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Richard Ben Cramer in the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom, celebrating his 1979 Pulitzer Prize

By Charles Layton

Let me tell you about a guy I knew, who died this week.

The papers ran obits on him, and the Internet has been burning up with commentary about his wildly original accomplishments as a writer. But none of the obits even mentioned that he and a girlfriend once brought a camel into the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom as a practical joke on one of our editors. And very little of what’s been written so far quite captures the delicious hash of qualities that was Richard Ben Cramer, his mix of hilarious eccentricity, enormous ego strength, superhuman energy and originality as a writer.

At the Inquirer, we all knew Cramer was going to be big. He won a Pulitzer Prize for us in 1979 for his reporting on the Middle East – reporting that included an account of an audacious two-mile walk Cramer took across the no-man’s-land between the Israeli and Egyptian armies. His story simply described what he saw on that little hike; it emphasized not the conflict between the two hostile forces but rather the humanity of the ordinary soldiers on both sides. It was unlike any other battlefield account ever written.

He developed into a brilliant writer for national magazines, which eventually led to a publisher’s contract for a book about the lives of six candidates in the 1988 presidential race. That book, What It Takes: the Way to the White House, is acknowledged now as one of the two or three best books ever written about American politics. Some say it’s the very best.

After Cramer’s death became known this week, White House spokesman Jay Carney called him the greatest political journalist ever, and Joe Biden, who had been a featured character in What It Takes, said: “It is a powerful thing to read a book someone has written about you, and to find both the observations and criticisms so sharp and insightful that you learn something new and meaningful about yourself.” Working politicians do not speak that way about any other reporter I can think of. Only Richard Ben Cramer.

In a talk in 2011 to a group of students at the University of Pennsylvania, Cramer explained how he – a writer with no previous experience covering Washington – convinced Random House to give him a book contract. He said he told the editors, “Look, I don’t know who the cast of characters is yet, and I can’t tell you exactly what the story line is going to be, but you just give me a boatload of money and I’ll see you in a few years, and don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” That is Cramerspeak. I cannot verify that those are exactly the words he used in negotiating with the editors, but they do pretty much describe the deal he came away with. His advance, he has confirmed, was in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. Cramer was one persuasive customer.

Having struck that deal, he then had to go out and produce, which proved to be a problem. He arrived in Washington in late 1986 with no contacts and no clout. Most of the politicians who were going to be candidates in the 1988 race had never heard of Cramer. And when he started calling the offices of these bigshots – Bob Dole, George Bush, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt – he couldn’t get an interview with any of them. He was put off, evaded and ignored. Even with his silver-tongued powers of persuasion, he couldn’t get the access he needed to these men.

“So I went to their home towns,” Cramer recalled, “and I talked to their mamas. Because who knows these guys? Their mamas. And I said, ‘Tell me about this kid, who thinks he is so great that he’s gonna be president.’ And they would bring out the photo album and the report cards and all their essays from school, and we would begin to discuss their son.”

After he talked to the mamas he went to see the candidates’ brothers and sisters, and then the mamas’ brothers and sisters, and the dads, and the candidates’ first-grade teachers and college roommates and first employers for summer jobs. And next-door neighbors, and roommates, and old girl friends, “and everybody they ever knew.”

Only after all that did he begin to follow the candidates around on the campaign trail. And by then, after all his meticulous background work, he said, “I wasn’t just another guy on the campaign bus, I was the guy that their Aunt Sarah had been calling them about. In fact, I was their only link to Aunt Sarah… So I was giving them news of their aunts and their cousins and their best friends and their old college roommate who they hadn’t seen for 30 years. And I knew more about their lives than they did at that point.”

Thus did he burrow his way into a deeper access to the candidates than any of the seasoned Washington reporters could ever dream of. He had simply outworked those other reporters. He understood the candidates far better than they did. Hell, he was practically seeing the world through the candidates’ own eyes. And he wrote a book that explained, in glorious depth of detail, how these extraordinary men got to be who they were and what motivated them to take up the most difficult task in politics: running for president.

The book came out in 1992 at 1,047 pages, a daunting length. Also, by the time it was published, the 1988 campaign was long over and a new campaign was under way. Perhaps for those reasons, What It Takes didn’t sell well. Which was a shame, because by the time the book was done Cramer had about burned through his entire publisher’s advance.

Sometime in the ‘90s, after his book was out, Mary and I spent a day and an evening with Cramer and his wife at an old farmhouse property they had bought in Chestertown, Maryland. He showed us around this large, weedy, unkempt place, explaining how he was going to have every room of the house wired for Internet access (the Internet was new then) and fix up one of the outbuildings (some old, falling-down chickenhouse or barn) as a writing office. He seemed almost as expansively enthusiastic about that money pit of a property as he was about his writing. He had grand (maybe grandiose) dreams.

Cramer’s next book would be entirely different; it would be about Joe DiMaggio. He was just starting to work on that one, and when I asked him what his vision for it was, he said he wanted it to be “tissue thin,” in contrast to the brick-thick political book. That notwithstanding, he was already growing obsessed with the research and maybe a little frantic, as was his wont. I came to think that his style of operation was to rope himself into commitments that put extraordinary pressure on himself to do the exhausting work those commitments required.

Published in 2000, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life did indeed turn out to be a much shorter book than What it Takes, but it was, like all Cramer’s work, comprehensively researched and gloriously well-written. It became a New York Times best seller. And although What It Takes failed commercially, it became, after 15 or 20 years, extravagantly praised by writers, literate politicos and, for all I know, scholars. It is still in print.

Cramer always said that what interested him most about presidential candidates was their willingness to pour every milligram of energy into this soul-crushing, family punishing, long-shot gamble to be president. He said he wanted to understand why a person would do such a thing.

But in my opinion Cramer was just exactly that type of person himself – a man who cultivated huge dreams and ambitions and then gambled the whole hacienda to make them come true.

When I think about Cramer I usually think about what Jack Kerouac wrote in On The Road: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

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The University of Texas tower — the perfect place for a sniper

By Charles Layton

Before last week’s massacre at Newtown, Connecticut — and before the others at Virginia Tech, at Fort Hood, Texas, at Aurora, Colorado, and all the way back to the 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School — decades before all those, there was the sniper shooting by Charles Whitman at the University of Texas.

I was there that day and witnessed it.

It was the summer of 1966. My first wife and I were students at UT. She had a class that day, and we had planned to meet for lunch as soon as her class let out. Driving in to meet her, I heard a radio report that a sniper had opened fire from the observation deck of the tower of the Main Library. He had already killed and wounded an unknown number of people and was still said to be firing down randomly as I parked my car nearby. “It’s like a battle scene,” the radio reporter said. “He fires a shot, and another shot, and another shot … it’s a battle between the sniper and the police.”

The radio said the sniper seemed to be a good shot. Some of those he hit had been several blocks away from the tower, about as far away as I then was. People were urged to stay clear of the campus.

But there was no way I was going to stay clear; I was worried about the safety of my wife. For all I knew she was one of those who had already been shot. She would have had to pass very near that library tower on her way to meet me for lunch.

By the time I parked, I could hear the rifle fire. Moving onto the campus, I tried to keep out of sight of the top of the tower where Whitman (we didn’t yet know his name) would have been. I dodged behind the Education Building, then behind a corner of Parlin Hall, which housed the English Department, and then behind a high stone wall running along the edge of a large grass-and-pavement expanse directly in front of the tower. Once behind that stone wall, there was nothing to do but stay put.

Policemen, sheriff’s deputies and other lawmen had taken cover along the wall, leaning out occasionally to fire a shot in Whitman’s direction. By the time I arrived they pretty much had him pinned down, although once in a while a hurried shot still issued from up on the observation deck.

I had been on that observation deck myself many times — we all had; it was the most peaceful spot on campus, just a beautiful place to stand in the fresh breeze and look out across the city of Austin and beyond, westward, toward the hill country. Anyone could go up there during library hours. You simply took an elevator to the 27th floor, then up one flight of stairs, then through a door that put you out on the landing. That’s what Whitman had done.

From where I stood, I had a partial view of the expanse of lawns and paved promenade between the place where I had taken cover and the tower building. It was an area called The South Mall, a large open space where students would often lie on the grass and read a book, or eat a sandwich, or play with a dog. It was the first place I ever saw a dog catch a frisbie.

On the day of the shooting, acts of high drama took place there. People were shot while trying to help other people who had been shot. These casualties, both dead and wounded, were lying on the ground when I arrived. I could see a young woman, alive and well, who had been caught in the open by Whitman’s gunfire and was now crouched behind the concrete base of a flag pole, out of his view but unable to move. She must have been terrified.

What none of us on the ground knew at the time was that three Austin police officers were making their way to the top of the tower in order to access the landing where Whitman was. The top of the building was square, with a somewhat ridiculous-looking Greek temple at its apex, clock faces just below that, and then below the clock faces a walkway that reached around the building on all four sides. It was an impressive act of bravery for those policemen to step out onto that walkway, not knowing around which corner the sniper might suddenly appear, rifle blazing. As it happened, they got the drop on Whitman and killed him.

I don’t recall how we on the ground learned that the gun fight was over and the sniper was dead. Maybe the news came by radio to one or more of the policemen nearby. But somehow we all knew at once, and we surged out from our hiding places, intending, I guess, to see to the wounded. Along with grief and shock, one could also feel a sense of rage in that crowd, as if we wanted to find the sniper’s corpse and desecrate it, hang it from a pole.

I saw a stretcher being carried out of the building with a body on it — one of three people Whitman had murdered inside the tower building. A blanket covered the body, and there was blood. After killing the three inside, Whitman had begun his potshot barrage across the campus, killing 11 other people. Earlier that day he had also killed his wife and his mother. He killed 16 souls in all and wounded 32.

I cannot claim that having seen that incident gives me any special insight into how people may be feeling now in Connecticut. The Connecticut victims were mainly small children. Ours were college students and employees. I didn’t know any of the UT victims personally.

Most of us in Austin had never heard of such an indiscriminately murderous act before. We had little with which to compare it. I believe most of us considered it a lamentable, freakish, once-in-a-lifetime aberration. Times were different in 1966. As my ex-wife told me in an email the other day, “My memory, very vivid, is how shocked we were that someone would take a gun to kill random groups of people. Now we are not so shocked.”

Not so shocked, but maybe even more distressed, and very saddened.

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