War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

Journalism

JOURNALISM THE NATION WOKE UP in the I950S to a nightmarish hangover . Two centuries of racial injustice toward blacks burst from the recesses of our culture, and the pages of post-Civil War apartheid laws, into the mainstream of American politics. For sure there was also the Cold War, the vividly perceived possibility of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, and a hot war in Korea. The more immediate issue, however, was right in front of us at our schoolhouses, dime-store counters, streetcars, and public parks. It was the integration crisis which became, in I957, an echo of the Civil War-the crisis over federal and states rights. The nation would not adopt laws that opened voting booths and public accommodations to all citizens until the I96os. But in I954 those historic strictures limiting full participation and access were bending under the weight of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board ofEducation, the ruling against segregated cO.mmon schools. Nowhere was the heat greater than in the "Great (pronounced Gret) State of Louisiana," the origin of Plessy v. Ferguson, a Supreme Court decision of the I870S fixing blacks as second-class citizens, due "separate but equal" accord. Earl Kemp Long was governor , the White Citizens Council flourishing and violence anticipated when I took a desk in the UPI office in the back of the New Orleans Item. The Item was not flourishing. It was about to die. The newspaper had been publishing daily since the days of its star reporter-editorial writer, Lafcadio Hearn, in the I870S. Hearn 5 I 52 / JOURNALISM looked strange, had trouble with deadlines, but wrote like an angel. The high walled city room had changed little since his time. Some of the city was the same, but not our work routine. Lafcadio Hearn described his typical day at the Item: "Have coffee, slip into the office, rattle off a couple of leaders [editorials] on literary or European matters and a few paragraphs based on telegraph news.... Work over and the long golden afternoon welcomes me forth to enjoy its perfume and its laziness ... a delightful existence without ambition or hope of better things." Restless, he wound up as professor of English literature at the University of Tokyo, having discovered Buddhism, as well as coffee with chicory, in New Orleans. UPI shared the backroom with the Item's news wire teletype machines whose heat more than offset the single, overworked air conditioner. Frequently in the summer evenings of 1958 we worked shirtless with heads bound in bandanas to prevent sweat from soaking our copy. A visitor might have thought us workers in a Congo diamond mine. Sad to say, the Item folded that summer, but as a result of this death in our journalistic family, UPI would soon get cooler quarters in a cheap office building on Poydras Street. I shared the four P.M. to midnight shift with an ex-Marine platoon leader named Muller. We worked breaking news-it was hurricane season and we had a big one, a dozen dead, millions of dollars in damage-and rewrote the afternoon and evening file for the early editions of P.M. newspapers, mainly the Item, a newspaper in death throes but not quite finished. The night's work done, we crossed Canal Street to the Napoleon House bar on Chartres Street in the French Quarter to join reporters from the Times-Picayune, the state's leading newspaper, drink Regal beer, and swap stories until dawn. (The place had been built for Napoleon's exile, but the ousted French emperor never showed up.) Muller told about Marine Corps training when he was inevitably matched against Jim Mutscheller, the next Marine in the company alphabet, in hand-tohand combat. and bayonet drills. Muller was fiesty but of slight stature. Mutscheller came to the Marines from a starting position on the Baltimore Colts, professional football champs. Muller got JOURNALISM / 53 battered with regularity until his unit ran a house-to-house combat course. This involved scrambling two stories up a rope secured at the top by a fellow Marine. Muller went first, holding the rope with his giant comrade at the other end. "I held on until he got to the top, when I just couldn't hold any longer," my UPI partner explained. "I had to let go." Mutscheller got flattened. Muller had evened the score either for real or in...