The Bizarre Fall Of A Morning News Columnist

For the past four years. Bradley Miller has been the gadfly of The Dallas Morning News editorial page. Politically, the former Washington-based freelancer was hard to categorize: his diatribes againsl Communism and welfare-state economics could out-News the ultraconservative News at times; on social issues such as abortion and school prayer, he was farther to the left than most liberals. Miller might start the week with a blast against Soviet expansionism, then shift gears to skewer the latest pop psychology guru. However, his unusual imagination may have proved too much for the News. Miller was fired in early March after a comedy of errors worthy of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.

In the doldrums of the 1984 presidential election, with a Reagan landslide all but assured. Miller decided to punch up his columns by creating a fictitious political group known as the National Capitalist Workers Party. In the guise of NCWP General Secretary, Miller pushed his vision of a new America-aggressivety anti-Soviet abroad, laissez-faire capitalist at home. That’s as serious as the NCWP ever got; most of the time, Miller was calling for forced busing to end age segregation in singles bars, mandatory rock music at political rallies, and a twenty-year term for the president-if he was elected from the NCWP.

During 1984. Miller says, he wrote seven or eight columns devoted to the hopelessly obscure NCWP and its bungling attempts to win power. In all, he estimates that he mentioned the NCWP in seventeen columns during his four years at the News. If any of his superiors disliked the National Capitalist columns, Miller never heard about it. He says that all his performance reviews were positive and adds that he was given regular raises. Letters and calls from readers showed that the NCWP had a following; the News even ran a handful of letters under the heading “Up with the NCWP.”

The NCWP hit the fan when Miller received a letter from a reader in College Station, a twenty-nine-year-old A&M graduate student named William Clark. “He went through a list of complaints that seemed to me to reflect either paranoia or the attempt to caricature paranoia,” Miller says. “His complaints seemed to be the Big-Brother-is-watching-you type.” Unable to tell whether Clark was serious. Miller put tongue in cheek and dashed off a reply on News stationery. As Miller recalls (he was not given a copy of his letter or any other evidence concerning the matter), he told Clark that he might be of use to the NCWP “in its campaign to save America from the twin scourges of Marxism and Christianity.” Miller signed the letter (he thinks) “Leonard Glumph. Deputy Minister of Propaganda.” He mailed it and forgot about William Clark.

But Clark did not forget about Miller and the NCWP. Apparently convinced that Texas” most conservative newspaper was harboring subversives, Clark wrote to News executive editor Ralph Langer, who did not reply at the time. Clark also- hang on, now-sent a copy of the “propaganda minister’s” letter to his congressman, U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, asking for help in getting to the bottom of the NCWP mystery. According to Bob Welling, Rep. Barton’s press secretary, the letter was forwarded to the News. Miller was later told that someone- presumably Langer or Barton’s staff-contacted the News’ own Washington bureau for information about the NCWP.

About a week after he contacted Rep. Barton’s office, Clark says, he received a letter from Langer asking for addi-tional details. Clark sent the original propaganda minister’s ! letter and the letter from Bar-ton’s office to Langer. who was about to learn that his paper was investigating the fictitious creation of one of its own staffers.

On March 4, Miller was summoned to the office of editorial page editor Jim Wright and told that he could either resign or be fired. Miller says Wright told him the decision was made by News editor Burl Osborne. (Both Wright and Osborne refuse to comment on the firing.) “He resigned,” says Wright. “Nothing that happened reflects any discredit on Brad. There wasn’t any bad blood here. We all wish him well.”

Contacted by D last month, Clark was astonished at the bizarre chain of events. “For a guy to lose his job over this is absurd,” he said. “If this is all in jest, why the hell didn’t somebody tell me? I think Mr. Miller should get his job back with an apology. It’s all my damn fault. I should be the one losing my job, not him.”

Joseph Heller, call your office, Among the many questions raised by this black comedy: why did the News allow Miller to carry on the NCWP spoof for two years, dispense those columns to its huge readership, then fire him when one reader took offense? At best, the News seems wildly inconsistent; at worst, some suggest. News officials may have used the NCWP nonsense as an excuse to get rid of Miller, perhaps in an effort to moderate the paper’s hard-line conservative image or to make room for a minority columnist. Some News staffers believe the whole matter can be traced to the large ego of editor Osborne, who is embarrassed that his paper’s right hand didn’t know what its left was doing.

Miller, now job-hunting, hasn’t let the firing dull his satirical knife. “I am humble and contrite and no longer power-mad,” Miller says. “I realize that only the conscientious and patriotic efforts of the high-minded men at The Dallas Morning News-along with one bulldog of a U.S. congressman, Joe Barton-saved the Newsfrom falling under the control of National Capitalists and theircollaborators.”