The Roots of Inspiration   

The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968
Edited by Roy Peter Clark and Raymond Arsenault
University Press of Florida
312 pages; $24.95

Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House
By Margaret Carlson
Simon & Schuster
320 pages; $25

If you want to better understand why journalists are the way they are, start with these two collections.

Gene Patterson and Margaret Carlson are different writers from different generations. But their books both vividly demonstrate the same point: Personal background matters. Like politicians, artists and probably everyone else, journalists come of age imprinted by their circumstances and upbringings. Their work never fully frees itself from these powerful roots.

Patterson, for instance, born in 1923 in south Georgia, is a romantic Southern liberal grounded, writes historian Raymond Arsenault, "in the populist folkways of rural life." He became a World War II tank commander further imbued with notions of honor and duty, then a big-city newspaper editor who never lost his "empathetic concern for the angry and often bewildered white southerners caught in...wrenching social and economic transformation."

As editor of the Atlanta Constitution, he wrote a daily column, some 3,000 in all, of which 122 are collected here.

As selected and introduced by Arsenault and writer Roy Peter Clark, they show a native son discouraged by the region's "cultural hypocrisies and racial demons," writing "with a light touch and a heavy heart."

A fine balance between unsparing criticism and unflagging hope pervades these columns. They are respectable and respectful but firm. Almost universally, they are aglow with decency.

When Alabama's George Wallace brought to Georgia "the speech most Southerners were raised on, and which would best be forgotten," Patterson wrote, he was "an outsider agitator trifling with our state's children."

And when dynamite killed four black children at a Birmingham church, Patterson, through tears, wrote a column that Walter Cronkite invited him to read on national television. "We broke those children's bodies," he wrote. "We--who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.... We created the day. We bear the judgment."

Patterson was so idealistic that in retrospect some of his judgments seem naïve. He opposed 1963 civil rights bills, preferring to rely instead on "the sustained power of voluntary decision in the hearts of the people."

Some of his best columns frame large issues around the struggles of one individual--a principal driven from town for objecting when his students cheered the news of President Kennedy's assassination; a segregationist who shielded a pro-integration demonstrator from attack by a mob; a black teacher in anguish over the pressures of integrating a formerly white school's faculty.

Patterson's voice and vision made him a titan not just of the South but of the nation.

Margaret Carlson grew up in a different time and place, a working-class home in Washington, D.C., and later Pennsylvania, where she too developed a populist commitment to fair play.

"[M]y parents propelled me toward journalism as surely as if they'd had the Alsops over for cocktails every night," she explains. "My brother had suffered serious brain damage at birth, and their struggle to give him a normal life stamped my view of the world. I learned quickly to dislike those who slight the weak or different or unlucky."

Carlson came to journalism after stints in government and teaching, and a hitch with Ralph Nader that led to a law degree. She wrote for Esquire and The New Republic, among others, before landing at Time and securing a seat on one of those weekend TV talk-fests.

Her book collects numerous columns interspersed with new essays on growing up, covering politicians and navigating the journalism business.

She offers the expected amount of backstage nuggets: candidate George W. Bush calling adviser Karl Rove "turd blossom"; Carlson herself falling asleep during an interview with Hillary Clinton or being branded an "idiot" when she kept a furious Katharine Hepburn waiting for an interview.

Some columns seem dated. But the best of them are perceptive and insightful. She specializes in the wicked left jab--a pithy punch that captures a large point.

On George W. Bush: He "honed his laissez-faire approach to life into a potent tool for bonding with the goof-off in all of us."

On Al Gore: "...speaking so remotely that we can't feel a word he's saying."

On Bill Clinton: "Just because anyone can grow up to be president doesn't mean anyone who gets to be president is a grown-up."

On the 2000 election:
"Gore couldn't catch a break. The state was controlled by the other guy's brother, and he was being robbed in broad daylight by Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris...who doubled as Bush's campaign chair.... Imagine if Gore's daddy had appointed the Supreme Court judges who subsequently delivered the presidency to him on a golden 5-4 platter."

Both Gene Patterson and Margaret Carlson could be called liberals, but the word as usual seems miscast. They are seldom ideological or partisan. Like so many journalists from working-class circumstances, they write with special sympathy for underdogs and special skepticism for top dogs. As journalism becomes more professionalized and recruits from higher and higher on the social ladder, it would be a shame to lose such inspiring social sensibilities.