The Death of a Columnist

By Roger Rosenblatt

Joseph Kraft died on Jan. 10. Two hundred newspapers lost a column, one of the best in the nation. A clear light in journalism for 35 years, Joe wrote books, editorials and long reportorial analyses, but his regular "beat" consisted of producing two or three columns a week on national and foreign affairs. His columns were always stately, unhurried. They stared out from the page hard, like a good teacher absorbed in, though not quite obsessed by, his subject, and fixed the readers to the processes of a strong, fair mind. Presidents knew Joe, and he had power in Washington, but his force as a writer came from his dignity. He possessed a scholar's nature fitted to a frenzied profession; a spirit of magnanimity and gentleness; a temperament at once high-strung and serene; a sly sense of fun; a fierce love of words, of his work.

Strange work. Columnists take a ribbing from their fellow journalists, reporters especially, who tend to regard columnists with the same chummy contempt that linemen show quarterbacks. Reporters do the real work, sleep in cars, get kicked by Mafia bosses on the courthouse steps. Even editors do some sweating (yelling is taxing). But columnists ride the gravy train, that's what the pressroom says. In a way, it's true. They manage to arrive home before midnight; they dine with the brass. Their physical exercise consists of pacing all the way to the far end of the study, and often back again. Sometimes they sit up straight.

Otherwise, they brood. Into their study every morning parade the armies of the news. A knock on the door, and there stands Heseltine resigning from Mrs. Thatcher's Cabinet, Marcos on the stump, Gaddafi playing cowboy on his tractor, mummied to the nose. Come in, boys. The columnist will make sense of all this somehow. After the reporters and the editors have dumped the facts on the doorstep, the columnist, like a jigsaw addict, scoops up the pieces, studies the angles, mulls, clears his throat and says, with as much self-assurance as possible: This piece goes here, and this one here.

And then he asks: What piece is not here? What ground is missing from this puzzling geography that would allow us to view the map redrawn, to sit back and behold the brand-new country of our concern and comprehension? The piece is not really missing, of course; you just don't see it, like the shy side of the moon. Yet the missing piece is the one that counts.

That piece must be found very quickly; the column is due tonight. Meanwhile, more facts crowd the study door like extras on a movie set, peer in, cry, "Use me!" Guatemala, Mr. T, a new novel by Bellow; Dow Jones goes down, Columbia goes up. Say hey, Willie McCovey, you made it too. Nice hat, Mrs. Gorbachev. Hold it, please. I have to think. Didn't I read something by Octavio Paz that fits in here? Or was it Pia Zadora? Where is my authoritative, I've-studied-this-for-years lead sentence? Please, God, let me discover an apt quotation from someone other than Samuel Johnson. You have to sound as if you knew it all along. You have to shape your column too--mostly Doric, a Corinthian fluting when they least expect it. It's work. Whatever the others say, it's work.

Yet the laws of physics insist that work must move things: A pushes against B, and B moves. What, besides paper, does the columnist move? He wonders that himself. Swiveling in his chair, he catches hummingbirds, bats, butterflies in flutter, pins them to the wall and whispers, "Gotcha." But he doesn't. Today Gaddafi, tomorrow the Chicago Bears. Call this history? Come Thursday, no one will remember how right he was on Tuesday, and the facts may have altered to prove that he was wrong on Tuesday after all, but who will remember that either? Twenty years after his death, maybe ten, how many readers will speak his name? Perhaps all columnists should change their names to Walter Lippmann. In the entire history of the game, only Lippmann's name survives.

So what good is effected in pointing that capacious intelligence at fast-moving targets? Why find the missing piece if even the visible pieces will vanish in a shot? Ask Joe Kraft, and he would have said that the good lies in doing it, in using the mind to grasp everything the world can throw at it, baseballs to missiles, because that is how the mind protects the body, protects itself. Understanding is protection. More: understanding is forewarning. More: understanding is life. The individual column does not count, because a column is not supposed to exist alone. A columnist looks to erect a whole assembly of columns, each single effort standing patiently at attention after it is created, until eventually a population emerges, a civilization emerges. The civilization is both an accumulation of the columnist's ideas and of his being; he is his collected works. More: he has shown that collecting the works is the way a life ought to be built, column by column, displaying both continuity and changes in the structure and in the architect. He has shown the way to make and use a mind.

More: there is always more, a deeper level to spot and land on, like a plane swooping down from bright white and blue into a heavy snow. People like Joe Kraft play Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist all their lives--they cannot help themselves--requesting "more" where others are horrified by, or are deaf to, or fear, or pretend not to recognize the word. The more that is sought is a statement of innocence; one believes in his heart that enlightenment will be cheering, though experience proves that more often it is punishing. Still the optimistic pursuit continues, the pursuer buoyed every morning by that barrage of knocking on the study door, the news that the news is still coming strong, and that the bonfires are still being lighted around the world, signaling that everyone is still present, still cocking their senses for the missing more.

All columnists are fifth columnists. Prominent for a moment, they rapidly go out of view, but the influence stays, and the impulse to contemplate abides. It's not a career deep down; it is a protest against being overwhelmed by the speed of things, against letting the world get away from us. When Dickens' daughter died, he was in London and his wife in the country; he wrote her a letter telling her at the outset, "You must read this letter very slowly." Joe Kraft died on Jan. 10. You must read his death very slowly. The missing piece is the one that counts. --By Roger Rosenblatt