Who are those two fellows up there? Carl and Lou Cannon, son and father. Carl recently snapped the selfie. He is the Washington bureau chief of RealClear Politics; Lou is a legendary political reporter who is most closely associated with the Washington Post. And with his Reagan biographies. He is now at work on his memoirs. I have a piece about Lou on the homepage today: his life, his Reaganology, etc.
All right, some mail. A reader writes,
Dear Mr. Nordlinger,
I am hoping that you will find room to mention Charles Wiley, who was one of the unsung heroes of the conservative movement. Bill Buckley described Charlie as being “as uninhibited as silly putty” and delighted in telling friends the story about the time Charlie visited the Soviet Union and went to the Lubyanka asking to interview political prisoners. He was promptly declared an enemy of the state.
I bet.
Our reader continues,
Charlie was a child actor on Broadway and appeared as Wally Webb in the original cast of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town . . .
. . . He was the last journalist to interview Malcolm X just prior to his assassination. . . .
Here is an obit by Tony Carnes, dated March 20, 2022. Heading: “Charles Wiley, 95; War Reporter, Writer, and Speaker for American Democracy.” One passage reads,
Soon after Pearl Harbor, at age 15, Wiley joined the USO and entertained the troops at bases throughout the United States for a year. But his desire was to get into the fight at the front lines.
So, at age 17, he enlisted in the United States Navy. His service included duty with the amphibious corps in the Pacific and a brief tour with naval intelligence. He received a battle star for Okinawa . . .
Another passage:
In July and August 1960, he was infamously imprisoned in a Cuban dungeon while he was a correspondent for New York City radio station WOR. His hunger strike became the front page news at the time.
Toward the end of the obit, we read,
Wiley was born on November 17, 1926 in Flushing, Queens, and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He learned loyalty to friends and lessons of life by being part of a small nonviolent kid’s gang that hung out on 95th Street, shouting out to each other’s appearance, “Yamoo!”
Finally,
He started as a child star on Broadway and ended as a lodestar in the hearts of freedom-loving peoples around the world. To all his friends, Wiley would say, “Yamoo!” And goodbye.
Before we leave: Our Molly Powell, at her New Hampshire home, witnessed a little drama recently. In explanation of a photo, she writes,
Here is a fox that appeared outside our kitchen window yesterday. He had a squirrel in his mouth; the squirrel escaped and ran up our maple tree. In this photo, the fox is eyeing the squirrel, which seems to have won the day. I hope the fox found a good meal somewhere. They are glorious creatures. Squirrels are pretty nice also, of course.
One for the road, from Molly? “Delphiniums, rescued after heavy wind and rain”:
