From the third grade on, I knew that I wanted to write. From early childhood, when my mother taught me the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm and the 100th Psalm, I wanted to please God.
It never occurred to me, as a young man growing up in the Bible Belt, that the two desires might conflict. But I learned fairly early that my religious beliefs, while they need not bar me from the craft I loved, might pose obstacles that could preclude my going to the top.
I grew up in a Southern cotton-mill town, Graniteville, S.C., about 15 miles east of Augusta, Ga.
Graniteville was a church town, with a rich mixture of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Holiness and Nazarenes. My father never went to church, but he loudly proclaimed his belief in the Baptist faith. My mother’s family were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they never missed an opportunity to direct my attention to the Bible and to provide me with Bible literature. I read it avidly, except for those occasions when my father found it and confiscated it. Though he professed Christianity, he had only a rudimentary education and never read the Bible. Yet he hated everything associated with the Witnesses.
In the tug of war between his uninformed beliefs and the well-developed theology of my maternal kinfolk, there was no contest. Though it would be years before I could take my stand as a Witness, my outlook on life was shaped by their teachings.
I was four years old when World War II broke out. Several adult relatives answered the call to arms and served overseas. One, Grady Rains Jr., was an active Jehovah’s Witness. He took a stand as a conscientious objector and served out the war in a federal prison.
Growing up in the super-patriotic atmosphere of a nation at war, I regarded my soldiering relatives as heroes. But I also admired my Uncle Grady’s moral courage. Later, when it appeared that I might face the same choice, I found that standing up for an unpopular belief required more grit than following the crowd down the path of glory. I was proud, after the war, to learn of the thousands of German Jehovah’s Witnesses who went to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps rather than support the Nazi regime and the armed forces that were slaughtering Allied soldiers and civilians by the million.
I went through high school during the early ’SO’s, discussing my religious beliefs vigorously with my fellow students and developing my love for writing as Editor of the high-school newspaper. I worked an eight-hour shift as a laborer in the cotton mill during my senior year, except for a one-month stint as a fill-in editor of the company magazine.
I won a scholarship from the mill company and enrolled at the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. There, my faith for the first time posed a conflict with my career interests.
Though my father’s intense opposition had prevented me from becoming a practicing Witness, I was nevertheless concerned when I learned that the University of Georgia, as a land-grant institution, required male students to spend at least two years in the Reserve Officers Training Corps before they could graduate. The university informed me that nothing in its military-science program should offend a conscientious objector, and I accepted this assurance.
At the university, I was free for the first time to attend religious meetings, and began to participate in the activities of the congregation. I was baptized in 1955, at the age of 18, as a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
By that time, I was already a fledgling journalist. In my freshman year, I had been appointed Feature Editor of the campus newspaper and had landed a part-time job covering police court and city hall for the local daily.
I had also learned a great deal more about Jehovah’s Witnesses. A brief description of those beliefs might be in order.
Jehovah’s Witnesses see themselves as a worldwide brotherhood that transcends national boundaries and national and ethnic loyalties. They believe that since Christ proclaimed that his kingdom was no part of the world and refused to accept a temporal crown, they too must keep separate from the world and refrain from political involvement. The problems of the world will not be solved by human governments, they believe, but by the heavenly kingdom that Jesus taught us to pray for in the Lord’s Prayer.
As part of that worldwide brotherhood, I felt that I could not in good conscience participate in military training. I dropped out of ROTC after my freshman year. That meant, of course, that I could not get a degree from the University of Georgia.
I could have transferred to a number of other schools that did not require military training. But my family had no college tradition, and I soon learned that entry-level pay at most newspapers was the same for a college drop-out as it was for a college graduate. So I dropped out in the middle of my sophomore year and took a job with the Augusta, Ga., Chronicle and Herald at a salary higher than anything my father had ever earned.
I could see little reason at the time for my career as a journalist to conflict with my beliefs as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And indeed, there were few conflicts at first. As a reporter, and later state editor, of the Augusta newspapers, I had no reason to take sides politically. My job was to provide impartial coverage of political and other events. That requirement fit both my professional and my religious principles.
I found the editors of the newspaper quite tolerant of my religious faith. I remember the time my Managing Editor, John Harper, handed me a letter from a man who had attended a few meetings of Jehovah’s Witnesses and therefore knew who I was. He asked my boss whether he knew that I was a member of “a subversive organization known as Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
I asked John what I should do with the letter. “I’d throw it in the gutter, where we put all the other filth,” he told me.
Later, Louis C. Harris, the Executive Editor of the newspapers, told me: “I don’t care if you go out and marry a black woman. That’s none of our business, so long as you do your job.”
When a staunchly conservative deep-South editor makes a commitment like that in the midst of the civil-rights revolution, you know you’ve got a lot of job security.
Shortly after going to work for The Chronicle and Herald, I married Esther Fox, a girl brought up among Jehovah’s Witnesses. About a month after our marriage, I was called to Fort Jackson, S.C., for a pre-induction Army physical. I informed the personnel there that I could not conscientiously submit to military service.
One sergeant glared at me.
“Did your father serve in the Army?” he asked.
“Yes sir. He was in World War I.”
“What does he think about you now?” he asked.
“He fought for what he believed in, and he expects me to stand up for what I believe in,” I told him. Dad’s attitude toward the Witnesses had mellowed considerably.
“What do you do when you’re covering a parade and the flag goes by?”
“I stand there respectfully,” I said. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t approve of showing disrespect for the flag.
The military cup was allowed to pass. Within a year, I was the father of a healthy boy, and the Army was not drafting fathers at that time.
The area of news coverage that created the greatest temptation for political involvement was the civil-rights struggle. I sympathized with the black youths who demonstrated for equal opportunity and equal treatment.
I knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses taught obedience to human law whenever it did not conflict with divine law, but I also knew that their publications taught racial tolerance and racial equality. So long as state laws forbade mixing of the races, we obeyed them, but at the first legal and practical opportunity, we integrated our meetings, and we now are probably the most integrated religious group in the country.
I remember once when we were going from house to house in Barnwell, S.C., giving brief Bible presentations and leaving literature with the householders. A local lawyer saw us working in a neighborhood of black families and called the police to us. I read the police officer a decision from the South Carolina Supreme Court, which held that our work was legal.
The policeman apparently failed to grasp the distinction between the state Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I don’t agree with a lot of things the Supreme Court’s been saying,” he said, and ordered us to stop distributing our literature. I appealed to the mayor, who told us we couldn’t distribute our literature without a license.
We returned and began speaking with the householders directly from the Bible. Even a segregationist cop couldn’t argue with that right. I wrote an article for my newspaper describing the encounter, but John Harper gently turned it down: “You’re too close to this, Gene,” he said.
Later, I opened a news bureau in Barnwell from which I covered a four-county area for The Chronicle. The lawyer didn’t recognize me in my journalistic role, and he became a good news source.
My faith and my career finally came into direct conflict after I had migrated to Norfolk, Va., and began working for The Ledger-Star and The Virginian-Pilot.
After several years as a Ledger-Star reporter and a stint as Assistant City Editor, I was offered a chance to move to the editorial page. Executive Editor Perry Morgan wanted to make a dramatic change in the editorial page of the afternoon newspaper. We went to an innovative layout, with signed editorials, written in the first-person singular.
I considered Perry my journalistic mentor, and I accepted the job, even though I knew it would take me dangerously close to a compromise with my political neutrality. Perry never knew about this moral conflict, or I’m sure he wouldn’t have played the role of tempter. I had great latitude in choosing the topics I would write on, and I avoided heavy-duty political topics in favor of off-beat subjects and those that dealt with moral questions. Neverthless, my editorials generated more letters to the editor than those of any of the other writers.
After a year of this, I was placed in charge of The Virginia Beach Beacon, a zoned edition of The Ledger and Pilot that went into 65,000 homes. I instituted an opinion page, with my column as the principal conveyer of opinion. Again, I chose my topics carefully. I was an elder in my congregation by then, and spoke regularly from platforms around the Tidewater area. I periodically checked with fellow elders to assure myself that I wasn’t crossing any boundaries. But I was on the slippery slope. From The Beacon, I went to The Virginian-Pilot to become Senior Associate Editor on the editorial page of the flagship publication of Landmark Communications. It involved a substantial pay increase and a shot at the editorship of the newspaper.
I rationalized that, as the writer of unsigned editorials, I was simply serving as a mouthpiece for the publisher, much as a lawyer serves as a mouthpiece for his client.
My editor was J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a former University of Virginia law professor who went on to a position on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Jay Wilkinson had an incredibly incisive mind. By the time we held our morning editorial conferences, he would already have devoured several newspapers, would have chosen the editorial topics for the next day, and would have specified, point by point, what positions the newspaper would take. Normally, I would have resented this micromanagement, but I was actually grateful to Jay for taking this burden off my conscience.
When Jay left the newspaper to resume his legal career, I was one of the candidates for the editorship. In a memorandum to the newspaper’s principal owner, I laid out my religious beliefs as candidly as I knew how. I stated my position as a conscientious objector to military service. I didn’t get the job, but was offered a position at comparable pay at Landmark’s Roanoke Times & World News, a newspaper of 120,000 circulation, on the opposite end of the state.
No one ever told me, but I suspect that the ownership was wary of placing a conscientious objector in charge of its flagship newspaper in a market that was home to upwards of 200,000 active or retired military personnel. In addition, a candidate with much higher academic credentials was available. Terry Eastland, who was later to serve in Ronald Reagan’s administration, got the job. I understood the choice, and was grateful for an opportunity to employ my skills in Roanoke, a pleasant city of 100,000 nestled in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains.
In Roanoke, I continued to soothe my conscience with the thought that I was a spokesman for the publisher and not an architect of editorial policy.
But I was misleading myself. First Barton Morris and then Walter Rugaber, as President and Publisher, exercised extremely light control over editorial policy. Basically, they established a spacious ballpark and allowed me freedom to take positions on specific issues.
I also wrote a personal column, usually on political or philosophical subjects. The column was well-read and often hotly criticized in strongly conservative Virginia.
My crisis of conscience occurred in 1983, two years after my move to Roanoke. My wife, Esther, had been plagued with emotional problems since adolescence. After 26 years of marriage, she took her own life through carbon-monoxide poisoning.
I married Peggy Conner Bates, my college-days sweetheart. We had been baptized together as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
In the aftermath of the tragedy and the early years of my second marriage, I did some intensive soul-searching and decided that to find peace, I needed to bring my life into alignment with my conscience.
I informed Walter Rugaber that I could no longer continue as an editorial-page editor. Landmark had no comparable position to offer on the news side.
So I penned a farewell column. In it, I explained the Witnesses' worldwide-brotherhood concept and the basis for our political neutrality:
“For many years now, my life has moved along two tracks — one secular, one religious,” I explained. "On nights and weekends, I have been placing my faith in a heavenly government determined to replace all earthly governments with something infinitely better. On weekdays during business hours, I have been pontificating on ways the existing world system can best perpetuate itself.
"Out of the secular side of my mouth, I have been recommending that people put their faith in human policies and the political systems behind them. Out of the religious side of my mouth, I have been telling people that these policies are doomed to failure and the systems behind them are doomed to destruction.
"The two tracks have not been getting any closer, and riding them simultaneously has forced me, emotionally, into a precarious spread-eagle stance. My professional career pulls me one way. My spiritual inclinations pull me another. Something has to give.
“A young man as yet untouched by calamity may cheerfully make the Faustian bargain, trading eternity for the good life here and now. But as the years bring their calamities, he begins searching for sustaining strength. Woe to him if he has bargained that strength away.”
I told the story of Esther’s suicide and my struggle to regain emotional equilibrium for me and my adolescent son.
“In the lonely hours of self-examination, ” I wrote, “when all the what-ifs descended like sandbags on already-sagging shoulders, I came to realize that I could not carry the burden alone. I realized the need for a change in my relationship with Jehovah and his Christ. It was a change that would require me to give up something dear to me: my career as an opinion writer, and a profitable relationship with an enlightened, tolerant and honorable corporation.”
I left Roanoke for High Point, N.C., where from 1990 to 1993 I became, basically, a ghost writer for professional speakers and consultants. The income was far less than what I had earned in journalism, but I had expected that. It also left me with far less job security — a source of great anxiety for a man who had never in his adult life worried about where his next paycheck would come from.
To get some security, I took a job in 1992 as City Editor of a small newspaper in Tennessee — at less than half of what I had earned in Roanoke. In the meantime, I continued my ghost writing. But after a year of this, my core client had several projects that demanded my full-time attention, and since I couldn’t meet my obligations on the small newspaper’s salary, I had to leave newspapers once more.
After another year of ghost writing, I looked for a position that would enable me to build up my retirement nest egg. I would have preferred a high-level writing job, but nothing was on the horizon for a person my age with my salary requirements.
In the spring of 1994, however, an old friend called me from Mobile, Ala., and told me that The Mobile Register was trying to shake off its longstanding reputation for mediocrity and was looking for senior editors. Among the questions asked in my initial interview was whether I would be willing to take over the editorial page. My answer was no.
I joined The Mobile Register as Assistant Managing Editor and writing coach. After 15 years outside a major news department, I felt lost at first amid the new technology and a staff organization I didn’t quite comprehend.
Then Stan Tiner, a Nieman Fellow who is The Register’s aggressive and imaginative Editor and Vice President for news, began to give me an opportunity to write. At last I felt back in my element.
Stan asked me to take on the job of supervising political coverage for the newspaper. It’s a playing manager’s job, and a demanding one. Some of my fellow Witnesses wonder how I can cover politics without compromising my political neutrality. I explain that my job description calls for the kind of objective treatment that my religious scruples require.
Stan Tiner has allowed me to develop as a writer even as I put in my time as an editor. As an employee of a Newhouse paper, I enjoy the fringe benefits a large corporation can offer, and the Newhouse pension plan adds to my retirement security. I know that I will never again have the earning power or community status I enjoyed as Editorial-Page Editor in Roanoke, but I don’t need it.
Had I chosen to live my life as a non-Witness, participating fully in contemporary society, I’m sure I would have gone further in my career. But I don’t look back. I’ve discovered that contentment involves much more than a big income and public acclaim. You achieve true contentment when you achieve peace with yourself, peace with your fellow man, and peace with God. If I can bring my career to a close with that kind of achievement, I will consider myself successful.