The Unconcentrated Mind, Jim

My husband, Jim Hoagland, was a great journalist and a great listener. He would sit quietly during a general group conversation and hear above the noise. He had the ability to synthesize what people were saying and draw his own conclusions, adding a new perspective. He would always look at the whole picture before deciding how to frame it. When people were done talkingIt was inevitable someone would say, “So what does Hoagland think?” 

I asked him why he became such a good journalist.  Jim was very modest and never touted his own accomplishments. But he knew his worth and he knew what he stood for. So when I asked him that question, he told me this story. 

Jim was raised by his maternal grandmother and grandfather on a farm in South Carolina with no running water and no electricity. He walked a mile to school every day. His grandmother was a harridan who, according to Jim, resented him for being left in her care while his mother went to work miles away.  She was also a devout member of the church of the Nazarene. She used religion as a cudgel to terrify Jim when he was little. His most vivid memory of his religious upbringing was this:  One New Year’s Eve when he was seven years old his grandmother took him to the church because the congregation believed that on January 1 the world would come to an end. Little seven-year-old Jim sang and prayed and rolled around all night in the church with the entire congregation as they waited for The Rapture. Little Jim grew so exhausted that he finally fell asleep. When he woke up on the morning of January 1, the world was still there. The world had not come to an end as his grandmother had prophesied. 

He said to me with a twinkle in his blue eyes: “I think that’s when I realized I’d always need two sources for a story.”

The other story about Jim’s great career that made me both sad and proud at the same time. He told me that growing up on the farm his best friend was a young neighbor boy named Henry. Jim was white. Henry was black. Jim said they were devoted to one another as they played together, hunting and fishing, and roaming around getting into the usual mischief with boys that young age.  

However, as they grew older, the unjust laws and unjust societal mores of the Deep South pulled them slowly apart. By the time they were teenagers, their lives were on completely different trajectories. Henry moved away. Jim went off to college. They lost touch. But Jim always remembered their close friendship and how hurt and bewildered they had both been when they recognized their fates would be so different given the ingrained cruelty of those times.

Years later, when Jim went to South Africa as a young reporter for The Washington Post, he was struck more deeply and personally by apartheid than a casual observer. He said he always thought of Henry and their truncated friendship when he wrote the six part series on the evils of apartheid which won him his first Pulitzer Prize.  

Jim said, “As the story unfurled  before my eyes and I sat down to write, I felt Henry guiding me.”

Jim was banned from South Africa after that series appeared. Then somehow he got himself unbanned and went back to that country. He wrote another series which got him banned yet again he told me with a touch of glee.

When Nelson Mandela came to the United States to address the General Assembly in the 90s, Jim was one of the reporters that he wished to meet.

He said he still felt Henry’s presence.