| No Mere Journalist: J. Anthony Lukas | Reading Homer | |
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| Yesterday's News | ||
 Front and center: When Harvard's new president, Nathan Pusey, took the unusual step of calling a full-scale press conference to reply to Senator Joseph McCarthy's attack on Harvard in the fall of 1953, Crimson reporter Tony Lukas '55 (in the dark jacket) was there to cover the story. THE BOSTON GLOBE |
On May 23, Simon & Schuster mailed this magazine a prepublication version of Big Trouble, the enormous new book by J. Anthony Lukas '55. Writing it must have taken prodigious effort: Lukas's thirtieth-reunion report mentioned his plan to embark on the project; his thirty-fifth, in 1990, told the topic (labor strife and the assassination of a former governor of Idaho in 1905) and expressed hope that completing the book wouldn't take as long as the seven-plus years it took to create Common Ground, the account of school desegregation and racial strife in Boston that won him his second Pulitzer Prize.
It did take that long, though. And a few days after the galley arrived came news that Lukas had committed suicide in his New York apartment on June 5--Commencement day, as it happened.
John McPhee once began a lighthearted New Yorker article with the sentence, "J. Anthony Lukas is a world-class pinball player who, between tilts, does some free-lance writing." The same year, Lukas and his classmates David L. Halberstam and John R. Harrison--already all Pulitzer winners--wrote introductory essays for their twentieth-anniversary class report. Lukas called his "Pangloss and Beyond." He recalled taking refuge in the Pangloss Bookstore during the winter of his senior year, and reading the memoirs of foreign correspondents. In their dashing lives he found an alternative to the prevailing "Eisenhowerism--golf and canasta and Mamie and detective stories at bedtime." Work as a reporter, first at the Baltimore Sun, and then as a New York Times correspondent in the Congo and India, fulfilled his youthful ambition, but only in part. "I could report a riot over the cow slaughter issue," Lukas wrote, "but it was much more difficult to get into the head of the Hindu zealot who would go into the streets and risk his life over the death of a cow." The Times, he found, wanted the facts, "But increasingly I wanted the nuance too."
In the pursuit of nuance, Lukas came back to the United States, reporting on Watergate, the hard issues of race, and, finally, in Big Trouble, on the sinews of class conflict. Even in his 1975 accounting, he found his "Panglossian years" a "flight from responsibility," an emblem of how "We--the Class of '55--were particularly obtuse about America." He urged the "Candides of the future" to "tend to the rank and poisonous weeds in their own gardens."
 From a Crimson group portrait. HARVARD YEARBOOK |
Throughout his career, Lukas found himself often in Cambridge--as a Nieman Fellow in 1968-1969, a fellow at the Institute of Politics during 1976-77, and an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School in 1979--and in Boston, during the hard years of labor on Common Ground. The Boston Globe reported his death on its front page. At a memorial service in New York City on June 13, Rachel Twymon, one of the schoolgirls whom Lukas portrayed in that book, brought the audience to tears by recalling how he had encouraged her to return to college and attended her graduation, and asking, "Who's going to be my inspiration now?"
Other speakers at the service included two of Lukas's Harvard classmates. Excerpts from their remarks follow.
Richard H. Ullman, Bruce professor of international affairs at Princeton, roomed with Lukas in Lowell House during their senior year. He talked about their travels in Europe in 1956.
When we arrived in Prague for the Congress of the International Union of Students, we called on the organization's Secretary General, a typical Communist apparatchik many years beyond his own student days. My approach...was to assume that he must be embarrassed, so why embarrass him further by grilling him? Lukas took the opposite approach: The guy is a nogoodnik, so nail him. He did. I squirmed. The experience made me realize that investigative reporting might not be the career for me. I lacked the stomach to crucify the wicked. Lukas thrived on it.
David Halberstam is the author of, among other books, The Making of a Quagmire and The Best and the Brightest.
We were just boys when we met for the first time; [Tony] was all of 18 and I was all of 17. It was the fall of 1951 and we were freshman candidates for the Crimson. He walked into that newsroom different from the rest of us, already fully formed intellectually: he was passionately serious, yet surprisingly gentle for someone so fiercely ambitious, and finally, he was also darkly brooding. He was, it seemed in retrospect, already more a candidate for the New York Times than the Harvard Crimson. For the rest of us in the beginning the Crimson held the promise of quick-fix journalistic excitement, the thrill of those early bylines, proof to ourselves and to the rest of the College community that we did, indeed, exist. But Tony did not merely want to be a journalist, he was ready to cover serious issues in a thoughtful and illuminating way. "Lukas, I think I finally understand you," Jack Langguth once told him, "you want to be the next Scotty Reston." "No, Jack, not Scotty Reston," he answered, "Walter Lippmann."
In the 1950s, in the world of the Crimson, boys taught boys. Tony was my first great mentor. He helped teach me that journalism was not just the collection of bylines, but that it had to be about something larger. He came from a politically sophisticated home: Ed Lukas, his father, was a liberal troubleshooter for the American Jewish Committee; and Tony was, I believe, the only member of our class who arrived at Harvard in the midst of the McCarthy years with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's home phone number. The rest of us were periodically allowed to listen in on their calls--they were literally Joe and Tony to each other--and for the rest of us it was all quite thrilling.
What a marvelous enhancing colleague he was. I still take pride from the fact that the first issue our board put out in February 1954 contained a long, detailed magazine piece by Tony about the life of Wendell Furry, an associate professor of physics at Harvard and an early Communist Party member then very much under attack from McCarthy. The piece detailed why Furry had joined the party and what party meetings had been like. It was an astonishing piece of reporting. He was all of 20 at the time. The Associated Press moved the entire piece on its wire. The next day the managing editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch called to offer him a job. "Would it be all right if I just came for the summer instead?" he said. Why just the summer? asked the editor, slightly annoyed. "Well, I still have a year of college left," he answered....