Common Ground (102 page)

Soon word percolated through the paper that Tom Winship himself was in trouble with the front office. More orderly and politically conservative than his father, young Bill Taylor was dismayed by Tom’s ostentatious nonconformity and slapdash administration. Insiders believed that once Bill became publisher he would look for a new editor, but that may have been averted through some unusual mediation. Bill’s cousin Charles Taylor had been provost of Yale before abruptly abandoning academia to become a Jungian analyst in New York. Now the call went out for Charlie, who commuted to Boston for several years, serving as a kind of “court psychiatrist,” helping his cousin and Tom Winship move from mutual suspicion to tenuous accommodation.

Eventually both men concluded that Winship’s tendency to spontaneous combustion needed to be balanced by a new sense of rigor and discipline. This seemed particularly imperative as Boston’s approaching school desegregation crisis confronted the
Globe
with a complex story which would make heavy demands on its professionalism. Fortuitously, in that winter of 1973–74 an editor was available who possessed precisely the qualities the
Globe
was looking for. Bob Phelps had been with the New York
Times
for more than nineteen years, the past eight as deputy chief of its Washington bureau. A meticulous editor, scrupulously attentive to detail, he was particularly adept at communicating his seasoned judgment to young reporters. But this very circumspection could prove a liability in the helter-skelter of a breaking story, and Phelps became a scapegoat for the
Times
’s disappointing performance on Watergate. Passed over for bureau chief, he concluded that the time had come to look elsewhere. Christopher Lydon, a former
Globe
reporter then with the
Times
, alerted Winship, who scribbled a note to Phelps: “I’m told I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t see you. Why don’t you come up and talk with me?” After prolonged negotiations, Phelps received the title of assistant managing editor for metropolitan news. Yet it occurred to him that the
Globe
wasn’t so much hiring Bob Phelps as it was hiring the New York
Times
, that what it wanted was the
Times
’s reputation for objectivity imprinted on the busing story.

The
Globe
had ample reason for concern. For more than a decade its coverage of Boston’s racial turmoil had been skewed toward the black community. When a black child was confined in a school cloakroom with tape over her mouth, the
Globe
kept the story alive for more than a week, using it to dramatize the plight of minority pupils in a white system. But when young Negroes disrupted a School Committee meeting, black leaders objected to the front-page coverage and the paper beat a hasty retreat. Unlike many papers which strictly separated news and editorial page operations, the
Globe
kept them united under Tom Winship. “We were pretty shameless in using the news
columns to show how we felt,” recalls one reporter. “The
Globe
was on the side of the angels then, and all the angels were black.”

This sympathy found unusual institutional expression. After blacks hooted Louise Day Hicks off the stage of Campbell Junior High in June 1966, one Boston television station ran film of the episode narrated by Mrs. Hicks herself. This so alarmed black leaders that they turned to their one sure ally in the white media, meeting for three hours with the Taylors and Tom Winship. Assured of
Globe
support, they dispatched telegrams to every newspaper and television and radio station in town, over the signature of Celtics star Bill Russell, warning that Boston risked a ghetto uprising like those in Watts and Harlem. On June 24, forty editors and news executives met for breakfast at Russell’s restaurant. The blacks had good reason to complain, for most Boston papers barely covered the ghetto (for years, when a legman called the Hearst city desk with a juicy crime, a rewriteman would ask, “Is it dark out there?”—meaning “Is the victim black?” If the answer was yes, the reporter was told to forget it). Now the blacks demanded some far-reaching changes: the hiring of staff reporters to cover all phases of black life; more attention to the “positive side” of the community; increased employment of blacks in the press; and a media-community committee “so that we can get to know you and have you know us before the crises develop.” When the editors concurred, Tom Winship enthusiastically accepted election as co-chairman of the new Boston Community Media Committee.

For two years the committee limped along with modest results. Then in early 1968 two events lent it a fresh sense of purpose. One was the Kerner Report, which condemned reporters and editors for failing to communicate “the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto.” The other was the assassination of Martin Luther King, with its violent echo in Boston’s streets. Shortly after King’s death, the council convened 120 black and media representatives for a weekend conference in New Hampshire. In an apocalyptic mood, accentuated by Robert Kennedy’s assassination, they met virtually nonstop for three days, descending from their green hillside with a new zeal to confront Boston’s racial crisis.

Nowhere was that sense of urgency more acute than at the
Globe
. After King’s assassination, Davis Taylor pleaded with downtown department stores to underwrite the emergency telecast of James Brown’s concert, “if only for your plate-glass windows.” Meanwhile, the
Globe
took a hard look at its news staff—then employing just two blacks above the rank of clerk—and immediately recruited four Negro interns from the University of Massachusetts. Desperate for seasoned black hands, Winship reached into the
Globe
’s own circulation department for a former NAACP public relations man named Dexter Eure to write the paper’s first black column, “Tell It Like It Is.” Soon after the New Hampshire conference, Winship loaned Eure to the media council as its temporary executive director.

In years to come, the committee proved an uneasy alliance. Blacks expressed dismay because Boston’s press continued to reflect “the biases, paternalism
and indifference of white middle-class America.” Media members bridled at the “excessive demands and overheated rhetoric” of black leaders. Although the
Globe
developed doubts about the undertaking, it stuck with it through the early seventies, dispatching senior editors to meetings, supplying a lion’s share of the budget, remaining publicly identified with what one editor called “the press’s effort to atone for 200 years of injustice to black Americans.”

The newspaper’s position was further revealed in its attitude toward the Irish working class. When Charlestown demonstrators staged a noisy demonstration at City Council hearings on the urban renewal plan, the
Globe
ran a column in the form of a letter from a Townie woman named “Daisy” to her sister “Mazie” in the suburbs. “Wow [it went in part], what a ball we had! Wish you were there. Us loyal Townies almost tore the roof off City Hall. You’d have been proud of us, Mazie, only Ma says it was terrible the way we booed the priests and ministers. But that was our strategy—keep the other side bottled up. Boo them. Yell them down and don’t give them a chance to talk. Ma is old-fashioned, you know. She doesn’t know anything about democracy in action—ha, ha.”

Now and then, the
Globe
made a gesture toward inner-city ethnics. In the late sixties, it joined City Hall in a sudden rediscovery of Boston’s neighborhoods, establishing an “Urban Team,” running series on white communities like East Boston and Charlestown, lending reportorial—if not always editorial—support to the battles against airport expansion and highway construction, though giving no ground on racial issues.

As the busing crisis neared, the
Globe
invoked its nineteenth-century support of Irish rights with increasing frequency. “We have decried the double standard at every turn,” it said in a 1973 editorial supporting the racial imbalance law. “It’s wrong when used to exclude blacks from certain schools now, just as it was wrong in our early days when job advertisements carried the tag N.I.N.A., meaning No Irish Need Apply. We refused all ads from businesses which used that label.” But this recital of favors past only intensified current resentments. Like the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, and the Kennedys, the
Globe
seemed to have deserted Boston’s Irish in their hour of need.

By the time Bob Phelps arrived in April 1974, white backlash already was threatening to swamp the
Globe
in a tide of indignation. Determined to wrest the paper off its perilous course, Phelps wasted no time in shifting direction. At a
Globe
“think tank” that May he asserted that the paper was going to be “fair” and “balanced,” that it would present “all sides” of every issue. In line with the
Times
’s traditional separation of news and opinion, Phelps said he never read editorials. “I don’t want to know what the
Globe
thinks about the news,” he said. “I just want the news.”

Those who chafed at Tom Winship’s unbridled enthusiasms were delighted by Phelps’s advocacy of professionalism; those thriving under Winship’s loose rein were dismayed by the specter of oppressive editing. One of those whom Phelps made uneasy was Dexter Eure, by then the
Globe
’s director of community
relations and its principal liaison with black leadership. In the discussion that followed Phelps’s speech, Eure asked him how he could direct the
Globe
’s busing coverage if he didn’t know anything about the minority community. It was both a question and an accusation, and Phelps tried to defuse it with a quip. “Don’t tell me about minorities,” he said. “I’m more of a minority than you are. I’m part American Indian.”

In fact, Phelps did have some Seneca blood in his veins. But the quip failed to reassure—or amuse—blacks on the staff. Once at a staff meeting Phelps suggested that everyone choose an Indian name. Most of the writers went along, but when it was Carmen Fields’s turn, the young black woman glared up the table at Phelps. “Black Foot,” she said. “And Black Arms. And Black Legs. And Black Head. And Black Neck.”

In the face of such misgivings, Phelps made several structural changes in the editorial operation. He established a “story editor” system to compensate for the
Globe
’s notoriously weak copy desk. In June 1974, every reporter was assigned to one of four story editors, who closely supervised his articles from inception to publication. And he stopped reporters from doubling as columnists, covering a news event one day, coming back the next with subjective commentary. Most of the reporters were not pleased; they saw Phelps’s innovations as a shift from what had long been a “writer’s paper” to a more rigidly controlled “editor’s paper.”

Winship himself was unimpressed by Phelps’s punctilio—he had never been one to sacrifice excitement for order—but he let the new man have his way. For Tom was more worried than he acknowledged about the
Globe
’s capacity to cover the impending busing confrontation. That spring he dispatched Bob Healy to newspapers in four cities—Denver, Detroit, San Francisco, and Riverside, California—which had experienced school desegregation. On his return, Healy produced a confidential memo describing what each paper had learned. Among other things, he concluded: “It is important that someone, other than the newspaper, play a leadership role in support of school integration…. Make sure that black attitudes on busing are known. No one should get too far ahead of the black position…. As the time for implementation of the system approaches, anticipated violence and the statements of violence should be carefully avoided in the news columns…. Finally, it might be a good idea for a
Globe
editor to live in Boston.”

The last point particularly worried Winship. Of the paper’s top twenty editors, all but two lived in the suburbs. Chris Lydon had urged his friend Bob Phelps to live in the city, where he could learn its ethnic and class attitudes firsthand, but, ardent ornithologists, the Phelpses bought a home not far from Winship in Lincoln. Even Irish reporters generally settled at one remove from the inner city in enclaves like Scituate and Hingham. The
Globe
’s prevailing voice was that of a Harvard-educated lawyer from the suburbs—affable, humane, and well intentioned, but no longer entirely comfortable in the city of his youth.

Irish politicians loved to twit the
Globe
about its suburban orientation.
State Senator Billy Bulger, an acerbic wit from South Boston, regaled audiences with an apocryphal anecdote: “I was talking with Tom Winship not long ago. I said, ‘Mr. Winship, how do you know so much about Boston?’ He said, ‘Well, we have an Urban Team.’ I said, ‘How can I get in touch with them?’ And he said, ‘You just call the regular number during the day, and in the evening you dial long-distance.’ ”

Such gibes cost Tom some sleepless nights. The critics had a legitimate beef, he thought. Originally he had favored a metropolitan plan under which city children would be bused to the suburbs and vice versa, but once the Supreme Court barred such “cross-district” busing in the Detroit case and the
Globe
began lecturing city dwellers about their obligations under Garrity’s order, Winship wondered whether he ought to be living in a rambling farmhouse at the end of a wooded lane in Lincoln. (What fun the Irish pols would have if they knew that the two Vermont Morgans grazing in Tom’s pasture were named Seamus and Clancy.) During that summer of 1974, riding the 7:52 train to work each morning, he toyed with the idea of buying a house in the city, but his wife was more committed to country living, less afflicted by liberal guilt. They stayed where they were.

The
Globe
’s anxiety was aggravated that summer by pressure from a newly aroused Boston Community Media Committee. At an all-day meeting on July 10, black members demanded that the press commit itself to “implementation of the law,” express its commitment through both “advocacy journalism and straight reporting,” and “use its awesome power to influence leaders in the private sector.” The press agreed to work toward these ends. That summer president John I. Taylor represented the
Globe
at a series of meetings designed to assure that the press play a “positive role” in the fall’s events.