Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 16

Seltzer dropped out of school at the age of twelve to take a job as a copy boy at the Cleveland Leader, in time writing his own column under the byline “Louie the Office Boy.” By this time, Seltzer was in love with the profession and had no desire to go back to school. At seventeen, he got a job as a reporter for the Cleveland News. By nineteen, he was heading the city desk at the Press, where he’d begun as a police reporter, but only held the city editor job for six months because he wanted to get more experience as a reporter. He was named editor of the entire paper at thirty-one. “Like Alice in Wonderland,” Seltzer said, “I felt I had to run my best to stay in one place and twice as fast if I wanted to move ahead.”

While the Press was already successful, Seltzer guided it in a new direction, namely, making it the voice of the city he loved and perhaps knew better than anyone. “My idea,” he told the Saturday Evening Post, “has been to get back to the way of the old country editor who spent most of his time learning about his hometown. If you don’t get the flavor of the town into your paper, you’ve missed the boat.” A newspaper had “to beat every day with the hearts of our readers,” and if it didn’t, he wanted to know why. A reader who decided to cancel his Press subscription would often receive a call from Seltzer himself. The editor wasn’t trying to change his mind, just to find out where his paper had failed him.

And Seltzer appealed to one of the underlying flavors of the city by nurturing a reputation for fighting corruption and standing up for the underdog. Known as the self-appointed conscience of the city, Seltzer, who didn’t drink or smoke (which was highly unusual for the time), saw himself and his reporters as public watchdogs and the Press’s rickety old office building at East Ninth Street and Rockwell Avenue as Cleveland’s citadel of truth. Seltzer wasn’t afraid to criticize the police or judges or politicians when he felt they were trying to pull a fast one on John Q. Public. In theory, it sounded honorable, and Seltzer and the Press did much good. When a local four-year-old boy was assaulted and left for dead, Seltzer and the Press offered a $1,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator. A tip to police led to an arrest and a confession two days later, and Seltzer presented the tipster with a check—in a ceremonial photograph that, naturally, was splashed across the front page of the Press.

But Seltzer also was known to get carried away, seizing on the mere appearance of corruption or misconduct and clinging to it tenaciously. In 1953, he attacked one of the most honorable judges in Cleveland for conducting shady financial affairs. The eventual firestorm of attention resulted in the judge’s resignation from the Bar Association, though he was acquitted of embezzlement charges. Many involved in the case were either outraged at Seltzer or simply rolled their eyes, commenting, “Louie is just trying to sell papers.”

He was involved in seemingly every decision the newspaper made, and his fingerprints could be found on every article the Press published. Clevelanders would use Seltzer’s name and “the Press” interchangeably, and by the 1950s, he had become known as both a “kingmaker” and a “boss-buster.” With one editorial, he could shatter a political campaign or anoint a new legacy. He paved the way for Ohio Governor Frank Lausche (who in 1954 appeared to be an appealing Democratic candidate for the presidential campaign of 1956, particularly if President Eisenhower decided not to run for re-election), Senator Thomas Burke (a former mayor of Cleveland), and most recently, new Cleveland Mayor Anthony Celebrezze, who had risen out of obscurity to defeat better-known opponents in both parties in 1953. Seltzer himself had reportedly turned down an offer to run for the Senate, in addition to plush jobs at bigger papers in bigger cities, because he refused to leave the city he loved. Needless to say, politicians and power brokers often fell over one another courting Seltzer’s support.

Seltzer’s passion for his hometown was reflected in a column he wrote about an ordinary return flight from a long trip. “You breathe that sense of comfort that can come from only one thing in the world—the unequaled sense of coming home,” he wrote. “Of being among people, in surroundings and mixed into the traditions and life of the city you love—of that place upon Earth most important of all: Cleveland, Ohio, USA.”

Along the way, he’d become a beacon of professionalism, giving countless speeches on the importance of his trade. With the nation still buzzing about the hydrogen bomb, Seltzer was the feature attraction at the University of Missouri, one of the nation’s leading journalism schools, during National Journalism Week. In Cleveland and beyond, Seltzer was seen as both a role model and a dynamic showman, capable of holding people’s attention for as long as he wanted it. For example, taking a distant and routine weapons test and molding the story to provide a local angle: how a nuclear holocaust would affect your neighborhood. This was a brand of reporting other newspapers couldn’t offer, and while those competitors may have snickered at Seltzer’s tactics, he consistently proved he was better—maybe not at effectively relaying the pertinent facts surrounding a story but certainly by selling more newspapers.

But even the Press’s shrill proclamations surrounding the H-bomb were soon drowned out. President Eisenhower went on television later that week and allayed the nation’s worries. Clevelanders were further comforted three weeks later with the announcement that their city had been selected as one of the first in the nation to host a NIKE missile—the Army’s electronic rocket response to an atomic air raid. Within days, the specter of nuclear holocaust faded into the background, as did, to some extent, the threat of a Soviet ambush fanned by the accusations of flamboyant Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. With the passing of a pair of geopolitical storms that spring, Americans eased back into everyday life. The Soviet threat didn’t appear quite so immediate after all.

Thus, when word trickled out of Southeast Asia that a French fort in Dien Bien Phu was under assault by communist insurgents, few gave it much notice. As the story dragged along through the spring, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned that the situation “may involve serious commitments to us all.” In a speech to the Cleveland Engineering Society that April, the president of one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of aircraft defense equipment stated that the U.S. was already committed to the conflict and would eventually “inherit” the situation. Yet the headline “Indo Crisis Could Pull U.S. In” in the Plain Dealer seemed melodramatic. Few readers had heard of this little country, so it was difficult to imagine the United States becoming involved. Newspapers couldn’t even settle on whether “Viet-Nam” was one word or two.

But such details didn’t matter. America was the world’s shining empire of freedom, winning two wars in the span of a decade, and was now basking in the glow of peace and prosperity.