RIP David Broder

Complications from pneumonia, age 81. What a legend.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/09/AR2011030902821.html

Did anyone here know him? Wish I did.

 

I certainly read him and considered him somebody to look up to in my career. The survivor pool of the Golden Age of our business is only going to get smaller from here on.

 

Great (and now sad) line from Broder in Dave Kindred's book on the Post, on Broder walking out of an interview with Henry Kissinger after Kissinger refused to let him take notes:

'That's what I'd like on my tombstone: He walked out on Kissinger.'

 

If only more people had thought that way.

 

Farewell, great guardian of official Washington.

 

The only word that should be on his tombstone is "legend."

RIP.

 

What in particular made the nasties unhappy?

 

Yes, 21, knew him well. We shared the Post and baseball. A big Cubs fan. He worked at the Pantagraph in Bloomington, Illinois, 15 years ahead of me. Last time I saw him was Election Night in 2008, slight and trembling, working like a kid on deadline. When George Solomon hired me, he said, "I want you to be the sports department's David Broder." As if anyone could do that.

 

The only criticism I heard of Broder was that he was "too fair" to the other side.

 

Excerpt from Broder's 1973 Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech. Truer words have never been spoken:

"Instead of promising 'All the News That's Fit to Print', I would like to see us say - over and over, until the point has been made - that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past twenty-four hours - distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labeled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: But it's the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected and updated version."

 

That is simply tremendous.

RIP, Mr. Broder.

 

My wife always thought he was too right wing; her conservative brothers thought he was too left-wing.

Clearly, he was doing something right.

My favorite political writer will be missed.