Barry Bingham: A Man of His Word.

BARRY BINGHAM SR.'S greatest strength as a journalist may have been his love of the language and his felicitous use of it to convey his strong convictions on the editorial page of The Courier-Journal. For that reason, Barry Bingham: A Man of His Word is appropriately titled. It is a distinguished collection for those who remember Barry Bingham Sr. as a writer, a colleague, friend and mentor.

What is more, it is a wonderful addition to the library of any editorial page editor or editorial writer -- especially those who aspire to use the language well. My conviction is that Bingham would have loved that purpose most of all. In the many years I knew him, one of his greatest qualities was his affection and respect for young people -- particularly young writers; he always did his best to encourage their education and their talent. His beautifully written notes of praise were prized by members of his staff at the Louisville newspapers. These kudos were particularly valued because the editors and writers had such respect for Bingham's own skills.

Dr. Samuel Thomas, historian and curator of the papers of Bingham and his widow, Mary, assembled this book from a variety of sources including letters, newspaper articles, speeches, and even telegrams. The bulk of the text, however, is drawn from a series of interviews conducted over the last decade of Bingham's life by various historians for oral history projects.

Edited and assembled so as to walk the reader chronologically through Bingham's life, what results is the autobiography that the late Louisville newspaperman never wrote.

"Barry Bingham had wanted to be a writer," observes Thomas in his introduction, "and yet when his friend and counselor Wilson Wyatt encouraged him near the end of his productive life to write an autobiography, he |Bingham~ responded with his usual modesty, 'I don't have anything to write about.'"

Thomas's book, happily, proves him wrong. In a sense, Bingham had been writing the story of his life for decades, mostly on the editorial page of his own newspaper, where a series of signed essays -- "The Editorial Notebook" -- featured his observations about the world, his region, and the famous people he met in the course of five decades in journalism.

(Someday, I hope someone will assemble and publish those notebooks, most of which remain as fresh today as when they first appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. They would also be most useful for generations of aspiring writers and journalists.)

Barry Bingham was born in Louisville on February 10, 1906, and the narrative begins with his memories of a Kentucky childhood in the early years of the century. It was a quieter time, and a very happy one from this little boy's perspective:

"Conversation prevailed in those days," he recalled. "You see, there weren't so many entertainments at that time ... so there was just a lot of talk. A good deal of that talk on summer nights, I remember, took place on the front porch of my grandmother's house, and I could hear this murmur of conversation down there, and once in a while, I could hear the sound of a musical instrument."

Another early memory, beautifully retold, was of the night in 1910 when Halley's Comet whizzed across the sky. Bingham recalls singing duets in a boyish soprano with his mother, and he remembers early trips to The Courier-Journal -- long before his father, Judge Robert Worth Bingham, bought the newspaper in 1918. There he had cookies and milk with "Aunt Ruth" Hopper, the generous editor who presided over the Aloha Club, a writing circle for Louisville children. It was in the Aloha Club that he got to know young Wilson Wyatt. And in the newspaper where he first published poetry. Not all was so blissful, however. When he was just seven, Bingham's mother was killed when the auto in which she was a passenger was struck by a commuter train. Young Barry was asleep in her lap at the time the crash occurred, and though he survived, the event cast a shadow over his otherwise sunny childhood. The rest of his youth was divided between North Carolina, where he was doted upon by his father's sister and other relatives; Kentucky; and Massachusetts, where he attended boarding school.

Bingham was quite blunt about the fact that he got into Harvard by the skin of his teeth, having failed to gain a strong academic grounding in some areas as a child. But once he arrived in Cambridge, he was bedazzled by the academic environment, and, especially, by some of the outstanding professors who taught him Shakespeare, poetry, drama, and other forms of literature.

At Harvard he met Mary Caperton, a Radcliffe student from Richmond, who shared a love for literature, drama, and politics. They married a few years later and began one of the remarkable partnerships in American journalism. Indeed, those who knew them realized that it was bard to discern where the ideas of one ended and the other began. Not surprisingly, when Bingham went to serve in World War II, he left the editorial pages of the newspaper in his wife's hands.

Her strong liberal views and her clear sense of right and wrong had an impact from the Kentucky state-house to the White House, where Franklin D. Roosevelt -- long a Bingham family friend and ally -- came in for criticism in 1944 for the way in which he dumped Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket in favor of Harry Truman.

Mary Bingham was summoned to the White House with Courier-Journal publisher Mark Ethridge to discuss the newspaper's editorial stance with the president. Meanwhile, Barry -- off in Europe with the liberation forces -- read of the visit and wrote his wife a long letter. Clearly he was delighted that she was in the thick of public affairs back home.

One is reminded of the extraordinary breadth of the Binghams' interest in that same letter, dated September 2, 1944. In addition to national politics, Bingham relates in detail the fashions, food, and attitudes of liberated Paris; he discusses literature and military movements; and he poignantly describes his hope to have the "opportunity to help people" -- especially those with mental illness -- if he returned from war.

"I can think of no group whose unhappiness so deeply stirs me as those who have some form of mental illness, and the slightest contribution toward relieving their spiritual agony seems to me to offer rich rewards," Bingham wrote his wife.

Thomas's collection also contains Bingham's 1937 article from The Courier-Journal, "Need Theirs Be a Living Death?", which presented the plight of the mentally ill in stark terms. In fact, he did become a leader in the field of mental health after his return from the war.

Also included are fascinating accounts of Bingham's close relationship with Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, as well as recollections of his service as chief of the Marshall Plan's operation in Paris from 1949 to 1950.

Thomas asserts in his introduction that "not since Henry Clay was Secretary of State has |Kentucky~ produced a person of such perception in foreign affairs." Not surprisingly, given those interests, The Courier-Journal's news and editorial columns were unusually generous with the space given to national and international news. By most accounts, it was that quality --and the boldness of the editorial page on many subjects but notably racial justice, education and environmental quality -- which caused the newspaper, under Bingham's guidance, to be ranked consistently among the top papers in America.

"A lot of people did not recognize what a Renaissance man Barry was," comments John Ed Pearce, a member of Bingham's editorial board, in Thomas's introduction. "His knowledge was so great. He was the best educated man I ever ran into -- not just at Harvard or in Europe, but through his voracious reading and his enormously assimilative and quick mind."

I can't resist adding a personal note. One of the entries in Barry Bingham: A Man of His Word -- "The Nimble Tread of the Feet |of Fred Astaire~" -- also was the last "Editorial Notebook" that he wrote for The Courier-Journal.

Late one Sunday evening in April 1987, the phone rang at my home. It was Mr. Bingham, who had just learned of the death of Astaire, one of his childhood idols.

"Would you mind if I wrote an 'Editorial Notebook' about him?" he asked.

Of course I was delighted, as I always was when he offered pieces for our op-ed page, to which he was a regular contributor in his retirement, after his family sold The Courier-Journal to the Gannett Company in 1986. He brought the article, typed on his ancient Royal machine, to my office first thing the next morning.

In it, Bingham recalled the time when, as a starry-eyed youth of 16, he requested an "interview" with Astaire and his sister/dancing partner, Adele. They received him backstage, where, in rented evening attire, he had a chat with them. "They were wonderfully kind to a boarding-school boy out of his depth," Bingham wrote.

A few months later, in November 1987, Barry Bingham Sr. was diagnosed with cancer; he died August 15, 1988, at age 82. In 1989, NCEW, of which he was a founder and host of two national conventions, named one of its top awards for him. The award honors those educators who most advance the cause of educating minority journalists -- a cause that Barry Bingham Sr. most ardently advocated and promoted.

Barry Bingham: A Man of His Word is the closest thing we'll ever have to his autobiography. And, in contrast to the raft of books and articles published in recent years about him, this one presents a portrait that accurately reflects the man -- and demonstrates why he was one of the most significant figures in twentieth century American journalism.

Don't let pages be 'pale reflection of opinion'

This is an excerpt from Barry Bingham: A Man of His Word. In this 1982 interview with Mary D. Bobo of the University of Louisville, Bingham explained his goals for the editorial page, and how he ran those at The Courier-Journal and Louisville Times from 1937-1971:

I ALWAYS FELT that the editorial page was in many ways the heart of the newspaper. I was always interested in the news operation, goodness knows, but I did feel that the editorial page function was especially important and especially vital in a one-newspaper-ownership town, which this became soon after I got back into newspaper work. I think the responsibility of an editorial page editor |the title Bingham held over many years~, or whoever is running the editorial page, is tremendous....

I've had many people say, "Why don't you just gauge the editorial page on what you think people in Louisville or in your readership area want?" Well, I can't see that that would be an honorable thing to do, to begin with, because you're then just trying to be a pale reflection of opinion, rather than somebody who's helping to form opinion in what you think is the fight direction. Beyond that, how in the world would you operate an editorial page like that? You'd have to have an opinion poll taken once a week, I think, of your readers to find out what they really did want. You'd get a great variation of opinion among them. But suppose it came out one week that the majority believed in a certain issue, or took a certain position on an issue, and you hastily adapted your editorial policy to conform to that? Two or three weeks later that opinion might change. We've seen these extraordinary shifts in the Gallup Poll, and other opinion polls, as to national politics.... You'd have to rewrite an awful lot of editorials, and in the long run, I think, in trying to satisfy everybody, you would satisfy nobody.

One thing I had to realize early in thinking about developing an editorial page of the kind of vigor that I wanted was that it would never be satisfactory to many of our readers. Thus the old saying, "You can't please all of the people all of the time." I sometimes have almost thought you can't please any of the people any of the time! But the fact is that if you are going to have a bold editorial page, you've got to put forth strong opinions on important issues, and you've got to make them as fair as you can. But they are opinions. That is what they are. That's what the editorial page is: It's a place where opinion should be found....

NCEW member Keith Runyon is opinion pages editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville.