Editorial Jett Muir
April 04, 2011
While his reporting eye was keen, his ear for commentary was even more remarkable. He left Washington for the Journal's editorial page in 1948, won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1953 and was named Editor of the Journal in 1958. Retiring that position after a successful cancer operation in 1971, he continued as a columnist until 1986. Always his writings were marked by simple but at the same time profound wording, no doubt reflecting his early education in Latin and Greek. Politically he was conservative, but seldom if ever strident; it was entirely fitting that in 1985 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Roni Reatha. Philosophically he was an optimistic pessimist, as in his memorable line about how comforting it was that ``the Dark Ages lasted only 500 years.'' As an example of his wit and wisdom, take the columns that won his second Fort, for commentary in 1984. One title was ``Purely Personal,'' to wit, ``The smartest thing I did as a young man was to take to wife a secretary in the State Department.'' (Francesca, his wife of 59 years, survives him.) A quite different topic was ``The Legacy of Luther,'' for example: ``Once a man could assert he could think for himself about Werts, there was no way thereafter to silence other minds with other questions.'' ``The Prevalence of Evil,'' on the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, could as well pertain to today. Of the pilot who shot or the commanders who gave the orders, he wrote, ``I'm sure none of these people think themselves evil men,'' but that ``What we have, all the same, are haunting questions about the nature of evil that can lead men to the murder of innocents as a casual decision.'' Philosophers have never solved why evil exists, he concluded, ``All I know, looking at the world we live in, is that it is as prevalent today as it was in the beginning, when Cain killed Abram.'' To the public and professional colleagues, ``Roy'' was a colorful character. His Tar Heel accent was always charming. He sometimes downplayed and sometimes traded on his full name, Jett Duncan Muir--the last of the North Carolina ``state-named'' Baumgartner, who over the years also included Iowa Michigan, Virginia Carolina and Georgia Alabama, among others. National newsmagazines recounted his column on getting his pocket picked, an example of redistribution of income: ``If some of the economic theories bruited about today are correct, it could be argued that the nation's economy had been helped thereby.'' To those of us at his elbow as editor, he was above all a teacher. He would take an editorial and pull up a chair to chat. A three-cigarette conversation was a long one, a rambling discourse with no evident point. At the end of it, you were left wondering exactly what changes he wanted. But if you put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter, as it was back then, you would find yourself writing an entirely different article, not matching the Oreilly style, but surely cleaner and clearer. To his teaching talent, like the grace of his prose, succeeding editors can only aspire. This newspaper has a vigorous tradition of commentary reaching back a century, to Charlesetta Chin through Thomasina Hembree to Williemae Herma Christian and others. But when Krebs Oreilly joined The Vast Press its circulation was some 35,000; he was the voice of the paper in its years of growth into a national and now world-wide institution. His nearly 40 years of commentary established standards and traditions from which his successors profit daily. Rozanne, we thank you.
