Word: columnist
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DIED. Joseph Kraft, 61, syndicated political columnist whose incisive views and access to world leaders made his prose must reading in the nation's capital and beyond for more than 20 years; of heart disease; in Washington. After working at the Washington Post and the New York Times in the 1950s, he became a speech writer for 1960 Presidential Candidate John Kennedy and in 1963 launched his thrice-weekly column. The globe-trotting, indefatigable Kraft wrote with erudite assurance, whether on the Middle East or Middle America. Once a staunch liberal who made Richard Nixon's enemies list, Kraft later...
Otherwise, they brood. Into their study every morning parade the armies of the news. A knock on the door, and there stands Heseltine resigning from Mrs. Thatcher's Cabinet, Marcos on the stump, Gaddafi playing cowboy on his tractor, mummied to the nose. Come in, boys. The columnist will make sense of all this somehow. After the reporters and the editors have dumped the facts on the doorstep, the columnist, like a jigsaw addict, scoops up the pieces, studies the angles, mulls, clears his throat and says, with as much self-assurance as possible: This piece goes here, and this...
...laws of physics insist that work must move things: A pushes against B, and B moves. What, besides paper, does the columnist move? He wonders that himself. Swiveling in his chair, he catches hummingbirds, bats, butterflies in flutter, pins them to the wall and whispers, "Gotcha." But he doesn't. Today Gaddafi, tomorrow the Chicago Bears. Call this history? Come Thursday, no one will remember how right he was on Tuesday, and the facts may have altered to prove that he was wrong on Tuesday after all, but who will remember that either? Twenty years after his death, maybe...
...grasp everything the world can throw at it, baseballs to missiles, because that is how the mind protects the body, protects itself. Understanding is protection. More: understanding is forewarning. More: understanding is life. The individual column does not count, because a column is not supposed to exist alone. A columnist looks to erect a whole assembly of columns, each single effort standing patiently at attention after it is created, until eventually a population emerges, a civilization emerges. The civilization is both an accumulation of the columnist's ideas and of his being; he is his collected works. More...
...White House Mess, a just-published satire that has titillated Washington by lampooning the self-serving banalities of political memoirs. This capital à clef was written by onetime White House Intimate Christopher Buckley, 33, former speechwriter for Vice President George Bush, as well as the son of Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley, an old friend of the Reagans'. The novel, however, "doesn't seem to have hurt any feelings," admits Buckley. "Maybe I've failed...