[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 19, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S723-S724]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       A TRIBUTE TO RUSSELL BAKER

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, Thomas Carlyle remarked, ``A 
well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.'' Carlyle 
could have written these words, 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. As 
Boston Globe columnist Martin F. Nolan observed last month, ``the most 
bathetic braggarts and most lubricated louts among us never thought we 
were as good or as fast as Russell Baker.''
  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 Miriam. 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 unanimous consent that Russell Baker's last 
regular ``Observer'' column entitled ``A Few Words at the End'' (New 
York Times, December 25, 1998) appear in the Congressional Record 
following my remarks. I further ask unanimous consent that Martin F. 
Nolan's column, ``A journalist, a gentleman,'' (Boston Globe, December 
9, 1998) and Jonathan Yardley's column, ``Russell Baker: A Columnist's 
Columnist,'' (Washington Post, January 4, 1999) also appear in the 
Record following my remarks.

               [From the Boston Globe, December 9, 1998]

                       A Journalist, a Gentleman

                   (By Martin F. Nolan, Globe Staff)

       San Francisco.--American journalism has marinated in 
     wretched excess in 1998, and the year closes with the 
     ultimate deprivation and indignity. This month, Russell Baker 
     files his final column for The New York Times.
       For readers, this means losing that rare sense of 
     anticipation, glancing at a byline as a guarantee. Baker's 
     byline delivers good writing, good humor, and a ruthless 
     honesty about himself. He does not bluff or pontificate. 
     Readers know: Character counts. Russ Baker's sensibilities 
     have enriched the op-ed page of the Times since 1962, longer 
     than any other columnist on that newspaper.
       Ink-stained wretches still in harness will miss him as a 
     role model, which in journalese means an object of fierce and 
     unrelenting envy. The green-eyed monster squats daily over 
     every newsroom word processor, presiding over pointless 
     arguments: ``I may not be good, but I'm fast'' vs. ``I may 
     not be fast, but I'm good.'' But the most pathetic braggarts 
     and most lubricated louts among us never thought we were as 
     good or as fast as Russell Baker.
       He has written 3 million words for the ``Observer'' column, 
     few of them out of place. His lasting contribution to 
     American letters was ``Growing Up, ``his 1982 memoir, which 
     ignored politicians to focus on his mother, Lucy, who 
     hectored him about ``gumption'' and often said, ``Don't be a 
     quitter, Russell.''
       He's hardly that. He began reporting for the Baltimore Sun 
     in 1947, as he wrote, ``studying the psychology of cops, 
     watching people's homes burn'' while trolling the same 
     precincts as H.L. Mencken 50 years earlier. Instead of 
     Mencken's bile, he infused his prose with bemusement. He 
     moved from street reporter to rewrite with no illusions: ``I 
     knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing 
     together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.'' Gulp. 
     Also ouch.
       A profile in The Washingtonian this year quoted Calvin 
     Trillin on Baker as a 1950s guy: ``No complaining, no dancing 
     in the end zone.'' One lesson of ``Growing Up'' is that war 
     and depression are more character-building than peace and 
     prosperity, so Baker sought no slack and no other short cuts, 
     which were notoriously unavailable at the Washington bureau 
     of The Times, which he joined in 1954.
       ``In those days plain English was under suspicion at the 
     Times,'' he once recalled. ``Many stories read as if written 
     by a Henry James imitator with a bad hangover. 
     Incomprehensible English was accepted as evidence of the 
     honest, in inarticulate, reporter; plain English botherd 
     people.''
       But the copy desk yielded. Because Baker knew the 
     difference between ``disinterested'' and ``uninterested,'' 
     because he could navigate the perilous waters between 
     ``flaunt'' and ``flout,'' his news stories penetrated the 
     philistine phalanx with lines like: ``Senator Everett M. 
     Dirksen, the Illinois Republican and orator, looking 
     Byronically disheveled . . .''
       Such a phrase would vanish in the hyena cacophony that 
     passes for political discourse on television today. It is all 
     the more fitting that Baker has become a TV star as host of 
     ``Masterpiece Theatre.'' In 1993, when PBS searched for 
     Alistair Cooke's successor, Christopher Lydon and other 
     lobbied heroically for Baker, one of the best-read reporters 
     ever to meet a deadline.
       Baker admired his fellow Virginian, Murray Kempton, the 
     columnist who set out in New York every day to take the luck 
     of the day. Writing in retirement, Baker hopes to ``take the 
     luck of the year.''
       In an ancient newspaper joke, a butler informs his employer 
     that ``Some reporters are here to see you, sir, and a 
     gentleman from The Times (or Transcript or Tribune).'' He may 
     still identify with the typical Washington correspondent of 
     his day, a dirty-fingernailed hustler ``who services a string 
     of small papers in the Gadsden Purchase.'' But Russell Baker 
     adorns this increasingly rude trade because he is a true 
     gentleman.
                                  ____


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

                 Russell Baker: A Columnist's Columnist

                          (By Jonathan Yardly)

       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 Ripkin 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

[[Page S724]]

     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.
                                 ______
                                 

              [From the New York Times, December 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 Sunday's 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 
     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 
     metro 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 there 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 realities 
     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 Westminster 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 one 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 
     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.

                          ____________________