Common Ground (99 page)

In an Irish Catholic city then rabidly pro-McCarthy, it took courage for any newspaper to breast the tide. The
Globe
was more temperate than the
Post
but, aware that it shared the Senator’s constituency, it did nothing to protest his behavior. James Morgan, still the
Globe
’s guiding spirit, concluded that a
stand against McCarthy would lose the paper 100,000 readers. In private, he justified its silence by invoking a curious apologia called “The
Globe
Principle,” first devised three decades earlier to explain the
Globe
’s reticence on E. Mitchell Palmer’s anti-Communist raids: “The
Globe
policy is to uphold principles and not to tie itself up with personalities, necessarily transient. In fighting men, it would make too many enemies for the measures it advocates…. The
Globe
perseveres in a good-humored patience with each successive challenger of the American Way, in its faith that ‘they, too, will pass away.’ ” (The
Globe
was more courageous when its own staffers ran afoul of the hysteria. Charlie Whipple, who covered McCarthy for the paper, had been a Communist at Harvard in the thirties. When State Senator John Powers threatened to subpoena Whipple, the
Globe
sent its political correspondent up Beacon Hill to warn Powers that it would not tolerate such harassment. The subpoena was quietly shelved.)

By transforming the
Post
into a strident broadsheet, John Fox may have won it some readers, but he alienated others. When he broke with the newspaper’s Democratic heritage to support Eisenhower, the newsroom phones rang all night with outraged subscribers. Creditors’ lawsuits brought the paper to its knees. In 1956, the 125-year-old war horse succumbed to mortal wounds.

With the journalistic spectrum thus shorn of its extremes and the
Monitor
and Hearst papers fading into insignificance, Boston’s press wars were left with two principal contestants. Each brandishing the relics of ancient battles, each furnished in the full regalia of morning, evening, and Sunday editions, the
Globe
and
Herald
eyed each other uneasily from opposite ends of Washington Street.

Seeking to avert a costly war of attrition, the
Herald
pursued a shotgun marriage. Robert Choate, the
Herald
’s publisher, was a splenetic autocrat, model for the tyrannical Amos Force in
The Last Hurrah
. Having relentlessly urged merger on his
Globe
counterpart, William Taylor, he renewed his campaign after Taylor was succeeded by his son, Davis. When Davis went ahead with plans for a new
Globe
plant, capable of outprinting the
Herald
’s aging presses, Choate called on the John Hancock Insurance Company and the State Street Trust Company in a vain effort to block their loans for the building. Finally, in January 1956, he invited Davis Taylor to lunch at the Somerset Club on Beacon Hill. Choate was accompanied by Carl Gilbert, president of the Gillette Company and a
Herald
director; Taylor brought his cousin John, the
Globe
’s treasurer. The four men lunched in a private second-floor dining room, its walls lined with pale green silk. Over broiled scrod, Choate explained why further competition would do neither paper any good. “If you build, we’ll build,” he warned. “If you go to ninety-six pages in your first section, we’ll go to ninety-six pages. It’s like the arms race. For God’s sake, let’s stop it now. Let’s put the two papers together.”

Davis politely demurred—the Taylors cherished the
Globe
’s independence. As they finished lunch, Choate said coldly: “You fellows are stubborn.
Worse than that, you’re arrogant. You better listen to us or we’ll teach you a lesson. I’m going to get Channel 5, and with my television revenues I’ll put you out of business.”

For the time being, the Taylors didn’t take Choate’s threat very seriously. The
Herald
had been seeking Boston’s third VHF channel since 1947, but on January 4, 1956—only three weeks before the lunch—a Federal Communications Commission hearing examiner had tentatively awarded the channel to Greater Boston Television, headed by Arthur Garrity’s law partner, Richard Maguire. The ruling had been appealed to the full FCC, but the Taylors were confident the
Herald
wouldn’t prevail, for the same reason the
Globe
hadn’t applied in the first place: the commission’s “diversification policy,” which discouraged undue concentration of newspaper and television properties.

But “Beanie” Choate never gave up. All through 1956, he used every device in the lobbyist’s repertoire to sway the FCC, including repeated calls on White House and congressional Republicans, and a critical lunch with Commission Chairman George McConnaughey. Shortly before Christmas the campaign paid off. In a preliminary vote, the commission instructed its staff to draft an opinion awarding Channel 5 to the
Herald
. Ruefully recalling Choate’s parting words at the Somerset, Davis and his cousin John went to Washington for a frantic effort to reverse the decision. Within three days they visited every commission member as well as Massachusetts Senators John Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall; New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges; and Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks. To each they delivered the same message: they had no interest in Channel 5 themselves, but they were determined to prevent the
Herald
from obtaining a weapon which could put the
Globe
out of business. The Taylors garnered little encouragement. House Minority Leader Joe Martin summed up the situation when he told them, “I’m afraid you fellas have just been outpoliticked.”

They may have been outswapped as well. Joe Kennedy was determined to bring his son the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for
Profiles in Courage
, thus bestowing an extra dash of prestige on Jack’s presidential campaign. But the biography judges didn’t cooperate, nominating Alpheus Mason’s
Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law
, and seven runners-up. The senior Kennedy thereupon conferred with Arthur Krock, the New York
Times
Washington columnist and longtime Kennedy adviser. Together, they mapped a strategy to convert the Pulitzer Advisory Board, the thirteen editors and publishers who review the judges’ nominations. Krock has confirmed that he “worked like hell” to get the prize for Jack, intervening with board members like fellow
Times
man Turner Catledge and Barry Bingham of the Louisville
Courier-Journal
.

But Joe Kennedy gave personal attention to the board’s lone Bostonian—Robert Choate. According to one version of subsequent events, Joe sent his faithful retainer, Municipal Court Judge Francis Xavier Morrissey, to solicit Choate’s vote. What’s in it for me? the publisher replied. What do you want? asked Morrissey. To which Choate snapped: Channel 5.

Joe Kennedy had other reasons for proving useful to the
Herald
. He knew
the Boston press could be bought—five years before, he had loaned John Fox $500,000 in exchange for the
Post
’s endorsement of Jack. Now JFK was seeking a massive reelection victory in 1958 to boost his presidential hopes and the
Herald
’s support could be critical. Still the city’s largest daily, it was the Republican paper whose readers Kennedy needed for such a landslide (indeed, a year later, the
Herald
broke tradition by endorsing Kennedy, who won by a staggering 874,608 votes).

Moreover, Joe Kennedy had little affection for the
Globe
. In 1940, while Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, he had granted an interview to the
Globe
’s Louis Lyons. Already secretly sparring with FDR, Joe was about to stake out a carefully articulated isolationist position which he hoped would carry him to the White House in 1944. But relaxing in his suite at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he indiscreetly shared his unexpurgated thoughts with Lyons: “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here…. If we got in [to the war], a bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear would be gone.” When the
Globe
spread the story over page one, Kennedy claimed he had been misquoted and insisted that the
Globe
fire Lyons. The newspaper stood firm (although once the furor cooled down, it shunted Lyons off to Harvard as director of the Nieman Fellowships for journalists). Meanwhile, Kennedy retaliated by withdrawing his liquor advertising—he then controlled all imports of Haig & Haig and Gordon’s Gin—a boycott which cost the
Globe
two million dollars over six years. As late as 1961, days before his son’s inauguration, Joe was still denouncing the
Globe
’s transgression.

Kennedy had ample motivation for a deal with the
Herald
, and he had the resources as well. At least two FCC members—Richard Mack and Robert E. Lee—were close to Kennedy. Whatever may have passed between Joe and the commissioners, the public record is intriguing:

In the last week of April 1957, the Pulitzer Advisory Board overrode its judges, leapt over eight distinguished nominees, and awarded its biography prize to
Profiles in Courage
. Robert Choate voted for Jack Kennedy’s book.

On April 24, the FCC formally overrode its hearing examiner and awarded Channel 5 to the
Herald
. The vote was 4–2. Messrs. Mack and Lee voted with the majority.

Over the next fifteen years, the issue went back to the FCC twice, five times to the Court of Appeals, and three times to the Supreme Court, becoming the longest administrative case in American history. Though the
Herald
continued to operate the station, the license competition was ultimately reopened, and four contenders from every corner of Boston’s ethnic and class map slugged it out in a bare-knuckled free-for-all. Yet the essential collision remained between the
Globe
and the
Herald
, a gritty war of survival that gradually transformed the Taylors and their somnolent newspaper. Like his father and grandfather, Davis Taylor had been a relentlessly conventional man—a lean, crew-cut sailing enthusiast and polite Episcopalian, who, as late as 1956, could write, “My social, political (independent), and religious convictions [are] normal, I hope, for a Harvard man.” But perhaps for the first
time in his placid existence, Taylor had been stung by Bob Choate’s threats. The day after the
Herald
gained Channel 5, Uncle Dudley appeared with an uncharacteristically blunt editorial, concluding: “The
Globe
will continue to publish an independent newspaper as happily as it has for the past 85 years.” It was a shot fired across the
Herald
’s bow, a warning that the
Globe
would not go down without a fight.

Not long thereafter, the paper appointed a new Washington correspondent, a young Irishman named Bob Healy. Healy’s father had been a
Globe
mailer for fifty years, earning the Taylors’ special affection and assuring that his sons would always have jobs at the paper. Bob parlayed his street savvy into the
Globe
’s top political beat, but he had other functions as well. If the Taylors stood aloof from Boston politics, they needed someone who could deal with the Irish pols, and Healy quickly became the family’s principal pipeline to City Hall. Moving to Washington in 1957, he served as their special envoy on Channel 5, making sure the publisher was never “outpoliticked” again. By then, Washington was the front on which Boston’s journalistic tong wars would be decided. An emissary from the
Herald
presented $50,000 in government bonds to Senator Styles Bridges. The
Globe
chased rumors linking a
Herald
stockholder to mob interests. But the biggest coup came from Healy, who obtained telephone company records documenting improper contacts between Choate and FCC Chairman McConnaughey.

The
Globe
’s new investigative zeal paid rich dividends. In 1961, Healy learned that Jack Kennedy intended to appoint his father’s old gofer, Francis Xavier Morrissey, to the vacant seat on Boston’s federal bench. The White House backed down when the
Globe
reported that Morrissey had twice failed the Massachusetts bar exam, then been admitted in Georgia under questionable circumstances. Four years later, Lyndon Johnson finally named Morrissey, but ex-Kennedy staffers like Kenny O’Donnell, fearing that the appointment would besmirch Jack’s memory, fed Healy damaging new material which killed the nomination and won the paper its first Pulitzer Prize.

The Pulitzer was particularly welcome because it put an official stamp of approval on the
Globe
’s new editorial leadership. In September 1965—the very month the paper launched its final assault on Morrissey—Tom Winship became the
Globe
’s editor.

The appointment stirred some talk of nepotism because “young Tom”—then forty-five—succeeded his father as the paper’s principal news executive. Cheerful, tractable Larry Winship had been an appropriate editor for the
Globe
of the forties and fifties. A protégé of the circumspect James Morgan, he began on the Sunday paper and remained a “soft news” man, inclined toward the inoffensive feature story (he once assigned a piece on what people keep in the backs of cars). Even his close friend Felix Frankfurter, who once called Winship “a really wise New Englander,” conceded that he was “not much concerned with general ideas or causes.” Boston’s most pressing problems—rampant McCarthyism, endemic corruption, stagnant industries, decaying neighborhoods, ethnic strife, racial segregation—did not engage him.

Nothing in Tom Winship’s youth promised more involvement with the troubled city. Raised in exurban Sudbury, a truck-farming community sixteen miles west of Boston, he received an education anachronistic even in that part of the world. In nearby Sterling, the industrialist Henry Ford had discovered the one-room schoolhouse linked by legend to Mary and her little lamb. Installing it on a Sudbury hillside, he furnished it with nineteenth-century desks and a potbellied stove, then recruited a teacher and sixteen Sudbury children. For six years, Tom Winship played his appointed role in Henry Ford’s tableau. When Ford produced a movie about Mary and her lamb, Tom’s job was to hide the animal under his desk until the director was ready for it. As he gamely hugged its woolly neck, the lamb shat all over his new shoes.