George Tames Oral History Interviews, January 13 through May 16, 1988

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened December, 1988
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[i]

PREFACE

In 1846, an unknown cameraman took the first photograph of the United States Capitol, a view of the East Front. Thereafter the Capitol, from all angles, became the subject of countless amateur and professional photographers. During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth most photography took place outside the building, due both to its dimly lit interior and to the antipathy many committee chairmen felt about the distractions of flash powder and bulbs. Eventually, photographers moved into the building, shooting everywhere at will, except within the Senate and House chambers. By the 1980s, television cameras penetrated even this haven.

Nearly a century after that first photo, George Tames began photographing the people and events of Capitol Hill, first for Time-Life and later for the New York Times. During the course of a long career that ranged from the 1940s through the 1980s, Tames developed access to, and captured the likenesses of more significant members of Congress, and had his work reproduced more widely in influential publications than any other photographer in American political history. He developed a style contrary to the "herd instinct" that led other photographers to group together outside a closed door waiting for a standard shot. Instead, his

[ii]

pictures demonstrate an artistic eye, an intense sense of place, and a special intimacy with his subjects.

George Tames was born in the shadow of the Capitol Dome, in a Washington alley house on January 21, 1919, into a Greek-Albanian immigrant family, and "born into the Democratic party" as well. The son of a pushcart peddler, he dropped out of high school during the Depression to help his family, and took a job as an office-boy in the Washington bureau of Time-Life. Carrying equipment for the magazines' photographers, Tames became both a self-taught photographer and writer. When World War II drew senior photographers to distant battlefields, it opened opportunities for young Tames in Washington. During the war he took pictures of the Truman committee investigation into the national defense program, and of other major events at the Capitol. At the White House, he had the opportunity to photograph his family's idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, as he did every president from Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

After the war, in 1945, Tames joined the staff of the New York Times, where he remained until his retirement in 1985. He defined his own daily assignments, following bits of information and inside tips to decide who and what to photograph. As the Times' Washington bureau chief James Reston observed, Tames' camera got him into places closed to other reporters. He observed prominent senators close-hand, engaged them in informal

[iii]

conversation and banter, and overheard their deliberations. He became particularly close to John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, trading jokes and gossip with them as he recorded their activities on film.

George Tames' photos in the New York Times, especially those that appeared in its Sunday Magazine, created a visual record of Washington's more celebrated inhabitants, in moments of triumph and tragedy, and in casual, candid moments of reflection and relaxation. He offered his viewers a chance to see the Senate as he saw it on a regular basis -- for he used the congressional press galleries as the center of his operations, ate lunch daily at the press table in the Senate restaurant, and prowled the corridors of the Capitol as purposefully as any lobbyist or staff member. In this oral history he recalls some of the stories behind his more celebrated photographs, and presents another dimension to his perspective of the Senate through the camera's lens.

About the Interviewer: -- Donald A. Ritchie is associate historian of the Senate Historical Office. A graduate of C.C.N.Y., he received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. He has published articles on American political history and oral

[iv]

history, including "Oral History in the Federal Government," which appeared in the Journal of American History. His books include James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (Harvard Press, 1980); Heritage of Freedom: History of the United States (Macmillan, 1985); and The Senate (Chelsea House, 1988). He also edits the Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series) (Government Printing Office, 1978-). A former president of the Oral History Association and Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), he received OHMAR's Forrest C. Pogue Award for distinguished contributions to the field of oral history.

[1]

INTRODUCTION TO THE HILL
Interview #1
Wednesday, January 13, 1988

RITCHIE: Can you tell me about your background?

TAMES: All right. My name is George Tames. I was born on January 21, 1919, in Washington, D.C., within the shadow of the Capitol, at the old Episcopal Hospital on North Capitol Street. I was raised in Southwest Washington, again within four city blocks of the Capitol. I remember the building very well. I didn't know what it was, as a young boy, but I remember seeing it. My first visit to the Capitol occurred I guess in the first grade, when our teacher took us on a field trip and we walked up to the Capitol, and got a chance to ride on the old subway cars. That was a big treat for us, and we took a turn from the Capitol to the Senate Office Building and back again, and made our tour of the Capitol Building.

Then in later years I was at the Capitol as part of the mob at the swearing in of [Franklin D.] Roosevelt in '36, for his second term. In '32 I was too young, and I don't recall whether I bothered to go to the Inauguration, but I do remember watching the Inaugural parade, because I can still see in my mind's eye,

[2]

Roosevelt and [Herbert] Hoover going up Pennsylvania Avenue in their top hats, going up to the Capitol and coming back. I probably watched it from the old Post Office Building, because I remember us boys from Southwest scouring the old markets in Southwest and getting discarded onion crates, apple boxes, and anything that could support human weight. I remember going up Twelfth Street carrying about ten of these onion crates. And then we'd sell them for twenty-five cents apiece to the spectators along the route, so they could stand on them and get to see the president when he came by -- because there was such a crowd, such a mob scene, that you couldn't see over. We'd sell these crates and then we'd get away in a hurry, because a lot of times they would collapse, and we didn't want to be around when that happened! I did this when Hoover was elected, I was there selling boxes on Pennsylvania Avenue. But in '36 I was old enough to head up to the Hill and watch it from there, and it was quite a scene. It was so exciting.

My next introduction to the Hill was the introduction of a long love affair, that began in 1940 -- maybe 1939, because by 1940 I was pretty well established. In 1939, when I was a copyboy for Time and Life in Washington, it was my job to be a gopher, and I would go up and pick up bills, and handouts, and releases, and whenever there was an assignment up there for one of the Time and Life photographers to photograph any personality, invariably I

[3]

would ask to come along and hold their gear, and write their captions, and so forth. I became fascinated with a camera, and also realized that being the son of a Greek-Albanian immigrants, a first generation American who couldn't speak English when he went to school, that my schooling was minimal. In fact, I dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, I had to go to work, there just wasn't any money. Being the oldest, I was responsible. In the old tradition, my mother and father never let me forget the fact that I was head of the family, and that I was responsible for my younger brothers and sisters. That was a burden I didn't want. That's why I can never remember believing in Santa Claus, .because I was the one who was told there wasn't one, but I was to take care of the younger ones. I always thought I was short-changed on that one.

Anyway, I came to the Hill and started in 1940 going with the photographers and eventually photographing individual members. But we didn't cover the Hill the way it's covered today, so intensely. It was a much more leisurely pace, particularly before World War II, and during the war there wasn't that much of a churning up there. I remember covering [Harry] Truman's War Investigating Committee, but I don't recall that there was that much of a flap over it. But you have to remember also that I worked for a weekly magazine, and didn't have to be on top of everyday affairs. I feel sad every time that I walk up to the

[4]

Hill nowadays and realize how much security is around and how many guards are there. I used to feel that that was my Capitol and my Senate -- I didn't go around the House that much, I just didn't feel that I could become acquainted with that terrific number. Unless the House members were chairmen or were making noises, I very seldom got to go around them. The Speaker, of course, and the leaders, I knew them. Whereas on the Senate side, I think by 1950 I recognized every member. Of course, we were all about the same age. They were slightly older. I considered them old when they were ten years older than me. We all had children about the same age, so it was a personal relationship. It was a sort of a family atmosphere up there, unlike the frenetic, bugger-your-brother attitude I get sometimes.

I was particularly amused during the [Iranscam] hearings when one senator would take off after another, or one House member would take off after another, and they still tried to keep it in a polite vein. The one and only real bitter fights that I have ever listened to were the ones involving Civil Rights in the early days, by early days I mean the forties, when blacks were becoming more militant and we were starting to realize that something had to be done. Senator [Theodore] Bilbo at the time was the big gun on the anti-black side, who used that as a platform for reelection. I recall one time being in the gallery when Bilbo took on the whole Senate on Civil Rights. This was about 1946 I

[5]

think. All I remember was that I was impressed by the fact that he took on the whole Senate, and right during the debate, a New York senator took on Bilbo. Bilbo refused to yield to him, and finally he said, "I yield to the nigger-loving senator from the State of New York." Well, needless to say, the whole Senate erupted. The senators were jumping up, demanding the floor and denouncing the language and views of "the distinguished senator from Mississippi." I've never forgotten that! They kept referring to him as the distinguished senator from Mississippi. And this was also about the time that Bilbo was in trouble for some financial shenanigans, and he was being censured by the Senate. Bilbo's personal habits were rather repulsive to me. He chewed tobacco on the floor, and later it came out that he died of cancer of the mouth. But he would dribble tobacco juice down his front, and the stains were there. It kind of repulsed a young, eager, Democratic liberal to see this happening by a person flying the Democratic standard.

I was born into the Democratic party. People ask me, "Why are you a Democrat?" I say, "I was born into the Democratic party, the same way I was born into the Greek-Orthodox Church." When I became old enough to think for myself, I saw no reason to change either. Even to this day, in spite of everything, I think that the broad programs instituted and proposed by the Democratic party are the best for all the people. If there is anyone that

[6]

should be a Republican or an ultraconservative, it's me, because I have not only conquered the fact that I had only a tenth grade education, but based on the friendships that I made, and the betting on people, like Mr. [J. Willard] Marriott, who I used to carhop for. I bet on him, and I invested heavily in Marriott. Today I am financially well off and have nothing to worry about, yet I still feel for the people who don't have it, and have no choice in the matter. Because I know, I've gone through it. So I believe, my own self, that the thrust of the Democratic party is the correct one for this country. I also, in my heart, believe that Roosevelt prevented a terrible bloodbath in the Thirties. People say, "Well, he didn't do much." Yes, he did. He gave people hope. If you don't give them bread, at least give them hope, that they'll know that tomorrow things will be better.

My family was on relief during the Depression, but everybody in those days when they were on relief they tried to hide it. We went to great pains to hide it. We would receive these government surplus oatmeal, flour, butter and can goods. These were all marked; they came in a plain cover that said "Government Surplus," or "Government Issue." So we at home would keep old Quaker Oatmeal boxes, and when these surplus ones would come in, we'd pour the oats into the Quaker Oats box, put the lid on, and stick it up in the cabinet, and throw away the government box, so anyone coming into our house would not see that we were doing that.

[7]

Also, every winter we would receive a ton of coal, or a half a ton, I don't remember what. The only heating we had in that old house was a wall furnace behind isinglass. One was in the living room, and one was on the second floor. The rest of the house was heated by the wood stove we had in the kitchen. The federal government truck would come in our alley and dump the coal in the alley, and it was my brother Steve's and my job to go out with buckets and put the coal in the buckets and bring it into the shed and dump it -- and count the buckets. Because, by the number of buckets that we had, my father calculated how many winter days there were, and how much coal you could afford to burn. Otherwise you ran out, and then you really were stuck.

Every year we always had a few buckets left when the spring finally arrived, because some of those March days used to fool us and we'd be caught short. It was nothing for us to wake up in the morning in our bedroom and find the ice on the inside just as much as outside. As a result of being that way, and receiving handouts from the federal government, and we were not alone, people had a different feeling about our President Roosevelt. My father would hear the truck and say to me, "Go out and bring the Roosevelt coal in."

[8]

My mother's reference to Roosevelt would be "Ieous," which is the Greek word for saintly, Saintly Roosevelt. She would refer to Hoover as "garata," which means someone with horns, like a goat. So that's how I reckoned my own feelings. Then also in every Greek Orthodox family there's a holy corner, usually in the bedroom of the parents, and it faces east. The icons are there, and the candles are lit. It's tradition for the couple who are married, who receive these crowns when they are married, to put these crowns in an icon and keep them there all their lives. Every night my mother would light the candles, these were little wicks that were floating in a little bit of oil. I can remember knowing when it was time to get up because I could hear the sputter of the wicks. They only poured enough oil to last a certain amount of hours, because they had to be very careful of the oil that they poured.

As soon as it started getting dusk, my mother would yell at the nearest child and say, "Go up and light the candles." It was our job to pour a measured amount of oil in, and drop the wick in and light it. We'd pull up a chair in order to do it. Well, one day, when I went up there, in the line-up first was the Virgin Mary and Christ child, then we have the saints, Mark, John, George, and Luke, and one day there was another one: Roosevelt. Roosevelt was in the line-up of the saints, so when I was finally a photographer and was working around Roosevelt, I always had a

[9]

different feeling, unlike Truman, whom I met when he was running the War Investigating Committee. I considered Truman a human, whereas I was never able to really throw off this awe of Roosevelt, and the fact that he had been president all of my growing days. I never thought that anyone could ever replace him, and I never wanted anyone to replace him.

So those were my ramblings about my early days in Washington, but then coming up on the Hill, I became very friendly with individual members. I was able to work with them, very early on. I make friends easy, as a result I gained their confidence. Most importantly, they realized that when I was photographing them, whatever I would overhear I would never mention to anyone. As a result I had the confidence of the members. I think Senator [Howard] Baker once said to a group, "One thing you can say about Tames, anything he ever heard wasn't leaked." That was true. The only times that I ever gave stories to the New York Times was when I had their permission. I had a way of signaling. The moment I'd hear something that perked up my ears, involving something that would be newsworthy, I would look over towards the chairman or the senator who was making the statement, and with a glance they could see the question in my eyes. They would either shake their heads no, or nod, and then I would know that this was something I could repeat. Other times, when I heard things that I thought would make a good story, that it was favorable to the senator, or

[10]

favorable to our country, or just a story, but had been told at an executive session, well, I would later go to the chairman or the individual who made the statement and say, "This is what I heard" or "This is what I understand. Is this something that could be used?" He'd say yes or no, and then I would follow through. If he said no, I would never repeat it.

I remember one incident, unlike today at the White House where we have reporters going in with photographers and shouting questions at the president, why we photographers would go in and make a picture and we wouldn't repeat anything that we heard. One time I went in and heard [Dwight] Eisenhower talking to a foreign visitor. Whatever he was saying, it was very newsworthy and very favorable to the president. I came out and I was just hot for this. I sat down and I typed out about three hundred words on what I had heard. Then I went in with the typed sheet into Jim Hagerty. I said, "Jim, this is what I heard." I handed the sheet to Hagerty, and I said, "Can we use it?" And Hagerty just sat back and read the whole thing, and then right in front of me he just took his hand and just tore it right in half. I said, "Why? It makes the president look good." He said, "Look George, it makes him look good this time, but next time you might hear something that will not." Today it's impossible. There's nothing the president can say -- he can't even make an aside into a supposedly dead mike without having somebody pick it up."

[11]

I formed a very close relationship with Senator [Arthur] Vandenburg, one of my first heroes, and I liked Tom Connally because I liked his sense of humor, and his sense of drama, posturing and put-on pompous, like [Everett] Dirksen. I think Tom Connally and Dirksen were cut from the same cloth. They were competent politicians who masked their real intellect by playing the buffoon, and that's a very clever way of doing it, particularly when you get everything done that you want done. Connally took care of his Texas constituency, and I'm sure Dirksen did also.

Dirksen, for example, never once called me George, he'd always say, "Dear boy." "What can I do for you, dear boy?" I would ask him about certain things, and he'd say yes or no, and so forth. I think of the humor of Dirksen. One day it was the first day of spring; and it was a terrible day. There was snow and ice and the wind blowing, it was miserable for the first day of spring. Dirksen was having his Ev and Charlie press conference, which was a weekly thing. They were trying to drum up some interest and publicity after the Republicans lost control of the House and Senate under Ike, and it was slow going. In those days there wasn't as much news under Eisenhower anyway. We didn't realize how well off we were. I used to bitch about Ike's not doing this, Ike's not doing that, but I look back with nostalgia on how calm things were. Things were going along okay. God was

[12]

in his heaven and his representative on earth was at Burning Tree having a golf game. Everything was fine with the world. So Dirksen was meeting the press, and finally during a pause, one of the reporters said, "Well, senator, it's the first day of spring. What do you have to say about that?" Dirksen got up very dramatically, walked to the window, looked out, then came back and said: "It's been my observation that petunias, planted with a pickaxe, never do well."

I've got others on him, but the other one I like so much was when he was on the floor and about forty women came in, an elderly group to lobby for Social Security. They sent word in to him, and he came bouncing out with his hair all aflutter, and shaking his head, that mass of white hair. He looked up and down this group and said: "Ladies, I was on the floor, defending the Republic against the onslaughts of the opposition, when I was informed that forty lovely girls wished to see me. I immediately removed the armor of the warrior and put on the cloak of the poet. What do you girls wish of me?" There was dead silence, and then this little voice piped up from the back and said, "Nothing senator, we just want to hear you talk!"

Then the Ev and Charlie show hit the boondocks. They went to play Gettysburg, at Ike's office there at Gettysburg College. They went up there and held a press conference with the president, just to drum up some more publicity. Dirksen turned to Ike and

[13]

said, "Mr. President, this Ev and Charlie show is becoming so popular that it is my understanding that the Washington Post is receiving complaints from viewers of television who say the Post is not listing the Ev and Charlie show." Ike laughed, and looked over to Dirksen and said, "The Washington Post? I don't see why anybody reads the Washington Post anyway." He said, "I wouldn't read it, and I wouldn't have it around the Oval Office." He said, "One day, there was nothing to read, so they ripped out the sports page of the Washington Post and gave it to me. And I read it, and do you know, that Shirley Povich, for a woman, is not a bad writer." This was right in front of us!

Anyway, I've covered every important hearing in the Caucus Room since Truman's War Investigating committee. I've covered [Joseph] McCarthy, the terrible hearings on Pearl Harbor, where we just seem to relish beating ourselves over what couldn't be recalled. I mean, we were trying to find fault, like we always do for something that I guess was a general, overall lack of awareness. In spite of all the warnings we received on the Japanese attack, I never heard anyone mention the words Pearl Harbor. I was outside Secretary [Cordell] Hull's office with all the press, which in those days you had a crowd if you had ten press, including the photographers and reporters. I remember standing out there with three other photographers, we were the only ones in the hall, waiting for the Japanese envoys to come

[14]

out. I remember seeing old Cordell Hull sticking his head out and shouting down the hallway for Sumner Wells, who was Undersecretary at the time. He said, "Sumner! Sumner! Where the hell are you Sumner!"

The Pearl Harbor hearings went on and on and on. We tried to put the blame on various persons in the military, I guess we always do that. Then going right on in to the present day, Watergate and Irangate, and so forth, and [Oliver] North. I think of all the years -- forty-seven years -- that I've covered hearings up on the Hill, I had never seen a performance like North's before. One, I just kept waiting for the members to tear him up. He made the whole Senate look foolish. He had them buffaloed, and he did it deliberately. It was well-planned out. The man even put on a strict diet and lost about fifteen pounds so he could wear his uniform and look real good. When they finally accepted his terms for appearing before the committee, the committee originally intended that North would be the last witness. As a result, you would have heard the complaints by the Secretary of State, by the Secretary of Defense, and by these other people who came after North. But North got his story in first, and they had a hell of a time following him.

Of all the members of the committee that I talked to, only one had the balls to see this and to react to it, and that was Jack Brooks. Jack Brooks told me before he appeared and during

[15]

the appearance by North, that every time he'd shake his finger at me and I knew what he was talking about. He said to me, and I'll be very blunt, he said, "Fuck him! He doesn't want to appear, we'll subpoena him." And then after about four or five days, Jack Brooks came up to me and said, "I was so upset, I went to see Senator [Daniel] Inouye, and I said, 'Goddamn it, I'll put my Marine record up against his any time."' He said, "I propose that every member of this committee that served in the military put on their uniforms, including the chairman, and everybody march in here and plump themselves down, and see then what." The chairman was shocked at the suggestion. Then after a while, he said, "I cooled down. I realized we'd be playing into North's hand." North made them look foolish.

However, I personally believe that was one of the best examples of democracy in action that has ever come out of Congress. Because it has been my strong belief that there is no such thing as too much news in a democracy. As a young man I remember reading somewhere that the old Greeks in their wisdom, when they sat down and conjured up this frail being that they called a democracy, that some of the wiser heads cautioned that democracy cannot survive beyond the range of the human voice in the market place. When the people on the fringes are uninformed, then democracy dies. It's been my feeling that our country has been very fortunate that it was formed at a time when

[16]

communications were improving, you could get a letter from England in three weeks and so forth, newspapers were developing. And then the big burst of our development came right at the same time.

Then came the radio. This televised and radioed hearing was an exercise in democracy which to me helps sustain us. Radio in particular. Television demands that you sit and watch, whereas you can listen to the radio whether you are changing a baby's diapers or driving an eighteen wheel truck, you're still part and parcel of what's going on. Television focuses on the dark side, the problems, the injustice of it all, the way Israel today has got their balls in the wringer. They're being the oppressors, and no matter how many parties they can have for Martin Luther King here in Washington, the blacks are going to realize that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is exactly what was done to them here. And it's done because of information. Do you think that we or the southerners, white southerners who held the political power for years would have given it up willingly? No way. They didn't give it up for fifty or sixty years or more -- and only because of information. Also, in a democracy, if everyone is going to be equal, we have to respect the other person's viewpoint.

I've always maintained that the worst piece of legislation that can come out is one that is unanimous, or damn near unanimous. The moment I hear that word unanimous I think, "Oh,

[17]

oh, somebody's getting sold down the river." Because there's no such thing. You've got your viewpoints, I've got my viewpoints, and I'm just as sincere in mine. Everything is a compromise on the Hill. A half a loaf. And if you get sixty percent of the loaf you have really made a big impression. And you are ten years behind the general public! They want something and you're ten years slow. But that's the way it should be. I think our form of government, how frail it is, and how lucky we were that the two times in our history since our establishment that there was a demand for a dictatorship in this country, when [Abraham] Lincoln was president he was urged to become a dictator, and he said no. And [Franklin] Roosevelt himself could have taken over the powers and nobody would have objected. In fact, I as a young man would have approved it, because I didn't know any better. But at least those two men saw, and we're fortunate. I've always been afraid of the man on the horse that's going to come down the pike and solve all our problems. There again, television has the power. Can you imagine what Hitler would have done with television? That's what Harry Truman told me one time. Can you imagine what Reverend [Charles] Coughlin could have done with it? Or even [Huey] Long. When people have a grievance -- I'm wandering on, I'm not talking about the House and Senate that you're interested in.

RITCHIE: No, I'm interested in all your views.

[18]

TAMES: I've thought about where we're going, and what we're doing. I hate what's happening to us, the so-called national security. In the name of security we're doing everything. If as Samuel Johnson wrote that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then I think that security today is the second refuge of the scoundrels. In the name of security we're covering up everything. North was doing that. Thinking back, I'm just wondering what some of the senators would have done, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, if a colonel in the military had shredded documents and his girl friend had stuffed her clothes with the documents and gotten them out of the White House, why they would have exploded! What are we doing here? What is happening? You can't do that.

In a democracy the railroads and the airplanes don't run on time, and people's baggage gets lost. We could have a more efficient, so-called scientific government. But look how efficient the Russians are. The greatest experiment in the world since Jesus Christ, and look what's happened to them. They can't feed their own people.

People say, "Well, that Congressman is really doing that to further his own political ambitions." I say, so what, as long as the country is also being helped. I always maintained that Lyndon Johnson really didn't believe in Civil Rights, or push for them. But the moment he became president he was very conscious of what

[19]

history has to say about him. He wanted that record to show that LBJ was bigger than life. I have always felt that Lyndon Johnson got tangled up in Vietnam because he wanted to out-Roosevelt Roosevelt. At one time it was very revealing to me, when I was talking to him -- because Johnson and I were pretty good friends, as Congressman and Senator. And when you're one-on-one you're able to say things you don't want people to hear. But I got on him about this habit of his having the White House photographers shoot pictures of him all day Monday, and Tuesday morning when he came into his office, they had to have the stack of prints on his desk, shot from the day before. That was the way he operated on the Hill too. He was the one who created the staff photographer on the Hill, because he wanted that photographer shooting pictures of himself. He was always conscious of pictures.

I was kidding him about the stack of pictures that he had on his desk, and how he'd go through them, and when he found one he'd like he'd leave it on the desk, and the rest he'd throw on the floor. That meant you were supposed to destroy all those, throw them away. I said, that's just the image, not how they're going to remember you. They're going to remember you, I said, for what you've done in office. He looked at me and said, "Name me five presidents, immediately [snap, snap, snaps finger]. "Don't think!" Well, hell, he caught me by surprise, and I said, "Well, Washington Lincoln, Roosevelt." He said, "Hah [snap], war

[20]

president [snap]; war president [snap]; war president [snap]." He said, "You remember the war presidents." And I had to agree with him, that the ones who came to my mind were the ones who were active, Jackson, and so forth. He, I think, if not consciously, unconsciously, he wanted to imitate them: I called that the "Texas Syndrome."

I used to joke with LBJ and tell him every little bit of scandal I'd heard, or picked up around the Hill, and tell jokes, and he'd laugh. But two subjects were taboo. One was jokes on Lyndon Johnson himself, and the other was jokes about the state of Texas. One time I got into trouble when I told him that I thought there wouldn't have been any Texas if there had been a backdoor to the Alamo. I started laughing. He didn't laugh. He didn't think that was funny, not one goddamn bit.

When he was majority leader I took that series of pictures we have of him with [Theodore Francis] Green. Hugh Sidey told me after he saw my show that he was there as a reporter for Time when I made that series. It was an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We were allowed in until the chairman called the meeting to order. We were just wandering around, which is the time I always like to work, because you can get candid shots of the senators in action. Hugh Sidey told me that that was the time that LBJ was leaning on Green to give up his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee in favor of J.

[21]

[William] Fulbright. He finally persuaded Green to do so. Green was getting way up in age anyway, but I think LBJ lived to regret Fulbright because Fulbright finally had enough of the war in Vietnam and turned around and went after LBJ.

I'll never forget one day I was in making a picture of the Cabinet, and LBJ was sitting there. At the other end of the room by a great big map of Vietnam was a full colonel. He was pointing to the map and giving a briefing on the situation there. And LBJ was just sitting there with his head down, slumped in his chair. Every once in a while he would look up, and drop his head, look up, and drop his head. Finally, when the colonel was finished, he sort of unwound those long legs, and leaned forward, and looked up towards the end of the table, and said, "Shiiiiiit." He didn't care for what was being said! I always felt that if anyone was prepared to be president, he was. He knew which buttons to push and how to get legislation done. If he had not been involved in the Vietnamese war, if he had seen his way clear to get out, or if he had won, I think he would have gone down as, out-Roosevelting Roosevelt insofar as social programs.

My father always used to say that the reason this country didn't have more trouble is that it's so rich. For all the stealing that's going on, there's still some that trickles down to the little fellow. The surest way to tamper down tempers is to give a little something, give a little bit, which is a technique

[22]

we have followed, rather reluctantly, whether we admit it or not, with the blacks in this country, and other minorities. When I was growing up, nobody knew what a Greek was. We were raised in an Irish neighborhood, next to an Irish church practically. The priests came around and were giving the landlord hell for renting to a non-Catholic. They wanted nothing but Catholics in the area. At that time, the priests and the religion were pretty strong, compared to today, particularly among the Irish. We were looked down on. Between the Italians, and the Greeks, and the Jews, and the Syrians, why we were on the level with the blacks, and sometimes one step lower than the blacks.

I'll never forget the heavy drinking by the Irish, and the raising hell. Our neighbors, the mother would wait for the father to come home with his paycheck, and he had already drank it, and there would be yelling and screaming out there in the front. She wouldn't let him in. I'll never forget one Sunday morning, bright and early, our neighbor who was drunk went several doors down to a vacant house and just lay down on the porch and went to sleep. We went over there and he was still sleeping it off, with the flies on him, and smelling to high heaven. My father took me by the hand up there, I was I guess eight or nine, we went on the porch and he pointed down to -- I won't give his name -- and said to me: "Tute ena Iristi," "This is the Irish." He said, "Never drink, or you'll be like them." It stuck with me. I have never cared for --

[23]

I like the effect of booze, one or two drinks and I love everybody. I like the feeling, but by the same token I don't like what it does. I don't think I've drunk a fifth of Scotch a year, when I go to social events and take a drink or two. Well, we're getting off the track.

RITCHIE: I'd like to go back, because I've heard a lot about that old Southwest neighborhood. A lot of Smithsonian curators lived there, and regret that that neighborhood was demolished.

TAMES: Oh, yes. Around the old War College and Fort McNair, that was a beautiful place. We'd go there and watch the troops parading. Southwest was a rich neighborhood. I just drove past the Washington Monument the last couple of days in the snow and I didn't see one person sleigh riding, and there used to be thousands of kids up there. All the Southwest boys and girls would come there, and all the ones from downtown Washington that still maintained apartments and houses in the area that's all full of government buildings now, and various law offices. And with the Tidal Basin there, I fished the Tidal Basin. The first time I caught a fish in my life I caught it in the Tidal Basin. The Southwest that I remember was a very heavily ethnic neighborhood. The Irish finally moved out, the ones who got money, and the area was filled by Greeks, and Syrians, and Jews. A few of the old houses were still maintained by the Irish, and Germans, but most of the people that I went to Jefferson Junior

[24]

High School with were ethnic, as we refer to ethnics today, first generation Americans. We didn't know where we fitted. I'll never forget my father, every time he'd get Teed off at something the U.S. was doing, he'd tell me: "You Americans." He never considered me Greek. "You Americans do this or you Americans do that."

RITCHIE: Your father had a pushcart?

TAMES: Yes, he was a pushcart peddler. He was right there down at the Agriculture Department, down at 12th and B Street Southwest, which is Independence Avenue now. The streets were cobblestone in those days, and he used to push his pushcart next to the Freer Gallery of Art on 12th Street, where he'd park his little pushcart. I remember as a boy, eight or nine years old, also selling sodas from a newsboy's wagon. I'd put an icebox on it, and put some ice in it and some drinks, and I'd peddle them through the park. But the police didn't like us doing that in those days. They would chase us, or try to arrest us, or whatever. But that's what he did. He was a good man. He was a hard, harsh man, and he could never understand the freedom here, coming from almost a feudal society in Albania. And being a minority in Albania, in the Greek Orthodox Church. Whether our stock is ethnically Greek or Slavic or a mixture of everything is hard to say. The way you tell a Greek today is himself a Greek and he goes to the Greek church. Then he’s a

[25]

Greek, no matter what skin color he's got, or where he comes from, that's it. I'll never forget the first time I ever saw a Greek Orthodox priest out of Uganda, speaking better Greek than I did. He was a priest in the Greek church, missionaries had gone through there.

Yes, my father was a pushcart peddler, and I dropped out of high school in order to go to work. I was lucky to meet a person who was a stringer for Time, Inc. and was able through him to get a job. When he opened up a bureau, I became his office boy. That started me off. A whole new world opened up.

RITCHIE: Who was this?

TAMES: Harold J. T. Herran, was his name. He just died last year. He hired me as his office boy and told me what to do. He went to a great deal of trouble to hire me, because Time, Inc. didn't want me to be hired because I didn't qualify. I only had a tenth grade education, and they were hiring office boys who were graduates and who had masters' degrees in journalism from Columbia and various other schools. But he kept me on the payroll from the winter of 1938 to the winter of 1939, paying me out of petty cash, eighteen dollars a week. Then in the Christmas of 1939 he finally persuaded them to put me on the payroll.

[26]

That was still the Depression. Everybody today keeps talking about displaced persons, the homeless and so forth; we used to call them bums. They were around then, and they're going to be around no matter what you do. There are certain people that just cannot be helped. They love it, or do not do any better. Sometimes I think they really like it, being out there on the grates and begging. I kid with them, I went in the subway the other day at Farragut North and there was a panhandler there, several of them, with signs saying they were hungry. I looked at one guy, and said, "You've been here for two years, are you still hungry?" And as I came up, for the first time I saw one at the Sears, so it looks like they're picking the spots like we used to sell newspapers, when I was a boy. Once somebody staked a claim on some streetcar stop, it was their's. I came up and this bum was holding out his hand, with a sign that said "I'm hungry." I said, "I gave at Farragut North. I can't give at both ends of this thing!"

RITCHIE: You said that you worked for Marriott, was that at the old Hot Shoppes?

TAMES: Oh, yes. I went to work for Mr. Marriott carhopping on Connecticut Avenue, when he opened up that one on Connecticut Avenue. He had the root beer garden next to the Hot Shoppe. We boys -- because I don't remember too many girls at that time, I guess they did have them, but mostly boys -- were running

[27]

the orders back and forth. He would have the big root beer mugs that they serve the root beer in, iced mugs. We fellows got to be pretty hip to what was happening. Some of the young dudes would bring their girl friends to the Hot Shoppe and sit in the root beer garden and talk and carry on, the way teenagers do. They would carry flasks with them, so when they ordered root beer they'd say: "Two glasses of root beer, please." Then he'd give me a wink, which meant I put ice in the glass, but no root beer. I sell them that, and they'd give me a little tip for that, and they'd pour a little bit of booze in it and sit there and drink it. Well, you know, Mr. Marriott being a Mormon and against that, he would have fired us if he had known. Years later, I guess thirty years or more after I did that, I mentioned it to Mr. Marriott one time, and he just became very angry at me. I thought he was going to disown me, and this happened thirty years earlier!

The other thing we used to do, my friend Frank Aurito and I would work around the kitchen. In those days the Marriott had chickens. He'd cook them en masse and them warm them up as ordered in those ovens. They didn't have the microwave, but would warm them up. These were roasted chickens. Once a week we would steal a chicken and a pound of coffee, coffee was in bags. We alternated. I would take the coffee one time, and he would take the chicken. I'd take the chicken and he'd take the coffee. The reason for that was you had to put the chicken under your coat,

[28]

and you couldn't put it in a bag, because it could make noise. You literally got a greasy chicken under your coat, naturally you got some fat on it. We had to alternate anyway. And I told Mr. Marriott about that, and he got very upset. But I must say, I invested in the Marriott Corporation and it's done very well for me.

Yes, I worked for Mr. Marriott. He was part and parcel of the Washington scene, a true blue conservative -- I mean a real conservative. A Mormon, one who lives his religion, and I admire people who do.

RITCHIE: A strict taskmaster, I gather, as an employer.

TAMES: Yes. He mined the University of Utah and got the best people out of it and put them in his corporation. He did very well by them, and they did very well by him. I know the present Marriott, Bill, Junior. I knew them when he was still suckling his mother. They're very fine people.

I've searched back in my mind as far as the members of the House and Senate and maybe it's because I always try to see the best in people, but I can't recall any incidents where some real bad ones were there. Of course there was Joe McCarthy, whatever personal devils were driving him. He was trying to become popular. I'll never forget those speeches he made about Communists and homosexuals in the State Department. He started

[29]

getting publicity and got on that treadmill and couldn't get off. As things got tougher, he took to drink. In fact, I've got one of his old flasks in my memorabilia. On the fourth floor of the Russell Building, near the elevator, is a small committee hearing room, where towards the end when he wasn't drawing the crowds that he used to, he would preside over a hearing and he would excuse himself and go into the men's room, which was next to the elevator, and he'd have a flask of booze up on top of the stall. One day, I was by there and looked up and damn if his flask was there. The hearing was not going on, and he was gone, so I went up and got it. I have it back there as part of my memorabilia.

The first time I noticed Joe, Senator McCarthy, was when there was hearing being held by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Malmedy Massacre, and Joe came and testified in defense of the Germans. They were following orders, he said, you could not fault a colonel or a captain for following orders. Of course, our position was there were some orders you just couldn't follow. This was murder pure and simple. And Joe stomped out of the room on that. Then he picked up the other thing on the homosexuals. The thing I remember more than anything else. When he was being battered by the State Department, that there were not any homosexuals in the State Department, and that he should come up with a list and prove it. I was sitting there listening to this

[30]

and realizing that I had it in my power to make Joe a hero and to get him off the hook, because the task force that the State Department had put out to investigate his charges of homosexuals in the State Department, was headed by a homosexual.

Nobody knew it, but the way I knew it was simply because I had subleased an apartment from this man. I subleased an apartment up on Sixteenth and Calvert Street, and I kept the phone that he had. In those days, if you turned in your phone you had to justify needing a phone, because of shortages, so everyone just kept the same phone. And I would get these mysterious phone calls from various people, and sailors knocking on my door at all hours of the night. It doesn't take an Einstein to finally realize what was going on. This man apparently was a practicing homosexual. But I didn't say a word. I sat there, playing God, I guess, and enjoying it, as to whether I should blow the whistle or not.

Then of course there were the Army hearings. He had the Secretary of the Army up and was beating on him. Anyway, Joe had his faults. One of the things that I remember was when one of my photographer friends came to me and said, "Look, we've got a scheme. We can make a lot of money. We need ten photographers to come up with two thousand dollars each." That was an immense amount of money then. "We would go over to Alexandria, south of Alexandria is a piece of swampland that's for sale for half a million dollars. With twenty thousand dollars we can get an

[31]

option to buy that land. Then we can go to the federal government and get a loan to build an apartment there. Not only that, we can get a loan of five million dollars, and it's only going to cost four and a half million to build it -- and instead of giving the money back to the federal government, we divide the money." The federal government still has a note for five million, see, at two percent or three percent, or whatever it was. I said, "You can't do that." He said, "Yes, because we're going to get ten photographers and Joe McCarthy is going to be our silent partner. He's going to be in on it, as one-eleventh of the ownership. He's going to make all the arrangements to push it through." I just couldn't believe it could be done. My mind just didn't work that way. But it was done by somebody else later.

Joe was very close to the photographers because he was a young senator, bachelor, and we had some bachelor photographers who had been around a good many years, many more years than I had. Particularly one was Henry Griffin of the A.P. He's still around. Then there were a couple of others, and they used to love to play the horses. Joe loved to play the horses, and every time he wanted to make a bet, he would tell one of the boys what horse he wanted, and they would call it in. They would go to the race track quite often together. So he knew the photographers. I don't know whether he came up with this scheme, or one of the photographers came up with it. But Joe was going to see it

[32]

done. And the beauty of it was, like I say, that not only did you build it, and own it, but you divided a half a million dollars and you had all this money. A lot of people became multimillionaires doing it. Another lost opportunity.

RITCHIE: Could we go back to when you started working for Time Life. What was Time-Life back in those days? What was it like to be associated with it?

TAMES: Well, the bureau only consisted of six reporters, and they were hired in 1940. When I first started there was just Mr. Herran, and Mary Malloy and myself. Then Robert Sherrod came in. The man is ill, but he still gets around a little bit, and I think he might be a source for you. He was bureau chief for Time, Inc. during the war. He shared it with Harold Herran. We were in a brownstone at 1719 K Street. In those days, K Street was all houses, from Union Station to Georgetown. Beautiful old homes with big yards, with wrought iron fences around them. Of course, they were deteriorating, and had been deteriorating during the Depression and had been turned into rooming houses and into offices. Ours was the second floor. It wasn't even painted. We just moved in with a minimum amount of expenditures. My salary at eighteen dollars a week for a five day week was untold riches. And a two week vacation. I never had a vacation in my life. I

[33]

didn't know what to do. In fact, the first vacation I had, I hung around the office, I didn't know what to do. What does one do on vacation? I loved the work so much that I just couldn't stay away. We covered the town, but it was a lot easier, because there was a lot less press.

RITCHIE: Would assignments come in from New York?

TAMES: Oh, yes. They'd come down from New York, or we would generate assignments here and send them up to New York for suggestions. Suggestions for cover stories, and what have you, in fact that's how I got my start. Say we had a cover story pending, the writer would write a suggestion, and then they'd buy the cover story, then he would write it, and then he would also have to arrange with the subject for a photo session, so that the photographer could literally walk around him shooting his head and then send the pictures to New York so the artist could paint him. It was up to the reporter to write that his eyes are blue, and he was wearing a gray coat, and this and this and this. That way the artist could paint him. They hated to do that. Also, they would have to go into the files of the subject's wife and say, "Do you have pictures when he was on the Harvard rowing team?" And all of that, they'd go through the album. Then you'd have to take the album to the office, and have it copied, and bring it back. It was a lot of trouble. So I started suggesting that they give me those jobs, and that I could do it.

[34]

Meanwhile, I had bought a camera from Tom McEvoy, and I started making pictures of everybody in the bureau, just walking around. Nobody but nobody told you or gave you any lessons in photography. You had to learn by trial and error yourself. I learned by going in the darkroom and start printing, by watching and observing, and then started shooting. That's how I started. Next thing, I started suggesting stories, and I started trying to write. The way I would write -- and I still write -- I refer to the rhythm system. If it seems like its flowing, I just go. I was just at a fourth grade school the other day, photographing in Prince George's County, where some black students were being taught the parts of a sentence, and diagramming a sentence. I'm listening to them, and I can't do this today.

Well, I suggested a story one time on a new piece of art at the National Gallery. At that time they must have paid some fabulous sum, like half a million for it, fabulous sum. The gallery put out a release and they had a press conference, so I told the editor maybe I ought to go over. He said, "Go ahead." He didn't care, because in those days, any writer worth his salt who wrote for Time Magazine wrote for the front part of the book. Art, music, and leisure, books; all those back of the book sections were jobs for women or fags. Nobody worth his salt would touch that. This was an art story, so they said, "Sure, go ahead." So I went to the gallery, and I knew absolutely nothing

[35]

about art, absolutely nothing. Here I am in 1940, twenty years old, going over there, with a tenth grade education, to talk to the curator of the art gallery about a painting. Well, they had the painting up, and there was a press conference. I went just like the others, looked at the painting, put my hands behind my back, and leaned over, and looked at the painting. I didn't know what the hell I was looking at, but I did it just like the rest of them, and I commented. And they were just aflutter that somebody from Time Magazine would come there.

I went back and I had to write it. Well, I waited till the next day when the Washington Post and the Star, particularly the Star had a good article on it. I just took that article and sat down and started rewriting it. I only had to write two hundred and fifty words. I went in the files and got out a story that had been written on art by one of the other reporters before. I put it next to my typewriter, and I said, "Well, he's got five words in his first sentence, and he's got three sentences in the first paragraph. That's exactly how I'm going to do." I banged out five or six words there. Then I went to the next paragraph, and it took me all night to write it. I handed it in the next day, and John Denson who was bureau chief said, "Mmm-hmmm," and he took his big pair of scissors and cut into it, and rearranged it, and wrote a new lead on it, and sent it in with my name on it. God bless it, they used it. I went over and made a picture of the

[36]

painting, and they used that. They paid me thirty dollars. Fifteen dollars for writing the story and fifteen dollars for the picture. Well, from then on, man, I was a writer and a specialist in art!

Years later, some people commented on my work and said I used the triangular system of composition. I said, "Yes, I do." They said, "This is a Rembrandt technique." I said, "Mmmmm-hmmmm." I don't know what the hell Rembrandt's technique was, but I accepted that for what it was worth.

One of the things people have often asked me is, "George, what was the most important picture you ever made?" That's a typical question. Well, I got to thinking, first of all it would have to be politics, because ninety-five percent of my work was here in Washington, and it had to be personalities. I started thinking of the Truman hearings, Watergate, Pearl Harbor, McCarthy, Estes Kefauver crime hearings, joint sessions, and so forth. And also I was there for the declaration of war in December, 1941. I was so young, I was frightened. I was angry, churned up. You just can't describe your feelings: angry at the Japanese, afraid for my country and particularly for myself. I was in the gallery, waiting for President Roosevelt to come up to request a declaration of war. The electricity in the air, you could just feel the tension. You could literally smell the tension. It reminded me of a high school locker room just before

[37]

the big game, the tension and the smell of bodies, the scurrying on the floor, and then the president came in and made his big speech. I thought, maybe that was it.

Then I thought no, inasmuch as I am a great one for theatre and I love grand gestures, it would have to be General MacArthur's farewell speech to the nation and the Congress to a joint session, for the sheer drama. Up until Colonel North, MacArthur held the great dramatic incident by any member of the armed services before the Congress. But he held the Congress for only one hour, whereas North went day after day, and managed to keep the Senate and the House on the ropes. As I recall, Joe Martin was the minority leader then.; and he had arranged for MacArthur to speak. The tension was rising high. He was a proconsul, a hero, and that damned Truman had fired him. So we all went into Joe Martin's office because the Times wanted to do a story on Joe, and the preparations for the great visit. He hit the West Coast and came east like a Roman proconsul; every stop he made was even more of a celebration, the honors, just like a triumphant Caesar coming into Rome. Joe Martin was beside himself trying to figure out how to greet him when he came in at the airport, and what could we do.

So I'm in there with him, and I'm teasing him. I said, "I've got a great idea. What we should do, is he's going to come across the Anacostia, over the John Philip Sousa bridge, because he's going to land at Andrews Air Force Base." I said, "What you

[38]

should do is get a barge and load it up with some old, stale wine that they can't sell and pull it up into the Anacostia, and the moment the signal is given that he's coming, you just start pouring all the wine into the river, so it will be a purple vista as he comes across, befitting a proconsul." Joe said, "Aw, no, no. That won't do." So I said, "Well, I'll tell you what we can do then: we'll line up the members of the House and Senate on both sides of the bridge. We'll have them up on platforms, a little bit higher, and when he comes by, in his car, all the members will unzip and urinate a golden arch which the General can go under." He said, "I'm not in any mood for humor!"

Anyway, I made a few other suggestions, just to break the tension and get him to laugh, but he was not in the mood to laugh. He was really serious about this.

Then the great day came, and I was in the gallery photographing him, and he was really laying it on. I always felt that the way the Congress was, that all he had to do was say, "Follow me!" And they would have marched out of the chamber and walked down to the White House and stormed the gates. He was giving his speech, and all of a sudden he said, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And it's time for this old

[39]

soldier..." And the House erupted, with senators and congressmen jumping up and shouting: "Don't go!" "We love you!" "Oh, no!" "Damn that Truman!" "Don't you go!" "We'll back you!" Finally he rolled his head up and said, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." And he just faded away.

We all went down afterwards to get photos of him leaving, and Joe Martin was there, and he gathered around the reporters, and one of the reporters asked him, "How did it go?" Joe Martin was a little short fellow with a round face, and he had a little grin just like a kewpie doll. He said, "Well, boys, there's only one thing I can say: there wasn't a dry eye on the Democratic side, and there wasn't a dry seat on the Republican side." So I think that was probably the most dramatic event that I covered, for sheer political drama. The general played that to the hilt, and that was his greatest moment. From then on he went downhill, including when he tried to run for the presidency and was defeated.

You know, we never know when to quit. We say we know when to quit, and I'd like to think I knew when to quit. The Times wanted me to stay on, but I decided forty years to the day was a nice dramatic way of departing. They said, "Can't you stay on a little longer?" I said, "Well, what can I do with this president that I haven't already done?" Of course, what with the television today, masses of press, it's hard to work. It's hard to get next to

[40]

someone. Everything is put on. Everything is acting. Everything is done for the camera. I see so much of that now, both in the Congress and outside the Congress. We're all acting.

I remember a comment by Harry Truman to me when I was in photographing him on the anniversary of his first year as president. Mr. [Arthur] Krock had written a piece for the Magazine of the Times for which Mr. Krock received the Pulitzer -- because you didn't get interviews with the president in those days the way you do today, when every other person interviews the president. I mentioned to him in passing, since we were talking, that I had been up to the organization of the U.N. at Hunter College, and that I had seen television for the first time in my life. I said, "Mr. President, that is really something." The main auditorium was too small to accommodate everyone, so they had these satellite rooms set aside with these TV screens. And I said, "Do you know, you could see better and hear better than if you were on the floor. Not only that, Mr. President, what struck me more than anything else was that members, and politicians have got to learn that they're on camera all the time." I saw some of those people doing some very personal things, scratching their crotch and picking their nose. He said, "Yep. It used to be to be a successful politician one had to have seventy-five percent ability and be twenty-five percent actor. I can see the day when that all could be reversed."

[41]

So, fini!

RITCHIE: Well, thank you. I'll be back next week with a transcript, and I thought we could talk more about some of the members of Congress you knew and photographed, and to look through some of your photographs as well.

TAMES: Okay.

End of Interview #1

[42]

A CREATURE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
Interview #2
Wednesday, January 20, 1988

TAMES: Last night was the night I did the Dave Letterman show. That was a complete surprise to me to be asked. I had only seen that show once or twice and I felt that it was slanted toward the young college student and younger audience. To have a fellow like myself who's approaching seventy to appear, what could I say to these young ones? I'd start talking about Dirksen or Kennedy and they were not even born when I took those pictures!

One of the pictures that we were looking at, prior to going on, was a picture of Jacqueline Kennedy and the president. Letterman was tempted to make a few remarks along that line, and I was talking not to Letterman but to his producer, and I told him very simply that as far as I was concerned, Jacqueline Kennedy had paid her dues to this world when she stood tall during and after the president's assassination. I'll never forget her, as long as I live, the night when they brought the president's body back, and I was at Andrews [Air Force Base], in the spotlights, agonizing, feeling loss at the death of the president, who I felt was my president. He was only two years older that me, and I felt that

[43]

for the first time we were going to take over, we young people were going to take over the world from the old ones. And here my president was dead, and who was going to succeed him but another old bugger, Lyndon Johnson. Here I was feeling sorry for myself and for the world, and the doors opened on the airplane's cargo side, and this forklift goes up to get the president's body, and there stood Mrs. Kennedy in the doorway, her husband's brains still spattered on her dress. I thought right away: there she is, the perfect symbol of all the women of the world from the dawn of history who have watched their husbands and sons go off to war, and have seen them brought home on their shields, and have lamented, and washed them, and buried them, and then carried on.

She was a symbol when we needed her. Occasionally she was theatrical, sure. The gesture of John-John saluting was Mrs. Kennedy's doing. Caroline kissing her father's casket in the Rotunda of the Capitol, that was her prompting. But those were gestures that we needed, and it really helped us in our grief. So as far as I'm concerned, I don't care what happened to Jacqueline after, or Onassis, or whatever she's gotten into. As far as I'm concerned, she was there when we needed. So I'll say, "Here's to you, Jackie. Grab life's brass ring and go ahead." That's the way I feel.

RITCHIE: Didn't she start out as an inquiring photographer?

[44]

TAMES: Oh, she started out as an inquiring photographer at the Washington Times, the Hearst Paper. Because Mrs. [Eleanor] Patterson was an old family friend of the Bouviers', they gave her a job, just to have her do something. They made an inquiring photographer out of her. She was never one to mix with the other staffers. There was no question that she was on her own. There are very many amusing stories involving her. The first time that one of her pictures appeared in her column, the other photographers said: you should buy us a drink. From what I understand, she went out and bought a quart of milk, to tease these fellows.

I always had a lot of fun with her. She had her own favorite photographers and she had her own ideas about what made the best picture of herself. She followed pretty well in that line, and we just had to go along with her. She played the role of First Lady to the hilt, and used the children as part of the family image of the president. I'll never forget the pictures of her on the south lawn on the first snow, the first year they were in the White House, when she took the children out on a sled. She had pony and sled take them around the White House. That was a nice little gesture. Only Jacqueline could have thought of something like that. And the president indulged her. He was very proud of what she was doing. He looked at her and smiled, knowing that she was doing this to further his image also.

[45]

RITCHIE: Had you know them during their Senate years?

TAMES: Yes I had. I had known Jack Kennedy since he was a member of the House, and as a senator. I campaigned with him and knew him all the way to the presidency. I felt at ease around him. I used to save up all my raunchiest jokes so that I could tell him. He'd love to hear them, and laugh. I'd even try to top Dave Powers sometimes, and he had quite a few. But it was a way of breaking the tension, and also being able to make some pictures at the same time.

I never tried to contact Jacqueline Kennedy after the president was assassinated and she moved to New York, because she seemed to be involved with Onassis, and involved with fights with press photographers, and I figured she had enough problems without me showing up and breaking down and crying when we started reminiscing about the president.

But I did see her in New York -- I guess it's been eight or ten years now -- at a ceremony. I shook hands and we sort of brushed cheeks, and I told her what I had been doing, not ignoring her but that I just didn't want to add to her problems. She said, "You should have called me and come up. We could reminisce." She said, "Jack loved you so. He would come up to my room and say that you'd been telling him jokes, and that you were incorrigible, and he would just laugh." I said, "I hope he never told you any

[46]

of them!" She said, "No, he never told me those jokes." I said, "Well, thank God for little things." They weren't worth repeating, some of them.

RITCHIE: Was joking with someone like Kennedy a way of making him more at ease when you were photographing him?

TAMES: Oh, yes. Sure. With Senator Baker, who's at the White House now, I used the same thing. I wouldn't call it a technique, because I loved to tell jokes, and I love to hear jokes, and I love to see people react to them. And I'm always telling them. They do break the tension, there's no question about that. It's something that I've always done. I like it. It's just my way of life. I think that's one of the reasons I've kept my sanity. Two things have kept my sanity: one has been fishing, and the ability to get out and fight the elements by wading in the ocean waist deep and walking for miles pushing against the water, all your frustrations and tensions leave you. The other has been my sense of humor. I can retreat into my sense of humor and how tragically funny some of the events are that are shaping our lives. Thus I'm able to get over it.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm oversensitive. I look at my colleagues and I don't detect externally the same sensitivity. I don't hide my emotions. I like somebody, I like them, and I guess I can count on one hand the people that I disliked. And even

[47]

those people that I've disliked I've found fine qualities even in them. Maybe that's one of my faults, that I see so much good in everyone. I'm willing to trust. I've been done in by it, and some people have fallen from my expectations. Maybe I've done the same thing, maybe I've fallen from others' expectations. But, by in large, it's been a good life. It's been rich, rewarding, stimulating. To be able to call the high and the mighty friends, that's pretty heady wine.

RITCHIE: I'd like to go back to when you were just getting started in the business. From talking to other people I've gotten the sense that for a lot of journalists, World War II opened a lot of doors. There was tremendous turnover and opportunities. You were just getting started at that stage.

TAMES: Yes, it was a great opportunity, there's no question about it. We were stagnant, the economy was stagnant, and there was just nothing, and then all of sudden whamo it just opened up. There was demand for journalists like the demand for welders and every imaginable type of job. A lot of guys became writers who never thought about the business. A lot of photographers came out of the military. They were drafted and all of a sudden they said, "You're going to be a photographer." They handed him a camera and sent them to school for six weeks,

[48]

and he came out supposedly taking pictures. A lot of those fellows followed through. I knew a lot of them during World War II and afterwards. A lot of them fell by the wayside in the photographic business, and a lot were killed.

RITCHIE: And a lot of the regular photographers went off to become war correspondents.

TAMES: Oh, yes. The ones who were a few years older than I was at the time. When the war broke out, I was twenty-one. Although that's fairly old, at least I thought it was fairly old, but if you've never had the educational background, it was still as if I was a high school student, when you consider the formal education. There was never any question of sending me as a writer. And by the time I started making some small reputation as a photographer, the only thing I could garner was a few trips up and down the East Coast classified as a war correspondent on some of the ships that were bringing oil up from Venezuela and Aruba.

So, yes, the war opened up great opportunities, particularly at the New York Times. The New York Times had sold its news photo service to A.P. in 1941, in the spring of '41, because the photo end was losing money at that point, and they had been carrying it for many, many years back to before World War I, and they sold it just at a time when the need for pictures was great. If they had kept their service, the Times photo service would be rival right

[49]

now to A.P. and U.P., and I.N.P., which later folded and became U.P.I. When I came along, they asked me to open up a photo bureau in Washington, because they thought about the possibility of going national now that the war was over. They had seen the need for photos, and they thought this was going to continue. They tried it for five years, but the world economy was in such a state that there was just no way for us, New York Times, which was maintaining photo bureaus in Germany and in various countries of the world, to make any money. Not only were they not making any money, but they were losing money.

I'll never forget when one of our correspondents went overseas and went into Germany. He went into the New York Times bureau there, they just opened up a closet just full of German marks, because they couldn't take the money out. At least they could spend it; they could give it to the correspondents who wouldn't be spending U.S. currency. And there was no exchange really worth much.

So they decided to give it up. Plus the fact that the technical know-how was not there. The New York Times was trying to go national by using the wire photo machine, which is a technique that the Times helped develop. They totally owned a subsidiary which made the wire photo machines. The A.P. was using our machines. But the biggest piece of film that they could take was eleven by fourteen inches. The Times was thinking of printing

[50]

that way, but they wanted to print it full size. They didn't want to go with a miniature. Unlike today, they push a button in New York and our satellite printer plants in Chicago, or L.A. or San Francisco, wherever they are, will immediately start rolling the same time the presses in New York are rolling, with the same copy, because it's all been sent by satellite. If we had had this technique available in '46 and '47, I think the New York Times would have gone national. We would have been the first truly national paper, way ahead of the U.S.A. Today, and a helluva lot different, I can assure you.

RITCHIE: But during the war you stayed with Time-Life?

TAMES: Yes, I stayed with the Time-Life bureau during the war, and developed the job of Time photographer. I was just hustling as much as I could, going out with the other photographers, George Scatti, Tom McEvoy, and all of the others who had come down on various trips from New York. I'd help them by carrying their gear, and making myself as useful as possible in the photographic end, because I looked upon the photographic end as something that could be done mechanically, with the little instrument, at the same time I could stay within this business and find a niche for myself, which was what I was really doing. Who knows, if the opportunity to become the office manager or the janitor of a Time, Inc. bureau had come along, I probably would have jumped at it, being unskilled.

[51]

But by the same token, I've always figured that I would have somehow or another come to the top, or near the top, of any profession or any group that I would have done in. I always figured that if I had gone into the Mafia, like a couple of my friends -- who are now dead, by the way -- that I would have either been the top don or encased in cement at the bottom of the Potomac. I always felt that I should be out front. When we had gang fights, I was the one who was always getting hit by the bricks. I was up in front, I wasn't in back. I was up in front to throw the first brick, or to take the brunt or the curse, or what have you. I felt that way all my life. I've always felt that one of my roles was to be the shield for less fortunates. Either they were less fortunate because they lacked the guts or the desire, or they just simply like the New Testament were the meek who were going to inherit the earth. I wasn't ready to inherit the earth. I wanted a little something else first.

RITCHIE: I'd think that would be a good attitude for a photographer, who would have to get in right up front to get pictures, and to go where you might be wanted at times.

TAMES: Oh, yes. No photographer has ever won the Pulitzer Prize by sitting on the deck of a battleship and watching the action through a pair of binoculars. You have to be in the front. One of my best little friends, he's now dead -- that's one of the troubles when you start reaching the Biblical four-score-

[52]

and-ten, that so many of your colleagues have left you. You start realizing that you're very fortunate to be here today. This poor fellow, we called him Buckwheat, he was in the navy. When they landed on one of the islands, he was a movie camera man, and he jumped into a shell hole, and then he got up and started running towards the Japanese lines, and all of a sudden he said he felt like he kept putting his foot in little holes. Finally when he looked down, half of his leg was gone. From the ankle down was gone. He was just bouncing along on a stump, he was so excited. It was only when he saw it that he felt the shock and the pain and he fell down. He put a tourniquet on there, and the medics got him. He got the purple heart. The war made a lot of heroes, and a lot of fellows who should have been heroes, but nobody heard about them.

RITCHIE: Did you find the same when you were covering political events? That you had to have some moxie to get inside?

TAMES: Oh, God, yes. If you weren't up on the political end of life, you'd miss it. You have to know the ballplayers. You have to know the scores, you have to know what they're batting. When a man comes up to bat, and he's a .210 hitter, you know how to play him in the infield. But when he's hitting .415, you know you've to back off, he's a heavy hitter. He doesn't hit

[53]

them every time, but when he does they'll come out your way. You have to know just exactly how much weight they're pulling, how serious their presidential bids are, and what chances they have of making the presidency, or the vice presidency.

I was in Chicago in '52 during the Republican convention when Eisenhower was nominated. I just happened to be coming out of the Drake Hotel when Richard Nixon pulled up in a cab and jumped out. "Hi, Senator," I said, "how are you doing?" He said, "Fine, how are things going?" I said, "Pretty good. They got this thing pretty well wrapped up. Ike is going to be the nominee, and they seem to be shuffling to find out who's going to be the vice presidential nominee." He said, "Who is going to be it?" I said, "Well, the betting seems to be [Henry Cabot] Lodge." I think I mentioned one or two other names, but Lodge was the prime contender for vice president. But Nixon was not on that list. Nixon just nodded, and said, "Mmmmm-hmmmm." And he went on it. To this day, I've never asked him, but I always wanted to ask him, whether at that point he knew that he was under consideration or whether he was just feeling me out to see what I knew.

So you don't guess right all the time, but it's just like a commander going into a battle, unless he has some preconcept of what's going to happen and what forces he's going to face, he's out of it. You just don't show up with the army and say, "Well, what are we going to do?" I've seen photographers show up on a

[54]

scene and say, "Well, what are we going to do?" Right now, when everything is being arranged so, we've become like Pavlov's dogs. We look around, and if there's no rope to get behind, we're lost! We don't know what to do! We're being restricted so that we're just like the animals in the zoo. They tell me that the guerrillas in the zoo look so ferocious, and he has these iron bars between you and him. You think they are there to protect you from him, and he's inside. He knows they're there to protect him from the people. It's just a question of how you look at these things.

Photography is just like anything else. You have to know what you are doing and angle your way. The picture I made of George Bush, where he's leaning against the dais of the renovated old Senate chamber, where they reenact the swearing in of the senators. I showed up late, and Bush had been swearing in and reenacting these, he had about twenty of them he had done already, and he had about four or five more to go. He was getting a little tired, and the other photographers there were getting a little tired. They were there to photograph every one. I walked in and greeted the vice president, and we were standing around. Then another senator came in and I watched the vice president go through his act. Then he backed up and put his back up against the dais, sort of rested a little bit, crossed his legs, and was sort of thinking. Gosh; looking at him dead ahead it was a good

[55]

picture, but it didn't really mean much. But with my eye I was figuring, "If I went to the side, with those beautiful columns, and the juxtaposition of that, that would probably make a very dramatic shot."

So in order not to alert my colleagues, I sort of eased on over to the side a little bit, and when the next senator came in I did not photograph him. I went over to the side and I just stood there trying to be as nonchalant as possible. All of a sudden, after the ceremony was over, the vice president backed up and put his back against the dais, and crossed his legs, and sort of hung his head a wee bit, thinking. I lifted my camera, and wham, wham, I made two quick shots. The moment my motor went off, all the other photographers' heads popped up. When they saw where I was, and where he was standing, they all came running around to my side. Immediately, I broke the spell by yelling: "Mr. Vice President!" He looked up and he smiled, and broke that whole mood.

There's something else, how some people see things in pictures that even the photographer who made it doesn't see. When the vice president would walk toward the dais, he had the Bible in his hand, and he'd put it on the dais, and then he'd turn his back and lean against it. You could see the Bible there if you looked. I received a letter from a fundamentalist preacher from down here in Virginia, in which he asked for a copy of the

[56]

picture. I sent it to him, and he said the reason he wanted it was that Bush was going to be the next president of the United States, because he had God behind him. Look where the Bible was! Well, that was his interpretation. Be that as it may.

RITCHIE: Covering the Congress strikes me as presenting a lot of difficulties for a photographer. The chamber is off-limits to photographers, many of the committees met in closed session when you first came there. The corridors of the Capitol are very dark. How did you get started getting a feel for photographing members of Congress under those limitations?

TAMES: When I first started up there the whole Congress was off-limits. In '38 and '39 the photographers were literally sitting on their camera boxes on the Senate side of the Capitol, down by the steps, and watching members as they walked over from the Old Senate Office Building, which is the Russell. Building today. Coming toward them, they would photograph them. All the corridors were off-limits. All committees were off-limits. Only at the discretion of the chairman were you allowed in, and you were allowed in for just enough time to make one or two shots and then get out. This was carried on all through the post-war period until television started breaking down the barriers. By that time, the still photographers had broken down the barriers in the majority of the committees, but there were still a few committees that were being chaired by senators who had been there quite a few

[57]

years, who did not want photographers to be operating freely. Judiciary was one of them. Ways and Means on the House side was another one. But with the advent of television, these committees have opened up.

In a way, I approve of the opening up of the committees, because I don't think there's any such thing as too much information in a democracy. This is one way that everyone can participate in a democratic system, by listening and watching the Congress in session. By the same token, there is a tendency on the part of some members, that is hard to suppress, to showboat. They will posture and they will become extra verbal, what do you call that?

RITCHIE: Verbose.

TAMES: They become more verbose. It's a tendency that I deplore. It turns me off. They're playing for home, I guess.

And you mentioned about the corridors -- yes, it was difficult, much more difficult than today. Today: one, there is a lot better lighting; and two, the films and cameras are so much better. If we had had the films and cameras then that we have today, even if we didn't have the light, we'd have still been able to operate a lot better than we did. I understand that Eastman Kodak is coming out with a film that is 3600 ASA. Three thousand six hundred ASA!. Do you know what you can do with that? You could walk out

[58]

in the middle of the night, anywhere, and make pictures as if it was daylight. You don't need any light, very low light, to shoot at that high ASA rating.

But slowly we worked on the chairmen of the committees. The old-timer photographers would work on the chairmen, or on the senior opposition party members. If the Democrats were in power, we'd always make a point of going over to the Republicans, so that they understood our problems. We tried to tell them that what we were doing was helpful to them, and to the legislative process. Slowly they started letting us in, to make the opening for three or four minutes, or until some member objected, or mentioned to the chairman that it was time for the photographers to go. We would pack up and go, there was never any question about it. But slowly they opened up. Foreign Relations was one of the first. Harry Truman, to his credit, his War Investigating Committee was open all the time.

We do sometimes make a theater of a very serious hearing; that's the nature of our business, I guess, today. But with new equipment, there's really no need for lights, there's really no need for that theatrical atmosphere. You can operate and work just as well without it. Then you come into the prima donnas of the networks. The moment they start getting long in the tooth, and want to look their best on TV, they need light. You have to have the flattering light. You can't stand in the corridor with

[59]

crisscrossed lighting, and you look like something out of the Hound of the Baskervilles. One of the ways we used to make pictures in the old days of a rapist or a murderer in a jail cell, and he agrees, instead of shooting straight on or holding the light high, so you're imitating sunlight, you hold the camera to your eye and put the light down by your crotch, or lower by your knees, and shoot up. Oh, that makes him look terrible! He looks like something sinister. Well, that was a technique. I might say, we never did that with any member of Congress. At least I never, and I don't recall any of my colleagues ever doing that, not even to Joe McCarthy or Bilbo, or some of the ones we started feeling real personal animosity towards.

By and large, what we had going for us was the fact that we were part and parcel of the media, but at the same time we were not crucifying the individuals by writing about them, or trying to dig up something that would be a problem. I've seen many a member, either in a nightclub or even in the Senate dining room having a meal with someone of the opposite sex, or with a lobbyist, or someone who would make him look bad, or raise a question. I have looked at them, and they have given me the slightest nod of their head: no. And I have just gone on. If I had been a reporter, I'm sure that I would have just barged right in and started asking questions. But I've always played it that way, as long as they're playing fair on the Senate floor.

[60]

It's just like [Gary] Hart right now saying, "If I become president, I won't be the first adulterer in the White House." He's missing the mark there. That's not the issue at all. He's probably right, I'm sure he is, but just because he's going to pick someone whose personal social habits might be deplorable, that doesn't mean then that he'll drop himself to that common denominator and expect to be elected. It's one thing for me to vote for you when I don't know it, and another thing when I do know it. But I do want to know, and I'll make my own judgment. They say, "Well, you don't want to vote for him because he's a homosexual." I say, "Be that as it may. Are we voting for him to be school superintendent or scoutmaster? Or are we voting for him to be fire chief or to be a member of Congress? I want to know, and I want to be able to use my own judgment. After all, whether consciously or subconsciously, we are all preachers of our basic instincts, for want of a better word. I sometimes wish I had a better command of the English language. Sometimes I can't say some of the things I want to say, I just can't seem to be able to put it in words. But anyway.

RITCHIE: I was interested about the old-time senators from the '40s. I've seen a lot of the still pictures of them, and they always look very formal. I saw one of Tom Connally, where behind

[61]

him you could see his cigar on the edge of his desk. He had obviously taken it out of his mouth and stuck it back there so it wouldn't be in the picture.

TAMES: That's correct. He didn't want to be photographed with his cigar in his mouth. When he was chairman of the committee, we photographers once crowded around a witness and fired away with our flashbulbs. Finally the witness complained: "Mr. Chairman, can you get these photographers to stop? They are disturbing me with their flashes. They're blinding me." So Connally, with his cigar in his hand -- he always kept it below the table; he would puff on it, and then drop his cigar down -- he took his cigar in his hand and sort of waved at the photographers and said, "You photographers, you can click but you can't bulb!"

We photographers, when we had just a little time, when we were pressed, we had to get a little action out of the witness. We would say, "Sir, would you say something? Would you wave your arms?" They'd say, "What am I going to say?" I'd say, "Say anything, say walawalawalawala." And they'd go "walawalawala." And bang, bang, bang, we'd get them. But you only got one exposure off. You had it if you had it, or you if you didn't have it you didn't have it.

[62]

There were some witnesses that just wouldn't bend. Dean Acheson was one who was very proper, always dressed immaculately. His little mustache would twitch as he stood there in front of the committee. Al Muto, who was a photographer for I.N.P., was covering Dean Acheson one day. They were leaning across the desk, and saying, "Mr. Secretary, would you do something? Do something, Mr. Secretary. Make a gesture. Do something!" And he wouldn't do anything. He just looked at Al. Al had a short fuse anyway, he got so angry he finally leaned over and he grabbed his Speed-Graphic in one hand and with his other hand he started patting his Speed-Graphic, [bang, bang, bang], patting it like that and saying: "Mr. Secretary" [bang, bang, bang], "I make my living from this." [bang, bang, bang]. He said, "My wife and my daughter get their bread and butter from this." [bang, bang, bang].

All the while, Dean Acheson was looking up at him. Then he said: "What do you wish me to do, take up a collection?" With that, Muto straightened up, and he was struck dumb. He didn't know what to say. Little Frank Cancellare, who was a U.P. photographer at that time, grabbed A1 by the arm and said, "Come on, Al, let's go. You lost that round." Al went outside the committee room and said, "I am going to go back and take this

[63]

camera and smash it in his face! I'm going to wait till he comes out of that committee room and I'm going to deck him!" Frank Cancellare said, "Al, take it easy. There's no doubt in my mind that you can whip him physically. But please, don't trade wits!"

RITCHIE: Do you feel that politicians in those days were stiffer, and wanted to appear more formal?

TAMES: No, I don't think they were stiffer. It's just that the means of recording them was stiffer. I look back at some of the old five-by-seven inch pieces of film, and before that glass plates, in the five-by-seven Graphflexs. When they got the four-by-five Graphflexes they thought they were improving. And a Graphflex is when you look down into the hood. You're blind to everything else. You could get kicked by a horse and never know it, because you don't see anything coming. All you're doing is looking down into that one little reflex. It's pretty hard. A good example of this is Abraham Lincoln. Have you ever seen a picture of him smiling? No. And you're never going to see a picture of him smiling. Because in order for Matthew Brady to make an expression, he had a minimum of one minute. When you have a film where the ASA was so slow, you had to be in bright sun, for a long time. So politicians who were raised in an era of the first Kodaks, starting in the 1880, 1890s, and 1900s, in spite of everything, you got a blur if you moved too fast, even when you were using flash. So they had a tendency to pose. You had to

[64]

keep telling them to relax. That's why the advent of the 35mm camera, where they didn't even know whey were being photographed, ended up making the best candid shots.

Show biz that has taken over politics by and large. It used to be that maybe ten percent of the members had an instinctive show biz mentality. General Patton, say for example, General MacArthur, Montgomery, various generals during the war between the states, the Confederate cavalry general who wore the feathers in his hat, they have a sense of drama, and by priming themselves and making themselves outstanding that way, the followers notice them, and appreciate them. "Good old Monty, " and General Patton with his pearl handled pistols, and the general in Korea who carried the grenades on his chest, a couple of belts of grenades. These people cause others to look at them. Your politician, in his way, is starting to learn to do that, to attract attention.

It's just Senator [Alben] Barkley's favorite story about the mule skinner who was cited for being one of the humane of the mule-breakers, because he broke thousands of mules just by whispering into their ears. Barkley told this story, and I remember the first time I heard him I just broke out laughing. A delegation from the humane society went over to see him in action and give him a plaque. To demonstrate his technique, he went down to the paddock where the mules were, and the first thing this fellow did was to pick up a two-by-four, go to the nearest mule

[65]

and whop him across the head. The poor mule went down on his knees, and his eyes were crossed. Then he just gently picked up one ear and started whispering: "You want me to do this again?" And the humane society people were horrified. They said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Well, first I want to get their attention." Well, you get the attention of the people by posing this way.

RITCHIE: Did you find that there were some politicians who went out of their way to pose for the pictures, or tried to present this image?

TAMES: Oh, yes. They learned very early like Hubert Humphrey, he used to make a big joke out it, we knew that. If you were in a group of five or six senators and we form a circle of pro and con, or a group talking, the ones on the end stand a good chance of being cropped out. So Hubert always made it a point of being in the center. He also made it a point of carrying the action by waving his arms and talking. That way, the reader's eyes go directly to the one who's doing the acting, or making the motions. The first thing you know, all the senators started learning that. So you'd get five of them waving their arms at the same time. They looked like a bunch of windmills in Holland. But Hubert always used to get in the center, or if he couldn't get in the center he'd go around the back and stick his head between two others in the center where they couldn't crop him out.

[66]

RITCHIE: I've heard that Nixon was a pointer, that he used to point his finger at people while he was talking.

TAMES: Oh, yes. In fact, he used to point and poke, poke you in the belly, right in your bellybutton. This way, you kept backing up. One time I was photographing Hubert Humphrey in President Kennedy's office, and the president said, "Wait till I'm ready, George." And then he said, "I'm ready now." He buttoned his coat, and then he went up to Hubert and took his finger and started poking Hubert right in the bellybutton. Hubert started backing up and saying, "For Christ sake, Jack, what are you doing?" The president said, "Just a little trick I picked up from Nixon. Not only do you keep him off balance, but you upstage him." Then they laughed and I went on to make my shots.

RITCHIE: During the war you stayed with Time-Life, covering mostly Washington, and then in 1945 you went to the New York Times.

TAMES: Right.

RITCHIE: How did that switch come about?

TAMES: I had been doing some free lance work for the Times magazine, and I happened to be New York to see the people at Time and Life about my future. The war was over, and I was still an office boy. I was shooting pictures, but I was still classified

[67]

as an office boy. By that time I was getting paid forty-five dollars a week, but I was getting twenty dollars for every picture of mine that appeared in Time and forty dollars for every picture that appeared in Life. I thought I was the hottest thing that ever came down the pike, and I went up to ask about being put on the staff. I still had some enemies up there, people who just couldn't conceive of a person of limited formal education like I had to be able to come to the top without going through all the steps. I could understand how they felt. They didn't encourage me, but they didn't discourage me either over at Time, Inc. There was one fellow, Bob Boyd, who was picture editor of Time. He kept trying to get me on, but he couldn't get it through the hierarchy up there.

So I went over to the New York Times, to see them and meet some of the people that I'd been doing some work for. While I was there, I was offered a job on the New York Times. I told them that I didn't know, because I was a magazine photographer, and being a photographer on a paper would be a step down in the hierarchy. The magazine photographers were the tops. I don't know, I didn't particularly care for newspapers in general. Also, I had heard that they paid notoriously low. I needed to make at least a hundred dollars a week, because I was thinking about getting married. They said, "You're shooting pretty high." I said, "Well, I need that kind of money." So the next thing I

[68]

know, they offered me a job in the Washington bureau. I said, "I'll take it under the conditions that I get paid a hundred dollars, and I'll stay in Washington." Well, I got a call from the New York Times the next morning saying could I come back up to New York, because the publisher wanted to talk to me. I said, "Sure, if you pay the expenses." They said they would pay it. It cost around thirty-five dollars to go up and back on the train.

I went up to New York, and was ushered into Mr. [Arthur] Sulzberger, who proceeded to talk to me about how the plans were to go national, and to put plants here and there and go be a national paper. What did I think of it? I said, I thought a hundred dollars was not too much money. We talked a little longer, and he said, "We'll let you know." So I got a call the next morning from the director of photography telling me that they were offering me a job at a hundred dollars a week, and that I was to have the title of National Photo Correspondent for the New York Times. I said fine. I didn't even know what a National Photo Correspondent meant, but it sounded good. So I accepted. I submitted my resignation over at Time, Inc., and boy they got upset at that. I said, "Well, I've been waiting all this time." They made me a counter offer to keep me on. I said, "How much are you going to pay me?" They said, "We haven't got that down." Well, needless to say, they hired a photographer for two hundred dollars a week after I left. But they hired one who had a little

[69]

more experience than I did. But if they had paid me two hundred dollars I would have stayed there. I wouldn't have gone to the New York Times, and I wouldn't be here talking to you, I don't believe. Although, I don't know, you can never say, the varied experiences I've had.

Although Time, Inc. is a great company and has great people working for it, I think that by far and large the New York Times has the greatest reporting staff, and the greatest and finest writers and personalities that I have ever run into in my life. I was very privileged, at a young and impressive age, to literally sit at the feet of Mr. [Arthur] Krock, Scotty Reston, Tom Wicker, Johnny Apple. These people have always influenced me, because I read the paper quite religiously, and know them by their writings. I've always considered myself a creature of the New York Times. If any species were to be created called creature of the New York Times, it would have to be me. I came to the Times without any background, without anything other than the fact that I could operate this little instrument called a camera. You could be the dumbest person in the world, but when you're immersed in this intellectual ooze that's the New York Times Washington bureau, you just cannot help acquiring some measure of culture and

[70]

education. It's impossible, if you don't get it through your brain you get it through osmosis. So I've always been very grateful to the Times, because looking back sometimes I was not quite as good or as productive as I thought I was, and they tolerated me.

RITCHIE: How different was it working for a newspaper than for a magazine?

TAMES: How different was it? Well, for one thing, in your analysis of the news, say if I made a statement to you on a Monday, Time Magazine would not try to print it until Friday for next Monday's issue. They had a whole week for this statement that you made to be developed. You know, many times the reporter has to run with something that is being told to him verbatim. He has to use his own judgment as to whether this is true, or what other source he goes into. The magazine reporter was a little more leisurely. He had time to pick up the paper the next day and see exactly how you wrote it, and what you thought, and got his own sources. You have a tendency to lay down on the hustle and bustle and the five o'clock deadline, when you've got a weekly deadline. It's a snobbish thing. Of course, we all want to be better or considered better than the other guy, and do our little thing.

RITCHIE: What about as a photographer?

[71]

TAMES: Photographers did the same thing. As a magazine photographer, say for Life Magazine, you're covering the world, you're covering all the figures, you're covering the whole higher spectrum of political life. The newspaper photographer, he wasn't covering anything. It's only been in the last twenty years that the Washington Post -- less than twenty years -- that they have had a photographer full-time at the White House or the Capitol. Jim Atherton is up there now, and he's been doing a good job for many years for them. They have a permanent person at the White House. They cover the State Department, they cover the national news. They've just covered the local horse races and handshakes and bar mitzvahs and what have you. You know, they didn't have the opportunity. You look down on somebody like that, just like the old foreign correspondents used to look down on the fellows who never went overseas. They talked to world leaders, woh, oh, oh.

RITCHIE: What kind of marching orders did you get? Did they tell you what stories were breaking that day and they wanted pictures to go with them? Or did they send you out on your own?

TAMES: On my own, right from the beginning. It was hard going. That's how I learned how to cover the news. I had to be able to read the papers, and I had a routine set up which I've only managed to break in the last year since I've been retired. That's simply you catch the eleven p.m. news, the latest breaking

[72]

news, you catch the seven a.m. news. You're on the Hill between eight and eight-thirty in the morning, and you go down to the Senate coffee shop and see which senators are there early. I used to be able to find Mike Mansfield in there, Senator Stennis, as a rule both of them were in there. Then Senator Aiken, and a few of the other old timers. I'd look and see if they were in conference or alone, and I'd sit with them and ask them what's going down today? Could I come in on it? What does it look like? That's the way it was done.

Then during the morning after you see what the senators are doing, you walk over to the House leadership, stick your head into the Speaker's office and see what's happening over there. You get a feeling of how the legislation is going. But if you expect to sit back and have some one tell you, "Go over and make a picture of the Speaker, because they're going to be voting today," ..you're not ahead of it. You're lost. It's already happened. I've had photographers show up on the Hill at nine-thirty, quarter of ten, asking me what's happening, and I've already done my job. I've already covered the main story of the day. The members are usually moving a lot faster than the average person gives them credit for.

RITCHIE: So you have to anticipate what the reporters will be working on?

[73]

TAMES: Oh, yes. In fact, many a time I've told the reporters what's happening. I discovered early that the Times would not run a picture of mine unless they had a story to go with it. Today they are more likely to run one without a story with it, however, I would say: "This is what's happening, and I've just made a picture of so and so." I've gone into Senator Baker's office when he was Majority Leader and asked him about certain events. He'd say, "I haven't even thought about that." I'd say. "You'd better start thinking about it, because it's coming up!" I was anticipating. You could say things to him or to anyone and they knew that you didn't mean it disrespectfully. You were just anticipating. Once you get a reputation like that around town, they're more likely to open up to you anyway.

And the fact that I'm with the New York Times didn't hurt me, I assure you. There was never any doubt in my mind that if George Tames had been representing the Alexandria Gazette, he never would have had the entree that George Tames of the New York Times has. I've always felt that George Tames was just the prow of the icebreaker, and that the New York Times was the full weight of the ship behind me. That's how I got in. Some members of our profession acquire the feeling that it's they themselves that are doing all these marvelous things, and the fact that they are with the New York Times is incidental, or any other papers, that it's just them. But they soon discover, once they've gone, that the

[74]

phone stops ringing, the invitations stop coming, and who they thought were friends of their's were really just acquaintances. They were just tolerating you, not only for what they could get out of you, but what you could do to them -- what you could do for them, and what you could do against them. Thank you.

RITCHIE: Well, thank you.

TAMES: I don't know, this is just rambling.

RITCHIE: No, no. It's a matter of one thought associating with the next, and I'm getting a very good picture of the time and place, and what the work was like.

TAMES: One of the things that I remember more than anything else is the wonderful times we had at the Senate dining room, at the press dining table. These were the years from '48 up until '61 or '62, when I used to make a practice of eating lunch every day at the Senate, at the same time, at the same table, at the press table. It was a wonderful, stimulating event, because of the jokes, the information. Also we were served by Mr. King, the waiter, who was a wonderful person, sweet tempered. He knew that I liked lemon meringue pie, and every Friday, the Senate Bakery would bake these wonderful lemon meringue pies, and Mr. King would always take a big slice of one and put it aside for me. I would call him from wherever I was in the country because I knew he was expecting me there on Friday. I'd say, "Mr. King, I

[75]

won't be in today, you better sell that piece of pie." He'd say, "Mr. George, you're not going to be in? Are you sure you're not going to be? I'll save it for you. Even if your late, I'll put it aside, you just come on up." I'd say, "I'm in California, I will not be in." "All right, Mr. George, I'll see you next week." Mr. King was an ex-vaudeville hoofer with his sister, who in his latter years got a job as a waiter there for the press table. He was beloved by everyone. In fact, if you go up to the Senate dining room, there's a plaque on the wall, a tribute to him signed by quite a few members. He was a great person.

I think that's something else -- the staff, the policemen, everyone was on a much looser basis. The awful feelings of tension, and the security, it's an entirely different atmosphere now. I just don't like it, but I don't know what to do with it. I was walking by the White House the other day, and I see they're putting barricades up in the street. What are we coming to? Antitank barricades facing the White House. Next think you know they'll want to build a Kremlin. They'll want to put a wall all the way around Lafayette Park and the president's house and we'll be like the Russians. I don't know what the answer is, but I feel that I was there at the right time and was able to record in my own way the events.

[76]

I've always felt very close to the presidents, from Truman to Carter. I felt less close to Roosevelt, who was my first president, and to Reagan. Coming out of California that way, I never got to know him, just a few times at conventions. Here it's been seven years of Reagan's presidency and I still don't know him. Here's a president who goes every weekend -- every weekend -- to Camp David. He has been away from Washington more than any other president that I have had anything to do with. I just wonder what he does up there, other than look at the beautiful scenery. I know Camp David. I've walked that whole area many, many times before World War II, because a friend of mine's grandfather owned about twenty acres up on that mountain. We used to camp out there, so I'm very familiar with that area. I've always wondered what he did up there.

The New York Times, ever since I've been on the staff, starting with Truman, has asked every president to list their ten favorite books. Which books are your favorite? Which books do you consider the ones that have shaped your life? Or have followed the general trend of your thoughts? You find out a lot about a person from what books they read, or which ones they like and which ones they keep around and pick up again and read later, or remember a passage from. But we never did that with Reagan.

[77]

There's a beautiful view up at Camp David. If I recall, we used to climb up on a rock overlooking the little valley there. On your right is Frederick, and the whole wide panorama of the trail through the Cumberland Gap, where so many people went west in the early history of the United States. And over on the left, if you looked on a clear day, you could see Gettysburg, where the high tide of the Confederacy finally broke on that hill there, Little Round Top. And I always wondered, what does Reagan think when he sits up there? Does he wonder: where do I belong in all of this? How do I fit in this? What will history think of me? Does he sit on a rock or a stump, reach in his back pocket and pull out a copy of his favorite poet, and dream a bit, muse a bit, and then be recharged and come back Sunday afternoon to Washington, ready to tackle the world. But I still don't know him. I felt I had a handle on everyone of them., including Roosevelt, but not this guy.

RITCHIE: He's that much more removed from the press?

TAMES: He's not that removed from me, and he's pleasant to me. I can't say that he's been mean or refused any demands, or refused any requests -- you don't demand anything of the president. Although sometimes it sounds like we're demanding, we

[78]

really mean it to be a request. "Would you?" Sometimes we forget the word "please" in the push and shove. "Mr. President, do this, do that." He's never taken us to task, in fact, he's never showed any passion. Maybe that it. You have to have some passion.

RITCHIE: You told me a story once about trying to get him to show you how he made a decision.

TAMES: Yes, was that on the tape?

RITCHIE: No, that was before.

TAMES: Oh, gosh, that was a good one. I happened to remark to one of our reporters on the Times about this. He brought it up at a meeting and they decided to do it. They called it "The Mind of the President." A reporter went over and interviewed the president, and he came back shaking his head. But he sat down and very dutifully wrote a piece for the Magazine of the New York Times. So they decided that I should go over and photograph him, sort of try to get a mood picture. Ever since I made that picture of Kennedy ["The Loneliest Job in the World"] every publisher in the job always wants me to go back and make one like it. It's not there.

I put a request in, and I got a call back from Weinberg, who said, "You've got eleven minutes." That's a lot of time. I said, "I want a one-on-one." They said sure. I went over and I took an

[79]

assistant with me so he could put up some lights. The first thing that happened when we walked over, there were three people from the press office in the room, one TV crew, and one still photographer. A total of nine people; ten with the president. How can you get a one-on-one? I was trying to get a mood picture, trying to talk him into something. Anyway, I finally said, "I'm ready." And I had taken his chair and pulled it away from the desk, and had it by the window. They called him in, and he walked in very briskly. The first thing he does is grab his chair and pull it to his desk. He sits down and starts looking up and me and giving me one-liners, bing, bing, bing. I'm laughing, I'm loving the jokes. I made a few shots of him smiling like that. Finally, we just weren't getting anywhere, because he just kept the jokes going. I said, "Excuse me, Mr. President. This is a very serious piece we're doing. It's called the mind of the president. The whole concept of it is how you make decisions. How do you come to conclusions? When someone presents a very difficult position paper to you, and you read it, how do you make up your mind? Do you scratch your chin? Do you suck on a pencil? Do you get up and walk around? Do you walk out in the garden and check the roses and come back in? How do you do that?" And the whole time he was looking at me. [Makes expression.]

RITCHIE: With sort of a blank stare?

[80]

TAMES: Just a blank stare looking at me. Then when I stopped, he said, "I never do any of those things." So I said, "Don't do it for me." And I turned to the press officer and I said, "Thank you, I've got enough." He said, "You've got five more minutes." I said, "I don't need it. This is all I'm going to get out of this." We started breaking down our gear, and I learned long ago that like a good soldier you never fire your last rounds in your chamber, you always keep a couple just for emergencies, and that as you back towards a door you keep your camera ready. I was just backing away, and backing away, and shuffling my feet, and delaying the departure as long as possible, so that I was literally the last person out the door. As I did so, he had been reading while we were packing up, he picked up the papers, and stood up, and faced the window, and just started flipping them over. From the door I made the shot that we used. It was like pulling teeth.

We ran it full page in the New York Times with our story. The USIA America magazine called and they used it full page for the Russian edition. They used it everywhere. There are not that many real candid shots of this president, and it's so unusual because here is a person who has been in the movies and the theatrical end of the business for so many years. He cannot get into a natural looking situation. Everything looks contrived. He doesn't have any passion. He doesn't seem to project

[81]

forcefully. I haven't read anything that he's written that has really stirred me or set me afire. Sometimes I wonder, maybe the Oscar nominating committees were correct. He's never given an Oscar performance, whether as an actor or as president.

Well, that's one man's opinion.

End Interview #2

[82]

THE VIEW FROM THE PRESS GALLERY
Interview # 3
Tuesday, March 8, 1988

TAMES: We were talking about reminiscences of Southwest Washington, and my family life -- why Sam Lyons became like a son to my mother. He's not that much older than me. He's about three years older than I am. He was a heavy drinker, and Mom used to be very upset about that, and try to break him of the habit. But he and my father got along great, because my father used to make booze in the kitchen, Mastika they call it Greek, by cooking it on the stove. He and Sam would have a drink after he'd just finished making the stuff, when it was just about an hour old, and used to smooth it off with a little licorice.

When Sam went into the military he went out to Texas for tank training. It was dusty, and he wrote back that he sure could have a drink, but there was absolutely no way to get any booze. So my mother and I conjured up an idea. It was Easter time, and the Greeks make this special bread for Easter, in which they shape it into a cross, and there are eggs in the four corners and one in the center. This symbolizes the Easter resurrection. She made an extra big one, and I hollowed it out. In those days there were no

[83]

plastic bottles, so we had to use regular glass bottles. I put two pints -- or half pints, I don't know which now -- in the bread, and stuff it, and put it in a box and marked it: Easter bread, eggs, be careful, stamped all over it, and sent it to him in Texas.

Well, it almost got there intact. In spite of all the cautions on it, apparently the bottles broke there in the camp. They got to the camp okay, but apparently they broke in the camp, and the stuff just permeated this bread. Sam very gingerly picked out the broken glass and then cut up the sopped up bread into small squares, just like they serve at a Greek Orthodox service. At the end of the liturgy, if you're not prepared to take communion, then you just simply receive a piece of bread at the end. Everybody files past the priest and received this bread, anditoros it's call, which symbolizes the body of Christ. So he cut it up into squares like that and then called his friends into his tent to participate in this Greek service that he was having, and it was a great success. Everybody was taking it, and everybody was getting bombed off eating bread! The word got around so that one black GI tried to join in with them, to go in to participate, and he was stopped by a sergeant who asked him where he was going. He said he was going in to participate in this Greek service. The sergeant said, "You don't look Greek to me." He said, "I am." The sergeant said, "What is your name?"

[84]

He said, "Tyrone Popanopolis." The sergeant, "Well speak some Greek to me." And the guy said, "Happo pie pine happo pie kikki." The guy said, "Pass, Greek!"

Sam always thought my father missed his calling. Instead of being a pushcart peddler in the United States he should have had a cottage industry of making this Mastika-soaked bread. It would have been a terrific hit, he said. He knew he would have bought quite a few loaves of it. He said it was the only way he knew that he could drink and eat at the same time, and keep it down!

RITCHIE: And Sam will be one of the speakers at the American Legion tribute to you this week?

TAMES: Yes, Sam's going to be the lead off speaker. He's got a few things to say. He reminded me about the time Sam had written a story about Cordell Hull's Under Secretary of State, Sumner Wells. In his story, Sam wrote that Sumner and his wife liked to bathe together in a huge double tub. They faced one another and bathed and talked. So I went over and asked to take a picture. With great delicacy and diplomacy, I said I would agree to shoot them from the back. But of course, naturally, I didn't get the picture. But at that time that was really risque. The whole idea of a husband and wife bathing together was really a little off the wall.

[85]

Well, I've been thinking more and more about this dinner, tribute as they call it. It's a tribute to me in name, however I think it's more of a symbol for all the first generation of immigrants who are in this great country of ours and the opportunities that we shared, and that still continue as we see in this latest wave of Vietnamese, and Eastern Asians, and South Americans. The dream is here, and it is possible. I'm going to use an example of that. One of the young men, a young black whose name is Ron Thomas, is going to be there as our guest. Three years ago that young man was bagging groceries down here in Safeway. He was putting some groceries in the trunk of our car and saw some of my gear, my lights than things, and he asked my wife if she was a photographer. She said, "No, my husband is." He said, "Well, I've always wanted to be a photographer and I wonder whether he would talk to me." Fran said, "He talks to everybody. He hasn't refused to talk to anybody yet! So you just come on up, make an appointment." He called me, and he came in with his pictures. He showed me what he had done, and what his ambitions were. I could sense that his command of the English language was not on par with his age, that although he was in his twenties he was speaking like a nine or ten year old in the normal white schools that I have gone to. I could sense that he didn't

[86]

have the qualifications, or a background of any kind for photography. I looked at his pictures and I encouraged him, but at the same time I told him: don't give up his job bagging groceries if he expected to eat.

About six months later he came back, with much improved quality of work. Then I sent him back, and gave him some encouragement. I told him that if he could spare the time, and if he wanted to follow me in the summer, he could follow me around, and see how I worked. I could give him some tips and explain to him what I was doing. He did so, in fact, he stayed for a whole year. We literally had to drive him away because of the union problems. We either had to drive him away or hire him, and the Times was not about to hire him. So he went off on his own. To make a long story short: in three years he went from bagging groceries to having an exclusive interview with the president of the United States. So it can be done, but you have to work hard and you have to put your nose to the grindstone and apply yourself. But it can be done. He'll be right there in the audience and I might even ask him to stand.

RITCHIE: Is he working as a photographer now?

TAMES: He's freelancing around town now. The ironic thing is that he's recommending me! That's what really gets me! He called me up one day and said, "Look, I can't do this job for this

[87]

advertising agency in California, but when they call, don't sell yourself cheap, because I've been charging them a thousand dollars." I haven't charged a thousand dollars for an assignment in my life! With all the years I have! So I'm selling myself cheap, I don't realize what the market is out there for the talent.

I've helped him, and I've helped others. I look to Ron Thomas and to A1 Shuster, who is now foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times as two of my greatest proteges. Al Shuster went from my office boy, carrying my gear -- I hired him for the Times when he was seventeen as my office boy. I've helped quite a few people. I've never been reluctant to let anybody know what I know. Unlike when I started, when everything was kept as a close guarded secret, I cut loose. I figure, if I let you know everything that I know, I can still beat you, because you're just trying to catch up to me. Unless you take that quantitive leap like the Japanese, you're always going to be right there. You've got to think. That's the big thing I have found about the young people today, most of them, they're content to be "as good as." That really guts me.

RITCHIE: But not "better than."

[88]

TAMES: Not "better than." Those are the three words that really gut me. God almighty, if I here those words, "as good as," I'm ready to fight or to turn around and walk away. It is just not in my nature to be that way. If you're only as good as someone, don't even say it. It's just like winning second place in a photo contest. I said it's just like kissing your sister. It's very pleasant, but it doesn't lead to anything.

RITCHIE: When you have someone like Ron Thomas in tow, what kinds of things would you tell him? What kinds of things would you try to train him to think as a photographer?

TAMES: Basically, more than anything else to young ones, and particularly minorities who have been depressed, like the blacks, they have a built-in inferiority complex: you have to take command. The moment you work into a situation, and you are a photographer, you are taking over. You are in command. You are the one who is telling them what they are supposed to do. You do it either by direct command, if you can get away with it, or you do it by showing, gently. If people have their own ideas about what they want and how they look, you say, "Fine, I'll do everything that you say, but afterwards I want to do it my way, and then we'll let the editor or let you decide which one is the best." It satisfies me, it satisfies you. So you've got to be able to work with people. This is one of the secrets of my success with the members of Congress. I have always been very,

[89]

very careful about overstepping my bounds. I have always prided myself that I am able to go to the limit before I have to back off, and know when I'm approaching the limit in pushing for any particular thing, and then back off. That way I maintain friendships. Ah, well.

RITCHIE: I wanted to show you one of your pictures, speaking of first generation immigrants. Do you remember this picture you took of Harry Bridges, ten years ago, 1978? Bridges gave a talk at the National Portrait Gallery.

TAMES: I'll be damned, yes.

RITCHIE: The reason why I brought this photograph is because I was one of the people attending that conference, and it was the first time I met you. I think you were the only photographer who came to that meeting.

TAMES: That's right.

RITCHIE: And while he was giving that speech, I recall you moved silently around the room, and there were balconies up above and every once in a while you would appear on a balcony and snap a picture, and then come down below. You must have snapped thirty or more photographs, it seemed to me at least as I was watching.

[90]

And then the next day this picture of a cocky, self-assured looking Harry Bridges appeared in the Times, just the right pose, the chin up in the air.

TAMES: There again, see I had photographed Bridges before, usually in a more defiant character at hearings, or maybe at a strike or in some other situation. He had mellowed, I guess we all mellow as we get older, at least we're supposed to. Anyway, although he had mellowed, he was still defiant. He knew his own mind, and he represented his union well. It's amazing that you should bring this here, because I had forgotten about that incident, yet I remember it now very well. I used to enjoy those lectures over at the Portrait Gallery. Gosh, maybe I ought to go over there and give one.

RITCHIE: That's true, that lecture was called a "Living Portrait." He was telling his life, and they were videotaping it, and you were photographing it at the same time. I wondered the next day when the article appeared in the paper, I wondered out of all the pictures that you took, how do you choose the "right" one.

TAMES: Well, there again, I don't remember this incidence, but there are very few pictures that you can show me that I don't remember making them. I picked this one because I thought it fitted into the article physically, that is the picture itself, and it also gave a little bit more than just the -- what shall we

[91]

call it -- well, it gave more of a portrait of him, still a defiant, chin up guy. I'm sure that this was made just at a moment when he was making some outlandish statement and was reacting to the audience. I knew he loved to make statements where he knew that the audience would respond. In this particular case he threw that chin up. Also what attracted me at that time, if you will notice, is this very outlandish tie that he was wearing, which I thought was part of his defiance, and I wanted to show that.

RITCHIE: Even the article mentions how "dapper" he was dressed that day, but the tie really fills up that picture.

TAMES: Yes, it's the most dominant thing there. It looks like a dinosaur's tongue or something, it's a huge thing.

RITCHIE: And he's obviously standing on the podium, so you're shooting up at him.

TAMES: Yes, he's on the podium and I'm shooting up, so this is a reaction. I caught him just at the moment when there was a reaction by the crowd, or he was listening to a question that was being asked that he didn't particularly care for, someone was reminding him of something that he didn't particularly like. He threw that chin up in a defiant sort of way and semi-closed his eyes, as if he was thinking, but really that's a gesture of defiance. Closing your eyes, you're not really thinking, you already know what answer you're going to give. It's just part of

[92]

the acting. You know, a good orator, so much of it is acting in order to grab your audience, or grab your committee. I've seen it happen so many times. Then again you get some people who are so intellectually bright, who just cannot seem to do it, it's amazing. [Paul] Sarbanes is one, Senator Sarbanes. Senator Sarbanes is a very, very intellectual man. He's very well read, and he can write well, but God bless it, he can't give a speech! He cannot project that. Sometimes I think, God, I wish I could give that speech for him! It's been unfortunate that we have had members of Congress that way. The Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee two years ago...

RITCHIE: Percy or Lugar?

TAMES: [Richard] Lugar was very smart, very intellectual, a very fine senator, but he doesn't get the press. He doesn't get the attention. Yet he's well read, he writes well. He makes sense in committee hearings. We have a tendency...I think one of the greatest inventions is the world has been this automatic clicker [remote control] on TV. You sit back there and the moment somebody says something, click, you click them right off. The moment somebody says Lugar, you have a tendency to think of a 9mm pistol and click you cut it off. That's a shame, but that's what happens.

[93]

RITCHIE: I wanted to ask you again about a picture like this one of Bridges, where you've taken twenty pictures or more of one incident, did you normally just present one to the Times, or did you give them a sampling?

TAMES: No, no. Normally we tried to give them three: one, a single column; two, two columns, if it's one person; and then three is just a straight, dramatic head, just a big head. This is a one column deep, so it could go either way. In fact, sometimes we get away with just two pictures by giving them a good deep one column this way, so they can come in and cut the head off and just use the head if they decided that that's what it calls for in this space. It depends on the dressing. Also, in a case like this where it's a feature story, a feature picture, you also try to dress the page. In other words, if you have two good pictures of him, one looking right and one looking left, you send them both, because you don't know how it's going to look. In this particular case, he's looking to the right of the reader, which is the correct way, into the story. Now, if you had this flipped and he's looking off the page, it would be distracting, and they wouldn't use it. See, they wouldn't use it. Now, of course in the old days, in a case like that and it was the only picture they had, they would just take his head and flip it, and you wouldn't know whether it was the right or left. But if they left the tie in and a few other things, you can distinguish that they are

[94]

flipped. But you usually try to give them three: looking right, looking left, and a good two-column in the center. Sometimes more, depending, but usually right about that.

RITCHIE: I wondered, did you ever regret, sometimes, when a picture you had taken wasn't used?

TAMES: Oh, yes, many times. Of course, that was my fault. Unlike the young ones -- see, I had an advantage and a disadvantage. I never worked in New York, I worked in Washington, so I didn't know how the picture desk worked. Now, many times I made pictures down here that were exclusive, that were very newsworthy and on top of it, and I would send them up to New York and they never would get used, because the people in New York didn't recognize what the story was about, and they didn't recognize how important this particular picture was.

I made a picture when a Republican candidate eight years ago dropped out of the race. He was a Congressman.

RITCHIE: Phil Crane?

TAMES: Not Crane, no, it was another one. The one who was a very religious one. He had an office on the first floor of the Longworth Building. Oh, God, what was his name?

RITCHIE: He was running for president?

[95]

TAMES: He was running for the nomination, and he backed out right on public TV. I happened to be there. I followed him that day. I didn't know that he was going to say this, but the moment he finished on TV, the McNeil-Lehrer Report, they offered him a cup of coffee, and he cupped it in his hands and was bringing it up, and was blowing into it. The look on his face of weariness and resignation -- I sent that up. Then I sent a regular talking shot, when he actually made the announcement on TV. Well, I didn't call New York. I sent them two, I should have only sent them one, of him blowing into the coffee, because to me that was a more dramatic shot. But they went with the talking shot. Yeah, I remember that, I never forget that one.

RITCHIE: What is the role of the photo editor? Your photo editor gave you the award at the Kennedy Center the other night, and that raised a question in my mind: what's the relationship between the photo editor and the photographer.

TAMES: Well, of course, there are a lot of assistants. She's the picture editor, and then there are editors on the various desks. The Times now has gotten so big that they have regional editors. They have one that does sports, one that assigns photographers to travel the country, or picks up freelancers, then there's one that does the domestic, metropolitan area, and so forth. But the relationship between the two is that you shoot it -- and here in Washington we have the advantage that we

[96]

print it and then we send what we like. Now, of course, if you send up your raw film, or contacts, or just contacts, then he or she will look at the prints and decide which picture they like. It should be a very close relationship between the two, so you could call up and say, "Look, this is what I think," and let them decide. See, we're looking at it from the picture point of view, and they're looking at it from the page, how does it fit and how does it dress up the rest of the page. Unless the picture is so outstanding that the picture is used and then everything else has to be worked around it. We've had occasions where they have said, "We're holding that story because we need some art with it. Go ahead and make something on it." And we try to do what we can on that.

RITCHIE: Have you ever tried to second-guess the photo editor? You know that they like certain types of pictures, and you aim for that?

TAMES: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Many times. The late Lester Markel, the editor of the Sunday department of the New York Times, who had a finger in everything, used to pick the pictures for the New York Times magazine cover, and so forth. I knew that he used to love silhouettes, and he used to love chandeliers and mirrors, reflections, that type of thing. I used to always try to do something like that, that would please his eye. Silhouettes particularly, I'd always try to get something silhouetted to make

[97]

it stand out. Yeah, you do that. You learn to work with your editor. He's the final arbitrator of what goes in, so you have to have a good relationship. You can call up and ask, "Why did you do this?" "Why didn't you do that?"

Sometimes they'd leave things out of captions. We did it just recently. We had a piece on the State Department's lawyer, the counsel for the State Department. I got a very nice, moody shot of him, leaning up against his desk, in front of his desk, with his legs crossed, and some papers under his arms. He had folded his arm, his flag was over his right shoulder, and there were some pictures on the wall. It was a beautiful picture, but he's looking at a TV set. I made the TV set prominent in the foreground, shot so that on the left you could it was a TV set and he's looking right at it. The caption read, "Sawyer in his office today." Well! And I went to great lengths to describe the fact that he keeps three TVs going on in his office all the time. One on CNN for the debate in the House and Senate, and one for any committee hearings that are going on. So anytime something attracts his attention, he can zap in on it. We failed to mention it. To me, that took away from the whole picture.

Then another thing we had, just recently, I made a picture of the Secretary of Defense, [Frank] Carlucci, up with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral [William] Crowe. They were testifying before the House Armed Services Committee. Just before

[98]

they started testifying on the Defense Department budget, just two days previously the Secretary of the Navy [James] Webb had resigned, and it was still hot news. So the Admiral leans over and puts his hand on the microphone and leans in and whispers to the Secretary: "What's my answer if they ask me about why the Secretary of the Navy quit?" And Carlucci laughed and said, "Just keep your mouth shut." Well, I put that in my caption, and we didn't use it. But we used the picture of his holding his hand over the mike.

RITCHIE: Are there many occasions when you feel that the photo editor has a particular slant, or a dislike of people or groups? Do they ever choose pictures out of a particular bias?

TAMES: Well, yeah, they do have some. But I never catered to their whims. If it's there, I'll do it, but I'm not looking for something just to justify some preconceived idea that somebody might have.

RITCHIE: I don't know of any examples on the Times, but I know that people have complained that some newspapers run unflattering pictures of Republicans or Democrats, or this politician never gets a good picture in that paper.

TAMES: The only reason why he doesn't get a good picture is because he doesn't make a good picture! Some people make good pictures, and some don't. It's just a quirk of the camera.

[99]

Sometimes I will look at people through my lens, and then look at them with my eye, and look through the lens again, and it seems like it's two different people. It just does something. We call it "photogenic." Well, there is something there. Some try all their lives to get something, and they never get a good shot, or never have anything that really pleases them.

No, of all the years that I have been in the business, I've never heard of any one person, photographer, going after some member of a political party just simply because they didn't like them. I mean, I will admit that there are times when say the Ku Klux Klan or some of the more obvious brutal sheriffs and deputies in the South during the Civil Rights fights, that we photographers would try to catch their most unflattering angle, if we were able to without being too obvious at it. Yeah, we've done that. We make sure the background doesn't do them any good. But by in large we try to bury our personal feelings, otherwise if you don't you're never going to come up with anything that's worthwhile. And once the word gets around that you're doing that, why...But in Washington I've never heard of anybody doing that, or getting a reputation for deliberately going out of their way to make someone look bad. Although there are photographers who earned their living deliberately making cops look bad, or society in general look bad.

[100]

RITCHIE: The other thing I remember from that night when Harry Bridges spoke was that afterwards there was a reception downstairs in the hall where all the paintings of the presidents were hung. I was with Jim Ketchum, the Senate Curator, and you came over and walked us past all of the portraits of the presidents that you had photographed, and told us each of the quirks of these presidents. Eisenhower was sensitive about his earlobes, as I recall you said, and Johnson always wanted to have his left side taken.

TAMES: That's right.

RITCHIE: It was a wonderful account of the vanities of famous men. I wondered how much as a photographer you had to take those vanities into account. Did you run the risk of encountering the ire of some of them if you didn't take the pictures they wanted?

TAMES: Oh, yeah, sure you ran the risk. LBJ used to blame me for every picture that he considered unflattering that ran in the New York Times. He never bothered to look at the credit. I just caught hell, because I was his friend, and I was supposed to make sure that these types of things did not get in, that's all there was to it. It was almost impossible to avoid the left side of Lyndon Johnson's face, because he deliberately presented that every time that he possibly could. At one time I told him that if

[101]

he could walk on the stage backwards, just so his left side showed, he would do it. If you notice, at every one of his rallies, that when he walked on stage he came from the right and walked on stage with the left side of his face showing to the audience. He always entered from the right of the audience, so it was always the left side of his face that was showing when he walked across the stage.

RITCHIE: Do you recall that night you told a story about taking a businessman or a banker in to see Johnson?

TAMES: Yes.

RITCHIE: Could you tell me that story again?

TAMES: It was a group of IBM-ers who were going through the Hill that day. He was Majority Leader or Vice President, one or the other. We went through his office, and I told them before we went in that he was going to give them his "sound dollar” pitch, where he started talking about "what makes Amurrrica great: it's the dollar that makes Amurrrica great." You could see these business people's eyes start sparkling when he started talking. Then he would take out a dollar bill and very dramatically flattened it out and used his fingers as if he was cutting with scissors: "This much for defense, and this much for that." He was showing how much of the dollar it took to run the federal government, and their eyes would light up.

[102]

But just before we went in, the public relations man for the group was also about six foot five, big outdoor type, and he asked me if I could get a picture of him with Johnson. I said, "Sure, I'll make the other pictures and I'll introduce you to him and make a picture of you." He said, "Well, before we go in there I wanted to let you know that..." I said, "Don't tell me that you have a favorite side of your face." He said, "Yes." I said, "Which side?" He said, "The left." I said, "No way. LBJ thinks the left side of his face is best, so we're going to stand with his left side showing, your right showing." He said, "Well, I'll take care of it." I said, "You take care of it, I'll photograph it, but I know what's going to happen."

We went in and I introduced him to the Vice President, and I said, "Can I get a picture?" And LBJ said, "Sure." He got up and buttoned his coat, and just as he was buttoning his coat, this friend of mine grabs him by the elbow and spins him around so that his right side is showing, and the other fellow stepped in left. Just as fast, LBJ spins him around. Then they spin around again. Finally I said, "Hold it guys! If you both want the left side of your face to show, stand back to back!" And LBJ said, "No, George, I don't mind, you know that I don't mind." I said, "Yeah, I know you don't mind." So we made the picture with LBJ's right side of his face showing. He was very unhappy with that, I could tell that. I said, "Now, Mr. Vice President, that was nice

[103]

behind your desk, but let's make a different picture over here by the fire place. I think this is a nice mantle here." He said, "Oh, sure, George." We went over there and he stands with the left side of his face showing, and this time I signaled to my buddy just to go along with it. He was smiling and shaking hands and I was banging away. Then as we were going out the door, LBJ put his arms around my shoulder and gave me a big squeeze. He looked down and said, "You pick the best one, you hear?"

When I had them printed, this friend of mine said, "Jeez, I'd love to get it autographed." I said, "He'll never autograph that one with the right side of his face showing." So what I did was to take a mounting board and lightly glue the picture by the mantle place, with LBJ's left side showing, and put it on the board. Then I took it in and had LBJ look at it. He liked it and he signed underneath. When I left the room, I just removed that picture and put the other one on, and everyone was happy. That's called diplomacy.

RITCHIE: Were there many members of Congress who had vanities about how they wanted to be photographed?

TAMES: Not that I'm aware of to the extent that LBJ did. There were quite a few who would joke about not having had a good picture made, I'd do this or do that, but I never really had any problems.

[104]

RITCHIE: I've heard that Johnson particularly was interested in getting a good coverage from the New York Times and cultivated a lot of their correspondents, and was very close to William S. White in the 1950s. Did you feel that he sort of cultivated you as well?

TAMES: Oh, yes. He cultivated me and he cultivated all photographers. I think White was just one of his favorites and I think I probably was one of his favorites. The reason for it, of course, from my angle was I love to joke, I love humor, and I use humor quite a bit. I would tell him what jokes I'd been hearing and what was happening around the Hill, and he would laugh and tell me a few things. And I knew him for so long, from when he was over there as a member of the House, so that had something to do with it.

Yes, he had favorite photographers, like Okimoto, who was his official photographer. He kept calling him "that Jap," but he didn't mean it in a derogatory sense. "Where's my Jap?" he say when he wanted some pictures made. He didn't ask for Okimoto. He probably couldn't even pronounce it. He'd say, "Where's my Jap?"

I'll never forget the time after he became president and he called in Pierre Salinger, who was still working as press secretary. "Pierre," he said, "I want you to get my Jap and bring him over here and take some pictures." "Yes, sir, Mr.

[105]

President." Pierre didn't even question what the president was asking. Then he went into the press office and said, "Who the hell is this Jap that he's asking about?" He found out it was Okimoto, who was working for USIA at that time, and had followed LBJ when LBJ took that tour of the world and ended up in Pakistan and got the mule driver a car and all that stuff. Okimoto was along, and Vice President Johnson liked what Okimoto did. I think Okimoto presented him with a huge album of all the pictures that were made by him and the staff. That's how Oki got the job over there as the first official White House Photographer.

RITCHIE: When they created an official position, how did the rest of the photographers feel? Did they see that as competition in a sense?

TAMES: Well, no. We saw it both as competition and a source of pride, that finally still photography was becoming recognized as a force. We had pride in having one of us make it. In fact, I make no bones about it, that was my ambition to have that title, personal photographer to the President of the United States. I thought, hell, you couldn't do any better than that. I was perfectly willing to do it for Hubert Humphrey, and I would have become the photographer for Hubert if he'd have made it. Then some of Jimmy Carter's staff people asked me to come over: would I like to go over there and work? They also asked Bernie Boston. But when they asked me, I told them yes, I was

[106]

interested, until I found out that Carter didn't want to give me the title. He didn't want the Imperial Presidency, so he said. But he was willing to let me run the place. I said, "I'll stay where I am." As far as I was concerned there's not enough glory or glamor in the job to compensate for the fact that you were doing the work without getting the proper credit. I guess we all like a title of some kind.

RITCHIE: Has there been a tendency of presidents to try to get the newspapers to publish their official photographs rather than candid shots taken by the press photographers?

TAMES: Oh, yes. Very much. This goes back to the times when Harris & Ewing had a lock on it. Up until my picture of Eisenhower they had a lock on the president's pictures. They had every president's picture there, God, I believe from Lincoln on up. They would sell them, and they would make thousands of prints, and make quite a bit of money out of it. Also the state of the art was such that you could only take pictures by elaborate set ups, and so forth, that took a lot of time. Of course, it's reached a point now where we're getting so much media coverage. When I showed up at the White House first before World War II, it was practically deserted. If you got five, six still photographers, you had a crowd. Normally, you had three. Today, on a simple, routine assignment, you'd see eight or nine.

[107]

Just last Friday I was at the announcement by the Postal Rate Commission, recommending the increase of a U.S. stamp from twenty-two cents to twenty-five cents, and there were eleven TV cameras there! For a simple little old announcement! And four still photographers. So you have an increase not only there but everywhere in Washington. The media has increased. Just look at the Congressional Directory, with the names of the newspapers represented. And today, with instant communications, my goodness. I understand that the Architect of the Capitol turned down a request by the TV companies to put a huge satellite dish on the roof of the Capitol, so they could beam to world everything that was going on, right directly from the Capitol. Gosh, if this is happening, you can imagine how much more is demanded of photographers.

RITCHIE: You mentioned Harris & Ewing. They were an old-time Washington photographic studio. I gather they must have kept someone standing outside the White House regularly, because I've seen loads of their picture -- they all seem to be the same pose -- of somebody coming in or out the White House door.

TAMES: That was all you could get. You see, when I showed up in 1940, by that time photographers were allowed to hang around the door leading into the press room, which was in the West Wing of the White House, where the president's office is. Previous to Roosevelt, the only place where the photographers could stand was

[108]

on West Executive Avenue, down the bottom of the steps. They used to sit there, when they would hear that some king or queen or some big personage was coming, and try to get a shot of them as they came in and out of the gate, from outside. Then when they were allowed inside, all dignitaries were always escorted through the west door of the West Wing, why we always used to stand them right there at the door, with their hands on the doorknob, or just standing there talking to one another, before they went in or after they left, after seeing the president. We'd just stop them there. We'd just stand there and just wait. Yes, we spent a lot of time staked out that way.

The room that the photographers had as their office at the White House, when I first showed up, was a little room which we called the "dog house," because it really was like a kennel. It was six feet wide and about twenty-five feet long. It was on the side of the White House where today the present offices of the assistant press secretaries are, inside the little building. In other words, it was in that little extension where Roosevelt had his swimming pool, which is now the press room. When you come up to the dais, where the press secretary gives his briefing, directly behind him was where the old room was. We stayed in there, and we literally had no chairs or nothing. We just had a changing room, we could go in and change our four-by-five holders and re-load and unload. The way the wire services would send

[109]

their film back to the office was they would go into this little room and put their exposed film in little light-tight boxes and tape them and put a caption on them, and then walk out to the gate and wait for the messenger to come from the wires and they'd take it back for printing.

We weren't even allowed into the press room. It wasn't until Harry Truman became president that he went on an inspection tour of the West Wing of the White House, after he had been in office for about a month, and he went into the press office. There Merriman Smith, who was then the dean of the White House press corps, escorted him around and showed him the offices. And Harry Truman said, "Well, where are the photographers?" Merriman Smith said, "Oh, Mr. President, we don't let them in here. We just keep them outside in the dog house." Harry Truman said, "I want them in here." That was the first time we were allowed to come in. Sometimes the press reporters would suffer us to come in when the weather got cold or rainy outside, but they had a bar: photographers were not entitled to come in to the press room. Harry Truman made us first-class citizens. That's why I've always claimed an affection for him. He made us first-class citizens.

RITCHIE: How do you account for the reporters' bias or feelings against the photographers?

[110]

TAMES: Traditional. I've always claimed, to be very facetious, that the photographers were the asshole of the Fourth Estate. Through us all the crap wends out, and we received all the abuse, because by and large we were a craft in a literary profession. We were craftsmen, we could operate this little gizmo, this little thing called a camera, and take images. But it would only take minimal training to get someone to use one of these boxes. The writers came out of backgrounds in journalism schools -- while photography schools were unknown as part of journalism. It wasn't until the advent of Life magazine that everyone started thinking of photography as an art, and as a visual adjunct to the writing.

Of course, the writers always kept their numbers small. They were very jealous of their proximity to the president. They still are, to this day. They become prima donnas themselves, and start telling the world how the presidency should be run. You can see that today in some of their writings. But the presidents, by and large I have found, felt more at ease around still photographers, and photographers in general. Today the photographers are just as well educated as the writers or they can't get the job, at least around here. And I think it was just a class distinction, and it has only been fairly recent that when a photographer went out with a reporter, that you were always introduced as "my photographer." We used to resent that. "This is my photographer,

[111]

and we're doing this story." Until we photographers started introducing the reporters as "my reporter." Then that kind of took the edge off of that.

I think the reporters also looked upon us as infringing on their time. Say if they had fifteen minutes for an interview, they thought that the photographer distracted because of his movements and so forth. Where I've always maintained that we added to the interview. At least particularly in my case, I used to ask questions myself that I thought that the writer hadn't asked. I brought them up in such a way that it wasn't taking away the job from the reporter, but at the same time I was asking the questions.

RITCHIE: How did the accommodations at the Capitol compare with the accommodations at the White House for photographers?

TAMES: Oh, the Capitol accommodations are sensational. We can't complain. The set-ups today, with free access particularly to the combined press galleries -- you know, this tradition extended to the galleries at the Capitol. The photographers were not members of, or allowed to be members of, or tolerated in the galleries. We were not allowed to go up into that area. It was for reporters only, and members of the gallery. It wasn't until we formed our own gallery, and petitioned the Congress to be allowed, that we were allowed to come into the main gallery and

[112]

even look over the railing. No, that's why you have such a proliferation of galleries. If the writers had allowed the radio-TV, and the magazines, and the photographers, to join their gallery, there would only be one gallery today. That's what the Congress tried to do in the last four years: consolidate the galleries into one, where they should be. But once you get an entrenched bureaucracy, and the various superintendents who are seeing their jobs in jeopardy, they didn't want to give up their galleries and combine.

But today in the gallery, with flashing on the monitor who's going to appear in the gallery and at what time and on what subject, everybody's invited to go there. The set-up we have in the Dirksen Building, with our labs and our studio where we bring the members down for portraits, and TV also uses that for interviews, a lot of space is occupied and a lot of money is spent on the media.

I for one wouldn't mind seeing the Congress ask for rent, because we are occupying the space, and we are their guests, so to speak. Of course, the New York Times has its own phones. We have telephones and our own lines. We use them when we're calling back and forth. However, there are hundreds of reporters up there who use the government's phones every day. It's sort of a subsidy for the media. Yet you try to tell them it's a subsidy and they rear back and tell you no.

[113]

RITCHIE: Well, it's an old tradition. Congress, always provided pens and paper for the reporters, and eventually typewriters and telegraph machines.

TAMES: That started early when reporters suggested this, particularly for some of their poor colleagues, who were getting paid by the word that they were writing and were frequently down on their luck. They used to sleep up there in the gallery! They spent all night in the gallery. When I was a young man, a lot of fellows slept out in the gallery and got up and washed in the wash stands in the morning and went downstairs and had coffee. When they had the bar in the Capitol, they used to tell me that they would go down there and have a free lunch. That was up until fairly recently, until the prohibition went into effect, there was a bar on the first floor of the Capitol, down on the House side, where the old barbershop used to be. There's a hearing room there now.

Yeah, they provided the pens, they provided the space. This just led into more and more, step by step. All of a sudden you find young reporters showing up demanding these things. Now you've reached a point where it's part of life. It's just like reporters going into an enclave of poverty in some part of the United States and the first thing that strikes you is the forest of TV antennas. How can they be so poor if they've got TVs? TVs have become necessities. We change. Hell, yes, I have seen

[114]

members of the press who actually have gone off their rocker up there. They think they are members of the House or Senate in that their advice should be taken. I think it's gone about as far as it can go, and I think that a fee for use of the space -- there's nothing in the Constitution that says that free space has to be allocated for the media. The only step after that is to feed them, and then they'd better write favorable articles or they'll cut them off, and that's a danger that we have to be very careful with here.

RITCHIE: Did you have a desk or working space in the press photographers gallery? How did they work that?

TAMES: No, no, we have a communal arrangement. There are about three desks and a long table where we put our gear. There's also lockers where we can keep valuable gear. Valuable gear has been stolen from us around the Capitol over the years, so now we try to keep everything under lock and key.

The only slots that are marked for the New York Times up in the Capitol are for the reporters. We use it also, but it's one little desk and three phones in a corner of the press gallery. I think maybe one phone line is for our direct computer to the office, and the other two are for conversation. Then of course there are other desks allocated to other reporters on a seniority basis, for the ones who cover Capitol Hill regularly. Sarah

[115]

McClendon has a desk, for example, because I know her. Her desk is right next to the Times. There are others, the wire services and individual newspapers. The Washington Post has about as big a space as the New York Times. Some of the other papers have individual desks, which are their desks. I don't know whether they were bought by the individuals or they are provided by the Capitol but at least the phone service we provide ourselves, and I think we are perfectly willing to buy our own furniture too, if it had to be. It's a convenience. It works both ways up there. By having the desk there you know that the reporters can spend a lot more time there, instead of having to come downtown to write their story, they can just write it directly from there and have it filed.

RITCHIE: Was the gallery a good place to pick up gossip about what was going on?

TAMES: Oh, God, yes. The gallery plus the place I loved, and I picked up more stuff there, was the press table in the restaurant on the Senate side of the Capitol. I'd have lunch there every day. I made a point of having lunch there every day. The same gang, usually the same bunch. We'd bat it back and forth. You'd pick up a nugget here, a nugget there, and you'd put it together just like an intelligence service.

[116]

But my greatest asset was that I was at the Capitol every morning no later than 8:30, sometimes 8 o'clock, about 8:15 was average. And I'd walk back to the Senators' Dining Room, and I'd see Mike Mansfield and Senator Aiken, Senator Stennis, Senator Long, Kefauver, some of my favorites who were early risers and would get in that early. Senator Stennis was one who had his coffee and his breakfast up there in a corner -- he may still be doing it to this day, although he's so crippled -- but he would spread out the daily paper and mark articles so his staff would clip them out and follow up and these particular stories. I'd have breakfast with him, or I'd be having breakfast with him and I'd walk over and say hello and ask him what he was doing that day. We just bat it back and forth, and as a result I was able to pick up what was going on, and the feel and the drift of the Senate, which way the Senate was going on various issues. Of course, there weren't that many issues, either. I will admit that it's so overwhelming today, there's so much legislation, so much happening. If it was happening then, I didn't know it. But I thought I knew everything that was going on, and it was a little more leisurely pace. It was work, but it wasn't as frenzied as it is today. So many things happening, one on top of another.

I'd ask a few questions, and have coffee, and talk some more. I'd pass on what I heard. I would have already read the Washington Post, because I wasn't getting the Times until I got to

[117]

the Hill myself. I didn't get a chance to read my own paper until a little later. But I always did get the Post at home and I knew what was happening. I'd comment. I'd say to one senator, "Well, what do you think about what David Broder said today?" Or "What do you think about what such and such a person has written?" "What do you think of the editorial in the Post today?" "What did you think of the editorial in the Times?" "What did you think of the editorial in the Baltimore Sun?" When they were in the field, the individual senators, I'd ask them what did they think of it, and they'd let me know. And it was on a personal basis. I got information just for my own satisfaction and my own judgment of what was going on, not necessarily for the office, except on occasion when I got a real good piece, I would pass it on to the reporters.

Invariably I would say, "This is what I hear, but you'd better check it out." Because I learned early, one time I told somebody to check it out, and they didn't check it out. It ran as a headline in the New York Times the next day. It was true, but it frightened the hell out of me. It was just my perception of what was happening, not any facts. I don't know whether the reporter was being facetious or not, but I walked up to him with a great big smile and said, "Well, you checked it out and it was true." He said, "Oh, I didn't check it out, I just went on what you told me." I said, "You what!?" He said, "Yes, I went on what

[118]

you told me." I said, "Why did you do that?" He said, "Listen, George, I discovered early in my career not to dig too deep into a good story. It might turn out to be untrue." Well, I never forgot that! That was a lesson I never forgot. I made a point of always telling them: "Be sure to check this out."

But most of the time I just kept it to myself. I'd pass it on to the other senators, you know, this is the feeling. Or someone would ask me: "What do you hear, George?" "This is what I heard, what do you think about it? What do you think are the chances of this bill? What do you hear?" I'd say, "Well, this is what I hear." I don't know if they were just trying to get from me the viewpoint of the media, or if they know that I talked to quite a few members. I enjoyed it, too. You know, it gave you a sense of power. It surprises me, its a feeling of power, psychologically I guess, when you know some big secret and everybody doesn't know it. You know that something is about to happen, and you can't tell anyone.

It just reminds me of during World War II when some of our correspondents were writing these super-secret memos to Time, Inc. They would send up confidential and secret messages to the editors in New York, a few select ones, about what they were hearing here in Washington, or what was told to them by the military here about certain operations, or certain things that were going to happen, certain new weapons, radar, which was hush-hush.

[119]

I knew all about radar. The big to-do one time was they spread the word that they had the answer to the German tanks. They were going to really take care of them with rocket propelled grenade launchers; they called it the bazooka. Hell, I knew what a bazooka was when nobody else knew about the bazooka.

How did an office boy know? Very simple. Everything was hush-hush, yeah. They'd bring the secretary in, who takes this all down, or when the guy types it they have to make twenty copies. So who did they give it to? They give it to the office boy to run it off on the machine? So I'd run off twenty-one! Get one for myself. I'd read it, I wouldn't tell anyone, and I'd destroy it later, because I'd probably get fired if I got caught. I often wondered if this was the weak link in a lot of information that's leaked. You can make all these elaborate arrangements, and then you send it to the printer, and the printer leaks it!

Mary Malloy the office manager would sit there and she'd count as I ran it off the machine, because that was my job to run it off the ditto machine. "How many are you going to make off this, Mary?" "Oh, we're going to make thirteen of those." "Fine, okay. One, two, three." And up to thirteen, and then I'd run it through one more time as I was counting thirteen. Or, if I didn't do it that way, I would take the stencil master, and it was very inky, you would take it off that damn thing and drop it in a

[120]

special bag and drop it in the trash. I would retrieve it and read it, and then drop it back in the trash. I told one of my friends one day what I was doing. He said, "Shit, don't you know that your fingerprints are all over that thing." I said, "But they're all over everything anyway. I handle it, they know I handle it."' "Got another one Mary?" She'd come over and say, "Okay, shove this one through." I'd shove it through, and that way I'd find out what was going on.

I knew a great deal about what was happening in the military, as much as they'd let the media know -- particularly Time magazine, because Time magazine was publishing a week later, so it was news by that time. What they were telling Time two or three days in advance was secret. God, a hell of a lot of memos were going back and forth on the timing of the invasion of Europe, at that time they didn't say Normandy. I don't remember the word Normandy, but I do remember invasion, and a lot of plans, and a lot of preparations, and a lot of artificial bulwarks or docks, super secret artificial docks. I don't know whether the Germans knew about it that much in advance; or whether it was a complete surprise to them, but I knew about it. It was pretty heady stuff for a twenty-one year old. It was just like fine wine, I guess. It's been a very interesting career, when you consider it all. I just fell into it.

[121]

RITCHIE: You're in a city where knowledge is so significant. Knowledge is power in many ways.

TAMES: Knowledge is power. Knowledge is money. And words are power. That's what I keep trying to tell these blacks. "So you want to keep black English, beautiful," I'd say. "Keep black English, but don't speak it when you go out in the public. Keep it for yourselves, like I kept Greek for myself." The moment you try to start speaking black English and carry on a conversation on a high level, nobody's going to listen to what you say. And the English language today is the language. Everybody speaks it. It's the lingua franca of the present world, and it's going to be that way for quite a while at the rate we're going. I don't give a damn what the French do, and how they fight for the purity of the French language, the French language is going to pick up English, the way the English language picked up French. They might as well lay back and enjoy it as they see the words "computer," and "chips" going into the French language.

Language is a living instrument, and words are power, and the same word means different things to different people in different eras. You have a very simple word like "Theodore." That's "gift of God" in Greek, but "Theopholis" literally translates "friend of God." At the time it was created, it meant "love of God." So the same sounding words a thousand years later mean something different entirely, so you have to be very careful with your

[122]

words. The Greek speaking people here in the States picked up many English words and incorporated them right into their Greek and rattle it off as if it was Greek. The same way I hear Japanese today rattling off Japanese and you can pick up the English words they are using. I'm sure the young Japanese boys in school think that it's Japanese they are speaking, and when they hear the Americans using the word they think, "Ah, using Japanese words."

Well, we covered a lot of subjects again. We didn't do much on the Hill.

RITCHIE: That's okay. I think we can cut it off at this stage today, but I would like to come back and follow up more on the Congress, and look at some of your photographs, and talk about some of the individuals who you have photographed.

TAMES: Sure. I'm fixing up the third floor where we'll have a lot more room. I'll put the pictures and that way we can go over them. Like you triggered me on Bridges here. I hadn't thought about him. I remember that big tie he was wearing, I was very taken by that.

RITCHIE: Well, photographs are wonderful for triggering memories, and yours in particular because photography was your life, or your career at least.

[123]

TAMES: My career and life.

End Interview #3