Restless On His Laurels

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE GOOD TIMES by Russell Baker; Morrow; 351 pages; $19.95

Russell Baker has worked for laughs at the solemn New York Times ever since his "Observer" column was established in 1962. For satire, parody and burlesque on short notice, he has few equals. He has had what many journalists would consider a dream career, and nobody tells him what to do. Or so it appears:

"My mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak. 'If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a quitter.' I have heard her say that all my life. Now, lying in bed, coming awake in the dark, I feel the fury of her energy fighting the good-for-nothing idler within me who wants to go back to sleep instead of tackling the brave new day."

So begins The Good Times, the second installment of Baker's memoirs. The first, Growing Up (1982), won a Pulitzer Prize, stayed on best-seller lists for nearly a year, and remains a masterstroke of unpretentious autobiography. It too got its direction from the character of Lucy Elizabeth Baker, the needy young widow whose platitudes about hard work and gumption herded Russell and his sister through the Great Depression.

"It was impossible to succeed enough to satisfy this woman," writes Baker, who sounds as if he does not believe how far he has come. To hear Baker tell of his rise from newspaper delivery boy to the Baltimore Sun's man about London and Washington, one would think he still regards himself as an ink- stained wretch.

Baker, of course, practices the art of deflation for a living, and he repeatedly reminds us that Lucy Elizabeth must share the credit and the blame. "I was happy to get your letter, especially the news that someone else has noted your writing ability," she remarks after learning of her son's job opportunity at the Times. No matter that his abilities had already earned him big-league distinction in Europe; Mother Baker thought the offer was just the break he needed.

Baker, who believed he was doing just fine at the Sun, was less sure. The paper nurtured and rewarded his talents; its editor was like a father. James Reston, then the Times's Washington bureau chief, would eventually assume a similar role as Baker's boss. But before the relationship could be established, home-office politics required that Baker pay dues in New York City. Underemployed in the Times's vast, overstaffed city room, the "jumper," as he describes himself, guiltily plowed through Dostoyevsky and corresponded with his wife Mimi. "The Times felt like an insurance office," he observes. "Writing a 600-word story seemed to be considered a whole week's work." Meyer Berger, the paper's star feature writer and house historian, put the situation in perspective: "Mister Ochs ((Adolph Ochs, publisher from 1896 to 1935)) always liked to have enough people around to cover the story when the Titanic sinks."

The author's nights to remember are less dramatic. Recalling his marathon coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, Baker downplays the pageantry in favor of offstage vignettes, like long lines of colonial potentates in animal skins and gold braid forming to use Westminster Abbey's toilets. The Eisenhower White House produces little excitement, partly because there wasn't much, but mainly because Press Secretary James Hagerty ran a "tight, tight ship." Later there was the smothering style of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson: "For you, Russ, I'd leak like a sieve."

Many of Baker's professional anecdotes are familiar, including the still valuable cautionary tale about the late W.H. Lawrence, the Times's White House correspondent whose friendship with John F. Kennedy resulted in gushy coverage that embarrassed the paper and eventually led to Lawrence's departure. It is impossible to avoid dated material in a reminiscence. It is also difficult to write an autobiography when one has been more an observer than a participant.

The good times Baker refers to in his title are from 1947, the year he joined the Baltimore Sun, until 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. Yet to come were full-scale war in Viet Nam, civil unrest, Watergate, gas lines, stagflation, and the proliferation of junk food and junk politics. Unsurprisingly these not-so-good times provided Baker with his best material as a columnist. But as a memoirist he seems to be finding that Russell Baker is a tough act to follow, especially if you are Russell Baker.