The Storied Life Of a Newsman

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 5, 2006

R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr. of the New York Times, who died yesterday at 71, kept his friends well stocked with anecdotes. These always were (and long will be) anecdotes about Apple, his outrages (numerous) and his triumphs (even more numerous). When asked yesterday to appreciate Apple for Style, it occurred to me that the best way to do this was to ask some of his best pals to share their favorite stories.

Ward Just, the novelist and Washington Post war correspondent who with Apple covered the Vietnam War:

"I have spoken to Cao Van Vien," Apple said. "I have made him a proposition."

This was sometime in 1967. Apple and I were correspondents in Vietnam, he for the Times, I for The Post. Gen. Cao Van Vien was chief of the general staff of the South Vietnamese Army. On this occasion we were drinking somewhere, probably in Apple's villa in Saigon.

"I have asked him to select the finest unit of the Vietnamese army," Apple went on. "I have asked him to allow us to accompany this unit on its next operation to see if the army is all he says it is -- aggressive, disciplined and tactically sound."

"Us together?" I said. Johnny Apple was the fiercest competitor I have ever known. What was going on here?

"Yes," he said. "Our reports will be authoritative. We leave in the morning, we rendezvous at Can Tho."

Rendezvous we did and remained with this Vietnamese battalion for two days while it beat its way through villages in a contested zone south of Saigon. The soldiers seized chickens, one chicken after another; lunches, dinners of chickens, stolen from pens, from back yards, from the bush. Apple and I had brought beverages, so the meals were -- hilarious.

We interviewed the lieutenant colonel commanding, seeking enlightenment on the precise military purpose of this operation. We were told they had cleared the enemy from the area. No shots fired in anger. In fact, no shots of any kind. The operation therefore was a complete success.

Our dispatches were very droll. And before filing, Apple was careful to ensure that we used different datelines so that our foreign editors would not discover that we had marched in lock step, the New York Times and The Washington Post, both under the protective cover of the chief of the Vietnamese general staff.

Jon Randal, author and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and New York Times, spent many overseas assignments with Apple:

I first met Johnny Apple in Sardi's in Manhattan in 1965 when to my horror I was informed out of the blue that I was assigned to the New York Times Saigon bureau to work under this exceedingly brash young man. Within weeks, I was won over by Johnny's energy, curiosity, speed and willingness to listen, occasionally even to me. He was a superb bureau chief, insistent on sharing the good stories with the other reporters in the bureau.

Over the next 40 years our paths often crossed. We became the best of friends. After I went to work for The Washington Post in 1969, that meant we sometimes competed on the same stories. He never let me or any other reporter forget how good he was. Johnny could sweep into Tehran in the last few weeks before the Iranian revolution in January 1979 and beat me on a story I'd been covering for a good year.

His passions were eclectic and his interests profound. He knew domestic politics as well as any reporter extant but also loved cricket, as well as professional football, baroque music, modern art and Venice, too -- and always the good life. For him that basically meant food and wine.

When we were younger, he would arrange week-long grand tours with two- and three-star restaurants for every lunch and dinner. In recent years, he relented a bit but still would enlist me during his regular Paris sojourns in, say, a three-day investigation of the mysteries of varied recipes for such simple fare as pot-au-feu .

And only last year we journeyed to northern Brittany, where within 24 hours he had us eating at the best fish place in St. Malo, then lunching at a one-star and dining at a three-star restaurant.

John Newhouse, author and former writer for the New Yorker:

Johnny was an extraordinary companion -- invariably fun, entertaining, sometimes arbitrary and occasionally outrageous. He was an architecture aficionado, and his vast knowledge of food and wine was best known to restaurateurs and winemakers. A friend might be traveling to, say, Oregon or Australia, and Johnny would tell him or her where to eat. All a person had to say was, "Apple sent me," and the cooking and wine would be the best that the house could provide. On these subjects, as on many others, he was opinionated. Take wine. He was railing against merlot many years before that wine was savaged in the film "Sideways."

Elizabeth Becker, a friend and colleague from the Times, also a former Post correspondent, who with her husband visited Apple three days ago:

Johnny was sitting up, his eyes focusing on us as best he could when we visited him Monday morning. We promised to leave after 15 minutes but Johnny asked us to stay a little longer, just a minute or so.

Gossip was what he wanted to hear, about politics, the latest scandal on the Hill and what friends are up to. My husband, Bill, said he was off that afternoon for Romania to give a series of speeches at the behest of the State Department.

Johnny's eyes lit up. "You know, they painted their frescoes on the outside of the churches, not the inside . . . and they built large overhanging eaves to protect them -- they're remarkably well preserved . . . have to see them . . ." Then he rattled off a few names of churches. He hadn't been to Romania in a decade.

"And the raspberries and tomatoes are the best in Europe," he said, "but the raspberries won't be in season."

Finally my own contribution. I can't remember when or where I first met Johnny, but I do recall he was the first of our group of struggling young journalists to serve champagne as a pre-dinner cocktail:

At a dinner in Georgetown at least 20 years ago, when we were already middle-aged, we turned from talking about politics, government policy, wars and our own grand accomplishments to what we would do in the future when, God forbid, we would be "older."

And someone, I think it was Randal, suggested that we all chip in and buy a chateau in the South of France and spend our final years there, together, with our wives, taking care of each other. There would be constant rounds of lunches and dinners and conversations about the old subjects, plus music, art and football. It would never stop, except perhaps when children and grandchildren visited.

Of course none of us ever found time to quit, to stop doing what we do, which is writing, Johnny least of all. He and I joked about the chateau the last time I saw him. His wonderful wife Betsey said the other day that she had never before heard about the retirement chateau. Yesterday, when we talked of Johnny's death, she said we should have found it, should have moved there together. In fact, that mythical chateau grew up around us every time we sat down for a meal with Apple. It was a feast, not just for the stomach but for the heart and for the mind.