Russell Baker, Bard in a Buick The Times columnist and author was a true American original.
'There’s a story the 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,” as Russ once put it in The New York Review of Books — he encountered the former Senate majority leader outside Mr. Johnson’s Capitol Hill office. 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 babysitter, 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 and unpretentious man. He was admired in our profession and 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 Gordons 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.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/russell-baker.html?
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