By Robert W. Snyder
J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families has been rightly praised as the work of a reporter who fused journalism and history to produce one of the best books ever written about an American city. Imitated but never surpassed since its publication in 1985, it stands on Lukas’s extraordinary talents as a reporter and writer and his subtle grasp of a complex conflict over racial integration. Perhaps most important, it reflects Lukas’s rebellion against hard news and objectivity, which was invigorated by a trait that is rarely counted as a journalistic virtue — empathy. For all of Common Ground’s reportorial and literary strengths, it is Lukas’s ability to put his readers in other people’s shoes that gives the book its enduring power. This is a virtue worth recovering today, when news organizations cultivate lucrative but narrow slices of the public and Web journalism caters to sharply exclusive points of view.
In Common Ground, Lukas told the story of Boston’s bitter struggles over busing for school integration through the experiences of three families — the African American Twymons, the working-class Irish American McGoffs, and the middle-class Yankee Divers. While Lukas’s elegant writing gave the book a compelling narrative, the braiding of the three families’ stories gave it a human dimension. Lukas’s prodigious research set the people of Common Ground in the multiple contexts of personal history, family history, and what he called “tribal” history — the history of their ethnic group and its memories. For a book on racial and ethnic conflict, this could move readers from saying “How can they do that?” to “What would I do in their circumstances?”
At the same time, the book owes much to Lukas’s penchant for asking himself “How can I improve my journalism?” His answer, amid the conflicts of the sixties and seventies, was to survey the gap between American ideals and American realities.
Lukas’s own career straddled two traditions in American journalism. He became a reporter in the fifties, in an era, as Daniel Hallin has observed, when “the belief ran strong that a professional elite could report the news rationally, without bias or subjectivity, that it could serve all of American society and indeed all of the Free World, that it could simultaneously be independent and firmly anchored in the institutional structure of society — equally a ‘watchdog’ and a ‘fourth branch’ of government.” Yet Lukas first flowered as a reporter in the sixties and early seventies, when the literary quests of the New Journalism and the tumult of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and Watergate sparked a questioning of newsroom objectivity and sharp scrutiny of journalism’s claims to independence.
Consequently, to create Common Ground, which occupied him from the mid-1970s into the 1980s, Lukas had to jettison the worst elements of conflicting tendencies in journalism — the old muzzling of the reporter’s voice in the name of objectivity, and the self-indulgence of first-person journalism. Then he had to reconcile their strengths — the hard-news commitment to factuality and the new journalists’ experiments with literary form. He also had to develop the research skills and analytic perspective of a historian.
In 1967, five years after he joined The New York Times, Lukas was assigned to cover the story of Linda Fitzpatrick, an eighteen-year-old girl from an affluent family in Greenwich, Connecticut, who was murdered in New York City’s East Village. Lukas discovered the chasm between the way Fitzpatrick’s suburban parents understood their daughter’s life and Linda’s bleak hippie existence in the Village. To highlight this, he proposed publishing his article in two typefaces — roman for her parents’ perspective, italics for hers. When editors at the Times resisted, Lukas desperately telephoned metropolitan editor Arthur Gelb, who backed him; the piece ran in two typefaces. Lukas won a Pulitzer Prize for a story that achieved on a small scale what he would do again in Common Ground: introduce strangers to one another.
Yet Lukas’s successful rebellion against the Times’s house style in the name of greater reportorial autonomy and latitude was short-lived. His next big assignment for the paper was to cover the Chicago conspiracy trial, where a collection of radicals was charged with inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Lukas was much more a moderate than a liberal. Still, he felt that the Times’s codes of newswriting inhibited the kind of searching reporting needed to cover the conflicts that gripped the Chicago courtroom. Once, during the trial, Lukas went so far as to refuse to write a story as the Times had requested because he thought it to be “virtually stenographic.” Out of his experiences emerged the book, The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, published in 1970. The title was taken from an incident in the trial when a defendant described a deputy police chief’s testimony as “bullshit” and the Times refused to print the word.
In an oral history interview for the American Jewish Committee, Lukas recalled the words of Norman Mailer during the trial and reflected on how they influenced his understanding of journalism:
"He was chastised by the young assistant U.S. attorney for embroidering an answer and he said to this young prosecutor, ‘Facts are nothing without their nuance, sir.’ And I think that, in my view, is the single most important piece of advice that any journalist could be given. You know, facts are nothing without their nuance. That is the trouble, it seems to me, with the whole concept of objective journalism — that the facts may be the same but the nuance differs from journalist to journalist. So ultimately there doesn’t seem to me there is any such thing as objective journalism. The New York Times often solves this problem either by removing the nuance altogether or by substituting the editor’s nuance for the reporter’s nuance and calling it objectivity."
Lukas’s respect for nuance and complexity deepened after he read C.D.B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire, a nonfiction book about an Iowa farm couple’s search for the truth about their son’s death in Vietnam. Reading Bryan’s book also got Lukas thinking about writing a book organized around one or more families. The proper story came to him when he read in 1974 how an angry crowd drove Senator Edward M. Kennedy from a podium in Boston with boos and hurled eggs and tomatoes before he could explain his support for school busing. “I remember asking myself,” Lukas recalled later, “What in the world is going on when Ted Kennedy is driven to shelter by his ‘own people,’ Boston’s Irish Catholics?” Common Ground sought to answer that question.
Lukas had entered journalism when a reporter’s detachment from a story was considered a sign of professionalism. In Boston’s busing crisis, however, he found a story that worked for him because it touched him so deeply. Lukas’s first love had been not journalism, but theater. And the busing story, with its public demonstrations and private passions, was a highly theatrical subject. It also addressed a question that had first dogged him in his days as a government major at Harvard: “How much consensus on fundamentals is necessary in a society in order to keep it stable”?
Boston’s struggles over community identity in the face of integration were also echoed in a void in Lukas’s own life. Lukas’s youth was shadowed by his mother’s suicide, his father’s confinement in a sanitarium for tuberculosis, and his own years in a boarding school. He later described himself as a man without a community. “I wasn’t just writing a book about busing,” he said. “I was filling a hole in myself.”
To understand the three families and their city, Lukas immersed himself in books, archival research, and interviews. His long kitchen-table conversations in Charlestown with Alice McGoff about “the haves and have-nots,” as she put it, heightened his appreciation of class in Boston’s tangle of inequalities.
Years later, and despite their differences, the three families, in public comments and interviews with me, have described the same man. He was a “patient” man, as Alice McGoff put it. He talked with her family around the kitchen table and “tried to be very fair.” Joan Diver recalled how “his questions evolved organically in response to the answers, never formulaic or programmed.” Cassandra Twymon, a daughter in the Twymon family, said, “Nobody believed what I was telling them. I sat down and talked to Tony and Tony believed what I was telling him. I told him I was scared. I told him I was frightened. I told him they weren’t teaching me anything. He said, ‘You keep going.’ Tony was a very big inspiration in my life.”
At the same time, Lukas became convinced that “in order to understand what we do in the present, it’s important to understand that our current actions are formed in significant part by the influence of this weight of history.” Lukas traced his families back in time. He also met frequently with Thomas Brown, then a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, for long talks on Boston and its Irish. If Lukas came to Boston with standard liberal notions about race relations, Brown recalled, his experiences in Charlestown led him to see a more nuanced picture.
Lukas learned how the working-class Irish Americans, whose children were in the middle of the busing crisis, felt betrayed by middle-class Irish Americans, like Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr., the architect of the busing plan, whose suburban families would not have to live with the direct consequences of integration. Lukas grasped the importance of race in Boston and in American life — Common Ground begins with the three families’ different reactions to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — but he grew to recognize how the challenges of dealing with the turmoil around integration were unevenly distributed by social class.
Lukas’s book reflects his deep, subtle thinking about the issues that confronted Boston, but his conclusions are offered with little overt analysis because he wanted the families’ voices — not his voice — to be the loudest.
For Lukas, balance was more than mechanically providing two sides to a story. To convey his points, Lukas etched contrasting scenes and stories with powerful implications. He illuminated not just the contrasts between characters but the contradictions that could exist within one family or neighborhood. Common Ground, for example, offers no extended discussion of the tension between the rough and the respectable among African Americans. It does deliver an unforgettable portrait of the determinedly respectable Rachel Twymon, flush with the excitement of having just seen the play Hello, Dolly!, unable to get a taxi to take her home to her housing project on an icy night. It also shows her sons drifting into muggings, burglaries, and hustles; their preferred targets were white professionals, like the Divers, who lived only blocks away.
For all their differences, the people Lukas described shared a desire for community. Yet in the Boston of the 1970s, with its segregated schools and court-enforced busing as the solution, community clashed with equality before the law. Watching people work through the agonies of this impasse moved him not from right to left or left to right, he said, but “from the party of simplicity to the party of complexity.”
Of course, there were limits to Lukas’s approach. At times, the “lessons” conveyed through his narrative, which “seep out through the interstices of the three families,” as he put it, are so subtle that readers may miss them. At points, the historical background on the families shades into ancient genealogy, with little connection to the present. The book is far more effective in its portrayal of recent history, where Lukas shows persuasively how memories and patterns in ethnic history shaped his characters in Boston. But these are modest flaws in a superior book.
As James Carey, the late Columbia journalism scholar, once argued, journalism is more than an information industry. It is also charged with conducting the conversation of our culture. In Common Ground, Lukas showed us how to conduct that conversation between the covers of a book that is utterly factual, passionately committed to its time and place, and open to all points of view. In refusing to take sides, in declining to frame his story as a conflict between good and evil, and in refraining from offering policy solutions, Lukas sculpted an enduring narrative that grasped the tensions and contradictions of Boston in years of crisis. In his fundamental commitment to empathy he didn’t tell us how to solve a problem. He told us how to write and think about a problem. n
Robert W. Snyder, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers-Newark, is writing a book about New York City in the years of the crack epidemic.
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