Common Ground (101 page)

Tom was determined to inject some of this youthful iconoclasm into his own staff. For decades the
Globe
had been like a pudding, with a thin crust of Yankee editors, a thick custard of veteran Irish subeditors and reporters, and here and there a few raisins—an Italian, an Armenian, a Jew or two. Many of the reporters were sons of printers and mailers, for the
Globe
was a benevolent institution: the Taylors never fired anyone, and although they had fended off the Newspaper Guild, they always paid above Guild scale, with usually “a little something extra” at Christmas. It was a warm bath nobody wanted to get out of. Much of the staff Tom inherited had been soaking in it for years.

Seeking a different breed, he recruited young reporters at the
Harvard Crimson
and
Yale Daily News
. Soon the newsroom was filling up with earnest young men and women, bristling with mid-sixties visions. Tom was a quarter century their senior, his pink cheeks, sandy hair, and clear-rimmed glasses
reminiscent of McGeorge Bundy, Henry Stimson, and all those other scions of the Yankee establishment. But his flowered ties, red suspenders, and ankle-high boots, reinforced by the breezy idiom of an Irish politician (“Whadya say, pa? Howya doing?”), proclaimed:
I am not one of them
. Quickly establishing an easy rapport with his “city-room Weathermen,” he encouraged them when they produced (with “tiger notes,” beginning: “Terrific job, tiger!”), defended them at editors’ conventions (“These young people still think the newspaper is one of the most effective instruments for social change; they are not in the business in order to become stenographers”), and rallied around them when they got in trouble. When one flamboyant reporter was arrested for accompanying—and allegedly abetting—an airdrop of supplies to militant Indians at Wounded Knee, Winship proudly asserted that the
Globe
man had been “covering a legitimate news story for the paper; we are defending his right to do so.” One Labor Day weekend, another young reporter was arrested by state troopers for growing marijuana in his New Hampshire backyard. The reporter called Winship at home, and the editor, wearing his favorite lounging clothes—a bright orange jumpsuit—leapt into his car, drove to the jail, and delivered a personal check for the $4,000 bail.

Winship’s enthusiasm for youth occasionally got him in trouble with his own staff. Once, in a
Globe
advertisement, he declared, “All of a sudden everybody over 26 is middle-aged.” That was too much for several veterans banished to the evening paper’s rewrite desk. At their insistence, the publisher yanked the ad after the first edition and Winship had to sit through a grueling session with a delegation of “old-timers” demanding equal rights. Tom solemnly promised to mend his ways, then went right on promoting the youth movement.

By 1967, he had made the newspaper his own. Two telling blows at tradition announced Winship’s new
Globe:
ads were at last banished from page one, and Uncle Dudley was evicted from the editorial page. For years, Winship kept on his desk a small marble tombstone embossed: “Uncle Dudley, Died January 4, 1966.” The first move was more dramatic, clearing the way for a bright new makeup, but the second was more significant, for Uncle Dudley’s passing allowed the
Globe
, at last, to begin taking unequivocal stands on important issues—starting with Vietnam.

For months Winship had been hearing about Vietnam—from his kids, his Cambridge friends, the city-room Weathermen. In April 1967 he gathered all the material he could find on the messy little war and sent editorial page editor Charlie Whipple off to Vermont to read it. The result was a series of six editorials urging the government to bank the fires of war and seek a negotiated peace. For years to come, the
Globe
was at the cutting edge of American opinion on Vietnam: in 1968, it launched a “Draft Counselor” column to advise young men on their rights; in March 1969, it devoted the entire op-ed page to an anti-war speech by Nobel Prize winner George Wald; that October it became the second major American paper to call for unilateral withdrawal; in May 1970, during the Cambodian invasion, Winship joined a delegation of
Elliot Richardson’s Harvard contemporaries which called on the Under Secretary of State to express their horror at the incursion, a visit which contributed to a pronounced cooling in relations between Tom and his former skiing partner.

Not many Americans, however, were aware of the
Globe
’s trailblazing. Winship suffered from the paper’s relative obscurity, feeling particular distress in 1971 after Cambridge’s own Daniel Ellsberg presented the Pentagon Papers to the New York
Times
and the Washington
Post
. Three months before, the
Globe
had run a story about the still-secret report, and now Winship implored the author of that article, Tom Oliphant, to somehow get part of the Papers. Oliphant’s entreaties finally reached Ellsberg. On June 21, a caller identifying himself only as “Bosbin” told Winship that if he sent one staffer to a Harvard Square phone booth, another to a booth in Newton, one of them would receive a delivery. Late that afteroon, a news editor walked into the office with a package containing 1,700 pages. After the
Globe
rushed the first installment into print, Winship received a call from Attorney General John Mitchell, who rasped, “Well, Tom, I see you’re in the act too.” Although the Justice Department moved to block further publication, Winship was exultant. At long last the
Globe
was, indeed, in the act.

It was there to stay. Richard Nixon was the perfect foil for a liberal Massachusetts newspaper, and so long as he clung to office, the
Globe
was one of his most determined antagonists. Cartoonist Paul Szep mercilessly lampooned the President as a raving paranoid with drooping jowls and sunken eyes. The Washington bureau, though breaking little of the Nixon epic, produced such aggressive coverage that the White House excluded it from the President’s 1972 trip to China. The
Globe
brought special gusto to Watergate (three of its staffers were on the Enemies List), and the Monday after the Saturday Night Massacre it became the first major newspaper to demand Nixon’s resignation.

But Vietnam and Watergate were relatively easy issues for the
Globe
. More perilous were political, social, and racial questions which cut to the heart of ancient Boston resentments. For decades the newspaper had scrupulously protected Catholic sensibilities, fawning on the Cardinal, even finding a job in the pressroom for Cushing’s nephew. Now it campaigned for liberalization of Massachusetts’ antiquated birth control law, a stand which might not offend Cushing, but surely alienated more orthodox Catholics. While once it had printed only fluffy encomiums to the city’s neighborhoods, now it enlisted in Boston’s urban renewal wars, backing Ed Logue in his confrontations with various ethnic interests.

But boldest of all was the
Globe
’s decision to give its first political endorsement in seventy-two years. The occasion: the daunting prospect of Louise Day Hicks as mayor of Boston. Davis Taylor and many of his Yankee editors were New England “abolitionists,” quick to support the Southern civil rights movement. Although slow to act on the same principles in Boston, the
Globe
soon threw its full weight behind the struggle for school desegregation, fair housing, and equal employment practices. But its reaction to Mrs. Hicks’s 1967
candidacy grew from something more than a passion for racial justice. In part it was a matter of class. The huge marshmallow of a woman in her tentlike dresses was patently from a different social order—the frumpy world of the Irish middle class that the
Globe
had only recently left behind. Her election would make Boston look like a goofy city. Ben Bradlee would say, “Hey, who’s that idiot mayor you’ve got up there.” The
Globe
, at last on its way to national recognition, would be just another bush newspaper in a bush town.

Tom Winship had no great enthusiasm for Kevin White; his personal choice for the job had been Ed Logue, an old friend from Washington days. But when Logue lost the preliminary election and the choice came down to White and Hicks, Winship decided that the
Globe
had to intervene. Charlie Whipple and Bob Healy agreed, and Davis Taylor consented on one condition. Fearing a backlash from Irish readers, he ordered that the editorial include a reference to the
Globe
’s nineteenth-century campaign to permit Catholic priests to administer last rites in Boston’s hospitals, evidence that the newspaper supported “equal opportunity for all,” regardless of race, religion, or ethnic background.

Meanwhile, Winship’s young tigers were shattering icons right and left. For years the
Globe
had enjoyed a relationship with Harvard approximating that of
Osservatore Romano
to the Vatican. Each June, it dispatched squadrons of reporters to cover the university’s commencement, scrupulously documenting how grounds keepers raised the candy-striped pavilions, what drinks alumni favored at the bars. Then, in April 1969, the Students for a Democratic Society led a strike demanding that the university sever all ties with the Pentagon and the CIA. Covering the story for the
Globe
were two young Harvard graduates who displayed sympathy for the students and skepticism toward President Nathan Pusey. Their coverage made life acutely uncomfortable for Davis Taylor, then serving on the university’s Board of Overseers. Although other board members—notably journalist Teddy White—angrily demanded that he crack down on the pair, Taylor gritted his teeth and declined to interfere with Winship’s news operation.

Now the
Globe
was breaking new ground daily, rapidly becoming the most countercultural of major American newspapers. One Sunday it appeared with the word—WOMEN—stripped across page one, proclaiming a special edition on feminist concerns. The Sunday magazine produced an issue on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution (with contributions from Communist writers), a sympathetic piece on Gay Liberation, an article on the youth culture so daring it was published by the
East Village Other
with a note: “This story is reprinted from the Boston
Globe
, not an underground newspaper.” When an article about singer Janis Ian quoted lyrics from her song “New Christ Cardiac Hero,” the front office warned that such blasphemy could cost the paper heavily in Catholic neighborhoods.

Any consternation the Taylors may have felt at Winship’s innovations was ameliorated for the time being by the paper’s new prosperity and prestige. The
Globe
had opened an impressive lead in circulation when in March 1972 came
the decisive stroke it had sought for so long: completing fifteen years of litigation, the FCC found the
Herald
guilty of improper lobbying, revoked its license for Channel 5, and awarded it to a competitor. Stripped of its principal revenue producer, the
Herald
stumbled on for three more months, then sold out to Hearst, which merged the empty shell with its own daily to create the Boston
Herald American
. This left the
Globe
virtually unchallenged as New England’s dominant newspaper. Meanwhile, Winship’s staff embellished its reputation with two more Pulitzers: for Szep’s cartooning and for a series on corruption in suburban Somerville. In January 1974,
Time
magazine named the
Globe
to its list of the nation’s ten best newspapers.

Not everyone applauded the selection, for by then the
Globe
was a highly personal institution, mirroring Tom Winship’s weaknesses as well as his strengths. Like him, it was obsessively political, providing superb coverage of local, state, and national campaigns, though less impressive on the performance of government, less still on foreign affairs, business, and finance. It cultivated a stable of provocative columnists—Ellen Goodman, Diane White, Martin Nolan, George Frazier—but consistently overvalued opinion and undervalued fact (at one count it ran well over a hundred columnists—syndicated and local). It developed a tough-minded investigative unit, the Spotlight Team, which uncovered judicial impropriety, “no-show” public employees, and slipshod trade schools; yet much of the paper’s valuable news space was squandered on huge photographs of sandy dunes and honking geese, and a regular front-page feature called “In This Corner,” devoted to such nonsense as a reporter who looked like John Denver or another who hated umbrellas. It boasted the nation’s best sports pages, an unalloyed joy to fans of Carl Yastrzemski or Jim Plunkett, but if one sought to follow the work of George Balanchine or Jasper Johns, it could be maddeningly inattentive. In short, the
Globe
was erratic and capricious. But it was also ebullient, inventive, surprising, and almost never boring. Even its detractors conceded that less than a decade after assuming full control, Tom Winship had transformed the
Globe
from one of the nation’s worst metropolitan newspapers into one of its best.

But even as the paper rode this crest of approbation, a powerful undertow was tugging at it from within. Most of its employees—particularly in the advertising, circulation, and mechanical departments—were conservative, working-class Catholics with no taste for Winship’s bold adventures. Once, as George Wallace arrived for lunch with
Globe
editors, a crowd of printers gathered in the lobby to applaud him. “I only hope I get as good a reception upstairs,” said the Alabama Governor. “Don’t count on it, George,” said a husky linotypist. On several occasions, printers and mailers refused to handle stories they found objectionable. Even middle-level editors and veteran reporters rankled at Winship’s alarums and excursions, which they labeled “Tomfoolery.” The newsroom was split down the middle, as much by style as by politics. Dismayed at their sudden obsolescence, the old-timers nipped on pints of scotch stowed in their bottom drawers while Winship’s “hippie reporters” smoked pot in the men’s rooms, banana peels on the roof. The
Kulturkampf
claimed its first casualties when an editor was discovered to have had an affair with a reporter who worked for him, which resulted in her pregnancy. Reaching the limits of their toleration, the Taylors fired the editor. The reporter says that when she insisted on having her child out of wedlock, she was “fired” too (the
Globe
says she resigned).