In my senior year I was editor of the high-school newspaper. (We even won a prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism.) What I remember most is the literary progeny on my staff. It included the daughter of Burke Davis, a well-known writer of the time; the daughter of the historian Richard N. Current; and the stepdaughter of the poet Randall Jarrell. Once we had a small gathering at Jarrell’s house near the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was on the faculty. Jarrell came through the room, cast a distracted but unfriendly gaze on the adolescents, and wandered on out. Not long after this he was killed under strange circumstances, struck by a car as he inexplicably walked along the side of a highway.
Howard Smith is unknown these days. From Virginia, in the 1950’s and 60’s he was chairman of the Rules Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a notorious bête noir of the liberal press for keeping “progressive” legislation bottled up. As a young reporter, I covered a state convention of the Democratic Party of Virginia. An old man, leaning back in a chair in a distant corner of the room, was pointed out to me as the legendary Smith. I asked him a few questions, which he answered laconically...