a blog by Jack Limpert, Editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.
In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump got 4 percent of the vote in Washington, D.C., and when he was elected President the reaction in D.C. was “We don’t want you here.”
In the 2020 presidential primary in the nation’s capital, Joe Biden was the leading Democratic vote-getter with 62,069 votes. Elizabeth Warren received 9,675 votes, Bernie Sanders 8.007 votes.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump got 0 votes.
Leonard Downie.
From the book All About the Story: News, Power, Politics, and The Washington Post, by Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Post:
As Ben Bradlee had, I insisted on complete nonpartisanship in The Post’s news coverage and noninvolvement of Post journalists in political activity or advocacy of any kind. The newsroom’s Standards and Ethics policy, which I strictly enforced, required our journalists to “avoid active involvement in any partisan causes — politics, community affairs, social action, demonstrations — that could compromise our ability to report and edit fairly.” That meant that members of the news staff could not contribute money to candidates, parties or causes; sign petitions; or participate in any of the many protest marches in Washington.
From a New York Times obit by Steven Kurutz headlined “Winston Groom, Author of ‘Forrest Gump,’ Dies at 77:
Winston Groom, a Southern writer who found a measure of belated celebrity when his 1986 novel, “Forrest Gump,” was made into the 1994 Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks, died on Thursday at his home in Fairhope, Ala. . . .
Mr. Groom had published three well-regarded novels and a nonfiction finalist for a Pulitzer Prize when he wrote the book that would define him as a writer and turn the Gumpian phrase “life is like a box of chocolates” into a modern-day proverb.
Novelists, Margaret Atwood said, spend their time imagining some nonexistent people are real. Bureaucrats, she said, do the reverse: As they construct rules and procedures to make normal life impossible, they pass their days imagining that real people don’t exist.
—From a review, by Andrew Stark, of the book Out of Our Minds, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.
By Christine Armario
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — César García, a veteran reporter for The Associated Press who ventured across Colombia to tell the story of the nation’s armed conflict, has died. He was 61. . . .
With a voice recorder in hand, García became a fixture at many major events of the last three decades in Colombia, whether peace talks with leftist guerrillas or breaking news from the halls of the presidential palace.
Along the way, his dogged reporting and disarming personality won him the trust of a wide range of dignitaries, an unusual feat in a country where division runs high and wounds from decades of violence are deep.
From a Jason Gay interview of writer Roger Angell in the Wall Street Journal:
When I was young, and starting to obsessively read books about sports, my father gave me two paperbacks: Roger Angell’s “The Summer Game” and “Five Seasons.” I had no idea it was possible to write about sports like Angell could: at great length, in sublime detail, as focused on the humans under the uniforms as it was on the stats and scores.
Angell turns 100 years old on Sept. 19. The legendary New Yorker writer and fiction editor spoke to me this week via telephone from his home in Manhattan, where he’d recently returned after spending the summer in Maine.
By Jack Limpert
When art critic Robert Hughes wrote a story for The Washingtonian about the Phillips Collection, a much-loved Washington museum of modern art, it included this sentence:
“And yet the Phillips has never lost its aedicular quality, its gift of intimacy and unhurried ease in the presence of serious art.”
Howard Means, the editor on the story, remembers it this way: “You almost fainted when I sent you the manuscript without removing that word.”
From a letter that Raymond Chandler sent to Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic Monthly:
By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proofreader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street between.
From an Inside the Times story by Marc Lacey and Shreeya Sinha headlined “What Unifies the National Desk”:
No day is dull on the National desk. We arrive at work — which now means striding a few steps from our beds to our laptops — and the barrage begins. Will it be a raging wildfire today that occupies us? Or another grim police shooting? Will coronavirus cases surge in a new part of America? Or will cars line up by the scores, their occupants in search of food? Reporting on all this, and making sense of it, is what we do.
By Jack Limpert
In 1975 I was the relatively new editor of the Washingtonian and dating Jean, a pharmacist. We had little money but wanted to get married, buy a house, and have kids.
I had $7,000 in savings. Jean had no money but through her drugstore job knew a banker who agreed go lend her $7,000. We took the $14,000 and used it as a down payment on a $72,000 house in Bethesda, two blocks from the DC line. We happily moved in and in 1977 had our first child, Ann.
