The Deal from Hell (5 page)

But
Register
reporters and editors also had a special relationship with the public that infused the paper's journalism with a sense of public service and connection to readers that would be diluted in years to come. If some huckster or abusive state official tried to ride herd over state residents, Iowans alerted the
Register
, and the paper made sure it all played out in public, often far beyond the state's borders. When, in 1955, Millard Roberts, a Presbyterian minister with little knowledge of how to run a university, was recruited to head Parsons, a college in Fairfield, Iowa, he embarked on the so-called Parsons plan—aggressively recruiting students to beef up the student body. In his quest for numbers, meritocracy fell by the wayside, and a gaggle of wealthy kids who'd been rejected elsewhere, as well as kids who were trying to
dodge the draft, arrived. All went well until James Flansburg got onto the story. His exposé drew national attention and prompted
Life
magazine to dub the place “Flunk Out U.” (The college later became Maharishi University, a school for transcendental meditation.)

The
Register
, like any paper worth its weight, was interested in upholding the rights of the First Amendment. It wasn't easily cowed. If a government official tried to close a meeting, a
Register
reporter simply refused to leave and the paper's lawyer would threaten a lawsuit to ensure the public had access to the public's business.

The Cowles family had infused their newsrooms with a proud tradition of subordinating business considerations to the independence of their editorial department and their mission of public service. “Two avenues of popularity are open to the newspaper,” explained Gardner (Mike) Cowles Jr., one of Gardner's three sons, who would play a key role in modernizing the company and making it a media powerhouse. “The first is to yield to flatter, to cajole. The second is to stand for the right things, unflinchingly and win respect.... A strong and fearless newspaper will have readers and a newspaper that has readers will have advertisements. That is the only newspaper formula worth working to.... After making all allowances, the only newspaper popularity that counts in the long run is bottomed on public respect.”

About the same time I walked into the
Register
newsroom, David Kruidenier, one of Cowles' grandsons, became publisher of the paper and embarked on a long and determined effort to modernize the paper without diluting its editorial excellence and independence. Kruidenier beefed up the business operations of the papers, eliminating Linotypes and printers, saving the newspaper and its owners an enormous amount of money. Kruidenier also modernized the paper's design, an area in which the Cowles had long been innovators. When computers revolutionized the production and composition of newspapers, Kruidenier made sure the
Register
was ahead of the curve.

To continue its strong tradition of newsroom independence, he hired editor Michael Gartner from the
Wall Street Journal
. A spirited editor, Gartner added a touch of class, sophistication, and derring-do
to the paper, reinforcing its crucial role in Iowa but also pushing Washington bureau investigative reports that soon landed the
Register
another Pulitzer. A creative and facile writer, Gartner effortlessly wrote the best headlines of any editor with whom I've worked. He made me the paper's business editor with the mandate to make the
Register
's business coverage the best in the Midwest. Soon the aggressive brand of journalism we delivered prompted community business leaders to privately ask the publisher to muzzle us because we were “anti-business.” Kruidenier retorted that a newspaper performs best not as a mouthpiece, but as a paper that reports on the community's strengths and weaknesses.

After five terrific years at the
Register
, I was offered a golden opportunity. When a desk opened up for the
Register
's Washington news bureau, Gartner made me a correspondent, my dream job. I had thought it would take me a decade of working at the
Register
before I could set foot in Washington. In 1976, my family and I left Des Moines to join the best small-newspaper Washington bureau in America, a move that was a stepping-stone to other bureaus and jobs that would propel me to the top of my craft.

Unfortunately, the
Register
didn't fare as well. As the direct descendants of the patriarchs of the great newspaper families died off, they often left large, far-flung families with disparate interests. The Cowles were no exception. Seeing looming estate tax bills and the potential for far higher profits that reduced budgets could bring, some members of the Cowles family began to press for better financial returns or a sale to reap the unrealized value resting in the newspapers so carefully nurtured by their forefathers. They found an entire industry willing to help them with their problem.

T
he morning I met him, Bill Jones sat at the oval table in his office, grease pencil in hand, scoring page proofs of the Sunday paper with bold red slashes. A top editor at the
Chicago Tribune
, Jones was a trim, blue-eyed ex-Marine with close-cropped hair and a tattoo, at a time when tattoos were not popular. He routinely worked in his stocking feet as he put out the newspaper on Saturday mornings. Jones' daring reporting symbolized the kind of audacious journalism that had lured me to the offices of the
Tribune
, a legendary paper with a bare-knuckled newsroom. At thirty-nine, and already a legend in Chicago, Jones had won acclaim a few years earlier as an undercover reporter posing as an ambulance attendant. His investigation exposed mismanagement, welfare fraud, sadism, and police payoffs in the city's corrupt ambulance industry, which he dubbed “misery merchants.” Until Jones exposed them on the front pages of the
Tribune
, the racket had profited the ambulance companies at taxpayers' expense. (Eventually, the federal government picked up the tab for the fees they had collected through health insurance programs for the poor.)

When we met for the first time—a snowy day in March 1979—Jones and I hit it off. A few days later, he offered me a job. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to work for a big metro daily, and the
Tribune
seemed as good as any. It didn't have the stature of the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
, but journalists across the country had crowned Chicago the undercover reporting capital of America in the 1970s, thanks to Jones and his iconoclastic colleagues. Chicago was an exciting place to work. Journalism there was as big, raw, and tough as the town itself. Over the past few decades, the newspaper industry had undergone a crushing wave of consolidation spawned by financial pressures and the competition of new technology: radio and television journalism. American cities that once had three, four, sometimes as many as ten newspapers competing for readers saw publishers discouraged by declining profits, high tax rates, and frustrated shareholders sell or fold publications. In the blink of an eye, publications with household names—
New York Evening World
, the
St. Louis Star
, or the
Cleveland News
—were closed. With newspapers around the country closing up shop, thousands of journalists and newspaper employees were out of work. When, in 1931, Roy Howard of the Scripps Howard chain folded the
New York Evening World
, he furloughed 2,867 journalists, printers, ad salesmen, and circulation men, some of whom went to their graves without ever working again. Critics mourned the loss of reportorial diversity as more papers increasingly fell into the clutches of a single owner. Of the 1,461 American cities that had papers by the 1960s, all but 61 were reduced to one-ownership towns. “A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one owner,” A.J. Liebling of the
New Yorker
wrote, “is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.”

Papers like the
Chicago Tribune
that survived the bloodbath emerged much stronger than they'd previously been—gaining monopoly control of circulation markets and lucrative advertising—particularly classified advertising of jobs, cars, and real estate that would become the financial backbone of the newspaper industry over the next two decades. By the late 1960s, editors flush with monopoly revenues sent
reporters from big papers in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles to cover the civil rights movements in the South. When America became entangled in Vietnam or idealistic Americans flooded the streets of Chicago to protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, newspapers like the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
and the
Los Angeles Times
sent their own correspondents and reporters to file fresh accounts to readers back home. Such fine-tuned coverage by national and regional papers changed the tone and impact of stories formerly the domain of local publishers and wire services, and transformed journalism from a notoriously low-paying job that relied on well-placed sources to something bordering on a profession. Trying to muscle in on the national advertising pie, television networks expanded their evening newscasts to thirty-minute segments, revolutionizing how Americans consumed the news. Explosive growth of suburban America prompted readers eager for cheap housing, new schools, and lower crime rates to move far away from the city center, vastly increasing the challenge of delivering a newspaper in the rush hour traffic that became synonymous with suburban sprawl. At the same time, an increasing number of women who once spent their daytime leisure hours reading the newspaper started entering the workplace, a factor that helped drive the last nail in the coffin of the most popular newspaper—the evening edition that landed on their doorstep in the afternoon. Traditional print editors who favored
objective
reporting had taken a hit too, after newsmen in the 1950s routinely repeated the unsubstantiated tirades of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin demagogue who ruined numerous lives and careers with his sensational anti-Communist harangues.

By the 1970s, the Colonel had died and publisher Stan Cook and editor Clayton Kirkpatrick had led the
Tribune
away from McCarthy-type tirades and slanted reporting championed by the Colonel and his successors into a new era of journalistic pride and prosperity, rejecting the reactionary politics that had stained the paper's reputation for decades. But journalism in Washington overshadowed anything happening in Chicago.

Two young police beat reporters from the
Washington Post
, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, had toppled an American president by digging through records and mining sources further down the pecking order than those treasured by the nation's elite political journalists. Woodward and Bernstein broke an explosive story about a botched burglary at The Watergate Hotel that brought them fame, fortune, and a Pulitzer Prize. Soon newsrooms and journalism schools across America became magnets for a new generation of reporters eager to expose corrupt officials, social ills, and wrongdoing. Their long-form narrative and investigative journalism produced groans from old school newsmen who viewed themselves as craftsmen, “master plumbers,” in the words of one old pro, not professionals minted by the Columbia Journalism School crowd.

Reacting with much the same suspicion and contempt with which mainstream journalists once viewed the emerging digital world, the old school of the sixties and seventies didn't exactly lay out the welcome mat for idealistic newsroom rookies. Jimmy Breslin, the iconic, hard-drinking New York columnist, once referred to the new breed as people who reject simple declarative sentences in favor of “these 52 word gems that moan, ‘I went to college, I went to graduate school college, where do I put the period?'”

But this new host of reporters found a far more willing audience in a new generation of editors like Kirkpatrick who were searching for ways to distinguish their publications and generate circulation that would sustain their publisher's ad revenues. Investing in their morning and Sunday editions, editors added color photography, modern designs, better typography, broader coverage, and better-educated (and paid) reporters and editors. I was proud to be one of the new breed.

At the
Des Moines Register
, I had done the basics, covering police, courts, crime, and politics, and taking on investigative projects, before heading to the paper's Washington bureau. In the nation's capital, I relished covering the banking scandal surrounding Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's budget director, and carved out a new beat scrutinizing the impact of federal regulatory agencies on companies
and citizens in Iowa. On the bus going home every night in Washington, I watched hundreds of chanting Iranian students in Lafayette Park across from the White House stage protests that eventually helped topple the Shah of Iran from power and led to the seizure of American hostages in Tehran. A severe recession loomed as President Carter appointed Paul Volcker head of the Federal Reserve, igniting the soaring interest rates and deep recession that would drive Carter out of office and install Ronald Reagan in the White House.

At the
Register
, we covered some of the big stories, but the paper Iowa depended on focused heavily on subjects of interest to Iowa, stories that the big papers ignored. Jim Risser, the paper's Washington bureau chief, won the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes covering the environmental damage done by American farmers who relied too heavily on chemical fertilizers. My
Register
reporting chops had evolved into a specialty many journalists shunned—business, economics, and finance, particularly the investigative variety.
Register
editors found Iowa coverage more compelling than what I wanted to do, and I decided it was time to move on to a bigger paper where I would get a crack at bigger stories. When a friend suggested I talk to Jones on a trip through Chicago, I agreed and a few months later showed up at work at the legendary Tribune Tower in May 1979.