![]() ![]() ![]() Once, during a White House news session, he saw Walter Lippmann in the throng rushing over and grasping him, the President all but shouted: ''This man here is the greatest journalist in the world, and he's a friend of mine!'' That was in early 1964, when a good many people would have agreed with Johnson. He courted them incorrigibly with lavish flattery and shoulder-squeezing bonhomie. Of modern Presidents, none was more transfixed by columnists than Lyndon Baines Johnson. This helps explain the resentment on the part of successive Presidents over the need to placate these potentates there is no two-term limit for a Scotty Reston. Members of Congress are elected columnists are more like life peers in Britain's House of Lords. Reston enjoys an obvious advantage over a Senator. ![]() In 1975, when he himself was still a Washington columnist, Marquis Childs guessed that James Reston of The New York Times had roughly the power of three United States Senators. Judgments differ on how much influence senior columnists wield. White, an occasional columnist, called the political pickle. But in our more prosaic age, the most influential practitioners deal with what E. Dooley's dialogues, the Uncle Remus tales and George Ade's ''Fables in Slang'' were cradled in newsprint, as was the verse laboriously typed by the cockroach Archy in Don Marquis's cubicle at the old New York Sun. Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce ascended from the column, as did H. Though the form is common, its pedigree is awesome. Many more are syndicated, so that if you travel around the country their eyes seem to follow you from passport-style photographs used to relieve the grayness of Op-Ed pages. Some columnists are local institutions, a few so popular that they are said to own their cities. He has come to be the patron of an unruly calling. Simeon Stylites of Syria, who spent 30 years preaching from the top of a column in the fifth century. The term also has an apt association with the I-shaped pillar from which the columnist can harangue the populace - like St. Pick up a newspaper anywhere in the United States and you will be addressed by insistent strangers known generically as columnists because each occupies, more or less, a column of newsprint. ![]()
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