Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist

By FRANK RICH
NYT

THE first political columnist I ever encountered, after a fashion, was Walter Lippmann. It happened on a snowy afternoon when I was a kid of 11 or 12 growing up in Washington during the J.F.K. years. My wallet had somehow slipped out of my pocket as I trudged past the National Cathedral on my way home from school. Hours later, my mother barged into my bedroom, interrupting my full-scale sulk to announce a miracle. “I just got a call from Walter Lippmann’s maid,” she said, sounding more excited than the circumstances warranted. “They found your wallet on Woodley Road in front of Walter Lippmann’s house!”

My starry-eyed mom then explained to me who this giant was. Fairly soon I would discover some of his colleagues’ bylines in the newspapers I was starting to devour: Arthur Krock, Joseph Alsop, Joseph Kraft, James J. Kilpatrick, Evans and Novak, Drew Pearson. Eventually I’d figure out that my stepfather, a K Street lawyer before they were called “K Street lawyers,” fed scabrous off-the-record tidbits about his dealings on the Hill to Pearson’s column in exchange for favors I now dread to imagine.

By the time I reached high school, Vietnam was heating up. I began tracking the columnists’ pronouncements with some ardor. This was, of course, in the day when everyone read the papers, when pundits had yet to start bloviating on television, and when it was widely believed, especially in Washington, that the wise men of the press held enormous sway over national events, from the making of presidents to the waging of wars both hot and cold.

I can’t say I aspired to be a columnist, however. My first love was the theater, and the first opinion writers I read religiously were the drama critics Walter Kerr and Kenneth Tynan. The political guys (almost all guys then) were too Olympian for my taste. But when, decades later, I was intent on ending my run as The Times’s drama critic after nearly 14 years as Kerr’s successor, an editor at the paper floated the notion of taking my highly opinionated self to the Op-Ed page. And so I leapt. I had written about politics on and off in my career, and had always been fascinated by the intersection of politics and culture. It had not been lost on me as a child that the Kennedy inaugural gala had been studded with stars from Broadway and Hollywood, and that the Rat Pack might have held even more sway over the White House than, say, Lippmann.

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