ETHEL WHITE: This is a conversation with Don Edwards. We are at his home, at
3408 Millen Lane in Lexington, Kentucky. It is February 19, 2002. My name is Ethel White. Could we start with a little biographical information, starting with birth, education and whatever experiences might devolve on this oral history we’re doing?DON EDWARDS: Okay, my name is Don Edwards. I was born August 25,1940 in Corbin,
Kentucky. I studied English and Philosophy in college. And I went into Journalism in nineteen sixty-four. I took a job as a reporter with The Winchester Sun newspaper. 1:00WHITE: Where did you go to college?EDWARDS: At Eastern. And my sister was a guidance counselor, and my
brother-in-law was a school superintendent. And my family really, I think, wanted me to be a teacher. But I had the writing bug early on and I wanted to write. And the newspaper looked like an easy way to get into writing.WHITE: Before we move into your journalism career. Since we’re talking about
civil rights, I think when we talked over the phone, you said you had, had certain.....I don’t know what you call them, civil rights experiences. Or perhaps something to do with the question of race?EDWARDS: Yes.
WHITE: As you were what? Growing up or in college?
EDWARDS: Well, that’s correct. Actually beginning when I was a child--I
2:00don’t know if you know anything about the history of Corbin, Kentucky or not. It’s a small town in Southeastern Kentucky. It’s not a very old town. I think it actually was just a wide spot in the road until about the eighteen eighties, when it grew up along the railroad, the L&N railroad. And there had been a terrible labor dispute in Corbin. I think it had probably happened in the nineteen teens or maybe around nineteen twenty. At that point, I think there had been a strike. The railroad had brought in substitute workers to take the jobs of the people, who were on strike and a lot of those people that they had brought in were black. And there was what amounted to a combination race riot-labor riot, at that time. And nearly all the black people 3:00in Corbin were shipped out of town on boxcars. There were only a handful of black people left in the town by the time I was born in nineteen forty. There were some people on my paper route. I think there was a black porter, who worked at the hotel. But virtually, it was like a ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent white town. My earliest memories of racial matters in that town, were things like, my father, who was a railroad engineer, had begun on the railroad working with men who were still old enough to remember the assassination of Goebel, which was generally believed that the L&N Railroad had paid for. And they also--they told him and he told me, 4:00about how all the railroad workers were ordered to vote against Goebel: that their jobs were on the line, that they were told that Goebel would integrate the railroads, and that white people would stop using the railroads and that they would all lose their jobs if they didn’t vote against Goebel. Typical scare tactic, of course. I think they all voted for him. This is a town that’s approximately halfway between Lexington and Knoxville, Tennessee. And black people were actually terrified to go through that town, because of its past: because of what had happened there before. And so I remember when I was a child, there was an attempt made to start what was called a colored tourist home in Corbin, a place for black 5:00people to stay on the trip. All the roads were two lane back then; it was a tough trip. The first night that tourist home opened for black people, it was dynamited. And after that, it did not open again. It was the kind of town, where in the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, US 25 was the main highway. There was no Interstate. And US 25 went right down Main Street. And there were instances of, black people who would be passing through the town on their way to somewhere else, would be stopped at a stoplight and dragged out of their cars and beaten, by people who were just loafers, who were standing on the corner with nothing to do. 6:00It was like a hobby with them.WHITE: o you remember any of that?
EDWARDS: Oh yes, I remember that very well.
WHITE: Did you ever see it or hear talk of it or what?
EDWARDS: Yes, I did see it. It was a virulently racist environment.
WHITE: What did you see? Can you describe it? Can you remember?
EDWARDS: Oh yes, I can remember that. I just, the same way I can remember the
railroad strikes and the violence around the railroad strikes. These would usually be guys who had played on the football team. And sometimes they would be out of school, like a year or two older than the graduation age. And they would just be standing around on the corner, and I was downtown. And they would be standing on the corner, and suddenly you would hear these terrible screams. And they had started jeering or some sort of conversation with black people who were caught at a red light. 7:00And then ran over and just ripped the doors open and pulled them out and started beating them. I witnessed things like that. I didn’t actually go to school with black people until I was a senior in high school. That was in 1957, and that was in Richmond, Kentucky. It was a school that no longer exists. It was called Madison Model or Madison High School. But Model was the Eastern Kentucky University training school and the two schools were separate, but they combined for athletics, because Model wasn’t large enough to have an athletic team of its own.WHITE: Now, did you say.....Is this the black school and the white school that combined?
8:00EDWARDS: No, no, no.WHITE: Oh, okay.
EDWARDS: No. The public school was Madison and the private school was Model.
WHITE: Oh, okay. Sorry.
EDWARDS: And Model was a training school for practice teaching at Eastern
Kentucky. At that time Eastern Kentucky University was called Eastern Kentucky State Teacher’s College and they had a laboratory school on campus. And that was Model.WHITE: But then how? Let me back up for a minute. When.....Did you actually move
to Richmond that year, when you were a Senior? Or had you moved before?EDWARDS: Well, here’s what happened. I lived in Corbin through the fourth grade.
We moved to Richmond so my sister could go to school there. And I lived there fifth and sixth grades. Then in the seventh grade I went to Valley High in Jefferson County. My father had 9:00bought a house at West Point, down there between Louisville and Fort Knox. But my mother didn’t like it there and we stayed there for a year. And there for some reason my father moved back to Corbin for three more years. So I had the eighth grade in Corbin and the first three years of high school. And then in fifty-seven we moved back to Richmond.WHITE: So you went to the school that combined for athletics, but what had
happened, that you were actually going to school with blacks? What had happened in Richmond?EDWARDS: I think what had happened all over the country, was the Supreme Court
decision, that integrated the schools. There were no blacks to go to school with in Corbin, so I never went to school 10:00with blacks in Corbin. By the time I was a senior in high school though, in 1957, the schools had been integrated; and I went to school with black students in ‘57. This was really kind of surprising in a way, because even though there were black athletics and black students in the public high schools then, the University of Kentucky athletic programs were all white. It wasn’t until years later that it was, gosh, I guess the late sixties or early seventies that they actually integrated. And I remember thinking how tough it was for really good athletes, because we had a couple in our high school, who probably could have played college ball. But they were automatically ruled out from everything 11:00from the state university at Lexington, because at that time it was all white.WHITE: Now you said you remember thinking that. So what was your thinking about?
How was your thinking developing? Or how had it always been or what were your reactions to all of this? As a teenager.EDWARDS: As a teenager, I thought it was terribly unfair that they should not
have a chance to play for the state university, when they were such outstanding athletes in high school.WHITE: How do you suppose coming from Corbin, Kentucky, which you just
described.....Why do you suppose you felt the way you did?EDWARDS: Well, I think growing up in Corbin--even though it was a racist
12:00environment--it was not like growing up in the Klan or something like that. I don’t mean to leave that sort of impression. In fact, children in Corbin, the kids that I went to school with and grew up with, really had more curiosity about black people, than they had antipathy toward black people. And so it was, when I finally began going to school with black kids in ‘57, for me it was just more a matter of trying to understand what I had been missing all those other years.WHITE: And in trying to understand all of this, what were you learning? Aside
from the fact that there were good black athletes who couldn’t, who couldn’t be part of college athletic programs?EDWARDS: Well, I think you learn tolerance.
13:00I mean, you learn to relate to black people as individuals, rather than to relate to them just as a group or some stereotypical group. I think that was the main difference.WHITE: How many.....Do you remember how many black students were in your class?
EDWARDS: You know, I can’t remember, but I can remember the ones that I knew.
And I’m wanting to say like about half a dozen or something like that, that I actually knew.WHITE: In a class of roughly how many?
EDWARDS: Oh, in a class of say maybe a hundred, hundred ten, something like that.
WHITE: And you said, you remember the ones you knew. Now did you know one or
more fairly well? Or how would you say?EDWARDS: Just school friends, friends at school and the kids that you
14:00cheered for at the football and basketball games, the ones who were playing for you. The ones you had classes with. The ones that you were in the same class with because you were the same age.WHITE: Did you ever find out what happened to any of these kids or where they
went after high school?EDWARDS: At reunions. Many of the kids left Richmond and went to other places.
WHITE: Many of the, both black and white?
EDWARDS: Oh yes. In fact, I read that at the beginning of the twentieth century
in the year nineteen hundred, that Lexington was about forty percent black. Now I think it’s fifteen percent, because of so much outward migration of black people and inward migration of white people. Because there simply wasn’t a lot of opportunity here, and particularly not any 15:00opportunity for black people.WHITE: And what.....Do you remember where they had gone and what they had done
with their lives? Any of these black class mates of yours?EDWARDS: The boys had gone into the Service. I do remember that. A high
percentage of them had gone into the Service. A smaller percentage had stayed in Richmond, actually stayed there. And the girls, a lot of that depended on their husbands, because most of the girls got married. And you know, if their husband found a job in another city, that’s where they moved to.WHITE: Did you, aside from athletics, did you,
16:00were you aware of any other differences between your white class mates and your black class mates?EDWARDS: No, not really.
WHITE: Differences in opportunities or....
EDWARDS: Because we all went to.....Oh sure. Everyone was aware of the
discrimination that existed. In fact, in the late fifties and the early sixties, there were sit-ins. And you couldn’t help but go to the pool room, boys would hang out at the pool room. You’d be sitting there at the counter eating your sandwich and someone you went to school with, who was black, would have to come up to the window and get his sandwich to go. He wasn’t allowed to eat inside.WHITE: This was in Richmond?
EDWARDS: Yes.
WHITE: While you were living there?
EDWARDS: Right. And I mean one of the most flagrant examples of discrimination
that I saw, in fact I wrote 17:00a column about it. It might have been the one that your boss had seen. This was several weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago. I wrote a column about the first racial sit-in and civil rights demonstration I ever saw. We had seen these things on television in the Deep South, but we had never seen one where we were living. And so when it happened everyone went to see it, just out of curiosity. We had never seen anything like that in person, and this was in Richmond. This would have been about 1959 or ‘60. And this was a picket line outside a drugstore next-door to the Glendon Hotel. And while we were standing there watching it; there 18:00were several black people carrying protest signs, picketing the drugstore. And while we were watching, I’ll never forget, there were several of these college boys...WHITE: Several of the what?
EDWARDS: Of the college boys were there watching. And I’ll never forget the
chief of police and the assistant chief of police came up. And they watched the demonstration for a moment or two and then they turned to us: the boys who were standing there and said, very loudly, said, “Well boys, we’re going to go down the street and have lunch. And we’ll be gone for an hour or two, just in case anyone wants to break this up.” And they made sure that we heard that and then they walked off. And in fact, there was a college student, who climbed up on the roof 19:00of the building that was being picketed and started throwing bricks down on the picketers, from the top of the building. I witnessed that. I’ll never forget it.WHITE: So you think that the police.....I don’t want to sort of ruin the poetry
of this, if that’s what you can call it. (laughing) But you think, really the police chief was asking somebody else to go after the black demonstrators? The African-Americans.EDWARDS: The only message I could receive from that, in effect, was, “We’ll look
the other way, you know, while you attack these people.” This is the police chief and the assistant police chief. I think part of the mentality of the time was very provincial, because I later learned 20:00when I became a reporter. And I was a police reporter back in the days when you got blood on your shoes. Was that.....Police, the police in a small town then had a fear of outside agitators. They were very provincial. They were very insular. And their thought was, hey you have to be as tough and mean as possible to keep the bad guys out of your town. That was the philosophy they worked under.WHITE: So you think that their, the police attitudes went beyond race? To the
fear of the outsider?EDWARDS: Yeah.
WHITE: And race was part of it.
EDWARDS: Race was part of it, but they had a general philosophy, I think, that
crime prevention consisted in 21:00having people who might tend to commit crimes, to be afraid to do it in their home town. The same thing was true in Lexington, when I was a police reporter here. This was ten years later. You know, we’re talking about the mid and late sixties now. The police here had an attitude that, “Hey, you have to be so tough that the bad guys won’t want to come to your town, because they are afraid of the police.” So they’ll go commit crimes someplace else, but not in your town.WHITE: Do you think if, if these so-called outside agitators, if they were in
fact, outsiders, if they had been 22:00a group of white people, who had some other cause, you think the police would have been just as mean and tough?EDWARDS: My impression is that they would have been. The demonstrations that I
saw, and then the things I later covered when I was a reporter had a very small outside core of organizers. Because local people usually had been intimidated, too intimidated to do this on their own. And so they would have to have someone from outside to help them get organized and have the courage to stand up and do this. So that’s where I think, the police’s view of outside agitators came from.WHITE: All right so--but
23:00there also was an element of the local people having been intimidated. Were they intimidated by the police, by the business community? By whom?EDWARDS: I think they were intimidated every day of their lives. I mean walk
down to the Courthouse square in Lexington and look at the guys in the Courthouse yard. Look at the three statues. They’re both Confederates. I mean can you imagine being a black child and growing up here and seeing that every day of your life? In Richmond, restaurants, theaters, things were still segregated.WHITE: So the message was part of the culture?
EDWARDS: Oh yeah, the whole culture, throughout
24:00the culture, a discrimination. Hey, if you’re a black, you’re a second class citizen.WHITE: So it wasn’t a matter that the local people had tried something and been
intimidated and then called in outside agitators. They simply knew from living that they would need help. Right?EDWARDS: Well, whether they had tried something and had failed on their own, or
whatever the answer. Civil rights were sweeping the country then, and everyone was getting interested in them. I think black people got interested in them in the large cities first and then in the small towns. And it was just a movement whose time had came, you know.WHITE: Okay, well let’s
25:00now go back and pick up the thread, the chronological thread of your story. So you said that you, well you went to The Winchester Sun in nineteen sixty-four. That was your first job?EDWARDS: Right.
WHITE: Okay. And is that where you were a police reporter? What did you do for
The Winchester Sun?EDWARDS: Well, I was more like the reporter.
WHITE: Beat reporter?
EDWARDS: Yeah, I did everything.
WHITE: Like what?
EDWARDS: Oh, covered all the news, wrote obituaries, helped layout the paper,
took photographs, developed the film, printed the pictures.WHITE: How many people worked at The Winchester Sun?
EDWARDS: Maybe half a dozen. And it was a small
26:00town daily, and so you got to see a little bit of everything.WHITE: What, if anything, did you discover about the racial situation in Winchester?
EDWARDS: Well, I began to see it for the first time as a member of the working
press. So it gave me a different perspective on it. I guess I began to see it in a more organized fashion, whereas before I had simply seen it as a spectator with no particular view. At Winchester I would cover things like NAACP meetings. Or the uh...WHITE: Can we stop right there? (laughing) EDWARDS: Sure.
WHITE: What did you find at the NAACP meetings? What was going on? What was the agenda?
EDWARDS: Oh well, you know, you’d
27:00have a crowd of people and you’d sing the black national anthem. And there would be someone who would be a speaker, usually Reverend Porter Peeples from Lexington or someone who was active in the movement. And one of the first things-- I guess I should put it to you--one of the things you were always asking the organizers and there was a great burning curiosity then about how this was being funded and who was funding it. And whether or not it was funded by some Communist front organizations, because this was still during the Cold War. And so, Civil Rights organizers were always being asked, “Well, do you take money from the Communist Party? Or would you accept 28:00donations from the Communist Party?” I remember that. But the meetings themselves, there was no violence or anything like that. They were just simply, almost like governmental meetings or something.WHITE: Were they organizing protests or...?
EDWARDS: Yeah, they would address problems in the community. For instance, when
I began working at the newspaper, the newspaper was segregated. The only black people that worked for the newspaper, worked in the back shop, back in the printing. None of them worked in the front. Everything was segregated in the newspaper, even the news, even the desks. That was true of the Lexington paper when I began working there, too. 29:00They ran a column for the black community. It would have a name like “Colored Notes” or something like that. I remember one of my first jobs when I began working at Lexington. And I should say this was long before Jack Knight bought the paper, long before it became a Knight-Ridder paper. There would be a column--and this was not someone on the staff, because the staff in the newsroom was all white. But it was by a contract writer, someone who was paid to do that. I don’t remember if she was paid on a space basis or just per column or what. It was simply news notes on the black community.WHITE: The contract writer wrote “Colored Notes”?
EDWARDS: Yes. Who had died.
30:00There would be obituaries. There would be lots of announcements of church meetings.WHITE: And that was all contracted out?
EDWARDS: Yes. And some newspapers to this day still run a column like that,
believe it or not. Take a look at The Richmond Register some time, over in Richmond. And they’ve changed the name of it and the tone may be changed a little bit, but it is essentially still the same thing.WHITE: Okay. I interrupted you. You were talking about The Winchester Sun and
you talked about the NAACP meetings as how your perspective was developing as a journalist. And before I ask you 31:00for other examples, was there anything else about those NAACP meetings that stayed with you?EDWARDS: Not really. One thing that did stay with me was something that happened
at the newspaper while I was there. The newspaper had an advertising manager and he didn’t want to run paid advertising about these meetings. And I do remember he had an altercation with some black organizers, who came in wanting this to be published in the paper. And they said, “Well, we’ll come down and picket your newspaper.” And he said, ‘well, how many will there be?” And they said, “Well, we don’t know.” And he said, “Well, will there be more than six? Will there be seven or eight?” 32:00And they said, “Well, we really don’t know how many there will be. The point is, we will do this.” And he said, “Well, I just wanted to know.” And he whipped out a pistol and he said, “Because I’ve got six of them right here. So, if there’s more than six, then I’ll worry about it.” I still remember that. That would have been about nineteen sixty-five. I thought, “Good grief, how can you ever expect anything in the way of fairness if this is the newspaper behaving this way?” The guy who was in charge of the advertising.WHITE: What did the blacks do? Did they leave?
EDWARDS: They left. And there was a man, who worked in the back shop. He’d begun
working there when he was a boy, maybe fourteen or something. This is a white man. And he was still working there fifty years later. He was an elderly 33:00man. I’ll never forget one day, to the astonishment of me and one of the black guys, a man named Gassy Williams, who worked in the back. He brought out his Klu Klux Klan membership card and showed us the seal of the Klu Klux Klan, and explained that he had been the secretary of the local chapter of the Klu Klux Klan, back in the nineteen twenties. And I remember we didn’t know what to say. We were just staring at it, wide-eyed.WHITE: Was he still...
END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO EDWARDS: Okay, you have to
remember that we’re talking about 1965, see? Winchester at that time, was still a town 34:00that had a black face minstrel show that was put on every year by the Lions Club of all people.WHITE: I’m not exactly sure.....I have a question, which I’ll put off to one side.
EDWARDS: Okay.
WHITE: To ask you what else you covered then, besides NAACP meetings? That you
remember, that had anything to do with race relations.EDWARDS: Well, I’m trying to think. The Clark County Ministerial Association,
because that was a group that included black and white ministers. 35:00And as I recall then, they had--the black ministers had a couple of issues with the newspaper. I think maybe church notices: they were still segregated. Let’s see, we’re talking about something so long ago, it’s hard to remember. You realize how much I’ve read and covered since then.WHITE: You’re doing fine. Did you actually go to those meetings?
EDWARDS: Yes. The newspaper covered those meetings and these issues would have
been brought up at the meetings and discussed. And I remember I was put on the spot once. They said, “Well why does the newspaper do it this way?” And I said, 36:00“I honestly don’t know. I don’t determine policy at the newspaper, but my guess would be that the newspaper just reflects the community. It’s the community that is segregated. And that’s why some news is segregated in the newspaper.” WHITE: Did uh, how long were you at The Winchester Sun?EDWARDS: I was there for about, I guess, eighteen months.
WHITE: Did these attitudes - I mean the man, who whips out his pistol. The man
with the Ku Klux Klan membership, being put on the spot by the Ministerial Association, does this have anything to do with your moving on?EDWARDS: You know, I honestly can’t say that it
37:00directly did. I mean, there were a lot of other factors involved, too.WHITE: Well then, let me ask you what--unless there’s more that we haven’t
covered. There’s always more that you haven’t covered, but unless anything stands out that you want to talk about, maybe we could talk about what happened next and how it came about, then.EDWARDS: Right. What I wanted, what I’m trying to say, I guess is, that the
racism that I saw in Richmond and Winchester was almost casual. It wasn’t the violent type of confrontational racism that you’d expect to see everyday in Alabama or Mississippi or someplace like that. It was more polite, but it was still racism just the same.WHITE: So this whipping out of the pistol, which maybe you don’t call that
violent, but it seems violent to me. But that might have 38:00been the exception.EDWARDS: That’s an aberration. And I think that’s why I remembered it, because
that was so extraordinary. The same way that I remember the civil rights demonstration and the college boy throwing bricks from the top of the building. Because that was just so extraordinary.WHITE: So it was almost more of an undercurrent than anything else. All right.
So, then what happened eighteen months after you started working at The Winchester Sun?EDWARDS: Well, I worked for a newspaper in Indiana for a while.
WHITE: Where was it and what was it called?
EDWARDS: This was in Bloomington. It was called The Bloomington Tribune. It was
a brand new newspaper, which is what attracted me to it, because there aren’t many of those. And you don’t usually get a chance to do that: to work for a new newspaper. And they were trying something 39:00different up there. And I went up there for, I guess, about a year. And my father was ill and I came back to Kentucky and I worked for The Herald-Leader for a while. And then I was the editor of The Clay City Times, which is a country weekly. I did that for a little while. And then I went back to The Herald-Leader. And I was there for the rest of my career.WHITE: All right, maybe we could, there may not be a whole lot you want to say,
but I’m just curious to know.....Well, you said they were trying something new at The Bloomington Tribune. This may not have anything to do with civil rights, but I’d just love to know what it was. What they were trying that was different. 40:00EDWARDS: Well, it was a more modern production process. They were, I don’t know if you are familiar with newspaper production or not, but that was the time when cold type was beginning to replace hot type. And photographic type of reproduction type rather than setting it in melted lead and so that was part of what was new and different about it. It was just a fresh outlook, fresh start. They had recruited some people I thought I would like to work with. Some people who were really talented and really smart that they had recruited from the Chicago area.WHITE: What about the race issue? Did you notice anything?
41:00Anything similar? Anything different?EDWARDS: I can’t say that I noticed that much in Bloomington. The big issue at
that time that was beginning to take over was the Viet Nam War. And I covered a lot of protests, but they were usually war protests. The kind where you go up and interview the guy sitting on the curb with the bloody nose. And he says, “Well, you’ve never been hit until you’ve been hit by a pacifist.” WHITE: So this would have been around ‘67?EDWARDS: Right.
WHITE: There’s some people that say that the protests against the Viet Nam War
42:00never really happened until the white middle class was sent off to Viet Nam, in addition to the minority groups, which had gone to war in the earlier years in greater, proportionately greater numbers. What.....Do you have a comment on that?EDWARDS: Yeah, I think that’s correct. The first time I ever heard of Viet Nam
was at The Winchester Sun. And there was a boy from Clark County, he was killed in the war. He was the first fatality in Clark County. And part of that story was to explain to the reader where Viet Nam was. And even his own family couldn’t tell me, when I went out and interviewed them. So, 43:00I do remember in like, ‘65, Viet Nam was some place you had to research and look up. But a couple of years later, the situation had entirely changed. There were huge demonstrations against the war. And as middle-class kids did start getting killed, and more and more body bags came back; I think that made a huge difference in the protests against the war.WHITE: So, Viet Nam had something to do with race? I mean, the Viet Nam issue
and the race issue have some kind of a meeting point.EDWARDS: I think there is a point of intersection there, but I think there’s
also a point of intersection of class there, too. As long as poor kids were being killed in Viet Nam, I didn’t see a lot of protest. 44:00It was when middle class kids started being killed in Viet Nam, that was when the protests began.WHITE: Okay. Well then, after--if I’m not moving on too fast--after Bloomington
and your father became ill and you came back to Kentucky and went to The Herald-Leader. And you were there for what? A year or less?EDWARDS: Yeah, that would be about right.
WHITE: What greeted you there? Was there any kind of a culture shock? Or did you
just sort of move from one newsroom to the next?EDWARDS: Well, my feelings about The Herald-Leader is that, at that time, The
Herald-Leader was behind most newspapers. The Herald-Leader was run by a man named Fred Wachs, 45:00who was the General Manager and in effect a CEO of publishers.WHITE: How do you spell that name?
EDWARDS: W A C H S, Fred B. Wachs. And he managed the property, which was
actually owned by the heirs of a man named John G. Stoll, S T O L L. Stoll had died and he had left the newspaper in trust to his heirs. The heirs, as nearly as I could tell: and I never saw one of them step foot in the building; were simply a bunch of wealthy alcoholics, who lived in Palm Beach and clipped their coupons, and only came to Lexington when the races were running at Keeneland in the Spring and the Fall.WHITE: So they left the running of paper to Mr. Wachs?
EDWARDS: Exactly. Mr. Wachs and the Trust.
46:00And so there was discrimination in the newspaper. For instance--and it really bothered many of us who worked there--but we couldn’t do anything about it. For instance, if a kid were arrested for marijuana possession, if he were a poor kid or a black kid his name went in the newspaper. If he were someone whose father knew someone that worked for the First Security Trust, they could call the newspaper and have that name left out. So it was a family run newspaper, but it was a long shot from say the Binghams in Louisville or someplace like that. And I don’t mean to imply that the Binghams were more fair. I think the Binghams exercised 47:00the power that they had in Louisville, not by the divine right of Binghams, but by the virtue of owning the only newspaper in town. (Phone rings) WHITE: Do you need to get that?EDWARDS: Yeah.
(Tape pauses) WHITE: You mentioned a little bit earlier about the fact that The
Herald-Leader had a “Colored Notes” and a contract writer, who did separate material for obituaries and meetings for black people and groups. But how would you describe the, Mr. Wachs’ sort of overall attitude about how you run a newspaper from the point of view of race issues. Would you say there was an overriding philosophy?EDWARDS: Don’t make waves.
WHITE: Okay.
EDWARDS: He didn’t like for news of racial disturbances or civil rights marches
to be put on the front page, because 48:00he thought it would cause more of the same in Lexington. He thought it would eventually lead to violence in Lexington. And Mr. Wachs, oh how shall I put this? Part of him thought that the purpose of a newspaper was to reward your friends and punish your enemies, and he had a large number in both camps. Another part of him felt like, in terms of civil rights, that he would help black people. For instance, he helped get the buses integrated in Lexington. But he felt that the best way to do it, was quietly, to do it behind the scenes. He thought that was the best way to get things done, because 49:00race was a very volatile issue. And it had exploded all over the country. And he worried about it exploding in Lexington, too. And so I would say that he did have some sympathy for black people. At times it might be expressed paternally, but I think he did have some genuine sympathy for them.WHITE: Let’s talk about The Clay City Times, because then we’re going to come
back to The Herald-Leader and we can talk some more about that. Why did you go to The Clay City Times? Oh, because they made you editor. 50:00EDWARDS: No, not because they made me editor. At that time, the editor had recently died and I had a friend, who went up there also, to The Clay City Times, to be the advertising director. And we’d actually thought about buying the newspaper. Because at that time, the former editor’s daughter didn’t think she wanted to run the thing and talked about selling it. And we thought we’d give it a try and see how we liked running it and see if it was something that we might want to buy.WHITE: I’ve lost a little track of the years, but you must have still been in
your twenties at the time.EDWARDS: Yeah, I was still in my twenties. But the deal fell through. The guy
who was doing the advertising, he didn’t really like it that much and he went back to where he came from, which I think was Frankfort. And I went back to The Herald-Leader. 51:00WHITE: All right, well how long were you with The Clay City Times?EDWARDS: I was with The Clay City Times less than a year, I would guess.
WHITE: And what did you find out about Clay City from the perspective of a
journalist? Their attitudes toward what was going on?EDWARDS: I have to say, that I don’t think I can remember ever seeing a black
person in Powell County, at that time. And I don’t know whether that was my own fault, or maybe I didn’t, wasn’t as perceptive as I should have been or what. But it just seemed like racism was not an issue up there, that it was more like an all white community. And of course, there weren’t a lot of jobs 52:00up there. A lot of people who lived up there, commuted to other surrounding counties for jobs.WHITE: So, I was going to assume that we can now move on to your next and last
stint with The Herald-Leader?EDWARDS: Right.
WHITE: And by now the year is...?
EDWARDS: We’d be talking...
WHITE: Around nineteen seventy?
EDWARDS: No. We’d be talking late sixties, I guess. And I was a reporter at The
Herald-Leader. As most reporters did back then, I covered several different areas, like the tobacco market, the UK Trustees. At one time or another, I covered all the beats, such as Police or City Hall, County Government. I was also something that doesn’t exist today. I was a rewrite man. 53:00That was back in the days when a lot of news, in order to get it into the paper as quickly as you could, it was telephoned in. And we would have say, three or four reporters covering different aspects of the same story and they would all call their reports in to a central source, which was me. And I would put it together and write the story.WHITE: While you were covering these different areas, what did you like the
best? What was the most interesting to you?EDWARDS: Well, probably the most interesting to me was writing. I had written a
column at every newspaper I worked for, but in those days, there weren’t as many full time columnists and it was something you had to do one the side, so to speak. And the newspaper would let you do it. They just thought it was an idiosyncratic 54:00thing for you to do.WHITE: Well now, when you say you liked writing the best, I mean, that’s what
reporters do, they write. You mean you liked having columns...?EDWARDS: No, I mean real writing. Okay? I mean real writing.
WHITE: Oh, I see a book here.
EDWARDS: Yeah.
WHITE: Okay. This book is Don Edwards, Life is like a Horse Race. The Best of
Don Edwards.EDWARDS: So, I didn’t become a full time columnist. I was always a columnist,
always had something going on the side. But I didn’t become a full time columnist until nineteen seventy-nine.WHITE: So, what you’ve always wanted to do was be a columnist.
EDWARDS: Right. I gave up being a city editor to be a columnist, to go back to
writing, just because I liked the writing part of me so much more than editing.WHITE: Well maybe we can talk in two phases here. Let’s talk about the years as
a reporter, just mostly in so far as what you covered--once again, we’re focusing on civil rights 55:00and racial issues. You said you were assigned to this and that, so what did you stumble across in the civil rights line?EDWARDS: In the civil rights line? Well, of course the University of Kentucky
was undergoing tremendous changes throughout that whole period. I don’t know if you are familiar with that or not. But they had a terrific individual who was president, named John Oswald, who wanted to drag the university kicking and screaming up to academic respectability. And politically he wasn’t allowed to do that. That was back at a time when the governor was automatically the Chairman of the Board of Trustees 56:00at UK. That went with being governor. In fact, that’s part of what sparked off the so-called student riots or civil disturbance in 1970 at the University of Kentucky; which was the largest civil disturbance I’d ever covered in Lexington. And that, I think, had something to do with the Cambodian invasion and the shooting of the students at Kent State. And students here at the University wanted the Board of Trustees to pass a resolution condemning the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. And the Board would not do it, and that’s when the trouble started and it just kept escalating and escalating. 57:00Started out with the former governor, named “Happy” Chandler, who was a member of the Board of Trustees, who punched a student in the nose. I covered that meeting and I knew there was going to be further trouble. I was over there that night, still covering things, when they burned, the students burned the building. That’s something, it took me twenty years to find out who burned the building. And I think I know who it was now, but I can’t write about it, because in Kentucky, a felony, like arson; there’s no statute of limitations on.WHITE: Oh my.
EDWARDS: Things that I noticed.....I think Lexington was changing racially back
then. The first 58:00black reporters, for instance, at the newspaper that I worked with - that would have been some time in the seventies.WHITE: Was this after Knight-Ridder bought the paper?
EDWARDS: Yes. At that time, it was not Knight-Ridder. It was Knight.
WHITE: Sorry.
EDWARDS: Jack Knight - I should say John S. Knight, but everyone at the race
track called him Jack, owned a racing stable and boarded horses here. And that was how he got interested in the newspaper here, because he visited here quite often, to check on his horses and watch them run at Keeneland. And so he’s the one who bought the newspaper and changed everything. I guess that was about 1973. And black reporters began appearing. There was suddenly a lot more diversity in the newsroom and a different attitude and lots of things 59:00have changed. Things had changed in Lexington at that time, too. Integration of the University of Kentucky basketball team. It was a huge symbolic step.WHITE: Well, you were there when that happened?
EDWARDS: Yes.
WHITE: Did you cover any of it?
EDWARDS: I think the sports writers covered most of that.
WHITE: But you obviously lived and worked there.
EDWARDS: Right.
WHITE: What do you remember about it?
EDWARDS: Well, I remember that Adolph Rupp, the basketball coach, always thought
- had only one valid argument about not integrating his basketball team. And it was this, he kept saying, “Well, who will guarantee the safety of my players?” He said, “Whenever we go down South 60:00to play in these ball games, as it is with a white team, we almost get killed. In Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama and places like that, they are terrible. They curse us. They throw bottles at us. They scream at us. They do all these things.” And he said, “If I take a black team down there, who will guarantee their safety?” WHITE: You mean they curse and throw bottles anyway, even without an integrated team?EDWARDS: Exactly. And he said, “Who will guarantee their safety? It will be even
more inflammatory. There will be more violence.” And of course, you have to remember the emotional context of the times. There was a lot of violence going on in the South back then. And people were being killed. Blown up. It was a dangerous place. And he didn’t want.....I think he had a reluctance to be the first, 61:00because he didn’t see that there was a problem in Kentucky, that was as severe say as in Alabama or someplace like that. And he thought, “Why should I be first? Why should we have to take the punishment?” And I thought he had a legitimate question when he did say, “Who will guarantee the safety of my players?” Because no one seemed to want to, to do that. So, in that case, it’s where the wrong path is at the same time is the easiest path. It was easier not to integrate the basketball team.WHITE: You write about this kind of thing, in this article you wrote in Sunday’s
- was it Sunday’s paper? February seventeenth.EDWARDS: Yeah, it’s easier to not do anything, to not get involved, than to get
involved and put yourself in danger of some sort.WHITE: Did you ever bump up against
62:00the young man, who wrote for The Kernel? The student newspaper?EDWARDS: Oh sure. And The Courier Journal reporters, too. We used to bump up
against all of them.WHITE: Because as I recall, The Kernel was pushing for the integration of the
basketball team. And I just didn’t know whether the student paper and The Herald-Leader ever communicated at all.EDWARDS: No. I’m sure they didn’t. Because when you were covering protests on
campus, the students would ask you where you were from. And if you said you were from The Courier Journal, they applauded and cheered, and if you said you were from The Herald-Leader, they booed you.WHITE: Even after Jack Knight took it over?
EDWARDS: No, not after Jack Knight took it over.
WHITE: Oh, in the earlier years.
EDWARDS: Because they felt like the newspaper hadn’t done enough as an
institution or at least enough publicly. 63:00I think more was done than the students understood. But I think the publisher had done more, but he had done it behind the scenes and quietly in a political power play kind of way.WHITE: Uh...
EDWARDS: The old building was behind the Courthouse, downtown at that time. And
it was...WHITE: The old Herald-Leader building?
EDWARDS: Yeah, the old newspaper building. And it was a respectable building.
Mr. Wachs, in a way, had a bunker mentality about some things. And he became very frightened during the sixties. You got to remember, kids, college kids were bombing the Bank of America. I mean, assassinations: and it looked like a revolution. And at that time, 64:00he put a, this protective shell around the building: on the outside, made of fiberglass, which was fire repellent in case someone tried to throw Molotov cocktails at the newspaper. All that seems laughable now, but in the context of the times, it was pretty reasonable actually.WHITE: I remember.
EDWARDS: Yeah, I can remember when Nixon resigned. Everyone sat by the teletypes
of the newspapers in newsrooms all over the country and wondered whether or not he was going to resign, or he was going to call out the military and seize power. We didn’t know which it would be.WHITE: Some people understood it was a constitutional crisis. Now, when did—when
did Wachs sell the paper? What year was that, 65:00do you remember?EDWARDS: Mr. Wachs never did sell the paper. The First Security Trust sold the
newspaper. And I believe it was ‘73. Prior to that, Mr. Wachs became senile and retired. And he literally had to be led out of the building. He became ill and could no longer run the building. At that time, a real young guy, who had been groomed for the job, groomed for several years. His name was Tom Buckner, took over as General Manager. And Tom Buckner was running The Herald-Leader at the time it was sold to John Knight, in, I guess it was ‘73, about then.WHITE: But effectively, Wachs’ leadership would have ended a year or two before then?
EDWARDS: Right.
WHITE: Well, I was just thinking.....Maybe
66:00you can comment on this. That about the time that the leadership of The Herald-Leader changed, was about the time, was it not, when the world of the country was also beginning to look a little safer? So, I mean, in 1973, the Viet Nam war was winding down. Perhaps even Mr. Wachs, if he had been functional, would have realized that he didn’t need that protective shell anymore. So, I mean.....So the leadership of the paper is changing and also the attitudes of the paper. They’re hiring black reporters and everything, just as things are calming down.EDWARDS: Right.
WHITE: Isn’t that right?
EDWARDS: Yes.
WHITE: So there’s a coincidence there, I guess.
EDWARDS: That’s a fair statement. And really the main thing on the table when
Mr. Knight 67:00bought the paper was building a new building and buying a new press and doing things like that. Because what he bought essentially was a subscription list. I mean, the equipment was worn out, the building was old and in terrible condition and too small, much too small. It stood on the little parking lot that’s behind the Courthouse today. And you can go down and look at that tiny parking lot and wonder how in the world did we ever put a newspaper out there? But we had the entire operation there, the loading docks, the press, everything. So, actually when he bought the paper, their first concern was, “Hey, we’ve got to bring this thing up to date.” Because the heirs had taken a lot of money out of it over the years, but they hadn’t put anything into it.END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE WHITE: In Louisville, you have
public accommodations demonstrations in the early sixties, you have open housing in the late sixties, you have school bussing, cross county school bussing, desegregation in the mid-seventies. And it was a pretty big deal.EDWARDS: My impression exactly.
WHITE: What was going on in Lexington? How, were these things being manifested
in Lexington?EDWARDS: Yes, these things were being manifested in Lexington, but my impression
is that Louisville and Jefferson County had a much more severe situation than Lexington did.WHITE: Why do you think that was?
EDWARDS: Well, that’s a good question. Louisville is an urban area and always
struck me as more of an industrial area than Lexington, which until recent years was primarily agrarian. There were, in fact, people here who owned horse farms, large land owners, who were wealthy, who years ago, like say at the turn of the century, already had schools and they made sure that black children got an education.WHITE: These are the horse farm owners?
EDWARDS: At the farm schools, yeah. And so, I don’t think, to me the greatest
disparity in Lexington, was the disparity between the white and black schools. That is, there were some excellent black schools here, but they didn’t get as many resources as they should have had. And so you would have a school like Dunbar, and I’m talking about the old Dunbar now, not the new Paul Lawrence Dunbar, which is on the Southern side of the city. But the old Dunbar School, which is in the inner city. I don’t know how many times I’ve interviewed black people, who talk about it nostalgically. The classes from the nineteen forties, and they’re remembering a period of segregation. But many of them have expressed to me the opinion that, “If we’d simply had more resources for that school, we would have been better, because the faculty of that school knew your family, everyone knew who you were and they cared about you. After bussing started, we started get lost in the shuffle then.” And strangely enough the same thing happened when they discontinued the segregated news column at The Herald-Leader. To my complete astonishment the people who protested its ending, were black people. Because they said, “We have our own space in the paper now, but when it’s gone, we won’t have anything. We’ll be lost in the shuffle. You’ll lose us. We won’t have a spot in the newspaper anymore.” 68:00And I was really astonished by that. But yet I can see how there’s institution, you know how those things become institutionalized; and how there’s a certain security and a certain feeling about those things. And you know, human beings are short viewed creatures. It’s hard to see the long view.WHITE: What do you know, or do you want to speculate on the motivations of the
horse farm owners wanting black schools? Was this humanitarian viewpoint? Or was it....?EDWARDS: Well you have to remember the people who owned the horse farms. You
know, these were wealthy people, many of them were from the East. Heck, I think, probably two out of three people 69:00in Kentucky, who fought in the Civil War, fought for the Union side. So, in a way this is a Southern state, but in another way it was a more liberal, more divided state, too. And...WHITE: So it was genuine.
EDWARDS: Yeah. I think about Hamburg Place, for instance, Preston and Anita
Madden’s farm. I’ve looked through that farm album, and you can go back and 1905 or something; they’re making sure that the people who work on the farm--those that are black people--they’re making sure those children are sent to school, that they get an education. So, you know, wealthy and enlightened individuals, so to speak, owned the horse farms. 70:00And I think that made a difference. I think the Jewish community in Lexington has made a difference. The Jewish community has been very progressive and had a great sense of fair play. And many members of the Jewish community came from other places when they came to Lexington.WHITE: You mean they’ve made a difference generally?
EDWARDS: In the cultural level, in the educational level. Anything progressive,
it was my experience, you would always find leaders in the Jewish community behind it. They would always be involved. And I felt like also the Catholic community here lived out their religion. That they got involved in social justice and in social causes. I can’t say that 71:00as much for the so-called Fundamentalist Christians, for the Bible Belt. I grew up in the Bible Belt and I never could understand how people could be preaching the Wrath of God on the radio, and those same people would go out: and there would be a car wreck and they would run over and see the person who had, had the wreck was a Catholic priest and just turn around and walk off and leave him to die. That’s the sort of town I grew up in.WHITE: No good Samaritans, eh?
EDWARDS: Right, not if you were a Catholic. If you had been another
Fundamentalist Christian, then that would have been okay. But it was the Bible and the gun. I think religious fundamentalism is just generally repressive, whatever form it takes. Whether it’s what we’re dealing with right now with the Muslims 72:00sect and 9-11 or whatever it is. I think it’s generally repressive. But it’s really wonderful what can be done by people who are enlightened.WHITE: Do you remember, Betsy Brinson, who’s in charge of this project mentioned
a few names to me, people who apparently were involved in civil rights in one way or another in Lexington. And I just wonder if you remember any of them, by virtue of being a journalist? One was a white woman named Abby Marlatt ?EDWARDS: Right. I remember Abby Marlatt.
WHITE: Did you have anything to do with, I mean did you bump up against her at all?
EDWARDS: I would run across her at different things, for instance, when I was
covering a City Hall meeting, City Commission, back then before we had the Urban County, 73:00before we had the Council. I would run across her, just maybe bump into her. You knew who she was. She was an activist and she was always working for some good cause.WHITE: Do you remember Bob Estill, who was at Christ Episcopal Church?
EDWARDS: I remember that name, but I never did really know Bob Estill that well.
WHITE: A man named Joe Graves, a white businessman and legislator.
EDWARDS: Oh, I know Joe Graves. Yes, I know Joe Graves very well. And one reason
I know him is because he sued the newspaper.WHITE: Why?
EDWARDS: During one of his mayoral campaigns, the newspaper ran a story that had
been planted, I think, by the opposing candidate. Anyway what the story said, in effect, 74:00was that he had under-assessed his net worth for the purposes of the campaign. And he said that wasn’t right and he sued us. And he won in the local court, but he lost on appeal.WHITE: Do you remember anything about him in connection with any of the civil
rights goings on? Particularly?EDWARDS: Joe Graves’ daughter, I believe, now is the one who is leading this PDR
fight that we’ve got going on in Lexington.WHITE: What is that?
EDWARDS: I don’t know if you are familiar with that or not. It’s property
development rights, whereby you sell to the city your property development rights. And you save the farmland, save the bluegrass, save the horse 75:00country, that sort of thing. That’s his daughter who’s doing that. I knew Joe Graves and I knew Joe Graves’ mother and they were both very interested in any sort of progressive action or movement around here.WHITE: There was Audrey Grievous, who was the president of the NAACP and also
involved in CORE. Did you ever come up against her?EDWARDS: You know, that name does sound familiar, but I don’t think I would have
come across her in any of the beats that I was covering at that time.WHITE: And the last one is an African-American nurse named Julia Lewis, who was
also involved with the NAACP and CORE. But not so...EDWARDS: I vaguely remember that name, but that’s
76:00about as much as I can remember. You know, most of the stuff that I covered, as I said, when I.....there was a great movement in journalism. Civil rights was one of the great things that journalism worked on. It was one of the big stories. (Knock on the door—tape pause) WHITE: All right.EDWARDS: One of the great stories of that time had been the Civil Rights
movement from its inception all the way to changing the law, integration of the schools and housing and things like that. I sort of got in on the tail end of that as a journalist. That was, somehow not being as big a story, particularly after ‘68 with the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. 77:00That almost, at that time the movement seemed to change from what Martin Luther King had wanted, which was a rational, sane, progressive movement to a kind of Black Nationalism. And it became more extreme and whatever. But the big story that was emerging of course, in the sixties, the big news story was the Viet Nam War. That’s what we seemed to devote more of our time and resources to as the protests grew bigger. And it seemed to just affect every nook and cranny in the country.WHITE: When you moved from being a reporter to being a columnist, did you move
78:00into any of the decision--did you move into a decision making position as well?EDWARDS: No. The only decision I made was what I was going to write about in my column.
WHITE: Now, did you ever write about civil rights as a columnist? Or once again,
was this a focus on Viet Nam?EDWARDS: No, as a columnist.....Well, I was going to tell you, I was on an
Editorial Board. The Lexington Leader, at the time I was City Editor of The Lexington Leader. And that was when the news, when the town still had two newspapers. And the morning newspaper was the State newspaper and had a Democratic editorial page. And the afternoon paper was the hometown paper and had a Republican editorial page. 79:00I wrote editorials and did some of that then. When I became a columnist though, my column’s tone was usually light. And I didn’t get that much involved in issues. It was more about personalities. It might be political satire. It was usually more about other things, just by the nature of the column.WHITE: When we were off tape and I forgot to get back to this. You did sort of
run through what your duties at the - what? Leader and then Herald-Leader were. In other words, you said you were a this and then a that. City Editor was one of them.EDWARDS: I’m the only one who’s ever been crazy enough to be City Editor of both newspapers.
80:00I was, yeah, I was a reporter. I had a knack for writing though. And those were still the days of the rewrite person. And if you had any ability at all toward writing, that was what they wanted you to be, because that was what they really needed. They could hire reporters at a dime a dozen, but they really wanted rewrite people, because it was just so much more difficult physically to put out the newspaper. I started in this business with melted lead and manual typewriters. Now it is all electronic. It’s completely changed. The technology has been the biggest change in my lifetime in the business.WHITE: So, rewriting’s a snap.
EDWARDS: Yeah.
81:00WHITE: Relatively.EDWARDS: So, generally, I’m trying to think about civil rights coverage in
general. One thing that I did not mention is the swimming pool situation.WHITE: Where?
EDWARDS: Now in Richmond, Kentucky, which had no public swimming pool. The
Jaycees finally built one. But that pool closed. And I think that pool closed because the government ordered the community to integrate. Sadly, I have been told by people who would know that the same thing happened at old Joyland Park here in Lexington. Joyland Park was an amusement park on 82:00Paris Pike, and a very popular one. And Joyland Park closed, I’m told because the owner didn’t want to integrate the swimming pool. And so there was a big to do about that sort of thing in the fifties, just like I mentioned in the column I wrote that ran last Sunday, about one of the State Parks proudly advertised itself as the only State Park in the nation just for colored people. That seems hard to believe now. It just seems, you know, incredible. That park was in Western Kentucky. It had some sort of Indian name, like Camp Cherokee or something like that. And I understand that the land was eventually absorbed--when the days of integration came--the 83:00land was absorbed and became part of another state park down there. And I don’t know how that was swept under the rug and hushed up. But so many of those things have been forgotten, just how racial discrimination was almost omnipresent. It was in everything, everywhere you looked, it was in the culture.WHITE: Perhaps then, we can sum up, by my asking you, and it’s, I’m assuming
it’s very much the kind of thing you’ve talked about for the last little while, but maybe you could encapsulate it for us. You said in this same column, last February seventeenth, this past February seventeenth, 84:00“I suppose it’s because I think that Black History is Kentucky History.” EDWARDS: Right.WHITE: Now, can you put that into a few sentences, why you said that?
EDWARDS: Well, it’s because I said that history is the truth of human
experience. And it’s everybody’s experience, not just one group. To me, different perspectives on history are like streams that all flow into the same river. And you don’t really understand the river unless you understand all of those streams. And that’s why it’s important, I think, that people, that white people, particularly, read some black history. Because I think many white people think Black History Month or Martin 85:00Luther King Day or whatever, is something in which they have no stake. They think that’s something for black people, but it doesn’t affect me. And so it’s kind of a psychological segregation. That’s why I simply think that kind of history is important. I’m a great history reader. I don’t know if you ever read this book or not. But surely you know who Tom Clark is.WHITE: Oh, yes.
EDWARDS: And I’ve taken lots of unpopular stands at the newspaper. I was the
first person, I think, at The Herald-Leader to write about gay people as people. And I’m really proud of the way he inscribed that book.WHITE: Hmm. This book is called The Kentucky by Thomas B. Clark,
86:00and it’s inscribed, “To Don Edwards with highest regards and profound respect, Tom Clark, November 17, 2000. EDWARDS: So, I’m really proud of that, because I have taken on unpopular things. One of the latest is the debate over slot machines. And it’s difficult to go against the flow, even if you know the flow is wrong. It’s easier to go on and get along. And my wife used to fear for me all the time, because I would get death threats. But you try to stand up for what’s right in journalism. And you try not to be dogmatic. 87:00What you’re really trying to do is find out the truth. If you have some preconceived idea of it, it’s almost always wrong. You have to get out there and get at it, to find out what it really is. I think newspapers can err going both ways. They can be too dogmatically liberal and too dogmatically conservative and neither approach is completely right. You have to get out there and try your best as much as you humanly can to be objective and see both sides, and just find out what the real truth is. And that’s what I’ve tried to do in journalism. And I’ve tried to present it in an entertaining way with the column. 88:00And of course, a columnist is allowed to express an opinion. Reporters aren’t supposed to, but sometimes they do anyway. Today they call that “spin”, but it’s always been around and called other things. (Laughs) WHITE: Well, thank you very much.EDWARDS: Oh, thank you.
WHITE: I have enjoyed it.
EDWARDS: May I get you something to drink? Would you like a coke or a glass of
water or something?WHITE: Um. Maybe a glass of water. I’ll turn this off now.
END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE END OF INTERVIEW
89:00