OPINION:
ADVENTURES OF A BOY ON THE BUS: FIVE DECADES AS A WASHINGTON JOURNALIST
By Carl P. Leubsdorf
Politics and Prose, $34.99, 263 pages
They are known as wiremen and it is a compliment in the newspaper business now battered by inhuman electronics. What it means is that they are reporters who can and will do anything because they are not only good at it, they love it.
Carl Leubsdorf is a wireman and he has earned the title over half a century of covering stories ranging from the assassination of a president to knowing who is drunk on the Senate floor and not writing about it on the spot but remembering it forever.
His book, “The Adventures of a Boy on the Bus,” is a historical kaleidoscope compiled with meticulous attention to accuracy and detail and supported by an encyclopedic memory. He remembers everything and everybody, and what is even more important he remembers what to forget. He is the kind of reporter who, as a colleague once said, could be dropped in the middle of a desert and come up with an oasis.
He spent most of his career in Washington soaking up the gossip and the flow of facts on Capitol Hill and winding up, like many, on the White House beat, which has been compared to a police beat and where intuition can be priceless.
An experienced White House correspondent is the possessor of myriad sources in the administration and even the cabinet and the president in times gone by could be examples of the best. James Baker, the former secretary of State for George H.W. Bush, was treasured for his capacity to tell a trusted reporter what he thought was good for him or her as well as to tell carefully tailored lies.
Mr. Leubsdorf assesses his book by writing, “I’ve tried to concentrate on offering some of what it was like to be a reporter in the midst of history and why I’ve told people that being a reporter beats working for a living.”
He did have a personal life that included two marriages, one very successful, and several children, but his passion was what he did and it is illustrated in the wide range of journalism he covered. Conversation with Carl invariably is interrupted by his sudden recollection that he is a close friend or even related to the people who have interjected themselves into his words
He was and will always be a wireman, launching his legendary career in the Associated Press where he spent most of his life leaping from news cycle to news cycle, before moving on to the Baltimore Sun as a reporter and the Dallas Morning News as Washington bureau chief. It was perhaps there that he made his mark because a good bureau chief has to understand people and reporters are people.
He spends a considerable part of his memoir relating the saga of the Dallas bureau’s battle over the affair of President Bill Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky. How the newspaper got the leak that led to the story is a classic back story and it carried its risks for the bureau chief fighting for what he was convinced were the facts. Politics in Washington, as many have said, is a blood sport and probably nobody knows that better than Mr. Leubsdorf.
Not that he didn’t have fun. The saddest development of journalism today is how few reporters seem to have fun, perhaps unsurprising given the bleakness of the journalistic world controlled by a new kind of president. All they do is cope with the problems, the difficulties and the anger of an uncertain leader where communication is impossible. The author obviously misses the old days, although he was never a member of the three-martini lunch brigade. But he had the sense of humor that matched it.
This is a book you can cherry pick and find the most succulent information about well-known facts and figures. The author is no cynic, but he knows what to do with and how to write facts in a way that intrigues the reader, and he is still busily writing a political column once a week in retirement. He admits he isn’t always right in his predictions, but he makes some pretty good guesses.
But then, you would expect a wireman to be accomplished at guessing, and there is nothing he enjoys more than getting a vote right without admitting whose side he was on. Not even his admitted passion for sports of all kinds from baseball to ice hockey surpasses his love of gauging a wild card in a political race that could wind up in the White House. He didn’t even complain when he was sent around the world on a trip with Spiro Agnew except to observe there isn’t much that interested the then-vice president, perhaps except money.
Mr. Leubsdorf has had fun as a wireman and so will his readers.
• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
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