Nick Summers

Gene Weingarten on the Washington Post dust-up.

Gene Weingarten: Yes, there were fisticuffs last Friday in The Washington Post newsroom, as chronicled here and here. Inasmuch as this is an incident I did not personally witness, between colleagues I do not know very well, over a matter that remains partly conjecture, it would be inappropriate and irresponsible for me to comment on it. I will therefore try to limit my thoughts to a mere 4,000 words, roughly the length of feature stories that The Post and other newspapers used to publish with some frequency but seldom do anymore, to the general exasperation of persons such as me and Henry Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia.

The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. (Obligatory mature qualification: I of course decry any breakdown in comity and collegiality and civil discourse in the workplace, and urge all young people to maintain decorum and respect others, to be tolerant of opposing viewpoints, to seek compromise, and to not punch each other out in spit-flying scrums.)

Still, hooray. Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions — a situation thought of as “creative tension” and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss. In the face of potential ruin, journalists have been forced to reach accommodations with themselves: New strictures, new styles, new protocols, new limitations on what is possible are now meekly swallowed. In the frantic scramble for new “revenue streams,” ethical boundaries are more likely to be pushed than is the proverbial envelope. Some of all this has leached out into the product. We all feel it. You do, too.

So, hooray. For both Henry and Manuel.

A word about the pugilists. I only met Manuel Roig-Franzia once, and I liked him a lot. He is not only one of the best feature writers at The Post, but he’s also no one’s patsy; no beetle-brow on this guy. He’s a product of the old school of telling a fearless narrative, which involves not only a search for complex truths, but for a way to tell them with texture and flair and voice, risking that dreadful label of arrogance, or the worse one of “self-indulgence.” (I hate that word; it tends to be used disparagingly by writers who can’t find their way to the end of a sentence with more than one dependent clause.)

My relationship with Henry Allen is older and deeper and more complex. Henry doesn’t like me very much, I think, probably for many completely justifiable reasons — one of which I alluded to a couple of years ago in a column. I never named Henry as the subject of the end of this column, but will do so now. I mention this all just so you understand where the rest of this comes from. It’s pure hero worship, untainted by friendship.

Henry Allen is very possibly the best newspaper feature writer who ever lived, certainly the best of his generation and mine. He is SO good, his stories roared with such daring and authority and rule-breaking literary brilliance that he couldn’t win a Pulitzer until his editors had the brilliant, cynical, pragmatic idea of making him a photography critic for a year or two. With his genius contained in a more familiar, less challenging format, ordinary judges got it. Henry Allen, the greatest writer of his generation of the long-form narrative, won his Pulitzer for … criticism.

What Henry was always best at was a muscly form of writing that not only tells you what is happening, but lets you understand what to think about it — not superficially, but in the manner of explicating The Meaning of Life.

This is Henry Allen in 1991, covering the media covering the first Gulf War:

The Persian Gulf press briefings are making reporters look like fools, nitpickers and egomaniacs; like dilettantes who have spent exactly none of their lives on the end of a gun or even a shovel; dinner party commandos, slouching inquisitors, collegiate spitball artists; people who have never been in a fistfight, much less combat; a whining, self-righteous, upper-middle-class mob jostling for whatever tiny flakes of fame may settle on their shoulders like some sort of Pulitzer Prize dandruff.

They ask the same questions over and over. In their frustration, they ask questions that no one could answer; that anyone could answer; that no one should answer if they could answer. They complain about getting no answers, they complain about the answers they get. They are angry that the military won’t let them go anywhere, the way they could in Vietnam. They talk about war as if it were a matter of feelings to be hashed out with a psychotherapist, or a matter of ethics to be discussed in a philosophy seminar. A lot of them seem to care more about Iraqi deaths than American deaths, and after the big spill in the gulf, they seemed to care more about animals than people — a greasy cormorant staggered around on CNN until it seemed like a network logo, along the lines of the NBC peacock. They don’t always seem to understand that war is real.

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And here is Henry Allen in 1992 on the enduring mystery of Jimmy Hoffa:

Hoffa.

He used it as if he were talking about a chemical compound or an elite military unit…

“Hoffa don’t need nobody; Hoffa can do this job alone.”

“Hoffa trusts nobody.”

“Hoffa can take care of Hoffa.”

Try using your own name that way. What an ego Jimmy Hoffa had: 5 feet 5 1/2 inches tall, never got to high school, and he referred to himself as if he were Charles de Gaulle. To the Teamsters’ rank and file, he was.

If, Hoffa once said, “a man don’t have an ego, he don’t have any money and he don’t have any ambition. Mine’s big enough to do the job I wanna do.”

Big enough.

There were stories: He got run though a Dispose-All; he was cremated the same day he was killed; he was chopped up and buried in four or five graves; he was baled inside a car trunk by a junkyard compactor …

Disappearing is like being taken bodily into the heaven of American fame.

The Mafia is vanishing too. The whole idea of the dignity of labor is dead. The workingman is a nostalgic figure wearing a tweed cap in movies.

The guys with the big swaggers are no longer heroes at all. We’re all little guys now.

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All little guys now. The same could be said for the people in the newsroom. It’s a realization that reaches well below the skin into the gut — maybe not if you are an ordinary hack, but if you’re a Henry Allen, or if you’re a Manuel Roig-Franzia, what is happening now hurts.

I don’t know the ultimate precipitating factor in what led to blows between these two guys on Friday — for all I know, Manuel strangled Henry’s cat. But I do know what I read, that the proximate cause was the quality of written word — what we put in the paper. It doesn’t surprise me. “What we put in the paper,” used to be a sacred term in most newsrooms, back before things began to change and some mediocre stuff began to appear with regularity. Back then, the meaning of “the paper” was completely different, too.

The news about the news, for the most part, has stunk for some time: There’s been cowardly and crappy decision-making in scary times; ethics, at times, have been mislaid; lousy things have found their way into print, and worthy things — killed for unworthy reasons — have not. I am not shocked that tempers boiled over, nor am I shocked that they boiled over between two people who know what has been happening, and care.

I hope Henry is invited and welcomed back to the newsroom; if anyone deserves a little slack, it’s him. I hope he and Manuel bury the hatchet. I hope neither of them loses one ounce of passion and I hope each of them remains privately convinced he was right.