Robert B. Semple Jr.

<h1>as Russ once put it in The New York Review of Books — he encountered the former Senate majority leader outside Johnson’s Capitol Hill office. </h1>

Russ had covered Congress for several years and was well known on the Hill as a reporter for The Times. Johnson clapped his back, mauled his hand, massaged his ribs,

“just as he’d always done in the glory days of old, all the time hailing me as though I were a long-lost friend” before inviting him in for an interview.

The essence of what Johnson wanted to tell him was that he had come to love the Kennedys, which Russ knew to be claptrap, since the Kennedys, Johnson felt, had pretty much knifed him at the 1960 convention. Russ sensed a big scoop anyway. At some point during the monologue Johnson scrawled a few words on a scrap of paper and sent it out to his secretary. The note came back, Johnson looked at it, crumpled it up, tossed it in a wastebasket and resumed talking.

Russ learned on his way out what was on the note. It said: “Who is this I am talking to?”

“My vanity needed that blow,” Russ recalled in his book, “The Good Times.” “Like so many Washington newspaper people, I had begun to kid myself that these terribly important people talked so readily to me because of my charm. I needed to be reminded that they were not talking to me at all; they were talking to The New York Times.”

If I have standing at all on the matter of Russ Baker, it is not that we overlapped at The Times for 35 years, in Washington and New York; it is that for over a decade, in the Johnson and Nixon years, he was my neighbor in Northwest Washington, his house across 39th Street a stone’s throw from mine. His mother-in-law, who lived with the Bakers, was our baby sitter, and from time to time after returning her home, Russ and I would share a nightcap or two, after which I would retrace as best I could the path just taken with Mimi’s mother.

As the Johnson story suggests, Russ was a modest man. He became famous with the publication of “Growing Up,” the account of his impoverished childhood, his strong-willed mother who kept urging him to “amount to something” and his satisfaction at eventually (he hoped) having achieved her ambition. He had many celebrated writer friends — Nat Benchley, David Halberstam, Pat Conroy, Murray Kempton — some of them acquired in Nantucket, where he owned a fine old house on Main Street. But there was not an ounce of pretense in him. On occasion I would open the kitchen door and find Russ and Mimi in my backyard, Russ armed with a bottle of Gordon’s in case I’d run out. “This is a Baltimore drop-by,” he would say, a usage I haven’t located on Google but which was apparently a reference to the neighborliness fostered by the densely packed rowhouses in Baltimore, where he did much of his growing up.

Then there was the Buick. When I learned of Russ’ death, two images immediately popped to mind. One was of a blue Buick Electra parked outside his house. Sometimes I would ride in it to and from The Times office. He loved that Buick. Buicks were not then or now a wildly fashionable car. He said he drove one because had always regarded a Buick as a quintessentially reliable American car that signified a certain level of middle class prosperity but didn’t put on airs.

The second memory was of Russ, standing outside The Times’ Washington Bureau, pointing a bony finger northward up 17th and asking, of all those buildings which one, do you suppose, is the public school? Of course it was a dilapidated multistory firetrap. For all the symbols of prosperity — the nice houses, the Buick — Russ had a deep, implacable sympathy for those left behind. His favorite senator (and good friend), was Eugene McCarthy, as liberal as a mainstream politician could get in those days, a man who, according to Russ’ children, could be found from time to time nodding off on the Bakers’ living room couch.

Nor was he a cheerleader for management. Although he loved The Times, and greatly appreciated what the Sulzberger family had done to rescue it from one disaster or another, so strong were his memories of the squalid pay at The Baltimore Sun, where he started his career, and his suspicion of bosses generally, that he remained forever proud of his membership in The Newspaper Guild, the industry union. In that regard I would urge aspiring journalists to read “The Good Times,” which is fundamentally a book about a period in newspapering’s predigital history, before reporters and columnists became little cottage industries with regular talking-head TV gigs, when the pay was low, when there was a bottle of Jack Daniels in the lower left-hand drawer and when there was fun to be had chasing stories and complaining about editors.

Read it, too, for the exquisitely restrained yet wonderfully accurate powers of observation he brought to his writing. Herewith Richard Nixon on the campaign trail: “There were darknesses in his soul that seemed to leave his life bereft of joy. He was a private, lonely man who never seemed comfortable with anyone, including himself, a man of monumental insecurities for whom public life, I thought, must be a constant ordeal.” In those two sentences lie a good part of the explanation for Watergate.

What did he make of President Donald Trump? According to Allen Baker, one of his sons, who spoke to me Wednesday from Russ’s home in Leesburg, Virginia, The New York Review of Books invited Russ’ thoughts on the matter. Dispirited by Mimi’s death a few years ago, his own failing health, and, one suspects, Trump himself, Russ declined to weigh in.

Of course, he would have found Trump appalling, in both personality and policy. But I believe he would have reserved almost as much scorn for the Senate, for abdicating its historic duty to provide a counterweight to the White House. In 2004, in a piece called “Troublemaker,” Russ wrote a review of “Losing America,” a book by Robert Byrd, the legendary curmudgeon from West Virginia, heartily praising Byrd for standing up in 2002 (unlike John Kerry, for instance) to George W. Bush’s appeal for Senate authorization to invade Iraq.

Byrd, he thought, was a throwback to the days when “a senator was somebody,” when the upper chamber’s grandees were men named Goldwater, Humphrey, Symington, Dirksen, Fulbright, Kerr, Bridges, Long, Stennis, Thurmond — some of them southerners and racist, but all of them feeling they had a role at least equal to whoever occupied the White House in shaping domestic and foreign policy.

As Russ (and Byrd) admitted, the Senate has not always exercised that power intelligently. It caved to its old leader, Lyndon Johnson, on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and again in 2002, when Dick Cheney and Colin Powell hornswoggled it into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yet the present Senate, even its more articulate Democrats, seems alarmingly feeble and unprincipled in the face Trump’s demagogy.

Anyway, I told Allen, I thought that’s where his dad would have come out. And by the way, I asked him, did his father still drive a Buick?

“Yes,” Allen said. “It’s right outside the window. A Buick LaCrosse. Waiting for him to come back.”

There’s a story writer Russell Baker, who died this week at 93, told about himself that reveals a lot about him. Back in 1961 — “in the time of Lyndon Johnson’s vice-presidential agony,”

Russell Baker, bard in a buick

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Robert B. Semple Jr.

Articles written by the author

Russell Baker, bard in a buick