Books Briefly  

Read my memoir 
They are written by journalists with huge egos and stories to tell 

By Gillian Steward 

Journalists are often criticized for having succumbed to the cult of personality. The TV anchors who read the news attract more attention than the people in the news. Snarky columnists become more famous than the politicians they write about.

Some would argue that TV anchors and columnists aren't the same as working journalists. Fair enough. But journalism is still more of a personality cult than medicine, engineering or social work. More like politics or theatre. And since it relies so heavily on the ambition, character and style of those who practise the craft, could it be any other way?

After reading a short stack of memoirs written by journalists, I decided only journalists with huge egos are likely to pen their memoirs. But as I read these particular journalists I found each of them practised journalism in a singular way.

Take Marjorie Nichols. An ace political reporter and columnist for 26 years, Nichols wrote her memoirs (with Jane O'Hara) as she was dying from lung cancer. But this is not a sentimental read. Mark My Words: The Memoirs of a Very Political Reporter (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992) has the urgency of a freshly written news story.

Here's Nichols on what it's like to find out you have cancer: "…my worst times always hit in the morning. The split second after I woke up, the voice in my head started shouting, 'You've got cancer.' It was like waking up suddenly in the midst of a nightmare and discovering that the nightmare was real. Where was I? Was I really in hospital? Could I really be dying at the age of forty-four?"

"In this business all you can aspire to, the highest honour you can achieve, is to have somebody say: 'She was a hell of a reporter.'" - Marjorie Nichols

Nichols was reporting on herself much the same way she had reported on Parliament Hill for the Ottawa Journal, the Vancouver Sun and the Ottawa Citizen, furious and fearless but always conscious of the facts. It was a style that made her a must-read but often left her lonely and exhausted.

Yet she wouldn't — couldn't — have had it any other way. Even as she was dying she was writing columns. Recording her memoirs. Having lunch with contacts. Trying to break one more story.

Helen Thomas is not as furious as Nichols. But she certainly deserves a medal for stamina. She has been covering the White House for 40 years — that’s nine presidents, nine first ladies and hundreds of White House staffers.

Her memoir — Front Row at the White House (Touchstone, 1999) — reveals a stubborn, but compassionate, journalist who treats presidents as though they were wayward sons in need of a good talking to. But she's also the kind of journalist who quietly takes notes as the world walks by the door of her White House office. The book is full of detail about each president, his family his staff, and other White House correspondents.

Thomas' recollections of Martha Mitchell, the wife of President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, are especially poignant, and revealing. Mitchell spoke out against Nixon early in the Watergate Affair but she paid an enormous price. She was cruelly discredited, abandoned by her family and later died of cancer. But to Helen Thomas, who took many of Mitchell's late night telephone calls, she was a true patriot.

"Perhaps it is fitting that she died on Memorial Day, the holiday of tribute to the nation's war dead. In a sense she was a personal victim of the political war of Watergate, and one of its very few heroines," writes Thomas.

Like Helen Thomas, many journalists do their best work when they fade into the woodwork and quietly watch. Arthur Kent is definitely not one of those journalists. His memoir, Risk and Redemption: Surviving the Network News Wars (Viking, 1996), is all about action. About sneaking into dangerous territory. Covering wars. Avoiding bombs. Fighting your numbskull bosses at the network. That's always been Kent's style. And it has served him well, made him famous.

But underneath all the swashbuckling is a deep sense of justice and a yearning for a good yarn. Early in the book he describes how he left CBC Television and then convinced some stockbrokers to finance a film about the war in Afghanistan.

"I was definitely going in at the deep and deadly end of the pool. At first things seemed pretty clear-cut. To the greenhorn foreign correspondent: the Russians wore the black hats, while the Afghan resistance fighters, the mujajideen, were turbaned Hopalong Cassidys or Robin Hoods, noble warriors defending their families from outside aggression," writes Kent. Rather florid prose, but if you yearn to be a TV war correspondent Kent is a must-read.

There are dozens of other autobiographies written by journalists. Another one I particularly liked is The Right Place at the Right Time (Little, Brown and Company, 1982) by Robert MacNeil the PBS anchor. His reflections on life as a reporter during the Vietnam war eloquently describe the difficulties many reporters face if they challenge conventional wisdom.

My short stack of memoirs also produced a few surprises. The two Canadians, Nichols and Kent, are much more adventurous and irreverent than their American counterparts. They also seem more driven. Determined to prove that they are better than anyone else at what they do.

The other surprise was the emphasis on good reporting. In the age of infotainment it's easy to forget that the essence of journalism is reporting, and good reporting is hard work.

Marjorie Nichols said it best. "People think of me now entirely in the context of being a columnist, but I think of myself primarily as a reporter. You have to be a good reporter. In this business all you can aspire to, the highest honour you can achieve, is to have somebody say: 'She was a hell of a reporter.'"

Furious to the end.  

---

Gillian Steward is Media magazine’s book editor.