WASHINGTON – “I am a wire service man,” Walter R. Mears writes in the first words of “Deadlines Past,” his book of political and journalistic memories, and once again he got the lead right.

Reporting for The Associated Press for half a century, Mears was the paragon of wire service reporters, writing for hundreds of newspapers and their millions of readers. He is famous for getting the lead and getting it out. Fast.

(So fast that an evaluating editor once wrote a memo to his boss: “Mears writes faster than most people think and sometimes faster than he thinks.”)

Tim Crouse made him famous. In “The Boys on the Bus,” his book on the antics of the press corps in the 1972 presidential campaign, Crouse told how a Boston Globe reporter asked Mears, “Walter, what’s our lead?” after a primary campaign debate between Democrats Hubert H. Humphrey and George McGovern.

Young journalists read Crouse, and “What’s the lead, Walter?” became a catch phrase to describe the tribal journalism of the campaign bubble, where everyone wonders what the other guy is writing.

“I came away with a slogan not of my making, but one that stuck for the rest of my career,” Mears writes. It was a 50-year career. He helped cover 11 presidential campaigns for the AP, from Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 to Bush-Gore in 2000.

Mears had to bang out stories about debates while they were still under way. Editors would see his lead before they saw their own reporters’ first-paragraph summaries. It became natural for the others on the press bus to wonder what Mears was leading with, and to ask.

“What’s the lead, Walter?” might have become the inevitable tag line when Mears’ obituary is written, if it had not been overtaken by another: “Pulitzer Prize winner.”

Win a Pulitzer, Mears notes, and you don’t have to wonder how your obituary will begin. He won his for his campaign coverage in 1976.

In his book, Mears acknowledges the thrill of winning, but pays just as much heed to the pants he wore. He reproduces a photo showing him holding a phone, accepting Pulitzer congratulations, and wearing checked double-knit trousers. “I wish I’d chosen to wear plain pants,” he writes.

The subtitle of “Deadlines Past,” published Oct. 1 by Andrews McMeel Publishing, describes its contents: “Forty Years of Presidential Campaigning: A Reporter’s Story.” (In candor, a disclaimer: This review is written by an AP colleague and Mears’ admirer, one who was hired by him.)

The book is not a profound appraisal of the costly, awkward, accident-prone way America finds its leaders. Its value is its crisp portrayals of the candidates as the reporters got to know them just as people, flawed and human, but by no means just plain people. It is fun to read.

It offers a critique of the constraints of the balanced, objective journalism of which Mears was a master. He recalls McGovern’s unheeded attempts to call attention to the burglars and buggings of Watergate during his campaign against Richard M. Nixon.

Evenhandedly, journalism reported McGovern’s claim that Nixon was the most corrupt politician in U.S. history and the methodical denials of the Nixon White House. Balanced, yes. But fair? “The average between a lie and the truth is still a lie,” writes Mears.

After covering all those primaries, all those conventions, all those campaigns and all those election nights, Mears seems to like the losers better than the winners. Two Arizonans, liberal Democrat Morris Udall and “Mr. Conservative,” Barry Goldwater, are his favorites.

Among the political trivia Mears digs up are losers’ words in concession:

-Democratic Sen. Fred Harris, quitting in 1976: “You couldn’t call it victory because we didn’t run that well. But we ran just well enough to keep going. So it wasn’t really defeat. So we didn’t know what to call it and we just decided to call it quits.”

-Steve Forbes, bowing out in 2000 after being buried by George W. Bush: “We were nosed out by a landslide.”

-Gary Bauer, giving up earlier that year after getting 1 percent of the vote in New Hampshire: “I’m a fighter, but I’m not delusional.”

-And Udall, after losing one in a string of primaries: “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

Now Mears, no longer beholden to objectivity, has spoken. In his opening sentence of this book he describes his wire service creed: “a calling that requires writing news instantly, keeping the copy terse, and keeping yourself out of it.”

Happily, in this book, Mears put himself in it, awful pants and all.

AP-ES-09-20-03 1346EDT

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