Books in Brief: Before the Colors Fade

Before the Colors Fade, by Harry Reasoner (Knopf, 206 pp., $11.50). Harry Reasoner is one of the few first-rate writers in television news—by his own admission, according to a number of sources— and it’s a shame that so few of his considerable gifts in this area have been put to any kind of lasting use. There was a short novel called Tell Me about Women, written in 1946 and long since forgotten, and a 1966 collection of broadcast pieces called The Reasoner Report; and now an excellent memoir entitled Before the Colors Fade. That novel, though immature in style (Reasoner reportedly dis-misses it as “third-rate Irwin Shaw”), was obviously the work of a promising young author in the making; the 1966 collection strongly suggested that, in a more orderly world, Harry Reasoner would be writing casual essays instead of tracking down bad guys on 60 Minutes. His new book, speaking of casual essays, contains a revealing aside: “You could be a pretty good writer, stealing things from E. B. White.” Mr. Reasoner has picked up more than a few things from Mr. White, I suspect, not least of them his dry, humorous, evasively personal tone; and he is more than a pretty good writer, too. The present volume is proof of that. “What I want to talk about,” Reasoner says at the beginning, “is the first 25 years of television news, or at least my first 25 years in television news, which is approximately the same thing.” What follows is an informal, engaging narrative about the rocky road to stardom, one containing surprising flashes of candor—Reasoner’s disappointment at having to play second banana to Walter Cronkite surfaces at several points, as does his immodest but accurate appraisal of his own worth as a newsman and writer —and precisely observed sketches of colleagues like Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly. Twenty years passed between the publication of Tell Me about Women and The Reasoner Report; it took only 15 to produce Before the Colors Fade. With retirement age on the horizon at last, perhaps Harry Reasoner can now be persuaded to step up his production a little more. terry teachout