White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Remembering Tom Wolfe, Revolutionary in a White Suit

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Every field of endeavor gets stuck in a rut and it takes a pioneer, a rebel, to blast it loose. In journalism and literature, Tom Wolfe, who has died, age 88, did that, starting in the 1960s.

His incendiary device was the “New Journalism.” It used the techniques of the novel in observation and quoted speech for news and feature writing. Wolfe was its exemplar with unequaled verbal pyrotechnics.

In the summer of 1963, I had the luck to work in the same room as Wolfe at The Herald Tribune in New York City. He was in the initial stage of shaking up journalism.

That golden summer, somehow, some of the greats of American journalism found themselves at “The Trib,” a newspaper that had had a history of shaking up journalism and was doing it again.

By 1963 the newspaper was suffering from years of poor business decisions, which had reduced it to near bankruptcy. It had been bought by the oil billionaire Jock Whitney to provide a conservative voice to counter the liberal New York Times.

What Whitney got was a cornucopia of newspaper talent.

Probably never before or since have so many gifted wordsmiths been assembled in the same place: a championship season of talent that was to affect journalism for a generation.

Altogether Murray “Buddy” Weiss, who was the managing editor, and I calculated, long after the paper had failed in 1966, that 67 people who worked at the paper went on to major journalistic success. The names included Eugenia Sheppard, Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith and David Laventhol, who later created the Style section of The Washington Post and fired another newspaper revolution.

And sitting there, in the middle of one of long tables where the reporters sat, was one Tom Wolfe, already wearing the white suit that was his trademark all the long years of his success. The tailoring got better over time, but the color remained.

Wolfe got to New York via a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale and stints at The Springfield Union and The Washington Post. At both papers editors knew he had talent, but sort of ignored it.

Fortune helped Wolfe along when The Trib was closed by a strike in 1962 and he contracted with Esquire magazine to travel to San Francisco and look at psychedelic paint jobs on cars.

Wolfe discovered the counterculture and Esquire discovered what became known as the New Journalism — a term that he didn’t really like. When he had difficulty putting his discoveries into traditional journalistic form, his editors told him to send them a memo and they would write it for him.

He did and they published the long, long memo, 49 pages, in full: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” It was unique in reporting history. It also introduced Wolfe into the world of the counterculture that he, along with Hunter S. Thompson and others, was to chronicle.

But unlike Thompson, Wolfe never joined the counterculture. He reported on it and gave it a language of its own, drawn from how people in the culture spoke, but remained a courtly Virginia gentleman.

One of the many gifted people at The Trib at the time was Clay Felker, editor of the newspaper’s magazine, which survives today as New York Magazine.

They were made for each other and Wolfe, the reporter and wordsmith, was on his way with Felker guiding and cheering. A collection of Wolfe’s pieces came out in 1965 and the New Journalism became the rage, especially in magazines. Other names like Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese and Joan Didion were soon in the flux.

But Wolfe was the supreme writer and reporter. His masterpiece on the space program and the Mercury 7 astronauts, “The Right Stuff,” his blockbuster novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and another novel, “A Man in Full” were all built on meticulous reporting.

Wolfe “pushed out the envelope” — one of the many phrases he has left us with — in reporting, writing and creative punctuation. A few other Wolfe-isms: “me generation,” “radical chic” and “master of the universe.”

 

 

Photo: Author Tom Wolfe participates in the White House Salute to American Authors hosted by Laura Bush in the East Room Monday, March 22, 2004. Public domain.

Raymond Durante, Man of the Atom, Dies Age 88

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Photo: Ray Durante with EPA Administrator Christine Todd-Whitman

By Llewellyn King

Raymond “Ray” Durante, who died at the beginning of December age 88, was a consummate man of the atom. For more than 50 years, in government and in private sector work, Ray championed the nuclear promise.

He was also a man of family, and a man of friendship. I was lucky to be his friend.

Ray was a proud graduate of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, where he earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in industrial engineering. He was a passionate supporter of the university, and remained absorbed in its alumni activities until the end of his life. Every Christmas, he and his wife, Dorothy, who died this fall, hosted a party for Stevens alumni and friends at the Congressional Country Club in Potomac, MD. It was staple of the season.

Ray’s career stretched back to assisting in the design and engineering of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and submarine design. For the Department of the Interior, he was the manager of the Balsa Island Project, a plan in California to build nuclear plants that would produce electricity and desalinate water for Southern California.

When I met Ray, he was vice president for energy systems in the Washington office of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. He was all over the town: in and out of government offices, on Capitol Hill and at the White House.

Ray, with his capacity for friendship, worked well with both Democrats and Republicans. In that time, which cannot be recaptured, people who favored nuclear worked together across party lines. There was a nuclear establishment that believed in a whole-hearted, now-forgotten creed that nuclear would carry mankind forward, that it was a blessing.

Ray was caught up in the energy crisis of the 1970s and strongly believed nuclear power was the ideal way to generate electricity and provide process heat. Natural gas was, at that time, considered a depleted resource, oil was thought to going the same way, and renewables were only a dream. Coal and nuclear stood alone.

Over the years, his work included yeoman efforts on the technology of food irradiation and licensing Canada’s natural uranium-fueled reactor in the United States. For more than 50 years, if it was nuclear, Ray was there hands on.

His devotion to his family was just as complete. He was never happier than when he was building houses with his three sons on property in Ocean City, MD. He was also an accomplished cabinetmaker and did much of the finish work on his own home in Potomac.

He reveled in his family. As it grew to eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, his joy grew with them.

He was palpably proud of and close to his granddaughter Maggie Rose Durante, a charted country singer, who goes as “Maggie Rose” professionally. Ray was looking forward to one of her concerts when he died.

I do not know if Ray could sing. But I do know that as a friend and a father, he hit all the right notes.

In Memoriam: The Pleasure of His Company

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John McCaughey, journalist, bon vivant, friend and a past editor of The Energy Daily, died on Saturday of heart failure. He was 61.

McCaughey was born to a Catholic family near Belfast, Northern Ireland, when it was not a city in which you wanted to be a Catholic. More remarkable, his father was a member of the strongly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Like many young Irish, McCaughey went to London to make his way in journalism. After a brief stint on a local Irish paper, McCaughey was scooped up by the foreign desk of The Financial Times, where he was a sub editor. He was also the toast of the paper’s staff and a growing circle of admirers across London. In the tradition of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, another literary wit from Ireland had arrived to disperse the London fog.

It used to be said of Wilde that he put his talent into his writing and his genius into his conversation. It could be said of McCaughey that he put his talent into journalism and his genius into his dinner parties. London had seldom seen the like of them. And when he moved to Washington, well, they were in the style only the Kennedys were known to approach: Waterford crystal (the Lismore pattern), the best Bordeaux vintages (preferably Chateau La Mission Haut Brion) and fine port (ideally bottled in Holland not in its native Portugal). All this he accomplished while despising garlic, cheese and nuts, except for the nutty flavor of the port.

If you entertained McCaughey, he would always, but always, send you a wonderful piece of writing as a thank you letter. If they had been gathered and published, they would take their place as works of the high art of protocol.

Such a man also had to be a man of friends, and so he was–friends in Washington, England, Ireland , Germany and France. He was a man of Edwardian tastes and formality softened with wit and charm. He loved satire and revered the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. He liked his church services served in Latin.

He was also a great journalist with a reverence for a well-turned phrase and an intuitive understanding that you could write commercial and industrial news with flair, passion and humor. I hired him as a temporary matter while he got a feel for the United States. He stayed more than a decade and rose to be the editor of The Energy Daily. He was good at his work and brilliant at his play.