From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
Reflections on Assuming a Storied Title
Originally Published June 5, 2000, in The Wall Street Journal.
To be sure, I've spent half of those 50 years not writing columns but hiring people to write them. Back in the halcyon '50s, I admired the profundity of Walter Lippmann and the inside connections of James Reston. But early in my career, I decided the world had become too complicated for any one pundit; you had to command a staff. So I set out a career goal: the highest position in American journalism in which you could still do journalism--that is to say, still report and write.
It helps to be lucky. To begin with, 1937 was not much of a year, except in which to be born. Demographics propelled the meager crop of Depression babies into rapid career advancement. With the bad luck of my mentors--Vermont Royster's early retirement after surviving kidney cancer and Joseph E. Evans's untimely death--I found myself at the tender age of 34 running the editorial page of what soon became the country's largest newspaper.
It was a long way from the rolling plains of Iowa, but in retrospect I think I was curiously well prepared. At its best, the Midwest inculcates self-reliance and self-confidence, albeit of a quiet sort. Its university towns also fill hothouse public schools with bright faculty kids, a large reason my father gave up his small-town practice in southern Minnesota to teach veterinary medicine at Iowa State University (then College) in Ames.
I enrolled at Iowa State because it was cheap--living at home and holding a scholarship to cover the tuition of $54 a quarter. In a college that routinely flunked out two of every three open-admission freshmen, I found myself tested into advanced math and advanced English--essentially the same 30 freshmen and the brainiest group I've ever enjoyed. But if you didn't want to be an engineer and didn't inherit land to be a farmer, course pickings were slim. Happily, the land-grant ag colleges had been founded to produce county agents to communicate about good farming, and that function evolved into many schools of journalism. With my first course my career was decided.
No "mass communications" here; this was an education designed to produce editors, albeit of country weeklies. The faculty happened to be top-notch, above all Jim Schwartz, ever available for advice on the Iowa State Daily. Here is where the real learning took place, in 60-hour weeks. Cliff Ganschow and I even won an intercollegiate award for editorial writing. And by the way, rubbing elbows with engineers and actually taking real math gave me the advantage of a sense of a world foreign to most of my journalistic peers.
In such places John McWethy, Chicago bureau chief and ace recruiter for The Wall Street Journal, happily trolled. With a little whirlwind of delay--a year at the semiweekly Grinnell Herald-Register, six months as a second lieutenant of artillery, marriage to another Ames High/Iowa State journalist and a master's degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin--I enrolled in the McWethy school of journalism. After a year covering appliances I was graduated off to Philadelphia to cover chemicals.
On this beat, I volunteered to review a just-published book on the DuPonts, and was suddenly on the edit page book review list. Then came an invitation to New York from Mr. Royster. He wanted me to try out writing editorials. "Just like reviewing books, except that you don't have the book," he explained. And so it has been, ever since.
Since the point of this autobiography is to flesh out the sensibility that shapes this column and these pages, I should say that I started political life as a Stassen Republican. Back then Harold Stassen was seen as boy governor of Minnesota, the hope of a Midwestern GOP with intellectual pretensions. On a college trip to Washington I once played Republican to my debate-team partner Chuck Manatt, later Democratic national chairman. Despite voting for Nixon, I quickly fell under the charm of John F. Kennedy; like impressionable youths of various ages, I thought he was finally bringing intellect to government.
So I arrived on the editorial page as what passed for a house liberal; much to the amusement of "Roy." I careened to his right during the 1960s. In particular I reacted to the spectacle of war protests in which intellectuals proved unwilling to defend freedom of speech, supposedly their cardinal value. This was also the heartbeat of my "neo-conservative" friends, but as I immersed myself in the legacy of The Wall Street Journal, the prefix did not fit.
I could after all read the history of what Charles Dow was saying a hundred years ago and recognize the same policies with a different jargon. In particular, I could pick up what Thomas F. Woodlock wrote in the 1930s and read about the dangers of too much faith in intellectuals and their inherently critical stance toward society--the same themes I thought I'd just discovered in the 1960s.
Mr. Woodlock, formerly editor of the Journal, was writing this very column. "Thinking Things Over" was later authored by editor William Henry Grimes, and then Vermont Royster. So I am now assuming the editor's personal vehicle--though anyone who thinks it a prelude to early retirement should know that back in Iowa my father, at 92, is just now debating whether to give up keeping his own house and mowing his own lawn.
Rather, I've arrived at a point where a more personal touch seems the most effective way to communicate what I think I've learned from all of the above. With unstinting support from the management of the Journal and Dow Jones, I've assembled a splendid staff to produce editorial commentary on three continents and in cyberspace. I can of course encourage and direct their good efforts, but it is not the same as sitting down and addressing the reader from your experience in full.
A weekly column is a way of forcing myself to do this more often. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, as I enjoyed being a carrier boy, editing the Daily and smearing ink in Grinnell. I only hope that readers will enjoy the column as much as they did when it was written by Mr. Royster, Mr. Grimes and Mr. Woodlock.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
