Comforting the Afflicted While Afflicting the Comfortable

Afflicting the Comfortable is This Writer’s Duty

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Introducing Mr. Martin Dooley

In October, 1893, Chicago Evening Post journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne created a newspaper column written by the fictitious Irish bartender, Mr. Martin Dooley, a Dunne avatar whose jabs and barbs, witticisms and knife-edged humor skewered the political elite, and discomfited the socially well-to-do.

I first began reading Mr. Dooley’s 750-word columns when I was a teenager in high school here in Virginia in the late 1960s. As a kid raised by a mother whose biting editorial lashings took deadly aim at local politicians she accused of malpractice when it came to county politics, budgets, road maintenance, health care facilities, and various restrictive land-use ordinances, I appreciated to no end Mr. Dooley’s rotten-apple-coring observations written half-a-century before my birth.

Perhaps the most famous Dooleyism is this one, pulled from a larger paragraph, but nonetheless getting to the heart of what we as journalists see as our founding principle:

“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

A bit of cheek and the sting of skepticism

Now, in all fairness to accuracy of context, Dooley — and by inference, Dunne — was not exactly championing the news media of his day. The complete paragraph is this:

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”

If you think about it, if you give it a bit of a cynical 21st century spin, you could almost infer that Dooley/Dunne was speaking of the newspaper as Donald Trump might…as Steven Miller might…as Kayleigh McEneny might, as any number of high-profile conservative politicians and right-wing media heads might.

The media as the lie-spouting enemy

To the single-minded, one track, red-hat-wearing subculture of our society, Dooley had it right. In their minds, the newspapers — the mainstream news media in general — have taken control of the public’s right to think for themselves, to measure facts against hearsay, to judge right from wrong.

And if you were to interpret the whole of Dooley’s paragraph that way, you are likely falling for the gaslighting propaganda flowing out of the White House, the Senate, and the conservative media and right-wing MAGAphones that want you to think that way.

But that was not Dunne/Dooley’s point at all. Dooley was taking direct aim at just those people who believed that the media was corrupt, that newspapers lie, that editors were in cahoots with the Robber Barons and the power mongers.

Earning the public trust is hard but necessary

It is the job of journalists to get it right

What Dooley was getting at is that newspapers must earn the public trust by standing with the public against the winds of conceit and money and self-aggrandizing behavior and shameful politics.

Dooley’s satirical take on the media was nothing less than a reminder to reporters and editors that the true meaning of their work was to raise public awareness of the ills and lies being foisted on society by elected officials, the monied elite, the holier-than-thou preachers of eugenics, America First, the rape of the land, and corrupt government as in loco parentis.

In this time of an escalating pandemic, anemic Congressional diddling, unfathomably dangerous and unhinged presidential blather, race baiting, unwelcome and camouflaged federal police, science denying, intellect-shaming, environment gutting, and society-splitting behavior, the last hope Americans have to understand the full scope of the disasters facing us is a free and rigorously questioning news media.

One is never too old to write

Although I am no longer an active member of the credentialed media, I still consider myself a member of that profession as blogger, a writer for Medium, and a frequent poster (some would say, not incorrectly, a scold) on social media.

In this role as a writer on the periphery, a writer — a common citizen — I am no less attentive to the principles of journalistic comportment than I was when I was an active writer and photojournalist. I have watched with increasing alarm and profound sadness at the decline of political and social comity, which present, as physicians would say, with symptoms verging on systemic collapse.

America is in the ICU

The last thing we need is to be intubated for our failings

America is in an ICU, and we are not far from an intubation from which we may never recover.

Wanton ignorance of Covid-19’s merciless march across America (and the world); reckless regard for the heath of the young, the sick, the elderly, the immunocompromised, teachers, grandparents; and the economically squeezed single mothers and fathers (and grandparents acting as parents) who have little or no margins for personal distancing and no health care to speak of…the list of the vulnerable is long, and the list of the stupid and uncaring seems longer still.

Three diseases are infecting us

Statues of division

Statues representing a war and way of life some still see as a personal or generational loss of plantation entitlement are being torn down. And that is a good thing. But in that act of removal, those bronze icons of bellicose distinction and elevated reminders of enslavement are being replaced by extrajudicial posses of armed men and women whose irrighteous indignation at being marginalized by history has not been assuaged by the passage of time and the rise of a society that does not see things their way.

They wrap themselves in flags of irrelevance and sling bandoleers of bullets across their pride-swollen and pretend soldier chests. To what end? To intimidate? To protect us from ourselves? To remind Black America that the South could rise again? To work the will of an administration that is itself quite ready to deputize these roving bands of lost-cause misfits? I suspect some of all of the above applies.

The planet is warming.

I don’t need to cite statistics that are readily available to all who fear for Earth’s ability to sustain human activity. Most of us know that we have only the narrowest of windows in which to act to at least slow the oncoming heat storm and rising tides that threatens my grandchildren and their children…your children, your grandchildren. And yet, while the Earth burns and the waters flood our urban shores, our leaders dither and doubt, ignore or refute the science, and in their maddening reluctance to act, condemn us and our future kin to a hellish and desolate landscape surrounded by plundered and dying oceans.

The Congress

That collection of self-serving, tit-of-the-public-sucking alleged representatives of the people…is so engaged in partisan sneering, name-calling, and internecine warfare, that they are willing to settle for a Pyrrhic outcome rather than tend unselfishly to the needs of citizens for whom $600 per week means food on the table and some modicum of dignity when facing debt collectors. I worked on Capitol Hill long enough to see just how the pork is ground up and distributed to those with the loudest voices, and how the pigs’ snouts, tails, and entrails wind up on the plates of the most needy.

And so I wrote

With that point of view, exacerbated by the uptick in Trumpian tweets about ballot fraud, election delay, and doubt about the legitimacy of the election that will be held November 3, I penned a Facebook note in the late night hours of July 31, three short months before voters either head to the polls or mail in their ballots.

I wrote, “I’m not a violent man…but if I had but one wish, should tonight be my last night, I would wish for a mass die-off of all Trump supporters and all who don’t believe in masks. They are invasive weeds of ignorance, sycophancy, racism, and xenophobia, nothing more than kudzu-like species of the worst plants of mankind. No rational thought occupies their vacuous brains, no reasonable consideration for the mortality of their vulnerable neighbors — young and old — can move them off their ancient statues to lost causes. Their leader is a buffoon, a less than pitiable minor character in a play about fools and idiots. Be gone with them. Vote in November. In person if you can, but vote, vote, vote.

Swift reaction

To which several of my FB friends — surprised at the vehemence of my post — replied:

• I’m sorry — I simply will not wish death on the people who attended the funeral of John Lewis and didn’t practice social distancing or wear a mask.
• Jim — I have great respect for you, but in saying what you just posted, aren’t you becoming like them? Sorry to see.
• I really wish people would stop saying this. They put other people in harm’s way too. Those people don’t deserve to die because of Trumpers ignorance.
• I wish No One ill.

A measured response

Given these and some on-the-side messages questioning my moral center, I penned an explanatory note just to relieve my friends of the notion that I would countenance real harm to anyone.

If anything, my intent was to resurrect the spirit of Mr. Dooley and afflict those who are comfortable with the deterioration of life in American, and comfort those who still believe there is hope for us if we do the right thing…which begins with voting.

My Facebook post had nothing to do with John Lewis or his advocates — of which I am one. I watched every minute of his funeral, and most of the congregation did wear masks. For those who did not, I can only hope they will not test positive. But I hold no animus toward them.

My statement…my visceral reaction…is directed at those Trump followers and misguided people who cannot, will not, see what damage to the underlying fabric of basic social decency and democratic ideals writ large.

Not a death wish

Of course I don’t wish actual death on any person; I do however refuse to mourn for the selfish crowds who gather, maskless, in defiance of science, or for the individuals who have no conscience about exposing children, the elderly, the most vulnerable simply because they reject the medical evidence and adhere blindly to the childlike tantrums tweeted out from Trump.

Your right to vote for Trump does not entitle you to threaten my right to vote against him

There are millions of voters who support Trump, support to which they are completely entitled. I don’t quarrel with any American’s informed and measured political choice, and I won’t be drawn into an argument in which micro-distinctions are posited to prove the error of my initial observation. Of course there are Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, gays, deeply religious people, well-educated people, etc., who voted for Trump and who will vote for him again. Fine. That is their right.

Again, my anger, frustration, and dismay are focused on those Trump followers whose belief system is not self-informed and logically measured by fact, comparative analysis, and reason. Just because Trump or Steven Miller, or Hannity, or Carlson espouses some whackadoodle course of action, or demeans or casts doubt on scientists and physicians, does not mean their words are sacred.

Just because they continue to hold grudges against Hillary and Obama, or they simply dont like Joe Biden, is no excuse for putting people around them in jeopardy, or for espousing unsubstantiated medical treatments, or for pressing for schools to reopen in those communities where the risk of Covid-19 is still real.

The truth is not a shield against entrenched ignorance

I could go on with more examples of what I alone may believe are clear and present dangers to the country’s political foundation and operations But in doing so, I know that for every point I make, no matter how well founded in statistics, direct quotes, recorded actions, there will be a refutation thrown at me. There will be suggestions that I am simply a left wing, hyper progressive, sour-grapes advocate for Trump’s defeat. That is a sign that Trump is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of those who care nothing for facts and everything for a return to a Neolithic age of tribalism.

We are all frustrated and unsettled

My hyperbolic statement was rooted in a frustration and deep-seated fear that a portion of Trump followers, science deniers, far-right advocates of government overthrow, and irrational followers of fact-twisting conservative media darlings will find a way to supress or taint the 2020 election and tear asunder the already fragile fabric of our democracy.

An object lesson in the penalties for speaking truth

A school project meets administrative resistance

In 1967–68 at Wakefield high school here in Northern Virginia, I wrote and produced an 8mm film for English seminar titled A Whiter Shade of Black. It was about interracial dating, and it featured a few of our white and African American classmates. The film was my way of calling out the hatred and distrust and malign attitudes about the beauty of loving one another regardless of race.

In one particularly offensive (to the school’s administrators) scene, I had a white girl walk across the student quadrangle, holding hands with an African American male. I shot their walk from several angles, showing the faces of groups of students who were watching the couple. In one shot, the students who were watching, saw just the couple — a boy and a girl holding hands, looking happy. In another shot, the students saw the girl walking a black poodle on a long leash, and I’d directed those students to sneer and mouth profanities.

A dose of reality

I was called into the office shortly before the film was to be shown at an assembly and told it was not suitable for screening…it was too volatile. I was allowed to keep the A for my work, but the film itself never saw the light of day.

It was an admittedly heavy-handed way of bringing out the racial animosities that existed in the 1960s, and it succeeded inasmuch as it was banned by the administration. And this was at a school known for its liberal makeup and progressive curriculum.

Dooley is still right

My history as an advocate for civil and human and animal rights spans more than half a century. Over that time I have worked for House and Senate members of both parties, have worked for presidents and cabinet secretaries of both parties, voted for Rs and Ds and Independents.

I don’t take my right to vote for granted, any more than I took my multiple oaths as a civil servant for granted. I care deeply for the republic and for the vote, and when I see any movement that willfully, with malign intent, seeks to cast seeds of doubt among an already anxious electorate, I will call out those who are doing the gaslighting and trolling.

Martin Dooley’s advice to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable holds as true for me today as it did for Finley Peter Dunne in the 19th century. In my opinion, informed if by nothing other than my conscience, my job as an observer and chronicler of the 21st century scene is to speak the inconvenient truths, to turn over the slimy stones of politics, to call out the liars and charlatans who inhabit high offices or the back alleys of nonsensical farces, of which there are far too many in our country today.

Every person can do something, even if no one person can do everything. My something is speaking out and voting. And come November 3, I am confident that I will be joined by millions of my fellow Americans who will not be dissuaded from exercising the most important right we have.

Just because you are insignificant does not mean you don’t have a voice

I am an inconsequential person…I reach so few people as to be nothing more than decimal dust statistically speaking. I have always been an inconsequential person, fortunate enough to have worked for people who tried to make a difference — but they did not really need me for that; I was just a handy choice, a conveniently skilled tool.

Most of my friends are far better educated, far more articulate and talented, far better acquainted with the goings on of our society. I just happen to be a writer, influenced by a family of writers and writers who were really good at passing along their passion to me.

So, yes, I am hard on myself because what I have to offer is of little use, but I offer it anyway because I want to live William Faulkner’s dream for humanity, put this way in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech:

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”.

The Pressure of Being a Legacy Writer

Novelist, Screenwriter, Producer, Oscar Winner....and Grandfather. Charles Brackett

The bar was set before I was born
My parents were wonderful writers, and through their encouragement and by their examples, my path as a writer was clear before I entered my teens. But following in the longer footsteps of a four-time Oscar-winning screen-writing grandfather really set the pace

A friend of mine emailed me a few weeks ago to let me know he had found a book he thought I might enjoy, one that could also be valuable to my research as I work on a biography. As any biographer will tell you, no piece of research is too little to ignore, and when my friend offered to send the book, I took him up on his kindness. The book, Hollywood Director: the Career of Mitchell Leisen, published in 1973 by David Chierichetti as part of the Curtis Film series, was, indeed, a treasure trove of interviews and background information about one of Hollywood’s greatest directors. Among Leisen’s long line of films dissected in the book, there are five that are that have special meaning to me:

Midnight, 1939; Arise, My Love, 1940; Hold Back the Dawn, 1941; To Each His Own, 1946; and The Mating Season, 1951. The first four were Leisen-directed movies in which my grandfather, Charles Brackett, was a screenwriter; the last one, The Mating Season, was produced and co-written by my grandfather, who worked with colleagues like Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, Richard Breen, and I.A.L. Diamond

Tributes to a gentleman
Quoting Leisen in Hollywood Director:

“Arise My Love was Charlie Brackett at his best. He had a facility with words that was fantastic, and I think his poetic sense came through particularly well in this picture. Billy Wilder was very emotional and would argue everything I objected to in a scene. But then he and Charlie would go out and put their heads together and come up with a superb scene. It wouldn’t be the scene we decided upon at all, but something much better. My philosophy regarding changing the dialogue was simply this, there was no tradition behind it and it had to be changed all right. But some of Charlie’s lines were so beautiful you just couldn’t tamper with them. Where Ray says he sees “Stately trees practicing their curtsies in the wind because they think Louis XIV is still king: you just couldn’t cut a line like that! Ray had trouble saying all that, but we just went over it until he got it."

About my grandfather’s screenwriting in the movie To Each His Own, Leisen said,

“In this tale of almost epic sweep, every second counts. Every line of Charles Brackett’s dialogue a) provides plot exposition and b) delineates the characters and see establishes the milieu.”

In the book Wilder Times, writing about Charlie Brackett and Billy Wilder’s partnership, Wilder biographer Kevin Lally writes,

“The elder Brackett had been something of a father figure helping Wilder with his faulty English and protecting him from the paramount bureaucracy.” “Billy was a little in awe of Charles and as far as I know he’s the only person Billy has ever been in all of,” says Barbara Diamond the widow of Wilder’s other longtime writing partner, I. A. L. Diamond. “Charlie came from a certain kind of elaborate WASP background that Billy found a little intimidating.”

What the legacy is all about
In On Sunset Boulevard: the Life and Times of Billy Wilder, Ed Sikov describes my grandfather, in 1935, as

“[A] soft-spoken Republican gentleman from Saratoga Springs New York, the gray-haired, 43-year-old Charles Brackett, stood at nearly 6 feet and could look Billy Wilder directly in the eye. He was Billy’s senior by 14 years. In 1914, when Billy was still a child pool shark in Kraków, Brackett graduated from Williams College. In 1920, while Billy was a semi-delinquent Jewish teenager running loose on the depressed streets of postwar Vienna, the blue-blooded Brackett was finishing up at Harvard law, having already served a short stint as vice consul in St. is there, and as a liaison officer for French general during World War I. Charlie Brackett’s father was a prosperous lawyer, a state senator, and the owner of a Saratoga Springs bank.

Brackett wrote because he was brought up to be a cultured man of the world and because he knew he was good at it. He wrote short stories during his time at Harvard, and when he graduated with his law degree, he returned home to Saratoga Springs and continued his nascent literary career while working in his father’s law firm. But first he had to get the war out of his system. He composed a story called War while he was serving in Nantes and, once he was safely back in law school, sent it to an agent, who promptly turned it down. He told Brackett that the story was censurable and therefore not publishable. The young writer may have been discouraged, but the writer’s mother was not, and she encouraged him to send war to The Saturday Evening Post. He did, anonymously, and they accepted it and asked for more. Brackett was ready for them. He immediately submitted his novella, Counsel of the Ungodly, which soon ran in the Post in three installments. Breezy, knowing, and exquisitely fashioned, Brackett’s literary works seem in retrospect to be the essence of their age, though their style is archaic.

He moved to Manhattan and began writing full-time. His novel Weekend came to the attention of The New Yorker’s Harold Ross, who offered him a job as the magazine’s drama critic. With his golden touch Brackett wrote criticism and two more novels: the Last Infirmity, 1926 and American Colony, 1929, and then with the supreme confidence that old money can buy he left his plum post and went off to write more books.

The work continued
Once my grandfather began working with Wilder, things only got better, with movies like Ninotchka, Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard — the last two earning my grandfather his first two Oscars.

After my grandfather and Billy parted ways in 1951, my grandfather went on to produce and/or screenwrite Niagara, The Wayward Bus, The King and I, Titanic (his third Oscar), and Journey to the Center of the Earth. He received his fourth Oscar, an honorary Academy Award, for his service as president of the Academy.

Early influencers and four decades of diaries
The writers in my grandfather’s circle of friends, men and women I either knew of, or got to know, included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Faulkner, Steinbeck (who I did meet), E. B. White, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, most of the Algonquin Round Table, and, of course, his colleagues and writing partners in Hollywood. 

After my grandfather’s death in 1969, I inherited his diaries, meticulously, scrupulously written daily from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. Those diaries alone, as key sources for the biography I am writing, have kept me occupied for the past ten years.

The vast compendium of journals, short stories, plays, drama critiques, novels, and movies written by my Grandfather over a forty-five year span was impossible for me to ignore as I came into my own years of learning to write, beginning to write, and finally becoming a paid writer.

Two key models 
Many thanks must be paid to my parents for their roles in guiding me toward my profession as a journalist and photojournalist. It helped that my mother — my grandfather’s youngest daughter — was not only a good writer in her own right, she was a good editor and writing coach. During his military career, my father was a speechwriter for two Air Force chiefs-of-staff, and while he was a fine technical writer, his personal letters to me were tender, lyrical, and meaningful. With two writing parents to guide me, I had a fighting chance to at least produce publishable materials.

Nonetheless, there was a larger legacy to uphold: my grandfather’s. For me, the ongoing challenge is to honor the legacy without trying to become the legacy. I cannot be a Charles Brackett clone. But not emulating someone whose body and style of work is so ingrained in family and professional lore — particularly when you idolized them in life — is so much harder than one might think. Look how many children follow their famous parents who are legendary politicians, musicians, artists, explorers, doctors, lawyers, military leaders, etc. And the whole idea of being a “legacy” student at a parent’s university is just one step along that road to becoming a familial chameleon. The urge to mimic, when reinforced by so many advocates — time-silenced models, or active and vocal champions — was so strong in my life, that at those times when I was faced with other very interesting choices — archaeology, anthropology, geology, even military service — the pull of the pen re-centered me and kept me on my writing path.

Hearing my grandfather’s voice 
The trick for me was to find a writing voice that was informed by my grandfather’s love of the English language, but which transcended his late-19th to mid-20th century application of English. The following are taken directly from his mid-1930s diaries:

"I am of course an old whore in my ability to like people — there are almost none that I really dislike, and a kind word weakens my latent softness to the mawkish point…".

"As I write, I am just about passing into my 40th year, and I am as discouraged about my career as one can be who is cursed with a foolishly sanguine disposition. I have an interesting, scattered life, and I have gotten nowhere and I am getting nowhere. I wish I knew the answer."

"I found in myself a Victorian regret or rather shame that members of the supposedly upper class should have so behaved themselves before the servants."

"After Sunday dinner with the family they went to a rehearsal, while we went to a reading by T.S. Eliot. He proved to be a languid young man with a constipated voice, very utter, without being effeminate. I believe I should have written young-looking rather than young, since he graduated from Harvard in 1910. His Poems strike occasional sparks of beauty, but their importance eludes me."

When style gets in the way, and time moves on 
For his time, my grandfather’s grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and overall flow were exemplars of his Ivy education and upper-class delivery, and those attributes served him well as a writer for directors and actors who were from the same socio-economic strata, or who learned to sound as if they were. However, unlike the up-and-coming younger writers of the 30s and 40s, my grandfather was reluctant to embrace popular or evolving social concepts, and words and phrases that were coming in vogue, patterns of thought and speech that would eventually fill the easy dialogues of the post-World War II generations. In short, as fine a writer as he was, he was stuck in a rut out of which he chose not to climb.

You can’t write if you don’t read 
One of the keys to becoming a good writer is to be an avid reader of great writers. I hammer that truism home at every opportunity — whether I’m lecturing an Intro-to-Journalism class, or responding to a Quora question, or offering advice to my own children. No matter how wonderful your high school English teacher was, no matter how deeply you were taken with your college English Lit professor, no matter how wide your bookshelf (real or virtual) is lined or stocked with style guides and well-intended books on how to become a great writer, there simply is no substitute for immersing yourself in the universe of classic, 20th century, and contemporary authors.

My boyhood books tended to reflect my parents’ and grandfather’s favorites, so for me, the works of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Poe, Verne, St. Exupery, Orwell, Woolf, Asimov and Bradbury, Heller, Wharton, and Baum were worn down to their spines. History was a never-to-be-neglected part of my daily education, and the writers of the Revolution — American, British, and French — were rarely below the top ten must-reads on my list. When I discovered the towering passions of Jefferson’s, Hamilton’s, Paine’s, and Madison’s lessons in democracy, I was hooked. Add to that collection the works of Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu, and I was immersed in styles of language that are, admittedly, dismissed today, not because the power behind the words changed — it did not — but because the styles changed with the times. In my grandfather’s case, his ability to craft a beautiful phrase was his gift; his inability to adapt his skill to changing times was his undoing.

It’s not that the basics aren’t important… 
When I began writing with a purpose, I was in my early teens — back in the 1960s. Although contemporary literature was part of my school work, my models for writing remained my grandfather and my parents, who were relative throwbacks to a time when personal letters were handwritten, words were carefully chosen, and manners — the comity of language —expected. Complete sentences containing all the appropriate parts of speech were struggling against populist winds filled with more informal, breezy mannerisms, with their contractions, incomplete sentences, wayward prepositions, and unchained exclamation marks.

A firm hand from a great editor 
I might have bent in those winds more readily had I not landed a job as a reporter in a local daily newspaper overseen by an old-school managing editor. Her name was Carol Griffee, and for my last two years of high school, she became my mentor and guide along the writing trail. My grandfather would have loved her. My parents were thrilled that I was under her tutelage. Their affection for Carol would not have been because she saw language their way, but because she was a bridge of understanding between their past and my future.

Know your audience Carol was Strunk & White to the core, but she also recognized, and knew how to apply, the lighter, more socially-connected language of the American street. By the time I headed off to college, I’d learned enough from Carol to be able to break the rules and still stay true to illuminating the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a news story. Carol knew my roots. She respected them. But she also knew that if I had any chance of growing as a journalist in a newspaper market trying to adapt quickly to their readers’ shorter attention spans and the reality of truncated television news, I could give a nod to my grandfather and my parents, but I needed to break out with my own voice.

New vistas and an improving tool kit 
I wandered in the wilderness for a while, signing on to another daily newspaper near my university. It was a paper influenced heavily by the region’s major agriculture and mining interests, interests that responded well to stories about soy beans, sugar beets, meat prices, farm equipment costs, and rural water rights. Issues I’d covered in Carol’s newspaper — national politics, urban education, suburban growth, student unrest, Vietnam and other national and international stories — did not make a dent in my second newspaper’s blue collar, low-income, hard-working world. Writing for that newspaper market really gets a reporter down to basics, and eliminates virtually all the frills of excessive descriptions. Subject, verb, object, and maybe a modifier or two. “Wheat prices hit new lows yesterday in Chicago.” That’s all a farmer needs in a headline, and really not much more in the following story.

A political jolt 
When I returned to Washington, D.C., I was hired by political committee to knock out talking points and briefing books for Congressional candidates. Now everything I wrote had fit on 3-by-5 cards, or in a handy binder filled with voter profiles, local and national issues, opposition research, soundbite-fodder, locale-specifics, VIPs to coddle, etc. Now I was so far away from my grandfather’s voice, I could barely hear him encouraging me to make every word count. It was a writer’s trial by fire to get through a campaign season, and I managed to do it until something better came along…and it sort of did: speechwriting.

Speechwriting at Mach 3 
As a Congressional speechwriter, I was knocking out two or more speeches a day, some barely longer than a minute (about 100 words), some about ten minutes long (1,000 words), and quite a few in the 20- to 30-minute range (2000- to -3,000 words. With secondary duties as a press secretary, responsible for putting out a newsletter and prepping my various bosses for interviews, the writing workload was unlike anything my newspaper experiences had prepared me for, except for two things: working on deadline, and clarity of message. The one person in my family who completely understood my work was my father who had been a speechwriter for high-level military leaders, and knew full well the demands of the job.

Where the hell is my grandfather? 
By that point, any thought of mimicking my grandfather’s gentle, elegant voice had been overwhelmed by the daily demand to produce hard-hitting, clipped, on-point speeches written to reach not the avid reader of classical literature, but the man- or woman-in-the-street whose skeptical views toward politicians required quick but memorable positions and promises.

I enjoyed a side job as a frequent columnist for the up-and-coming national newspaper, USA Today. My columns were usually assigned with often only an evening’s notice of x-number of words on a topic due for the next morning’s paper. Writing on such tight deadlines, with a specific word count (not much more than 400 words), does cause a writer to focus. It’s also a great way to learn to self-edit and to be brutal about it.

The journey begins to settle down, and a voice comes through 
After a few Congressional campaign seasons during which I built a new skill set, I was hired to write speeches for a string of cabinet secretaries, and that transition managed to bring me full circle back to a place where I could begin working on my own style while respecting the groundwork my grandfather and parents laid for me.

The upside of speechwriting for a cabinet secretary is having more latitude to develop long-form, deliberate writing. Speeches of 30- to 50 minutes (3,000–5,000 words) are not uncommon, and the topics are as varied as the audiences. There is usually time to research, time to confer, and time to build a bond with your boss. If you are lucky — and I was — your boss becomes a partner in the writing process. He or she offers the broad strokes — the vision thing — and personal preferences in terms of favorite phrases, anecdotes, idioms, speaking habits. Your value as their writer is their faith in you to embrace those characteristics and weave them into the story of the speech, applying your own writing style to meet their needs.

The more speeches I wrote (more than 200 per year), the more it began to dawn on me that what I was doing was akin to being a screenwriter: writing words for directors and actors to perform.

He was with me all the time 
And the realization that that was exactly what my grandfather had done all those years ago in Hollywood finally connected me to him in a way that assured his legacy without sacrificing my own voice.

I retired six years ago and returned to writing for myself. The transition from being an on-demand, high-production speechwriter to owning my own work, setting my own schedule, and choosing the topics I want to write about has not been all that difficult. Between 1966 and my first job as a newbie reporter, and 2013 when I closed the door on a long and varied career as a multi-purpose writer, I learned a lot about myself and the writing legacy I once thought I had to emulate. The journey has been anything but predictable; it has included miserable failures, unexpected successes, and lots of introspection.

I learned to be grateful for the discipline my grandfather and parents told me would be necessary in order to endure the long uphill climb to my own personal peak of success; I learned that it is possible to write in someone else’s voice, but it is not possible to divorce yourself entirely from your inner creative voice; and I learned that success in the pursuit of writing satisfaction is tied to one’s ability to adapt and change with the times, to hold fast to high standards while being open to new approaches.

In the end, I recognize that my grandfather’s footsteps are not mine; his success came from his own inner voice, and while I admire what he accomplished, I have to let my voice speak for itself.