My Times
Corry, John
BOOK REVIEWS A t the age of 7, John Corry pushed Billy Boswell into a pail of water. Billy Boswell was not just any classmate. He was the son of a bigshot—a lieutenant in the Fire Department. Cony...
...Putnam's Sons/240 pages / $24.95 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON his every tendency, becomes a trouble-maker...
...What, Reston chummily inquired, would be Corry's story for the next day's edition...
...Giving fits to Anthony Lewis: it's an honorable topper for any career...
...Corry offers this vignette to account for the push and pull of his own life—the pint-sized angel and devil who perched on either shoulder, luring him this way and that...
...And you only have to read the Times today—with its spongy trend stories, its overheated editorials, its trivial arts criticism—to sense how Herculean was the task Rosenthal set for himself, and how honorably he did his duty...
...Interesting lives don't necessarily make for interesting memoirs, of course, but John Corry has had the good fortune to lead the first and the literary gifts to write the second...
...There are heroes in this book, but its author is not among them...
...More recently, he has served as Presswatch columnist for this magazine...
...If nothing else, it makes for an interesting life...
...Rosenthal retired in the late 1980s...
...Within minutes, Corry's phone began jingling with calls from the clan, offering help—particularly in refuting any suggestion of a rift between Jackie and Bobby...
...But Corry's brushes with the clan—"clan" being defined to include the battalion of butt-boys like Dick Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger—lead to some delicious tales...
...Reston would never accept free bottles of liquor," Corry writes, "but he did comfort famous men...
...The disinformation crossed the Atlantic, circulated as rumor among the illuminati of New York, and evolved, inevitably, into an "exposé" in the Village Voice...
...At last came a call from his colleague, the great Scotty Reston in Washington, who had otherwise managed to ignore Corry for years...
...F or example: If I never read another word about the Kennedys it will be too soon...
...And the neo-liberal New Republic, reviving its pre-war tradition of Stalinist apologetics, insisted that Corry apologize to the Voice...
...Corry's portrait of him has its warts: under Rosenthal, for example, the Times's coverage of John Lindsay—especially early on, when the pulchritudinous young mayor was just setting off on his mission to destroy New York City—was as detached as a high school pep rally...
...Corry is the most self-effacing of memoirists...
...As his readers from those years will recall, his criticism was measured, skeptical, and fair...
...And he did so, always, with courage and wit and uncommon honesty—the same qualities he has brought to his memoir...
...In the newsroom, Corry was shunned, and the ink-stained useful idiots raised their piping voices in a soprano Bronx cheer...
...Don Hewitt and Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes" condemned him by name, while from the higher reaches of CBS came offers to buy him off...
...For thirty years Cony was a reporter at the New York Times, with a brief hiatus at Harper's during its recently disinterred "golden age" of the late sixties and early seventies...
...The American Spectator February 1994 87...
...But nowadays the conservative disposition puts you at odds with the rule-makers, the wised-up boys and girls who write the news, teach the kids, publish the books, and produce our entertainments...
...In the mid-sixties Corry broke the story of Jackie Kennedy's lawsuit against William Manchester, whose Death of a President the clan deemed insufficiently slavish...
...As Corry meticulously showed, Kosinski had been the target of a Communist disinformation campaign originating in his native Poland...
...Anthony Lewis wanted him fired, too...
...His memoir's immediate audience will probably comprise those with the misfortune to have read the Times for most of their lives, and those 86 The American Spectator February 1994 revered moralist and orotund oracle of high-minded journalists everywhere, can now take his place in line right over there between Dick and Artie...
...Lindsay himself is a minor, and unexpectedly engaging, character in the book...
...Reston's next column, in turn, announced that the brother of the fallen president would forever stand by his widow...
...My Times is a memoir of a very high rank, a brocade of observation and gossip, reportage and rumination, alternately moving, hilarious, and even profound...
...Like so many others in this otherwise cheerful book, the Kosinski story puts the lie to the bogus moralizing and self-proclaimed skepticism of the American press...
...But later, as the counter-culture dropped its prefix, Rosenthal struggled to anchor the Times in the political center...
...But I hate to think its audience will end there...
...As it happens, the tension was well-suited to the life he has led, for a conservative in late twentieth-century America is a walking paradox...
...Corry quit not long after Rosenthal.But in spirit his break with the paper had come a few years before, in 1982, when he wrote a long story defending the novelist Jerzy Kosinski...
...Cony was made to wait in an empty classroom for his mother to take him home...
...CI ^111111rta...
...As a conservative, you see, Corry couldn't help but make trouble...
...Uh huh, Reston said, and thanked me...
...Corry's final dose of sham came during his last assignment, as the Times's television critic...
...Corry declined...
...One could have predicted my life right there," Corry writes in his memoir...
...But Rosenthal believed in it, and so he was, as Corry writes, "an apostate in a media age of conformity...
...Having none, Corry made one up: "A reliable source had told me, I said, that [Bobby Kennedy) thought Jackie was screwing up his career...
...interested more broadly in journalism's orchestration of the national palaver...
...Following the Nation's lead, Newsweek called the story "embarrassing...
...When she arrived, young Corry left his desk and made sure to raise his seat, as all good boys do...
...He was thus branded an ideologue—a right-wing ideologue!—who soiled the pristine arts pages with his "editorializing...
...Scandal ensued—the scandal being, of course, that the Times had defended an anti-Communist novelist, not that the Voice had been duped...
...Rosenthal, editor of the Times and therefore the largest figure in American journalism during the seventies and eighties, was Corry's close friend, and in many respects his mentor...
...He has had problems with booze and with tomcatting, and his account of both is straightforward and dignified...
...the Times has been busy debasing itself ever since...
...At first the Kennedys used Corry as a conduit to the front page of the Times...
...When the guardians of the new orthodoxy celebrate the unorthodox, as they do, and when the rule-makers discard the old rules, as they have, the conservative, against his better judgment and contrary to Andrew Ferguson is a senior writer for the Washingtonian...
...On the other hand, a boy of 7 who is compelled to push the son of a Fire Department lieutenant into a pail of water is likely to fight with authority when he grows up...
...There is plenty here, in other words, to hook you in whoever you are...
...acknowledged and discussed and then dropped...
...phone calls went unreturned...
...But when some of his stories veered from the proper line, his sources dried up...
...His circumspection disqualifies him for a guest turn on Oprah but the reader will be grateful for it, and even find it strangely elevating, if only because it is so rare in contemporary memoirs...
...So I thought...
...That center may be a myth, and in any case journalism is never as fair and balanced as even the fairest journalists think it is...
...Scotty, the MY TIMES: ADVENTURES IN THE NEWS TRADE John Cony G.P...
...A boy of 7 who must raise the seat of his desk because the rules say he is supposed to is unlikely to be anything but a conservative as an adult...
...Abe Rosenthal is...
...The wry understatement is pure Corry, the anecdote is pure My Times: juicy and funny and expositive, pricking the pompous, and not, by the way, especially flattering to its teller, either...
...He may have been the most intelligent critic TV has ever had (not so grand a compliment, really...
...By definition, he cherishes order, plays by the rules, takes comfort in orthodoxy...
...the Washington Post concurred, by writing a story about the Newsweek story about the Nation's story about Corry's story...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
