For decades, Calvin Trillin has been one the most celebrated journalists in New York. This splendid collection of his pieces is filled with reminders of what makes him special: he is equally good at the serious stuff and “pieces meant to amuse”.
The press is the subject that knits these stories together. It occurred to Trillin that these articles “amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like” since he entered the game. Many are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. They provide the flavor of the glory days of print journalism, when newsstands were stuffed with magazines and papers written by giants like Murray Kempton, Molly Ivins and Edna Buchanan – and giants in their own minds, like RW Apple Jr – each of whom gets their due here, in Trillin’s 32nd book.
His title, The Lede, is the coin of the realm for every old-fashioned scribbler. Trillin sets the tone on page four:
A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers that she bit the 600-pound animal’s genitalia after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog.
Every good lede leaves the reader with a certain amount of mystery. Trillin points to this one: “While the veterinarian was caring for the camel, was anyone attending to that Florida woman?”
The book is replete with the best lines of other journalists but Trillin’s phrases are the funniest, like the one he wrote after Time Warner announced that the magazine that gave the company half its name was to be “spun off – a phrase that to me has always conjured up a business enterprise caught in the final cycle of a giant washing machine, with desks and office machines flying through the air and middle-management types being blown away, head over heels, like so many tumbleweeds”.
Or this one, describing Richard Nixon’s difficulties “with trying to buy an apartment in East Side co-ops that persist in treating him as if he were Jewish or a tap dancer”.
Time is one of the places Trillin has labored. In the 60s, all its writers were men and all the researchers were women. For one of scores of beguiling details, Trillin quotes the biography of one Time founder, Briton Hadden, which asserted that he designed the system with the idea that “putting a male writer and a female researcher together in a quasi-adversarial situation would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process”.
Trillin wrote a much-loved novel, Floater, about his Time experiences. It describes one of the researcher’s duties as finding “some reason why any sentence suspected of being even remotely graceful must be changed in a way that makes it boring or awkward”. (When I was a reporter at the New York Times its copy editors had exactly the same habit, which was a big reason I quit.)
RW Apple Jr was a national political reporter, a Vietnam correspondent and London bureau chief for the Times, equally famous for his scoops and the size of his expense account. Trillin’s profile begins with the book that made Apple famous, Gay Talese’s portrait of the Times, The Kingdom and the Power. Talese reported that Apple boasted that he personally killed a few Vietcong, which “led an older reporter to say, ‘Women and children, I presume.’”
Trillin was chairman of the Yale Daily News and Apple chairman of the Daily Princetonian when they met, in 1956. Apple was kicked out of Princeton a second time “after he began to spend every waking hour” at the paper. “By his standards, I have occasionally acknowledged to him, I failed to throw myself wholeheartedly into the job of running a college newspaper,” Trillin wrote. “I graduated.”
The book celebrates Kempton and Ivins, two of my favorite journalists, more wholeheartedly.
Kempton’s extraordinary erudition made colleagues “look forward to a courtroom recess” when he “might muse on some human characteristic that somehow linked, say, Montaigne and Bessie Smith and [New York crime boss] Frank Costello”. Kempton “was uncanny in his ability to find some way in which almost anyone who had been smitten was morally superior to those who had done the smiting”.
Ivins was celebrated for skewering Texas politicians, but here Trillin remembers Paul Krugman’s description of her prescience after she died in 2007. Krugman recalled that when most reporters swallowed the Bush administration’s fantasy that American invaders of Iraq would be greeted as liberators, Ivins identified the real danger: “The country is 20% Kurd, 20% Sunni and 60% Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war’?’”
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Trillin has plenty of serious things to say about reporting, including the dangers faced by journalists who mistake themselves for the people they’re covering. “You could argue that reporters, no matter how much money they make, forget at their peril that they are essentially cabin-class people traveling first class on an upgrade,” he writes. “When they acquire protective feelings toward the important people they enjoy seeing socially, they tend to get scooped.”
Like many great reporters, Trillin’s principles were forged in the civil rights movement, which he covered for Time. This collection ends with a tremendous recollection of those years – and the limited relevance of objectivity in the coverage of that story.
“I didn’t pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sides – the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought that people who acted on such a belief should have their homes burned down – had an equally compelling case to make,” Trillin writes.
As America barrels towards a showdown between one party committed to democracy and another addled by racism and xenophobia, the usefulness of objectivity in an age like this is becoming more questionable every day.
The Lede is published in the US by Random House
