The Master Who Reported Truth By Making Things Up

TUCSON, Arizona — “Damn,” a saddening email began, “we have lost one of the truly greats; a great reporter, a great man.” Ward Just has died at 84. No one I've known epitomized like he did good journalism at the farthest extremes of its outer dimensions.

This is a tribute to him and a reflection on what we are losing at the top end of a vital profession that has never been more essential.

Ward spent 18 months in Vietnam as war began to widen, sidelined briefly when grenade fragments lodged in his back. His Washington Post dispatches exuded futility. In 1967, back home, he wrote an analysis months before the Tet Offensive. America didn't listen.

“This war is not being won,” it began, “and by any reasonable estimate it is not going to be won in the foreseeable future. It may be unwinnable.” It ended in close focus on a 19-year-old grunt named Truman Schockley.

“Smoking a Lucky Strike and staring off into the mountains, Schockley died with a sniper's bullet through the heart and stopped breathing before the cigarette stopped burning. The company commander sent a platoon into the underbrush to look for the sniper, but the sniper had left. Schockley was put in a green body bag and sent to Bongson for transport to Saigon and then home.”

Ward was from a newspaper family, steeped in the old tenets. He had surely chuckled like all of us at A.J. Liebling's answer when asked why he never tried writing a novel. “What?” the iconic old correspondent sputtered. “And make things up?”

But he knew that news is about people, and he understood the human factors that cause them to do what they do. After covering the 1968 election, he decided that just-the-facts reporting allowed little leeway to explain the nuances of a complex world. He turned to fiction, which, hardly fictitious, shed harsh light on creatures inhabiting the Washington swamp.

That decision rattled Ben Bradlee, who had brought Ward from Newsweek when he moved to the Post. He had big plans for a fearless reporter with an elegant style, uncommon empathy, and a rare gift for finding dramatic detail that added up to enduring history.

“Sometimes Just would get a single quote that would tell an entire story,” Bradlee wrote in his memoir. “We spread one of those quotes, from a frightened GI surrounded by his enemies, eight columns over the top of the front page: 'Ain't Nobody Here but Charlie Cong,' as in Viet Cong.”

Ward was old-school and hardcore. He wrote his 19 novels and countless essays on a battered portable typewriter, mostly at Martha's Vineyard or in Paris, with a cigarette burning and a tumbler of Scotch at hand. He and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, hobnobbed often with loyal friends. But he never stopped reporting to dig up those telling details.

His 1982 book, “In the City of Fear,” probes hypocrisy and manipulation of the press over Vietnam. It remains fresh today. His most acclaimed Washington novel, “Jack Gance” in 1989, was about the rise of a senator from Illinois.

Stanley Karnow, a veteran journalist and historian, summed him up in 1997: “He's the quintessential Washington reporter except he's doing it through fiction.”

It takes a Ward Just to get away with that. Journalism depends on hard facts. Yet these are not nearly enough if they don't add up to clear pictures that show readers how real news impacts on their daily lives.

Now skilled and eloquent reporters flash back their stories at the speed of light, with images and audio. For a fresh generation, old-style correspondents are dinosaurs. And many of us savor the simile with pride.

Dinosaurs were pretty damned effective as all-terrain vehicles, stomping over obstacles and subsisting on whatever they could forage. Prehistoric reporters were short on technology, but for what counts — the why and the what-next — speed is seldom of the essence.

As David Halberstam wrote of Ward, “His were stories of men at war, and they were wonderful, in the best sense timeless.”

Fast coverage is important for stuff like natural disasters and plane clashes. Drones provide sweeping overviews; eyewitnesses weeping on camera add pathos. What matters more are world-changing stories that smolder until, if ignored, they burst into flame.

Wise, textured reporting is now too often lost in a sludge of so much else. A “breaking news” mania buries us in conflicting first impressions and leaves unanswered those crucial questions: why and what next.

The best news organizations hire carefully and fiercely protect their credibility. But in the end, excellence comes down to the depth and breadth of the reporter on the spot. That's why Ward Just was so good, whichever hat he wore. Fact or fiction, he wrote truth.

In Vietnam, photographers as much as reporters exposed the futility of war. That email announcing Ward's death was from Steve Northup, another true great, who showed people back home what they were up against, one image at a time.

Journalists were once judged on their work, not publicists' hype. They stayed out of the story, observers not participants. Today's most watched cable “news” channel stars a partisan flack who labeled the presidential impeachment a disgrace. (I hesitate to single out individuals, but his first name rhymes with fucker.)

Those bygone dinosaur days were certainly flawed. A lot of us got things wrong. But that was almost never on purpose. We all came down hard on anyone who hyped a story. No wannabe despot could undercut public trust by labeling inconvenient truth “fake news.”

And when a rare treasure like Ward Just came along, we paid homage. Accurate, evocative reporting was crucial to America. When a president abused his authority, press watchdogs hounded him out of office faster than you could say Richard Nixon.