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Baker was a fast, accurate reporter, and when someone complimented him on a story he would say, "Aw, shucks," and shrug it off. When he did time on the rewrite desk, police reporters all tried to phone in their stories to him because he could turn two purse snatchings and a dog bite into a tone poem. By the time he was 27 in 1952, he took over as the Sun bureau chief in London.
The next two years were glorious for Russell and Mimi. Fleet Street is the home of some of the world's worst journalism, and also some of the best. But most important, says Baker, the intense competition often or twelve newspapers jostling for attention in London produced a kind of reporting in which, because everyone had the facts, interpretation was prized.
He was doing a weekly article for the Sun called "Window on Fleet Street," which attracted the attention of another old London hand, James Reston, then Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. "It conveyed a sense of London, what the melody really was," says Reston today. So he made the young man an offer, and in 1954 Russell and Mimi returned to Washington.
Baker was not entirely sure that this was an improvement. He had briefly covered the White House for the Sun, and he has described the job as "sitting in the lobby and listening to the older reporters breathe." He covered the State Department for the Times, and did it well, but the airy ambiguities of the place bored him stiff.
Congress, a beat he was given in late 1954, was different. Baker loved its ripe pomposities, its jostling overweeners, the interplay and foolishness of it all. Pat Furgurson of the Sun recalls joking with Baker in the Senate gallery: "Baker would look down and say, 'Look, there's Ken Keating, wearing Charles Bickford's old hair.'" Charles McDowell of the Richmond Times-Dispatch recalls Baker's work: "He'd start out writing about some Senator, and pretty soon it would turn into a piece of architecture. He'd set scenes and roll around in his story like an essayist.
He had the feel of Washington."
Washington had the feel of him too. Baker's friend John Chancellor reports that once Lyndon Johnson, then Vice President and lonely, threw his arm around Baker, pulled him into his office and began a long, intimate, anecdote-filled confession of his hopes for the coming political season. Baker had dealt with Johnson during L.BJ.'s glory days as Senate majority leader, but as the great man spoke he scribbled something on a piece of paper, buzzed for his secretary and handed the paper to her. Soon she returned and handed the paper back. Some time after that the interview ended with Johnson still effusing. Another reporter who followed Baker into Johnson's office got a look at the scrap of paper; on it was written, "Who is this I am talking to?" and below that, "Russell Baker of the New York Times."
The reporter may have been on a first-name basis with Washington's movers and shakers, but he was not having fun.