We used to chat, very politely, in the elevator from the fifth floor in the red brick building on North Calvert Street to the lobby.
He was the unflappable Buck Dorsey, managing editor of the Sun at a time when it still raised its collective eyebrows over the idea of a woman reporter in the newsroom. I was a Sunday Sun feature writer, newly arrived from Scotland, where I launched my career in journalism at the age of seventeen on a weekly newspaper, covering everything from rabbit shows to murders.
The tall, lean, sober-faced man in well-cut tweeds was always courteous and even smiled on the occasions when I would bring up the the Sun’s Washington bureau—an elite group of male reporters with a number of Pulitzer prizes to their credit.
He even nodded once when, in the space of a few minutes, I managed to mention that President Kennedy was reigning over the New Frontier and that Jacqueline Kennedy was really a good story. And I quickly added that the Sun had no woman reporter in the bureau! He nodded and made a humming sound, and I looked at him hopefully because he was the only person in the building who could do anything about moving me from the Sunday Sun, where I was bored to death writing stories about ladies painting flowers on eggshells and listening to the four women in the Society Section solemnly discussing which weddings should be on page one, two, or three. I didn’t fit well in the Sunday section.
I missed covering criminal courts. And although it appealed to the Sunday editor, Hal Williams, that I could write at high speed, it did not appeal to him that, in a nine to five section where you were allotted thirty minutes for lunch and could have your salary docked for being late, I had been known to take three hours to eat. Worse still, I made friends with the police reporters on the morning Sun who hung out at a shabby bar called the Calvert House, which sported a tattered sign suggesting, “Let us cater your next affair.”
One day, I received a telephone call from Mr. Dorsey’s secretary, an imposing woman with a deep voice. I arrived in Mr. Dorsey’s office at the speed of light. He looked at me solemnly, and I looked at him anxiously. He said he had decided to use me for an experiment—though he really didn’t think it would work.
I was too scared to say anything since it didn’t sound like a promising start. He then revealed that he had decided to send me to the Washington bureau to cover Jackie Kennedy. I wasn’t sure whether to nod or curtsy, so I said, “Yes sir,” and didn’t tell him that there was little I would not do to get away from the Sunday Sun.
In a melancholy tone, he said he hoped I wouldn’t get in any trouble with all those men, and I shook my head vigorously and said, “No, sir.” He then hesitated and said he supposed he shouldn’t say this, but he hoped I was not planning to get married any time soon.
I shook my head even more vigorously, probably keeping in mind the totally inappropriate man I was currently interested in, and he nodded approvingly. Almost as an afterthought, he said I should go to Washington the next week and, by the way, what was I earning at the Sunday Sun? My response sent his eyebrows up, and he told me I would receive a substantial raise. Since the Sun had a reputation for being exceedingly parsimonious about salaries, I realized at that point just how little I was being paid. What I didn’t realize was that I was not only entering the world of the expense account, but I was also part of the beginning of a small revolution.
I am reminded of the great Russell Baker’s portrayal of a similar encounter with Mr. Dorsey’s deadpan directness in his delightful book, The Good Times. Baker recalled his own experience as a frustrated police reporter who was suddenly invited to have lunch with Dorsey at one of the most expensive restaurants in Baltimore. Mr. Dorsey—only a few veterans called him “Buck”—was drinking martinis. Baker, who was not accustomed to drinking at lunch, was determined to match the managing editor’s intake. He didn’t know what the lunch was about until after the third round of martinis. Once he sobered up, he staggered home to inform his wife they were moving to London, where he was to be the London correspondent of the Baltimore Sun. I can understand how amazed he felt.
There was indeed a revolution in the world of journalism—especially after World War II, when women proved themselves in some very challenging jobs. I was no revolutionary, God knows. I simply wanted to cover more interesting stories and not starve. But I watched women move from an entrenched masculine belief that the female sex had no role in the newspaper world except writing about weddings and food to becoming a real force in reporting and editing the news.
What they had to prove was that they could write as well or better than men, so that they could move into the real world and write about that.
Oddly enough, the British, who formed the most rigidly class-conscious society in the world, allowed women to transgress social boundaries in journalism long before the United States did. I was lucky that I emerged from high school to work for a Scottish weekly paper where nothing was forbidden. I was assigned to police courts, sheriff courts, high courts, crime, local politics, and dog shows, and was expected to write about them in concise English. My gender had nothing to do with it. To increase my meager salary, which began at two guineas a week—about ten dollars at the time—I wrote as a stringer from southwest Scotland for daily newspapers in Glasgow and London.
The Sun was an Anglophile newspaper, and had already hired the daughter of the lord lieutenant of an English county and made her an editorial writer—but not a reporter. Being on a less exalted social level, I was ahead of my time at the Sun, but in Washington there was enough eccentricity in the bureau that they not only put up with what I didn’t know, but welcomed me—especially when I proved I could drink. The bureau was then run by a quiet and gentle man named Gerald Griffin—who might have been taken aback by the fact I barely knew where Capitol Hill was, let alone how bills were passed.
Griffin was succeeded by the formidable Philip Potter. He taught me American politics and treated me very much like an egg he was determined to hatch. A tall, lean man, Potter resembled a superannuated Gandhi except for his height and pointed white head of hair. He yelled at me and was delighted when I yelled back—although I could not match the volume of his voice. And he taught me a great deal because he had a great deal to teach. He was a veteran war correspondent who was also one of the few reporters who went after the witch-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy. Potter not only taught me what the McCarthy hearings were about, he taught me how to drink martinis in the National Press Club, which at that time permitted only men in the bar. Women were confined to what was dubbed “the passion pit,” a room adorned by a painting of a Rubenesque woman in flowing draperies who looked to me like a Victorian postcard.
When I reached Washington, there were very few women reporters except for those assigned to cover social events like state dinners. Their numbers were meager in the White House press corps. There was Marianne Means of Hearst Newspapers who was assigned to the president, Helen Thomas of United Press International, and Frances Lewine of the Associated Press.
Being assigned to the president was traumatic for me because I grew up in a monarchy and Lyndon Johnson was culture shock. I was supposed to be covering Jackie Kennedy but had arrived in Washington in 1963 at the time of the assassination and the dramatic funeral that followed.
In fact, I never covered Jackie Kennedy except at the time of the funeral, but I admired her. There was a woman who went through hell and was tough enough to turn around and help plan the kind of funeral the British do so well, using Abraham Lincoln’s as her model. I was at Andrews Air Force Base with the press when Air Force One arrived bearing the corpse of John F. Kennedy, and I saw her in that blood-encrusted pink Chanel suit, impassive of face and betraying not emotion but anger when she was asked if she wanted to change her clothes. She refused, saying, “Let them see what they’ve done to him.”
I would have loved to cover Jackie Kennedy because she was interesting, but as far as I know, she wasn’t fond of women reporters, and she liked her privacy. Suddenly I was covering Lyndon Baines Johnson (figure 3.1), who required a lot of work, which meant the Sun sent a highly experienced political reporter, Pat Furgurson, to cover the political Johnson and added me to write about how colorful he was. And he was.
Lyndon Johnson may be the only president who led the press on walks around the White House grounds with his dog in ninety-five-degree heat while Mrs. Johnson called plaintively that lunch was ready. I distinguished myself by breaking the heel on my shoe and being asked by a photographer to do it again.
There was also the time I witnessed LBJ picking up his beagles by the ears, insisting they liked it and enraging the SPCA. But there were other problems. I couldn’t understand Johnson’s accent and he couldn’t understand mine. So any conversations we had usually began with him saying, “Talk up, honey.”
And there was the awful moment when I complained to the rest of the press corps about his driving. I didn’t drive, and LBJ liked to show off what his white Lincoln could do on Texas roads. So there I was on my first White House press corps trip, sitting in Johnson’s huge Lincoln while he showed off and sipped beer from a paper cup. Marianne Means was in the middle seat beside me. Our recollections vary, but I still maintain she expressed some concern about the speed at which he was driving—I think it was eighty-nine miles an hour. Johnson assured Marianne that she hadn’t seen the power that car had. I believed him. I had visions of winding up paragraph eighty-nine in a presidential obituary—and later in an Austin bar I referred to the president as “an adolescent idiot.”
Johnson never forgave or forgot. A few days later, he tracked me down in the middle of a ceremony in the Rose Garden and accused me of betraying him. When I denied it, he bent over me in that vulture posture he assumed to browbeat inferiors and said, “Yes, you did.” I quailed. As the possessor of a green card and no American passport, I had visions of being deported.
Figure 3.1. President Lyndon Johnson tempts Republican legislators.
Tom Flannery, courtesy of the Baltimore Sun Media Group, all rights reserved.
Johnson was the most fascinating politician I ever covered—and he had some reason to think me peculiar. Once when I interviewed him in the White House, I rose to leave and opened the door to a closet. I never had any sense of direction.
Even when I covered his departure from office, he walked down the line of reporters and when he reached me he kissed me on the forehead and said, “Come to the ranch, Muriel, and I’ll give you a ride.”
But what mattered were the dramatic changes I witnessed and experienced in both American history and the culture of journalism. After the turbulent Johnson presidency, I covered Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. I spent almost two years covering criminal trials and hearings during Watergate, and I was very happy. It was an amazing and always unpredictable story, one I’ll never forget, where the crumbs of political corruption led straight to the White House.
There were a few women reporters on Watergate: Lesley Stahl of CBS and Connie Chung of NBC. Women were trickling in, but it took a few more years before the Washington Post and the New York Times assigned a female to cover a president full-time.
After Watergate, I went back to the White House and reported on two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford that I always thought were entirely inexplicable. I mean, who attacks a man who so closely resembled a golden retriever? Then I was sent to San Francisco to run the Sun’s bureau and was responsible for covering the twelve states from Colorado to western Canada. It was great fun, partly because the Sun had a sink or swim approach to farflung correspondents and it let me come up with my own ideas.
I was on the West Coast for about eight years, at the end of which I had left the Sun, by then about to be purchased by the Los Angeles Times. I joined the Washington bureau of McClatchy Newspapers, which was then expanding its national coverage and wanted White House experience. I found the world of the White House press had changed. What I remembered as about a half-dozen women had expanded to about one-third of the entire group, and what pleased me most was that they were not there because they were women; they were there because they were good.
It was the beginning of the end of discrimination against women in what was considered a plum assignment in journalism. They led the way to equality by hard work and also by not pretending they were men. They were often better than the men they competed with, and the change was most marked in television, a brutally tough business where women like Martha Raddatz, Christiane Amanpour, Andrea Mitchell, and Judy Woodruff established themselves as standout journalists.
At the Sun, too, times had changed dramatically. Women were covering every beat, locally, nationally, and overseas. The paper that had hesitated so long in sending me to Washington was now readily appointing women as correspondents in Moscow, Johannesburg, Paris, and Jerusalem. Most of them excelled.
Alas, Mr. Dorsey is gone. But he left me a little legacy—one of the greatest compliments I ever received. Three weeks before he died, he sent me a brief note in the kind of spidery handwriting you rarely see any more, legible and graceful. He wrote briefly, “I should have written this a long time ago, but I wanted you to know I was proud of you. You made a lot of people look foolish.”
He probably relished the thought that he’d been right about me and others had been wrong. I sent him an immediate reply telling him how much his letter meant to me and shed a tear before I put it away. If he had been well enough, I would have offered to go to Baltimore and buy him a Beefeater martini.