My Times: Adventures in the News Trade
By John Corry
Grosset/Putnam, 256 pages, $24.95
Readers may not notice bylines, but journalists invariably do, and for decades the name John Corry in The New York Times made them stop skimming and settle in.
Fittingly, “My Times,” Corry’s curmudgeonly memoir about his adventures as a lifelong newspaperman, is something special-quirky, witty and wise.
Starting as a copy clerk who filled pastepots and supplemented his meager stipend by giving bookies the scores of late games over the phone, Corry spent 31 years at the Times, finishing up as the paper’s first TV news critic.
He left only for a brief flirtation with New Journalism from 1968 to 1971, during which he helped Willie Morris make Harper’s the most exciting magazine in America.
These days, he notes dourly by comparison, a hot magazine would be something like Spy-another example of what he calls “the slow fading of the culture.”
In Corry’s day, journalists used to be “rakish, intemperate, blithesome,” but above all serious about their work, if not so much about themselves.
Today, he worries that they are insiders, celebrities, unelected equals of the leaders they cover.
The lines between news and entertainment have totally blurred-as illustrated recently when the vice president of the United States went on the Larry King show to debate presidential aspirant Ross Perot about NAFTA.
Corry celebrates the past of newspapering, warts and all, and deplores the state-of-the-art. But unlike others, he has lived through fundamental changes that rocked and reshaped his profession.
His book retraces his big stories-how he scoured Greece for torture victims of the junta and Cuba for Castro’s heaven on Earth (both non-existent). He covered the Kennedys and the Rockefellers, and became embroiled in the celebrated brouhaha over Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski.
But his most artistic series chronicled a year in the life of one square block on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Corry provides a wealth of Times gossip, irreverently recounting the tenure of Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb. He takes us inside the “old-boy” foreign affairs network, and finds the exalted air breathed by pundits rather stale.
He describes how he became a member of what economists call “the new class” in America.
“My status was defined not by what I owned but by what I did, and my strength was in where and how I used words. I was, along with thousands of others of my kind, an opinion maker.”
The trend today, he grumbles, is for form to triumph over substance. He frets over the soul of a press that, in its insatiable desire to be liked and to do the right thing, has joined the Establishment.
“When I visit the (Times) newsroom now, I am struck by its quiet,” he writes.
“Reporters do not raise their voices or hang around after hours, and the atmosphere reflects a new sense of the news. Man bites dog would once have been story, but it might not be now, unless it touched on racism, sexism, gay rights, or the rain forest. There is less emphasis on hard news or breaking news, and much of the old urgency of daily journalism has fled, along with the eccentric humor wedded to it.”
