War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

by Shelby Scates

Overview

Shelby Scates’s thirty-five-year career as a prize-winning journalist and columnist for International News Service, United Press International, the Associated Press, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has taken him to centers of action across this country and to wars and conflicts in many of the world’s danger zones.

Born in the rural South in the 1930s, Scates rejected the racism he saw there and in his late teens set out across the United States — eventually to land in Seattle, attend the University of Washington, and launch himself into a world of work, travel, and adventure as a merchant seaman and soldier. He entered journalism as a wire-service reporter hired in Manhattan and assigned to the Dallas bureau.

Reporting the political beat brought Scates to Baton Rouge and New Orleans to observe the remarkable performance and influence of Earl Long as governor of Louisiana; in 1957 to Little Rock, Arkansas, to witness a constitutional crisis, the early struggle to integrate the public schools; to Oklahoma City and Dallas; and to Washington, D.C., where he became familiar with both the corridors of Congress and Lyndon Johnson’s Oval Office and Air Force One. He was in Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and its aftermath; in Lebanon and Egypt to learn about the Palestine Liberation Organization; in the Suez to investigate the “War of Attrition”; and in Cambodia during guerrilla fighting against the Vietnamese Army.

As a newsman he reported on those American climbers who triumphed, though not without suffering great personal losses, by reaching the top of K2 in 1978. Scates used his considerable journalistic experience and inventiveness to get the story of this epic climb quickly back to the United States. He also describes his own midlife climb of Mt. McKinley with two friends.

In a straightforward portrayal of professional life that manifests elements of both The Front Page and All the President’s Men, this memoir is about the particular combination of idealism, persistence, skepticism, and dedication to truthful reporting that marks the best of American journalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295802947
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	09/01/2012
Series:	Donald R. Ellegood International Publications
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Shelby Scates was a prize-winning journalist and columnist for International News Service, United Press International, the Associated Press, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He is the author of Warren G. Magnuson and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century America.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

OBION COUNTY

MY BEST FRIENDS in those hard times in the 1930s in West Tennessee were John Lee, Jerry, Wolf (pronounced Wuff), Hunter Byrd, and Charles. We played football, baseball, and imaginary war games and fought each other. On Saturdays we went together to the cowboy picture show at the Capitol Theatre, cheering Buck Jones, the Lone Ranger, Ken Maynard, Hopalong Cassidy, and even Gene Autry, although the singer looked kind of sissy.

    I shared my allowance with John Lee, Jerry, and Wuff. Times were harder for them, or so it seemed from their ragged clothes and perpetual search for green apples. At the theater entrance on Main Street, Union City, the Obion County seat, we parted. They went to a side door and then up to the colored section in the balcony. They paid the same price for the ticket, 10 cents, and cheered as loudly as Hunter Byrd, Charles, and I when Buck and Ken routed the black hats and Indians. It was especially good when, occasionally, Randolph Scott was the star. He had a noticeable Southern accent, like us.

    My allowance, 15 cents a week, came from chores. In winter these were strenuous for a lad. It turns cold in the damp of West Tennessee near the Mississippi, Obion, and Forked Deer Rivers, an alluvial plain patched with hardwood thickets where creeks come down and run to the rivers. My task was to make fires in the fireplaces that heated the room of my mother, Stella, recently widowed, and the dining room. I was a firemaker, but that was the easy part. The hard part was busting large chunks of coal into small pieces, then hauling the fuel inmetal scuttles to the yawning fireplaces. We were a large Southern family—ten siblings—but by that time in 1940 all had left Obion County except myself and a younger brother and sister. They were of little help with heavy chores.

    We lived in the old Waddell place, a fiercely ugly piece of post-Civil War architecture with 15-foot ceilings, and windows that ran the same length. The windows were shuttered with cedar venetian blinds that moved up and down in grooves along the frames, a bit of Victorian luxury. The house was made of brick but smelled of decaying wood. The lovely part was its great, sloping lawn and fixed rows of old oak, elm, and walnut. This is where we played games and climbed trees. I attained a close bond with one of the young maples, odd as this may sound. The tree became a refuge, then a friend; a refuge because when Addie Ross, the family serf, a field hand never fully broken to the work of wash and kitchen, would give me chase for some improper act. I'd run from the old house, down the lawn to a small branch of the young maple. One leap and I'd be free, scrambling up the branches to its limber summit, leaving Addie barefoot and frustrated on the earth below.

    "You ain't fitten to be a white boy," she would announce with terminal disgust and turn away. Safe from her fury and a serious beating, I'd hold to the maple and gently sway, grateful to the tree for deliverance. Much later when the mountaineer-philosopher Willie Unsoeld wrote, "I am son of the rock, brother to the ice," I understood.

    But once I failed to break free of the dreadful house. I was alone with my Grandmother Victoria when Addie launched a search and destroy mission against me for some outrage. We ran in circles in the big, cold dining room. I was fast and nimble. Addie was huge and clumsy. Grandmother was an island of calm. She knelt by one of the dining room windows—this I saw as I raced ahead of the black woman—fixed in a pool of sunlight coming through a venetian blind. She prayed while Addie pursued: "Dear Jesus protect this precious lad from the wrath of Addie Ross. He is a good child, despite his mischief. And, sweet Jesus, bless this good woman Addie, a child of God and duty." All this was said in Grandmother's clear, declarative English sentences. It mixed with Addie's litany of reproach: "I'm fixing to skin you alive, boy. You ain't fitten to be white."

    I don't know whether it was by the grace of the Lord or my fresh legs, but that day I was spared a whipping.

    Addie Ross loved me as much as I loved her and when, some years later, I went off to a military school in Middle Tennessee, where rowdy behavior was even less tolerated, she sent me a package and a note, crudely lettered, which said, "U wont get no thin this fit to eat so I cooked specal." The package contained a dozen of her biscuits. How all of this love, rage, and biscuits went down with our Savior is a matter I leave to theologians.

    The old Waddell place is gone now, probably torn down for its bricks. We came to it from a modern home, built by my father on our farm east of the county seat. There we had electricity from a Delco generator, a rarity in our country at that time, and a radio which brought in dance band music from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and the live broadcast of the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby. He was sentenced to death and electrocuted. We had a show horse named Gold Dust and a tenant farmer, Manlis, who would come to the living room of our home when mother and father were away and play blues on the baby grand piano. Like almost every other tenant farmer in the county—white or black—Manlis and his family lived in a wooden shack lit by coal-oil lamps. Until the coming of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal revolution denounced by my father as "communism," only the privileged had electric lights. We lost the farm, my father lost his life, to the great economic Depression, and then moved to the Waddell place at the edge of town. A literate in-law promptly renamed the place Bankrupt Manor. It was an abrupt fall from prosperity.

THERE WERE ALWAYS TALES of "the war," the nation's tragic struggle when our Southern forebears rolled the dice, all or nothing, in the bloody attempt to separate from the rest of the nation, and, as our elders put it, "preserve our way of life." These tales, however, became increasingly bitter once we domiciled in Bankrupt Manor; the glories of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers all the more splendid, Yankees all the more perfidious when magnified by near poverty. The fact of the war was seven decades past, yet it lingered like a banked fire. Memories kept fanning it. Once in 1937 we drove down to the Shiloh battlefield where, 75 years earlier, soldiers of the Union and the South slaughtered each other in the bloodiest battle in Western history. (It was soon surpassed, alas.) There were monuments to the Yankee dead all over green fields of this patch of Southwest Tennessee. My mother stood atop a common grave for the Confederate victims, tears coming from inflamed eyes, cursing the stately obelisks of stone placed on behalf of soldiers from Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana. It is easy to win, hell to lose.

    Such bitterness did not seize Grandmother, a devout believer in the Gospels yet just as much the creature of English rationalists Hume and Locke. She was a child in Hickman, Kentucky, when General U.S. Grant launched his guns and men at Columbus, only a few miles away up the Mississippi, and at Belmont, just across the great river. This began Grant's war to sever the Confederacy at Vicksburg. In contrast with others, Grandmother's tales of the sound of battle and the subsequent Yankee occupation were benign—some Yankees were gentlemen, not predators. At the request of small fry, she told these war tales repeatedly: the loss of her favorite mare, Buttercup, to Yankee cavalry, who returned the animal, wind-broken, after the war; the coming of the murderous guerrilla Tom Hook (not as famous as Jesse James but more dangerous); and the murder of a Union veteran by his brother, a Confederate, on the Hickman dock. She gave no signal of good or evil in these narratives. Perhaps she assigned them to God's will. But for us young ones, the stories dramatized to the point of reality the struggle that rent our nation, the residue of which now shaped our consciences.

    Like the war, racial segregation was a fact of life, unexamined beyond the bald premise that blacks were inferior to whites, thus subject to our natural dominance. My friends, John Lee, Jerry, and Wuff, lived in colored town, a ghetto that, I realized years later, looked remarkably like Soweto in South Africa. Streets were unpaved, water was drawn in buckets from infrequent hydrants. Come election times, votes were solicited with free barbecue and prepaid poll taxes. There were outhouses for sanitation and a ramshackle school named for Mayor Miles, a banker and politician who always dressed finely and smiled like a man with a card up his sleeve. Schoolbooks, hand-me-downs from our white schools, were as tattered and woebegone as Miles School itself. There were many among us whites who believed education for blacks was a wasteful, if not dangerous, social policy. Credit Mayor Miles for allowing a measure of education. In fact, blacks and whites were separate and unequal and this was plain for an eight year old to see.

    Yet these racial barriers were not so rigid for small fry, a paradox of the South where social fraternization between adult blacks and whites on the basis of equality could literally be fatal. Since they lived not far away, John Lee, Jerry, Wuff, and I spent our summers in games, sometimes slipping off to swim in a creek running through a thicket about a mile away. John Lee, two years older, was our natural leader. One day he staged a fight between Wuff and me, the ring an army blanket laid out in the cow pasture. We fought until bloodied, no winner either declared or in fact. Hunter Byrd Whitesell lived about ten miles away in the antebellum home of his farmer ancestors. His cousin Charles lived in the country near Bankrupt Manor on a farm that turned emerald green in summer from long rows of corn. They came frequently to visit and play.

    "Hunter Byrd and Charles are coming today," I told John Lee one summer afternoon while we lay at the foot of an elm tree seeking refuge from the heat and talking about what to do.

    "I reckon that means we play Silver War," he sighed. Indeed, that was always the game played with Hunter Byrd, who outranked John Lee in our social order, not because of his age or physical prowess, about which they were equals. But Hunter Byrd knew of the war. He could talk with authority on how the South could not endure attachment to the barbarian society that started north of the Ohio River. Slavery was Lincoln's excuse for making war on us. What he really wanted was our cotton for the mills in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The names of those remote states sounded ugly when Hunter Byrd spoke them. And he had been to Stones River, which ran red with blood from the fallen as the Yankees pressed toward Chattanooga, and also to Shiloh. He would tell of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and Nathan Bedford Forrest's raid and capture of the entire Yankee garrison at Union City, thus thwarting Grant's main supply line from the north. This was the railroad junction which connected to Hickman and Columbus where steamboats bearing war material from northern factories came to dock. He learned all of this from his father and grandfathers, and related it to us and our black friends, sons of slavery. They listened without display of passion, eager to get on with the game.

    Hunter Byrd assigned ranks. He would be General Robert E. Lee (a hero for whom one of my older brothers was named), I would be Stonewall Jackson, Charles was J.E.B. Stuart. The Yankee lineup featured John Lee as Grant, Jerry as William T. Sherman, and Wuff as General Phil Sheridan. Weapons were fallen walnuts and long, slender canes used for beanstalks in Addie's garden. Had she been near, Addie would thrash the lot of us. The Yankees held one side of a sunken road behind Bankrupt Manor, one that carried the overwhelming fragrance of honeysuckle. We Confederates attacked from the other side, hurling cannonballs of canes, minié balls of walnuts. We warred furiously, our dogs howling and yapping at the spectacle. Only once did anyone cry from pain. Jeb Stuart caught the point of a cane hurled by William T. Sherman. He cried for a minute, then ceased before his mother came to take him home. He would return for another war, the name of which John Lee must have confused with the name of the Lone Ranger's horse.

    After the fourth grade, John Lee, Jerry, Wuff, and I went separate ways to our worlds of black and white. The rigor mortis of our social system set in. School, games, Christian worship, which we all shared, and parlor conversation had to be done separately.

    I knew of only one exception to those strict rules of apartheid, although there was talk of a "communist," a cotton planter across the river in Charleston, Missouri, who was a "nigger lover." But we never saw him. Grandmother, however, was conspicuous to all of the town. She lived with a widowed daughter on a shaded street near the border separating white houses and black shanties. Very quietly, she reconciled the conflict between Jesus' teachings and Southern racial mores by ignoring the latter. The moral force of the old woman—by then she was in her 90s—shielded her from the rage, potentially fatal, that otherwise attended any breach in the racial code. Her conduct was ignored by the town. Most conspicuous was her treatment of Uncle Simon, a stump of an old black man with gray hair and a philosopher's pessimism. Uncle Simon walked about town wearing a worn-out dress coat and pulling a small wagon. He was not feebleminded like one of the Gibbs boys, whose father came home from the battle at Antietam missing a leg, to farm 500 acres. The Gibbs boy, in his 50s, made bicycle deliveries for the Evans Drug Co., always talking to himself in what most people thought was gibberish. Uncle Simon was dour but coherent.

    "Dear Simon," Grandmother would hail the old man as he shuffled past her kitchen porch. "How are you today?"

    "Just tolable, Miz Vickie. I got the miseries in my legs and hips and it looks like it's gwine to spread up."

    "Then you must come in for tea before you return home," Grandmother would reply.

    The black man would enter the old woman's home, seat himself at the dining room table and drink a sweet mixture of tea, sugar, and milk served from a white porcelain pitcher.

    "The weather is coming up, Miz Vickie. It's shore ugly. It will make my miseries worser."

    "You must take care of yourself, Simon. Perhaps you would feel better if you did not pull your wagon on your walks."

    I'd watch this calm exchange, the destruction of the racial barrier, in awe. Grandmother's manner with Uncle Simon did not differ from her treatment of Mayor Miles, who called sometimes to discuss town matters with the Christian lady. He had attended Princeton. She would sit upright, drinking tea, bowing slightly to address the visitor. The linen tablecloth was always fresh. The fact of formal rapport between a white and black fixed a contradiction between social practice and the Christian example of my Grandmother. I did not resent this, but it was a worrisome thing.

    Grandmother died in the summer of 1946. I went off to school in Middle Tennessee. For all of her English rationalism, she had believed in Heaven, so death for her meant deliverance. John Lee, Jerry, and Wuff were long gone from my life. I would never again see Jerry or Wuff. At Christmas I came home to Obion County on vacation. There were dinners, dances, and young romance. I shared a bottle with Hunter Byrd and other young lions of the West Tennessee social set; a fine vacation. One morning someone knocked at the backdoor. I answered. A tall black man, cap in hands, an expression of his traditional status, bowed and spoke: "Mister Shelby." I then knew his identity.

    "John Lee, don't ever call me mister. I am your friend." His eyes shifted, feet shuffled in acute discomfort. I remembered Grandmother's tale of her young mare, Buttercup, wind-broken.

    "I been living in Chicago, but I come down on the Illinois Central so I could see you, Mister Shelby, and my grandaddy. You looks good."

    "John Lee, please don't ever call me mister."

    "Yessir," he said, and then there wasn't much else to talk about.

    Not long after, I decided the only way to resolve the contradiction between conscience and social practice, and be liberated from a culture that had become uncomfortable, was to leave. There was no longer sufficient reason to remain in Obion County—it weighed and hurt too much. So I headed West to a new life. From that time, neither my empathy for the less powerful nor my disdain for the powerful who would exploit their advantage has waned. This mindset fueled a career as a journalist as powerfully as an innate curiosity.

Table of Contents

Obion Country

The Makings of a Journalist: Blue Sky, Blue Water

Politics

Journalist

Journalism

Newsman

Olympia

1968

More Happenstance

The Six-Day War

The Palestinians: The "War of Attrition"

Cambodia and Us

Mountains

Hickman

A Few Words about Sources

Index

Maps

What People are Saying About This

Leslie Stahl

Too bad Ben Hecht never met Shelby Scates, a journalist's journalist. His memoir is an enchanting crackle of political history, and it is all so elegantly written you'll despair when you finish it.
—Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes

Ted Van Dyk

"Shelby Scates has written, with a fine ear and eye, an account of historic times and events in which he often was a firsthand observer. It contains not only recollection but truth and insight . . . . A good piece of work."

Editorial Reviews

A memoir by a journalist whose career, spanning 35 years, involved covering historic political events in the US and foreign wars in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, the Suez, and Cambodia. Unapologetically portraying his sometimes raffish conduct as a seaman, in the military, and as an international journalist, he describes well the political realities of Southern racism, political maneuvering, and the mores of the profession of journalism then and now. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

This workmanlike memoir takes Scates from hardscrabble Depression Tennessee to the Pacific Northwest and onward to thirty-five years of exploring America and the world, first as a young merchant seaman, then a fledgling reporter, and eventually a prize-winning journalist for the International News Service, UPI, AP, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The book's title, loosely drawn from Von Clausewitz, refers to the author's beat--war and politics--and he has surely witnessed plenty of both, and much more. He's done everything from watching a knife fight in a sailor's bar in India to crisscrossing America with Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One as LBJ agonized over whether to run for reelection in 1968. His first big story, in 1957, took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to desegregate Central High School until President Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne to hold back angry white mobs; more than twenty years later, he was filing reports from 18,000 feet as a member of the first American expedition to summit K2, the Himalayan peak second only to Everest. In between, he's heard the crackle of gunfire in half a dozen countries, from the Golan Heights to the Cambodian jungle, witnessed a remarkable variety of historic events, and met an astonishing roster of colorful people. He's a newspaperman of the old school, and his stories evoke such scenes as the Louisiana Statehouse under Earl Long, a clandestine PLO headquarters in Cairo, and a firefight between Khmer Rouge guerrillas and the invading Vietnamese army. The book is not without its flaws, the foremost of which paradoxically stems from the very thing that made Scates an ablereporter. Vivid, exciting, and often genuinely historic as his chronicle is, his instinct is to follow an unfolding story, not elaborate on it, so these are frequently sketches rather than portraits and the reader may sometimes wish he had added a bit more detail, although he provides fine background accounts to put his own role and perspective into context. Here and there, the editing leaves something to be desired, most of all in the final chapter, which leaps confusingly back in time to discuss the author's Tennessee forebears; logic would suggest that this worthwhile material belongs toward the front of the book, not as a somewhat awkward endpiece. These quibbles aside, War and Politics by Other Means offers an eventful, perceptive glimpse of many people and places that made headlines from mid-century on, both here and all over the globe.

"A fascinating look at the inner workings of journalism by a conscientious reporter."

Booklist

"Too bad Ben Hecht never met Shelby Scates, a journalist’s journalist. His memoir is an enchanting crackle of political history (I especially loved the stories about Huey Long and JFK), war chronicles (in the Middle East and Cambodia), and other treacherous adventures, like his white-knuckle climb up the Karakoram mountain range in Pakistan. And it is all so elegantly written you’ll despair when you finish it, as I did. A real friend of a book."

60 Minutes - Lesley Stahl

A fascinating look at the inner workings of journalism by a conscientious reporter.

Booklist

"A fascinating look at the inner workings of journalism by a conscientious reporter."—Booklist

"Too bad Ben Hecht never met Shelby Scates, a journalist's journalist. His memoir is an enchanting crackle of political history (I especially loved the stories about Huey Long and JFK), war chronicles (in the Middle East and Cambodia), and other treacherous adventures, like his white-knuckle climb up the Karakoram mountain range in Pakistan. And it is all so elegantly written you'll despair when you finish it, as I did. A real friend of a book."—Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes

From the Publisher