Word: lisagor
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...Lisagor modestly attributes his popularity to the fact that he works for a provincial paper. None of his sources, he claims, ever see what he writes. But being a "busher" in the bailiwick of the Eastern press giants has had its drawbacks. Lippmann or Reston could get a Cabinet member by phone, but Lisagor once waited weeks trying to see John Foster Dulles. He got an interview immediately when, on the strength of a New York Times Sunday Magazine assignment, he identified himself as Mr. Lisagor for the Times...
...News. Outside the profession, much of Lisagor's recognition and prestige is due to his appearances on television, which he pretends to disparage. "I belong to the dirty-fingernail set," he boasts. "Those who work with pencil and notebook, as opposed to the folk heroes on TV. I'm a working stiff, a shoe-leather man." He is embarrassed when little girls recognize him and ask for his autograph. Nevertheless, he does a weekly report for NET and is the most frequent guest journalist on NBC's Meet the Press, a program that displays Lisagor...
...After a year," he asked an evasive Daniel P. Moynihan, "how does it feel to be the house liberal?" Lisagor had used the approach before. "If you were Secretary of State," he asked Johnson Adviser McGeorge Bundy several years ago, "would you want a McGeorge Bundy in the White House?" And when Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler began a song and dance about how General Lewis Hershey had not actually been canned as Selective Service director but promoted to a higher advisory post, Lisagor stopped the nonsense and broke up the house by asking quietly: "How did he take...
Shorn of Britches. Those fortunate enough to catch Lisagor in print (his features and weekend columns are syndicated in 90 cities but seldom appear in D.C. or New York) find Pete hanging on no ideological peg. An apolitical anomaly in a highly partisan town, he is praised by Bill Buckley's National Review and quoted by the liberal New Republic. "An old editor once told me to walk down the middle of the street and shoot windows out on both sides," he says. "I guess that's about what I try to do." He will agonize for hours...
...Pete Lisagor's "plain folks" pose is an honest one. He was a 14-year-old orphan when he went to Chicago from the West Virginia coal fields in 1930. He played pro baseball "for $65 a month and hamburgers" in Iowa, until he saved enough money to go to the University of Michigan. With time out for the Army and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he has worked for the News almost continually since 1939. In Washington, Old Pete never flaunts his unique eminence, but he obviously enjoys it. When a friend called...