Touch and Go

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by Studs Terkel


  Between the curved steel of the El and the nearest Clark Street hockshop, between the penny arcade and the shooting gallery, between the basement gin-mill and the biggest juke in Bronzeville, the prairie is caught for keeps at last. Yet on nights when the blood-red neon of the tavern legends tether the arc-lamps to all the puddles left from last night’s rain, somewhere between the bright carnival of the boulevards and the dark girders of the El, ever so far and ever so faintly between the still grasses and the moving waters, clear as a cat’s cry on a midnight wind, the Pottawattomies mourn in the river reeds once more.

  The Pottawattomies were much too square. They left nothing behind but their dirty river.

  While we shall leave for remembrance, one rusty iron heart.

  The city’s rust heart, that holds both the hustler and the square.

  Takes them both and holds them there.

  For keeps and a single day.49

  MY FRIEND the British journalist James Cameron played a great role in my life. He was the nonpareil, the best of all British roving correspondents of the last half of the twentieth century. Most British journalists of any worth will cite him as an inspiration. Cameron had a certain way of capturing what’s important in the news. He went all over the world, and wherever he landed, he’d capture the true quality of what was happening.

  In North Africa, he saw Schweitzer and discovered that Schweitzer was not all that he was made out to be. Great at playing Bach, perhaps, but not great in helping to foster creative people where he was living. Cameron was the first to reveal Syngman Rhee—the great little hero of Korea, the guy we were fighting to protect—as a phony.

  James Cameron’s life as a British roving correspondent was what might be whimsically called a checkered one. He got in all sorts of trouble, but he was able to keep on working. The thing about British journalism, everybody sought him, even when he was in hot water. He often offended his publishers by exposing some of their friends in high places as corrupt. But he was never really blacklisted because he was so good that the publishers all wanted him; he was always rehired.

  For years, his bête noire was Lord Beaverbrook, the celebrated publisher and tycoon. Beaverbrook had two papers and in one of them, he was exposing Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet spy. Cameron was in Hong Kong at the time, working for the other paper, and it was a couple of days before he read the article. The headline was: KLAUS FUCHS WINS, SO DOES JOHN STRACHEY. This was shortly after the war, and Churchill had been upset by a Labor victory. Clement Atlee, the new prime minister, had chosen Strachey as undersecretary for air. Cameron considered this to be yellow journalism in the worst sense of the word, and he said so in an open letter to the Times of London along with the words: “I quit.”

  Beaverbrook, thoroughly embarrassed by Cameron’s Korea articles, threatened to kill him with a whiskey bottle. Cameron always told the story matte r-of-factly. “I received four or five calls from a voice saying, ‘I am the butler of Lord Beaverbrook and he must see you immediately.’ Naturally, I thought it was a practical joke, so I hung up. One day at the door stands a man with his derby, glasses, umbrella, and the London Telegraph under his arm. He says, ‘I’m the butler of Lord Beaverbrook. Why did you hang up on me? Lord Beaverbrook must see you at once. There’s a plane waiting for you at Heathrow airport to take you to Cannes.’ ”

  Cameron said, “What the hell, I’ll go.” So there he is and there’s Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook says, “Cameron, your last book wasn’t very good. May I suggest another for you.” Meaning a book about himself. “There’s a little gathering here, just four of us. The other two are Aristotle Onassis and Winston Churchill.” Churchill was elderly at the time and had been ill. Beaverbrook says, “Do put on a tie.”

  Cameron said a phone call came from his current publisher, who was very excited and said: “We know where you are, Jimmy. You’re at Beaverbrook’s house and Churchill is going to be there soon. Word has been passed that Churchill is close to death. Prime Minister McMillan is calling a special conference to work out the proper tribute. Do it. What a coup this will be.”

  As Cameron told it, he puts on a tie, and he’s walking down the stairs, grieving not for Churchill but for himself. The door opens, in come four footmen carrying the seemingly inert body of the former prime minister. “Oh my God,” thinks Cameron, when suddenly the body moves, and it says with Churchillian gruffness, “Let me down, let me down, let me down.”

  Beaverbrook seats Churchill at one end of the table, he’s at the other end, and on the other two sides sit Cameron and Onassis. Cameron is watching the old man, a totemic figure, whose Romeo and Juliet cigar is about to fall into his Courvoisier. He appears asleep. Cameron very gently removes the cigar and puts it in his own pocket, thinking it may very well be Churchill’s last cigar and he wants it for his son Fergus. In the meantime, this tedious conversation is going on, about money and profits, between these two dull men, Onassis and Beaverbrook. Just then Churchill looks up as though awakened, and says: “Max!” addressing Beaverbrook, who is disturbed at being disturbed.

  “What is it?”

  “Did you ever go to Moscow?”

  “Yes, you sent me there on a mission to Stalin. I was your minister of aviation.”

  “But did you ever go?”

  And Cameron says of that scene: “It occurred to me it was a comic version of King Lear.” Of course, Churchill lived on for years.

  When we first met in 1967, Cameron was on a book tour for Here IsYour Enemy, his report from Hanoi. His sponsors put him on all kinds of American shows. They didn’t realize he was going to be clobbered as a Communist because he’d described North Vietnam as a country inhabited by human beings. He appeared on my show because I asked for him.

  There I was in the studio of WFMT, having just finished a program, waiting for this guy to appear. I was looking forward to it because oh, I liked the way he wrote. He came in lugging a heavy bag, shoulders slumped, so tired. As soon as he appeared, I said, “James Cameron! I’m delighted to see you. That’s a hell of a book you wrote.”

  “You like it? You’re the first one.” He’d just come from a different station and someone had given him the works.

  On the show I said, “This is a great book by a marvelous newspaperman,” which was the opposite of everything he’d experienced in America. He’d suffered all sorts of attacks: Eric Sevareid and Morley Safer slashed him; Time magazine called him a conduit for the Communists. He felt good after my show, came over to the house, we had a drink, and that’s how we became friends. He ended up staying with us that trip, during which he also happened to be covering the 1968 convention. I describe our adventures in Grant Park in Talking to Myself. From then on, every time he came to town he stayed with us.

  Cameron had an incredible ability to improvise. That’s the way he wrote when he was at the Hilton Hotel during the ’68 convention, sitting in that pressroom with the typewriters and the telegraphs and everything. He’d write without revising, the words just flowed off of him. I didn’t learn that from him—I wish I had—but observing his style played a role in developing my own. Mostly it was his attitude and his thoughts about the matter of objectivity that affected me.

  I often quote from his book Point of Departure, a collection of dispatches from all over the world:I cannot remember how often I’ve been challenged, especially in America, for disregarding the fundamental tenet of honest journalism, which is objectivity. This argument has arisen over the years, but of course it reached a fortissimo—long years after this—when I had been to Hanoi, and returned obsessed with the notion that I had no professional justification left if I did not at least try to make the point that North Viet Nam, despite all official arguments to the contrary, was inhabited by human beings. The Americans could insist that they were a race of dedicated card-carrying Marxist monsters, and the Chinese could insist that they were simon-pure heroes to a man; both statements were ludicrous; as I had seen them they appeared to differ in no perceptible way from anyone else, and t
hat to destroy their country and their lives with high explosive and petroleum jelly was no way to cure them of their defects, which in any case seemed to centre on a tenacious and obstinate belief in their own right to live. This conclusion, when expressed in printed or television journalism, was generally held to be, if not downright mischievous, then certainly “nonobjective”, within the terms of reference of a newspaper man, on the grounds that it was proclaimed as a point of view, and one moreover that denied a great many accepted truths. To this of course there could be no answer whatever, except that objectivity in some circumstances is both meaningless and impossible. I still do not see how a reporter attempting to define a situation involving some sort of ethical conflict can do it with sufficient demonstrable neutrality to fulfill some arbitrary concept of “objectivity.” It never occurred to me, in such a situation, to be other than subjective, and as obviously so as I could manage to be. I may not always have been satisfactorily balanced; I always tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than the truth, and that the reporter whose technique was informed by no opinion lacked a very serious dimension.50

  Cameron was the first Western journalist in Hanoi during the Christmas bombings. He went to visit Ho Chi Minh, whom he had previously interviewed. They spoke in French, Ho Chi Minh saying, “I hope you’ll pardon my not speaking English, Mr. Cameron, I’m a little out of practice for fairly obvious reasons.” Cameron brought as a gift a whole carton of Salem cigarettes because Ho Chi Minh loved Salem cigarettes. Ho Chi Minh said, “Mr. Cameron, I’ve got to ask you some questions.” He asked if a certain fancy French hotel still existed. “You know, I worked there. My boss was Escoffier and I was his pastry boy.”

  “I heard you were very good, Mr. President.” Cameron left, he had the big scoop, an interview with Ho Chi Minh; no one else had even come close to it. He wanted to return to London from Beijing, but nobody would stamp his visa. He was saying, “I have to go back at once!” He always traveled light and China was very cold; for three days he waited in the freezing-cold airport. He went to the visa office ten times, each time the guy said no. Cameron said, “I didn’t know what to do, I was going crazy. Finally I said, ‘Would you please help me?’

  “ ‘Help you? Well, of course I’ll help you. What is it you want?’

  “ ‘You know what I want, a visa.’

  “ ‘Well, of course I’ll help you.’ ”

  Stamped the visa, gave it to him. Cameron was puzzled.

  “ ‘Why did you have me wait this long?’ ”

  “ ‘You Westerners, you’re all the same aren’t you? Even you, Mr. Cameron: “I need this, I need that.” We are your hosts. We are here to help you. The first time you said “Will you help me?” what did I say? I said, “Yes I would.” That’s all. Can’t you do that? Can’t you Westerners say, “Will you help me?” ’ ”

  Cameron was just loaded with fantastic stories, all told with humor but also with a certain kind of gentleness. He once stopped off in Havana to see Fidel Castro. Fidel had heard of him and said, “Of course I’ll meet with you. We’ll have a long conversation. I’ll see you at ten o’clock tonight.”

  Fidel doesn’t show up, so Cameron, who loves Bell’s scotch, drinks a lot while waiting. It’s twelve, Fidel doesn’t show; one, Fidel doesn’t show. Cameron drinks and drinks and finally falls asleep. About two in the morning, the tread of heavy footsteps, and he’s being shaken: “Mr. Cameron!” It’s Castro, of course.

  “Mr. President.” He’s thinking, “Oh God, I’m too tired.”

  Fidel says, “You wanted to see me. You wanted to have a conversation. What’s your first question?”

  Cameron says, “What is the number-one obstacle you have? Start with that.”

  “Let me begin . . .”

  Cameron later said, “And he began to talk. And he talked. And he talked.” Cameron fell sound asleep.

  Next morning, four, five hours later, Cameron wakes up. Nobody is there in the room, but he sees the imprint of two heavy buttocks on the bed and a note saying: “Cameron. It was a delightful conversation we had. Come again next time.” Signed “Fidel.”

  I so admired Cameron’s grace. He would never make fun of someone’s personal attributes, and there was real ease in the way he would devastate the opposite party without humiliating that party. He had a dignified ability to demean others without ever demeaning himself. That’s an art.

  I think it was his kind of grace that on occasion kept me from going off half-cocked and bawling out somebody when there were other ways of making the point. When I get mad I do rash things, write angry, insulting letters. I once called someone a craven toady, and he happened to be the book editor of a major magazine. Cameron would never have done that. Quite simply, he just knew the human condition.

  CONSIDER MY THIRD OLD FRIEND who spoke truth to power, Mike Royko. He was possessed by a demon. How else can I explain his almost forty years as a Chicago columnist and observer of the human race? For five days a week he put together a column on Page 3 of the Chicago Daily News. When that paper closed he switched to the tabloid the Chicago Sun-Times. The moment the Sun-Times was sold by Marshall Field V to Rupert Murdoch, Royko posted a fond adieu. He quit with a comment: “No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper.”

  He wound up with the Chicago Tribune and worked for them at least three days a week until the moment he died. Journalists from all cities, and for that matter various countries, were curious: How could he do it? Maintain this schedule and be read by more Chicagoans than any other all this time. You’d ride the bus and immediately see half the people turn to whatever page Mike was on; he was, for a time, the city’s court jester.

  Some years ago, a celebrated young journalist, co-author of a bestseller, passed through town on a book promotion tour. As we sat in Riccardo’s, Chicago’s favorite watering hole for newspaper people, he had one pressing question: “How does Royko do it? My editor suggested I try to do what he does in D.C. I tried for a couple of weeks and came near a nervous breakdown.” A long pause. “How does he do it?” I simply said, “He is possessed by a demon.”

  How else to explain the tavern keeper’s kid, in a world he never made, a world compressed into one cockeyed wonder of a city; of the haves kicking the bejeepers out of the have-nots; of Jane Addams and Al Capone; of the neighborhood heroine Florence Scala, and Richard J. Daley and Richard M., too; and of Slats Grobnik, for God’s sake? Royko was the right one in the right city at the right time: to tell us in small tales what this big crazy world in the last half of the twentieth century was all about. And the devil made him do it.

  My favorite Mike Royko column appeared October 25, 1972. He wrote it the day Jackie Robinson died. It is his recollection of a Sunday, May 18, 1947, the day Jackie first appeared in Cubs Park.

  Hundreds of stories, scores of books have celebrated Jackie’s trials and triumphs. Mike’s piece was not about Jackie. It was about Jackie’s people who were in the stands that day.

  In 1947, few blacks were seen in the Loop, much less upon the white North Side at a Cubs game. This day they came by the thousands, pouring off the northbound Els. . . . They had on church clothes and funeral clothes—suits, white shirts, ties, gleaming shoes and straw hats. . . . As big as it was, the crowd was orderly, almost unnaturally so. . . . The whites tried to look as if nothing unusual was happening, while the blacks tried to look casual and dignified. . . . Robinson came up in the first inning. They applauded, long, rolling applause. A tall middle-aged black man stood next to me, a smile of almost painful joy on his face, beating his palms together so hard they must have hurt.”

  During Royko’s vintage years, when Richard the First held court in the palatinate called Chicago, he wrote what is inarguably an urban classic, Boss. Jimmy Breslin, no small potatoes himself, the only big-city minstrel in the same class with Royko, called it “the best book ever written about a city of this country.”

  Mike’s pieces seemed to flow so naturally, to rea
d so free and easy. You’d think it was a snap, his daily chore. The laughter it evoked or the indignation or the catch in the throat did not come about by happenstance. He worked like a dog, obstinately gnawing away at the bone of truth. So it was with nailing that right word, that telling phrase. After all, they were as much the tools of his trade as the gimlet eye was to the jeweler. His obsession with detail was positively Dickensian.

  I can still see him in his cubbyhole of an office. His glasses have slipped down to the tip of his sharp nose. He is listening. Some nobody is at the other end of the phone. Sometimes it is a cry for help. Sometimes it is an astonishing tip. Sometimes it is just a funny story. The human comedy has him on the hip. Most often, it’s from somebody up against it. The other calls are from some fat stuff with clout whose venality Royko has exposed to the light. Not in a million years could he ever play the hero of The Front Page, Hildy Johnson, the Hecht-MacArthur character of the journalist who got a scoop. Scoops did not interest Royko. Speaking truth to power did.51

  RIC RICCARDO appeared in one of the most popular films ever made, though you’d never know it. He was portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, in Casablanca. Riccardo’s spa was the favorite, naturally, of those who spoke truth to power. For that was this man’s life from the beginning. He had the bearing of Don Giovanni, say, as played by Enzio Pinza, and he did very well in that respect. But more important, he was an anti-Fascist who escaped Mussolini’s castor-oil treatment. It was a special sort of punishment for dissenters. (You may have seen a filming of that in Fellini’s wondrous last work, Amarcord.) Ric escaped that fate. His very presence afforded the place an openness and ebulliance that made it a natural for three such as Algren, Cameron, and Royko.

 

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