(8 of 10)
"Finally, I just got bored," says Baker. "I had done enough reporting. I began to feel like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, carrying that typewriter in one hand and that suitcase in the other and a dirty old raincoat into one more hotel lobby. It came to seem that this wasn't a worthy way for a grown man to spend his life. You have good seats, sure, but you're always on the sidelines. You're not making anything. Auden has a wonderful essay—it's in The Dyer's Hand—about how young people want to be writers. He says it's something the Greeks understood. The writer is somebody who makes something with his own hands. And he draws the distinction between being a maker and a drudge. Work is what a freeman did, and drudgery is what slaves did. Kids instinctively grasp that writing is being a maker. But reporting is drudgery."
The end came, he says, one afternoon when he had been sitting for some hours on the cold marble floor of a corridor in the Senate Office Building, outside a closed meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "I began to wonder why, at the age of 37, I was wearing out my hams waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me."
Deliverance was at hand:
Charles H. Dorsey, managing editor of the Sun, wanted Baker back and offered him a column on whatever subject he wanted. Baker accepted and told Reston. Baker says now that he thinks no one had ever quit the Times before. "They weren't used to it," he adds. So Reston persuaded the publisher, Orvil Dryfoos, to counteroffer him a column at the Times. The Sun lost Baker again, this time for good.
Baker's first column lampooned a J.F.K. press conference ("Q. Mr. President, can you tell us what you have done with Chester Bowles? ... A. The State Department is looking into this matter and we are expecting a report"). The attempt worked, partly because it shocked people; it was still a bit daring in 1962 to laugh at the Kennedy style. He wrote the column in its first years from Washington and had a splendid time unstuffing shirts, though he deadpans now: "It's depressing to read a politician's memoirs and realize how little you got right." But by the end of 1974 the stake had been hammered through Richard Nixon's heart, and Jerry Ford seemed to be doing an adequate job of satirizing himself. Baker felt that the column was too reportorial, and he was tired of politicians. He moved to New York City.