The first image that comes to mind of Richard Ben Cramer, the gifted reporter and author who died of lung cancer on Monday, is this goofy orange hunting hat.

One of those winter models with ear-flaps that folded up with a snap when not in use. It was probably a relic of those frigid Rochester, N.Y., winters, but sitting atop his flannel shirts and blue jeans, it served Cramer fine at the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus in the late ’60s when no-style was the style on college campuses.

I had met him briefly in the spring of my freshman year when I wrote my first story for the Hopkins News-Letter. When I reappeared in the fall of 1969 as a sophomore, he spotted me and came over to make sure I was returning to the Gatehouse, the quaint building near the Art Museum that housed the weekly student paper.

Even though I hardly knew him, there was something of a thrill: Cramer had paid attention to me! Charisma sort of oozed out of him, all the more powerful because it seemed to appear effortlessly, as if the spotlight searched for him. He never had to seek it out. Of course, I would come work on the News-Letter. Richard asked me.

In fact, it was “Dick” back then. It certainly was not “Richard Ben Cramer,” a byline that came later, a beautiful stroke that only added to his complex image with its bit of Mideastern flavoring. Richard always said he put his middle name in because when he got his first professional job, his name without the Ben was not as long as what they ran below his byline: Annapolis Bureau of The Sun.

Cramer sat in back corner office of the Gatehouse, the editor’s office. When on your first visit inside you asked what you were supposed to do with the ashes that were dangling off the end of your cigarette, someone pointed to the words written in large black letters above the door: The World is Our Ashtray.

Most of us smoked Marlboros or Winstons. Cramer smoked Camels, unfiltered, picking bits of tobacco out of his stringy red beard.

Inspiring the Troops

I think back to those days and, frankly, can’t really remember that many stories that Cramer wrote, nothing that sticks out as a harbinger of the amazing prose that was to come.

Mainly what I remember is that he seemed to keep us all together with the sheer force of his personality. We all wanted to work for him, to please him, though we could not exactly figure out why that was. He walked around campus with an entourage, when that word was used only for heavyweight boxers. He even had something quite rare on the all-male Hopkins campus – a girlfriend.

He also worked our butts off. With a tiny staff, no journalism major, no paid positions, barely able to get one paper out a week, we started putting out a second weekly issue under his tutelage. I do remember one thing Cramer wrote – the announcement of that change in our first Tuesday issue, in big type across the top of the front page: TWICE A WEEK? NO SHIT!

That was another thing he taught us – not to worry about the rules. We were in many ways present at the birth of the so-called New Journalism, and Richard had us coloring outside the lines. We did. And we loved it.

Sartorial Splendor

A few years later, when I was full time on The Evening Sun, Richard arrived at The Sun, the morning paper.

He was the picture of style. Atop his white suits was a Panama hat. I didn’t see any trace of the orange hunting model.

He raced through the hierarchy of local reporting, becoming City Hall reporter and later covering the legislative session in Annapolis (back when The Sun sent its own sizeable delegation to Annapolis and covered state politics with a fine-toothed comb.)

A few years later he was gone, leaving some controversy – and a romantic triangle that almost destroyed the newsroom – behind.

A few years after that, he won a Pulitzer Prize at the Philadelphia Inquirer for foreign reporting, work he did in the Middle East.

When he finished with daily journalism, he turned out some notable freelance articles for the likes of Rolling Stone and Esquire, profiles of Jerry Lee Lewis, Ted Williams and William Donald Schaefer that are still read in journalism classes.

The detail-rich Schaefer profile grew out of close observation during Cramer’s time at City Hall, when he was producing hard-hitting stories that infuriated “Mayor Annoyed.” (A nickname Cramer came up with that stuck.) His 1984 Esquire cover story calling Schaefer “the best mayor in America” defined not only Schaefer’s public persona but that of the city of Baltimore.

The urban renaissance narrative, whereby the Inner Harbor makeover turned a fading blue-collar city into a sparkling tourist destination, had a mythic quality in Cramer’s piece that still holds sway today.

What It Took

The centerpiece of his career was a remarkable book, What It Takes, a stunning 1,047 pages about the 1988 primary season that took a starting point 180 degrees from that of most political journalists. They assume that the candidates for president are flawed and their job is to find those flaws, to take a candidate down.

Instead, Richard found that these candidates were remarkable people who had the type of appeal that warped their families, that caused people on first meeting them to drop whatever they were up to in their lives and follow. To become their entourage. Richard saw his job as to make you appreciate and understand these people.

To do that book, Richard dedicated years of his life to interviewing everyone who had every come across these men – George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart.

What It Takes told for the first time the real story of what happened to Dole in Italy during World War II, why one of his arms didn’t work. It detailed the extent of his wounds, the pain of his recovery. For all of the candidates, it took you inside the bubble that surrounds our would-be presidents, inside the minds that get shaped and warped by that bubble.

Though it received a lot of scathing reviews when it came out in 1992 – mostly written by the political press corps he skewered in the book for their sanctimonious simplicity – there was a distinct minority report by a few voices who found it to be among the best – if not the best – book ever written on American politics.

Now that is the general consensus about it.

With his profile of Ted Williams and, even more, his biography of Joe DiMaggio, Richard had a powerful impact on sports writing. At his death, his biography of Alex Rodriguez was long, long overdue. Only a few weeks ago, he was sued by his publisher to get the $550,000 advance back.

After What It Takes was published, I spent a few days with Richard, doing a profile for the Johns Hopkins magazine. I watched that personality in action once again, schmoozing bookstore clerks, waitresses, someone selling him shirts in a department store. They all seemed touched by his attention.

That reminded me of a piece about him in the Washington Post around that time. It reported that when he accompanied Dole to his hometown of Russell, Kansas, for his presidential announcement, many in the crowd – those Cramer had interviewed for the book – ignored the would-be president in their midst and said, “There’s Richard,” and waved.

The Seducer

Like the presidential candidates he profiled, Richard would do what it takes – becoming a friend, a son, a father, a brother to the source who would give him the perfect anecdote. The reporter as a Don Juan-like seducer.

Just like a politician going after votes, he would go after the story.

It was a pattern he followed as long as I knew him. At Hopkins, he was the perfect late ’60s hippie. He tried to get a job at The Sun, but at that time that pretty much required an Ivy League pedigree. So he went to Columbia and got one of those. And then he showed up at The Sun in the requisite duds.

When I once asked his advice on an investigative piece I was working on, he told me to bring flowers to the secretaries in the government office, as he had once done to get a killer piece on zoning in Baltimore County. Those secretaries pointed him in the right direction. The reporter as seducer, doing what it takes.

He waited out Ted Williams for weeks around a fishing store on the Florida Keys, schmoozing with all of Williams’ buddies, until finally the great man himself agreed to see him.

There are many who thought that, over the years, Cramer violated some basic journalistic tenets to tell the story he thought needed to be told. Something like the problems with accuracy and sourcing that got him into hot water at The Sun.

And all of Cramer’s great work came at a price, an obsession that blew through deadlines, that exhausted his body and his editors, that led to ailments, real and imagined, that kept him returning to the cigarettes that had first hooked him in his teenage years.

Though I did not see him that often over the years – the last time was over five years ago – it is in his absence I realize how large he loomed in my life, in the lives of all of us who came into his sphere at some point in his journey, in our journeys.

That last meeting we were at a reception on the grounds of Mount Vernon. We took a walk, to talk, and so Richard could smoke a Camel away from the disapproving looks on the lawn. He died at Johns Hopkins Hospital of lung cancer on January 7 at age 62.

Just about everyone else I knew from those News-Letter days quit smoking. But for Richard, the world was still his ashtray.
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Michael Hill followed Cramer’s footsteps as co-editor of the Hopkins News-Letter in 1971-72. He then had a 35-year career as TV critic, foreign correspondent and essayist for The Evening Sun and Sun.