Sarah McClendon: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Knight: Today I'd like to talk to you more about your time in Washington, D.C., and your point of view about journalism in your own career as you look back on it. You have written a lot about the substance of what you've done. I read your book that was first My Eight Presidents and then I heard you were writing about My Nine Presidents, and I hope to read the latest manuscript, My Ten Presidents. I want to talk some more about the "how" and "why," rather than the "what" today.

Describe to me your feelings and your experience of the very first presidential press conference that you ever attended.

McClendon: I was quite scared. I didn't ask any questions, and I figured that if I did, I would show my ignorance, because I'd just come up from being in the army and I had not kept up with current events as much as I should have, and I didn't know as much about the war, really, as one might think. So I kept quiet, but I was watching the other people, and they were very distinguished, very wonderful, brilliant news correspondents, people in history, really. They were writing on each other's backs, the room was so crowded, and you couldn't see very well.

I had to squinch down and run around to try to even see the desk where [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was. Then I saw him, with his hands shaking like this, and I saw him hide his hands under the desk, because he didn't want people to realize how ill he was. But it was quite an experience. I was overwhelmed with the majesty of the moment and with the brilliance of the reporters around me.

Knight: You never asked FDR any questions?

McClendon: No, indeed. I wasn't going to show my ignorance, and I was kind of scared of him, too. I knew he was very much of a dictator, and I knew he was always right, but I knew that he had given one man, Drew Pearson, a very fine reporter, a great columnist, he had given him a dunce cap and told him to go in the corner and stand as a dunce. Then he'd given another man, John O'Donnell of the New York Daily News, he gave him an Iron Cross from Germany because what he had written, he said, had not helped the war effort.

Knight: I also read that you saw the women reporters who had distinguished themselves because they developed a certain personality and style, and that you made a conscious decision to do that.

McClendon: Yes, I did.

Knight: How did that transformation take place?

McClendon: I watched Esther Tufty, and she had everybody calling her "the Duchess." She was tall and statuesque and beautiful, long braids. She had established this idea that she was very

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Kennedy staff and the Kennedy people, that after the press conference was over, if I were to ask a sharp, piercing question, the reporters would go out of the room on one side of the room and stay far away from me, as if to show the press secretary that they were distant from me. And I would go out the other side. [Laughter.] Well, that sort of hurt.

It hurt several times when I heard of reporters making fun of me, and some very big columnist and others accused me of trying to ask questions sharply for publicity purposes, trying to push my own way personally. I was never thinking of that. I was thinking only of trying to get an answer that I thought the American people needed to know. And the way I did it was because of the indirect obscurity of the way that reporters were acting in Washington. They were not asking questions directly enough.

Knight: Did that come from your print journalism experience? What do you think accounted for the fact that people didn't ask questions directly and you did?

McClendon: I think it came from my own heritage of liking for things to be clear and liking for things to be direct and quick, and not liking to have to go around the block to get somewhere when you could go directly to it.

Knight: How did you determine what questions you would ask?

McClendon: That's easy to do, and that's the best way in the world to do. I read the newspapers very carefully, try to see what are the big questions in the air, and I was told by my employers, "You're not supposed to duplicate the wire services. You're down here to get additional angles and additional stories." So I would naturally not ask the stories that the wire services were going to ask, which were usually on international relations or foreign affairs or the latest thing in Congress, the top thing in Congress. But I would ask a question on a subject that I thought people across the country were anxious to know and they didn't know, they didn't understand, or they wanted to know more about, a story that affected a lot of people.

Knight: You mentioned one way that reporters excluded you. Were there other specific things that you remember?

McClendon: Oh, lots of times, lots of ways. I was dis-invited from a party that I really wanted to go to, because it would have been big news for me. I was covering for El Paso Times, and the leading general's wife was going to have a party and she was a close friend of Mamie Eisenhower—Mrs. Surles. She knew me and she was from El Paso. I covered her all the time. So she invited me to a luncheon. They didn't think Mamie would come to the luncheon, and then Mamie, at the last minute, called up and said she was coming. So they called me and asked me if I would mind not coming, because they thought if Mamie saw me there, she would think that I was—she and a lot of other people had the idea that I was seeking to undermine [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. I wasn't fighting with Eisenhower; I was just trying to get some answers to questions out of him, and sometimes it embarrassed him because it showed his lack of knowledge of government, it showed his unwillingness to reply, although Ike was better at replying than many other presidents are, I assure you. So I was hurt because I couldn't go to the luncheon, and I was sorry because I wouldn't get the stories that I knew would come out of that.

Knight: Did you feel there was anybody in the journalism community who was in your corner, who supported you consistently?

McClendon: Practically nobody, except Bascom Timmons, a man for whom I worked and had the greatest respect. He had been here for many years. He said I should go to all press conferences and go to as many as I possibly could, and that started me off. He said I should get a White House pass right away, which I did. The other people in the office staff were inclined to keep me from going out the door. They said, "Oh, another woman around here! We don't want her

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question, which I thought was wonderful. So I have that letter in my lock box at the bank to this day. [Laughter.]

Knight: Any other questions that you regretted asking?

McClendon: No, I don't think so. No. I've certainly had a lot of flak over some of the questions. One time I had to take in some volunteers to help me answer the mail, and I couldn't answer it all. I've had a lot of reaction from some questions. The two questions I had the most reaction from, one, I asked Kennedy about why he was naming two people, alleged security risks, to reorganize the innermost office of the State Department, where our spy list was and our secrets.

The other question was asking Mr. [Richard M.] Nixon why something wasn't done to let G.I.s who were entitled to checks from the government for going to college after Vietnam, why weren't they allowed to get their checks. They were not getting their checks. He said he thought they were. I said, "No, you're just misinformed." So he started working on it right away, and I had terrific response from that. A month later, he made a nationwide radio broadcast in which he said that a very "spirited reporter" had asked this question, it was a valid question, and he had taken action and found out that I was right. At first he didn't fire the head of the Veterans Administration, but ultimately he cleaned out the whole Veterans Administration. I'm told that about 1,500 jobs were changed because of this, an error, but it was really a stupid error in administration. Some machinery was fouled up so that the boys were really not getting their checks.

Knight: How do you feel when there are a lot of things that happen as a result of your questions?

McClendon: You feel very lonely. You come home at night. And I don't have a husband to cry on his shoulder. You feel very much alone in the world, but you think you're right, so you just really feel a little peculiar, but you suffer through it. I had a lot of people, some people ask me if I was right in questioning [Ronald] Reagan—eleven times he and I went back and forth on a question of what was he doing about the report on discrimination against women. It was in the government. He said he didn't know anything about it, and I said, "Well, you've seen it. It's been at your Cabinet meeting. You had it right there." He didn't remember it. So finally, he agreed to study it, so I shut up after that. [Laughter.]

But I had sixty-five letters, I think, from people saying that I was rude to the president, and 100,000 people, at least, must have written me and communicated with me to tell me that I was right. One father called at seven o'clock in the morning to say, "I have three daughters and I realize if you don't make this point, my daughters will suffer."

One woman wrote me and told me, she said, "We should clone you." I wasn't quite sure. [Laughter.] Then a man got out of a car downtown on the street. I was walking along on the sidewalk. He got out of the car and came up to me, and he said, "May I touch you for asking that question?" And I'm very happy over the results over the years, because just the other day I had a man introduce me, and he said, "She asked the questions that we all wish we could ask."

Knight: Does that outweigh the sense of discouragement you had?

McClendon: Oh, my goodness, it certainly does. I'm a newspaper reporter. I'm not up here just to be popular. I'm not up here just to be liked by some of the other press, and to heck with them. The Gridiron Club never paid the slightest bit of attention to me. One of my friends got me in there one time as a guest; that's all I've ever seen. I'm not going to be exalted. Katharine Graham of the Washington Post did make a lovely, beautiful tribute to me one time at a meeting,

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insisted on people not telling people a lot, and his men really didn't want to be in that position. But I think Jody Powell, under Carter, was pretty bad. I think Jody didn't really know a lot about government. One time he said he thought he might go over to the Capitol and visit. I said, "Jody, let me give you a tour of the Capitol and the Congress." But he never did.

Knight: You think you could have helped him?

McClendon: Ron Nessen, one time, came in and he was lambasting a venerable congressman whom I have known, who had fifty years' service, who was a great man, Wright Patman. He was lambasting him without knowing of Patman's accomplishments for the people. I thought that was terrible, so I told him about it later. [Laughter.] It doesn't do any good to tell them that they're doing things wrong. Of course, many times they're doing what they're told to do.

Knight: Who are the best people at the White House you've worked with?

McClendon: I think Marlin Fitzwater is one of the best secretaries I've ever seen. Jim Hagerty, under Eisenhower, was great. He was a newspaperman with experience. I'll never forget, Jim, one time I asked him a question, if it was true that this deputy president, Sherman Adams, at that time—that's what he was called, assistant president and deputy to the president, I asked, "Is it true that he's accepting gifts from industrialists in New England?" He said, "Oh! Couldn't be true. Couldn't be true. I'll look into it," and found out later on it was true. So Sherman Adams lost his job as number-two man in the White House. He went back to obscurity in New England, and no one ever heard of him much anymore, and he finally died.

I think Pierre Salinger tried to be a good press secretary, but they railroaded Pierre. Kennedy's people would put out a trial balloon and leak it to the New York papers, and then for two days they'd deny it, and Pierre would have to deny it all that time, and then they'd come around and admit that they'd done it.

Knight: Were you ever involved in anything that you think was purposely leaked to you? Do you think you ever were used in that way?

McClendon: No, no, no. They don't leak to me. I wish sometimes they did. It would be a lot easier. My life would be a lot easier if they did, but I've always been on the side of those people who were not getting things easy. It's very hard sometimes. Today they leak. You go to the briefing in the morning. You spend the time and money to go down there at the briefing and you get nothing. In the afternoon, they call up different biggies in the pressroom and give them stuff. Leak, see? I'm very much opposed to undemocratic press secretaries and undemocratic press activities. I'm very disturbed about the way George Bush has a few reporters in all the time whenever he wants to, and I think this is the wrong way to do it. He has a lot of press conferences, but then he has so many of these sessions with reporters privately, that gives a few people a break.

Knight: There have been examples of other presidents who have also had a few reporters close.

McClendon: Lyndon Johnson was terrible. Lyndon Johnson loved to manipulate the press, and he was always trying to. He made two people columnists by telling the publishers, "I will give them stories every day." And they were great columnists. One of them is still a columnist. One of them faded away right away when Lyndon left.

Knight: What do you think you would do if you became one of the favorites?

McClendon: I have often thought about that, if anybody offered me a job or anything like that. I don't think I would want to take it. I don't think I would be comfortable in it at all. I was a WAC public affairs officer once, and I apparently had the wrong attitude. My attitude was to be

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McClendon: A few. A few. Not so very many. There was a man in Texas who was a great crusader, and he was shot. Then I had a boss who was a great crusader, and he gave me my first job, Carl Estes, in Texas. He was always crusading editorially, and he crusaded for some special interest jobs, too, which I wouldn't go along with. But I learned you can crusade for the public good.

My first crusading job was to get a better milk standard for the people of Columbia, Missouri, when I was a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. My second crusading job was trying to get a hospital for people in East Texas, at Tyler, Texas, who had a tremendous oil boom on and surging population increases, and they needed a hospital.

Knight: You also said that you prefer covering Congress to the White House. Why is that?

McClendon: Definitely. Because it's people. It represents people and it is not just one ruling power that's so strong that it's keeping secrets from people and trying to dominate people. The Congress, I really truly love. I think that you can get more justice out of Congress than you can out of the White House or the Supreme Court. Our people in this country don't realize how much they owe to Congress. I know they've done some dumb things collectively and individually, but all in all, as the late Speaker Sam Rayburn used to say, "Congressmen are just as good as the people who sent them here." But I think they, overall, are trying to help people, and each congressman's office has a caseworker who can call up and use the congressman's name and get more things done.

For example, when I was a WAC, I became very ill of pneumonia in sort of a rooming house here. I was just a simple little WAC, and I needed to get in a hospital real badly, and I couldn't get in a hospital. Nobody would pay any attention to me. So my congressman found out about it. I didn't ask him; he found out about it. He called the hospital and demanded that they take me, and they did.

Knight: Today, as well as other times that I've read what you've written and what you've talked about, you do seem to be in the situation of having to defend yourself a great deal.

McClendon: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I'm accustomed to that and it really doesn't bother me.

Knight: It doesn't really? I've heard you say it does bother you, and I've heard you say it doesn't bother you.

McClendon: It bothers me that it kind of hurts me that I have to do it, and I think it's a shame that I have to spend the time doing it. But if I think I'm right, I would go right straight ahead with what I was doing.

Knight: How are you able to keep in touch with what you call the average taxpayer when you've spent all your time in Washington?

McClendon: I don't spend all my time in Washington. I go out of Washington as much as I possibly can, and I talk to people when I go out, spend several hours or maybe one or two sessions with people in groups. Then I check the congressional mail and I check over a wide area of the country, different offices. Even offices that I don't usually cover, I'll call and check about their mail. But I try to get myself with each delegation, as many delegations as I can, who come to Washington, and I ask those people, "Why are you coming here? What are your problems back home? What do you think?"

One of the first offices I covered in Washington was U.S. Senator Tom Connally of Texas. His secretary used to do a great favor for me. He used to let me have huge batches of mail, that I could read the mail as long as I didn't use the name of the person. I was reading to see what

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Sometimes they change my leads, but they don't usually change my facts—ever. And another thing I do, I try to keep ahead of the bosses. I try to figure out what will be the problem there, when it will be, and I call them and tell them that I'm working on this story which concerns you. They say, "Oh, yeah. You're already on it? That's good. Go ahead," they will say. I got very few queries in my life, considering the time I put in as a reporter, but this was often because I anticipated the query and called them and told them that I was beginning to work on the story. That's better, I think, far better. Many times they don't know they've got a story here, and you do. That's from keeping up with the news and developments.

Knight: Have you ever gotten into difficulties with editors to the point where they essentially fired you?

McClendon: Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh, yes. Oh, my gosh, yes. I was first fired on this paper that I worked for for eight years, because they told me not to write any more stories about a huge industrial development that we'd been covering very closely. Well, I couldn't get in touch with the editor, and a new development came in that I thought was very newsworthy. So I wrote the story.

Knight: This was in Texas?

McClendon: Yes. And he fired me just like that, and I guess he had a right to. It's like Truman and MacArthur. [Laughter.] Here I had disobeyed his orders.

Then I was working for a man. Lyndon Johnson was in the Congress, and a man was coming to Washington. He was running for governor of Texas, and Lyndon Johnson did not—let's see. I'm a little ahead of my story. This man was a political figure in Texas. It was an opponent of Lyndon Johnson's. Let's put it that way. Lyndon didn't want him to be covered up here by the press, and he didn't want him to be known. So he began to tell all the press up here that this man was coming and this man was bad news and this man was terrible and he was horrible and all this. So most reporters didn't cover the man when he had a press conference. I thought that was not the right way. I thought he should have a chance to be heard. I knew he was a distinguished Texan, and I went to hear him and covered the story. I wrote a story saying just what the man said, not slanted one way or the other, but just what the man said. Of course, the man said things in his own behalf.

I was fired immediately by the Abilene Reporter News and I made them put it in writing as to why I was fired. They said because they differed with that man; they were for Lyndon Johnson, and it was against their editorial policies and, therefore, that's why they did it.

So I've had some other experiences being fired. Lyndon had me fired from two of my big papers right after he became president. He called my boss and told him, he said, "I can't do my job and take that woman's questions. So if you'll please get rid of her, get her away from here." I was covering the White House very closely. He said, "I want you to give it to Les Carpenter." And so I said, "Why give it to Les? Les hadn't been down here in the last two or three days. I've been covering this man adequately." Anyway, I lost those two papers. But the same management kept me on. Les told them that he would take the job only if they would leave me on two of their smaller papers, at the same pay. He knew that I'd tell everybody in town why I lost the two larger papers. [Laughter.] So he said, "Leave her with two smaller papers at the same salary," which they did.

I had a boss call me one time and said, "Look, I'm going out of the country and I'm going to Europe. I don't want you to write a thing about Lyndon Johnson while I'm gone. I have to edit your copy and be careful that you don't say anything bad about him. I want to be sure that you don't write anything about him while I'm gone, so I can relax and enjoy my vacation. I'll give you a bonus if you'll do it."

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Knight: But later on, under Johnson?

McClendon: Under Johnson, yes. I lost another paper under Johnson. I was for seventeen years correspondent for the San Antonio Light as a regional correspondent. They had a bureau in Washington, a national bureau, and they covered the White House and Capitol. So they told me just to stay out of the way of the national bureau, and I covered hordes of information about Texas and Texas congressmen all for San Antonio Light. We got along famously, and we just did a nice job, I think.

All of a sudden, I was told I was out. I had been told that Johnson was in the hospital and while he was in the hospital, the Light thought he had cancer. They told me to follow his condition very closely and find out what was going on. I went out to the press conferences at the hospital, and Bill Moyers was the press secretary. I asked him several questions, more than other reporters. Bill came to me afterwards and said, "What are you doing? Why are you asking so many questions? Why are you so interested?"

I should not have told him, but I said, "The Light told me to follow his condition closely and get everything I could." I was fired that afternoon.

The firing was not done by the San Antonio Light. The editor told me there, he said, "You were doing a good job for us. I thought you did a very good job. I know nothing about it." The bureau in Washington had not known anything about it. They told me they didn't do it. I presume it was done from New York, where Johnson had an almost daily talk with a man on the Hearst paper in New York, with whom he was very friendly. I presume that they did it. Hearst had another bureau person out there covering Johnson at the hospital, too. But I would have given more personal, localized information to my paper. But I lost that paper, and that was a darn good paper. I loved it. So that's four papers I lost through Lyndon Johnson.

Knight: Directly because of your coverage?

McClendon: Directly because of my coverage of him. Directly because of his action. I lost the papers because it wasn't that I was inaccurate in my reporting; it was because I was covering stories, that I was writing stories that Lyndon didn't want written.

Knight: Did that ever happen with any other presidents or people that you had covered?

McClendon: Oh, no. Oh, no. Not at all.

Knight: It was because of his relationship with the press from Texas.

McClendon: It was Lyndon's personal management agreement that he had with two different newspaper types. He was very close to the top Hearst people and he had cultivated that relationship. Then in his early days of politicking, he had made this agreement with two chains of papers in Texas that they were never to carry anything adverse to him.

If you covered Lyndon Johnson, everything did not come out just praiseworthy of Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon couldn't understand that. He said, "You're my friend and you've been around me a lot, and I know you very well. Why is it you would ever write anything that was unfavorable about me?" Well, I wasn't just out to write anything unfavorable about him; I just covered him for what he did.

Knight: Let me switch gears just a little, because I think another part of your life that we've talked about, but we haven't talked about in this period, was how did you manage child care and working—how many hours a week did you average?

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I suppose we all do the best we can under the circumstances. I saw that she had good care and good doctors and good schooling, and she did have very fine schooling. One of my editors sent her to summer camp one summer, which was nice, and some of my family helped me. My brother helped me very much with her schooling, which was great, and he helped me to obtain a house. So she had wonderful schooling. Now she's a very well-educated, beautiful young woman.

Knight: Did having her have any career consequences for you? Were there jobs you didn't get because they knew you had a child?

McClendon: Well, one time she had come downtown to see the Santa Claus parade. Being a woman, I couldn't get an office in the Press building, because at that time they didn't let women in the [National] Press Club. So the only way I could get facilities in the Press building was to share an office with a man who was a member of the Press Club. I was sharing this office, a small, narrow office, with two loud-mouthed men, one in the front and one in the back. I was doing as well as I could at this desk. She had come to town for the Santa Claus parade. I always saw that she did everything very normally, very traditionally.

So she was sitting on my lap at my desk when three executives of a big paper I had worked for for years in Texas walked in. They were trying to decide whether to keep me or the Carpenters. They were going to consolidate their coverage in Washington under one reporter. They were trying to decide whether to leave it with me or give it to Les Carpenter and his wife. They had the other paper. I had the morning paper and they had the afternoon paper. So Les, being a member of the Press Club, he had just obtained a beautiful new office that had just been painted, and he and Liz were going to operate together a bureau. I think before that, they'd been operating separately. Anyway, it looked like it was a great deal: two for one in one office, freshly painted, neatly organized and well arranged, and my situation. So I lost my paper, which was a paper that I had worked for for years. I really felt like I had contributed a lot to the town's development because of my background in knowing their problems. So it was quite a blow.

Knight: Were you interested in remarrying?

McClendon: Oh, yes. I started to four or five times. Once I was going to marry a man who was a Texan. My child pointed out to me that when my back was turned, he tried to burn her with cigarettes.

Another time I was going to marry somebody and she didn't like him, so I didn't marry him.

I was really in love with a man I'd met, who was married, who was in the war, and I had sent him back to his wife a dozen times or more. But I dated a lot, went to a lot of functions. [Laughter.]

Knight: Why are you laughing?

McClendon: I was thinking about one funny instance. I had to stay home. I was going to have a date but I couldn't go anywhere because I had to stay with the child. I was living way, way out in the suburbs, and this very distinguished reporter, a charming man with great wit, finally found me. As he came up to the door, he said, "Why didn't you tell me you lived in Baltimore?" But anyway, I managed. I had some very charming dates.

Knight: I read that recently you said you'd still be interested in getting married.

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Knight: Tell me about some experiences you've had with anonymous sources. Do you have a point of view about how you deal with "anonymous sources"?

McClendon: I try my best to get them on the record. I try to argue with them into going on the record. I've gotten lots of people to go on the record who were not going to otherwise. You can do that lots of times.

Knight: How?

McClendon: Well, you just try to persuade them that it's not going to hurt them, that it really is for the public good and it would be better if we quoted them. I realize when you get into the government, you don't quote the government bureaucrats, especially if they're lower-level people who would be fired right away if they were quoted. They can't be quoted because their interpretation of the office might differ a little bit with their boss, or he might think so, or he might not want the story out. So I respect that all the time. But even then, I try to go on the record as much as possible. A lot of people in Washington, a lot of reporters think that you can't go on the record so much.

Several reporters started small groups for a study of press conferences, and they were background sessions only, which means that you didn't quote the person who was giving you the information. Well, I thought that was silly, and I started McClendon Press Briefing Group once for women journalists to try to get them better acquainted, to give them more opportunity to meet officials in the government, top officials. As a group, we would have them come before us for press briefings.

Knight: When was this that you put this group together?

McClendon: Oh, years ago. We ran it for, I guess, about five years. The slogan was "Everything is On the Record." We would not take a man unless he agreed to have it on the record. Senator [Barry] Goldwater once tried to get us very strongly to put it off the record, and we just said, no, we wouldn't take him. Later on, he agreed to give it to us on the record. You can talk many of these people into doing it on the record if you present it to them and tell them you're not going to take it the other way. Half the time, they don't have to go off the record; they just think they do. But this worked. I had a lot of reporters tell me it wouldn't work, I couldn't do it, but I did. We grew to about sixty-two members and finally had to include men, because it wasn't right just to have women. There were complaints, so we included men.

We were doing very well, but we finally just got to the point where I just quit. It was too much effort and it took a lot of money to get out notices and that sort of thing. We charged very little, charged a very low fee, so that more people could come, and all the networks and all the wire service stations wanted to be in on it in case that sometime they would miss a story.

We had the only press briefing that J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. [Federal Bureau of Investigation] had ever had in Washington, up till that time, and I think the only press briefing with women. It lasted for two hours and forty-five minutes, and that's when he called Martin Luther King a liar. One of the girls didn't think the press conference would be very important, so she didn't attend. She got in a really bad way with her boss. And one girl attended, but she didn't think everything there was so terribly important, so she didn't write such a hot story, and she got fired. We had people calling us all over the country, 6:30 a.m. on, trying to find out more about that press conference.

So it ultimately resulted in Martin Luther King having a meeting at the Department of Justice, where Martin Luther King said, "I'm going to go in there and I'm going to tell him. I'm going to tell him!" So he went into the meeting with Hoover, and we were waiting for him when

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all about. She knew Lyndon, and she was very good friends with his daughter Linda Bird. So he summoned Sally to come there, and she went. I didn't know anything about it at all. He wanted her to be examined by an eye doctor whom he was using for himself and his daughters and his closest friends and his wife, and they were all getting contact lenses. This was supposed to be a very good doctor, and he knew that Sally had very bad eyes. Sally is my daughter. So he had him prepare contact lenses for Sally. I didn't know anything about it till this was all over and she told me. So I didn't give them back.

But I used to do a lot of traveling with Lyndon. He got to the point where if I wasn't going, he would be mad at me. One time I traveled with him so much on planes, my legs were swollen and the doctor told me I had to stay off of traveling for a while. Lyndon said it was all my fault. He said, "You just don't want to go."

I said, "No, I'm dying to go."

One time he shanghaied us, we all said. He took me and three male reporters down to the ranch for a weekend, and we couldn't figure out why he was doing that or what he wanted. We were told to come down there. Of course, after we got down there, he would barely talk to us. He wouldn't sit us down and give us a big story or tell us anything. We could barely even see him.

The next day, we left the ranch and we came through Austin, Texas, and were going on out to Midland in West Texas. We came back to Austin, Texas. It wasn't until we got home the next day that we read the newspapers and found out that President Jack Kennedy had decided to take 400 troops out of the Fort Hood military base right near where we had been and send them to Oxford, Mississippi, to take part in the school segregation problem that was existing over there. It was a big story. And whether to send these troops or not was what Jack Kennedy kept calling Lyndon about during the weekend, to ask him what to do about it. They were on the phone nearly all the weekend. He didn't tell us. The whole trip was supposed to be off the record, and we didn't like that very much. We got back here, and one of the boys was so incensed at the way Lyndon had treated us, that he broke the rule and wrote the story. He got fired from a Houston paper and never got another newspaper job. He became a very fine man in the journalism business, but he worked in other things than newspapers. Never got another newspaper job. But that was a funny thing that happened.

Knight: Along the ethical lines again, you said earlier that when trying to get access to people, you would suggest that you were a friend of theirs. Have you ever posed as someone that you weren't? And what do you think about that as a mechanism for getting stories?

McClendon: Oh, I think maybe I have once or twice. We had a man in Texas who was a sheriff. We had a woman in Texas who ran a house of ill repute in east Texas, in the oil fields. She claimed that none of her girls did anything there but just dance. They danced so much that they wore out their shoes frequently, and she complained about having to buy shoes. But anyway, she wouldn't talk to any reporters. She had a very good story down there. So I had been wanting for a long time to interview her, so I went down there posing as the niece of the sheriff. She was talking to me while I was down there posing as the niece of the sheriff, whom she liked, and she talked to the sheriff. Then suddenly my cousin, a lawyer, came in and said, "Sarah, what are you doing here?" [Laughter.] Of course, that blew my cover. But anyway, it was quite a story.

Knight: Do you have a point of view about whether that's—

McClendon: I think if you have to do that, sometimes you can. I don't think that's too bad. I was trying to get a story about a lot of public activity going on down at that place.

Knight: Had you ever had any other experiences when you posed as someone you weren't?

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McClendon: Terrific response and results, and the results were Nixon did reply to my question. He would respond. He was very keen on trying to keep his ear to the public. I don't know why he got in all that trouble later. I can't understand it, because he was a man who was very sensitive to public opinion.

Knight: What's the story that you're most proud of?

McClendon: Well, I'm proud of that story very much, and I'm also proud of the fact that I asked Kennedy about the security people who were reorganizing the State Department. I got a letter from one of the two men involved. I got a letter from him for the first time. I think this was '62 I asked that question. And I got a letter from him in '89.

Knight: No kidding! Saying?

McClendon: One of the men. Saying that it was unjust and he was sorry I asked it and had done him a lot of harm, and I felt very badly about it, very sad about the fact that it caused him a lot of harm, but I would ask the question over again. Both of these men were being investigated by various committees at the Capitol. I lost a good source of news by asking the question. A congressman that I was very fond of, who was an excellent congressman from Pennsylvania, told me that he would make no more resources available for me because I asked this question which embarrassed Kennedy, and Kennedy had helped him get reelected, and he was going to stay by Kennedy. So I had no more access to his office or his committees. [Chuckles.] Well, you get that sometimes. You get a lot of rebuffs.

Knight: Who is on the reporting scene today that you admire?

McClendon: Reporting scene? Helen Thomas, of course, tops, the most, the best.

Knight: Why?

McClendon: She never fails to ask the question that should be asked in her field. Bear in mind she's in the international and national, and I'm more in the national and regional. She never fails to ask the questions that should be asked. She's got the nerve to press it and press it through. She never lets the White House, regardless of how nice they are to her or how bowing down to her they are, she never lets them get out from under the piercing tone of her investigation. She's very tactful. She's much more tactful than I am, and she has a nicer way of doing it. She gets around things a lot better than I do. She's far nicer a person than I am, but she's the one I admire very, very much.

I admire many people. We have wonderful reporters today, many women coming on, just great women, doing a great job, I think. I think Charlie Rose of "Nightwatch CBS" is one of the best interviewers, because he lets the person he's interviewing talk. He doesn't tell them what to say.

Of course, I just admire a lot of reporters. I think the Knight-Ridder chain is doing a tremendously good job. I like a lot of reporters there. But there are several others I don't like. [Laughter.]

Knight: Who?

McClendon: Well, I don't think they do a good job, and I have incurred their dislike because I have so said. I think that reporters should be not just trying to get another invitation to the White House dinner parties. [Laughter.] I'm afraid that some of them are.

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Knight: You've written so much about your experiences over the past fifty years. Tell me something that you haven't told, a story that's new, something that you've thought about but maybe haven't written down about any of your experiences.

McClendon: I think I have not said anything about the struggle it is sometimes to just really get a story. It's a great struggle for me, really, to get a story and insist on my ability to cover it and insist on the fact that the story ought to be covered. I don't think I've talked about that. I have said that I thought the older I got, things would lighten up and you wouldn't have to fight for everything you get. But you still have to. I have to fight every day. As a woman, I have to fight for women's rights. I have to fight for my place, to be able to be somewhere. I have to fight to get the story. I have to fight for the citizen's right to know, every day.

Knight: How will you know when it's time to quit?

McClendon: Well, I'm already seeing that I'm not as able to work as many long hours as I used to, and lately it's been walking every step with pain. But there are certain periods when I don't have pain. But as for quitting writing or quitting thinking, I can certainly use my hands and write and think and talk on the telephone. I'm doing a lot more by telephone now than walking around to the different offices, because it's just hard to walk with arthritis in my back.

But as for time to quit, I won't know the time to quit. I'm just going to keep on as long as I possibly can. I am reminded about the nun who died out here at Georgetown Visitation Infirmary. She was a great worker for women's rights. She was dying. They came in and told her there had been a big victory for women's rights. She raised up and smiled with a great smile, and then died. [Laughter.]

Knight: You'd like to go working?

McClendon: Absolutely! Absolutely.

Knight: And how do you want to be remembered?

McClendon: As an individualist who tried to do something for society, for human beings, and maybe accomplished some results. Hopefully they can see some results. But mainly as an individualist who struggled to help human beings.

It's humanity that is journalism. It really is. It's not just big business and not big money; it's people. When people talk about politics being so awful and they don't like politics, well, I say politics is people. It can be good or it can be bad, but it certainly is people. We have it going in a lot of wrong directions these days. I think there's too much money involved in elections, entirely too much, and too much money spent on advertising in elections. But we'll probably come out of it.

I think the people unfailingly, if they just could be informed, the people can make a good judgment. But when they're not informed, they certainly will make bad judgments. As Jack Kennedy used to always say, "The people have to make a judgment." Make a judgment. I always thought that was an interesting, funny phrase. But you do make a judgment.