By MARSHA MERCER
In an era of “fake news” and the press as “enemy of
the people,” let us today remember an ally of the people: journalist John Hall.
As a reporter, editor, columnist and bureau chief in
Washington, he went to work every day for decades with the goal of informing
readers about the nation’s capital and the world. He died of pneumonia March 26
in a Falls Church hospice at 81.
It’s not an exaggeration to say John changed my life.
I couldn’t believe my luck when he hired me as a reporter in Media General’s
Washington bureau, and I worked for him for about 20 years.
But if you were reading
newspapers in Virginia and elsewhere from 1979, when he was hired to build the
Washington bureau, until he retired in 2006, John may have changed your life
too.
He believed in the duty of a free press to educate the
electorate, and he challenged his reporters by example to be fair and get the
facts right.
He and Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Charley McDowell were
unlike many Washington reporters then and now in that they didn’t follow the journalistic
herd, and they were great listeners.
“We zig when they zag,” Hall would say.
The bureau was a window on Washington, and Hall used
it as a base to open a window on the world.
One of the few American journalists to report from
Iran during the hostage crisis in 1980, he courageously covered demonstrations
in Tehran, where he faced a million people marching toward him, shouting,
“Death to America.”
He wrote countless columns over the years on foreign
policy, reporting from China, the Philippines, Vietnam, the former Soviet
Union, Poland, Great Britain and Western Europe.
Hall came up in the gravy days of newspapers, when print
was king and papers were fat with want-ads and department store display ads. Local
newspaper owners used the good times to hire reporters and editors, open state,
statehouse and Washington bureaus, and start investigative reporting teams.
Travel and expense budgets were generous. Hall once gently
scolded a young reporter who, after an assignment in New York City, submitted
an expense report with a cheap lunch at an automat.
“Don’t go back there,” Hall said. “You’ll make the
rest of us look bad.”
He consistently put his reporters forward, often stretching
the sense of their own possibilities.
Before the 1984 Democratic National Convention, my
first, Hall asked if I wanted to rent a car in San Francisco and take a reporting
trip across country, stopping to join bureau staff covering the Republican
convention in Dallas, and continuing to Washington.
Did I? I was on the road seven
weeks.
Hall and McDowell were members of the Gridiron Club of
journalists, and I later was invited to join as well. Hall was a prolific
song-writer for the annual white-tie dinner that “singes but never burns”
government officials. One of his songs was
performed at Carnegie Hall.
As Gridiron president in 2006, Hall sat next to President
George H.W. Bush at the head table, while Sen. Barack Obama was the Democratic
speaker.
But Hall never forgot his roots in Philippi, W.Va. He fumed
for years after a pompous member of Congress, on hearing where Hall was from,
offered what amounted to condolences.
Married to his wife, Susie, for 60 years, Hall was the
devoted father of two sons, Mark and Doug, and grandfather of five.
John did have a tornadic temper – mostly directed at himself.
He didn’t suffer machines gladly; computers confounded and passwords perplexed
him. To help him keep up with his appointments, he kept weekly engagement
calendars.
One notation, Susie Hall told me, read: “ANNIVERSARY!!
Don’t screw it up.”
But his reportorial
instincts were spot-on. When a turret explosion aboard the USS Iowa in 1989 killed
47 sailors and the Navy blamed two young crewmen, Hall said the explanation
didn’t smell right.
He headed home one Friday
evening loaded with documents. After poring over the official reports and much
dogged reporting, he wrote an award-winning series showing the Navy had scapegoated
the young sailors.
John Hall was an ally
of the people.
Don’t let anyone tell
you the news media are the enemy.
©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved. 30
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