Ridin' the Storm Out with Bob Hager, NBC News

Robert Hager - Newsman & Family Man

You've seen the dashing Bob Hager on NBC since the late 1960's.  He covered Vietnam and the Palestinian atrocity at the 1972 Munich Olympics.  43 years ago today he was in lock-up, arrested in Chicago while covering the protests at the Democratic National Convention.

Over time, Bob developed a couple of specialized beats, notably Air Disasters (TWA 800, Pan Am 103, ...) and Weather Disasters.  Every year, when NBC changed its new anchor set and logo, Bob would be issued a new company windbreaker to wear on camera as wind, waves and rain battered the coastline somewhere, or as volunteers picked through tornado wreckage.

Well, in 1981, I dated Bob and wife Honey's daughter for several months.  She and I had a great time and once made a trip north, stopping in Westport to visit her old home (and to make a furtive dash up the driveway of neighbor Mary Travers).  This Hager house - and all others the itinerant newsman and his family had inhabited - were lovingly recreated as scale models (Bob had impressive skill as a woodworking hobbyist), and linked by a string of Christmas lights in a village scene that the Hager family would set up each year.  An entire town center made up of their past homes.  I'm a sentimentalist and have never seen a similarly sweet scene, anywhere.

Buck Henry: "Mr. Leech"

Jessica: Golden Girl

My favorite inside-NBC News story that came from Bob (via his lovely daughter who observed the tableaux as a teenager at the time) is of bow-tied old Irving R. Levine chasing the ill-fated but quite gorgeous Jessica Savitch around the Hager living room during a cocktail party, with fingers a-pinching (a bit like Buck Henry coming after Mary Woronov in "Eating Raoul," I always liked to imagine).

With Irene bearing down on the east coast, let's salute Bob Hager, NBC Newsman Emeritus.

Airborne with Magic Johnson

Magic in the Air: Head to head w/MJ

I Got the Magic Stick!
 May, 1996. Following a grueling E-3 show, my boss and I are waiting to board a commuter flight from LAX - SFO for meetings with software developers, when there in the conjoined boarding area is The Magic man, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, - in line to board at the very next gate.

Yes, he'd made the announcement of his HIV condition about 5 years earlier and was now retired, but even out of uniform to see that face, and that smile, was like a radiant blast of L.A. sunshine.

Magic Johnson: A Love Supreme

My boss had lamented in the cab that she didn't make time to get a picture taken with Sonic the Hedgehog at the SEGA booth, for her kids, so I urged her to hit up Magic for the goods. "Drive for the lane, shoot and score an autograph!" I pushed, so she'd have a trophy for her young son, a wild NBA fan. No NBA captain, she mustered a Hello, but didn't have the guts to request an autograph

Yours truly was less bold than that, just staring slack-jawed at the Magic Man.  He boarded his flight, and that was that....

I've always been a Celtics fan.

But I will not deny the incredible natural talent, the on-court leadership, and the warm personal appeal of this giant.

Roger Mudd and the Fannie Mae Kerfuffle

Newsman Mudd

One afternoon in 2005, on the sidelines at Washington Episcopal School in Bethesda, MD, I met Roger Mudd - star CBS correspondent throughout the 1960's and 1970's, and subsequently host, co-host or contributor to NBC News, Meet the Press, and McNeil Lehrer Newshour.  I knew Roger's son Matt because our daughters were lacrosse teammates and playing against WES that day.

Matt greeted me, introduced me to Dad, and we enjoyed a few moments of sunshine before I told Matt "I just heard your brother on the radio as I was driving here!"   Roger's ears perked up: "How did he do?"  "Fine - they didn't lay a glove on him!"

Dan Mudd: Taught me Laddered T-Bills and Mark-to-Market

At the time - that very day in fact - older son Dan, then the C.O.O. in Franklin D. Raines' Fannie Mae, had spent 2 hours testifying before a senate committee regarding improprieties at FNMA.  These problems, from which Dan himself emerged wholly intact, did reveal substantial wrongdoing by Raines and CFO Tim Howard, in what would be preamble to the unraveling of Fannie Mae as a structural support to the housing and financial markets in 2008 (see Reckless Endangerment for a superb account).

Dan too had kids at the school, and he and I served for 4 years together on the Budget & Finance committee for the small ($6 MM annual budget) operation.  A USMC vet,  he patiently taught me some simple principles and terms of art in the course of our work together.  On one occasion, attending a winter fundraiser together, Dan (well, his driver) jumped the dead battery in my Isuzu Trooper.  Today, Dan is CEO of Fortress Investments.  And today Fannie Mae is asking the U.S. Treasury (that is, you and me) for another $5.1 BB in protection against the consequences of its business decisions.

Of my exchange with Roger regarding Dan, I'll say it was funny to share the news I'd just consumed retail, from NPR, with this giant of journalism, but satisfying to learn he'd suffer this fool gladly, and I guess that he needs to source his facts like anyone else, no matter how dubious the source.  In this case, he was able to get corroboration later - not only from other news sources and intermediaries, but likely direct from the subject.

Roger Mudd at 83 continues to consult on the presentation of documentary programming and and to share historical, political and ethical context on the History Channel.  He has also generously endowed a center for Ethics study at Washington & Lee University in Virginia.  And he's a devoted grand-dad who likes a good lacrosse game once in a while....

Appreciating Jerry Liebling's Vision

R.I.P. Jerome Liebling, 1924 - 2011

In Focus: Jerome Liebling: (photo of, not by ...)

Jerome Liebling was a visionary photographer and documentarian of the American experience, who taught and inspired so very many, and whose pictures illustrate unique, personal and transcendent stories. It is said that "Jerome Liebling and his camera saw into the souls of America" - have a look here and see what you think.  He passed away on Wednesday.

In 1969, moving from Minnesota with his family, Jerry rented our home in Amherst for a year (my father had an exchange to teach American Literature at Keele University in the British Midlands). Upon arrival, Liebling started the interdisciplinary film and photography program at brand-new Hampshire College.   I challenge you to think of a better artist at combining film and photography than Ken Burns, who has many times expressed his deepest debt to Professor Liebling under whom he studied at Hampshire.

* * * Today begins the Emily Dickinson International Society's annual meeting, in Amherst. Come one, come all!  The EDIS was founded in 1980, my father keynoting and organizing the events.  At around this time, Jerry began capturing images for his spectacular book, The Dickinsons of Amherst.

Dickinson Fence  - Amherst, MA (1980)  Jerome Liebling

"Like Emily Dickinson, he is constantly wondering what happens to us after we die. Liebling: "In the body that remains, is there some residue of the spirit, of the soul?"  Dickinson: "Do people moulder equally. / They bury, in the Grave?"  Liebling's photographs are always asking where the line is between life and death.  What of our feelings lingers around the objects we loved?  Why is grief, even when 'tongueless,' so palpable?"

Christopher  Benfey

The Dickinsons of Amherst

While his imprint is admired the world over, and his work appears in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art,

Emily, by Jerry

 Jerry and his family made a huge mark on the Amherst academic, social, and political community for over forty years.  I feel fortunate to have known him.

God Rest His Soul.

J. C. Duffy: Fusco Father

Porter Brothers Meet the Fusco Brothers

J.C. Duffy, the hilarious cartoonist whose work appears frequently in the New Yorker and elsewhere, is a friend of my brother's whom I met at the bachelor party that I'd organized before Dave's wedding in 1997.  The two were classmates at U. Penn in the glory days.

We chatted again at a 40th birthday cookout in Trenton, N.J.

A lot of Duffy's tableaux take place in bars - and I support that!  For instance this one and that one. And here is something to enjoy in the sunny summer season:

Happy Summer Reading, friends...

Yes . . . a laughing, funny, burly guy is J.C. Duffy!

Once Around the Track with Andrew Cuomo - Champion of Same-Sex New Yorkers

Beginning this Sunday, New York citizens may legally enter into same-sex marriages under the law signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo one month ago.

At a high school track meet this spring, I snapped a shot of my parents, who had come along to see their granddaughter run the individual 400m and the 4x400 relay.  Seconds later my mother turned around, spotted the gent nearby and exclaimed "That's my paesano, the Governor of New York!"

Indeed, it was he.  Forza Italia !!

Governor Cuomo lurks behind my opposite-sex parents

Strauss-Kahn Scrum with Maid, the NY County D.A., and Me

One day sometime in autumn,1981, down on the Mall by the Lincoln Memorial and where the Viet Nam Memorial would shortly be unveiled, I joined a college classmate and his rowdy soccer club for a game of - not soccer, but rugby.  Among the players: Cy Vance, Jr.

Cy Vance, Jr. May Throw Out Case Against Strauss-Kahn

Then a law student at Georgetown U., Jr. was noted more for his father's recent stint as Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter (a performance that received mixed reviews), than in his own right.  But it turns out that he is now the Manhattan DA.


And just look at Jr. now!


Although some are heckling him...

Watergate Doug Feaver - You Heard It Here First

Got The Feaver

<< ------ Who's the beatnik?  He's the night city-desk editor who answered the call in the wee hours of Saturday morning June 18th, 1972 about a bungled break-in by some ersatz plumbers at the Watergate apartment & office complex.  39 years... and it seems like only yesterday!

Doug Feaver was my cubicle neighbor in the Post newsroom for 6 months in 1999 while I worked on a "top secret!" editorial technology project for washingtonpost.com. A painstaking, personable, and funny guy, Doug had seen it all - and 'though he was by then only 5 years or so from retirement, he kept up exceedingly well with the rowdy young journo's.

I'd watched my dad build an entire back patio of bricks and railroad ties by hand during the summer of 1973, his energy fueled by the live radio coverage of the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings, chaired by Sam Ervin and starring a cast of astonishing characters ("Abplanalp," anyone?), and a featuring the almost-daily detonation of a new bombshell in the fascinating disintegration of the second Nixon administration.  Years later to be inside the Post newsroom was pretty cool, but to meet Doug was to shake hands with history.  A true newsman's newsman.

Where it all began . . .

"On the average there are roughly fifty burglaries daily in the District of Columbia. Some are reported at length in our newspaper. Most are reported in smallish type in a crime column.

Obviously, this burglary was different."

—Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons in 1973