Sure enough, two searchers from the dude ranch would have walked right past Kari and her captors. This was tough country, steep and wild, and you couldn’t see ten yards through the timber. Excerpt:īy dawn, there were fifty people on the trail or on their way: her parents from Montana State U, all hangs from the dude ranch where she worked, dogs, helicopters, lots of lawmen, Sheriff Onstad from Bozeman. I admire “ The Ballad of Johnny France” ( Esquire, October 1985) because it’s a character-driven narrative with an unexpected protagonist and a campfire-tale voice that complements, without mocking, the subject matter. Junod’s colleague Mike Sager described Cramer’s 1984 profile of Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer as the piece that “anointed him as the leading member of a new generation of muscular literary journalists.” Cramer’s opening: Only an incipient boycott by his friends, frequent dinner guests, finally shook his resolve.) For more than a year, he honed his technique on chuck roast and stew meat. (A few years ago he decided $2.38 was top price for a pound of beef.

Lastly, restaurants charge a lot, and Ted doesn’t toss money around. At restaurants there’s never enough food. Restaurants have little chairs and tables, no place for elbows, arms, knees, feet. Or worse, it’s a stream of sportsfans (still Ted’s worst epithet) with napkins to sign. He does not go to restaurants, and the reasons are several: They make a fuss, and the owner or cook’s on his neck like a gnat. Esquire’s Tom Junod called his “ What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” the greatest magazine profile ever written. The Washington Post‘s Gene Weingarten tweeted, “Read his diMaggio and know awe.”Įveryone has a favorite Richard Ben Cramer piece. “… What It Takes is the first book I tell anyone interested in American politics, American culture, and American journalism to read,” The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote on Monday morning, after hearing the news. A 1979 Pulitzer winner for his coverage of the Middle East, Cramer went on to magazines and book authorship with a reporting depth and storytelling style that has influenced countless journalists. It’s hard to find a narrative journalist or a serious political writer that Cramer didn’t influence with What It Takes: The Way to the White House, his 1,047-page saga of the 1988 presidential race, or with his newspaper and magazine stories. When Richard Ben Cramer died Monday, at 62, of lung cancer, the outpouring of grief and gratitude began immediately.

What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer