Joseph Kraft died on Jan. 10. Two hundred newspapers lost a column, one of the best in the nation. A clear light in journalism for 35 years, Joe wrote books, editorials and long reportorial analyses, but his regular "beat" consisted of producing two or three columns a week on national and foreign affairs. His columns were always stately, unhurried. They stared out from the page hard, like a good teacher absorbed in, though not quite obsessed by, his subject, and fixed the readers to the processes of a strong, fair mind. Presidents knew Joe, and he had power in Washington, but his force as a writer came from his dignity. He possessed a scholar's nature fitted to a frenzied profession; a spirit of magnanimity and gentleness; a temperament at once high-strung and serene; a sly sense of fun; a fierce love of words, of his work.
Strange work. Columnists take a ribbing from their fellow journalists, reporters especially, who tend to regard columnists with the same chummy contempt that linemen show quarterbacks. Reporters do the real work, sleep in cars, get kicked by Mafia bosses on the courthouse steps. Even editors do some sweating (yelling is taxing). But columnists ride the gravy train, that's what the pressroom says. In a way, it's true. They manage to arrive home before midnight; they dine with the brass. Their physical exercise consists of pacing all the way to the far end of the study, and often back again. Sometimes they sit up straight.
Otherwise, they brood. Into their study every morning parade the armies of the news. A knock on the door, and there stands Heseltine resigning from Mrs. Thatcher's Cabinet, Marcos on the stump, Gaddafi playing cowboy on his tractor, mummied to the nose. Come in, boys. The columnist will make sense of all this somehow. After the reporters and the editors have dumped the facts on the doorstep, the columnist, like a jigsaw addict, scoops up the pieces, studies the angles, mulls, clears his throat and says, with as much self-assurance as possible: This piece goes here, and this one here.
And then he asks: What piece is not here? What ground is missing from this puzzling geography that would allow us to view the map redrawn, to sit back and behold the brand-new country of our concern and comprehension? The piece is not really missing, of course; you just don't see it, like the shy side of the moon. Yet the missing piece is the one that counts.
That piece must be found very quickly; the column is due tonight. Meanwhile, more facts crowd the study door like extras on a movie set, peer in, cry, "Use me!" Guatemala, Mr. T, a new novel by Bellow; Dow Jones goes down, Columbia goes up. Say hey, Willie McCovey, you made it too. Nice hat, Mrs. Gorbachev. Hold it, please. I have to think. Didn't I read something by Octavio Paz that fits in here? Or was it Pia Zadora? Where is my authoritative, I've-studied-this-for-years lead sentence? Please, God, let me discover an apt quotation from someone other than Samuel Johnson. You have to sound as if you knew it all along. You have to shape your column too--mostly Doric, a Corinthian fluting when they least expect it. It's work. Whatever the others say, it's work.