We were all friends for 30 years, he and his wife, my husband and I. David loved to fish, which made sense, since, like good reporting, it requires plumbing the depths with only sporadic results. He traveled the globe with a group of anglers called the Dirty Dozen, whose stock in trade was easygoing male bonding. One night at a fishing camp in the Bahamas, David introduced an uncommonly serious note by speaking of his new book on Korea. The room fell silent, and the sunburned men listened, rapt, as he described what he had discovered over years of reporting. He was doing something that he loved so much, and did so well, that it had become as much second nature as casting out his line: learning, and telling.
“I’m doing interviews for—” a conversation would begin. For an enormous book about the auto industry in Detroit. For a smaller book about basketball in Portland, Ore. When the Korea book, “The Longest Winter,” is published later this year, it will be his 21st. He always seemed to be just ahead of the curve, writing about the great media companies of America before such scrutiny became commonplace, making sports a metaphor for life before everyone else did. That was because he was the most curious person I have ever known. His totem was the question mark. Sometimes he would turn himself into one, head lowered, broad back curved. He was a big, imposing man with dark drill-bit eyes, and, perhaps because of that, when he spoke to certain people, kids mainly, he would arrange his body closer to the ground. He was an aerobic listener who asked questions in a voice so sonorous that it sounded like an avalanche in a deep canyon.
David spent his life filling in the increasingly small gaps in his knowledge of the world, driven by the belief that a person who thought he had done enough reporting was probably fooling himself. He had concluded that Iraq, like Vietnam, was a military exercise in futility. But he said, soon after the White House had announced the appointment, that he was reserving judgment on David Petraeus, the new commander there. He had sent for the general’s doctoral dissertation and intended to read it thoroughly first. In other words, he always did the work. At a time when he could have made his living being wise in public, he continued to take notes and pursue leads like a man half his age. The New York Times did not have an advance obit ready because no one thought of him as old, though he was 73.
There’s not much to be learned from his death in California except that life is sometimes precisely as random and stupid as we suspect. As one Web site said, “the guy reported from fricking Vietnam and he dies in a traffic accident in San Mateo.” But his life is a lesson for everyone bewailing journalism in our time, something David did with some frequency, believing foreign bureaus were being denuded and coverage dumbed down. We don’t get great journalism only because newspapers, magazines and publishing houses decide to put money into serious coverage of important issues. We get it because there exists a class of people who have intelligent curiosity written into their DNA, who will never stop learning and telling. At his funeral the Rev. John F. Smith, the former chaplain at Groton, asked, “If his voice is stilled, who will speak?” David would have answered with a litany of names, up-and-comers he had met across the country. “He’s a marvelous young writer,” he would say, rolling the adjective on his palate like a good red wine.
The gospel choir at the funeral ended with a wailing version of “America the Beautiful.” David loved his country, and his work, and his life. He was married for nearly three decades to a woman both elegant and intelligent; she was a world-class cook, and he was a world-class eater. He adored his daughter, who has a vocation for teaching in the way David had a vocation for reporting. (I was covering the 1980 Democratic convention the day Julia was born. “I’m calling with some real news,” David said.) So in recent years, whenever we said goodnight after another of Jean’s spectacular meals, David would end with the self-same valedictory. “Aren’t we lucky?” he would rumble before heading out to take the dog for her evening walk. Journalism, we like to say when we’re feeling full of ourselves, is a public trust. Sometimes it is even true. In David’s case, the American people were lucky enough to be the beneficiary of someone who stayed true to that trust his whole life long. I was lucky enough to be shamed into trying harder by his example.
