Memoir: The Good Times

Overview
Russell Baker’s The Good Times picks up where Growing Up left off, tracing his path from a green reporter in the late 1940s to a seasoned Washington hand and, eventually, a writer with a distinctive comic voice. It is both a fond salute and a wry autopsy of mid-century American journalism: a world of battered typewriters, ringing telephones, smoky newsrooms, and deadlines met by dictating copy over crackling long-distance lines. Baker renders the trade’s camaraderie and absurdities with an eye for telling detail and an ear for language, revealing how a shy kid from Baltimore became one of the era’s most agile observers.

From Cub Reporter to Washington
The narrative opens with Baker’s entry into newspapering after college, learning the business on modest beats and tougher editors. A stint at the Baltimore Sun hardens his instincts: knock on doors, trust your eyes, and file clean copy. The work is low-paid and high-spirited, powered by gallows humor and coffee. He graduates to Washington, where the press gallery is its own small republic with rituals, hierarchies, and a bar-stool grapevine as important as a press pass. There he discovers the capital’s unending theater, committee rooms filled with thunder, offices perfumed by power, and hallways where gossip travels faster than legislation.

On the Campaign Trail
Baker’s account of national campaigns in the 1950s bristles with train whistles, hotel ballrooms, and the choreography of political spectacle. He rides with candidates, watches handlers script the unscriptable, and learns how the press pack’s herd instincts can create a narrative as surely as facts can. The Eisenhower and Stevenson contests, and later the rise of Kennedy and the relentless presence of Nixon, provide stages for his education in skepticism. He studies the difference between the public man and the private one, the speech and the silence that follows it, and the way a single phrase can calcify into conventional wisdom by deadline.

Cold War Washington
As a Capitol and White House reporter, Baker witnesses the Cold War’s atmospheric pressure on official Washington. He sees how secrecy, fear, and loyalty tests shape bureaucratic behavior and journalistic caution alike, and how rhetoric can fog reality. In committee rooms and press briefings he comes to distrust the easy answer and to value the accidental revelation, the stray aside or unguarded moment that tells more truth than prepared remarks. The lessons are professional and moral: resist flattery, prize clarity, and never confuse access with knowledge.

Abroad and Back Again
An overseas assignment expands his field of vision and sharpens his sense of how America appears from elsewhere. London brings fresh cadences, different press traditions, and the contagious theater of scandal and diplomacy. He learns the uses of distance, how being slightly removed from the home front can make the home front more legible, and refines the understated style that will later mark his column. The expatriate chapters are brisk, amused, and tinged with a patriot’s skepticism.

Finding a Voice
The book culminates with Baker’s move from straight reporting toward the “Observer” persona that made his name. He discovers that irony can carry truth where solemnity cannot, and that the light touch can pierce heavy subjects. The newsroom is changing, public relations grows slicker, television crowds the stage, and the old rituals of copy desks and rewrite men begin to fade, yet he locates a way to be timely without being captured by the news cycle’s panic.

Themes and Tone
The title is affectionate and sly. The good times are the fellowship and craft of a profession in full stride; the irony lies in the hangovers, late trains, missed family dinners, and the dawning knowledge that institutions, including newspapers, are only as good as their skepticism. Baker writes with self-deprecation, resisting heroics, and his portraits, of editors, pols, and fellow scribes, are warm without being sentimental. The result is a chronicle of a golden age that refuses to mythologize it, a memoir of work that doubles as a lesson in how to look at power and describe it plainly.