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The Legendary Annals of Peter Kihss By Robert D. McFadden |
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Pat Burns/The New York Times (1965) A consummate performance by Peter Kihss who pounded out
the story of the Great Northeast Blackout of November 10, 1965 lit only by
candlelight and fierce determination.
Depicted are, left to right, A.M. Rosenthal, Peter Kihss, baldish man
seen leanig over desk to the left, Sheldon Binn, Arthur Gelb, glasses, hand
lifted to head, Dick Witkin and Bayard Webster, in the third floor newsroom
of The New York Times. |
Courtesy of Robert D. McFadden Peter Kihss, his gentle essence captured so magnificently
by an unknown artist, is a legend to whom great journalists aspire. |
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By Robert D.
McFadden Here he
comes: long-legged, gangly, sweeping into the newsroom in his rumpled old
jacket, the awful necktie askew, smudged glasses all but falling off his
nose. His shoulders are stooped, as if compensating for the too-tall frame
and the big baldish head. His collar, as usual, is frayed. He looks more like
an Old World clockmaker than one of America’s best reporters. As he
confers with editors in the flickering candlelight at the city desk, Peter
Kihss flips open his notebook, filled with scribbles in the tiny, spidery
hand of a Depression kid saving paper. He has an agreeable smile, despite the
hopeless situation. It is the
night of Nov. 9, 1965, and the biggest power failure in history has plunged
New York City and parts of nine states and two Canadian provinces – some 25 million people – into darkness. Chaos rules the
streets. Thousands are trapped on subways. Across the Northeast, planes are
circling in the dark, and engineers are struggling to figure out what went
wrong and how to restore the dead power grid. The
blocklong newsroom of The New York Times, too, is a maelstrom of excitement
and confusion. Banks of typewriters thunder away. Editors and reporters
shout. Copyboys race up the aisles. The clocks are out, and the deadline
looms. But in the golden glow of the candles, Peter is calm. He moves to his
front-row desk, settles behind the typewriter and cradles a phone at his ear. Then
something magical happens. The kindly eyes turn serious. The gentle voice
takes on authority. His hands move on the keyboard – big hands with long fingers as powerful
and subtle as a telegrapher’s. He hunches over the steel desk to read his
tiny cursive notes, and starts to write. He types
with astonishing speed and precision, the takes rolling out, graf by graf,
the color and detail piling up, the story rising to life. By morning, a
million readers of The Times will take their coffee with a dazzlingly
comprehensive, analytic and dramatic account of the blackout, of what
happened to the people as well as to the power grid. It is a typically
distinguished Kihss performance. ·
Peter
Kihss – the
Latvian name is pronounced KEYS – died 23
years ago, at 72. To those too young to have known him, he may seem as
distant as Ernie Pyle. But to those of us old enough to remember, he is as
vivid in memory as if it were only yesterday that he swept in with his kind
determined face to pound out the news, and to inspire us with his
selflessness. In a
career that began in 1933 after his graduation from Columbia University,
Peter worked for The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York
World-Telegram, The New York Herald Tribune and finally, for 30 years until
his retirement in 1982, for The New York Times. For nearly
a half-century, he covered the news with a tenacity that awed competitors and
colleagues. He often handled the big breaking stories – urban riots, plane crashes,
blizzards, elections – but his
daily bread-and-butter was the general-assignment: city and state government
affairs, transportation, labor, education, utilities, crimes and fires, civil
liberties fights, obituaries and myriad other subjects. As a
World-Telegram reporter, he once confronted Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia on
the steps of City Hall, asking why he had helped a former official get back
on the city payroll to qualify for a pension. The mayor
flew into a rage. “I’m going to throw you right down the steps,” he shouted,
grabbing Peter’s arm. “Mr.
Mayor,” Peter roared back. “I don’t care what you say. Four hundred thousand
readers of The World-Telegram want to know, and that’s why I’m asking!” There was
a sudden silence in the crowd, and Peter realized he had seized the stocky
little mayor and lifted him into the air. “I put him down – gently – and went quietly into Room 9,” he
recalled, referring to the City Hall press room. Mayor and reporter later
laid the matter to rest. In 1956,
Peter found himself facing a hostile white crowd in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where
he had gone to cover Autherine Lucy’s enrollment as the first black in the
125-year history of the University of Alabama. “Let’s
kill her! Let’s kill her!” someone shouted. Eggs were
thrown, and some hit Ms. Lucy and Peter, who whirled to confront the mob. “If
anybody wants to start something,” he roared, “let’s go!” Nobody
moved. (Ms Lucy
was suspended after three days, ostensibly for her own safety, as mobs
threatened wider violence. She was later expelled. But in 1992, Autherine
Lucy Foster and her daughter, Grazia, received degrees together at the
University of Alabama commencement, a story Peter would have loved to cover.) ·
He was an
investigative reporter before anyone knew the term; a beacon of fairness and
accuracy in an age when critics took the press to task for arrogance and
carelessness; a tireless believer in legwork and cross-checking his countless
sources, who trusted him because he tried never to misrepresent them. He
searched for human dramas behind ponderous welfare statistics and government
reports. Many of his best articles focused on ordinary people –immigrants, the poor, victims snared
in bureaucracies, the personalities behind the masks of politicians and
celebrities. He wrote hundreds of articles a year, often two or three a day – 140 in his last year, when he was 70
and losing his eyesight. And he was
never too busy to share his notes in the street or to mentor a young reporter
in the newsroom. “Peter
never shooed us away, even when he was on deadline – his calm under pressure was also
legendary,” Sydney H. Schanberg wrote in a post-mortem column in The Times.
“He kept files that could make the clippings morgue look puny. He could tell
you who the city sanitation commissioner had been in 1949 and then provide
you with his current telephone number. More often than not, an interview with
Peter was the most valuable research a reporter could do on a story.” Peter wasn’t angelic, as Schanberg noted. He
had a temper, often arguing with editors who wanted to make changes in his
stories that he felt distorted their meaning, and he sometimes threatened to
quit. “His ethics were scrupulous to the point of being maddening,” Schanberg
recalled. “He would argue that he should not be paid while on earned sick
leave because he wasn’t producing anything.” Stubbornly
self-effacing, Peter called himself just a reporter. But as I wrote in his
1984 obituary: “He was, by nearly every standard of American journalism, an
ideal reporter: thorough, fast, tenacious and objective, with an encyclopedic
memory, voluminous contacts and the ability to write with speed, grace and a
towering calm against a deadline.” He was the
recipient of many awards – from
Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, the Sigma Delta Chi journalism
society, the New York Newspaper Guild, the New York Press Club and the
Society of the Silurians. He was nominated four times for Pulizter Prizes,
but never won that honor. His laurels, however, are only a small part of who
he was and why we honor him. The
Society’s Peter Kihss Award cites his journalistic achievements, his
willingness to mentor young reporters and his dedication to the enduring
principles of fairness, accuracy and integrity. But the award also celebrates
the humanity of a modest and deeply principled man. On a
bookshelf at home, I keep a small portrait of Peter. It’s not a work of art,
just a line drawing of a gentle face that reaches out across the years. It’s
a reminder of who he was and what he stood for, but also of who I am – who we all are, perhaps – and of our obligations to this hard
business we’ve chosen. |
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