Wesley Pruden, shown during a 2005 appearance on C-SPAN.
Wesley Pruden, a gifted writer who got ink in his blood as a teenage staffer at the Arkansas Gazette and went on to make the “Moonie”-owned Washington Times a favorite of conservatives, including President Ronald Reagan, died after a heart attack July 17 in Washington.
Pruden, 83, was a former editor in chief of the Times and author of its combative twice-a-week column “Pruden on Politics.” He was also accused of running a racist and sexist newsroom and slanting stories to suit his conservative bent.
He once described Hillary Clinton as “everybody’s candidate for b—h-in-chief” and notoriously wrote that Barack Obama was “sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.” It’s a testament to Pruden’s language skills that every word of the Obama passage is factual, yet the anti-race-mixing message is clear.
Pruden’s father was the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., “one of the most vehement racists of the time,” recalled longtime Arkansas journalist Ernest Dumas, who knew the Southern Baptist pastor when he was a pro-segregation leader after nine brave students integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
Dumas, who oddly never met the younger Pruden, followed his career from a distance and “thought he was a pretty good writer.” He recalled that Pruden Sr. was president of the Capital Citizens Council and joined fellow race purists Amis Guthridge and Malcolm Taylor in organizing “the Reverse Freedom Rides” in summer 1962. “I covered those things,” Dumas said.
The publicity stunt played off the Freedom Rides that carried civil rights activists by bus to various Southern cities. Pruden’s group would buy one-way bus tickets for poor black Arkansans and ship them to Hyannis, Massachusetts, the summer home of the Kennedy family, where liberal Northerners would presumably “take good care of them.” Of course, the reverse riders ended up stuck thousands of miles from home.
The sins of the father shouldn’t necessarily be visited upon the son, of course. But the younger Wes Pruden faced racism charges of his own, and reports of ethical lapses.
A graduate of Little Rock High School (Central’s previous name), Pruden started at the Gazette while in high school in the early 1950s and became assistant state editor while studying at Little Rock Junior College, now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He made his bones as a hard-hitting correspondent at the National Observer in Washington, now defunct, but left that paper in the 1970s under a cloud of manufactured quotations. He spent years on a satirical novel about Vietnam, where he had covered the war, but never saw it published.
After burning through his savings, Pruden joined the Washington Times as chief political correspondent shortly after it was formed in 1982 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a Korean-born self-proclaimed messiah and leader of the Unification Church. Moon’s goal was to counter what he saw as liberal bias in the Washington Post. Pruden fiercely defended the Times’ news integrity, saying all conservative stances were reserved for the editorial page.
The paper grew to a circulation of about 100,000 at its peak in the Reagan administration, which ended in January 1989. He was publishing a weekly Civil War feature in the Times when he faced charges from the Southern Poverty Law Center of promoting neo-Confederate sympathies. Criticism from former colleagues eventually built to a critical mass, and Pruden stepped down as editor in 2008, but continued his columns and editorials.
David Brock, a former Times reporter, wrote of Pruden’s reign in his book “Blinded by the Right”: “There were endless controversies and resignations over what became known as ‘Prudenizing’ news copy, slanting it in a conservative fashion.”
But admirers liked Pruden’s hard-nosed approach, his loathing of “political correctness” and his disdain for “victim stories,” which he banned. Pruden advised those feeling downtrodden to “get a life!”
James Wesley Pruden Jr. is survived by his companion of a half-century, Corinna Metcalf.
Dean Duncan, the longtime journalism professor at the University of Central Arkansas who died in 2015, knew Pruden in Little Rock and roomed with him for a time when both were at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. Duncan called Pruden “the smoothest and snappiest writer that I ever came across,” but he’d add that as a young man, Pruden was known to keep a Confederate battle flag on his bedroom wall.
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