When I returned to Washington in the summer of 1960, I found my salary had been raised from $68 a week to $85. I know that such sums seem paltry today, but in 1960 you could buy a dinner for $1, and three shirts at a upscale men’s clothing store for $10. The Star at first was unsure what to do with me. The editors knew that I was now an “expert” on the Soviet Union, having spent the summer of 1969 touring that country as part of a cultural exchange of “youth” that had been negotiated by Eisenhower and Khrushchev as part of a cultural exchange agreement.
I was initially assigned to do some stories about Soviet tourists in Washington, and about the Soviet embassy. This was of course the year that John F. Kennedy was elected president and I was assigned, along with my colleague Haynes Johnson to keep tabs on JFK. I in fact was sent by The Star to Cambridge to do some articles for a special Inauguration package on what JFK was like as a student at Harvard College. Harvard would not release to me Kennedy’s records. But I was able to ferret many of them from other sources. I learned that unlike his brother Joe, who was a star on the football team, and a strong student, JFK was a “C” student at best, and was too frail to make any varsity team. But in his junior year he did go to Europe where his father was the ambassador in Britain, and ended up writing a senior thesis and a book about his observations which was called “Why England Slept.”
After the United States entered the world war after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, JFK became a naval officer and was assigned to a PT-boat in the Pacific, and Joe was a pilot in the Air Force in Europe. Joe died when his B-24 blew up in mid-air in 1944. I was clearly very pro-Kennedy and I enjoyed helping cover the Inauguration festivities. The Inauguration in January 1961 was marred by a heavy snowfall the night before, and U.S. troops from Fort Meyer in Virginia were sent with flame-throwers to get the snow off the pavements of the Inauguration procession.
In April, 1961, Kennedy went ahead with the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion that President Eisenhower had authorized the planning for, but which Kennedy approved that month. It was a total disaster. The Cuban exiles who made up the invasion force surrendered after three days of fighting.
I was an interested observer but in those early days of 1961, I found myself involved in covering the ratification of the 23d amendment to the Constitution which gave Washington D.C. the right to vote in presidential elections. The amendment which was approved by the Congress in 1978 needed the approval of 38 states to go into effect. I first was sent to New Hampshire when the editors thought the Concord legislature would approve it. But after I got there, I found out it would not be taken up for several days at least. I went back to Washington and was soon sent out to Topeka, Kansas. I found myself in the Kansas House, when in a phone conversation with Washington, I learned that one other state had approved it, and if Kansas would now approve it, it could lead the Washington Star’s front page for the late edition. I told that to the Speaker of the Kansas House and he quickly called a vote which was approved without dissent. I phoned it into “rewrite” at the Star and sure enough it produced a banner head for the late edition.
As a footnote, there are now no afternoon papers in D.C. The story would see print until the first edition of the Post comes out late at night.
Meanwhile, I was writing in my spare time articles about Russia gleaned from my reading of Pravda and Izvestia which I had mailed to me every day at my house in Cambridge where I had an upstairs bedroom which I rented.
In the spring of 1961, I was promoted to the Sunday Review section of the Star where I was to write all foreign stories; my colleague L. Edgar Prina did the national stories. My first big piece for the Review was to herald in the start of a tense time in relations:
“President Kennedy made final preparations for his trip to Europe this week. He will meet President de Gaulle in Paris on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and then travel to Vienna for weekend talks with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. He will fly to London to confer with Prime Minister Macmillan before returning home.” It was indeed a rough Soviet-American
(more to come)
