As I, Ah, Was Saying

Public figures who frequently complain that they are misquoted seldom realize that their best friends are often newspapermen--who don't quote them verbatim. Last week the Washington Post proved it. Blunt, bellicose District Commissioner (i.e., "Mayor") J. Russell Young, who used to be a newspaperman himself, had made a speech of welcome at a dinner for new Congressmen. The Post, out after Young's scalp, took the speech down on a wire recorder and printed it in full, two columns long. It included every grunt and groan, every dangling participle, every unfinished sentence that Young had uttered. The off-the-cuff speech was no worse than hundreds of others. But, said Executive Editor Frank Dennis, "Some of us around here just got tired of cleaning up speeches in reporting them. So we decided to run this thing exactly the way he said it."

Excerpts: "To you members of Congress, all over the room--I don't know who they are all--gentlemen, I want to say this: you have come to, ah, not only a great city--you've just seen its picture-- but your duties are going to be very perplexing and unusual, because the city of Washington is a federal city . . . Realize that we people of Washington who have no vote, no say in our government, need the support of you gentlemen who have come here tonight and don't know anything in the world about Washington . . . Disrespectfully I don't intend it that way, but I suspect, sometimes they put members on our committee--they don't know where to put 'em. But that's no disrespect to the men on the committee. That's probably the, the, ah, the, ah, probably the, ah, custom of the, ah, House . . ."

The Post also warned other politicos: it was planning to use the recorder again--whenever "the occasion warrants."

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