Common Ground (100 page)

This was not, perhaps, the best place to acquire a thirst for learning. Entering Harvard in 1938, Tom concentrated in cultural anthropology. But the ruling passion of his young life was skiing. With his Norwegian roommate, he founded Harvard’s first ski club and led the ski team to fourth place in the Dartmouth Carnival.

Graduation left him at loose ends. As his classmates went off to war, Tom—his eyes damaged at birth—was classified 4F. No civilian career seemed attractive, least of all newspapering. Twice a month during college he’d gone downtown for lunch with his father, but nothing he had glimpsed in the
Globe
’s musty offices or at journalistic watering holes like the Bell and Hand had ever stirred his imagination. He was damned if he was going to spend the rest of his days in a green eyeshade huddled over a stack of greasy copy paper. When nothing else presented itself, Tom enrolled as a management trainee in a sanitary napkin factory. But quickly tiring of Kotex, he memorized the eye chart and found a berth in the Coast Guard recruiting office, a job which included peddling press releases to the Boston papers. Pleasantly surprised when his name opened editors’ doors all over town, Tom wangled a combat correspondent’s assignment aboard a transport ferrying troops onto Omaha Beach. The invasion of Europe was heady stuff for a young reporter. All about him as he prowled the French coast were the most renowned names in wartime journalism: Ernie Pyle, Don Whitehead, Wes Gallagher. Winship was hooked.

Reassigned to Washington as chief of correspondents, he had plenty of time on his hands. Coast Guard headquarters was directly across the street from the Washington
Post
. With his father’s introduction, he got a nighttime job writing obituaries for the
Post
and, after his discharge, a full-time position covering police headquarters. Weightier events left him strangely indifferent. If pressed, he called himself a Wendell Willkie Republican; in fact, he was largely apolitical. So Tom was caught by surprise when Leverett Saltonstall, Massachusetts’ Republican senator, asked him to serve as his press secretary. The appointment would obviously benefit the Senator—though the
Globe
still gave no political endorsements, favorable coverage in its news pages would lend a Republican credibility in Democratic Boston, and a Winship on his staff would help assure that. On Tom’s part, it was a rare opportunity to see Washington
from the inside out, and
Post
publisher Phil Graham urged him to “get up there on the Hill and learn where the men’s rooms are.” For two years he immersed himself in congressional politics, an apprenticeship which left its lasting imprint. Despite his personal admiration for Saltonstall, Tom was dismayed by the Grand Old Party’s unrelenting negativism. By the time he returned to the
Post
in 1948, he was a political junkie—and a Democrat—for life.

At Phil Graham’s suggestion, Tom took the redevelopment beat, an important assignment as Washington began to tackle the fetid slums which had crept to within blocks of the Capitol. Graham was crusading for a bold slum-clearance program and Tom became one of his principal agents, writing dozens of stories on the renewal of Southwest Washington. For a young man raised among Sudbury’s tomato patches, it was an abrupt exposure to the ills of urban America. Until then he had known only one Negro well enough for conversation: a carefully groomed Harvard classmate. Suddenly, he found himself in a brick wasteland, interviewing Georgia and Mississippi blacks who had trekked north during the war in search of work and stayed on seeking a piece of the American Dream. Their blasted hopes kindled the first spark of Tom Winship’s social conscience.

Later he was drafted for another crusade much favored by Graham and the liberal Georgetown set—the mounting demand for District of Columbia home rule. That too was largely a racial issue, for the House and Senate committees which governed the district were traditionally dominated by reactionary Southerners, while the city itself was increasingly black. Not surprisingly, Tom identified closely with Graham, Felix Frankfurter’s elegant protégé who had taken Washington by storm and become perhaps its most influential private citizen. He particularly admired the publisher’s determined use of the
Post
to champion liberal causes.

Ben Bradlee, another
Post
reporter, later to become the paper’s editor, got a revealing glimpse of the way Graham operated. In the summer of 1950, an ugly race riot erupted over the integration of a public swimming pool. After hours on the street, Bradlee returned to the
Post
offices to find his story cut to the bone and buried on an inside page. When he exploded, Graham dragged him into a meeting with Clark Clifford of the White House and two Justice Department officials, all in black tie. When Bradlee recounted what he had seen, Graham warned his guests that the
Post
would print the full story unless they closed all municipal pools and agreed to open them the next summer fully integrated. The officials agreed. Graham’s insistence on being a prime mover, not just an observer, may sometimes have compromised his newspaper’s integrity, but Tom Winship seemed not to notice. Years later he credited Graham’s example with convincing him that “a newspaper must put itself on the line to help its city through the great crises.”

Returning Tom’s attention, Graham moved him rapidly up the ladder: a stint on the paper’s promotional staff, national political reporting, then assistant
city editor. Some thought he might have risen much further, but in 1956 came an offer he couldn’t refuse.

With Bob Choate’s hot breath on his neck, Davis Taylor knew he had to strengthen the
Globe
’s editorial staff. Tom’s name had often cropped up, but his father was leery of the nepotism issue. “I can’t ask him,” he’d tell Davis, “you can.” One evening, Davis called to invite him to join the
Globe
as Washington correspondent (which would presumably lead to an editorial position). Tom consulted a colleague, who told him, “If you want a scrap, take it. Boston’s the last good newspaper fight left in the country.” Tom welcomed the challenge. Weary of derisive cracks about the tired old
Globe
, he wanted to redeem his father’s name; resentful of Choate’s bulldozer tactics, he itched for a counterattack. Within twenty-four hours, he accepted Taylor’s offer.

Taking over the Washington bureau shortly before the 1956 Democratic convention, at which Jack Kennedy made his bid for the vice-presidential nomination, Winship talked his way into the candidate’s suite at the Stockyards Inn, perching on the toilet while Kennedy soaked in the tub and watched the roll call on TV. When he came within a whisker of winning, the rest of the press corps nearly beat down the door, but Tom was already inside with a nifty exclusive. Over the next two years, he got a lot of good stories out of Kennedy. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: Jack, a Massachusetts politician in pursuit of the presidency; Tom, a Massachusetts reporter in pursuit of an editorship. Happily for both, an Irish Catholic’s rise to the highest office in the land was a blockbuster story back in Boston. Unlike his father, Jack harbored no animus toward the
Globe
, pragmatically using its pages whenever he could. Thus was born a natural alliance which lasted for years.

At times the
Globe
grew perilously close to the Kennedys, as in 1962 when, just as Ted announced for Jack’s old Senate seat, Bob Healy heard rumors that the young candidate had once been expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish exam. In three extraordinary meetings in the Oval Office, the President himself negotiated with Healy to provide material if the story was played “below the fold.” Eventually it did appear just below the fold, written not as a sensational disclosure but as a low-key confession. If the story had to surface—and eventually it would have—that was surely the most acceptable format for Ted and his brother.

By then Winship was back in Boston as metropolitan editor, a new post designed to deal with an ironic turn of events. For eighty years, the
Globe
had been struggling for supremacy in Boston’s crowded marketplace. Finally, in 1957, it had reached that goal, only to find it a prize not worth the contest. For Boston’s inner-city population was beginning to decline, growing older, poorer, and blacker. As the
Globe
mastered that arena, the
Herald
was consolidating its hold on the exploding suburbs, then in the first fine flush of postwar prosperity. So long as Bob Choate’s newspaper ruled that affluent sphere it would hold a decisive edge in advertising—and the potential for delivering on its publisher’s baleful threat to the
Globe
.

Commissioned to lead the paper out of its urban captivity, Tom Winship now mounted a double-pronged assault on the
Herald
’s suburban stronghold. Under his prodding, the paper at last transcended garden club chitchat and Little League line scores to start examining the substance of suburban life. Meanwhile, he beefed up coverage of science, medicine, education, and the arts, a blandishment to the educated men and women then flocking to Massachusetts’ universities, research labs, and high-technology companies.

This new perspective also gave Tom an excuse for some muckraking: examinations of the troubled state university and Boston’s archaic public schools, even some long-overdue attention to municipal corruption. Such innovations provoked resistance from
Globe
veterans who had done well under the old order, notably Andy Dazzi, the classified advertising director. For years the paper’s principal ambassador to politicians downtown—he had actually managed two mayoral campaigns—Dazzi and advertising manager John Reid had long kept a powerful grip on the editorial product, maintaining a blowsy spatter of nightclub and racetrack ads across the bottom of page one and ordering up puff pieces on influential advertisers. The front-page ads were a particular embarrassment to Tom Winship and he waged a relentless campaign for their removal.

In the early sixties, as he advanced through the hierarchy, Tom carried on a private dialogue with his father, still the
Globe
’s top editor. In brief communiqués, they debated news policy, headlines, and editorials. Leavened with sly family jokes and the affection of father and son, the exchange was nonetheless a contest between the old
Globe
, battling for survival, and the new
Globe
, struggling to be born. When Tom applied for assistance in getting rid of front-page ads, his father responded: “Sorry. Advts. very interesting part of Page One.” When the paper began to reflect Tom’s political interests, Larry warned: “You’ll have to watch now that we don’t give space to politics at cost of other material. Only 13 percent read politics as against 79 percent who read human interest, women’s stuff and sports.” And when Tom sought to drop Barry Goldwater’s column, his father warned: “My feeling is that we are underestimating the circulation value of the right wing audience. Bigger than most places here, except the Bible belt.” But the old man’s grip was loosening. In late 1964, he scribbled: “Don’t bother to call me evenings. Do what you think right and I will take the responsibility.” The baton was ready to be passed.

Tom’s assumption of command in 1965 coincided with another
Globe
watershed: at long last it overtook the
Herald
in suburban circulation. Soon that new balance of power was graphically revealed. The 1966 campaign for State Attorney General pitted Elliot Richardson, a Brahmin Republican, against Francis X. Bellotti, an Italian Democrat. Richardson was a Harvard skiing pal of Tom Winship’s, a liberal reformer who echoed the editor’s own politics—a candidate, in other words, congenial to the
Globe
’s new suburban constituency. Still bound by its self-imposed ban on political endorsements, the
Globe
nevertheless made little secret that fall where its sympathies lay. In the past, Richardson could have counted on automatic endorsement from the
Republican
Herald
, but Bob Choate was dead by then, and his successors, in their struggle for survival, had struck an alliance with Bellotti. On election morning, the
Herald
ran a front-page editorial denouncing Richardson as a “manicured Senator McCarthy” and throwing its weight behind his Democratic opponent. Two
Herald
editorial writers immediately defected to the
Globe
. Almost overnight, Boston’s journalistic gladiators had reversed positions: the establishment
Herald
became the spokesman for Boston’s aggrieved inner city; the shabby old
Globe
, the voice of Massachusetts’ academic, technological, and social elite.

The capital of that world was across the river in Cambridge, whose dinner parties and salons Tom now frequented, forging friendships with John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others. Cambridge was the Massachusetts equivalent of Georgetown, where, ever since his days on the
Post
, Tom had hobnobbed with journalists like Ben Bradlee and Mary McGrory. All through the Kennedy and Johnson years, liberal intellectuals, politicians, and newsmen shuttled along the Cambridge-Georgetown axis and, increasingly, it was to those red brick enclaves that Tom Winship looked for his closest friends, his social values, his political commitments. Whatever he collected on that circuit was scrupulously recorded on a reminder pad, then scattered through the newsroom in a blizzard of story suggestions.

The Cambridge-Georgetown influence was reinforced by his four children, three of them true exemplars of the sixties, caught up in most of the demonstrations and lifestyle experiments of that tumultuous decade. Some of his kids’ unorthodoxy may have come down through the maternal line, for their mother was the daughter of A. Sprague Coolidge, ardent civil libertarian, defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, a onetime candidate on the Socialist ticket. Elizabeth Coolidge, a strong-minded woman with liberal convictions, had married Tom Winship right out of college, eventually becoming a popular
Globe
columnist on teenage problems. The Winships’ home in suburban Lincoln was a freewheeling place. The children had wide latitude to express themselves: in his front hallway Tom kept a photographic gallery of his kids in irreverent poses.