Plain Dealing

Richard Zimmerman

Description

A collection of political remembrances from a longtime Statehouse and Washington bureau reporterSon of an Ohio Supreme Court Justice and longtime political reporter, Rick Zimmerman presents Ohio politics from the inside. He began learning about Ohio politics and politicians as a young boy, sitting at the dinner table presided over by his father, Judge Charles Ballard Zimmerman. The author says his "father was a Democrat of sorts, but identified with the Jeffersonian wing of the party. In short, he was a conservative and a favorable mention of Franklin Roosevelt was practically banned in our house." Yet, in spite of these philosophical leanings, the elder Zimmerman was truly nonpartisan as far as his political tales were concerned, with an opinion about most political leaders from both parties, that were for the most part negative, a "perspective which my later critics likely would suggest I inherited," contends Zimmerman.In the same way his father entertained with his reminiscences, author Rick Zimmerman tells stories of and on Ohio's politicians and their machinations, including governors (James Rhodes and Mike DiSalle), senators, and congressmen. His discussions of Watergate, his African sabbatical, and the National Press Club and reflections on the state of journalism are refreshing, witty, and insightful. Plain Dealing is an engaging memoir that doubles as an irreverent look at Ohio's political history.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis
• Ohio

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 02 février 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612774602
• Langue: English

Extrait

PLAIN DEALING
Plain Dealing
Ohio Politics and Journalism
Viewed from the Press Gallery
RICHARD G. ZIMMERMAN
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2006 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2005015445
ISBN -10: 0-87338-852-6
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-852-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA
Zimmerman, Richard G., 1934– Plain dealing : Ohio politics and journalism viewed from the press gallery / Richard G. Zimmerman
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-852-8 (pbk. : alk paper) ∞ ISBN -10: 0-87338-852-6 (pbk. : alk, paper) ∞
1. Ohio—Politics and government—1951– —Anecdotes. 2. Legislators—Ohio—Anecdotes. 3. Governors—Ohio—Anecdotes. 4. Politicians—Ohio—Anecdotes. 5. Ohio. General Assembly—Anecdotes. 6. Zimmerman, Richard G., 1934– —Anecdotes. 7. Journalists—Ohio—Biography—Anecdotes. 8. Journalism—Political aspects—Ohio—Anecdotes. 9. Press and politics—Ohio—Anecdotes. I. Title.
F 496.2. Z 56 2005
977.1'043—dc22 2005015445
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
Dedicated to the memory of Robert W. Burdock (1927–1982) Early mentor, later colleague, forever a friend.
CONTENTS

Foreword by David Hess
Prologue: Indoctrination
1 Jim Rhodes and Me
2 Meet Mike DiSalle
3 Legislators and Lobbyists
4 Four More Notable Ohio Campaigns
5 Goodbye, Columbus
6 Senators and Representatives
7 The Watergate Game
8 Africa, Acid Rain, and Other Adventures
9 Tales from the Press Club
10 Publishers and Reporters
Epilogue: Later Years
Index
Foreword
BY DAVID HESS
I n every human drama, including the practice of politics, there is always a lot of collateral activity on the margins of the stage. Among the keenest observers of such byplay are the journalists whose job is to record in daily logs, called newspapers or more broadly “the media,” the central plot, often quite dull when it is engaged in the formulation and effects of public policy. Some journalism mavens are vain enough to refer to such reports as the “first cut” of history.
The irony is that a lot of the interesting stuff goes largely unheeded at the time, though many reporters’ notebooks are crammed with the peripheral events, mostly unpublished, that make for far more entertaining reading. In this book, Richard G. Zimmerman, whose productive career spanned the latter half of the twentieth century, mostly in observance of Ohio’s colorful and occasionally loopy political players, recalls the periphery, often amusedly and always with fine reminiscent clarity. Like most “memoirs,” Zimmerman’s recollections are unapologetically impressionistic. But they are clearly informed by his deep roots in the political soil of his native state, and though he does not say it, they embody a love and profound respect for his craft of journalism as well as for the political actors and stagecraft he covered for so long with great distinction.
The younger son of a state supreme court judge (unlike federal judges, Ohio judges must run for election), Zimmerman was born to and weaned on state politics. From childhood, his memories are rife with takes on Ohio’s eminent as well as rascally officeholders whose exploits remain etched in the lore of Buckeye history and mythology. In opening his recollections with the years during which he covered the elusive Republican governor James A. Rhodes, Zimmerman describes a love-hate relationship with a leader he came to admire as an adroit politician but whose policies he abhorred for catering to the rich and powerful while neglecting the poorer element of society. Rhodes’s popularity rarely suffered from this, despite the reports of Zimmerman and a few of his contemporaries who regularly chronicled the governor’s policies, causing Zimmerman to acknowledge with regret that “we never got the goods on that guy.”
Zimmerman’s intensely personal approach to covering politics is perhaps best exemplified in his chapter devoted to the years during and after the governorship of Democrat Michael V. DiSalle in the early 1960s. He quite openly confesses a deep admiration of DiSalle as a public servant (indeed, Zimmerman wrote a well-received political biography of DiSalle) and holds him up as an exemplar of decency and public spiritedness, while also recounting DiSalle’s personal foibles and political missteps. Thus, in spite of Zimmerman’s affection for a subject, he was careful not to subsume his journalist’s obligation-to-craft in his accounts of the late governor’s career as it transected Zimmerman’s.
If the tedious slogging in writing this book carried any reward, it was in the process of recounting the behavior of the scalawags who inhabited the Ohio General Assembly during the years that Zimmerman covered it. As this writer read his account, I was reminded of the famous finding of a nineteenth-century New York state judge who wrote, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” Or, as the conservative columnist James Kilpatrick once resignedly observed, “Legislatures are a faithful reflection of the voters, warts and all.”
That the Ohio legislature contained an ample sampling of incompetents and lackeys for special interests should surprise no one who has taken the trouble to look. Underpaid and often uninformed about the law and intricacies of public policy, legislators of that era were mostly ordinary men (and a very few women) more inclined to impede than to encourage the process of government. Except for a few proficient lawyers and educators, the General Assembly’s part-time members fancied themselves as being on missions to lay claim to the public treasury for parochial projects, to curb taxes, or to fatten the coffers of the corporate, labor, or other lobbies that financed their campaigns. It rarely occurred to them to be concerned with the overarching needs of their schools, colleges, mental hospitals, and other labor-intensive public institutions that required hefty expenditures.
In reading Zimmerman’s and fellow journalist Robert Burdock’s rather denunciatory series about the workings of the Ohio legislature back then, one might be struck not so much by the glaring frankness of its discussion as by the cool reception it got from the then-readers of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which published the series. Apart from drawing the obligatory letters from “good government” mavens, the series—as history shows—led to little reform, and its impact, discouragingly, waned as time engulfed that “first cut” of history.
And yet, amidst the mediocre mob that populated the legislature, there were a few in that era who occasionally rose above the mean, who possessed the intelligence, sound judgment, and moral courage to stand up to the power brokers and special interests and, if not always succeed, then at least hold a mirror up to the better characteristics of our nature. Those who stand out in Zimmerman’s recollection came from Ohio’s villages, townships, and cities. This writer, who covered the legislature in the same years as Zimmerman, recalls the names of some of them: Kline Roberts of Columbus, Charles Whalen of Dayton, Ed Sargus of St. Clairsville, Ted Gray of Piqua, to name a few in the Senate. In the House, Don Pease of Oberlin, Ralph Regula of Navarre, Chuck Kurfess of Bowling Green, Ed James of Noble County, Carl Stokes of Cleveland. All in their own ways brought a gloss of integrity and public service to the dull matte of legislative short-sightedness.
As unremittingly jaundiced as Zimmerman is about the shenanigans of Ohio’s politicians, he is equally critical of the shortcomings of most of the state’s newspapers, particularly their managers, including some of his superiors at the Plain Dealer. This writer need not reiterate Zimmerman’s quarrels with them but simply allow readers to look for themselves at the author’s accounts.
From covering the state government and politics in Columbus, Zimmerman moved to the Plain Dealer ’s Washington, D.C., bureau where he eventually rose to become bureau chief. From that vantage point, he covered some of Ohio’s most prominent members of Congress. His assessments of their strengths and weaknesses are generally accurate, particularly in the cases of the late U.S. representative Wayne Hays of Belmont County and former U.S. senator William B. Saxbe of Mechanicsburg. Zimmerman spares no verbal rod in summing up the brilliant but dour Hays as a self-serving bully and hypocrite whose abuses of power were legendary. As for Saxbe, a self-confident and unaffecting man whose frank appraisals of his political contemporaries made for great copy, Zimmerman recalls several of his more lustrous comments. This writer could add, from his own experience covering Saxbe for the Akron Beacon Journal, that interviewing the senator often yielded a trove of colorful quotes, some not repeatable in family newspapers, that might have wrecked the careers of lesser politicians. As an example, I recall an interview with the simmering Saxbe shortly after President Nixon had dispatched White House aide John Ehrlichman to the senator’s office to strong-arm him into supporting the nomination of one of the president’s embattled judicial appointees. “Did [Ehrlichman] make the sale?” I asked. “Aw, that guy couldn’t sell ass on a troopship!” Saxbe growled. Such homely exclamations were Saxbe’s trademark and set him apart from the standard politicians who couched their words in evasions and platitudes. You always knew where Bill Saxbe was coming from.
In summarizing this collection of memories from a reporting career that began in Ohio and continued through moves to the nation’s capital, to Africa, and to South America—and across a broad range of public affairs, from political conventions to environmental crises—one can say that it ought to serve as requ