanatic of the works of directors like Federico Fellini, Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, and while he introduced many less than erudite Herald readers to classic gems from the cinematography of Germany, France, Russia, Japan and Britain, his interest in hard news was more about how to fit it in the paper and how to get it all done in five or six hours than about the content.

This was reflected in the very clear division that was jealously maintained between local and international news coverage when I first came into the paper. The front page news schedule depended mainly on the Reuter’s and UPI international wire schedules from which Nicolás culled the paper’s headline news. He brother-in-law, meanwhile, handled local coverage, almost exclusively on the middle page of the paper facing the editorial section. And it was only when Bob Cox insisted that some local item of spectacular characteristics needed to at least have “a teaser” on the cover that Nicolás would reluctantly acquiesce, and even then would try to talk Graham-Yooll into just giving him a five or ten-line summary with a “continued in the local news section” line at the bottom.

After working with Nicolás for a time, I finally figured out that all of this was coldly calculated to coincide with the schedule of the Mitre train line out of Retiro Station. Nicolás’s last train to his home in the northern suburb of Acassuso pulled out shortly after eleven p.m. So, the international and features sections of the paper had to be put to bed by eleven on the dot so that he could race to the station down the road, catch that last train and not have to ride for twice as long on a bus to get there. If he had to wait for Cox or his brother-in-law to write an entire front-page story, he’d never make his train, and there wasn’t enough ink in his veins to make him think it was important to do so. 

I grew weary, then, of hearing foreign correspondents up at the SAFICO building on Avenida Corrientes where many had offices and just about all of them hung out, talk about “how clever Bob Cox was” for “hiding all of the meaty local news” that he was investigating in the middle of the paper and keeping the front page international “so that the cover would be innocuous” to the regime.

“You’re wrong,” I would protest. “Don’t try to read any sinister motives into it. The front page news schedule only has to do with a single criterion—whether or not Nicolás Meyer can make the eleven-twenty train out of Retiro.”

EXCERPT 9 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ — LEARNING THE ROPES

EXCERPT 9 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ — LEARNING THE ROPES

The following is a new excerpt from Chapter Four of the autobiographical book I’m currently writing, entitled “Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s Memoir”, about my early days working for a newspaper in Buenos Aires.

The fact that, for the moment, I remained pretty much monolingual was to present me with an opportunity to take up a post of central importance to the newspaper’s operations: the international news desk, better known in the Herald as “the Night Desk”. After a brief period of watching me struggle to eke out the translations of a few cables a night, Editor Robert Cox asked me to move over to the international desk to replace someone who had left the paper recently, leaving the Night Desk editor without an assistant.

Traditionally at the Buenos Aires Herald, the person running the Night Desk was a veteran journalist with considerable influence over the daily’s editorial policy, since it was this department that selected, ranked and handled most of the material that entered each edition. Cox had held the post at one time. So had British journalist James Neilson (son of a Scottish father and Anglo-Argentine mother), who, when I entered the paper, was working as media chief for the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina, but who would eventually return to the Herald as associate editor and, later, editor in chief. When Cox assigned me to the post of sub-editor on the Night Desk, however, the editor in charge was city editor Andrew Graham-Yooll’s brother-in-law, Nicolás Meyer.

Nicolás was clearly not a news-hound journalist in any sense. He had a working knowledge of international news and current events and adequate skills for layout and page design, but no real passion for news work, and especially not for local news. He was, rather, an intellectual, whose first love was cinema—classic cinema and art films more than blockbuster mainstream movies—with a particular bent for the kind of “foreign” (non-Hollywood) pictures created by European, Scandinavian and Japanese masters, though the Hollywood classics also formed part of his repertoire, as did the Golden Age masters of Hollywood comedy.

Oddly enough, however, for the kind of British Commonwealth community newspaper that the Herald tended to be when I first joined it, his whimsical organization of international news coverage tended to work, originating each night from a news schedule quickly written up between Meyer and cables chief Stuart Stirling just before we on the news desk started our night of work and the cables editor ended his—a daily schedule practically approved out of hand by Cox, mainly because he was too busy and overstretched to bother questioning it unless some major international news story was missing from it.  Local news Nicolás left up to his brother-in-law.

Heading the Night Desk wasn’t a post that Andrew himself would have wanted to occupy. By that time, Graham-Yooll was, with the exception of Cox, the Herald’s most renowned journalist—even more so than Stuart Stirling who moonlighted (or “daylighted” as it were) as Buenos Aires correspondent for The Times of London. Andrew’s orientation was entirely local and at that time, he was the only authentic political beat reporter that the paper had. Despite being the paper’s news editor and, as such, often working into the wee hours of the morning, Andrew spent much of the daytime beating the streets of downtown Buenos Aires. He haunted the corridors of Congress, visited the offices of politicians and government officials, gathered information from anonymous sources and lobbyists, and lunched with, drank with and generally socialized with a multitude of representatives from the country’s more than twenty political parties and splinter groups.

Andrew as he would appear on the cover of his

refugee memoir a few years later.

Andrew had a personal style that wandered somewhere between relaxed and scruffy, a style which, truth be told, probably merely reflected the constant state of quasi-fatigue on the brink of which he lived much of the time, trying to keep up the hectic pace and unhealthy lifestyle that his daily routine demanded of him. Although barely thirty at the time, he looked older than his years. The mane of dark hair that hung over his collar and the wild tangle of beard that reached his chest were already tinged here and there with silver threads and gave him the Russian refugee air of a younger, stouter Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, although the thick anti-Solzhenitsyn mustache that flowed equally unhindered by scissors or clippers into the beard tended to be more reminiscent of the Castroite Cuban-style revolutionaries that the rightwing Iron Guard of the ruling Peronist movement hated and was already plotting to destroy.  In those paranoid days of tit for tat violence between extreme left and extreme right in Argentina, Andrew’s appearance alone was enough to render him suspect in the eyes of the rightwing authorities who were rallying around the aging General Juan Domingo Perón. And his list of contacts would have been sufficient to condemn him to summary execution. Ironically enough, at the time, Andrew was serving as free-lance correspondent for London’s very conservative daily, The Telegraph, although he would later work for The Guardian, a daily much more in line with his political tendencies.

Only a small portion of the information that Andrew gathered in his reporting during the day made it into the local news section at night. And less still was shared directly with Cox. Despite his apparent friendship with the editor, with whom he had been working since 1966, Andrew appeared to harbor an underlying professional rivalry with Bob Cox. It seemed clear to me that Andrew held back considerable information for his own use, except when timing and newsworthiness were of the essence and made him willing to publish a story that was something of a scoop and that might not hold until the weekend. In general, however, Andrew depended in large measure for everyday news on local agency cables which he and his crew translated for the daily editions, saving his heavyweight reporting for his by-lined column, Politics & Labour, which came out on page three of the Sunday edition.

Although Bob frequently dropped by the paper on the weekends to work on stories that had remained pending from the previous week, it was his custom to finish both weekend editorial pages on Friday night and leave them with the Night Desk, just in case he decided to accompany his family to their weekend house in the country and give the Herald a miss. Andrew, for his part, often worked on his column until the wee hours of Saturday morning, long after Cox had gone home, so that the first glimpse the editor in chief got of Politics & Labour was only when he read it in the paper at his home on Sunday morning.

By the time I joined the Herald staff in 1974, Andrew’s column was the subject of not infrequent clashes between him and Bob. From what I could gather, Cox was less than pleased with what he saw as the often all too cozy relations that Graham-Yooll was weaving at both extremes of the political spectrum at a time when these “notorious others” on the political scene were suiting up and arming themselves to do battle for control of the government by any and all means necessary. A couple of decades later, the BBC would quote Andrew as saying, “It’s very hard to admit nowadays: I embraced murderers. They were my friends, and I’m not going to deny it. Yes, I am part of that past.”

This was an editorial slant that was radically different from Bob Cox’s own, which tended toward a rigid, if laborious, objectivity aimed at permitting the newspaper to be highly influential without being politically identifiable or compromised. If the paper had a political line, it was the line of human decency. What Cox was seeking was a carefully balanced vision of what was happening in Argentina. According to him, the Herald needed to be “a calm voice in the midst of the storm.” He seemed to fear that some of Graham-Yooll’s less than prudent stances could, on the one hand, bring us into too close a contact with the mad-dog right, or, on the other, cause the newspaper to be branded as radically leftist—something its own mostly conservative readers would never stand for, let alone the old-guard Peronist authorities, who might simply decide to accuse us of subversion and shut us down.

The editorial line that Cox sought to establish coincided much more clearly with the politics of James Neilson, although Bob was a much more liberal thinker than Jim was. I sometimes felt, however, that Neilson occasionally expressed Bob’s line more concisely than Cox himself did. That may sound strange, but it was a matter of personality. If Neilson had any doubts about how he saw events, stances, situations or sides of an issue, no one else ever knew about it. Bob, on the other hand, was too interested in objectivity to be boldly decisive. He agonized and tortured himself almost visibly in his nightly searches for the closest thing to truth and fairness that he could find. And in writing his editorials and op-eds, this almost blatant objectivity consistently embroiled him in the dichotomous choice between writing with his gut, exactly as he saw and felt the news, or writing with his intellect and creating editorials that could serve as lessons on how things should be, rather than merely reporting harsh realities and even harsher alternatives.  His emotions played strongly into his vision. He was a stubborn, resilient man, but he expressed that stubbornness and resilience in an almost romantic, quixotic way. He wore his heart on his sleeve and that caused him to be easily disappointed, which in turn sparked his anger at anyone who let him down or lied to him—sometimes even when the culprit was someone he didn’t know personally, but about whom he had written as being a respectable person.

Neilson, for his part, seemed to live within a very hard shell. He came off as unapologetically egotistical and vain. As such, he demonstrated great certainty in what he wrote and how he wrote it. He also seemed to have no question about his right to express himself as he saw fit, since he was audaciously, almost aggressively sure of himself, of his superior intelligence, of the righteousness of his beliefs and of the unassailability of his ethics.  You would never find him, for instance, asking himself who the devil he thought he was to say this or that about a subject—any subject—and less still when it came to topics on which he had acquired broad knowledge. Or at least you would never hear him questioning himself aloud, even if he might have struggled from time to time with the same kind of doubts that attack other writers as well during the creative process. But if he did, no sign of it ever reached the observer’s naked eye. In fact, he was the only editorial-writer I ever knew who could sit in front of a typewriter and bash out a thousand or so words of erudite commentary non-stop almost as fast as he could type, with no more than a couple of typos and seldom halting to ponder his stance.

Jim’s political line was clearly conservative, while Bob’s was openly liberal. But he was also clear about what it was he wanted to conserve and that was ground on which he and Bob could meet in harmony: English-style democracy, equality before the law, human and civil rights, the independence of the courts, the rule of law and, in general, civilized decency. His editorial comments were always hard-hitting and uncompromising. They expressed exactly what he wanted to say with unflagging conviction, even if, many times, in an ironic tone. His vision was black and white. Greys were conspicuous by their absence. In his world there was right and wrong, decent and indecent, no in-betweens. And he had inherited his staunchest Scottish ancestors' aversion to what he referred to as "bending to the boots."  He saw no reason to be even vaguely amiable toward authoritarian usurpers, terrorists, dictators or any other murderers, even when it might serve the aim of eliciting respect for the rights of others.

I think an anecdote that demonstrates perfectly Neilson’s cocksure attitude and sardonic turn of phrase, not only in his writing but in person as well, is of when he and I attended a lunch together a number of years later. A story I reported on concerning mafia intrigue in Buenos Aires’s Asian community led me to cross paths with a South Korean diplomat, who, as it turned out, was an ardent fan of the Herald. He invited me to lunch with him one day at a luxury Chinese restaurant, and during dessert, he said he would really enjoy having lunch with me again sometime, but hoped the next time I would bring along Mr. Neilson.  I expressed my doubts about any such meeting. Jim, I said, didn’t generally “do lunch”, and whenever he could avoid it, he tended not to go out at all, leaving that sort of thing to me and others.

The diplomat insisted, however, reminding me that, before he became a career diplomat, he and his wife had both been “journalists” and missed the opportunity to get together with “colleagues” and discuss current events, especially since, despite being assigned by Seoul to Argentina, neither of them spoke more than a few words of Spanish, so their interaction with the press corps was decidedly limited, mostly to American and British correspondents and now to me as well.

I said I’d see what I could do. But Jim was a hard sell so I wasn’t making any promises. I figured this would be enough to gracefully evade any commitment and that the diplomat would promptly forget about it.

But he didn’t. Shortly afterward, I received two engraved invitations, one for me and another for Neilson, requesting the pleasure of our company for lunch at the diplomat’s residence. Typical of his wry sense of humor, when I asked Neilson if, just this once, he’d mind accompanying me, he said, “Well, perhaps, Dan, just this once. But only if they serve beer with the meal. None of that bloody wine.”

When I called the Korean envoy and told him Jim’s condition for going, he laughed genuinely, but promised to make sure there would be a good supply of beer on hand for the occasion. 

On our arrival at the diplomat’s luxurious apartment, the host rushed to welcome us at the door. He led us into the ample living room, bypassing a covey of Argentine journalists, who were sitting around a coffee-table over drink, chatting among themselves, and guided us to a remote corner of the room. Once we were seated, the diplomat immediately launched into an analysis of the world situation, calling on us to respond to his prompts.

Jim Neilson many years after we first

met.

Typical of Jim, who was clearly more accustomed to talking through his typewriter than in person, he mostly limited himself to feigning interest in the envoy’s analysis, nodding and answering as laconically as possible, while puffing at his pipe and sipping from the glass of beer that he’d been served as soon as he sat down. It fell to me to field most of the actual conversation with our host and I was thus somewhat relieved when his wife arrived, a few minutes before we were invited to the lunch table in the dining room.

She made a sort of Loretta Young entrance, sweeping into the room in grand style, kissing the Argentine journalists on the cheek and trying out her painstakingly acquired Spanish words and phrases, before making her way across the room to our corner. The first imprudent words out of her mouth were, “So you’re the famous James Neilson,” to which Jim kept on puffing at his briar, but now with an acid little grin pulling at his lips. “My husband and I were journalists too, you know. I think it’s a wonderful career to start out in.”

Now the smile left Neilson’s lips and his eyes narrowed. He removed the stem of his pipe from his teeth and, eyes still hooded, asked the diplomat’s wife, “And just what does one ‘go on to’ from journalism?”

“Well,” said our hostess gesturing toward her envoy husband, “he and I became diplomats!” She said this with such emphasis as to imply, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Neilson took another drag on his pipe, softly tapped the bowl against the bottom of a heavy glass ashtray conveniently placed at his elbow and, narrowing his eyes once more at the diplomat’s wife, he said, “I’m not at all sure that’s a step upward.”

This phlegmatic statement struck the diplomat as hilarious and he laughed heartily. But our hostess was not amused and snubbed the rude duo from the Herald for the rest of the luncheon.