Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

27. Dixie Takes Washington without Firing a Shot

CHAPTER 27 Dixie Takes Washington without Firing a Shot My last political reporting for the Times, not counting bits of exotica from the British Isles and occasional freelance stories after I left the paper,was during the  elections.President Ford was being pursued by Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination. The Democratic field included several famous men like Representative Morris Udall of Arizona, Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, and Governor George Wallace of Alabama. It also included Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer who, in his beer-drinking brother Billy’s words, was crazy enough to believe that he was going to be president of the United States. It became obvious during the winter that Florida’s primaries would make or break candidacies in both parties. The Times opened a two-man bureau in a chic Miami hotel. Douglas Robinson of the New York office came down to handle editing. I was to provide dayto -day reporting on the progress of the campaign as the candidates criss-crossed the state. Doug and I spent a month there during February and March, and we took advantage of the hotel’s swimming pool and the city’s good Cuban restaurants. I got acquainted with one of my heroes from the paper, Anthony Lewis, who had set a standard for coverage of the Supreme Court that has never been surpassed. He had become a columnist. We had converted a large suite into a working news bureau. Typewriters were set up around a long dining table. Times reporters  attached to the various candidates came in every day or so to write their stories. Lewis swept in one day to write his column. He took a machine at the end of the table and immediately started typing. He grinned as he began. The grin widened into a smile as he wrote, and before the column was finished he was bouncing in his chair. I had never seen such a celebration of the act of writing. The suite was crowded on primary election day, March . All of us had filed lengthy background material to be set in type early. The only work left was to write a lead on each story. That was to be done as late as possible,before our first-edition deadline,as the early returns came in and as trends became evident. Johnny Apple, the paper’s chief political reporter, paced the room in a nervous frenzy that got worse as the deadline grew closer. He was beginning to make a nuisance of himself. I decided to escape to a bedroom and take a nap. He had a small temper tantrum when he looked in and saw me asleep. I wrote the lead story for page  and reported that Ford and the now-famous peanut farmer had won their primaries. I covered a few political events during the summer. It became obvious in a few weeks that the nominees would be Ford and Carter. The paper assigned me to accompany a Democratic delegate to the convention in New York in July. I selected Gene Kelley of Rogers, Arkansas. He took along his wife Joye, whose name I misspelled the first day, and two of their five children. My stories commented extensively on the family’s comparisons of New York City to Rogers, population thirteen thousand.A friendly cab driver confided that he himself would like someday to move to a small town somewhere. Where did he have in mind? “Miami,” he said. The Kelleys tried to keep from laughing out loud. With the prospect that a Southerner might win,the Times sent me back to New York to find some transplanted Southerners and tell the readers about these outlanders in their midst. I rounded up a representative bunch. The consensus was that they liked the big city well enough—some were getting rich; one young man was working for George Soros—but that all of them were homesick.And they still had trouble with the language even though some had become fluent in their adopted tongue. Then Carter won, and the paper needed more. I did a magazine  DIXIE TAKES WASHINGTON WITHOUT FIRING A SHOT piece on the continuing differences between North and South but emphasizing the inexorable Americanization of the lower states. I quoted my friend H. Brandt Ayers, who owned the newspaper in Anniston,Alabama, as saying that all Southerners should be admitted to the Carter White...