One afternoon in May of 1971 I answer the phone at my desk. It’s Don Reeder, by now almost a friend. Don was bureau chief in Chicago for the news magazine U.S. News & World Report and would every now and then call for my take on a story he was working on or for suggestions of possible sources. We’d last spoken during the months-long Teamsters strike in 1970, during which I passed on the private phone number of Teamster Louis Peick. This time he wasn’t working a story. In effect, he was offering me his job.
Reeder said he was being reassigned to the headquarters of U.S. News in Washington, D.C., and was tasked with finding his own replacement. I was the first (and maybe the only) person he called. He reported stories across the Midwest, from Illinois to Colorado and from North Dakota to Kansas. The job involved a good bit of travel, which I liked. On some assignments, he was the writer. But on others, stories with a scope beyond the Midwest, he would be one of several reporters sending material to a writer in Washington. Don told me to think about it and get back to him.
I was taken aback. I was happy at the Sun-Times and wasn’t looking for other work. But Don’s call touched a couple of nerves. One was very personal. Just two weeks earlier, Maggie gave birth to our first child, a girl, stillborn. We were devastated. The experienced unmoored me, and I guess made me receptive to such an idea as Reeder offered. Maybe it was time to start anew. And I thought back to those summer nights in 1967 in Milwaukee, when racial protests led to mass arrests over three raucous nights. I worked alongside Gene Roberts of the New York Times and Nick Chriss of the Los Angeles Times. I admired their smooth professionalism and the swashbuckling way they tackled stories throughout the country. I guess I wanted to be like them. This was almost that dream.
Or was it? A newspaper publishes every day, U.S. News just once a week. The newspaper prints breaking news, the news magazine an interpretation of the week’s events. I worked for what I thought was the best if not the biggest newspaper in Chicago, whereas U.S. News & World Report was a distant third to rivals Time and Newsweek in circulation and stature. I checked out some recent issues of the magazine from the Sun-Times library and took them home, quickly confirming my suspicion. If Time was authoritative and Newsweek breezy, U.S. News could fairly be called dull. Not overtly conservative or right wing, just dull.
I’d known of David Lawrence as a staunchly conservative newspaper columnist. He also founded U.S. News in 1926 and World Report in 1946, merging the two in 1948. About 1960, he sold the two-million circulation company to its employees, with a stipulation that he would continue to be its editor so long as he chose. In 1971, Lawrence turned 83 years old, and although he did not put out the magazine on a week-to-week basis, little happened without his approval.
I absorbed all this, talked with Maggie and decided to take the next step. Don arranged for me to go to Washington and talk to its editors (but not David Lawrence, who spent most of his time in Sarasota, Fla.). I marked off work for two days and flew to DC. The executive editor and day-to-day boss was Howard Flieger, a tall, thin, courtly man who like me was seldom without a cigarette in his hand. The managing editor, John Adams, did not impress me as much. He seemed quite conservative in his views of the world and in the way he wanted the magazine to cover news. I noticed that the hands of both men trembled. I also met David Richardson, the chief of U.S. correspondents. I took an immediate liking to David, who had been a reporter for the Army magazine Yank in the jungles of Asia during World War II and then a foreign correspondent for Time. If I were offered the job and accepted, he’d be my boss. You couldn’t ignore David’s affliction, a stutter that would hang him up for seconds. I thought to myself, people here either tremble or stutter—is the work that hard?
I walked the corridors of the magazine’s offices in Washington’s West End, near to Rock Creek and Georgetown. Almost everyone in the cubicles seemed old—old to a 27-year-old being 50 years or more. That could be good or bad, I reasoned. A lot of opportunities could open up if my impression of an aging staff was in fact correct. I don’t recall seeing the one person there I already knew. That was Archie Robinson, the labor writer. He had been on that beat for close to a quarter century. We’d see each other every February when the AFL-CIO Executive Council met in Bal Harbour, Fla., for a week. I had noticed on those occasions that Archie seemed to be almost a personal friend of George Meany, the AFL-CIO president, which I thought to be strange for a writer working for a supposedly conservative publication. What I didn’t understand then was that U.S. News & World Report treated unions with consummate fairness in its pages and was well regarded within the labor movement.
I went home and talked some more with Don Reeder. I told him the impressions I had formed. Don told me that a new generation of leaders was being groomed and that a sense of pending change seemed to exist at the magazine. He mentioned one name in particular, Marvin L. Stone. Stone had been an International News Service correspondent in Asia after World War II, covering the Chinese civil war, and came to U.S. News about 1950 to cover the Pentagon. He reported to Flieger and was said to be next in line to run the publication, at which time the magazine would be aired out.
This was a big decision for me. To leave the newspaper would alter the course I’d set for myself. I had expected to be a newspaperman my entire working life. Here I was, a mere five years out of college and about to veer off into places unknown. But really? Magazines are first cousins to newspapers, similar but distinctly different. Newspapers are a reporter’s medium—get the facts right and get them in front of people, pronto. Magazines are a writer’s world—come read this tantalizing story I’ve written for you.
Today, decades later, I really cannot recall what tipped the scales. I think it was largely the shock and sorrow of losing that little girl I had fathered. I was ready for something new. And I admit that the title “bureau chief,” even if the bureau consisted of only two people, would be heady.
Late in May I called John Adams in Washington and accepted his job offer. Then I wrote my editor, Jim Hoge, a letter of resignation, giving a bit more than two weeks notice. Jim accepted my decision graciously and didn’t try to persuade me to stay. I glad he did not, because I would have been torn, and time has proven my decision to be a wise one for someone so immature.
Two weeks to go. Nothing was happening or on the horizon on the labor scene. Nor was my city editor, Jim Peneff, likely to throw a good idea my way, me being a short timer. Out with a whimper! What I did not know the day I gave notice was that the most fantastic story of my stint as labor writer was about to come crashing down on Chicago, dominating all four newspapers and the TV news shows. I would go out with a resounding bang.