From Reporter to Pastor:

The conversion of a liberal and the loss of a culture

By Warren B. Causey

 Chapter 1
Principles and practices

CAUSEY!!" 

Brad Carlisle's voice boomed from the city desk, clarion clear, like a foghorn, despite the din of 30 or 40 typewriters being pounded and multiple telephone conversations under way.  There was a temporary decrease in the background noise of the busy city room.

Brad yelling your name in that tone of voice was never good.  It could, however, make for an interesting interlude in the busy day for those whose names had not been shouted.  The background noise returned quickly, however, as most people resumed their work while I stood reluctantly and made my way forward from the row of desks in the back of the huge city room where junior reporters were assigned.

Brad Carlisle was a stereotypical big-city newspaper city editor with a shock of unruly white hair framing a deeply lined face, a booming voice and an abrupt, abrasive manner.  He walked with a difficult limp from a years-ago automobile accident and his clothing always was disheveled.  You could not have found a better living example of the Superman comic-book character Perry White.  It was from those old comics that some of my desire to become a journalist had originated.  As a child, I didn't want to be Superman.  From the time I was old enough to read comic books, I dreamed of being a "mild-mannered reporter at a major metropolitan newspaper."

I was probably 24 at the time and still adjusting to the ways of a major newspaper.  After brief stints as the only newsman at a radio station and as a reporter at a smaller city newspaper, this was my first big break at a major paper.  It seemed like an awfully long trek to the city desk with its constant rattle of numerous police and fire scanners, the thunk of pneumatic tubes to and from the composing room, and Brad and his two assistants shuffling papers and muttering among themselves as they red-lined copy.  It amazed me that anything ever got done in that swirling galaxy that was the center of the city room. 

It wasn't until quite a bit later that I learned to appreciate, respect and like Brad Carlisle.  He was a marvelous teacher of journalism, actually quite a "gentle individual" despite his voice, appearance and ways, and a true "gentleman" in the Southern tradition.  Later I was privileged to be an assistant city editor under his tutelage, a job I remember fondly, primarily because of the opportunity to learn from, and work with Brad. 

At this early stage of my career, however, I was more in awe and fear than appreciation.  I had just been transferred to the city desk from the much smaller and less-prestigious state desk where had I started my new career with The Nashville Banner.  My friend and immediately previous boss, State Editor Weldon Grimsley, grinned at me as I walked past the state desk.  He was teasing me and looking forward to the "fun" of my first confrontation with Carlisle.

"You aren't finished with this," Brad boomed, tossing the sheaf of papers containing one of my recently completed stories to the corner of his desk.  I picked up the papers and saw it was a piece I had written about some current activities in the civil rights movement, which was in full swing at the time.  The story included quotes from several prominent black activists I had managed to interview.  Nashville was a hotbed of the movement and I thought it was a good piece and that I had fulfilled my assignment carefully.

"Why not," I asked.

"You've only got one side.  You need at least someone from the other side to balance the story," he yelled, waving his arms as though I was an idiot not to understand that.  Brad always yelled and waved his arms, even when a whisper would have done.  That was his persona and he enjoyed it.  Standing there, my face reddening in embarrassment, with Weldon and I didn't know who else watching and listening, I didn't enjoy it at all.

At this point in my career and intellectual development, I really didn't think there could be another side to the issue of black people campaigning for their just rights in our society.  Although as a Southerner I was somewhat out-of-step with a lot of people around me-including most of my family-at the time I was a died-in-the-wool liberal.  Civil rights for blacks was, to use an apropism from a later generation, a "no-brainer."  I had learned that from everything I had read, my background as an Army brat where desegregation was the rule, plus what I had been taught in college.  I still subscribe to that principle, though I no longer consider myself a liberal.  But then, liberalism isn't what it was in those heady days.

"David Duke is in town, get an interview with him and balance the story," Brad yelled.

I was stunned.  I just stood there for a moment, my mind in turmoil.  I was too new on The Banner to argue.  Arguing with Brad was not a good idea anyway.  I had seen a couple of other young reporters-and even some of the older ones-try that, and the results were not pretty.  I was not about to risk his well-known wrath, so I took the story, turned and retreated quietly to my desk.

I had heard of David Duke of Louisiana, self-proclaimed (or elected, I didn't know which) and highly vocal Grand Dragon of some version of the Ku Klux Klan.  Even in the early 1970s, he was notorious.  I knew who he was, but why would a major newspaper like The Banner give him a "platform for his hate?"  Why did I have to "balance" my well-written piece about current activities of the civil rights movement, especially with quotes from someone like David Duke?

Why did I have to chase down someone who I reflexively had an intense dislike for and had visions of appearing and acting very much like Satan incarnate?  I knew his knuckles at least had to drag the ground.  And I've got to interview him?  And quote him in a story, possibly with my by-line over it?  Though you didn't always get a byline, I had earned my share of them on the state desk, which was part of the reason for my promotion to the city desk.  I had been optimistic about one for this story.

I had heard Brad numerous times ranting at the two dozen or so reporters on the city desk from my much friendlier confines on the four-person state desk.  I had had no immediate ambition to move to the city desk, but the promotion hadn't been optional.  I had just been summarily told to report to the city desk the next day.  Despite having done my best for several days since to stay below Brad's "radar screen," obviously I had failed.

All of these thoughts were coursing through my mind as I sat back at my desk and stared at the old, much-abused black telephone to which I was assigned. 

How was I even to find the guy?  Didn't he skulk through back alleys and try not to be found?

It turned out, he wasn't hard to find.  He wasn't skulking in back alleys, he was speaking openly in public forums, as I'm sure Brad knew.  It took a few phone calls, but I finally got him and, to my surprise, he volunteered to come down to the newspaper office for the interview.

Though my position on civil rights and dislike for what he stood for didn't change, nor was Duke able to convince me of anything, my illusions as to his demeanor and appearance were changed.  He was well-dressed, urbane, polite and well-spoken.  He looked, talked and acted like a young, middle-class college graduate.  His knuckles didn't drag the ground and his statements-while outlandish to me-were eruditely delivered and, at least to him, reasonable.  I got the quotes I needed, "finished" the story and turned it back in to Brad, hoping I didn't get a byline. I did.

I remember this incident well, even after nearly 40 years, not because of David Duke, but because of what Brad Carlisle taught me in the episode.  In his abrupt, intimidating way Brad had reminded me of something I already knew, but had forgotten when I wrote that particular story.  I was a journalist reporting on events and differing viewpoints in a tumultuous era.  My personal opinions didn't matter, and had no place "coloring" my stories, either by commission or omission.

I have been an independent "observer" most of my life since.  For the first 15 years or so, I was a reporter and later editor in commercial journalism.  I am old enough, at 62, to have been trained in an earlier school of journalism than the one that predominates in the U.S. today.  In that earlier school, which was in vogue in the 1950s, reporters were taught to be "observers" in terms of what they wrote, not participants.  That was my training and the philosophical viewpoint from which I approached my work and much of my life.  Brad just helped remind me of who I was and am.

Obviously I couldn't help "participating" in a lot of the things I wrote about-in the sense that I was there, took pictures and notes and asked questions.  But throughout my early journalism career, which coincided with the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, I clung to my training and my journalistic philosophy. 

I was there to be an observer and a conduit of facts, not a judge over them, no matter how personally distasteful I might find them.  The mantra from those earlier days when I dreamed of being a reporter was: "Get the facts, all the facts, from all sides of the issue, and keep your opinions to yourself!" 

"Advocacy Journalism," which I'll discuss later in this book, originated in this period and was to have a tremendous affect on the course of my career.  But when I was in commercial journalism, it was just beginning and it is not something I ever embraced.  In that respect, I'm pretty much an anachronism among professional writers today.

I interviewed David Duke because of a direct order involving "balance" given me by my boss at The Banner, an old, highly respected newspaper of high and "traditional" journalistic standards.   Unfortunately it fell victim to changing times and ownership and because it was an afternoon paper it ceased publication in 1998.  I found Brad's order distasteful, but I obeyed it.  And it was the correct order on his part.  If more news organizations had retained this basic principle of balance, I believe we would have a less-contentious and less-divided society today.

Without a desire to restate a cliché, the 1960s and 1970s were a period of tremendous turmoil and cultural upheaval in the United States.  I was an observer of, and lived through, much of that turmoil.  Many of my reports were picked up by national and international media, especially the Associated Press, United Press International, and all the major broadcast networks.

I met and/or interviewed many of the major players in that 20-year year drama including all the presidents from Lyndon Johnson through George H.W. Bush, to David Duke and many others.  I met and/or interviewed people ranging from Kurt Waldheim, later-tarnished Secretary-General of the United Nations, to a much younger Ralph Nader, to "Steven" the leader of a band of "hippies" who migrated from California to start a free-love, marijuana-inspired commune in southern Tennessee that is still there.  

I rode with "Cap'n Bill," and his crew on a towboat pushing barges on the Cumberland, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers and flew aboard C-130s up the slopes of active volcanoes in South America.  I zoomed down dry streambeds and across fields in Texas at 100 knots in an OH-58 helicopter, going up to get over the occasional cattle that blocked our way across the fields.   I crept through the jungles of the Amazon River basin near the Columbian border.  I was in Panama, uncomfortable to be a soldier in civilian clothes (the classic definition of a spy-a hanging offense most places-though I was on military duty), just before the U.S. action to unseat Manuel Noriega.

I shared a press room at the Davidson County Courthouse with Al Gore after he returned from Vietnam, but before he ran for his first office.  I knew his father Sen. Al Gore, Sr., and a host of other politicians of state and national renown including governors, senators, congressmen, federal and state department heads and secretaries, etc. 

I also met and/or interviewed a large collection of entertainers ranging from Dolly Parton and Chet Atkins to war hero Audie Murphy-two weeks before he died in an airplane crash in East Tennessee-to Bill Cosby, Sir Lawrence Olivier and Pattie Page.  Included among these was a very young (early 20s) Oprah Winfrey, about whom I wrote one of the first, if not the first, nationally published articles, a profile that appeared in Essence magazine for black women.

Through my life, I have written thousands of newspaper articles, everything from full-page spreads on state, national and international topics to short news articles about crime, tragedy and trials as well as lighter features about a host of fascinating people and places.  I also have free-lanced several hundred magazine articles on topics of interest to me ranging from banking to subsistence farming, from modern commercial river-boating to ultra-light flying and private piloting through sports figures and events.  Later in life, I was privileged to be able to take lessons for a private pilot license.  I also have written more than 30 book-length works.

As an "observer," I covered everything from marijuana-puffing hippies and heroin addicts rubbing elbows with elderly tourists at the world's only full-scale replica of the Greek Parthenon and major crimes (one of which I wrote one of my 30 books about) to a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.  I covered state legislatures, local and federal court cases, the construction of the first trash-burning cogeneration plant in the U.S., to the first field trials of a new generation of military weaponry.  I spent time on the police beat, getting intimately involved in the less-savory parts of society, sometimes arriving in dangerous places and situations before or with the police.

Through a concurrent, part-time career as a U.S. Army Reserve military journalist/historian, I observed secret planning for a war in Europe against the Soviet Union.  I was on the ARPANET, the military predecessor of the Internet, when it was still a closely guarded military secret.  I worked with some of the first digital maps ever downloaded from a satellite (I also had a military engineering specialty).  I participated in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, riding into battle with the 24th (Mechanized) Infantry Division, carrying an M-16, a camera, a note pad and a tape recorder.

I hold a Thomas Jefferson Award-the highest given to military journalists-a Gold Award from the Associated Press, a 1st Place from the Tennessee Newspaper Publisher's Association, share an Addy Award from the American Advertising Association, and hold a Bronze Star and two Army Commendation Medals for my military and combat service.

What I learned through all those years as an "observer," is that I lived and wrote about a culture that was in the process of rapid decline.  In fact, the culture from which I sprang ceased to exist during that period.  The principles, practices, norms and assumptions that were in place at the beginning of that age (including the mores of my profession) are long since dead and gone.  No longer are journalists "observers."  No longer does "principle" trump "desire" or "right" trump "wrong."  In fact, right and wrong have become anachronisms in a society and a nation seemingly hell-bent upon self-destruction.

What I learned through those years as an observer is that many of the philosophical tenants I embraced so tenaciously in those days were wrong and have resulted in the death of a society.  While I still write, and have earned a good living-especially in later years-as a writer, today I eschew identification as a journalist.  Today I am a "writer" and a pastor.  I avoid journalists.

It has been as long a road in mileage (I've been on five of the seven continents and lost track of the countries I've visited) as it has been philosophically and theologically.  Those roads from the past and the changes they brought about in me and my country is what this book is about.  I preach today in part because I fear my country may not survive the upheaval engendered by the cultural revolution of the era in which I reached adulthood. 

Only the church, and who and what it represents, is guaranteed permanence, not nations.  In these pages, I will describe my philosophical journey, along with anecdotes from the physical one, in the hope that some may take heed before it is too late.  It almost is never too late to change, but it is getting very late.  One thing I have learned in my active, full, exhilarating years as an "observer" is that human life is very short on this Earth, for individuals and cultures.  Now, I have moved from being an "observer" to a "participant" in what I believe is the only hope for our culture-a call to repentance, my own, and my country's.