CHAPTER 4

From Omaha to ’Naptown

THANKS TO CREDIT for eighteen months of full-time experience at the Joliet Herald-News and the Champaign-Urbana Courier, my AP salary was $68 a week ($512 in equivalent 2007 buying power)—substantially less than I had earned as a first lieutenant. That did not go far even in Omaha. But I was tipped off to American Legion Post No. 1 in downtown Omaha, where, as a veteran, I could rent a maid-service room for forty-seven dollars a month—and with the added benefit of a bar that was often frequented by unattached ladies.

I never made any real friends in Omaha, except for a couple of bartenders, the local bookie, and Ross Lorello, who ran the best steak house in a city renowned for steak houses. I ate at Ross’s as often as I could, which was not often. What I could afford was reading library books, including Arnold Toynbee’s multivolume study of civilizations. It kept my brain active at a time when my main work on the night shift consisted of rewriting state and regional news for Nebraska radio and television stations. With no more than two news staffers in the bureau at one time, I also was expected to help write stories phoned in by stringers. I was particularly busy every evening after Randall Blake took over as night editor. He was a delightful character who had seen much better days at the AP and now, waiting for retirement, was dedicated to doing as little work as possible.

Blake took two weeks’ vacation every year to attend the World Series, and in 1954 asked me to write his Nebraska high school football predictions during his absence. “Randy,” I said, “I know nothing about Nebraska high school football.” “Kid,” he replied, “do you think I do?” Following his instructions I lifted the expert predictions from the Omaha World-Herald galley proofs and made a few changes so that it would look kosher.

Early in December, I was offered another temporary assignment as a full-time reporter—in the Lincoln bureau to cover the biennial session of the unicameral Nebraska legislature that convened in January 1955. The Lincoln bureau had only two permanent staffers. Odell Hanson, the “Correspondent,” was a brilliant wire service writer but preferred to stay in the downtown bureau rather than cover the legislators. That duty was supposed to be handled mainly by an old AP hand, but, luckily for me, he was having personal problems, and I ended up doing the heavy lifting. Given a weekly columnlike legislative feature, I changed my byline from “Bob” to “Robert D.”

The pressing issue of the legislative session was finding money for Nebraska’s depleted highway system. The construction lobby was attempting to pass a “ton-mile tax” on trucks that was vigorously opposed by the truckers lobby. The truckers seemed to have more money and put on a nightly buffet and open bar that attracted plenty of senators—and me. Living in the basement apartment of a private home in a lower-income suburb, cooking my own meals, I was delighted to freeload off lobbyists as often as I could. The truckers won the battle and killed the ton-mile tax.

The newly elected Republican governor of Nebraska, Victor E. Anderson, was neutral on this as on most issues. He was considerably less impressive than the athletic coaches who up until then had been my most intimate news sources. But so were nearly all the legislators. This first impression of the political class did not change appreciably in a half century of sustained contact.

Anderson was almost totally inarticulate. He seemed uninterested in public policy and had no ideology except a vague desire to stand pat. He held no news conferences out of fear that he would commit horrendous bloopers that newsmen would accurately report. When we needed to quote him, however, he was always available for quick interviews. His staff apparently figured that, one-on-one, the reporters would clean up his syntax. I did, and so did everybody else.

I had followed politics since I was nine, but government was something different, and now, at age twenty-four, I was learning how to cover it. It took more elbow grease and chicanery than cerebral brilliance. The other legislative reporters went home every night, but I had no desire to be in my basement apartment. I hung out at night with legislators and lobbyists as much as I could. I also learned it paid to be good friends with low-level staffers. Flirting with the female secretary at the Nebraska Supreme Court provided me with a few minutes’ lead in getting the court’s opinions—important in beating out the United Press, the dominant wire service in Nebraska.

I wrote the AP wrap-up of the 1955 legislative session that ran on the front pages of many Nebraska daily newspapers. For somebody who knew nothing about the state less than a year earlier, I was willing to offer authoritative judgments. I deplored the “striking lack of important legislation” that came out of the five-and-a-half-month session. Looking back after five decades, I would say it was a pretty good session.

I also wrote profiles of legislators. One I remember was of a retired farmer named William Purdy, serving his first and only two-year term as the representative from Norfolk. I think I was the only reporter to interview him. Purdy was a cipher, but he was a cipher on purpose. He had campaigned for the unicameral on these pledges: to serve only one term, to make no speeches on the floor, to introduce no bills, to vote against each and every bill to increase taxes or expand government. He faithfully kept all these promises.

My profile of the old farmer was as snide and dismissive as AP style would allow. Over the years, however, Bill Purdy has become one of my heroes.

         

I WAS ON borrowed time. I assumed the AP would put me out of my job when the unicameral finally adjourned. I scoured the Editor & Publisher want ads. Congressional Quarterly rejected me for a political reporter’s job in Washington. Thankfully the English-language Beirut Star turned me down for a subeditor’s job in Lebanon.

Then I got a reprieve—a new four-month vacation relief assignment in Omaha. That four months was almost up when Omaha “Correspondent” Ed Makiesky called me into his little office to tell me I had hit pay dirt in Indianapolis, assigned there permanently as the bureau’s second-ranking political reporter.

         

GOING FROM THE AP in Nebraska to the AP in Indiana was like going from Double-A to Triple-A in baseball. That is no comparison of cities. Indianapolis in 1955 was down-at-the-heels compared to Omaha (in Illinois, we refered to it as ’Naptown). But the Indianapolis AP bureau was twice as large. It had a “Chief of Bureau” rather than a mere “Correspondent,” a full-time political reporter, a full-time sportswriter, a photographer, and a bureau secretary. And in Indiana, AP was the dominant wire service.

There was also an active Indianapolis Press Club, where I spent some rollicking evenings and where I would meet my first wife (then working for the Republican State Central Committee). Sometimes a liquor-laden crowd would close the press club and reconvene at my second-floor walk-up apartment in the city’s “burglar belt” to scramble some eggs and do some more drinking.

INTRIGUE AND FACTIONALISM were nonstop in both Indiana parties. In 1955, three years had not healed the deep cleavage between the Indiana Republican Party’s Taft and Eisenhower wings. I had been unduly influenced by an adoring 1955 Time cover story on Governor George North Craig, a former national commander of the American Legion in his first political office. Calling him a “swift-footed, swashbuckling lawyer-politician,” the magazine cast him as the great hope of Eisenhower’s “New Republicans” aligned against the state’s reactionary Taft wing headed by the McCarthyite senator William Ezra Jenner.

Things were not nearly so simple. The Indianapolis press corps despised Craig as a corrupt and arrogant bully. Jenner at least had some ideals, even if they were not as acceptable in the Republican Party then as they would be a generation later: limited government, low taxes, and “home rule” (a euphemism for states’ rights).

But ideals were not what the factional battle was about. Indiana was one of the last patronage states. Some sixty thousand jobs were in the hands of the governor. A closed-door meeting of the Republican State Central Committee in the spring of 1956 demonstrated Craig’s way of wielding power. The governor’s forces pressured a committeeman, a coal mine owner in private life, by warning him that his coal contract with the state government was in jeopardy if he did not give Governor Craig his vote. I heard this with my own ears, and so did the other reporters on the political beat. Journalists usually are not accorded this view of the political world’s dirty underside. But in this case, the conversation in the room drifted through the Claypool Hotel’s ventilating system, and we all eavesdropped.

The Craig versus Jenner showdown came during the party convention at the Indiana State Fairgrounds Coliseum on June 29, 1956. At issue was the nomination for governor to succeed Craig. Massively unpopular at his party’s grass roots, Craig was booed by delegates chanting, “We want Jenner!” Jenner stayed in seclusion, pulling convention strings behind the scenes.

The convention nominated Lieutenant Governor Harold W. Handley, Jenner’s choice and the only one of five Republican candidates deemed “unacceptable” by Craig. The lame duck governor was finished. Never shy about speculating, I wrote in my account for AP’s national wire: “It was possible that Craig, highly regarded by the Eisenhower Administration, might have lost his chance for a high federal appointment.” The story was carried by the New York Times.

         

IN MAY 1956, I had a brief encounter that wound up changing my life. Douglas B. Cornell, the AP’s top political writer out of Washington, arrived in Indianapolis to write the national wire stories on Indiana’s Democratic presidential primacy. Handsome and self-assured, he was a figure of awe for us provincials. I was assigned to be his “caddy”—to brief him on the intricacies of Indiana politics from the depth of my six months’ experience. Cornell had been brought in not to just report raw primary results but to assess the political situation, and he peppered me with questions.

On Tuesday night, Cornell did stories for the morning newspapers and then wrote for the afternoon ones. He came into the bureau briefly early Wednesday before catching the plane back to Washington. He instructed me to write a new lead for late afternoon editions over his byline.

Before he left, Doug asked: “How would you like to come to Washington?” I allowed that I could imagine nothing better but did not think that it seemed likely. “Don’t be too sure,” he said.

         

TO SAY THAT I was born and bred antiunion would be an exaggeration, but not much of one. My father detested labor negotiations, his antipathy to unions becoming personal when a union organized the workers at his Lockport plant just after World War II.

Now that I was a permanent AP employee in Indianapolis, I was pressured to join the American Newspaper Guild. Night editor Leonard Pearson, a soft-spoken gentleman nearing retirement age, was the de facto shop steward for the guild and a stickler for union privileges. Just before I arrived in Indianapolis, he had suffered a massive heart attack and spent many weeks in convalescence. When he returned to work, his doctors limited him to three nights a week indefinitely.

I had been in Indianapolis only for a few months when the bureau chief, Peter McDonald, called me into his office. McDonald had taken a liking to me. Now, in confidence, he showed me Pearson’s applications for time-and-a-half overtime payments for several nights when he had stayed on an extra ten or fifteen minutes to file late high school basketball scores.

“Can you believe this guy?” McDonald asked me, as he threw Pearson’s reports on his desk. “We give him every break, pay him full time for three days’ work when it’s not required by the contract, and he wants ten minutes’ overtime. Novak, if I ever see you do something like this, I’ll clobber you. That’s why I’m showing you this.”

Shortly after his return, Pearson approached me and expressed surprise that I did not belong to the guild. This broke the previous unanimous membership in the Indianapolis bureau. He urged me to join and suggested that my stay in Indianapolis would be “more fulfilling” if I did. After talking it over with a couple of the bureau’s younger staffers (each more than ten years older than I), I decided that joining was the better part of valor.

Several months later in the fall of 1956, I noted that Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, strongman of the Eisenhower cabinet, was coming to the Claypool Hotel the following week to speak at a hundred-dollar-a-plate Republican fund-raiser. Our top political reporter was off that day. McDonald agreed to let me cover it.

Len Pearson kept an eagle eye out for “illegal” schedule changes. He quickly told me that my change had been posted less than the two weeks minimum notice required by the union contract. I told him that it was my fault for not having informed McDonald earlier. “Doesn’t matter, Bob,” Len responded calmly. “It’s management’s responsibility.” He said I must demand time-and-a-half overtime for the entire day. I told him I had no intention of doing that and walked away, thinking the issue was resolved.

It wasn’t. What followed convinced me of the value of right-to-work legislation, which guarantees employees the right to join—or not join—a union. Pearson went to McDonald and demanded I be paid time and a half. McDonald refused. Then, said Len, the guild unit would submit a formal grievance to go through adjudication.

I told Pearson that if he submitted the grievance, I would resign from the guild, never to rejoin. I walked away before he could reply. No grievance was filed.

The sequel to this story came at the 1957 session of the Indiana legislature, which passed a state right-to-work law. Len Pearson and his counterpart on the day shift, Herman Olsen (also an ardent union man nearing retirement), insisted on putting “so-called” in front of right-to-work as well as quotes around the title. Using both so-called and quotes, I told Len and Herman, constituted an editorial comment by the AP. They ignored me. I went to Pete McDonald, who agreed with me and instructed the deskmen to take out the so-called. They did, but these two faithful old servitors of the AP were icy toward me for the rest of my time in Indianapolis.

         

THE NOVEMBER 1956 election produced a massive Republican landslide in Indiana—and a stupidly juvenile act by me. When my absentee ballot from Illinois arrived, I voted for Eisenhower. But I had also registered in Indiana, and on Election Day voted again for Eisenhower. Double voting for Ike reflected my smart-aleck streak more than enthusiasm for the president.

During the campaign, Eisenhower did not lift a finger as Soviet troops invaded Hungary and put down the freedom fighters. Adlai Stevenson would have done no better. But was this all that could be expected from the Republicans?

         

IN JANUARY 1957 when the General Assembly convened, I was assigned to the House of Representatives, and I had an advantage. All my competitors were married men with families. I was a bachelor whose girlfriend had gone to Peru, Indiana, as a cub reporter on the daily newspaper there. So every night I could go to lobbyist parties or hang out at the bar of the Indianapolis Press Club, across the street from the statehouse, to harvest tidbits from legislators and lobbyists.

I did not find Governor Handley much more impressive than Vic Anderson in Nebraska. Nor were Hoosier lawmakers above the level of the Nebraskans. I was especially unimpressed by the very green House minority leader, at age twenty-nine the youngest floor leader in state legislative history: a lawyer and second-term representative from Terre Haute named Birch Bayh. He was pushed around on the floor by his Republican counterpart and not given much help by the Democratic caucus chairman, the much more experienced Otto Pozgay of South Bend. In my weekly column-type feature, I wrote this appraisal of the young Democratic leader:

…Bayh has appeared to be second best. Inexperience in the floor leader’s role has caused him to make some parliamentary errors, and a divided delegation on the gas tax issue hasn’t helped his prestige.

Pozgay, by limiting his action on the floor and showing a more conservative side than in previous sessions, may have gained some strength.

Actually, I thought Bayh was superficial and ineffective, a good-looking glad-hander who might not even be returned to the leadership in the next session. Instead, he became Speaker of the House when the Democrats took control in 1959, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1962, was a national figure in the party by 1970, and ran for president in 1976 at age forty-eight. I thought Pozgay was a powerful figure with an unlimited future. Instead, he ended up losing a local race for township trustee.

         

THE 1957 SESSION of the Indiana General Assembly ran two days over the sixty-day statutory limit, and the legislators were awake and working most of those last forty-eight hours. So was I. Unlike the lawmakers, I was paid for it. While totally exhausted, I had never been so rich. The last two-week check I received for the legislative session, instead of the usual take-home pay of around two hundred dollars, with time-and-a-half for overtime totaled over eight hundred dollars.

Besides being extraordinarily flush, I felt more settled than at any time in my adult life. I liked Indianapolis, I loved my job and the girl working on the Peru Tribune, whom I planned to marry in the fall.

In my contented mood shortly after the session ended, I attended a black-tie dinner at the Indianapolis Press Club with my girlfriend. I was just digging into a blood-rare steak when Pete McDonald approached our table. “I got some news for you,” the bureau chief told me, “that you’ll like better than I do. [Pause] You’re going to Washington.” Doug Cornell was not kidding.