THE CURRENT ISSUE of Texas Monthly -- the one with the Aggie bonfire on the cover -- tells the story of Molly Ivins's tenure as an intern at the Chronicle in the late 1960s.
She was an immensely talented, larger-than-life (in the nice sense, though her stature also gave her a striking physical presence) Texas writer who won't be forgotten by her admirers or the objects of her considerable scorn.
I met her in 1973. I was a reporter for the Houston Post (RIP). She was co-editor of the Texas Observer. We were both recent graduates of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
She was smarter and funnier than the average ink-stained wretch and could write far better. Most Austin reporters, me included, agreed with her hardcore liberalism and envied her freedom to write what she wished, while being fully aware -- in my case at least -- that if we had the same freedom, we wouldn't know what to do with it.
A profound weakness, however -- and it must be said -- is that she habitually mistook sarcasm for wisdom. She was gifted, but name-calling, however clever, is still just name-calling.
The Texas Monthly piece on Ms. Ivins -- "Newspaper Days," page 76, quite readable -- is adapted from a coming biography, Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life, by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith.
The article's description of the mid- and late-60s Chronicle is a hoot. It may even be true. (I'll leave it to others to do the factchecking.) But it also neatly serves an important dramatic purpose -- the dark castle stormed by a brilliant young woman in shining armor.
The [Houston] Endowment's philosophy was that the editorial processes should never block the mega-deals that were being cooked up in the still-segregated River Oaks County Club; the Old Capitol Club, in the Rice Hotel; the Petroleum Club; the Houston Club; and the Houston Yacht Club.
The Endowment, of course, owned the paper back then, allowing the old fixer Jesse Jones to help control Houston from the grave.
[Ms. Ivins] was part of a circle of sarcastic young interns and new reporters, many of whom were openly quacking about whether the Chronicle was too stodgy, too wedded to the various businesses and boards that the Houston Endowment kingmakers presided over. It was an early manifestation of what would become her lifelong suspicion of newspaper ownership, the high sheriffs, as she called them. She was exposed to the business at a time when the editorial pages often perfectly reflected the groupthink of the citizen kings. . . .
But she was also exposed to a particular newspaper at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the disparities and the inequities that persisted as Houston grew. . . . The police force was widely viewed by critics as one of the most racist in America. . . . It was 1965 in the meanest, richest city below the Mason-Dixon Line, and Ivins was party to occasional, but still enlightening, moments of how journalism could shine a light on a dark corner. . . .
The following year, she was back for her last internship at the Chronicle. She wrote a series of articles with fellow intern (and current publisher of the Texas Observer) Carlton Carl that were compressed into one long piece about poverty in Houston. It wound up on the front page, a major coup considering the topic and the fact that it had been spearheaded by interns.
Read the whole thing. It's good.
The Ivins saga is also a good object lesson in being careful what you wish for. The old Chronicle is long dead. The new one is a perfect fit with Ms. Ivins's political views -- reliably liberal with an occasional flash of radical derring-do.
But the cost of progress, if progress it is, was high. Maybe the high sheriffs no longer take orders from the downtown establishment, but they also no longer understand, empathize with, or frankly engage in any serious manner with the place they inhabit. They don't much like the business culture of Houston or the traditional religious, political, economic, and cultural sensibilities of most Houstonians.
The best that can be said is that in its season of trouble, the Chronicle has at least toned down its editorial derision of things Texan, an unfortunate legacy of the Ms. Ivins's view of things. Texas is less often referred to these days, for instance, as a national laughingstock, though I am all but certain that the editors still believe we are.
In Ms. Ivins's time there, the Chronicle had no liberals in positions to speak for or through the newspaper. Now it has no conservatives. The bad, old days of the Chronicle may be gone, but what a sorry thing we got in return.
My fondest memory of Ms. Ivins is of a piece she wrote -- I forget where -- on a visit to the Soviet Union.
Like today's Chronicle, she was blind to much that is good about Texas and the United States and to the argument for limited government and free markets. But if she had any illusions about the possible superiority of the commies -- and I frankly doubt that she did -- the trip stripped them away.
She ripped into her hosts for spying on their own people and on visiting journalists. How many eavesdroppers did it take, she wondered, to listen in on all those telephone calls, and at what cost to the economy?
She also blamed the apparatchiks for emiserating their own people and for promiscously blaming the United States for all their troubles. What about the U.S. role in supplying materiel to help defend the Soviet Union against Hitler, she asked.
And if that's not quite what she wrote, that's how I plan to remember it.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from Harris County Almanac.
Comments