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Memorial Service for Former AP President Keith Fuller
Edited remarks of Hugh A. Mulligan at Fort Myers, Va. after burial of Keith Fuller at Arlington National Cemetery — July 26, 2002. For the record, I am the alpha and the omega of the American hero we buried today at Arlington National Cemetery. I represent the beginning and the end. We almost began our Associated Press careers together, and I had the sad, proud chore of writing his obit. This was the only byline I never really wanted. And here I am for once having the last word with an AP boss. I joined the AP in 1951 as number two man in Baton Rouge, a two-man bureau. Keith Fuller was second man in Jackson, Mississippi, also a two-man bureau. You don't get much lower than that in AP, unless like AP board Chairman Burl Osborne you're sent to Bluefield, West Virginia, a one-person bureau. Keith and I occasionally worked together covering tornados and hurricanes, LSU and Ole Miss football games and the legislatures in the two states. There is no need now to review Keith's rise in AP. Many of you here knew him at various stages in a colorful career. When Relman Morin won the Pulitzer Prize for phoning in the stark story about Rednecks shouting obscenities at little black girls integrating Little Rock High School, Keith — the Arkansas bureau chief — was on the other end of the line taking dictation, editing and sharpening the copy. Not many people know that when it came to the written word, Fuller was a stickler for that lost art called grammar. He used to say "It's not who you know in AP that counts, it's WHOM you know.'' For a brief time, just for a few months, Keith defected from AP to try his skill at TV as news director of KCBD in Lubbock, Texas. But he realized he wasn't destined to become the next Edward R. Murrow when Mamie Eisenhower came to town and he three times addressed her as Mrs. Roosevelt. The last time I set foot on Arlington's hallowed ground we were burying John F. Kennedy just a few lawns away. Five months before, I had covered the President's trip to Ireland and to the Berlin Wall. Four of us AP feature writers collaborated on a book about the Kennedy assassination called "The Torch Is Passed.'' It sold 5 million copies in hard cover and was translated into eight languages. Keith directed the project. The AP gave us each a $500 bonus for turning out this huge best seller. Keith and I pooled our money and bought a sailboat, a 20-foot sloop. We named her "The Bonus Baby'' in wry salute to the AP's generosity. Neither of us knew how to sail. I took the Coast Guard 16-week course in seamanship and navigation. Keith had been a navigator in the Air Corps. The first course he plotted on a chart took us in a straight line from Larchmont, N.Y. to Port Washington, L.I. I told him he couldn't go that way because just outside the breakwater there was only two feet of water and jagged rocks called "Hens and Chickens'' that would rip the bottom out of the boat. In the Air Force they never worried about depth — only altitude — and there were no rocks up in the wild blue yonder. We had a time of it, learning to sail. Sometimes we sailed close to the wind, and sometimes "Nearer My God to Thee.'' As summer approached, we drew up a detailed schedule of who would get to use the boat on weekends, especially the Fourth of July weekend. But when that long holiday weekend came around, Keith, by now the AP Personnel Director, assigned me to cover Vietnam. Then he had the boat all to himself. I was the first of the Vietnam boat people, only I was heading in the opposite direction. Keith really loved sailing, not racing, just cruising. Long leisurely cruises along the Atlantic coast from Annapolis to Bar Harbor, looking for great lobster restaurants, tying up next to Walter Cronkite's boat at Martha's Vineyard and coming aboard for cocktails, poker games in the cabin by light of a Coleman lamp. In all the time we sailed together, he rarely talked of his wartime experiences except in a typical self-deprecating way. He was a 19-year-old navigator-bombardier on a B-17. I remember him telling us they practiced bombing runs while stationed at a Northern Ireland airbase — appropriately named Nutt's Corner, near Belfast. The drill was they were supposed to zoom in low over Lough Nay (Neigh), drop their dummy bombs in the middle of the lake and then pull up. Keith and his student pilot managed to miss completely the 30-mile-long lake — the largest in the British isles — but they deftly took out a 12-foot wooden dock used by eel fishermen. These two brash shave-tails could have lost their wings for a stunt like that, but fortunately the squadron leader had a soft spot for fiesty, dare-devil kids. He thought they made gutsiest airmen. But real war is never fun. Keith didn't even reach Catch 22. On his 10th combat mission, their bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire and burst into flames. He bailed out at 21,000 feet — more than four miles up — and parachuted into Nazi occupied-Nancy, France. For the next 14 months prisoner of war Fuller was shipped in cattle cars from one grim stalag-luft to another, as the Allies landed at Normandy and fought their way across the Rhine, forcing the the Germans to keep pulling back. Besides bailing out of a crippled bomber, his most terrifying moment came when he was imprisoned at Stalag Acht-B — POW camp 8B — at Mooseberg near Munich. He was awakened at dawn by a thunderous barrage of artillery and mortars. Suddenly tanks were battering down the camp gates. Had the Russians arrived? Were the Nazis blowing up the camp with inmates inside and retreating before the Allied advance? Lt. Fuller dove under his bunk and only ventured forth when he saw polished boots, cavalry-twill britches and ivory-handled pistols, and then beheld Gen. George Patton himself passing out cigarettes and C-rations to the airmen liberated by his Third Army. Why was Keith Fuller so reluctant to talk of his experiences in German prison camps? Had he witnessed some horrible sights? Or was it modesty? For behind that impish grin, he was a genuinely modest man, sometimes as Aw Shucks and Goll-lee as the John Wayne character he so remarkably resembled. When Keith became president of the AP, he did not decorate his office with pictures of himself shaking hands with presidents and world leaders nor with plaques and awards from various press and freedom organizations. Behind his desk hung a large painting of his sailboat, a new and larger one named "The Different Drummer.'' As CEO of the world's largest newsgathering organization, Keith — with that quirky sense of humor and that choir boy smile — did indeed march to a different drummer. He had a real affection for AP foreign correspondents. Perhaps because he was stuck behind a desk at 50 Rock, he envied their exciting life styles. As often as he could, he broke away to join them. He loved inviting foreign correspondents on home-leave out for a day's sail on his boat. The rougher the waves and the wind, the better. Getting seasick kept them humble, he figured, even if he did have to clean up the mess himself. And Keith loved visiting foreign bureaus, perhaps because he unashamedly was an innocent aboard, a Kansas farm boy seeing the bright lights of downtown Arlington on a Saturday night. That native innocence endeared him to the overseas staff, who sometimes playfully took advantage of his wide-eyed naivete. Jack Koehler told me that when he was bureau chief in Berlin, Keith arrived in town. Jack took him down to Kite Strasse, which is spelled K-E-I-T-H strasse. Koehler told Fuller he had arranged with Mayor Willie Brandt to have the street renamed in honor of his visit. Keith was impressed both with Jack's high-level contacts and with the street name, which of course has been the same for 250 years before he arrived. When he found out about the hoax, the grown up fiesty kid who bombed that dock in Belfast enjoyed the irreverent joke as much as anyone. Fuller visited AP bureaus on every continent and came out to Vietnam during the war. To emphasize AP's key role in international journalism, he led the Board of Directors on news-making trips to Russia, China, Australia, and Eastern Europe when it was still behind the Iron Curtain. I was on one of those board trips when our Russian built prop-jet blew a tire and the hydraulic wheel brakes caught fire landing at Lhasa in Tibet. On the day Keith died, Dennis Redmont, AP's Rome bureau chief, e-mailed me a note: "It is regretable there are so many people at AP today who did not work with Keith and have to be told about his magic and aura.'' Keith is probably the only AP executive who genuinely enjoyed negotiating labor contracts with the Newspaper Guild and the telecommunications unions. To him, this was another poker game and he was a born Mississippi Riverboat gambler. I recently attended a book signing party for Helen Thomas and a former negotiator for the Guild told me Fuller borrowed so many cigarettes off the union negotiators they were glad to settle the contract. Then Keith took up golf, and he fiercely loved that too. On the links there developed that strange and touching golfing friendship with Gen. William Westmoreland. AP and Westy had almost been at war for years over our relentlessly unbiased Vietnam reporting, which to some of the top brass seemed overly critical if not downright unpatriotic. But despite all, the General and the AP president became close friends. For Westy, it may have been a companionship dictated by the fates. His military career seemed inexorably intertwined with the AP. When Wes Gallagher, Keith's predecessor as AP president, broke his back in a jeep accident in Algeria in World War II, he was rescued by a young lieutenant colonel named William Childs Westmoreland. Keith no doubt kidded Westy a lot about that. To him generals were just your everyday overachievers, just like publishers, and he relished beating them at golf or contract negotiations. And with that winsome charm, he especially enjoyed letting them pick up the check for drinks and most likely dinner, too. As some of you know from experience, even the Venus de Milo could out-reach Fuller for a check. It was all a game to him, and he played it with puckish delight. I truly think Keith remained at heart that Kansas City farm boy seeing the downtown lights for the first time. In fact he once assigned me, a New York City-born, Harvard- educated feature writer to spend a week on a wheat farm in the Midwest when the giant combines came through to reap the harvest.
In writing that story I quoted Willa Cather's poem called "Prairie Spring.'' He loved every word of that poem and, out on the boat, often asked me to recite it. It vividly reminded him of that 305-acre family farm carved out of the prairie: "Evening and the flat land,And that's how I still see Keith — ever youthful, that boyish grin, flashing like a star, in the twilight of my life. Tom Brokaw spoke of us old World War II vets as the greatest generation. Well today, unknown to many but unforgettable for a lucky few of us, we buried one of the greatest of that greatest generation. You belong among heroes, old buddy. And may God be with us, while you're with God. (July 26, 2002) Related stories: |
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