The Pittsburgh Press (February 3, 1944)
Raymond Clapper dies in air crash in Marshalls area
Noted columnist victim of plane collision, Navy reports
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
Raymond Clapper: Reporter to the last!
Ray Clapper 16th war reporter killed
New York (UP) –
Raymond Clapper was the 16th American war correspondent killed in action, the newspaper trade journal Editor & Publisher said today. A 17th correspondent is missing and 70 others have been wounded.
Washington –
Raymond Clapper, Kansas-born newspaperman who rose to distinguished position in his profession, was killed in an airplane accident in the Marshall Islands invasion, the Navy Department announced today.
Mr. Clapper, 51, was a political columnist for the Scripps-Howard papers and for many others which used his syndicated daily article, but when he died, Mr. Clapper was on the job he loved best – reporting. He left Washington Dec. 28 to see how the war was going in the Pacific. He had spent part of last year in the Mediterranean Theater.
No survivors
The Navy advised Mr. Clapper’s colleagues today that word of his death was received in a dispatch dated Feb. 3 saying that the accident involved two planes which collided over one of the Marshall Islands. The announcement said:
The Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet has reported that a plane, in which Mr. Clapper was a passenger, engaged in covering the Marshall invasions collided with another plane while forming up. Mr. Clapper was in the plane with the squadron commander. Both planes crashed in the lagoon. There were no survivors.
The dispatch did not name the men who died with Mr. Clapper.
Mr. Clapper was born in Linn County, Kansas, on May 30, 1892. He married Olive Ewing in 1913 and attended the University of Kansas from 1913 to 1916, working at any job he could find to remain in school. He is survived by Mrs. Clapper and by a daughter, Janet, 20, and a son, William Raymond, 17.
Started in Kansas City
From the University of Kansas, Clapper went directly to the Kansas City Star, shifting shortly to the United Press Association with which he remained until 1933.
During his long service with the United Press, Mr. Clapper made a reporter’s reputation for himself in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, New York and, finally, here in Washington. From 1923 to 1928, he was night manager and chief political writer in the UP Washington Bureau.
Im 1929, Mr. Clapper became manager of the Washington Bureau, a position he held until he joined The Washington Post in 1933 as a special writer.
From the Post, Mr. Clapper in 1936 went to the Scripps-Howard papers as a political columnist. He capped his career with that nationally-syndicated column which has been voted by the newspapermen here as their first choice. That led Mr. Clapper to the radio and his voice, too, became familiar to millions. But that was a sideline always. It was as a newspaperman that he was and wanted to be known.
Here Mr. Clapper became a notable figure in journalism. Through his years with the United Press, the Post and finally the Scripps-Howard papers, he established and maintained a remarkable association with the great political figures and later with the military leaders of our times. He was assigned here during the latter part of Woodrow Wilson’s second administration and was on the job with Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and thus far with President Roosevelt.
Honor to his profession
From the Harding “front porch” campaign through the Scope “Monkey Trial,” the oil scandals, naval conferences, the political conventions, First, Second and Third New Deal, the war – Mr. Clapper covered them all, always adding distinction to himself and to his profession.
Mr. Clapper’s colleagues were remembering things about him today in the offices where he had worked and was so well known. The purple burst of profanity when things went wrong and the quick soft word of apology a moment after. There was the time he sat for some 13 hours dictating a running story for the United Press from the press box of the 1932 Democratic National Convention and could not be persuaded to leave his chair.
Shirt sleeve journalist
He was essentially a shirt sleeve journalist, although the country boy from Kansas did become a polished, cosmopolitan figure. He lived in one of the most emphatically modernistic homes in Washington.
He made three wartime roundtrip transatlantic flights, but had got his first taste of foreign reporting at the 1930 London Naval Conference. His first wartime journey was to England before Pearl Harbor.
Shortly after we got into the war, Mr. Clapper flew to Cairo, Calcutta and Chungking. Last year, he visited and reported in his column upon conditions in Sweden, England, Africa and Sicily. That was when he flew to observe the bombing of Rome.
Not a fatalist
It was a tribute to Mr. Clapper and the other reporters invited on that delicate mission that the Army chose them because it wanted trained, reputable and non-military witnesses to the fact that only military installations were attacked. Mr. Clapper fitted the pattern. He was known around town as a top flight reporter and his report on Rome was a sample of his wares.
Mr. Clapper probably was no fatalist, but he did have a comforting confidence in his star. It is a long way from Linn County to the places he had been, and Clapper figured there were plenty of places still inviting a look. He also knew that war corresponding may be a dangerous job.
On Jan. 26, in a column dated somewhere in New Guinea, Mr. Clapper wrote a few words which were, of course, intended more as reassurance to his family than for his public.
He wrote:
Just about every individual has some religious charm or other good luck token. I’m not a religious man, but I find myself frequently taking out a tiny brown bear which my daughter gave me as I was leaving last year for the European Theater. Over here seven war correspondents have been killed, mostly in the last few months, and I never get in a plane anymore without checking with the little brown bear.
Mr. Clapper figured that since the summer of 1941 when he visited England, he had flown more than 100,000 miles and crossed the Atlantic by air six times. He was proud to be a veteran war correspondent, having switched easily from politics to the greater story.
As the war tides rose, Mr. Clapper wrote less politics and more war. He carried an early-issue war correspondent’s credential, a little green card dated Feb. 28, 1942.
Early on the job
That meant that Mr. Clapper characteristically had been early on the job of telling his public – especially the Midwest which he loved best – about the biggest story going at the time.
Ernie Pyle was one of Mr. Clapper’s most enthusiastic admirers and he writes better than any of Clapper’s other friends, too. In November 1940, Ernie started his daily piece this way:
This is a column about Ray Clapper. I am writing it because I consider him the outstanding columnist of 1940. You who read him know that his sincerity projects itself outward from the printed page into your consciousness, yet sincerity is hardly the word anymore. Somehow, its meaning has changed these last few years. We grant sincerity to too many people we don’t like.
Clapper’s sincerity is something else. I have searched my head in vain for a way to describe it and then last night Mrs. Clapper put into four words what I was trying to say about her husband – “He isn’t selling anything,” she said.
Ernie added, “That’s it, exactly.”
The men and women who know Mr. Clapper’s work best will echo: “That was it.”
McFarland: Clapper insisted on first-hand view
By Kermit McFarland
Raymond Clapper lost his life because he was forever insisting on seeing things for himself.
As a commentator whose job was to write a daily column of opinion and analysis, Mr. Clapper easily could have followed the practice of basing his writings on voluminous reading.
But he wanted to get all his information firsthand.
On fourth trip
This was his fourth trip overseas since the war broke out. He went to England in 1941 to learn from experience what the Nazi air blitz of London was like. He flew to Africa, India and China early in 1942 to talk personally with the leading military and political figures. He was back in the European war zones last year, visiting Sweden, Great Britain, North Africa and Sicily.
It was on this last trip that he flew over Rome in a U.S. bomber at the time of the first bombing of that city.
Visited combat areas
Having seen a great deal of the war in Europe and even in China, Mr. Clapper, shortly before Christmas, decided he needed to see the war in the Pacific to get a full picture.
He left by air late in December and within a few days was visiting the actual combat areas in New Guinea and New Britain on Navy planes and ships.
Ray Clapper was always on the go. When he wasn’t hopping off to foreign points, he was making innumerable trips around his own country. He visited dozens of war plants to see how the tools of war were made. He went to training camps and arsenals, he interviewed military authorities, high and low, workmen, plant executives.
A good listener, too
An easy mixer, Mr. Clapper was possessed of an exceptional talent as a listener. To get a few basic facts, he would listen patiently to the most extraneous conversation, breaking his own silence only to ask pertinent questions.
Ray never went out to hear just what there was to be heard. He went to find out what he wanted to know. And what he wanted to know was not only what was going on, but why and how and what would be the long-run results. Everything he learned about the war in his extensive travels he looked at for its overall effect, not only on the outcome of the war itself but on the post-war world.
A ‘thinking columnist’
I don’t think Ray Clapper was ever obsessed with any special philosophy or policy, but he was obsessed with a terrific eagerness for news, basic news, and when he found it, he analyzed it in terms of what it meant to America.
Mr. Clapper was the acknowledged leader among the “thinking” columnists of the nation. He was, as several writers have said, a “newspaperman’s newspaperman.”
He has probably been “written up” by more writers in his own field than any other working newspaperman.
Ernie finds word for it
The esteem in which he was held in his own profession was probably best summed up by Ernie Pyle, who said he had searched his head in vain for a way to describe Mr. Clapper’s sincerity.
He seems to weigh his subjects each day, not out of some divine power to see better than other men, but out of old-fashioned horse sense.
His penchant for keeping abreast of events, if not actually ahead of them, frequently caused him to change his opinions.
He once said:
I try to learn from events. Events have not been consistent, so why should I?
Often violently criticized
This often drew violent criticism from those of his readers who were set in their thinking, but in the long run it was one of his chief assets.
Mr. Clapper’s daily column appeared in more than 180 newspapers.
His success as a columnist did not develop from any spectacular writing or sudden sensations. He became internationally famous the hard way.
Not spectacular writer
Mr. Clapper began writing a daily political column about 10 years ago, quitting his job as chief of the Washington Bureau of the United Press to work for The Washington Post, which had just been purchased by Eugene Meyer.
In less than two years, however, he joined the Scripps-Howard papers and began writing the column which has been appearing in The Pittsburgh Press ever since.
It wasn’t long until the United Feature Syndicate purchased rights to the column. It didn’t sell too well at first because, as one writer put it, “the success of Clapper is the triumph of the solid, unspectacular man.”
Clapper visited here in November
Raymond Clapper visited Pittsburgh a number of times, and had many personal friends here.
His last visit was in November, when he came here with his wife, who sponsored an LST at a launching ceremony at the shipyard of the American Bridge Company in Ambridge.
On that visit, he inspected Pittsburgh district war plants and wrote several columns on them.
The year before, in September, he spoke at a United War Fund rally in Syria Mosque.
As a political reporter, he came to this area in several tours of the country designed to determine public sentiment, and also accompanying various candidates on tour. He was a member of the party which visited West Middlesex with Governor Alf M. Landon in 1936.
Mrs. Clapper, a lecturer in her own right, addressed the Democratic Women’s Guild here in October 1942.