Ken Bacon Remembered

One of my first posts on this blog was about Ken Bacon, the former Pentagon spokesman, who was also a first-rate journalist, and an inspiring humanitarian.   I attended his memorial service and was particularly touched by the eulogy delivered by his friend and former colleague Eugene Carlson.  I asked permission to reprint his remarks.  They are an eloquent, and fitting tribune to Ken’s memory.

My name is Gene Carlson. I’ve been a friend of the Bacon family for 40 some years, and a professional colleague of Ken’s for a good portion of that time.

In speaking here this morning, I know that I’m representing many of Ken’s oldest friends and colleagues who are surely as well equipped as I to pay this tribute. For that reason, in these comments, I’ve let a few of you speak for yourselves.

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There are three things you need to know about Ken Bacon.

I know some of you are smiling because, of course, I’ve just told you the first thing. It was Ken’s penchant for salting his conversations with examples in groups of three.

You’re talking about, say, the Balkans. You’ve made a couple of points that you think are pretty smart and then Ken would say – not pushy, but firmly: “Look. There are three things you need to know about Bosnia.”

And he would tick off the three things and they would be brief, and thoughtful, and well-reasoned. And depending on what stage of his career you had this conversation, they could also be remarkably timely, since he might well have been in Bosnia the previous week.

Many of you have heard this “three things you need to know” turn-of-phrase countless times over they years and I suppose you can think of it as simply a charming rhetorical idiosyncrasy.

But really, it was much more that that. It was a vivid illustration — and a perfectly obvious extension — of how Ken’s mind worked.

Boiling down a complex subject into its essential parts and explaining them in a way that’s easy to understand is precisely what reporters do every day. It is hardwired in a journalist’s approach to any subject.

And Ken was, throughout his adult life, no matter his employer, no matter the task at hand, always reporting, always editing, and always focusing those efforts on a worthy subject.

And doing it, as we all know, extraordinarily well.

To his final days.

* * *

In July, when Ken was undergoing daily radiation at Johns Hopkins, several friends took turns driving him to and from the hospital in Baltimore. I was the driver one day and as we talked, he was fussing about a story he’d written on health care reform from a patients’ perspective.

I said I’d like to read it, why don’t you email it to me. Instead, he pulled out his Blackberry, retrieved the story, and began to read, squinting at the tiny font as we headed north on 95.

He wrote, in the lead, that as one undergoing treatment for advanced melanoma, he had an unfortunate ringside seat on the health care debate, and he continued.

“From this patient’s perspective, meaningful health care reform must include three things.”

When the story ran soon after in the Washington Post, the three things had expanded to five. Another example, if I may say so, of editors not knowing when to leave perfectly good copy alone.

Six days before he died, the New York Times published a letter to the editor, in which Ken lambasted military commanders who failed to address mental health issues facing combat troops.

A striking example, at the very end of his life, of the formidable energy and integrity that made him a great journalist. And in the next phases of his career, such an effective spokesman for the men and women of the armed services and later, such a brilliant organizer and compassionate advocate for refugees, the world’s forgotten and dispossessed.

Ken covered practically everything in Washington –- at least everything the The Wall Street Journal thought was important — and he did it superbly; admired by his colleagues, and by sources and competitors as well, for his dogged reporting and the even-handed stories that resulted.

Listen to his colleagues:

Skip Martin: “He was a true team player…one of the very few Journal correspondents who always filed a few lines for the Dow Jones newswire whenever developments called for that, without being asked to do it. He was a person of carefully considered and very sound judgment – a great person to have around in broken-field situations.”

John Connor recalls a time when Ken was covering the Federal Reserve and Fed Chairman Paul Volcker was giving some pivotal testimony on the Hill.

Says John: “The Post had Volcker clearly signaling a tightening in the money supply. The Times had Volcker unequivocally signaling an easing. Ken hit a home run for the Journal by simply reporting what Volcker said.”

David Rogers, the Journal’s chief congressional correspondent for many years: “You’d come into the office and he’d already read several papers. He’d come over and maybe mention some piece in The Economist I should read.

I wanted to be like him – so much so that I even subscribed to the The Economist until I realized they didn’t know much about Congress.”

David continues: “As a person and reporter, what I loved most was Ken’s eye for the humor of human behavior. I’ve always thought of him as one of those wise observer characters in a Henry James or George Eliot novel, where society moves in circles while he watches with wry amusement and compassion.”

Then there’s the case of the “wounded duck.” One of the facts of life of working in The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Bureau was coming up with items for the widely-read weekly column called the Washington Wire.

In the paper’s old layout, the Washington Wire ran every Friday, a full column, on Page One and it was read by everyone who matters.

The items for the Friday Washington Wire column were vetted in a bureau meeting earlier in the week known as the Wire Breakfast. Dennis Farney famously said that listening to reporters at the Wire Breakfast argue that their items deserved a place in the Friday Wire column was like watching a wounded duck trying to get airborne. Sometimes it would make it into the air but often it would plop back into the water to the considerable embarrassment of the reporter.

Bob Merry, a participant in this weekly drama, says, “Ken always had precise command of everything of interest in his beat. At the Wire Breakfasts, he would lay out an item, quietly, yet always persuasively, never winging it. Whenever Ken spoke, says Bob, the duck took flight.”

When Ken left the Journal to take the Pentagon spokesman’s job, the Washington Bureau made up a mock Page One of the paper as a farewell present. The page included four of his memorable stories, excerpts from many others, and a bunch of short gags about his reporting career.

At the bottom of the page, there was a parting tribute. It said in part:

He is a keen observer but never a smug know-it-all; he is alert to irony without lapsing into wizened cynicism; his sense of proportion is a trusted barometer; he always knew when a Washington tempest was a passing melodrama and when it was a critical story for the paper to jump onto.

The tribute noted his huge byline file assembled over nearly 30 years. And ended with this:

Unfortunately, there’s no written record of Ken’s contributions as a colleague, friend and mentor.

His humor and compassion were a part of the ecology of the paper and while others will write about armaments and monetary matters, nobody can duplicate a personality so much valued in the Washington Bureau.

The best we can do is trust that some of Ken Bacon as been absorbed by the paper and its people.

We all know about retirement tributes. Sometimes, in an effort to be generous, the prose gets pushed. Not this time. Anyone who knows Ken Bacon knows that this one wrote itself.

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The second thing you need to know about Ken is what anyone who spent time with him quickly learned: Behind the Yankee persona, the much commented upon bow tie, the owlish, somewhat professorial personality, lay a first-class wit, a wonderful, often quirky, sense of humor.

Picture the Grace Church auction of 20 some years ago when Ken as master of ceremonies and auctioneer, stunned the audience by appearing, and wearing throughout the evening a Ronald McDonald, clown fright wig — a polyester number out to here made of various shocking fluorescent colors unknown in nature that looked like they’d only recently been released to the world by the scientists at Dow Chemical.

* * *

Three weeks before he died, we were standing in the kitchen of the Block Island house, discussing the time-consuming, sometimes aggravating, scheduling required to get to Block Island from Washington.

This typically involves driving to BWI, flying to Providence, getting a taxi to Point Judith and then catching the ferry to the island.

“I think I’ve solved the transportation problem,” Ken said with a grin. “We need a C-130. It can fly direct to the island and land on the short runway.

“With that big ramp, we can drive the car right into the plane. And there’s plenty of cargo room for all of Darcy’s stuff.”

* * *

Ken and I met in 1969 as fellow members of the choir at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill. Two years later, we found ourselves linked professionally when we were two of the four reporters with permanent desks in the Treasury Department press room. In August of 1971, President Nixon imposed wage-price controls and suspended the convertability of dollars into gold. Economics was suddenly a hot beat. Ken was the front line reporter at Treasury for Dow Jones and I was doing the same for UPI.

There were, however, occasional slow days and it occurred to us at one point that perhaps not enough respect was being paid by Treasury to the Constitutional guarantee of a free press and the adversarial relationship that logically flows from that First Amendment privilege.

In the corridor outside our work space was a sign that said, simply: “Press Room” and the room number: 1302. We thought that could be improved upon.

We got hold of a Treasury work order form, found the office in the basement that produced room signs, and handed in the paperwork. The following Monday, the job was complete. Ken and I had our picture taken to celebrate our handiwork — Ken with a broad grin on one side, me smiling on the other, and in the center of the photo, the new sign which read: “1302 — Aaron Burr Memorial Press Room.”

We didn’t flaunt it, and indeed, the sign attracted little attention. Until Friday. In that day’s Washington Wire, Dick Jantzen, ended the column this way: “Treasury press wags name the department’s press room in honor of Aaron Burr, who killed Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary, in a duel.”

The Treasury reacted with lightning speed. By mid-morning our sign was gone. It was a triumph.

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The third thing you need to know about Ken Bacon is that he was, simply, the best of friends, a boon companion. And without a doubt, a model for us all as husband, father, grandfather.

“The best advertisement I ever knew for WASPS,” says John Connor.

Ask yourself: Who better to be sitting next to at dinner, or sharing a row on an airplane on a long flight to a difficult part of the world? Who better to see across the net on the tennis court on a Saturday morning?

Who better to have as a member of your book club where for 25 years, let the record show, he never showed up without having read the book.

Who better to see holding down the tenor section when you climbed into the choir loft on a Sunday morning. If he was in town, he was there, for 32 years.

He was a man of myriad enthusiasms who seldom approached anything halfway. The simple act of baking a blackberry pie, under Ken became no-nonsense competition – competition I suppose with himself since there were no other entrants I know of. Score was kept. Forty-two blackberry pies in three weeks is the current mark, a record, safe to say, that will remain unchallenged.

Starting a drive across the country? He would hand you a plastic bag full of educational CDs: The Old Testament; Beethoven’s String Quartets; Igor Stravinsky – His Life and Music.

Walk through a little hill town in Italy in an autumn evening. “Ken, it’s time for dinner,” says Darcy, who always has priorities in proper order. “Wait,” he would say, pointing across the piazza. “We need to nip into that church. There are some great frescoes in there. Not to be missed.”

And we would go in and of course he was right. They were great frescoes. Not to be missed.

I must add here that as that scene indicates, and as we all know, it’s impossible to think of Ken absent Darcy. As their myriad friends have learned over the years, these two gave “generosity” an entirely new, and loftier, definition.

* * *

Darcy and Ken’s long-time friend Nancy Grote notes that Ken wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Robert Frost and recalls these lines from Birches:

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

“I see Ken as a swinger of birches,” says Nancy, “in touch with spiritual things — and coming back down to earth to do good work.” Nice thought, that one.

Steve Cohen, whose friendship with Ken goes back to Amherst days, says that in the tradition of Hasidic Jews, there’s a story of the “36 Just Men.”

Says Steve: “According to Hasidic lore, there are, at any time, 36 Just Men in the world. They open their hearts to others and take upon themselves the sadness and the burdens that others feel.

“The Just Men, in other words, are the source of compassion without which the world could not go on.

The Just Men don’t know that they are Just Men and strictly speaking, they don’t have to be Jewish. I’m convinced that Ken was one of the 36 Just Men.”

And David Rogers with a Star Wars reference: “I told Ken near the end that he was my Obi Wan Kenobi – never really dying, and reappearing on occasion to reassure me. I am counting on that a lot.”

We’re all counting on that. A lot.

* * *

Several years ago, I was drafting some remarks for my boss who was speaking to a group of Army procurement officers. In a phone call with Ken, I raised the subject of the speech and asked him if  he knew of anything interesting I could add to to the text.

“The Army has a great farewell slogan,” he said. ‘See you on the high ground.’ Tell her to end the speech with that. They’ll love it.”

And that seems like an appropriate note on which to close these remarks. With words that are aspirational and forward looking — the hallmarks that defined Ken Bacon’s life; the sentiments that he discovered in his last days in Mozart’s Missa Brevis, which we’re singing this morning; and the values that he conveyed to his friends in his short, written farewell.

So Ken, from all your friends, here in this Cathedral, and from so many others in places near and far away, thanks and love.

We’ll see you on the high ground.

Eugene Carlson
September 9, 2009
National Cathedral
Washington, D.C.