Remembering Lance Morrow

I think it was during my second conversation over lunch with Lance Morrow, who died November 29, that I said to him, “Why didn’t I meet you 30 years ago?” We were so quickly attuned, Lance’s table talk was so endlessly fascinating, and his insight into both modern American history and the contemporary American scene was so penetrating that I wished the Creator had arranged things so that I could have been in personal contact with this man (whom I had been reading since college) for a much longer period than the seven years we were eventually granted as colleagues at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and as friends.

The 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who invented what we know as the “essay,” named this literary form after the French verb essayer, to “try.” A back-of-the-book Time essay or Wall Street Journal op-ed column — two literary forms in which Lance Morrow excelled — was thus a matter of trying: trying to identify and explicate the kernel of truth about the human condition hidden beneath the flow of events and the endless personality parade that make up “the news.” No one did this better than Lance Morrow, from the days in which he displayed a notable moral earnestness in Henry Luce’s weekly news magazine to his most recent musings on the state of the republic in the days of Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris. That voice — serious but never pedantic, concerned but never despondent — will be sorely missed.

Like two other eminently readable and consistently insightful octogenarians who survive him — Joseph Epstein and George F. Will — Lance Morrow the essayist didn’t lose game as he grew older: he got better, even as he deepened his reflection on two themes that helped define more than a half century of his elegant writing.

The first was the idea of journalism as a vocation: not just a job or a career, but a calling in which one could make an important contribution to the public life of a democratic republic. Jesuit-schooled at Washington’s Gonzaga College High School in the days when that meant an immersion in the classics, Harvard-educated in the humanities in the days before that university descended into the slough of political correctness, Lance Morrow brought to his chosen profession both impressive literary skills and a conviction that the fourth estate’s task was to help sustain an informed and responsible citizenry — for it was ultimately on the character of the people that democracy would stand or fall. Being a conscientious reporter and commentator was hard enough in the hyper-ventilated Sixties and cynical Seventies, when Morrow began to build his reputation as a journalist of consequence. It became even harder in the 21st century, when, as Morrow believed, much of the legacy media was self-destructing in various forms of ideological besottedness, while the citizenry was dumbing itself down in the social media playpens in which snark prevailed over reason. Yet Lance Morrow never dumbed himself down; rather, he “wrote up,” challenging his readers to be informed and thoughtful rather than merely opinionated.

The second theme running through his extraordinary oeuvre was Lance’s affection for the United States. This was no naïve love. Growing up in political Washington and serving as a page in the United States Senate gave him a ground-level view of the sausage-making that is the legislative process. Later, as a kid reporter for the old Washington Star, he got an extensive (and, one suspects, at times embarrassing) look into the gap between the public personae of prominent public officials and what was going on behind-the-scenes (and under the covers). Yet while increasingly concerned about the national culture and what its decay was doing to our politics, Lance Morrow never gave up on America, even as he wondered just what had happened to produce political leadership of the sort we have seen over the past decade or so. Rather, throughout his essays, he consistently called his fellow Americans to remember what Abraham Lincoln had called “the better angels of our nature” — a remembering, he believed, that would lead to a nobler politics.

Lance Morrow was also great fun to be around. He had a seemingly endless stock of wonderful stories, drawn from decades of experience with the great and the good, and he told those tales with both aplomb and a marked human sympathy. Perhaps my favorite was a tale he also recounted in his charming memoir, The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism. It seems that an inquisitive lady, encountering Henry Kissinger on a social occasion, asked, “Dr. Kissinger, how would modern history have changed if Nikita Khrushchev rather than John F. Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22, 1963?” To which Kissinger replied, without missing a beat, “I am quite certain that Aristotle Onassis would not have married Nina Khrushchev.”

It was likely this fond memory of Lance Morrow, storyteller, that put me in mind, immediately on learning of Lance’s death, of another notable raconteur.

Father John Navone, S.J., who taught theology at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University for decades, had a wide range of friends and interlocutors, among whom the most unlikely was Gore Vidal. Over dinner, that arch-cynic once twitted the scholarly Jesuit, “Now, John, tell us what your idea of heaven is . . . all about those angels.” Father Navone gently replied: “There are no harps. We are already there. Heaven is communicating with friends.” For perhaps the first time since William F. Buckley Jr. threatened to punch him out on national television, Gore Vidal, abashed, lapsed into silence.

If conversation with friends is indeed a foretaste of heaven (heaven being the perfection of all earthly goods), then I look forward to picking up my conversation with Lance Morrow, cherished friend and noble colleague, in the New Jerusalem — in a time beyond time when the perplexities we shared about our present American moment will have been clarified, and we can move on to other topics, and other great stories.