Word: man
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Intensely personal columns by other writers make this private man uneasy. "It's a terrible problem examining one's entrails in public," says Baker. John Leonard, also of the New York Times, is a columnist whose bouts with existential despair are on weekly view, with results that range from considerable heroics to embarrassing displays of bad taste. Baker has never exploited his family for material, with the forgivable exception of some memorable columns celebrating the archetypal awfulness of vacation car treks along the New Jersey Turnpike. Now and then he rules out a topic for a while because...
...like a junk-ball pitcher in baseball keeping them off balance." He laughs. "You get older and lose your fastball and there's more junk. It was easy to be angry, but I felt you couldn't go the distance being angry. God's Angry Man is delightful for the first six months, and then you wish he'd shut up. It wasn't easy to shut up when the Viet Nam War came along, and every once in a while I'd let out a shriek. People seemed to like that, as long as I didn...
...weekly article for the Sun called "Window on Fleet Street," which attracted the attention of another old London hand, James Reston, then Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. "It conveyed a sense of London, what the melody really was," says Reston today. So he made the young man an offer, and in 1954 Russell and Mimi returned to Washington...
...then Vice President and lonely, threw his arm around Baker, pulled him into his office and began a long, intimate, anecdote-filled confession of his hopes for the coming political season. Baker had dealt with Johnson during L.BJ.'s glory days as Senate majority leader, but as the great man spoke he scribbled something on a piece of paper, buzzed for his secretary and handed the paper to her. Soon she returned and handed the paper back. Some time after that the interview ended with Johnson still effusing. Another reporter who followed Baker into Johnson's office got a look...
...reporting. I began to feel like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, carrying that typewriter in one hand and that suitcase in the other and a dirty old raincoat into one more hotel lobby. It came to seem that this wasn't a worthy way for a grown man to spend his life. You have good seats, sure, but you're always on the sidelines. You're not making anything. Auden has a wonderful essay?it's in The Dyer's Hand?about how young people want to be writers. He says it's something the Greeks understood...