Tales from the attic: A young reporter

It was, as now, exciting to be young and living in the capital in the 1950s, perhaps more so because there was less around to be excited about. Only three television networks. Only one movie at the Ontario Theater all summer long. Only the set of values your parents, your schools, three networks and the local movie house had given you. And, increasingly in the 1950s, only one way to be a good American.

Everything in American culture seemed to point in one direction. The political apex of that direction was Washington, symbolized by its political cathedrals -- the Capitol and the White House. You not only were happy to live and work in their vicinity, you were honored and a bit awed. And, if your occupation carried you within their confines, you also felt a bit smug and self-satisfied. In a system with only one direction, you knew when you had arrived.

George Tames, the New York Times photographer, grew up poor within sight of the Capitol. He recalled the dome seeming to hang above the city, a sense he would capture in images as a grown man. I also remember the dome floating, especially in the rain and fog. And me with it, for whatever grimy or corrupt events took place beneath its circumference, they could not sully the grandeur and pride of being as certainly right as American democracy seemed at the time, with justice, fairness and progress only a few congressional bills or a handful of newscasts away.

Of course, you kept thoughts like that to yourself. If you were a young, neophyte reporter in an old, cynical city, the last thing you wanted to exhibit was idealism. So you watched the older reporters carefully and learned how to be indifferent to the right things at the right time, how not to be swayed by public words, and how to talk sardonically about events afterwards in the House and Senate radio-TV galleries.

I gravitated to people like Rouhlac Hamilton, who represented a string of southern radio stations and newspapers and carried within him an encyclopedia of congressional information. It was Rouhlac, for example, who told me that South Carolina Senator Olin Johnston -- Olin the Solon as he was known -- had once greeted the Pontiff by saying, "Good morning, your popeship" and had declared trees to be "our primary source of lumber."

You found out who was kind to young journalists -- like Sid Davis and Ann Corrick of Westinghouse Broadcasting and Mike Michaelson of the House Radio-TV Gallery -- and who wasn't. And you noticed things. One of the things I noticed was that my ambition to become a network anchorman or national correspondent might not be so wise. To be sure, this ambition had its encouragements, such as getting drunk with Chet Huntley and a few others in a hotel suite following a Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner. But it also slowly dawned that the network correspondents I overheard in the radio-TV galleries talking to their bosses were being told what to do and not, as was typically my case, suggesting their next assignment or how the present one should be carried out better. These journalists seemed to be taking a lot of orders given their ostensible success. I, it seemed, was being underpaid in salary and overpaid in freedom.

Later, in January 1961, I made my only foray into the real world of network television. I was hired for Kennedy's inauguration by CBS News as a news editor. Along with fellow WWDC newsman Ed Taishoff, I sat all day capped with a headset in a ballroom of the Hotel Washington , turning phone calls from CBS correspondents into stories then placed on Walter Cronkite's personal news ticker. If there was one thing Ed and I knew, it was how to take news from callers, turn it into copy and get it on the air fast. But when the calls weren't coming in, I looked around the room and tried to figure out what the scores of CBS minions and executives were doing. As far as I could tell, Ed and I and a few people in front of dials and screens were doing most of the work. Yet we were badly out-numbered and underpaid by men in suits who tore around yelling and looking concerned or angry or wanting to know where something was. It all didn't look like much fun and I think it was when I decided I didn't want to be a network anchorman after all.