After the holidays I’m having lunch with two other editors—the one in his 40s edits a magazine, the one in his 60s edited a newspaper and now teaches at a J school. I’m in my 80s and edited newspapers and then the Washingtonian magazine.

Three generations and how different our lives in journalism have been.

In 1952 I graduated from a small-town Wisconsin high school just as the world was changing in so many ways. We had gone through the Depression and World War Two. Our world was mostly shaped by radio and newspapers—television was emerging but in 1952 there was little to watch beyond the Ed Sullivan show.

John le Carre’s next novel, his 25th, will be published next October. The book’s arguably uninteresting title?

Agent Running in the Field.

The titles of novels, like the heds on feature stories, are a challenge for editors. One famous writer-editor disagreement was between author F. Scott Fitzgerald and book editor Max Perkins. After Fitzgerald finished his most famous novel he wanted the title to be Trimalchio in West Egg.

After much discussion, Perkins convinced Fitzgerald that Trimalchio in West Egg was too vague, uninteresting, and hard to pronounce and the book became The Great Gatsby.

From “The speech George H. W. Bush didn’t give may be his most important,” in a leadership column by Jena McGregor in today’s Washington Post business section:

Since the passing Friday of George H.W. Bush, there have been many recollections of the most famous lines or most memorable speeches by the 41st president. His “thousand points of light” remark from his acceptance and inaugural speeches was used by the current White House to celebrate the former commander in chief just months after President Trump openly ridiculed it. Bush’s “read my lips” promise got pulled into round-up after round-up of the former president’s most famous sayings.

British editor Alan Rusbridger at his first newspaper job at the Cambridge Evening News:

The newspaper was owned by one Lord Iliffe of Yatttendon, a largely absent figure who owned a 9,000-acre estate 100 miles away in Berkshire. More important to me was Fulton Gillespie, the chief reporter, known as Jock—a growling silver-haired Glaswegian with dark glasses and the stub of a cigar permanently lodged between bearded lips.

Jock  became my personal tutor. He was not a graduate, but a coal miner’s son who had left school with no certificates of any kind and had started work as an apprentice printer. . . .

George H.W. Bush went from being a war hero to a President and much more; he also had a sense of humor. Here’s a 1989 Bush dog story that involved the Washingtonian.

NOTHING BEATS A GOOD DOG STORY
By Jack Limpert

One morning, before going to work, I was walking Lindy, our Golden Retriever.  I stopped to talk with a neighbor who was walking her Springer Spaniel. When I said something nice about her dog, she began to talk about the virtues of Springer Spaniels and she mentioned that her dog was a lot better looking than Millie, President George H.W. Bush’s dog. I’m not sure she called Millie ugly but she didn’t think the President’s dog was a good representative of the breed.

The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher, in a weekend Outlook piece, writes that “Trump borrows his rhetoric—and his view of power—from the mob. The opening grafs:

President Trump’s reaction to a new guilty plea Thursday from his longtime attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, was predictably pugnacious: Cohen, one of Trump’s strongest defenders for more than a decade, was “a weak person and not a very smart person.” Asked why he had kept such a character on his payroll for so many years, the president sounded like a parody of a lousy mob movie: “Because a long time ago, he did me a favor.”

There is a feeling Faulkner probably had—I have had it myself—that somewhere the true life is being lived, though not where you are. He may have heard the sound of it in Greenville, the rich, destructive roar not of places such as he had known but of ones far more potent. Something in him responded to that, the same thing most likely that had made him pose as an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, invent combat missions, crashes, a silver plate in his head. He was a small man. He could sit in a chair and his feet sometimes might not touch the floor. His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he even knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.