At 76, I am a contemporary of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, musicians from the Clark family territories of New Jersey and Long Island. Our seniors include the surviving members of the Rolling Stones, now touring into their 80s. Why are these codgers still at it? “Because it’s what we do,” they seemed to agree.
My friend Donald Hall, former poet laureate of the United States, wrote me a note just before his passing at the age of 89 to share the news that a new collection of his work was about to be published. My brother Ted met Les Paul, one of the most famous guitar players in history, who used to jam with younger artists at the Iridium jazz club in New York City into his 90s.
It’s what they do.
It is my solemn wish that this indirect lead will not offend one of my idols, Robert McFadden, whose retirement from the New York Times has recently been announced. His words gave color to the Great Gray Lady for 63 years. He is 87. That means he was 24 when he joined the Times in 1961. Reporter, rewrite editor, feature writer, obit artist, he leaves behind a legacy of journalistic literature that may be unmatched in the history of America’s most important newspaper.
(Courtesy: The New York Times)
On a historical Times All-Star writing team that includes the likes of Meyer Berger, Francis X. Clines, Anna Quindlen, Isabel Wilkerson, Red Smith, Howell Raines, Jim Dwyer, Margalit Fox, and Dan Barry — just to name those I know best — Mr. McFadden might get elected honorary captain.
Shakespeare, a writer who starred in a different league, offered that a written text could lend a type of immortality to both the subject and the author. In that spirit, Mr. McFadden has been said to have written so many advanced obituaries, that some subjects of his prose might outlive the reporter. That means we might be seeing his byline in the Times for many years to come.
So, what’s the big deal?
The proof is in the prose, especially those renderings of news that have been described as poetic.
I had forgotten that I had written an appreciation of Mr. McFadden’s work which appeared in my book “The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English.” It goes like this:
Journalism tends to be light on metaphor or sound imagery. But that turns out to be good news for the clever writer. The general absence of such language means that when it does appear it will get special attention.
There are poetic moments in life and in the news. They may deserve special language. The writer can play with sounds, even in the most serious contexts and what could be more serious in New York City than a memorial to the victims of 9/11?
“Once more the leaden bells tolled in mourning, loved ones recited the names of the dead at ground zero and a wounded but resilient America paused yesterday to remember the calamitous day when terrorist explosions rumbled like summer thunder and people fell from the sky.”
That sentence opens a story by Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times, and I invite you to read it again, aloud….
For such a story, on such a day, the news can read like poetry. The writer begins with the inherent drama and symbolism of ceremony. The tolling of bells and the reading of names place us in a familiar, but still emotional setting, fraught with history and meaning. Then come the sounds. In this passage and throughout the piece, the details echo so effectively that they might serve as natural sound in a brilliant NPR story. The bells are leaden. They toll. The names are recited. On that dreadful day in 2001, explosions “rumbled like summer thunder.” (The poet would point out the repetition of those short “u” sounds, that device called assonance. And the repetition of those words “rumbled,” “summer,” and “thunder,” sound like the things they describe.)
The writer chooses words with care and each reverberates with a solemn tone. Examine the language. Listen to it: leaden, bells, tolled, mourning, loved one, recited, names of the dead, ground zero, a wounded…America, summer thunder, fell from the sky.
McFadden begins his story with three elements, a symbolic number that represents the whole. More interesting is the movement through the triad: from bells, to loved ones, to a resilient America — that is, from a symbolic object to powerful witnesses to an abstract representation of the nation as a whole. Finally, this sentence of 45 words ends with a haunting, almost mystical image. The bloodless euphemism of people falling from the sky exemplifies decorum, a sensibility that helps us look back with resolution and hope, rather than with bitterness and despair.
Now get off your assonance and make your story sing.
One writer’s influence
Since the announcement of Mr. McFadden’s retirement (an odd and obsolete word), his admirers have been flooding social media with favorite examples of his work. I have harvested several.
In a few of these examples, he is described as the master of a high-level journalistic move called the “lede-all,” or “lead-all,” if you prefer. It is the top of a big story — a hurricane, a mass shooting, large social protests — in which a writer or editor takes reports from the field from a squad of reporters, each of whom has a narrow focus.
In a memo to another reporter, which was published on X, Mr. McFadden described the steps in his writing process for a “big sweep” telling of the news:
- Action. What happened stated plainly and directly.
- Reaction: Just what it sounds like.
- Significance: Context or nut paragraph.
- Poetry: Some sort of grand sweep statement about the meaning of it all, where it leaves the players, what it does to the city, etc.
- Chronology: Go back to the beginning and tell the story.
As far as “grand sweeps” go, it is hard to imagine anything grander than this “lede-all” to the new millennium:
Two thousand years after Christ’s obscure birth in a dusty town in Judea, the world’s six billion people — most of them non-Christian and many of them preoccupied with terrorism, computers, diets, bank accounts, politics and the perils of the future — rode their turning blue planet across time’s invisible line today and, by common consent, looked into the dawn of a new millennium.
One of my favorite details from Mr. McFadden comes in the form of a kicker — or memorable ending — in his obituary for journalist and magazine editor Lewis Lapham:
Some readers saw a contradiction in Mr. Lapham’s affluent life and his stalwart liberalism, but he said he made his choice soon after graduating from Yale, when he applied for a job with the C.I.A., then a bastion of Ivy League elitism.
The first question he was asked, he said, was “When standing on the 13th tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club does one take from the bag?”
“They wanted to make sure you were the right sort,” he explained.
He found the question off-putting and dropped his spy ambitions for a career in journalism, although he said he knew the answer: a 7-iron.
It was my mom’s conviction that you should not wait for a funeral or obituary to show your appreciation for someone you admire. So consider this tribute a eulogy for a writer who is very much alive. In an era when tenure at a new job can last for 47 days, my tenure at the Poynter Institute and the newspaper it owns has lasted for 47 years. I am retired as a salaried employee but continue to offer my services when I can be helpful. I find it encouraging to know that I still have 16 years to go before I meet the standard set by Mr. McFadden.
Why keep writing? It’s what we do.
