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CHAPTER 28 London I phoned Dave Jones, the national editor, during the fall of  and told him I was travel-weary and needed a break. Maybe I could move to New York for a year or two and work on the copy desk. He took the suggestion to Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor, who made a suggestion of his own: how about the London bureau? Has anybody ever turned down an assignment to London? Remember what Samuel Johnson said. The man who is tired of London is tired of life. We flew there early in .When I first learned that I would make the transfer, the London bureau chief was Bob Semple, an old friend from my Washington days. But before the move took place, Semple was transferred to NewYork to become foreign editor.He was replaced by Johnny Apple. I didn’t know what to expect. Apple’s father ran a chain of grocery stores in Ohio. Johnny was expelled from Princeton and finally graduated from Columbia University in . He spent two years at the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, then got a job at the New York Times. People who dealt with him back then described him as overconfident, abrasive, and seemingly immune to insult. One day in the city room he walked up to David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and told him he had heard good things about him at a social gathering the night before. “Fuck off, kid,” said Halberstam, without looking up. Apple showed no sign that he felt the reproof. The assumption seemed to be that Apple had a thick skin. I doubt that. A good reporter—and he was good—has to be sensitive. When I knew him, he came across sometimes as blustery, but I never took that to mean that he felt no pain. He had to be aware of his reputation for arrogance.  He was assigned to the Albany bureau soon after the Times hired him. The thinking was that the kid had talent but needed seasoning. He was thrown with a group of topnotch reporters from papers all over the state. His reputation as a pain in the neck grew as fast as his reporting skill. The Albany veterans habitually gathered in the same bar at the end of each workday. After a few weeks, they realized that they were spending too much drinking time talking about the boy from Ohio. They laid down a rule that anyone mentioning Apple had to put a quarter into a kitty for buying drinks.Doug Robinson,already an old Albany hand for the Times, walked in after one grueling day and threw a five-dollar bill on the table. “I’ve got some things I want to say about Apple,” he said. I now have some things I want to say about Apple. He has been dead for several years, time enough for an assessment. For the most part, even his numerous detractors admitted that he was an excellent reporter. He would become one of the celebrated political reporters of his time, and along the way he would make a reputation as a bon vivant, a gourmand, a world traveler, and a master of the corporate expense account. I heard stories of his occasional big-footing, taking over stories being worked by the reporters under his jurisdiction. But when I first met him, in Saigon, I found him frankly charming. His boyish outspokenness would have been hard for a new acquaintance to fault. Besides,he had by then acquired a wife who already was known among the Asian press corps as brave, smart, and entirely admirable. Soon after we both arrived in London, Johnny and I made a deal. We acknowledged over lunch one day that both of us were known in the NewYork newsroom as prima donnas and that we had to take care not to fall out over some professional or territorial matter. We kept that pact. He never got in my way in anything that mattered . We agreed that British politics was his story. Northern Ireland, where the Catholic-Protestant conflict was in full swing,was mine.We understood that I would travel the British Isles for features and background stories that appealed to me. He did the same. The only time we came close to a difficulty was when I discovered that one of the paper’s New York reporters had poached a story that I had been expecting to do, a feature on the popular...

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