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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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year that I worked on the Trenton papers. There were two of them [State Gazette, morning; Times, evening].

And then I wanted to get onto something better and something that would be more useful and challenging. And again, at my brother's urging I applied to the Washington Post. My own application, which was just a letter to them, didn't get any response. And here again, I have to admit that -- and I always felt guilty about this, too -- but my cousin Julius, since I wouldn't accept a job in the New York Times, wrote to somebody on the Washington Post recommending me. That had a lot more effect than my own letter of application. I always felt guilty about getting my job on the Washington Post that way, through Julius's personal influence, but I did anyway, and I really had a very successful-- from a newspaper- journalistic point of view-- career on the Washington Post until I went into the army four years later.

I don't want to boast about it at all, but I was assigned first to regular police reporting, of course, and very arduous police reporting at the lowest possible level. But I did get assigned pretty soon to Capitol Hill, and I covered a great deal -- wasn't the only Post reporter covering Congress, but I covered at different times both houses of Congress, sometimes both of them together, but that was only when we were very short staffed. But I covered the Supreme Court on their weekly announcements of cases, and I had a lot of official stories, both political and others, that were really first class stories.

I covered quite a lot of FDR [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt]'s press conferences, and I covered -- again, not the only Washington Post reporter -- but I covered with at least one





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