Columnists: The Man Who Doesn’t Take Sides

No Los Angeles Times reader can reasonably complain that the paper does not try to satisfy his appetite for political discussion. Its pages harbor a host of 20 political pundits—something for every taste, from the liberalism of Walter Lippmann and Joe Alsop to the conservatism of David Lawrence and William Buckley. But despite the oversupply of syndicated wares, for an overwhelming number of Times readers the favorite political columnist is a native son, Bill Henry, 74, who has spent a quarter-century at the business without turning into a pundit, or even wanting to become one.

“I don’t have any causes,” says Henry. “I don’t advocate anything. I’m not an expert on anything. I’m just a square.” Although his column, “By the Way,” is focused on the political scene, it also reflects its author’s interest in such nonpolitical affairs as aviation, sports, and the theater. And on any subject, Henry simply reports; he seldom takes sides. On “By the Way’s” silver anniversary this month, Henry recalled the advice he got, and ignored, when the column began. “Most of it,” he wrote, “suggested doing something for which I had no qualifications, such as doing an ivory-tower double-think.”

“Corns & Hangnails.” Without half trying, Henry could have let the column mirror his pride in his intimate involvement with the important people and the important events of his time. Early in World War II, he was in London as a foreign correspondent for the Times when the liner Athenia was sunk off Ireland with the loss of 30 American lives. Through the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, “Old Joe Kennedy, who was a friend of mine,” Henry wangled his way to the scene. He recalls now that “Jack and I used to kid about it quite a bit in Washington.”

The big names and the big times roll off his tongue, but seldom from his typewriter. The product is always unembellished reportage. “He’s not the iceberg type,” says a fellow Times staffer, “the kind who hints that seven-eighths of what he knows can’t be printed. He covers Washington much as an old city-hall reporter covered city hall.”

Rather than weigh the comparative merits of U.S. Presidents he has known, Henry simply nominates them all for membership in the human race. “Presidents are just people,” he has written. “They have corns and hangnails and colds in the head and indigestion like other folks.” This relaxed approach contrasts sharply with the omniscient gravity so common in political columns.

Unaccustomed Leisure. Little in the background of William Mellors Henry, as he is never called, suggests a career as an impartial political columnist. His father was a globe-trotting Baptist evangelist, and the boy got his schooling in far places: London, Sydney, Lausanne and Piqua, Ohio, to name but a few of the way stations on Father Henry’s route. Bill Henry finished his education in 1912 with a B.A. from Occidental College in Los Angeles and joined the sports staff of the Los Angeles Times.

In turn, Henry was the Times’s first Sunday editor, an early movie columnist, automotive reporter, aeronautical expert. As a radio announcer he covered national political conventions and the Olympic games. In 1939, when a Times columnist, the late E. V. Durling, defected to another paper, Henry was summoned home from his job as foreign correspondent, and his columnar career began.

Better Starvation Than Ham. For 15 years, until his long-suffering wife Corinne objected, he produced seven col umns every week. Then he dropped back to five and took on TV assignments to occupy this unaccustomed leisure. Such duty does not entirely please him. “All the stuff those Bobbsey Twins said,” he complained of Huntley and Brinkley’s TV coverage of the political conventions, “came from people like me. I’d rather starve to death as a news paperman than get rich as a ham.”

Some Times men are at a loss to explain Columnist Henry’s undiminished popularity. “As far as I can tell,” says a colleague, “Henry has no redeeming quality — as a columnist, that is. Personally, he’s the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.” Times Editor Nick Wil liams, however, does not share this view. “More than any other person now living,” Williams says, “Bill Henry is identified by Times readers with the Times.”

“I suppose it’s something to get people to read you for 25 years,” Henry himself says of his career. “The great danger when you get to my age is that you’re famous because of your age. But I write for today and tomorrow, rather than yesterday.”