From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FIVE BEST
Read All About It!
A veteran reporter and editor's favorite books about newspapering.
1. "The Paris Edition" by Waverley Root (North Point, 1987).
Between 1927 and 1934, the Chicago Tribune published an edition in Paris, a small sophisticated daily in a big city with a raging newspaper war. Never in the history of journalism, it was said, have so many men had such a wonderful time on so little money. In "The Paris Edition," Tribune reporter Waverley Root memorably evokes the era, not least with his classic account of Charles Lindbergh's Paris landing in 1927. The United Press hired goons to monopolize the phone booths at Le Bourget Airport, where Lindbergh was set to land; the Associated Press hired bruisers to attack them; all six phone booths were destroyed in the melee and reporters had to run their copy into town on foot. In this memoir, we also meet the Tribune's proprietor, Col. Robert McCormick, who, in a fit of pique, assigned his best correspondent, Floyd Gibbons, to a new beat: the Sahara. Gibbons set out to become the first person to cross the desert's expanse while carrying a fully unfurled American flag, which resulted not only in a newspaper series that gripped the world but also in an epic expense account.
2. "How I Got That Story" edited by David Brown and W. Richard Bruner (Dutton, 1967).
Throughout my career, I have toted along "How I Got That Story," a collection of first-hand accounts of some of the greatest scoops of all time. Its authors are members of the Overseas Press Club of America. The volume starts with "Germany's Meekest Hour," about the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I, in which the New York Sun's Burnet Hershey describes how he disguised himself as a German to get into a prisoner-of-war stockade in Paris, where he heard the German foreign minister tell the captured soldiers from his homeland: "We will rise from this shame." The book also includes New York Times reporter William L. Laurence's story of how he was brought inside the Manhattan Project by Gen. Leslie Groves so that he could write an eyewitness account of the bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945.
3. "The Brass Ring" by Bill Mauldin (Norton, 1971).
In Bill Mauldin's memoir, the G.I. cartoonist who created the soldiers Willie and Joe tells the story of the Stars and Stripes newspaper in World War II. "The Brass Ring" reprints many of Mauldin's famed cartoons, including one depicting two officers on top of an Alp, one saying to the other: "Beautiful view. Is there one for the enlisted men?" A Pulitzer Prize-winning illustration, from 1945, shows a group of bedraggled Yanks marching a group of bedraggled German prisoners in the rain and mud, with the caption: " 'Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners,' (News Item)." One of the cartoons--at a USO show, soldiers line up to get in while officers escort girls out a side door--is accompanied by Mauldin's priceless account of how it prompted a showdown between the cartoonist and an outraged Gen. George Patton, who accused him of demoralizing the troops. Mauldin also describes, in a moving section of the book, a military funeral in Italy in 1945 when Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott turned his back on the dignitaries and addressed the dead.
4. "A Treasury of Great Reporting" edited by Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris (Simon & Schuster, 1949).
Here, in another anthology I have kept with me all my career, are reprints of classic pieces of journalism, as they were published--nearly 200 samples of "Literature Under Pressure, From the Sixteenth Century to Our Own Time," as the subtitle has it. You'll find the Boston News-Letter's dispatch on the Boston Tea Party as well as Homer Bigart's reporting for the New York Times on the trial of Adolf Eichmann (in the second edition, published in 1962). The volume has Horace Greeley's interview with Brigham Young. It contains Whitelaw Reid's coverage of the Confederate catastrophe of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg ("all the glory visible, all the horror of the fearful field concealed"). And the book covers the stories behind the stories in well-researched entries by the annotators. In the preface, veteran reporter and editor Herbert Bayard Swope says that the reprinted articles "will show why newspaper work is so eternally and irresistibly seductive." He's right.
5. "Newspaper Days" by H.L. Mencken (Knopf, 1941).
This is the second of the three volumes of H.L. Mencken's "Days." The first, "Happy Days," about his youth, is the best. The last, "Heathen Days," is anticlimactic. The middle volume--about what happened after he walked into the Baltimore Morning Herald, at the age of 18, and presented himself to its city editor--is a newspaper classic. In one chapter, he discusses what he calls the "synthesis"--or fabrication--of news, including a bogus story by one reporter about the ill effects of sticking one's umbrella into an arc-light. Given the evidence presented, the book is also a reminder to regard the crime reporting of Mencken's day with caution. Like other newspapermen of his time given over to casual racism and cynicism, Mencken is not a wholly attractive character. But he demonstrates how a master craftsman turns out prose and how the gritty job of a reporting beat on a metropolitan newspaper can create the foundation for a career in literature of the highest order.
Mr. Lipsky is the editor of the New York Sun.
