The Clapper Era

As childhood sweethearts, Olive Ewing and Raymond Clapper lived a block apart in Kansas City's (Kan.) packinghouse district. The grocer's daughter and the laborer's son went to the same Sunday school, the same high school. One day when Olive had just turned 17, they kept a date on a streetcar. She told him her father's ultimatum: stop seeing-that Clapper boy, or you'll be sent away to stay with relatives. Said Ray: "Let's get married."

Their partnership lasted 31 years, until Clapper's death in an airplane crash in the Pacific in February, 1944. They worked their way through the University of Kansas; even when they moved to Washington, and stooped, big-eyed Ray Clapper became first a crack U.P.man, then a Scripps-Howard columnist, they collaborated. Every morning, Olive sat on his bed while they criticized his efforts to "write it for the milkman in Omaha." After breakfast she would sit him down to make voluminous entries in his diary.

In a book just out, (Washington Tapestry, "Whittlesey House; $2.75), that drew on the diary and on her own wifely recollections, grey-haired, soft-spoken Olive Clapper set down some of the experiences and judgments the Clappers shared in the quarter century that began with Wilson, ended with Roosevelt and overlapped two wars.

She feit free to say many things that her husband did not. As New Dealers the Clappers often admired Roosevelt, often felt disappointed in him, supported him except in 1940, when Raymond--but not Olive--switched to Willkie. Both of the Clappers felt closer to their fellow Kansan Alf Landon (whom Clapper opposed jn 1936) than to all the Roosevelts put together.

"As a matter of fact," she wrote, "we were never close to the White House. We were invited only to the regular large receptions, as we had been since President Harding's time, and to a couple of dinners when Ray was president of the Gridiron Club. . . . Other newspapermen--even Westbrook Pegler--were invited for a weekend to Hyde Park, but never the Clappers."

The Clappers felt attracted to Wilson's idealism, amused by Coolidge's shyness, repelled by Hoover's icy remoteness, but Clapper did his dogged best to exclude these personal feelings from what he wrote. One Roosevelt story that Clapper never wrote, and his widow now tells, concerns a rumor that spread through Washington that Henry Morgenthau would become Ambassador to France. Franklin Roosevelt heard of it, jotted off a note to his Treasury Secretary: "Henry, see by the newspapers you are going to Paris. . . . As Al Smith is reported to have wired the Pope after the 1928 election--'Unpack!'"

Olive Clapper, now planning a third book (the first was a collection of Clapper columns), still lives in Washington, keeps busy lecturing to women's clubs, serving on the editorial board of Look. Before he went on his last trip, Clapper told her: "When I come back I will be ... a crusader for peace." That cause, she is sure, could use him now.

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