Anna Hastings, page 1
Book Description
The riveting tale of one woman’s journey and her rise to power, Anna Hastings gives readers an inside glimpse into the workings of journalism in Washington. Drury takes his own experience in the field to reflect on the state of journalism in the 1970s. In contrast to his other series’, notably Advise and Consent, he humanizes the very field he often calls into question.
Anna Hastings is a magnificent novel of Washington journalism, shown through the eyes of vivid, fascinating, and humanly likable characters. From Allen Drury, the master of spellbinding political fiction, author of Advise and Consent.
“Anna Hastings is both a fresh face and a fresh start in Drury fiction.”
–John Barkham, The Victoria Advocate 1977
Kobo Edition – 2015
WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-61475-327-8
Copyright © 2015 Kenneth A. Killiany and Kevin D. Killiany
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Janet McDonald
Art Director Kevin J. Anderson
Cover artwork images by Dollar Photo Club
Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com
Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers
Published by
WordFire Press, an imprint of
WordFire, Inc.
PO Box 1840
Monument, CO 80132
Contents
Book Description
Title Page
Dedication
One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Two
1
2
3
4
5
Three
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Four
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Epilogue
About the Author
Other WordFire Press Titles by Allen Drury
Dedication
Dedicated To
All those vigorous, determined, indomitable and sometimes a wee bit ruthless Bettys, Barbaras, Helens, Nancys, Kays, Marys, Lizes, Deenas, Dorises, Mays, Sarahs, Evelyns, Mariannes, Clares, Frans, Naomis, Miriams, Maxines, Bonnies and the rest, who never cease to amuse, annoy and quite often outscoop their male press colleagues of the Washington press corps. They’ve made it in a tough league—at a certain cost, of course: but they’ve made it.
Memo
From: A.H.
To: ALL
Most of the characters in this novel are completely fictitious. Any resemblance to any person or persons living or dead, except where specifically noted, is entirely coincidental and probably due to the author’s having lived in Washington too long.
ANNA’S EMPIRE
CIRCA 1977
HOW IT GREW—AND CONTINUES TO GROW
IN WASHINGTON
The Washington Inquirer, 1956
WAKH-FM, 1959
WAKH-TV, 1961
IN PENNSYLVANIA
The Du Bois Journal, 1963
IN TEXAS
The Waco Endeavor, 1963
The Odessa Enterprise, 1965
IN ILLINOIS
The Galesburg Gazette, 1969
IN CALIFORNIA
The Southland Record, 1972
NEWSMAGAZINES
Currents, 1966
Monthly Review, 1970
COLUMN
“All Things Considered,”
United Features Syndicate,
Three times a week,
436 newspapers; 1954-
TELEVISION
“Weekend with Anna,” NBC,
2 P.M. Sundays,
Reruns 10 P.M. Sundays; 1973-
PENDING
Three more newspapers, in Ohio, Colorado and New Hampshire
Two more television stations, in Philadelphia and San Francisco
National Spotlight, weekly supermarket newspaper, acquisition to be completed this month
One
“A Solemn Sense
of
Profound
Dedication”
1
THE MAJOR
PUBLISHING EVENT OF THE YEAR!
AT LAST! WASHINGTON’S MOST FAMOUS PUBLISHER
TELLS HER OWN STORY in
Anna Hastings
THE STORY OF A WASHINGTON NEWSPAPERPERSON
By ANNA HASTINGS
Major advertising! Major promo! Author appearances coast to coast! First printing 150,000! Already purchased for a major film starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford! Major rave reviews already rolling in!
“Ms. Hastings has long been one of the two dominant duennas of the Washington newspaper world. Now she tells All as only she knows All—the story of how she came to the capital as a cub reporter for Associated Press, covered Senate, White House and Presidential campaigns, made the famous marriage that set her on the high road to one of the nation’s greatest publishing empires, brought her to the pinnacle of power and influence she occupies today. Lively, filled with inside detail, sure to be one of the year’s biggest. Order early and big on this one. It’s going to top the list. BOMC selection for August.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Mrs. Hastings’ story has a profound significance for our times. She is living proof that a genuine liberal who labors with true dedication and unflagging determination can have a major influence on American history—particularly if she owns one of the three major newspapers in Washington, five others in the hinterlands, a major television station, two influential magazines, writes a syndicated news column and hosts NBC’s most popular weekend television talk-show.…
“There have been many analytical pieces on this extraordinary woman, but only Anna Hastings could tell her story as it should be told—placing her rightfully in the vanguard of all those gallant liberals who have brought the United States from saber-rattling immaturity to a statesmanly acceptance of its lessened position in the world. Anna Hastings has placed herself in the context of her times more skillfully than any of her critics could. It is an extraordinary self-revelation by one of history’s greatest Americans.”
—The New York Times
“To Washington: Anna Hastings came, saw, conquered. The story of how she planned it that way and made it all come true is one of the most intriguing inside accounts of Washington ever written. The little Polish girl from Punxsutawney, PA, who rose to become one of the capital’s two major publishers, has a tale to tell and she tells it with great skill and effect. If its publication is shrewdly timed to take advantage of recent political events—and perhaps encourage others in the future—well, that, too, is probably the way Anna Hastings planned it. She’s not a gal to trifle with, is Anna, as her journalistic victims know. Nor is her book one to miss. Skip it at your peril. If you do, you’re apt to find yourself skewered by Anna.”
—Time
“Anna Hastings’ story spans the changing of a nation from irresponsible reaction to responsible liberalism, from world bully to lesser, but more worthy, cooperator with history’s inevitable tides. As one of those most directly responsible for the change, Anna Hastings has fought the good fight ever since she came to Washington as a young reporter. Her story is the story of America’s coming of age, and of how one determined woman rose to wield a major influence upon that necessary change. That this influence has been to the country’s good, from the first day she reached the capital until the present moment, is a truism few Americans would dare challenge. Here is a thrilling tale that no true liberal can afford to miss, for in Anna Hastings true liberalism has reached its apotheosis.”
—Saturday Review
“This is the story of how Little Liberal Annie single-handedly remade a backward nation, pausing along the way only long enough to pick up a millionaire husband, one of Washington’s two most powerful newspapers, five more in the boondocks, two national magazines and a gaggle of television and radio stations. The tale of how innocent little Anna Kowalczek from Punxsutawney, PA, turned into the tough wheeler-dealer who now rolls political dice with the best of them has its full share of heroes and villains—but there is, of course, only one heroine. And of course everything she thinks, does, dreams or accomplishes is always for the best in an evil world saved from the fall only by the grace of her continuing, all-knowing presence. ‘E pluribus Anna!’ as Alice Roosevelt Longworth put it recently; and that is how Anna sees it too.
“It’s an entertaining tale, and you might as well read it. Ms. Hastings (or some body) has given it the full treatment, complete with muted violins and full brass choir playing softly at the foot of Mount Rushmore as preparations go forward for the unveiling of the fifth colossal head.
“There’s no denying it’s a good read—even if it isn’t quite the way we heard it.”
—The Washington Post
And allowing for the intense feline jealousy that always colors everything Anna and the Post’s own glamour girl have to say about one another, that isn’t quite the way I, Ed Macomb, heard it either.
But it is, of course, the way she wants you to have it: Anna has always been able to have herself presented as she wanted herself presented. And now, with the aid of dear old Bessie Rovere, who has ghostwritten a dozen inside-Washington autobiogs (In My Lady’s Chamber: A White House Maid Reveals Thirty Years of Scandal on the Second Floor … East Gate: A White House Cop’s Memories of Six Presidents and Their Sometimes Surprising Visitors), Anna has outdone herself. Devoted Bessie waited a lifetime in Anna’s shadow to do this book; it is, truly, a labor of love. But there still remain, among those of us who know her best (including Bessie), a few reservations. We were there, too, you see: and Anna can’t fool us.
I remember Seab Cooley telling me once, while Anna and I were still just bright young newcomers to the Senate Press Gallery, that if you met her in the pages of a book you wouldn’t believe her, because hardly anybody who knew her then could conceive that there was such a combination of intelligence, determination, ruthlessness and insatiable drive for power wrapped up in one charming, apparently innocent and naive little body.
This made me blink a little, because until the senior Senator from South Carolina put it that way (when Anna and I had been on the Hill scarcely six weeks), it had never occurred to me that she was any of those things—except, of course, charming, innocent and naive. But I decided to play it cool, with the air of knowledgeable cynicism one attempted to put on very early when the fates had tossed one, in callow youth, into one of the topmost reportorial slots in Washington.
“I don’t know, Senator,” I objected with all the mild ease of my newfound and earnestly developed sophistication. “It seems to me I know dozens just like her in this town.”
“Well, sir,” Seab said with one of his famous sleepy, sidelong glances, “well, sir, you mark my words. That little girl has more ambition in the tip of her little finger than you or I”—I already knew the old rascal well enough by then so that the start of a smile, quickly suppressed, came to my lips—“well, you, anyway,” he amended with an amiable grin, “could ever dream of having. Mark my words, young Ed, that little lady is going to own this town someday. I don’t know how she’s going to do it, yet, but I haven’t the slightest bit of doubt—not the leetlest—that she’s going to do it. I only hope I live long enough to see it, because it’s going to be a mighty skeerazzle. Yes, sir, a mighty skeerazzle!”
What a skeerazzle was, Seab never told me: it was just one of his words, but it described what happened as well as anything, I suppose. And as it turned out, of course, he did live to see her do it. In fact, he played a major and kindly hand in helping her on her way when he introduced her (at her request) to Gordon Hastings. But when Seab came to die, tragically and all alone, on the west steps of the Capitol after his futile filibuster during the debate on the war in Gorotoland, it was Anna herself who wrote the editorial that appeared in the Inquirer next morning:
“We cannot say we mourn, save as one mourns any moss-hung object that has been around a long time, the passing of Senator Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina. Raised in the lingering shadow of the Civil War, enwrapped forever in a cocoon of unchanging, unyielding, self-righteous reaction, he stood foursquare for more than half a century in the path of all progress and all liberalism in these United States. Perhaps he did some few favors for his constituents and so discharged the debt he owed them for sending him here; but in a larger sense, his years in the Senate were nothing but a detriment to America and a burden upon the forward progress of the country. He will perhaps be remembered, for a little while. But he will not be missed.—A.H.”
It was typical of Anna as she has become in her later years: filled with gratitude, generosity and warm, human compassion for one who had done much for her and had always regarded her with a tolerant, fatherly and protective friendliness. Some skeerazzle, all right. Old Seab knew about her in six weeks what it took some of us, and the town as a whole, a good many years to find out.
There was a beginning, of course. In the beginning was the word, and the word was:
WAR! JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR, CRIPPLE US FLEET, KILL THOUSANDS IN SNEAK DAWN ATTACK! F.D.R. TO GO BEFORE CONGRESS TODAY TO PUT COUNTRY INTO COMBAT ON SIDE OF ALLIES AGAINST AXIS! NATION AWAITS LEADER’S WORDS AS AMERICANS RALLY TO MEET GRAVEST CHALLENGE IN HISTORY!
2
I shall never forget my introduction to Washington. To think I, Anna Kowalczek from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, should actually be right there, in the Capitol of the United States, privileged to hear our greatest President on the most momentous day of our history! It was with a somber attention and a solemn sense of profound dedication to my country and my profession that I listened to the fateful words of the man whose vivid personality and shining policies were to dominate my early days in Washington—and to whose noble memory I hold allegiance still.
—ANNA HASTINGS, by Anna Hastings
There began on that day, for Anna, for me, for Tal Farson and for a good many others with whose lives our own would be entwined in the following thirty-five years, the first of those top-of-the-head acquaintances with the great that were to become a standard part of our reportorial existence as we peered down upon them at joint sessions of Congress from the all-seeing omnipotence of the House Press Gallery. Over the course of three and a half decades we have, at one time or another, examined rather closely the scalps of most of the major figures of our times. Sleek or scraggly, full or sparse, clean as a hound’s tooth or spraying dandruff like aging dandelions in a high wind, they have nodded, turned, bowed, ducked, reared, shaken, emphasized, admonished, encouraged or otherwise communicated their owners’ attitudes to us in the private code known only to the press corps. Out front, the electronic media may have been bringing their vigorous and statesmanlike visages full-face to the voters and the world: to us, it has been scalp-talk. We have been privileged to receive their messages, as it were, from the skin out. For some reason, on December 8, 1941, this fact struck Anna, Tal and me with dignity-shattering impact; basically, I suspect, because we were all eager newcomers to the great world of the Hill, and so brought a new and not altogether reverent point of view, even on so solemn and horrendous an occasion.
“But he has dandruff!” a feminine voice exclaimed in a piercing, gurgling, helplessly amused whisper just as, below us, there came the unforgettable words in the unforgettable voice: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—”
Someone else—I believe dear old May Craig of the Portland, Maine, Press-Herald, bless her heart—whispered severely, “Hush!”
But to three newcomers standing jammed together side by side behind our awesome seniors who were writing the story, it was impossible to be solemn once we had begun to giggle: we were all too nervous, and it was all too exciting, and we were all too young.
Young, and in the press, and in Washington in the war years! Was there ever such a bright and shining world? And will we ever again know anything like it? Of course not, still dazzling, ruthless Anna! Of course not, still ruthless, clever Tal! Of course not, still plodding, dependable Ed! Of course not, dear fat loyal Bess! Those were the great days for us, and nothing since has ever matched, or ever can, being young, in the press, in Washington in the years of war … as nothing can ever match those times for you again either, America. You, too, still had a certain innocence then, and you, too, lost it forever in those hectic, heroic, so-soon-betrayed and forgotten years of anguish, victory and triumph, when giants strode the earth and everything was ten feet tall.
At the moment Anna made her irrepressible comment, hardly anyone in the press corps knew who we were, nor did we, in fact, know one another. Within a week all this was remedied forever. We were three greenhorns who had been sent up from the bureaus downtown to assist the Hill staffs by running their hastily scribbled copy up the stairs to the wire-service booths for teletype transmission: Anna for the AP, I for United Press and Talbot Farson for what then was the old Hearst International News Service, before it was purchased and absorbed in postwar years by what now is UPI. It was all supposed to be strictly temporary, for this one dramatic day only. None of us knew when we would get back to the Hill; we all expected to be assigned to one of the departmental rabbit warrens downtown and never be heard from again. As it happened we all lucked out and stayed on all through the war and well beyond. Three happier kids never existed when we discovered our good fortune.
