>> The first concern is to be independent, to be free, to be able to write the truth as you can find it, to be able to state without any fear or any hesitation what you believe.
♪♪ >> When I started hearing about all of the things that he reported on or was involved in, all of a sudden I was going, "Wait.
We can show how this one person intersected with all these huge events."
>> How can you be involved in so many moments in history, and yet no one knows who Bill Baggs is?
[ Typewriter clacking ] [ Typewriter carriage dings ] >> Bill Baggs wrote six days a week on the front page.
He changed The Miami News from a red-baiting newspaper to a liberal newspaper.
>> He wrote more than 3,000 columns for The Miami News.
His newspaper broke the Cuban Missile Crisis story.
He went to North Vietnam twice.
That park would never have been saved.
It would look like full of condos.
♪♪ He was nominated for the Nobel Prize.
He was instrumental in helping Martin Luther King out of jail in 1960.
He pushed for 18-year-olds being able to vote.
Then he actually submitted one of the first ERA amendments.
He was very clear that a paper wasn't even worth printing if you were seeking to be popular.
He would talk about protecting the environment, desegregating public schools, peace in Vietnam.
And for that he was called a commie, a pinko, a traitor.
>> We have bombed enough in North Vietnam to unify the people but not enough to bring them to their knees.
>> I never had any thought that I was going to go to Miami and work in Miami.
But I just answered a job posting in grad school.
>> Look at this -- a boat in the pool.
Down towards the lighthouse, look at this -- no trees left.
>> Ten months after Hurricane Andrew, one of the first projects I worked on was doing paperwork to get debris removal out of the parks and get the parks operating for people again.
So we pull all the way into this park at the tip of Key Biscayne.
We parked, like, right around here somewhere.
And I said, "Who's Bill Baggs?"
And our coordinator that day goes, "Oh, he was some editor of some newspaper."
His name stuck with me that very first time I was in here.
That historic lighthouse led ships through Biscayne Bay.
Later on, it became a landmark for enslaved Africans escaping along the Underground Railroad to freedom in the Caribbean.
What Bill and I learned across the decades is that saving land in Florida was never simple.
I would find out these little things as I was doing other research for parks, and then I met his widow at a creative-writing class.
She mentioned that she really wanted to write about her husband.
Her name was "Frec" Baggs.
That's the nickname Bill gave her, and she was known by, because of the freckles across her nose.
For the next year, Frec and I would meet once a week.
♪♪ This is where Bill was stationed, right here at the Caribbean Hotel.
And then in the downstairs ballroom, that's where they met at a dance.
♪♪ This is where they would come and walk out to the beach.
She was working on a memoir of their life together.
It was so funny because she would say things like, "Well, that's when we had, you know, that phone that went straight to the White House."
And I'd go, "Pardon me?"
She goes, "Yes, Kennedy had it installed."
♪♪ >> So, I talked to Kennedy, and you talked to Johnson.
>> Yeah, he said, you know, "Is your dad there?"
And of course I held the phone away and went, "Dad!"
>> [ Laughs ] >> And I'm sure that I screamed in his ear, but they had a direct line.
>> That is so funny.
You see how he was on a fast track.
His time was running out very quickly.
♪♪ >> These were the columns that Bill Baggs wrote all throughout his career as an editor.
This is about the importance of a library in Lemon City.
Here, he's talking about Vietnam.
He would try to put in focus how what's happening in Miami has consequences elsewhere, as well as what's happening elsewhere, how it affects the daily lives of the people who live in Miami.
I still have no idea how he wrote six columns a week, from 1949 to 1969.
This is how he was even as a child.
He came from a family of high achievers, but they died young.
His father died three weeks after he was born.
So, he never knew his father.
And his mother died when he was 11.
And then he was sent to Colquitt to live with two aunts, kind of the same area where President Jimmy Carter grew up.
His family lineage goes all the way back to John C. Calhoun, the vice president of Andrew Jackson.
And for Bill to step so far away from that heritage and not romanticize it and say it was wrong -- that's a lesson for us now.
He witnessed a lynching.
And the next day, the white murderers were passing the plate at church.
From that moment on, for him, religion and righteousness were not equal.
And authority would always be questioned.
>> There's so many things that I could tell you about my father, but we'd be here for days.
He started his first newspaper at 12 years old.
He was an all-star football player, valedictorian, first lieutenant.
He saved several people's lives.
Harry Truman just walked into my dad's office one day.
He wanted to ask my father questions.
My father was -- was always there to give advice.
But he was also there to listen.
That's him with Nelson Rockefeller.
This was an invitation by President Johnson to come to the White House.
This was right after Martin Luther King got shot, the Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, very close friend to him and advisor.
>> At the age of 19, he served as a bombardier in a B-24 Liberator over Europe.
In his letters home, you get a sense of that widening perspective he was developing while he was laying in the belly of that beast.
He always wanted to be a newspaperman.
But, at the same time, he had really not huge ambitions.
He thought he would be at a small paper in a small town.
Here is his letter to The Miami News asking for a job, and he's so pathetic in it.
But you can also see it's somebody who just knows where he wants to be and just wants a chance.
And they negotiate for him to be the aviation reporter, which then leads him to covering labor issues and transportation issues, which is the bus boycotts, the Pan Am transportation union being infiltrated by communists.
So, just by being there at the right time, it leads him into all of these other areas.
He was dealing with a city that was the precursor for what would happen to America as a whole.
There was a very active KKK presence here.
It wasn't the typical that you found in the rest of the South.
Jews were the target.
Catholics were the target.
And blacks were the target.
So, Bill got plopped down right in the middle of a geopolitical firestorm.
When you read his work, you see how influential he was in helping calm the waters because this place could have erupted in ways that it didn't.
>> Men and women of good faith, who are trying to build a county, which will be a better place for your children to live -- for white children, black children.
Give them a chance to do a very tough job but a job which they're willing to do.
>> I'm very much a person who drives by landmarks.
And they're just all gone.
Like, I don't know where anything is.
There's the Freedom Tower.
This is where The Miami News first started.
And so it was in 1946.
That's the door he walked through.
Because after the News moved its offices to the Miami River, the building became an Ellis Island for Cuban refugees.
He often spoke about good urban design, and how do you create humane cities that connect people?
And this is his quote, "How does it affect the guy down on Flagler Street?"
♪♪ He was 23 when he became a reporter, and within three years he was a columnist.
And then in '57 became the editor.
And he was the youngest editor in the country at the time.
>> Every time it seemed like he was close to the end, maybe the goalposts got moved a little bit.
>> Bill was at a really low point in 1960, where he just felt the federal government was absolutely going to have to intervene because Southerners would not do the right thing on their own.
We're in Coconut Grove right now.
And Christ Episcopal Church was the center of the spiritual community here.
The Reverend Theodore Gibson was the head minister.
He was also the civil rights leader here.
He had distinguished himself as a crusader for better housing and better public transportation and jobs.
And then he met Bill in 1960, and they really saved each other's lives.
Together, they served on the Community Relations Board that eventually desegregated Miami's public schools.
Bill would hold in trust the negotiated settlement between the NAACP and the local department stores, which opened up the lunch counters and the restrooms to black patrons two years before the Civil Rights Act passed.
Bill would have Reverend Gibson to lunches, to his office, and at his home, when that was not customary.
People sent him death threats because of his stances on civil rights.
I'm glad to be in your company virtually.
I'm going to read the prologue from a biography of a man named Bill Baggs.
"Hanoi, 1968.
Bill Baggs, editor of The Miami News, had not slept much over the last few nights in Hanoi, what with the incessant air-raid sirens and the earth-shaking detonations in the suburbs surrounding the North Vietnamese capital."
♪♪ I've always felt like this was the moment that was truly the end of his life, this moment in Hanoi when they get the aide-mémoire, but they also find out Martin Luther King has been assassinated.
And he gets back into Washington, D.C., and he's standing on this balcony overlooking Washington, D.C., and it's on fire from the riots.
And he says, "What has happened to this country?
Are we all animals?"
And he was just like, "I left one war zone for another."
Bill made two trips to North Vietnam as a writer.
The first, in 1967, was to interview Ho Chi Minh.
He was the last American journalist to do so.
The second time, in 1968, was when he returned to help lay the groundwork for the Paris Peace Talks and to assess the state of the war.
>> The State Department was obviously interested in anything that Ho Chi Minh told us in a conversation, and we reported in full and I think accurate detail of what Ho Chi Minh told us in conversation.
>> Do you have any speculation on if the harder-line letter had not been sent whether or not the peace conference might have been held?
>> Well, we were deprived of the opportunity of finding out, but here we're getting away from the facts, and we're getting into that loose realm of opinion.
It's my opinion, gentlemen, that this is a war which no country on Earth really wants, with the exception of China, who apparently believes it's in the national interest of China to enlarge and sustain this conflict.
>> Did his very vocal support of negotiating peace in Vietnam cost you all readership?
>> Vietnam did very much.
We were losing people.
>> I feel like he got a lot of angry letters from readers.
>> Bill Baggs would stamp on postcards to the readers who sent him hate mail, "This is not a simple life, my friend, and there are no simple answers."
>> Here's the stamp.
And he was, "Boom!"
When he died, I stole the stamp.
>> [ Laughs ] He was a street editor.
He was always speaking to somebody during the week.
>> Right, right.
>> He was the biggest rainmaker for his reporters.
>> He had the ability to look into people and realize what their talents were, and he would pull them out.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> When he wasn't writing Vietnam and those things, he was very much a local editor.
I remember there was a point where somebody was trying to build an oil refinery at the southern tip of Biscayne Bay, and Baggs went to war.
He didn't want an oil refinery in there.
>> There's a sign that Art Levy the park ranger worked so hard to get into the park to tell Bill's story.
I love this picture of the Florida Governor Hayden Burns accepting title for the original 100 acres, because Hayden Burns did not want this to happen.
I think Bill kind of beat him down.
He wrote the editorial, which was a letter to the landowner, Mrs. Garcia, to see if she would sell the property.
♪♪ He was always that sort of futurist thinker.
You see what it would have looked like, flat condos all the way around and tennis courts.
It would look a lot like what North Miami Beach looks like right now.
It quotes this wonderful piece from his editorial that caught Mrs. Garcia's attention, where he says, "But the people also need parks, room to run or recline, to listen to the soft drawl of the sea, a place to dock a small boat, or simply a quiet place to walk."
Once she agreed to sell the property at 50% of the asking price, he went to find the funding.
So, he went to the county, he went to his state representative and state senators, and then even went to the federal government, to the secretary of interior, to become the third partner in funding the State Park.
That way he didn't necessarily need the governor to make it happen.
While this looks like a really happy picture, I think Hayden Burns was, like, gritting his teeth just a little bit.
The funny thing is, they would meet again, during the Constitutional Revision Commission, and they would battle things out.
He really fought for the reapportionment of the state so that the legislature would truly reflect the distribution of population.
♪♪ >> Question by Mr. Baggs.
We haven't heard from him yet this evening.
>> I've been sitting down out in right field just listening, Ralph.
My question has to do with reapportionment.
I would like to know how both of you candidates stand on this issue, which I think is important today.
>> Mr. Baggs, the Constitution says that the state of Florida should be reapportioned every 10 years.
And I'm going to require, as governor of this great state, that they reapportion according to the dictates of the Constitution.
>> They actually attribute 35,000 votes switching to Collins based on Bill's questions, because he kept hammering him on reapportionment.
He's like, "How can you justify not representing every person?"
And he couldn't answer.
>> He was able to affect change mainly because he just wouldn't stop.
>> Right -- he was relentless.
He always said, "If we would stop caring who got the credit, we could get so much done.
♪♪ >> John Knight, being a consummate newspaperman, said he wanted two contrasting views in the same town.
If The Miami News had not gone into a co-op with The Miami Herald, we would have been out of business long ago.
>> This agreement makes it possible for Miami to avoid the fate which has visited so many cities in America.
Miami is not going to become a one-newspaper town.
>> On the eighth floor, that's the Special Collections.
There's all these little treasures in those boxes.
There was a really funny Western Union telegram from Bobby Kennedy on the day Bill published an article sort of contradicting the Johnson administration, where Bobby Kennedy said, "I think he hates you more than he hates me now."
He befriended the powerful, like Senator Robert Kennedy, and nudged them along that arc toward justice.
1968 was a terribly tumultuous year, and it was a time when the tide was violently turning against the Johnson administration.
Bill also had grown concerned and decided to write his friend Robert Kennedy a letter, encouraging him to get into the race.
A month later, Kennedy entered the race.
Two weeks later, Johnson stunned the world by saying he was not going to run again.
♪♪ He had to take this daily medication.
His kidneys were failing.
I honestly think he didn't think he had much time.
>> He was beating the clock, literally, because they didn't have a cure for what was ailing him.
>> I was 13 years old, and I was having a talk with him.
And I said, "I think you're going to die.
You can't -- you can't keep doing this."
And he looked at me, and he said, "What do you expect me to do, Craig?
Do you expect me to quit?"
I said, "I expect you to slow down, Dad.
I love you."
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> It was only a one-block walk to the Episcopal church, where Baggs' funeral was being held.
We all left the newsroom.
We marched the one block, and it was very, very emotional.
And I'm standing there with the other pallbearers.
Ted Kennedy, Governor LeRoy Collins, Harry Ashmore, and there's me.
He was talking about being a friend of Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy and all that.
And then when Baggs died, I found out he didn't make it up.
>> Something that the staff of The Miami News did after he passed, they collected all of the obituaries that had been written about him all over the world, from The Washington Post, from The New York Times, from an Idaho newspaper, from The Atlanta Constitution, the tributes that other people did about him.
They're all in here.
♪♪ This whole thing is all the condolence letters that came into the news from all over the world.
I mean, there's things from Senator Fulbright, a letter from the United Nations, a Supreme Court justice, Kennedy's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.
Even Nixon, who we had a terrible relationship with, sent something.
♪♪ Craig was 15, almost 16, and Mahoney I think was 10 or 11.
And Frec was 45, 46.
So, that was a young family to lose somebody who was the center of their universe.
>> It would have been interesting if Pop had stayed around... >> Mm-hmm.
>> ...and been involved in that level of politics.
>> I think about that, too.
I just say, "What would it have been like for him to have lived another 25 years?
What would've he accomplished?"
>> This stack here is pieces of novels that he started.
I think there's one full, complete novel in here.
And then there's short stories.
And, like, here, you can see a whole list of characters.
I think he would have loved to have done that.
I wonder, though, if he would have ever been able to step away from news, I really do, because three years after he died was the break-in of the Watergate.
And he would have been right there in Miami, with all the "plumbers," and he would have been right there to interview them, because he would have known them from the Bay of Pigs.
I don't think news would have ever been able to let go of him.
♪♪ When you think of what got murdered in 1968, it was idealism.
It was coalition building.
I really have a theory after writing this book that our nation actually stopped advancing the cause of human rights... >> Mm-hmm.
>> ...and sort of sold its soul to the corporate interest.
>> At the end of the '60s.
>> At '68.
>> In the end, the gut-wrenching death of the News was worse than many thought it would be, even for 38-year veteran Howard Kleinberg.
>> It's really difficult.
I'm having a hard time coping with it myself.
I wouldn't want anybody to go through this.
I really wouldn't.
What was my favorite job in the newspaper business?
It was news editor of The Miami News.
I thought it was the best job I ever had.
♪♪ >> So, here we are in Coconut Grove, which was settled by Bahamians who actually helped build the community.
Yet after World War II, they were pushed into the very substandard housing.
And you can see remnants of that in these replacement buildings that were built around the 1950s and '60s.
This is something that Bill would rail against in his columns.
When he came through this community, he would see no sidewalks, no parks, and his biggest concern was that if we don't create humane places for people, we certainly can't expect them to feel like they're part of the community.
♪♪ As you move north out of the black Grove into these areas, the housing is much more opulent.
These homes go for millions.
You know, this is much more lush, much more tropical.
♪♪ We're going into Historic Overtown.
The brickwork and the tilework, it's all reflective of African cloth.
So, there's 95.
It cut Overtown right in two.
It basically destroyed very thriving African-American communities.
♪♪ All of this used to be open green space, where you could see the water.
In his last column that was ever published, he said, "If you're going to talk about putting a Civic Center here in the middle of Bayfront Park, how about we just redo downtown and make this open all the way from Overtown to here, so that you have a promenade, and you're connecting these historic African-American communities that got cut off by the highway system back into the fabric of a city?"
And this dream Bill had of what downtown could be never materialized because he wasn't there to fight for it.
♪♪ The Parks for People campaign revived Bill's call for parks, green spaces, and access to Biscayne Bay.
That led to a push by community leaders like the attorney Dan Paul and Lloyd Miller with Izaak Walton League and support of The Miami News staff to get Cape Florida State Park named in his honor.
And then in 1974, a ceremony was held at the park's entrance, where they unveiled the new sign.
Today the park is a place for respite, recreation, and raising curiosity for who Bill Baggs was.
I can't always say why I wrote this book, but I knew I had to.
It became sort of an obsession when I realized how necessary his story was to the times that we're living in right now.
We're going to have to have the tough, difficult conversations.
♪♪ ♪♪