[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 3 (Friday, January 8, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S54-S55]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

                                 ______
                                 

                        TRIBUTE TO RUSSELL BAKER

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, Thomas Carlyle remarked, ``A 
well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.'' Truer words 
never were written, if construed as a double entendre, about my rare, 
dear friend, Russell Baker. Baker's last ``Observer'' column appeared 
in the New York Times this past Christmas, ending a 36-year run. Over 
the course of some 3 million words, by his own reckoning, Russell Baker 
has displayed grace, gentle wit, decency, and profound insight into the 
human condition. Nearly fifteen years ago, I stated that Russell Baker,

       * * * has been just about the sanest observer of American 
     life that we've had. He has been gentle with us, forgiving, 
     understanding. He has told us truths in ways we have been 
     willing to hear, which is to say he has been humorous . . . 
     on the rare occasion he turns to us with a terrible visage of 
     near rage and deep disappointment, we do well to listen all 
     the harder.

  He leaves a huge hole I doubt any other journalist can fill.
  A life well-spent? He's a patriot, having served as a Navy flyer 
during World War II. For nearly fifty years, he has been married to his 
beloved Mimi. They have three grown children. His career has taken him 
from the Baltimore Sun's London Bureau to the Times' Washington Bureau. 
He has covered presidential campaigns, and he has accompanied 
Presidents abroad. He has met popes, kings, queens--and common people, 
too, for whom he has such enormous and obvious empathy. And now he is 
the welcoming presence on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre.
  A life well-written? The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley calls 
Russell Baker ``a columnist's columnist,'' writing, ``Baker broke his 
own mold. He was, simply and utterly, sui generis.'' I would not use 
the past tense, because I doubt Russell Baker is done putting pen to 
paper. But the sentiment is spot on.
  A life well-written? Baker has won two Pulitzer Prizes--one in 1979 
for Distinguished Commentary and another in 1983 for his 1982 
autobiography, ``Growing Up.'' He has written thirteen other books and 
edited The Norton Book of Light Verse and his own book of American 
humor. Russell Baker isn't just one of the best newspaper writers 
around; as Yardley puts it, he is ``one of the best writers around. 
Period.''
  Mr. President, I ask that Russell Baker's last regular ``Observer'' 
column, which appeared in the December 25, 1998 edition of the New York 
Times, appear in the Congressional Record following my remarks. I 
further ask that Jonathan Yardley's ``Russell Baker: A Columnist's 
Columnist,'' which appeared in the January 4, 1999 edition of the 
Washington Post, also appear in the Record following my remarks.
  The material follows:

                [From the New York Times, Dec. 25, 1998]

                         A Few Words at the End

                           (By Russell Baker)

       Since it is Christmas, a day on which nobody reads a 
     newspaper anyhow, and since this is the last of these columns 
     titled ``Observer'' which have been appearing in The Times 
     since 1962, I shall take the otherwise inexcusable liberty of 
     talking about me and newspapers. I love them.
       I have loved them since childhood when my Uncle Allen 
     regularly brought home Hearst's New York Journal-American 
     with its wonderful comics, Burris Jenkins cartoons and tales 
     of rich playboys, murderous playgirls and their love nests. 
     At that age I hadn't a guess about what a love nest might be, 
     and didn't care, and since something about ``love nest'' 
     sounded curiously illegal, I never asked an adult for 
     edification.
       On Sundays Uncle Allen always brought The New York Times 
     and read himself to sleep with it. Such a dismal mass of gray 
     paper was of absolutely no interest to me. It was 
     Katenzjammer Kids and Maggie and Jiggs of the King Features 
     syndicate with whom I wanted to spend Sunday.
       At my friend Harry's house I discovered the New York 
     tabloids. Lots of great pictures. Dick Tracy! Plenty of 
     stories about condemned killers being executed, with emphasis 
     on what they had eaten for their last meal, before walking--
     the last mile! The tabloids left me enthralled by the 
     lastness of things.
       Inevitably, I was admitted to practice the trade, and I 
     marveled at the places newspapers could take me. They took me 
     to suburbs on sunny Saturday afternoons to witness the mortal 
     results of family quarrels in households that kept pistols. 
     They took me to hospital emergency rooms to listen to people 
     die and to ogle nurses.
       They took me to the places inhabited by the frequently 
     unemployed and there taught me the smell of poverty. In 
     winter there was also the smell of deadly kerosene stoves 
     used for heating, though their tendency to set bedrooms on 
     fire sent the morgue a predictable stream of customers every 
     season.
       The memory of those smells has been a valuable piece of 
     equipment during my career as a columnist. Columnists' 
     tendency to spend their time with life's winners and to lead 
     lives of isolation from the less dazzling American realties 
     makes it too easy for us sometimes to solve the nation's 
     problems in 700 words.
       Newspapers have taken me into the company of the great as 
     well as the greatly celebrated. On these expeditions I have 
     sat in the Elysee Palace and gazed on the grandeur that was 
     Charles de Gaulle speaking as from Olympus. I have watched 
     Nikita Khrushchev, fresh from terrifying Jack Kennedy inside 
     a Vienna Embassy, emerge to clown with the press.
       I have been apologized to by Richard Nixon. I have seen 
     Adlai Stevenson, would-be President of the United States, 
     shake hands with a department-store dummy in Florida.
       I have been summoned on a Saturday morning to the Capitol 
     of the United States to meet with Lyndon Johnson, clad in 
     pajamas and urgently needing my advice on how to break a 
     civil-rights filibuster. I have often been played for a fool 
     like this by other interesting men and, on occasion, equally 
     interesting women.
       Pope John XXIII included me in an audience he granted the 
     press group en route to Turkey, Iran and points east with 
     President Eisenhower. The Pope's feet barely reached the 
     floor and seemed to dance as he spoke.
       Newspapers took me to Westminister Abbey in a rental white 
     tie and topper to see Queen Elizabeth crowned and to 
     Versailles in another rental white-tie-and-tails rig to share 
     a theater evening with the de Gaulles and the John F. 
     Kennedys.
       Thanks to newspapers, I have made a four-hour visit to 
     Afghanistan, have seen the Taj Mahal by moonlight, 
     breakfasted at dawn on lamb and couscous while sitting by the 
     marble pool of a Moorish palace in Morocco and once picked up 
     a persistent family of fleas in the Balkans.
       In Iran I have ridden in a press bus over several miles of 
     Oriental carpets with which the Shah had ordered the street 
     covered between airport and town to honor the visiting

[[Page S55]]

     Eisenhower, a man who, during a White House news conference 
     which I attended in shirtsleeves, once identified me as 
     ``that man that's got the shirt on.''
       I could go on and on, and probably will somewhere sometime, 
     but the time for this enterprise is up. Thanks for listening 
     for the past three million words.
                                  ____


                [From the Washington Post, Jan. 4, 1999]

                 Russell Baker: A Columnist's Columnist

                         (By Jonathan Yardley)

       Christmas 1998 was bright and beautiful here on the East 
     Coast, but the happy day also brought a great loss. The 
     announcement of it was made that morning on the Op-Ed page of 
     the New York Times, under the chilling headline, ``A Few 
     Words at the End,'' and under the byline of Russell Baker.
       The headline told the story, and the opening of Baker's 
     column confirmed it. ``Since it is Christmas,'' he wrote, ``a 
     day on which nobody reads a newspaper anyhow, and since this 
     is the last of these columns titled `Observer' which have 
     been appearing in the Times since 1962 . . .'' at which point 
     it was all I could do to keep on reading. But read I did, out 
     loud, right to the end--``Thanks for listening for the past 
     three million words''--when I could only blurt out: ``Well, 
     my world just got a lot smaller.''
       That is no exaggeration. I cannot pretend to have read all 
     3 million of those words, for there were periods when my 
     peregrinations up and down this side of the North American 
     continent put me out of touch with the Times, but I read most 
     of them and treasured every one. Baker's columns were the 
     center of my life as a reader of newspapers, and it is 
     exceedingly difficult to imagine what that life will be 
     without them.
       Thirty-six years! Has any American newspaper columnist 
     maintained so high a standard of wit, literacy and 
     intelligence for so long a time? Only two come to mind: H.L. 
     Mencken and Walter Lippmann. But Mencken's columns for the 
     Baltimore Evening Sun were on-and-off affairs, and Lippmann 
     struggled through a long dry period during the 1950s before 
     being brought back to life in the 1960s by the debate over 
     the Vietnam War. Baker, by contrast, was, like that other 
     exemplary Baltimorean Cal Ripken Jr., as consistent and 
     reliable as he was brilliant. For all those years he was my 
     idea of what a journalist should be, and I strived--with 
     precious little success--to live up to this example.
       Not that I tried to imitate him, or not that I was aware of 
     doing so. One of the many remarkable things about Baker is 
     that, unlike Mencken or Lippmann--or Baker's old boss, James 
     Reston, or Dorothy Thompson, or Drew Pearson, or Dave Barry--
     he really has no imitators. Other journalists may envy what 
     he did, but in a business where imitation is the sincerest 
     form of self-promotion, Baker broke his own mold. He was, 
     simply and utterly, sui generis.
       This made him, in the cozy and self-congratulatory world of 
     journalists, odd man out. His colleagues and competitors may 
     have admired and respected him, but few understood him. While 
     they chased around after ephemeral scoops and basked in the 
     reflected glory of the famous and powerful, Baker wrote what 
     he once called ``a casual column without anything urgent to 
     tell humanity,'' about aspects of life that journalists 
     commonly regard as beneath what they fancy to be their 
     dignity. Looking back to the column's beginnings, Baker once 
     wrote:
       ``At the Times in those days the world was pretty much 
     confined to Washington news, national news and foreign news. 
     Being ruled off those turfs seemed to leave nothing very 
     vital to write about, and I started calling myself the Times' 
     nothing columnist.' I didn't realize at first that it was a 
     wonderful opportunity to do a star turn. Freed from the duty 
     to dilate on the global predicament of the day, I could build 
     a grateful audience among readers desperate for relief from 
     the Times' famous gravity.''
       That is precisely what he did. As he noticed in his 
     valedictory column, Baker's years as a gumshoe reporter 
     immunized him from ``columnists' tendency to spend their time 
     with life's winners and to lead lives of isolation from the 
     less dazzling American realities.'' Instead of writing self-
     important thumb-suckers--``The Coming Global Malaise,'' 
     ``Nixon's Southern Strategy,'' ``Whither Cyprus?''--he 
     concentrated on ordinary life as lived by ordinary middle-
     class Americans in the second half of the 20th century. He 
     wrote about shopping at the supermarket, about car breakdowns 
     and mechanics who failed to remedy them, about television and 
     what it told us about ourselves, about children growing up 
     and parents growing older.
       Quite surely it is because Baker insisted on writing about 
     all this stuff that failed to meet conventional definitions 
     of ``news'' that not until 1979 did his fellow journalists 
     get around to giving him the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. 
     Probably, too, it is because he insisted on being amused by 
     the passing scene and writing about in an amusing way. He was 
     only occasionally laugh-out-loud amusing in the manner of 
     Dave Barry--who is now, with Baker's retirement, the one 
     genuinely funny writer in American newspapers--but he was 
     always witty and wry, and he possessed a quality of which I 
     am in awe: an ability to ingratiate himself with readers 
     while at the same time making the most mordant judgments on 
     their society and culture.
       There were times in the late years of his column when 
     mordancy seemed to hover at the edge of bitterness. This 
     struck me as inexplicable, but the inner life of another 
     person is forever a mystery, and in any event there is much 
     in fin de siecle America about which to be bitter. But mostly 
     Baker dealt in his stock in trade: common-sensical wisdom, 
     wry skepticism, transparent decency. He wasn't just the best 
     newspaper writer around, he was one of the best writers 
     around. Period.

                          ____________________