About Editing and Writing

From a Washingtonian interview with Stephen Rosenfeld, editor of the Washington Post editorial page, in June 2000:

Q. Who were the stars at the Post during your four decades?

A. Meg Greenfield was most special for me. As editorial page editor,  she had a quicksilver mind and greater penetration of issues than any other journalist I’d seen. She was sly, shrewd, secretive, insightful, and unbelievably funny. She had her moods, but she examined policies and programs deeply, as well as the human condition broadly.

Lance Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writing in the Wall Street Journal about Martin Luther King Jr.:

How can one understand the behavior unearthed by Martin Luther King Jr. biographer David Garrow? Mr. Garrow has reported, in sometimes pornographic detail, on King’s assignations with some of the more than 40 women. . .

When King preached to his congregation, he often spoke of himself as a sinner. Unlike some preachers, he meant it. He knew that he was a flawed man. Maybe King’s conscience should be understood with the help of the novelist Graham Greene’s modernist Catholic conceit that great saints may find their path to salvation by way of egregious sins. Some psychiatric speculation suggests that the drinking and the sex were the result of manic depression.

From the New York Times obit “Keith Botsford, 90, Writer and Bellow ‘Sidekick,’ Dies.”

Editing provided Mr. Botsford with a welcome respite from the rigors of writing. “I found editing myself difficult and being edited by others humiliating,” he wrote. “I got around this by editing others with generosity and rewriting with humility.” He called translation “the supreme exercise of mastering someone else’s style.”. . .

Whether writing fiction, journalism or biography, Mr. Botsford always kept the reader in mind. For this he thanked Bellow:

Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle lives in Kansas City.

The Washington Post, like the New York Times, is full of liberal columnists. And they’re surrounded every day by fellow liberals—in DC in 2016, Donald Trump won only 4 percent of the vote, while in Manhattan Trump got just 10 percent of the vote.

One journalist who escaped is Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle. He lives in Kansas City and he often brings an outside of Washington feel to his journalism. See today’s “Harvard has betrayed its mission to educate” and “Everyone acts like America is in decline. Let’s look at the numbers.”

Following up on Robert Caro at Work: “Come on Buzz, What Did You See?”, Barnard Law Collier adds some wisdom about the virtues of really listening.
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To ask questions that elicit glints and glimmers of information, and perhaps even bursts of enlightenment, is a difficult art. Caro is a grand master and enjoys the kind of dogged persistence that the work requires.

Yet it pays not to neglect the art of listening.

This is the best story about how to listen that I’ve read in a long time:

Why are some very smart people so quiet?

“My hands are clumsy. I typed novels with a single forefinger. Frankly, this limited my interest in revisions.”

“Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery”

“I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony.”

By Jack Limpert

While working as a magazine editor, I had a sentence typed on a small square of paper and tacked up on the bulletin board near my desk:

Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.

It’s spoken at the beginning of the play, I Never Sang for My Father. A middle-aged son is returning home to see his father, a difficult man nearing the end of his life, and the son is giving the audience a sense of what’s coming. When the play, written by Robert Anderson, opened on Broadway in 1968, the son was played by Hal Holbrook, the father by Alan Webb.

Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists, has rated 110 movies about journalism from best to worst.  The ten best:

1. Spotlight
2. All the President’s Men
3. His Girl Friday
4. Citizen Kane
5. Shattered Glass
6. Zodiac
7. Sweet Smell of Success
8. Network
9. Christine
10. Groundhog Day

There are lots of other good ones from 11 to 100—The Killing Fields, Good Night and Good Luck, The Quiet American, The Post, Capote—but the most fun may be the comments about the 10 worst:

The June 11th Robert Caro post described his repeatedly asking people who were part of a story the question “What did you see?” That relentlessness is a key to great narrative journalism.

As an editor, I learned about that from John Pekkanen, a Washingtonian writer who won a National Magazine Award for his 1981 story, “The Saving of the President.” The opening of the story:

From Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, by Robert Caro, published in 2019 by Albert A. Knopf:

If you talk to people long enough, if you talk to them enough times, you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t realize they knew. Take the evening of March 15, 1965. Johnson is going to address a joint session of Congress and he comes out of the White House and gets into the backseat of the limousine for his ride to Capitol Hill. Three of his assistants, Richard Goodwin, Horace Busby, and Jack Valenti, were sitting on the limousine’s jump seats facing him.