Salty Taste of the News:
MORGAN, EDWARD P.
Salty Taste of the News Don't Let Them Scare You. By Roger Burlingame. Lippincott. 341 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Edward P. Morgan Washington Commentator, American Broadcasting Company What a...
...Reviewed by Edward P. Morgan Washington Commentator, American Broadcasting Company What a pity it is that the flatly eloquent vocal resonance and the pungent wisdom of Elmer Davis are not around to twang our collective conscience about a lot of things today...
...Davis had more courage than administrative ability but both he and the OWI survived...
...Perhaps Davis' greatest contribution to journalism, electronic or otherwise, came in his cool—and sometimes coldly angry—analyses of the fear that gripped America before, during and after that nightmare called the era of McCarthyism...
...Perhaps if we had had more of the life and less of the times of Elmer Davis we would have had a clearer picture...
...Even so, the book is a valuable work...
...We would savor his salty comments about summits, space probes and sundry items from South Vietnam to Hyannisport, from Caroline's bons mots to the Kremlin's bad ones...
...Not that Davis' observations would make the incessant mess of world crises any more palatable, but somehow one harbors the wistful confidence that if it were all served up on the bright skewer of his analysis, we could at least be a little more sure what it was we were being forced to eat...
...In his final paragraph, Burlingame writes: "He saw through the fog—and helped clear it away for us...
...It is as if Burlingame had been waiting all along for that day when CBS' Paul White called Davis up and asked him to come over and give the news department a hand as an analyst...
...He had done a little broadcasting before, including some pinch-hits for H. V. Kaltenborn...
...Elmer Davis has been dead just three years...
...Davis' first major assignment for the Times, covering the unhappy odyssey of Henry Ford's Peace Ship to Europe in December 1915 is described in not very illuminating detail, without benefit of what additional description some quotes from Davis' own dispatches might have contributed...
...Burlingame next documents the frustrating but interesting and influential interlude of 1942-45, when Davis ran, or tried to run, the Office, of War Information...
...Roger Burlingame's book, Don't Let Them Scare You—The Life and Times of Elmer Davis, is frankly, sometimes almost embarrassingly, a labor of love, which is sure to be all right with the bulk of Elmer Davis' devotees, including this one, except for the wish that the writing might have been tighter, the narrative more taut and sharp and more in the style of the subject himself...
...Before we can give him as tall a monument of our maturity as he deserves we are going to have to grow up some more...
...His battle with the brass against unnecessary secrecy was notable...
...And he helped us too to grow up...
...Still, it is probably quite unfair to expect any biographer to catch the full flavor and depth of Davis' thinking and character except by equipping the volume with a choice set of recordings of his broadcasts, which speak for themselves with economical eloquence...
...But after recording something of the strain (and success) of Davis' freelancing with both fact and fiction after leaving the Times, noting that he predicted a Hoover victory in 1932 and chronicling the fact that Davis was reported dead in a New England hurricane at the time of the Munich crisis, the book quickens pace with the beginning of World War II...
...Radio was the medium through which Davis earned widest recognition and fame, and Burlingame finds it a joy to document that fact...
...People bitten with this madness attacked him, but he refused to let them scare him and his example helped others to show a little more courage too...
...We could use his dry good sense about the brutal, senseless contortions of racial prejudice in the South (and elsewhere...
...One of the author's most revealing bits of reporting is a description of how Davis got his news off the wire service teletypes—not by tearing off the endless rolls of copy but by standing over the chattering machines and taking meticulous notes which became the trim, hard core of his masterfully succinct broadcasts...
...It follows Davis on the long, purposeful, serious-minded route from Aurora, Indiana (which marked him, happily and permanently, with that devastatingly unpretentious Hoosier twang), through Oxford, the New York Times, the perilous world of freelance fiction and the even more unfictitious perils of the world at large...
Vol. 44 • August 1961 • No. 30
