CHAPTER 5

Advice from Ezra Pound

THE WASHINGTON I entered on Sunday evening, May 12, 1957, did not look much like the nation’s capital of the early twenty-first century. It was shabbier and less pretentious.

The cliché is that World War II transformed Washington from a sleepy southern town into a busy eastern metropolis. In truth, Washington in 1957 was still a city with southern efficiency and northern charm. Pennsylvania Avenue, intended by the capital’s designer Pierre L’Enfant to be America’s avenue, was disfigured from Georgetown to Capitol Hill by old two-and three-story buildings with tacky stores and cafés on the ground floors. Between the White House and the Capitol, 9th Street was a sex zone with a burlesque theater, peep shows, and porn shops. No New York–style posh restaurants were to be found.

If the city was a little down at the heels, it was better run on a “colonial” system than it would be under the home rule that followed. The president of the United States appointed three District of Columbia commissioners, with one of them mandated by law to be a major general in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of public works. In contrast to what followed, there were no potholes and snow was cleared expeditiously.

For a twenty-six-year-old newspaperman with no relatives or friends in Washington, there was one place to go: the National Press Club. Every night, the magnificent wood-paneled stand-up Members Bar on the top floor of the National Press Building (all male, as was the club itself ) was packed with journalists and lobbyists. It was a place where a nobody like me could meet and listen to the wit and wisdom of such big-time Washington correspondents as Merriman Smith of United Press. After fifty-cent highballs, you could eat well in the Members Bar by ordering the NPC (National Press Club) Steak, at $1.25.

Otherwise, Washington was expensive for me though my AP salary had now reached $125 a week ($896 in 2006 purchasing power). My difficulty in finding a decent furnished apartment I could afford was solved by Tom Nelson, a House reporter for United Press and a fellow Illinoisan. He lived with four other bachelors in a big, elegant house in Georgetown that was the Washington residence of Robert Woodward, a senior career diplomat who then was U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica. Woodward rented it furnished for five hundred dollars a month. One of the bachelors had gotten married, leaving a vacancy. Tom offered it to me, and I jumped at the chance.

Bill Sunderland, another UP reporter, was a third newsman in the house. The identity of the other two occupants illustrates how remote the Washington of 1957 was from what exists today. Charlie Stockton worked for the CIA, and Doug Bonner described himself as a Foreign Service officer, though he really was an undercover CIA man. The idea of journalists and CIA operatives living together is unthinkable today.

Also unthinkable today is a government where spending is under control, as it was in 1954. The federal government had not grown organically since New Deal days and would not until President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society eight years later. During the week that I arrived in Washington, President Eisenhower went on national television pleading for public support against congressional budget cutters. “Ike Fights to Save Budget” headlined the Washington Post. Eisenhower faced a Democratic-controlled Congress seeking to reduce his $71. billion budget—about $517 billion in 2007 money (compared with President George W. Bush’s 2007 budget of $2.77 trillion).

         

THE SIZE OF the government was not on my mind on Monday morning, May 13, 1957, when I drove back up Highway 50 from my motel in Virginia to the antique Evening Star building on the corner of 11th and Pennsylvania in downtown Washington. The Associated Press took up a whole floor, with a newsroom looking like a large metropolitan paper—telephones ringing and phone conversations droning amid the clatter of typewriters and teletype machines, punctuated by ringing teletype bells.

This was a far cry from the vest pocket AP bureaus that I had known, with more than one hundred staffers (overwhelmingly male). I was the only AP newsman in Washington less than thirty years old, and there were precious few under forty.

It was my fourth AP bureau, the first where the bureau chief did not greet me as a new employee, and the first boss with whom I never established a personal relationship. Nevertheless, William L. Beale’s attitude would exert a major influence in my life. Beale was reclusive, communicating through short, cryptic notes scrawled in orange crayon. Many were poisonous, but his infrequent missives to me were all complimentary. The poison was administered in our only two private talks, both lying more than a year ahead.

I was one of the bureau’s twenty-two regional staffers who supplied state and local news out of Washington. A story divulging new rivers and harbors projects could make newspaper front pages whereas serious developments from the State Department or the Treasury might not.

I was assigned Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. What a delight to get a reporting job covering something I knew about, including a Senate investigation of the Indiana state highway scandal. However, a close look at the regional staff made me wonder whether my fortune was all that good. The average age of these men (and one woman) was higher than that of the bureau as a whole, which was plenty old. Many regional reporters once held important AP jobs but had failed to make it to the top and now were nearing retirement. Of the regional reporters when I arrived in Washington, only one ever advanced to the bureau’s general staff.

A few regional reporters worked their beats hard, but most mailed it in. They were professionals who could handle this without half trying by relying on handouts and an occasional phone call. A disproportionate number of card players in the congressional Press Galleries worked on the AP’s regional staff.

I pondered a puzzle. I had been brought to Washington at an unusually early age with unusually little experience because Doug Cornell spotted me as a talent to be brought along quickly. Why then assign me to a graveyard rather than insert me as a junior reporter covering Congress, the State Department, or Pentagon? Because the veteran reporter covering the Illinois-Michigan-Indiana beat was leaving the AP to take a higher-paying job as an Illinois congressman’s administrative assistant, creating a vacancy. At the same time, the Indiana legislative session was ending, making me available. It all fit together.

         

AS A REGIONAL reporter in Washington, I tried the same techniques of shoe-leather reporting I had used in Lincoln and Indianapolis. I immediately found it more difficult in the nation’s capital.

I was assigned to cover a hearing by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which preceded the McCarthy Committee in Red hunting. The subject was a Communist-infested outlaw local of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, which made it a Michigan regional story for the AP.

Presiding over a one-man hearing was a familiar face from Indiana: Senator William E. Jenner. The death of Joe McCarthy two weeks earlier had made Jenner the senator most detested by the Left. Seated beside Jenner on the raised dais was the subcommittee’s staff director, Judge Robert Morris, a prominent conservative Republican from New Jersey. Since the Senate was controlled by Democrats, how was it possible for two right-wing Republicans to conduct this hearing? Things were less partisan then, particularly on the Internal Security Subcommittee, where party was less important than anti-Communist credentials.

Still more peculiar was the gentleman seated on the other side of Senator Jenner. He was in late middle age, plump with a jolly pink face, and smoking a cigar. When I asked, the reporter seated next to me at the press table told me it was Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune, whose reports from Washington I had read for years in Illinois. “How come a reporter sits on the dais?” I asked in wonderment. “He’s no reporter,” my companion answered sourly. Willard, who was to become my mentor, was actually a superb reporter but also a diehard right-wing Republican who was part of the Red-hunting establishment.

The other reporters at the press table—from the other two wire services and the three Detroit newspapers—seemed bored by the hearing, but I found fascinating the exposure of Communist penetration in the UAW local. After two hours, Judge Morris announced a final day of hearings on the subject the next day. Trained to try to put fresh material in rewrites for the next day’s afternoon papers, I approached Morris to ask what was ahead. He seemed surprised, but filled me in—with more detail than I expected.

As I entered the hearing room the next day, the United Press reporter approached me. He and the reporter for International News Service had received “rockets” from their New York news desks with the message: “How Pls AP?” Translated: How come the Associated Press has stuff about this investigation that we don’t have? Reporters for two afternoon Detroit newspapers were similarly questioned about why their desks had to use AP copy for the first edition. None had interviewed Morris.

The UP reporter, twenty-five years my senior, had been delegated to instruct the green kid from the AP about life in Washington. “With Internal Security,” he told me, “we never write anything except what happens in open hearing. We never, ever interview Morris.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because nothing they do deserves it,” he responded.

It was censorship by a self-created news cartel. As the most junior reporter in Washington, I could do nothing about it.

THE KIND OF story that won front-page play and kudos from Mr. Beale, written in orange crayon, was advance word on appropriations for air force bases in Michigan. The major regional stories that I covered included Senator Albert Gore’s investigation of those Indiana highway scandals, House Democratic probing of conflict of interest charges against the U.S. attorney in Chicago, and Chicago’s perpetual quest for congressional approval to divert water from Lake Michigan.

A source on this beat was Representative August E. Johansen, an Old Guard Taft Republican from Battle Creek, Michigan, whose dull conservative orations I occasionally reported for Michigan newspapers. He appreciated it.

On April 18, 1958, Johansen telephoned me in the House Press Gallery. “Novak,” he said, “I got a scoop for you if you come right over.” I was in his congressional office within ten minutes. Seated in his inner office was an elderly man, in wrinkled jacket and slacks, with his sports shirt hanging out, and his gray hair and beard uncombed. “Robert Novak,” the Congressman said, “meet Ezra Pound.”

Ezra Pound? The idol of my college poetry-reading days?

I loved Pound’s poetry, particularly the Cantos. His fascist, anticapitalist, and anti-Semitic ideology seldom was reflected in his poems. An expatriate in Italy since 1914, Pound began broadcasting for Mussolini when World War II began. Allied troops, occupying Italy, interned him in May 1945. He could either be tried for treason or committed as insane. The latter appeared to be the better way to handle a great poet, and he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington.

Twelve years in an insane asylum seemed enough for Ezra Pound in the opinion of prominent friends led by poet Robert Frost and including Gus Johansen. Pound’s wife called him “incurably insane.” The government agreed that he was incapable of standing trial for treason and at age seventy-two posed no threat to the community. The chief district judge dismissed fifteen-year-old treason charges and pronounced him a free man.

Congressman Johansen did not deliver the “scoop” he promised. A few hours earlier Pound had appeared in open court, where the charges were dropped. But he gave me an exclusive interview, which ran on the AP’s national wire. Pound did not have much to say other than expressing pleasure at seeing Washington’s famous buildings for the first time and his desire to return to Italy.

As I left, the poet asked me: “Young man, do you intend to spend your entire life in journalism?” I replied that I did. “Well, then,” Ezra Pound told me, “in that case, I have a piece of advice for you. Above all, avoid too much accuracy.”

As I related that advice to colleagues, they said it validated Pound’s insanity. He could have meant the truth would get me in the kind of trouble he had faced. But I thought he was saying I should not let a plethora of little facts get in the way of the greater truth. That difficult injunction for a journalist is one that I have tried to follow, not always successfully.

         

I DID NOT find the caliber of politicians in Washington generally any higher than what I had encountered in Indianapolis and Lincoln. Within the three-state limits of my beat, however, I found interesting national figures. The two senators from Illinois, Democrat Paul Douglas and Republican Everett Dirksen, were fascinating personalities, though Douglas was less effective and Dirksen was deeper than I had thought. Representative Charles Halleck of Indiana, a leader of the state party’s Eisenhower wing and a power in the House, came over as an old-fashioned politician who was very crotchety. Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan, a handsome ex-football star seen as a moderate Republican voice for the future, was nice to a young wire service reporter but seemed to me a little shallow.

Then there was William Ezra Jenner of Indiana. When I got to know Jenner, I was surprised how easy it was to deal with a man described as unapproachable by my colleagues. Jenner was a genuine conservative who antagonized other members of the Indiana delegation by trying to limit pork for the state. In private conversation, he was intelligent and well informed.

On December 2, 1957, Jenner announced he would not seek a third term. He was only forty-nine years old, at the height of his power as Indiana’s dominant Republican. His retirement was unexpected, but the reasons were no mystery for anybody who knew him. Jenner detested moderate Republicanism and what he perceived as the nation’s leftward drift at home and abroad, which he considered himself powerless to stop. He felt alone in the Senate after the death of his friend Joe McCarthy.

Jenner thought himself the last of a defeated breed. He never dreamed Barry Goldwater would be nominated for president in six years and Ronald Reagan elected president sixteen years after that. Jenner was around for the advent of the Reagan Revolution but never saw it coming.