Frank Rich: Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist

[cal04]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13rich.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

THE first political columnist I ever encountered, after a fashion, was Walter Lippmann. It happened on a snowy afternoon when I was a kid of 11 or 12 growing up in Washington during the J.F.K. years. My wallet had somehow slipped out of my pocket as I trudged past the National Cathedral on my way home from school. Hours later, my mother barged into my bedroom, interrupting my full-scale sulk to announce a miracle. “I just got a call from Walter Lippmann’s maid,” she said, sounding more excited than the circumstances warranted. “They found your wallet on Woodley Road in front of Walter Lippmann’s house!”

My starry-eyed mom then explained to me who this giant was. Fairly soon I would discover some of his colleagues’ bylines in the newspapers I was starting to devour: Arthur Krock, Joseph Alsop, Joseph Kraft, James J. Kilpatrick, Evans and Novak, Drew Pearson. Eventually I’d figure out that my stepfather, a K Street lawyer before they were called “K Street lawyers,” fed scabrous off-the-record tidbits about his dealings on the Hill to Pearson’s column in exchange for favors I now dread to imagine.

(snip)
Now 17 more years have flown by, and, as you may have heard, I have decided to move on from Op-Ed columnizing (as Bill Safire called it) to a fresh adventure in journalism at New York magazine. It was a highly personal decision and I’ve been weighing it for some time.

(snip)
It’s not easy to leave a home like The Times, where so many friends and brilliant colleagues remain. I am grateful to all of them, as well as to a pair of unexpected collaborators, the artists Seymour Chwast and Barry Blitt, whose inspired drawings took on an Op-Ed life of their own. My gratitude to The Times’s omnivorous, demanding, quarrelsome readership is no less enormous. Even when Times readers despise every last piece you write — and they do tell you so — they make you want to try harder. I hope I’ll meet up with many of you at the next stop.