COLUMNIST’S CHAPTER 2 SUPERB PORTRAIT

For years now, lots of us have been swigging our morning coffee over Russell Baker, either in the Daily Press or New York Times. True, we are more apt to smile at the veteran journalist’s subtle ironies than guffaw as we might over the Marx Brothers posturing of younger “humor” writers. But Baker fans know that there is no funny-house Wizzard of Oz behind his column. It is written by a decent, thoughtful man who serves us meat mixed with his self-depreciatory wit.

Just so his books. “The Good Times” is a (sometimes overlapping) sequel to Baker’s Pultizer Prize-winning autobiography “Growing Up.” Only better.

Better! For starters, his mother, while still the dominant force in his life, does not come across as the tendentious harridan that she did earlier. Even her condescending disapproval of the hapless Mimi (girlfriend turned wife) is muted – as is Baker’s smug satisfaction at two women fighting over him. In fact, RB’s uncanny laconism encapsulates the entire Depression with his description of his still young, widowed mother so desperately poor that she gave up a child for adoption. Like some Balzacian charcter, she struggles pridefully in her unaccustomed role as poor relation, understandably pinning her financial and emotional hopes for redemption on her only son. After all, cousin Edwin James, “no smarter than anybody else,” had been made managing editor of The New York Times.

Following graduation from Johns Hopkins, in 1947 Russell Baker was hired by Charles Dorsey (the first in a series of editor-father figures) as police reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Living more on the “glory” of writing for the prestigious newspaper than on their notoriously stingy pay, he married. But in 1953, lucky lightning struck the 27-year-old father of two. Because the Sun’s “hard” news reporters were all busy covering the Eisenhower inauguration, Baker, a “color” man, was sent to look over the new British queen.

Suddenly flush, the Sun’s youngest-ever, very green London correspondent had an extravagant expense account and crossed first class on the United States. (Peninsula devotees – both former passengers and builders – of that once magnificent liner will enjoy reliving her salad days). Checking into the Saoy, he found an England enthralled with socialism, filled with strange customs being played off against a backdrop of bombed out buildings and rationing. (Meat once a week, eggs twice, as I recall. Those of us who were college students at the time, viewing the rubble from years ago German air raids, can be forgiven for concluding that England must have lost the war.)

With his off-beat flair, Baker scored by recording the revealing details rather than broad pretensions. In covering the young Queen Elizabeth’s June 1953 coronation, for instance, instead of focusing on the pageantry, he described sights such as the formally, even gaudily, attired royals, nobs and foreign potentates queuing up for the toilet.

His eventual reward was an offer from James Reston for a job in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. A step up, certainly, but taken reluctantly (with prodding by wife and mother) for it meant, among other things, a change of editorial father figures. Baker’s always frank verdict on the Times of that era: an overstaffed bureaucracy working in slow-motion. Nevertheless he attempted (futilely) to dig beneath Jim Hagerty’s (Eisenhower’s press secretary) blandishments. Still, unlike many of his colleagues, he did escape the trap of uncritical adulation for the Camelot crowd. Indeed, although pretty depressing if by some miracle you have an ounce of political idealdism left (Alice-in-Wonderland here) Baker’s two most fascinating portraits are those of Times’ veteran Bill Lawrence’s fall under Kennedy charm and LBJ’s conning and conniving.

Because some of this is reprinted from the Times, there is a certain amount of disjointed repetition. And, admittedly, “good times” rest in the eye of the beholder. In hindsight, almost anything – short of the Holocaust or The Reign of Terror – can seem golden. (And the Bicentennial French are working on the latter.) Nevertheless, Russell Baker’s Mark Twainish details blend together, like so many pointillist dots in a superb Seurat painting, to form not only a colorful delight but a deeper comprehension of mid-20th-century America.

THE GOOD TIMES

By Russell Baker

Morrow. 351 pages. $19.95