On May 10, my blog post was titled Once in a Wile (No Spelling Error), and told the story of unknown journalist Frederic William Wile (1873 to 1941) through the first 250 pages of his memoir, News is Where You Find It. Like me, several readers were intrigued and wondered what the remaining 250 pages would show. I will tell you today. But first, go back and read the first one if you have not already.

I do have to say that the even journalists must age, and that included Fred Wile. He stopped being a young, energetic guy eager to prove himself, and turned into a seasoned journalist, with habits, responsibilities and all that entailed. That did take some of the fun out of reading the book to be sure, but there was more than enough remaining to keep me going.

We left his story when World War I broke out in July 1914 and, all of a sudden, the German population turned into a bunch of militant partisans. His description of Berlin in the days immediately following the start of the war (and of the German government of pressing for what might have been an unnecessary war) were fascinating. What Wile was probably not expecting was the he himself would be caught up in the partisan reaction.

Because Wile, an American, was writing for both American and English newspapers at the time (the US being neutral, but Britain being quickly at war against the Germans), Wile was arrested and accused of violating a newly established ban on transmitting information from Germany to England. Specifically, Wile was charged as being party to a scheme to send information to America (permitted) for transmission to England (verboten). His many German contacts were unable, or unwilling, to help him, but the American embassy was able to get him on a special train chartered to move the entire staff of the British embassy out of Berlin.

Wile was the only American on that train. His description of the long train trip (more than twice as long as usual) to the Dutch border, and the number of troop trains he saw as they went through Germany was interesting. He got to Holland, then Britain, and the took a liner through the dangerous Atlantic to New York, where his family already had come.

He spent his first months lecturing around the country, and then took a job in Washington where he had a regular weekly column on the goings on with the war in Europe. He was now in his 40s, and settling down, and Washington was neither as exciting or interesting as Europe was, but he had regular employment. And then, when the war was over, he went back to Europe to cover President Wilson at Versailles. He talks in the book a bit about the negotiations and participants, but his main focus is on the adulation that Wilson received in Europe, both as the man who ended the war, and as the man with a vision of how a post-war world would look. Not only in Paris, but everywhere he went, Wilson was looked at as a savior, a superman, a man of the future, almost as the second coming of you-know-who.

A digression. Today, Woodrow Wilson is a damned individual, so disparaged because of his southern attitude towards Blacks that his name is being taken off public buildings as if he was a clone of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Even my neighborhood high school, which from the day it opened was Woodrow Wilson High School has now been renamed. But when Wile was writing, the nation’s treatment of Blacks was far from front page news. Segregation was the law and basically not questioned. And, when he was in Berlin pre-war and decided to show the Germans what American entertainment was like, he got his friends together and they put on a black-face minstrel show without second thought or qualms.

Back to our main story. Wile spent most of the rest of his life here in Washington DC as a regular columnist for the Washington Star, then the premiere DC newspaper. His focus turned some from foreign to domestic affairs. He mentions but for some reasons decided that “this is not the time” to discuss the failure of Wilson’s international visions.

He was of liberal bent, as journalists go, and he is not very complementary about the three Republican presidents who served in order: Harding (no one looked more like a president, and acted less like one), Coolidge (he was “silent Cal” not because he didn’t talk, but because when he did he never said anything), and Hoover (a big disappointment because he had been so effective when he was helping in so many ways the recovery of Europe after the World War). On the other hand, he was fascinated by Roosevelt: his triumph over disability, and his determination to remake the country in a new way and the energy he used to accomplish his goals. He recognized Roosevelt’s attempt to stack and increase the Court was a big mistake and rightly unsuccessful. He was unclear if Roosevelt’s economic policies themselves were the ones that ended the Depression, although he welcomed them, but he thought Roosevelt’s primary achievement was in giving the American government a social conscience. An interesting thought, since we question that social conscience today.

But there’s more. In addition to his work as a print journalist, Wile became a radio journalist. Okay, big deal, you say. But wait. Wile (perhaps along with H.B. Kaltenborn) became the first radio journalist. His first broadcast for NBC came in 1923. And in 1923, radios as we know them had not yet come to be, except experimentally. Those few people who had radios still had crystal radio sets…..and that is what Wile’s first broadcast was on. Reception, to put it mildly, was problematic. When you think of it (or at least when I think of it), 1923 was really not that long ago. Yes, 101 years from today, but only 19 years from when I was born. To think that radio was just in its infancy back then is a surprise.

But he stayed on radio, and became a regular, and, in 1928, when the Allied countries had a large conference in Europe to talk about extending the earlier post-war agreement on limiting naval armaments, Wile went to England and reported the proceedings (NBC now working in conjunction with the BBC) back to America. This meant that he was the first journalist to broadcast live from Europe to the United States. Or, as he said, he was the first journalist to report live today to people who were listening to him yesterday.

Finally, a remark about the difference between reporting today and reporting back then. Wile commends (really commends) FDR for his ability to speak to the public over radio – his voice, his timing, his words. He thinks that will be crucial for politicians in the future. He also talks about Roosevelt’s press conferences, held sometimes in the Oval Office, sometimes elsewhere in the White House. There might be up to 100 reporters and photographers present. And there were unwritten rules that each and every journalist followed. Roosevelt categorized what he said. Some things he said were not for distribution to the public at all. Some things could be used as background, but could not be attributed to himself or his administration. Some things could not be reported until an all-clear was given. And of course, some things were for immediate consumption. Wile doesn’t even mention Roosevelt’s disability, which was so well hidden from the public.

No one broke these rules except, very very occasionally by mistake. Can you even imagine this today, when transparency is demanded? Have we made progress or regressed? Hard to say.

Final digression of the day. When I was in college and came to DC one spring vacation on a Young Democrats trip, we had a nice meeting with then attorney general Robert Kennedy, who told us various things “off the record”. The Harvard Crimson reporter who covered the trip for the newspaper, reported our meeting with Kennedy as follows: “Speaking off the record, Attorney General Kennedy told us……” I think that is the precise moment when things changed.