bobyoakum.com

Library lectern again forges writers’ early links to Paris
By Chester B. Hansen
New Canaan Advertiser 3/18/93
     Robert Yoakum will be playing second banana when he takes the platform Sunday, April 4, at the New Canaan Library to introduce Art Buchwald for the second annual Attwood Memorial Lecture.
     He alone would be worth the price of admission.
     For this event, however, there will be no need to prove it.  Admission to the Attwood lecture is free.
     A columnist and humorist like Buchwald, Yoakum was a long-time, old-time friend of Attwood.  Like Attwood, he started as a Paris-based newsman in the city room of the Paris Herald, now known as the International Herald Tribune.  And like Attwood, he afterwards turned to magazines with an occasional fling in presidential campaign politics and public service.
     Politics And Humor
     As a humorist, Yoakum won the anonymous fame that infrequently comes to a speechwriter when he and his wife Alice produced what many remember as the choicest line in Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 try for the White House, “Eggheads of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your yolks.”
     He is currently revising a book of political satire on which he was working with Bill Attwood before the latter’s death in 1989. It is titled “A Candidate’s Manual:  Time-Tested Ploys for Bamboozling the Public” and will be published by Random House.
     Yoakum is also doing his memoirs for that publisher.
     Those memoirs have their European beginning in 1947 when Yoakum arrived in Paris with $100 after having served in the Army in World War 2.
    
     Writing In Paris
     He soon discovered that even in Paris free-lance writing is a mean way to pay the rent and he went to work for Reuters, the British press service.  A year later, he was at the Herald.
     There he met Bill Attwood who would leave in 1949 to become European correspondent for Collier’s magazine.
     They were joined that same year by Art Buchwald, another thin-soled expatriate in Paris.  Buchwald, an ex-Marine, high school and college drop-out, had scammed his way to Paris on the GI Bill to study French.  Once there, he went through the motions while cutting classes to become a stringer for Variety, a theatrical newspaper.
     Now fancying himself a boulevardier, Buchwald promoted a job for himself as restaurant and nightlife critic for the Herald in 1949.  Yoakum was then on the masthead as city editor.
     Thereafter, all three went separate ways that crisscrossed as paths do for journalists.  Buchwald went to Washington to become a celebrity satirist with his wicked wit.  Yoakum returned to the U.S. as a magazine writer with a twice-weekly syndicated humor column.  Attwood became a foreign correspondent, author, editor and publisher of Newsday.
     Presidential Prose
     Along the way, Attwood and Yoakum joined forces as volunteer writers in Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign.  And in 1960 each became a full-time speechwriter for John F. Kennedy.
     With the election of Kennedy, Attwood was named U.S. Ambassador to Guinea and afterwards as ambassador to Kenya by Lyndon Johnson.  When Chester Bowles, a former congressman and governor of Connecticut, joined the “New Frontier” as Deputy Secretary of State, Yoakum went with him to Washington’s Foggy Bottom.
     Several years earlier, Yoakum – in a fit of entrepreneurship – had sought unsuccessfully to launch a newsmagazine in competition with Time and Newsweek.  It was to be peppered with humor and signed pieces, shunning what many perceived to be the political bias of those other publications.
     Prospective writers included Bill Attwood, Art Buchwald, John Crosby, Robert Shaplen and William Zinsser.
     Yoakum quit this exotic adventure when Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, purchased Newsweek.
    
     Global Exposure 
     From 1970 to 1986, Yoakum’s syndicated humor column appeared in newspapers here and abroad.  It had been started with the encouragement of Harold Evans, then editor of The Sunday Times in London. 
     As Evans was to observe afterwards, Yoakum broke the nationality barrier by creating a wit that travelled well across borders.  He was one of the few Americans to succeed in cracking a smile among British readers.
     Yoakum was attending Northwestern University when he, like Attwood, was called to service in World Was 2.  He finished after the war at the University of Chicago.
     He now lives in Lakeville with his lawyer wife, one golden retriever and the family cat.  They have three grown children.
     Reception Scheduled 
     The Attwood lecture on April 4 will start at 5:30 p.m. in the Adrian Lamb Room of the New Canaan Library.  It will be followed by a reception upstairs in the Curtis Gallery.  To accommodate the overflow crowd that is expected, the library will provide an audio-video hook-up to the main reading room.
     Leonard W. Cotton, president of the Library’s board of trustees, will present Sim Attwood and members of their family.  David Bryant, who will be reporting as the Library’s new director the next day, also will attend.
     The Attwood Memorial Lectures are funded by an endowment established by friends of Bill and Sim Attwood from New Canaan and elsewhere around the world.  It is administered by the board of the New Canaan Library.

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