Remembering WashPost legend Don Baker, mentor to many
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Left: Courtesy of John Harris. Right: Tweeted by David Poole, Virginia Public Access Project
Don Baker — longtime Richmond bureau chief for The Washington Post, who died on Christmas Day at age 90 — once was brushed off at a news conference by someone who told him questions were only for the media.
- "I am the media, buster," the grizzled West Virginia native replied — an instant classic immortalized on the button above, given out at his retirement party.
I shared an office with Don — and an up-and-comer named Peter Baker (no relation) — at Old City Hall in Richmond, next to the Capitol, when I was starting at The Post as a Virginia political reporter.
- Don loved the game: I remember him telling us conspiratorially, as he had generations of young reporters, that everything from the dinner we were about to have with a statewide candidate was off the record — "unless it's too good!"
- Don and his wife, Nancy, showered hospitality on the reporters who came through the bureau — including invitations to their grand home on Monument Avenue, with an A+ balcony view of the Easter parade.
Among those he mentored was Politico's John Harris, who told me Don "was rather modest of physical frame, but he nonetheless projected an imposing aura — with a full beard and twinkling eyes."
- "He was also quite commanding — the senior figure in the Richmond press corps and among the most respected ever."
Don Baker lives on in "A Perfect Candidate," a documentary about Oliver North's 1994 losing quest to unseat then-Sen. Chuck Robb (D-Va.).
- Baker, doing his daily job as a reporter on the trail, is a recurring character in the film, directed by R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor.
"For us," Cutler tells me, "Don was the audience surrogate — the hard-boiled, true-blue member of the so-called liberal media elite."
- "Time and again, Don served as a powerful reminder of the George Carlin observation that if you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist. For he was an idealist ... who believed in the role of journalism as crucial to the defense of our democratic system."
"With a wicked sense of humor, a twinkle in his eye, and a romantic's open heart, he was a great and fearless journalist," Cutler added.
- "But he was most of all an American — or as he put it in the film, 'an Amurican.' We’ve lost one of the greats."
