Seasoned Lehrer explores the dark side

For a failure, Jim Lehrer hasn`t done half bad.

Sure, there are the 14 books and the three plays. There are the years as a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, and as political editor, then city editor at the Dallas Times-Herald.

Then there was his solo anchoring, for PBS, of the House Judiciary Committee`s impeachment inquiry of Richard Nixon, which led to a spot on the "Robert MacNeil Report," which became "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour." Now, of course, it`s "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."

But Lehrer, who turns 66 today, has yet to accomplish two of his three life goals. Besides writing a book, he wanted to - still wants to - play shortstop for the Dodgers and become a bus driver.

The professional baseball career didn`t pan out. The bus-driving gig, however, remains a possibility.

"A few years ago, I was on `Good Morning America` for my book `A Bus of My Own,`" Lehrer said. "Charles Gibson asked me if I ever wanted to be a bus driver, and I said, `You bet I wanted to be a bus driver.` I said that my idea of a wonderful life would be to take off three to four weeks a year and drive an intercity bus for some small bus company. Not a New York to Washington express down the interstate, but somewhere out there.

"And the greatest thing happened. Three or four companies wrote me or called me and said, `Any time you want to do it, it`s yours to do.` They would give me the outfit, the ticket punch, the whole nine yards. I haven`t done it yet, but I`m going to."

What is it about Lehrer and buses? Well, his parents owned a small bus line in Texas, and Lehrer worked as a ticket agent for Trailways. He`s never gotten over it.

"To find romance in a bus," he said softly. "I love it, in a way, because it`s so counterintuitive.

"Greyhound had a big strike about six or seven years ago, and we did an interview with a driver in Denver. He wasn`t upset about not having any salary. He said to our correspondent: `I`m just somebody who was born to be out there. And when I`m not out there on the highway, I get jumpy and I get out of sorts. I`m not who I am.`

"And I thought, `God, he said it all.`"

Besides "A Bus of My Own," Lehrer dealt with buses in "White Widow," an unsettling novel of a dedicated intercity bus driver in 1950s Texas whose staid, secure life careens wildly off course when he cannot stop fantasizing about a beautiful passenger.

Unlike Lehrer`s earlier work, the book is decidedly downbeat, as is "The Special Prisoner." In the latter work, a minister - who is a former B-29 pilot and survivor of a Japanese POW camp - believes he has spotted the man who tortured him 50 years earlier. The minister follows the elderly Japanese businessman, who`s boarding a San Diego-bound plane in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, tracks him to a hotel overlooking San Diego Bay and confronts him with the crimes. What happens - intercut as it is with flashback scenes of torture and executions from the camp - is harrowing and deeply disturbing.

In the book, Lehrer passes on an amazing statistic: While more than 95 percent of American fliers captured by Germany survived the war, only about 5 percent of those captured by the Japanese came back alive. The Japanese considered airmen to be war criminals - special prisoners.

"I was so astonished that I checked and double-checked to make sure (the statistic) was right," Lehrer said. "Nobody paid much attention to it at the time. Later, it was overlooked, I think, for three reasons: It was overshadowed by the Holocaust; there was a real, burning need to get the Japanese with us against the Russkies; and there was a legitimate desire by those who went through it to put it behind them."

"Because so many of (the airmen) died," he added, "few of them got medals, because there were no witnesses."

What interests him even more, he said, is "what`s in each of us to prevent us from acting brutally toward an enemy in conflict? Can we even imagine that we, ordinary people, could commit extraordinary crimes against other ordinary people?"

Such questions have led him to his next book, a work in progress that deals with the same kind of issues. It`s a novel of the Civil War; the action takes place in a few minutes in the battle of Antietem.

"We have a house in the panhandle of West Virginia," Lehrer said, "only about 15 minutes from Sharpsburg, Md., where the battle was fought. And that, of course, was the bloodiest day in American history - 26,000 killed or wounded in 24 hours. What in the hell could have caused these kids to continue, to go to almost certain death?"

Why the turn toward darker themes?

"I think the only explanation is that I`m a little more confident in my writing, more willing to press it and see where it`s going - and these things are going a little darker than I would have intended or allowed them to go in the past.

"I`m not specifically sitting down to write dark books, but I am sitting down to write books that are serious, that have round characters - and round characters tend to do things that are sometimes dark. I`m increasingly comfortable with pushing the envelope. That doesn`t mean that every book I write from here on out is going to be a dark book. But I hope it`s a sign of maturity."

One sign that his fiction is maturing is that his characters occasionally seize the controls. When in "The Special Prisoner" Lehrer has the Japanese businessman board a plane, "I had no idea he was going to San Diego," says the author. "I`ve been here four or five times; it could be that I just loved the view of the bay from the windows of those big hotels. That`s not a cop-out answer, it`s my only answer."

The disturbing ending surprised him, too. "I was so disturbed," he said, "that I realized I got it right. And it wasn`t a case where I sat down and wrote five endings - this is the only ending I ever wrote for the book."

"The Special Prisoner" is doing well. Last week it was No. 24, among all books, on the Amazon.com best-seller list.

Lehrer, of course, is on television almost every weeknight.

"I have an unfair advantage over other authors," he conceded, "and I offer no apologies. I will take it and smile."

(c) Visit Copley News Service

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Author: Arthur Salm