Let’s say that he was a goose, friendly and witty, something that in La Vanguardia we would call a “viewer” and that in The New York Times they described as an “observer”, which was the title of his column “Observer”. I met him in 1978 at a colloquium with journalism students at Columbia University. Always dressed in velvet jackets and cheviot wool, he was like an English lord; Never strident, but always interesting, he spoke slowly and deliberately as if he were dictating one of his comments, emphasizing periods, commas and quotation marks.
Russell Baker began his talk with two anecdotes. The first about “the ideal journalism school” whose curriculum had to be reduced to a single-subject course: “a class lasting six and a half hours. The students would be locked in a room and for six hours they would remain in front of the same closed door that, when the time was up, would open slowly and mysteriously to give way to an official spokesperson who would limit himself to saying, solemnly, these two words: No comment . And the door would close again. When the students were still perplexed, the teacher would appear, who, without further explanation and in the tone of an editor-in-chief, would tell them: “Come on, get on the typewriter and write me a six-hundred-word chronicle with a headline; “They have half an hour.”
I imagine that the majority of Spanish journalists today would be able to get A’s and honors in the face of such an informative challenge because here, too, politicians are known for their silence and informative opacity.
The other was something that happened to him when he covered the Capitol in the 1960s and worked in the Washington office of The New York Times. He spent the day making corridors and one day the burly and garrulous Lyndon Johnson appeared; Without saying a word, he grabbed him by the arm, pulled him into his office, and began complaining about how the press was ignoring the Democratic administration’s efforts to end “this damned Vietnam War.” You don’t understand anything and you don’t help anything. And you, yes you, especially you, bastard, who does nothing but write nonsense… After giving him such a reprimand, he continued with a string of complaints and insults that were increasingly more off-color. Baker told us that he feared that this could get into his hands, but suddenly, Johnson grabbed the phone and one of his secretaries immediately came in and handed him a note that he had just scribbled. The secretary read the message and said a few words in her ear. When Baker was finally able to escape from that trap, he walked past the secretary and asked her about that note and that whisper in her ear. Nothing important, Russell replied: “I just wanted to know the name and diary of this son of a bitch in front of me.”
While covering the State Department, Congress and the White House Russell Baker began writing his famous column: a mix of satirical humor and reporter’s anecdotes. In 36 years he published almost 5,000 750-word columns. Thus he became one of the most popular “commentators” of The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer for his “Observer” columns and in 1982 he published Growing Up, a funny and endearing memoir that was a success with audiences and sales, and for which he won another Pulitzer.
Although he was born and died in Virginia, he was in love with New York. Some say that he was as shrewd and brilliant as E. B. White who divided New Yorkers into “locals” and “outsiders.” The “locals” were those who lived there without distinction of country of origin, and the “foreigners” or foreigners were the Americans from other states who visited New York. Russell Baker was one and the other: as a “local” he knew very well the city he loved and as a “foreigner” he lambasted it mercilessly.
Reader surveys showed that many readers opened the newspaper to the penultimate page of the first notebook where his column was published two or three times a week.
He liked Sinclair Lewis’s phrase when he said that “New York is a city of Russian Jews, dressed in London, who frequent Italian restaurants, served by Greek waiters, to the sound of African music.”
This is a crazy city, he repeated in his columns and readers enjoyed a masochism of the type “I will kill you because I love you.” Manhattan was an urban jungle: “the only city in the world where you can be run over while walking down the sidewalk by another pedestrian.” His advice was always “listen from time to time, you will be amazed at what you hear.” Faced with the “rigor mortis” of many journalists, he said that “serious journalism does not have to be solemn.” And he gave a lot of importance to punctuation in texts because “in writing they are like the body language of language: they help readers hear you how you want to be heard.”
As with the “traffic lights” of La Vanguardia, Donald Trump was dying to be quoted in Russell Baker’s columns, even if it was to mock that buffoon. Today it would not be surprising if such a clown arrived at the White House. As I said: “this is a crazy city.”
