January 2011

During a board meeting at Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1942, Henry Luce, editor in chief of Time Inc., passed a note to the educator Robert M. Hutchins. “How,” Luce asked, “do I find out about the freedom of the press and what my obligations are?” Hutchins said he didn’t know. Luce persevered: What would Hutchins think of impaneling a committee of experts to analyze the rights and duties of the press? “If you’ll put up the money,” Hutchins replied, “I’ll organize the committee.”

Like Luce, who had cofounded Time magazine at twenty-four, Hutchins had made his mark early in life, becoming dean of Yale Law School at twenty-eight and president of the University of Chicago at thirty. Also like Luce, Hutchins had a vigorous intellect, a fondness for unorthodox ideas, and the self-assurance to implement them. “There are two ways to have a great university—it must either have a great football team or a great president,” he declared in 1939, and proceeded to abolish Chicago’s football program.

It is the fundamental act of contemporary journalism. Washington reporters depend so heavily on it that in most of the stories they write they use no documents at all. Yet the interview is a relatively recent invention.

Newspapers in America date to the late 160Os, but not until the 182Os did leading urban dailies even begin to hire reporters to gather news. With the rise of commercially minded penny papers in the 183Os, reporting of local news became, as the Boston Herald observed in 1847, “one of the specialties of the press.”

Still, most reporting remained no more at first than the publication of official documents and public speeches. Reporters talked with public officials but they never referred to their conversations in print. In Washington, politicians’ and diplomats’ confidences were regarded as inviolate. President Lincoln often spoke with reporters in informal conversation, but no reporter ever quoted him directly.

Is your newspaper a Gazette ? A Journal ? Do you read a Gleaner or a Quill or a Bee ?

Newspaper names are a catalog of history and motive. Some were chosen because they seem traditional, like Gazette or Journal ; others reflect a sentiment of the namer. A Journal originally was a work that contained extracts from a recent book, while a Gazette , according to Voltaire, was “a relation of public affairs.” The distinction between the two was soon lost, and both journals and gazettes came to contain both political and cultural information.

By general consensus the first attempt to start a regularly published newspaper in America was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, issued in Boston on September 25, 1690. Its founder was a transplanted British printer, Benjamin Harris, who had been sent to the pillory in London for faking a story about a popish plot against the crown. First, he ran an exposé of the plot, and when it turned out there was none on at the moment, he took credit for breaking it up. Harris tried again in Boston with a monthly journal, printed on four sheets about the size of modern notebook paper, that offered a number of local stories ranging from house fires to a suicide. There was an account of a smallpox epidemic raging in Boston and a hair-raising tale of the depredations of Indians who “barbarously Butcher’d” forty white settlers. There were also a few snippets of foreign news about sexual improprieties within the French royal court.

My brush has waited since 1939 to be told. The place was the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard, the location was aboard the USS Richmond . A ship with a large crew and crowded living spaces: big guns, ammunition, mine-laying tracks, and airplane catapults had first priority. Officers had rooms, chief petty officers slept in bunks. The rest of us slept in hammocks swung eight feet above the decks in every available corner. The ship’s band, of which I was a member, lived, slept, and rehearsed in the stern gun tub.

We were anchored forward of the President’s yacht. Its presence constantly reminded us that, with luck, Franklin D. Roosevelt might pass by us before we set sail again. The gunner’s mates, on this particular day, were working on a gun. They had removed the breech block and replaced it with a boresighting telescope to test the accuracy of the sights. I was my own supervisor because the bandmaster and all other bandsmen were on annual leave.

From the time I was a young boy, one of my heroes was President Harry S. Truman. To me, the former haberdasher and county judge epitomized the model public servant.

Truman even had a physical impact on me. When I was in elementary school I read that he walked at a rate of 120 steps per minute. For months I practiced his pace, walking long distances and timing myself with a stopwatch until it became second nature. To this day I walk with a “Trumanesque” gait. And though I never had the privilege of personally meeting Harry Truman, he did come to know me, albeit fleetingly.

In 1969 I was attending the seventh grade at Ben Franklin Junior High School in Colma, California. During that year my history teacher, Mr. Puhr, assigned the class our first long-term homework project. We were to research and type a five- to seven-page biography of the subject of our choice. Naturally I chose Truman. I dived into my task with zeal: Instead of taking the allotted three months, I finished my paper in three days.

The sewing or “lady’s work” table on the opposite page is a splendid example of one of the most elegant and functional forms of furniture to be introduced in America during the Federal period. Small, delicate, and portable, it was designed to provide a convenient surface and storage space for needlework and other leisure activities of gentlewomen. It performed its tasks so well that by the era’s end it had become a focal object of refined feminine society.

Call Maryland Tourism (1-800-543-1036) or contact the Talbot County Chamber of Commerce (410-822-4606) for a schedule of events in St. Michaels—crab festivals, skipjack races, and the like—and for a list of nearby inns, many of which overlook the water. The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is open daily (except Thanksgiving and Christmas) from mid-March through December and only on weekends from January to mid-March. Its newest building, devoted to steam power, houses an eighteen-foot working compound steam engine from the 1924 tugboat W. J. Harahan ; it would make a warm, dry port in a storm.

“Bounded on the north by crabs, on the east by fresh fish, and on the south by mosquitoes” is how one visitor described an island he loved just off Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and with minor shifts of the compass, the description holds good for most of the region. By fall many of the mosquitoes have departed, but in almost any town along the water, you’ll see long, narrow crab boats piled high with the bushel baskets the watermen use to bring home their catch. The boats have no-nonsense names painted across their transoms, names like Hattie Walker and Hard Times. St. Michaels, located on the middle of a peninsula halfway down the bay, makes a good central base for exploring the area, especially because of the presence here of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

Remember Admiral Bobby Ray Inman? He was the Clinton Secretary of Defense-designate with a short fuse and an even shorter career as a nominee. Named last December, this ex-Pentagon insider with good press contacts was on the fast track to certain confirmation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Then, a few reporters began to ask critical questions, and Inman abruptly withdrew himself from consideration at a press conference in which he lashed out at the savage media sharks whose “new McCarthyism” was making it impossible for decent men and women to consider public-service careers.