The Press: Factmonger

Speaker Sam Rayburn called him the best-informed man in town, and Franklin D. Roosevelt said he had never heard a better toastmaster. He knew all the big and middle-sized people by their first names. Yet gaunt George William Stimpson had never amounted to much as a Washington correspondent. At 49, he was barely making a living by grubbing regional news for his little string of Texas papers.

He had arrived in Washington a quarter century ago from Anamosa, Iowa to catch on briefly with the Washington Herald before landing a small job with Pathfinder...

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