Oh, the people you'll meet

There’s an old song by Pete Seeger about newspapermen that was around when I became one 55 years ago this month. It celebrated the fact that “newspapermen meet the most interesting people,†which they certainly did and do. And some of the most interesting are other newspapermen and women.

I had been a newspaperman for about an hour and a half that day in June when the city editor of The Wheeling Intelligencer sent me on my first assignment to a downtown hotel to interview Merriman Smith, the White House correspondent for the United Press, who was in town to make a speech. The paper was a client of the United Press wire service, now known as United Press International.

Smith was quite famous in those days. He had been covering the White House since 1941 when Franklin Roosevelt was beginning his third term and he would also cover the presidencies of five Roosevelt successors, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Smith’s White House successor was another interesting newspaperwoman more recently in the news, Helen Thomas.

Nine years after our interview, Smith would win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the assassination of John Kennedy. Riding in the presidential motorcade in Dallas, four cars behind the president’s, Smith used the car’s radio telephone to report the first news of shots being fired at Kennedy. As he dictated the momentous news flash, he struggled with the Associated Press White House correspondent who was trying to pry the phone from his hands. Within 11 minutes of the shooting, the UP wire was carrying Smith’s 500 word story on the death of John Kennedy. William Manchester, in his book on the assassination, “The Death of the President,†called Smith “one of the most competitive men in journalism.â€

But in the summer of ’55, Smith was best known as the reporter who signaled the end of those new televised presidential press conferences by saying, “Thank you, Mr. President†to Eisenhower and for writing a bestseller with that title.

I found Smith having a drink with the newspaper’s publisher, and after introducing myself to both of them, declined Smith’s offer of a drink, figuring that drinking with the subject of an interview in the presence of the boss would not be terribly appropriate on one’s first day on the job. I may have been new but I was sophisticated.

Before I could ask Smith a question, he asked me how long I’d been with the paper and laughed when I replied, “since two o’clock.â€

“Then I’m your first interview,†he said. “I’m honored. I hope you do better than I did on my first interview. It was with Clarence Darrow and it was terrible.â€

Darrow, the famous criminal lawyer, was known for defending lost causes, most notably the Tennessee high school biology teacher arrested in 1925 for teaching evolution in the classroom. Darrow’s star turn at the trial was his questioning of the prosecutor, three-time presidential candidate and fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan, and asking him how Jonah came to swallow the whale or was it the other way around? Darrow was certainly a wonderful person to interview, but by the time Smith met him, he’d become a rather sour old guy.

“I hoped to make an impression on Darrow and get some eloquent observations that would please the editor,†Smith remembered, “so I went up to him and said, ‘Mr. Darrow, do you have any message for the youth of America?’

“Darrow looked at me and snarled, ‘Get the hell out of here, you little bastard.’ That ended the interview.â€

Since then, every time I read about the great lawyer or see him portrayed on the screen in films like “Inherit the Wind†and “Compulsion,†I think of Smith and how his first interview went awry.

Smith was far more gracious to the young reporter sent to interview him that day and he certainly confirmed Seeger’s musical observation about the interesting people we’re so fortunate to meet in this business, so interesting they can give you something to remember and write about 55 years later.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.