In The Boys on the Bus (1973), his behind-the-scenes account of correspondents covering the previous year’s presidential campaign, Timothy Crouse described a scene in the press room during a Democratic primary debate between Sen. George McGovern and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey. While most of the reporters smoked, drank coffee, or talked among themselves while gazing at a TV monitor, one was furiously typing away amid the noise, inserting adjectives and helpful explanatory sentences while recording what the candidates were saying as they said it.
The reporter’s name was Walter Mears, a member of the Washington bureau of the Associated Press. At 37, he was already regarded as the first among equals in the ranks of national political correspondents. At the end of the debate, his colleagues stopped talking, put down their Styrofoam cups, and gathered around Mears and his typewriter. “Walter!” they said, almost in unison. “Walter, what’s our lead?”
A “lead” (pronounced lede) is the opening paragraph in a news story that sets the stage for readers and captures the essential meaning of events. Mears was an expert at discerning the significance of what he and his fellow correspondents had witnessed on the campaign trail and reporting it with fairness, accuracy, and style.
Yet he was already worried in 1972 about the trend among journalists to concentrate on the politics of issues, covering elections as sporting events and taking sides, substituting their opinions for analysis. His younger colleagues, he observed, had not necessarily paid their dues learning “how to write an eight-car fatal on Route 128.”
By the time he died this month, at age 87, at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Walter Mears’s concerns about the state of American political reporting had largely been realized. And although he retired in 2001 to teach journalism at the University of North Carolina, by the time of his death, the internet and, to a lesser degree, cable television, had long since transformed his standard for political reporting, which, as he wrote in his memoir, was “to get past the managers and spinners to assess the strengths the candidates claim as well as the failures and flaws they try to conceal.”
This is not to say that Mears was without opinions — he just kept them under control. He was also a master of interpreting facts and reporting milestones with astonishing speed, insight, perspective, even poignance.
In 1968, on the evening in Chicago when Humphrey won his party’s nomination for president amid antiwar riots, Mears wrote that “Hubert H. Humphrey, an apostle of the politics of joy, won the Democratic presidential nomination under armed guard.” And on election night in 1976, when Jimmy Carter defeated the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, Mears reflected that “it has been a campaign without compelling issues … structured around three nationally televised debates which are in retrospect more important for the fact that they were held than for anything that was said.”
Mears was the son of a chemical company executive, and growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, “when other kids talked about being firemen or ballplayers, I talked about being a reporter,” he said. He began working for the Associated Press while still a student at Middlebury College. After graduation in 1956, he joined the Associated Press in Boston and then covered the Vermont Legislature before migrating to Washington in 1961.
In addition to a memoir, he was also a co-author of two books on journalism and won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
Mears’s iconic career was punctuated by a personal tragedy: On Christmas Eve 1962, his wife and two children died in a house fire in which Mears was injured trying to rescue them. And until he retired from reporting to teach journalism, he only detoured once from the Associated Press. As he told his Associated Press colleague Harry Rosenthal, the Detroit News “backed a station wagon into my driveway filled with so much money I couldn’t refuse.” But he only lasted nine months: “I couldn’t take the pace,” he said. “It was too slow.”
