Apropos of something else, I stumbled on this Edith Efron obit. I’m sorry I hadn’t heard of her earlier…
Edith knew exactly what [Clarence] Thomas was thinking not because she was a well-sourced reporter—she had never met Thomas and didn’t talk to any insiders about the hearings—but because she paid attention to history and to details. Everything she wrote had a Big Idea, an integrated concept that made sense of a welter of facts. (…)
After The News Twisters was published, she was twice invited to the Nixon White House and, determined to stay independent of an administration she found morally suspect, twice declined. (…)
She was a profile writer, she was a pattern finder, she was deeply read in literature, and she was passionately concerned about race in America. Before she was hit by a serious stroke two years ago, she was working on a book on the past and future of the country’s racial caste system. The more history she read, the more appalled and angry she became. She believed the book would be explosive and, knowing Edith, it would have been. It certainly would have been original, iconoclastic, and rigorously researched. (…)
Edith cared about race for personal reasons: In 1947, she married a Haitian businessman, with whom she had a child. After living in Haiti and working as a Central America correspondent for Time and Life, she divorced and returned to New York. She thus faced the challenge of raising a black son in the segregated America of the mid-1950s. (…)
She was a deeply intellectual woman who found nothing odd about alternating between C-Span and the Home Shopping Network. She described herself, quoting a friend, as a “sociable hermit.” She almost never left her house but had devoted family and friends. (…)
She wrote for TV Guide to support her son and for Reason to supplement her Social Security. (A chain smoker, she had depleted her limited retirement funds because she expected to die at 68, the median age of death for smokers. “Edie,” her brother said, knowing she knew better, “what does median mean?”)
