“Having a project is a gift, Not having a project is when you are in trouble.” — various

These pearls of wisdom were recalled at the recent conference of the Biographers International Organization, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on June 6-7.  BIO was founded in 2008 by Jamie McGrath Morris, a biographer with whom I served on the old Washington Independent Writers board.  Jamie moved to Santa Fee, where he continued to work on biographies and to build the organization that recently attracted 150 people from all over the country and abroad to the 13th top floor in the National Press Building, at 14th and F Streets NW in the center of downtown D.C.  You can find me among the 220 authors interviewed for a BIO podcast,  about my group biography Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army by clicking here.

For me, entering the National Press Building was also a return to my journalistic roots. My first newspaper job, right out of college, was as the bureau librarian for the late great New York Herald Tribune, whose offices were on the 12th floor.  In my memoir-in-progress, I write about that time and place in the early summer of 1964, when my job was to read, clip and file seven newspapers daily as part of a legendary bureau with a remarkable cast of characters:

In late June, I report to work at the Herald Tribune bureau, which is on the 12th floor, just below the penthouse National Press Club.  Except humorist Art Buchwald, who is part of the bureau but syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, is on the 11th floor with his own secretary, Elaine.  The Christian Science Monitor is also on the eleventh floor. This respected newspaper, no longer published in print daily but continuing online, is unique in (and ahead of) its time for banning smoking in its bureau, in keeping with the religion’s healthy lifestyle precepts. Columnist Roscoe Drummond, a short, mild-mannered man  who has covered nine presidents starting with Calvin Coolidge, shares an office with his son and assistant Geoff.  They are also Christian Scientists, but Drummond is syndicated by the Herald Tribune. Roscoe Drummond, a short, unassuming man, is also a former Trib Washington bureau chief.

But the Trib is soon on the move, after three weeks, to 1150 Pennsylvania Avenue, a brand new office building one block west of the White House. We are on the 11th floor. Newsweek is directly above us, and the United States Information Agency on the top floor. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak are down the hall. Their Inside Report column is must reading in town. Rowlie Evans is a patrician Main Liner, Novak is a rough-hewn Chicagoan, a Jew who later became a Catholic and politically conservative. But their column is nonpartisan, and both become my mentors. Buchwald, again, is on another floor, although he frequently pops up to show his column around.  He looks preternaturally rumpled, with a signature cigar dangling from his mouth. He has only just recently returned from Paris, where his columns for the International Herald Tribune brought him to prominence.

From the large rear window a panorama of monumental Washington unfolds encompassing the Washington monument, the Tidal Basin and the Potomac.  My task is to read, clip and file seven newspapers a day: The New York Times, Washington Post, Herald Tribune, Washington Star, Washington Daily News, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor – when print was still king and of which only The Times, the WSJ and The Post survive. My “office” is a cavernous room with a long table also is used for weekly bureau meetings, that oddly or not include me.  The word “clip” may be meaningless today when newspaper stories are read—if at all—online, even once “archived,” and saved as an attachment, PDF or Word document on a computer hard drive or even “in the cloud.”  But in this pre-digital time, I take scissors to paper, literally clip stories I think will be useful and relevant to the reporters, and place them inside folders in file cabinets that line one wall, all arranged alphabetically by subject or name.   For this, I am paid $85 a week.  I am classified as a cataloger, which under the Newspaper Guild contract–I am now obliged to be a member–is less than for a librarian. But knowledge of this comes later, and I’m just glad to be here.

I am the kid in residence.  My office buddy is David Wise’s “Gal Friday” Linda Morgan. She is the daughter of Edward P. Morgan, whose Mutual Broadcasting System radio commentaries have been sponsored for many years by the AFL-CIO.  He is a patrician prime-time liberal. Eventually, I am invited to his stately home and garden on the Potomac palisades of McLean, Virginia.  There, I meet Colman McCarthy, then working for Sargent Shriver at the Office of Economic Opportunity, waging LBJ’s “war on poverty,” the first of many “wars” that would be declared and not won. He would later write a left-liberal op-ed column for the Post until the paper said enough and he launched peace studies courses at area high schools and colleges.  Colman, with a slight stutter and a nasal accent, is a former Roman Catholic seminarian raised in Glen Head, one Long Island Railroad stop from my hometown of Greenvale. Linda is a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate and a survivor of the S.S. Andrea Doria, which sunk in the Atlantic in 1955.  She is tall and smart, and the only woman in the bureau.  With her Seven Sisters college degree in the summer of 1964, she is a glorified secretary.  Her boss, David Wise, Columbia ’51, has become a best-selling author with his book The Invisible Government, a revealing look at the CIA.  His bureau librarian had to be a Columbia grad, which is how I got here. Somehow, during my tenure, he decides that I am not a graduate of the Ivy League college but of the less prestigious Columbia School of General Studies, a notion he finds alarming.  In time, he acknowledges his error and sets me up for a week’s reporting tryout on the Tribune’s City Desk in New York. But that’s another story.

David and Joan Wise live in a Georgetown townhouse, and I am included in a bureau gathering at their home, as well as another at the home of Art and Anne Buchwald, off Tunlaw Road NW, in exclusive Wesley Heights. It’s pretty fancy digs, especially since, I learn much later, Buchwald grew up in an orphanage for poor Jewish kids in New York.  Rich but humble, that was Buchwald.  I vaguely remember months later taking care of his pet parrot Hubert (as in Hubert H. Humphrey). Alas, Hubert did not long survive in my care. Maybe it missed Buchwald. Or maybe it wasn’t Buchwald’s bird.  Either way, it died..

Though I am not yet a card-carrying member of the press (except for my Newspaper Guild card), I am well-treated in the bureau. Not as an equal, perhaps more as an understudy. Latin American correspondent Barnard Law Collier, at 26, is the bureau wunderkind.  He is a friend and mentor.  He had begun his meteoric climb writing slick copy for TIME magazine’s in-house newsletter.   He will go on to work for the New York Times and, overcoming his editors’ objections to the story, cover the August 1969 Woodstock rock festival. In fact, he was the only reporter there the first day.  Following his front-page scoop, he would write a book about the Washington press corps, published in 1975: “Hope and Fear in Washington (The Early Seventies) The Story of the Washington Press Corps.  Years later, his name would resurface in Woodstock retrospectives marking the event’s 40th anniversary in 2009. But to me, Barney will always be the devilish prankster who dumped a bottle of Scotch into the bureau’s water cooler.

Linda and I are also invited to lunch, along with the rest of the bureau, with John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the publisher of the Herald Tribune.  Jock Whitney was the quintessential Northeast Establishment Republican, a man of great wealth and moderate politics. The lunch is at the elegant Madison Hotel, at 15th and M Streets NW.  I have no memory of the menu, but I recall vividly one exchange.  Clearly, we were in competition with The New York Times, at least that’s how we saw ourselves.  Unlike The Times, we were not the “old gray lady,” to invoke a long-outdated phrase.  We were instead the New York paper with flair, a writer’s paper—but also one with a declining circulation and dimming prospects.   The Times was feeling the heat; we were the cool paper.  We were cutting edge, The Times was not.  “I’d hate to think,” Jock Whitney told us, “that our greatest accomplishment was to make the New York Times a better newspaper.”

Whitney’s comment was prescient.  The Herald Tribune will exist as an independent entity only a little while longer.  But to me, in the summer of 1964, that hardly matters.   Outside the office, my social life is largely forgettable.  But in the office, it’s all excitement as the 89th Congress enacts the Great Society with breathtaking speed not seen since the New Deal legislation passed during FDR’s first 100 days. I have, if not a front row orchestra seat on history, then at least a front row seat in the balcony. There will be many stories to tell and many memories to be cherished, the rough draft of my history.

To be continued.