The Good Times

By Russell Baker, 351 pages, William Morrow, 1989
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, April 26, 2020

It’s an entertaining but not completely satisfying book. My thumb’s up comes with a qualifier: If you expect the Russell Baker who for decades dazzled readers of The New York Times, you may be mildly disappointed here. His autobiographical voice is paradoxically more subdued than the iconoclastic one that dragged out of the Dark Ages the drab editorial page of the world’s most sober newspaper.

“The Good Times,” his second autobiographical book, doesn’t reach all the way back to his birth; his first such book, “Growing Up,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, covers his earliest years. This one starts with his late adolescence, then proceeds through his wartime stint in the U.S. Navy, his college days, his clumsy entrance into journalism and his rise to national prominence.

What “The Good Times” does extremely well is examine both the burden he carried as a boy whose father died young and the pressure his mother placed on him to succeed. His mother, Lucy, a native of rural Virginia, is in the first line of the book – she’s the entire first chapter – and she’s the voice of the book’s last lines: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, Russell, it’s a quitter.” Lord, I can hear her still.

Baker’s book is caustically honest: Despite his unlikely ascent from scruffy phone-in cops reporter in Baltimore to a columnist whose obituary in The New York Times called him “one of America’s most celebrated writers,” Baker describes himself as not much of a hard-news digger. One of his colorful anecdotes focuses on his screw-up in the first televised debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election.

Assigned to cover the debate for a deadline story, he mostly listened with his head down so he could transcribe every detail in the expected war of words. His recollection of the debate: “It was surprisingly dull, hardly a debate at all, and I thought Nixon had a slight edge in what little argument there had been. With no real blows struck, the event seemed a dud, and my story’s lead said the two had ‘argued genteelly.’”

As the debate ended he was surprised “to find the Kennedy people ebullient. … It was clear they thought Kennedy had indeed won a great victory. And of course, he had. I missed it completely because I had been too busy taking notes and writing to get more than fleeting glimpses of what the country was seeing on the screen. Most of the country had been looking, not listening, and what they saw was a frail and exhausted-looking Nixon perspiring nervously under pressure. It was a Nixon catastrophe.”

What surprises in “The Good Times” is Baker’s being eternally mystified at his good fortune, at his unwittingly enlisting as his two guardian angels first Charles H. “Buck” Dorsey Jr., managing editor of The (Baltimore) Sun, Baker’s first stop (and his account of a three-martini-plus-beer lunch with Dorsey is deadpan hilarious), then James “Scotty” Reston, the most powerful journalist of his day and head of The New York Times’ Washington Bureau, who lured Baker away from Dorsey’s domain.

Baker doesn’t tell stories; he spreads them out like butter on a flapjack, patiently and with grace, and they seep rather than smack. Late in the book, he spends a long paragraph that starts with a gentle boast about “scor(ing) the one journalistic feat likely to earn me a place in the history of journalism.” He was covering President Eisenhower’s recovery from a heart attack, and the paragraph’s last sentence delivers the punch promised by the first: “Thus I became the first reporter in history to report a presidential bowel movement in The New York Times.”

I enjoyed “The Good Times” because Russell Baker was an affable companion through tough times in Baltimore, heady times in London and, ultimately, valuable but disappointing times in Washington, D.C.; but what disappointed me was that the book didn’t sound like the uninhibited wanderer of his 36 years as a columnist for The New York Times. Those columns bubbled over with creativity, offbeat wit and risk-taking that the stiffnecks at The Times must have cringed at, especially when his whimsy roomed alongside yet another grim, crisis-centered Cold War cautionary editorial.

Once more, from the obituary: “His (column) writing, admirers said, matured into literature: an owlish wit, sometimes surreal, often absurdist, usually scouring dark corridors of paradox, always carried off with a subtext of good sense.”

That’s the guy with whom I expected to spend 351 pages, that’s the guy who, along with Art Buchwald, Mike Royko, Dan Jenkins and a few others, showed me that journalism commentary didn’t have to be square and colorless.

Russell Baker died on Jan. 21, 2019; the link to his obituary is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/business/media/russell-baker-dead-pulitzer.html

“The Good Times” keeps him alive, and I’m guessing that as he was writing it, he deliberately suppressed the columnist’s voice, opting instead for the more orthodox storytelling foundation he built block-by-block, from the murderous streets of Baltimore, through the urbanity of London, then back to more murder, the bloodless yet no less ruthless kind, in Washington, D.C.

One more thing endures, and it is a memorable description Baker wrote on Pages 8 and 9 of “The Good Times”: “After all … what is a newspaperman? A peeper, an invader of privacy, a scandal peddler, a mischief-maker, a busybody, a man content to wear out his hams sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie to him, a comic-strip intellectual, a human pomposity dilating on his constitutional duty, a drum thumper on a demagogue’s bandwagon, a member of the claque for this week’s fashion, a part of next week’s goon squad that will destroy it.”

For fellow-fans of “The Front Page,” I assert that even Hildy Johnson never said it better.