By Mike Brown
October 23, 2006

No one attending the 1986 annual meeting of The U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Juan can forget Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley’s presidential address. In a gracious gesture to the host mayor and city, Riley began his speech in Spanish. After a few lines, he shifted to English and, after a few more lines, he stopped, apologized to his audience, and explained that he had forgotten to turn on his tape recorder. Riley had wanted to make a recording of his address as President of the Conference for his father, and that meant starting over – again, in Spanish.

Richard Benedetto, who covered the Conference’s annual meeting that year for USA Today, was impressed by the speech, but clearly more impressed by the qualities exhibited by the man who delivered it. Twenty years later, that speech and that man are affectionately described in one of the scores of vignettes that Benedetto has assembled to produce “Politicians are People, Too,” a book that former USA Today executive editor Robert Dubill says is based on the author’s tactic of finding out “what’s right with politics and the politicians who practice it.”

“Sadly, we only learn of the good [politicians] when they die and people say nice things about them,” Benedetto writes in his opening chapter. “In life, the good they do is often ignored by the media. But let them foul up and it’s front page news. These days, the political water is so brackish that if someone tries to set it all straight, or provide some needed balance, he or she is often accused of being soft, bought off by one side or the other, or worse, seen as a journalist who is tired and has lost the way.”

In fact, Richard Benedetto’s 30-year career in journalism has been dedicated to setting it straight and providing balance, but no one familiar with his work would dare use the words “soft,” “tired,” or “lost.” He credits the editors he worked for early in his career (beginning with his first job at the Buffalo Evening News, now the Buffalo News) who knew full well “that human beings have the capability of doing great good and making huge mistakes, often doing both at the same time.”

Benedetto writes that he developed a soft spot in his heart for political figures who responded to his requests for interviews in the early days of USA Today when the paper was not well known, and among the mayors he puts in this category are Henry Cisneros of San Antonio, Harold Washington of Chicago, George Voinovich of Cleveland, W. Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, Ray Flynn of Boston, Terry Goddard of Phoenix, Helen Boosalis of Lincoln (NE), Ernest “Dutch” Morial and son Marc Morial of New Orleans, and Charles Royer of Seattle. “I remember them all as hard-working public servants who always had their cities and residents at heart,” he writes.

A few mayors are singled out for being particularly helpful:

• Chicago’s Mayor Washington “proved to be a very friendly fellow who was welcoming to me when I went to the Windy City to cover his re-election campaign in 1987. He even let me ride in his limousine for an interview between campaign stops one Sunday, much to the upset of local reporters who had been desperately trying, with no luck, to get an interview for weeks.”

• Riley “deserves to retire the title of ‘Mr. Nice Guy,’….I liked Riley immediately when I met him back in the early 1980s through his work with the U.S. Conference of Mayors….He was generous with his time with me...despite my representing a paper…he was largely unfamiliar with.”

• A lunch arranged by Cleveland Mayor Voinovich to enable Benedetto to meet his city’s top community leaders and executives “was the case of a mayor going far beyond the call of duty to extend a helping hand. It happens a lot in cities all over the country.”

The political reporting career that produced the rich material for Benedetto’s book started in Buffalo with his coverage of George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign and eventually brought him to Washington in 1982 to help launch the Gannett Company’s USA Today and then serve as its White House and national political correspondent. Many of the vignettes that fill the book are drawn from the years in the White House covering Presidents George H.W. Bush (with whom Benedetto jogged on occasion), Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and from his travels as a member of the White House press corps.

Through these years, Benedetto’s was a familiar face at annual Conference of Mayors meetings. His keen interest in the people running the nation’s cities and providing local political leadership never waned, and his coverage of them was frequently found on the pages of USA Today.

Benedetto’s byline appeared in USA Today from its first day of publication until his retirement just a few months ago. He now teaches journalism at American University in Washington, where his students are likely learning what he says he learned from his first editors: “News reporting is going to places where most people do not go and coming back and telling those who weren’t there what you heard and saw. What could be simpler?”

Politicians are People, Too by Richard Benedetto, University Press of America, Inc., 162 pages. For orders and information, contact the publisher: University Press of America, Inc. at 1-800-462-6420 or through their website: www.univpress.com/.

Now with City Policy Associates in Washington (DC), Mike Brown was at the U.S. Conference of Mayors from 1979 through 1998, and as was Director of Public Affairs, worked closely with Richard Benedetto of USA Today.