After early stints working in a Kentucky tobacco warehouse and a New York print store — and nearly getting a tryout with the Cleveland Indians — Mr. Causey drifted into journalism. It was, he recalled, a bygone period, when these with a measure of road smarts however few formal credentials may nonetheless land a job at a metropolitan newspaper. Throughout his profession, he delighted in being a newsroom scamp.
Contrary to rumors he unfold of being the “copy boy who took the telegraph report of the Custer massacre,” he finally admitted to a much less glorified begin at The Post in 1957 as a “buck-an-hour” messenger for the promoting division, he as soon as wrote in an inner newspaper bio. He quickly moved to the newsroom, writing tales about police, the Postal Service and a slew of what he referred to as “the sky-isn’t-falling” options that plugged in empty house on the web page.
A strapping 6-footer with a trim Clark Gable-style mustache, Mr. Causey was enlisted in 1964 to assist shield “a more experienced and (fragile) reporter” assigned to jot down in regards to the first Beatles live performance in Washington, he wrote. With a workers photographer, Mr. Causey additionally was among the many first to drive all the 64-mile size of the not-yet-officially opened Beltway encircling Washington.
Quick and reliable, he grew to become an apprentice to Federal Diary columnist Jerry Kluttz. The column, launched in 1932, was dedicated to federal-workforce points similar to pay raises, adjustments to advantages and telecommuting coverage, and different guidelines and rules affecting hundreds of thousands of workers. After six years helping Kluttz and briefly one other more-senior author, Mr. Causey carried the mantle himself in 1969.
By Mr. Causey’s personal account, the duty carried little seen status contained in the newspaper, the place nationwide and worldwide protection made reputations, however the Federal Diary grew to become a significant a part of the The Post’s every day report and a must-read for generations of federal staff. (The column, operating Sunday by Friday, bounced round many sections over the many years together with the comics web page, main Mr. Causey to crow at his luck, “Heck, I’d rather be there than on Page 1.”)
Broadly and deeply sourced, as a lot as any seasoned political reporter, Mr. Causey chronicled how public cash is spent or misspent on varied initiatives. One story in 1981 about President Ronald Reagan’s proposal to extend prime federal pay by 4.8 % led Mr. Causey to jot down: “That will be considered too little inside the Beltway and too much by taxpayers outside of Washington.”
Although there has reportedly been at least one earlier identified use of the expression, Mr. Causey was credited with inserting it extra broadly in use. The time period grew to become shorthand language typically utilized to self-absorbed journalists and politicians who’ve misplaced contact with Americans within the “Heartland” far past the symbolic Beltway that kinds a hoop across the heart of presidency energy.
As a reporter, he noticed himself as an advocate for typically underappreciated multitudes who constituted his core readership and bore the workaday penalties of imperfect legal guidelines authorised on Capitol Hill and carried out by political appointees named by the president.
“People, no matter who they are, have to pay the rent,” he instructed the Chicago Tribune. “They have to get the kids’ teeth fixed. A husband or mother worries about health insurance. CIA agents, in the Sinai or Northern Ireland, doing life-threatening things, have called about their insurance.”
A key mission of the column, he added, was to tell “the grunts what’s being done to them — not just their pay, but everything” and to behave as a trusted supply of information for high-level supervisors far faraway from the front-line trenches. If morale appeared curiously low just a few flooring down, he steered within the Tribune interview, perhaps it was due to “an underling firing everybody while the boss thought they were just all leaving to write novels.”
He scorned the trope of the lazy bureaucrat and noticed, as an alternative of faceless hordes, women and men, moms and dads, even grandparents who had been devoted to their jobs and would possibly lead fascinating inside lives. At the Office of Personnel Management, “which sounds like the dullest thing going,” Mr. Causey instructed the Tribune, he befriended a person — the “brilliant manager was president of the Lone Ranger Club of America and an authority on old-time radio.”
He distrusted politicians of each events who trumpeted their efforts to get rid of hundreds of federal jobs by attempting to persuade voters that it will make authorities higher and extra environment friendly. Such speak, he stated, was deceptive because the contracting trade boomed and carried with it many recent issues and considerations.
The CIA, he instructed Washingtonian journal in 2000, has no “counterpart in the private sector. Folks in Langley tell me the number of contractors out there has skyrocketed. It seems half the people there now are contractors. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, because contractors don’t take the oath. They don’t make the same commitments of devotion and patriotism as CIA employees must.”
In certainly one of Mr. Causey’s closing columns for The Post, he directed his sarcasm at politicians who invoked imagery of Nazi stormtroopers by describing federal workers finishing up their jobs as “jackbooted thugs.”
“I had lunch the other day with a ‘jackbooted thug,’ a.k.a. a retired federal law enforcement officer,” Mr. Causey wrote. “He now works as a volunteer with disabled children. He could have made more in corporate security but said he decided to spend his retirement — ‘giving something back.’
“He’s a disgrace to thugs everywhere.”
A particular character
Norman Michael Causey was born on Feb. 12, 1940, in Indianapolis to folks, he typically joked, who fled the Depression in Kentucky for the Depression in Indiana. He described his father to Washingtonian journal as a meat cutter who largely was “kind of a drifter.” After his mother and father divorced, he grew up along with his mom, who labored as a secretary. He additionally was raised partly by his aunt and uncle.
His marriage to Betty Lou Adams Dunn, who later glided by Elizabeth Adams, led to divorce. His son Steven Causey died in January. In addition to his son Michael, of Washington, survivors embody two daughters, Libby Causey-Hicks of Mechanicsville, Va., and Jocelyn Causey of Silver Spring, Md.; a half sister; three half-brothers; and eight grandchildren.
For Mr. Causey, the attraction to journalism was that it was justification for by no means having to develop up and for exploring “how things work, or are supposed to, or don’t.”
He minimize a particular character in a newsroom crammed with keen strivers searching for front-page tales that might get them on Sunday speak exhibits. Mr. Causey, by all accounts, cared little for modern appearances that might transfer him up a predictable profession ladder. He was an idiosyncratic mixture of unprintable humor and sudden pursuits, together with sizzling British dance bands of the Nineteen Thirties.
His workplace grew to immense ranges of hoarding and hazards. Executive editor Benjamin Bradlee made annual threats to name the fireplace marshal on him if he didn’t throw away a number of the manuals, newspapers and press releases that created near-impassible muddle.
Regardless, Mr. Causey churned out articles at a tempo unmatched by most. Amid the junk, he saved a T-shirt with a entrance studying “Anyone can be a daily columnist.” On the again was printed: “For two weeks.” (The column, since renamed Federal Insider, runs in print as soon as every week and is dealt with by Joe Davidson.)
Former Metro editor Jo-Ann Armao, now an editorial author, famous after Mr. Causey’s loss of life: “He clearly had the reporting and writing chops to do other things, but Mike knew just how important the federal government workforce is. Tens of thousands of government employees hung on his words, they knew they could trust him and no amount of page-one bylines could substitute for that.”
(*82*) his loyal following, Mr. Causey was much less earnest about his personal standing with friends and the general public.
“I never claimed to have six good ideas a week, just to write six columns a week,” he instructed Washingtonian. “Many of my columns had breaking news — the type The Post news section wouldn’t have for two weeks. That became an inside joke. I’d write some news, and the paper would feature it on the front page a week later. I wouldn’t nominate all of my columns for a Pulitzer Prize, but most did contain sound information. People think that my type of information is dull — until it applies to their agency. Then it becomes riveting.”