Two Titans of Journalism

The depths-of-winter holiday season always seems to bring more than its share of prominent deaths. Two I particularly noted and mourned these past few weeks, and that recent news makes more relevant, were of the writers Ward Just, on December 19, and Bill Greider, on Christmas Day.

The two men had established very different reputations by the end of their lives: Ward Just in the literary world, as author of more than a dozen novels plus numerous short stories; Bill Greider as author of trenchant books and magazine articles about politics, finance, economic justice, and inequality. Just spent most of the past few decades living and writing in New England or in Europe; Greider lived through most of his working career in Washington. In personality, Bill Greider had the sunnier disposition (as the writer Jim Lardner, who worked with Bill at The Washington Post, recalls in a lovely appreciation). If Ward Just were portraying himself in one of his stories, he might have applied terms like crusty or gruff (before getting to generous and kind.)

But I had long thought of them as a pair. Both were born in the mid-1930s, in the Midwest: Ward Just in the fall of 1935, in Indiana, to a newspapering family; Bill