Michael Lindenberger: Taken too soon

 

Michael Lindenberger, everything a journalist should be.

Michael Lindenberger’s legion of good friends and admiring colleagues mourn his loss. At 51, he is dead too soon, felled by a mysterious illness that his doctors couldn’t identify.

Given time, Michael would have become, I am confident, one of America’s best-known and best-loved writers. He was that good and he worked at it that hard. Time was all he needed, time that has been denied him – and all the people who loved and admired him.

During the time we worked together at The Dallas Morning News, Michael was everything I believe a good journalist should be: a compelling writer, effective interviewer and diligent researcher.

But he was more than that. He was tough-minded but kind-hearted, suspicious of power but tolerant of human frailty, courageous without being foolhardy, thoughtful but no egghead, confident but not egocentric.

His untimely death cuts short a career that was beginning to soar. Earlier this year, he was a part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories in the Houston Chronicle about “The Big Lie,” the myth of stolen ballots, rigged elections and fake voters.

He only recently had moved to the Kansas City Star to become the editorial page editor and vice president.

He spent 14 years as a reporter at The News, where he had few peers. There were no holes in a Lindenberger story. It was thoroughly reported, carefully organized and skillfully written. He was an editor’s dream.

We sat at adjacent desks, and I would get a running commentary about the progress of his stories. Michael liked to talk things through. I suppose it helped him organize the story before he sat down to write. His telephone interviews, which I couldn’t help but overhear, were like a master’s class in the art of interviewing.

He was among the first reporters at The News to use the internet to engage his readers. He was a devoted blogger and would write long, fact-filled posts about the news of the day, inviting his sources to participate in an online discussion. Often, he would mine his blog for his print stories.

Such things are common today. Back then, not so much.

Aside from journalism, Michael loved to cook – and was good at it. An invitation to one of his dinner parties promised mouth-watering cuisine, good liquor and sensational dinner conversation, over a wide range of topics and presided over with gusto by the host himself. On such occasions, he reminded me a bit of Winston Churchill – all the charm and intellect without the insults and suffocating egotism.

He showed his judgment and good taste by being a lover of good bourbon. Kentucky bourbon, thank you very much.

A proud native of Louisville, he believed devoutly that the best bourbon was distilled within its environs. He wouldn’t gargle with that Tennessee mash crap.

If fate had been kinder, Michael would have had time to finish his biography of fellow Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren, the only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize for both prose and poetry.  His most famous work is All the King’s Men, a novel loosely based on the career of Louisiana Gov. Huey Long.

I consider All the King’s Men as the best American novel of the 20^th century, and Michael and I had long conversations about the book and about Warren’s creative process. I had read somewhere that Warren originally conceived the book as a long, epic poem, but had abandoned that idea and rewritten it as a novel, leaving much of the poetic imagery intact. The idea captivated me, but Michael’s research gave lie to the myth. I remember his discreet amusement at my disappointment.

Michael’s other literary hero dwelled at the other end of the spectrum. He was an enthusiastic fan of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, like Michael a Louisville native. Michael saw beyond Thompson’s flamboyant personality and detected the serious writer often overlooked by critics.

The last year had been an up-and-down ride for Michael. Along with his career accomplishments came personal tragedy when his partner of many years, Phil Clore, died after a lengthy battle with cancer. Clore’s death rocked Michael, who dealt with his anguish in typical fashion – by writing about it.

In a Facebook post at Thanksgiving, he wrote about living with grief and finding a path beyond the pain.

“I’ve been a writer all my life. And one thing I have learned is that writing is thinking. We writers often don’t know what we think, or even what we feel, until we put our brains through the process of spelling it out on the page.”