Johnny Apple's Service, in the Best of Taste

· 285 pounds.

The last were the results Apple got from stepping on a scale, the first in about 1975, the second a year ago, before he was diagnosed with thoracic cancer. He died two months ago, at age 71.

Among his peers, a large number of whom were in the Eisenhower Theater yesterday morning, Apple's appeal had a simple origin: He was a great newspaperman. Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of the Times from 1994 to 2001, addressed this matter eloquently:

"He was in every inch and pound of his considerable being a great competitive journalist. Innate talent had something to do with it. . . . But beyond talent Johnny had a seriousness about our lonely calling, about its civic purpose. . . . He got up earlier than most of his peers, considered his beat to be pretty much the whole world, and cultivated a sense of history that extended back further than the considerable history he had witnessed. He also had huge energy. In his prime it was fair to say he was the best political reporter around."

Ward Just, the novelist and former Washington Post reporter whose eulogy was read by Purdum yesterday, put his finger on the essence of Apple's professional personality: "Johnny Apple was primarily interested in the demystification of things: the Iowa caucuses, Finnish architecture, the proper way to poach some wretched fish . . ." Figuring a thing out and explaining it is the true reporter's joy -- as, for example, Apple figured out early in 1976 that Jimmy Carter was actually connecting with voters, could win the Iowa caucuses and had a real shot at the White House. Carter was one of four presidents (also Clinton, Bush and Bush) whose letters eulogizing Apple were read at yesterday's service.

But admiring Apple and liking him were not the same, and as Purdum said yesterday, "there was nothing easy about him, as he would be the first to acknowledge." Apple's vanity was as prodigious as his appetite; he could find talking about himself endlessly fascinating. But when Apple wanted you to like him, he was nearly irresistible. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) talked about the charming Apple yesterday, describing the young Saigon correspondent who was flown to the deck of the USS Forrestal, the carrier off which McCain was flying bombing missions over North Vietnam. They met, liked each other, became fast friends. Years later, after McCain's six years in a North Vietnamese prison, they resumed a friendship in Washington.

Some reporters thought it was impossible to both write about and be friends with a politician, but Apple disagreed. And his friendships did not color his copy, McCain said: Apple skewered him more than once in the Times, in pieces McCain recognized as "accurate and educational . . . in hindsight only."

Alice Waters, chef of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and a founder of the "new American cooking" of the last generation, was a representative of the class that found Apple easiest to like -- the food professionals whose work he loved to eat, and to praise. "He was our favorite kind of person to have in the dining room," Waters said. "He ate with gusto."

Waters also credited Apple with "elevating our national conversation on food" with "important stories about eating" that reflected Apple's understanding that "food . . . is the purest expression of human culture." Calvin Trillin of the New Yorker, who wrote a memorable profile of Apple a few years back, made an early contribution to posthumous Apple-ology. Apple stories are already a subgenre of journalistic war stories, Trillin accurately reported, but there will be more of them in the future, and they will always contain common elements: "Apple sweeps in. Apple holds forth. He is always in 'full Apple.' "

And Trillin summed up the situation for the culture at large now that Apple is gone: "We have an acute shortage of legendary reporters," he said.