January 2011

When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., announced his intention to build a great urban complex in December 1929, the project was meant to be “as beautiful as possible,” but it also had to be a solid business proposition. Ultimately the Center was both, but not without a long process of negotiating, planning, designing, and redesigning—much of it heavily criticized by the press. Despite the stock market crash of a few weeks before, Rockefeller had no choice but to undertake the project: he had previously signed a twentyfour-year lease on the land that required him to pay nearly four million dollars a year. In 1932 Rockefeller’s first two buildings, one of them Radio City Music Hall, were opened to the public.

A significant piece of the credit for the success of the venture goes not only to the architects and to the Rockefellers but also to a small band of hired architectural renderers. One of these was John Wenrich, whose works are shown on these pages.

In the winter of 1894-95, Theodore Dreiser was a new reporter on the New York World , and things were going badly. One assignment after another fizzled. Dispatched by the city editor to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to follow up a tale of a graveyard apparition, the gangling twenty-three-year-old returned empty-handed: the cemetery caretaker insisted that the dead man supposedly involved was not even buried there. A visit to the morgue to view the body of a beautiful girl who was mysteriously drowned produced no copy when she turned out not to be beautiful. On the few occasions Dreiser did come up with the germ of a good story, he was ordered to turn his information over to another writer. So it went for weeks.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but one day in 1926 a picture was worth one hundred thousand extra readers. In August of that year, New York City’s newspapers were in the middle of one of their usual summer circulation wars. Of all the papers the most eccentric and sensationalist was the tabloid-size New York Graphic . The circulation-boosting picture showed nothing less than Rudolph Valentino’s entry into Heaven.

This was not the only such picture that helped make the Graphic the city’s second-largest evening paper. Fake photographs of executions, wild parties, and bedroom scandals all spurred sales. The Graphic posed models to duplicate events a camera had not photographed—and sometimes could not photograph—then superimposed the heads of actual participants. The proud editors coined the word composograph and claimed that by so captioning the pictures, they honored their masthead slogan, “Nothing but the Truth.”

It was three in the morning, two days after St. Patrick’s Day, 1958, when I disembarked from a Greyhound bus and stepped into the snowdrifts at the entrance to the Kennebunk Inn, in Kennebunk, Maine. A startled night clerk called the police; he could conjure no other service that might help me go the final mile of my trip in a snowstorm. My journey ended when I said good night to patrolman Frank Stevens, slammed the cruiser door, and entered the cottage where Sandy Brook waited for his new partner.

Together we were embarking on the most popular dream in American journalism: running a small, country weekly. And like so many who have sought to live that dream, we came from cities and we arrived without experience as publishers or editors or small businessmen. About all we brought with us was desire.

For three days in the fall of 1930 a bearded, former Norwegian seaman could be seen pacing back and forth at the front entrance of the Pulitzer Building on Park Row, New York City, home of the World , with a sandwich sign that read, “Hire Joe Liebling!”

Unfortunately for Joe Liebling, who had paid for the sandwich man, the World ’s city editor, Jim Barrett, generally used the back door on Williams Street, whether for lunch at Racky’s restaurant or a nip at DaIy’s, the staff speakeasy. Rarrett never saw the sign, but in the end Liebling did get to do pieces for the World ’s Sunday supplements and eventually went on to a distinguished career as A. J. Liebling, the New Yorker press critic, war correspondent, gourmand, and patron saint of U.S. reporters everywhere.

The greatest painting ever made by a European master on these shores has as its central figure a man reading a newspaper. It is the New Orleans Picayune and the man is the painter’s brother, René de Gas. In fact, the painter’s uncle, in the left foreground, was a part owner of the paper.

Edgar Degas came to New Orleans in October 1872 in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. During his sixmonth visit he made studies of his many relatives, but his major effort was this painting of the family cotton-brokerage office; he hoped it would find a buyer among the wealthy spinners of Manchester, England. It is considered one of the most important French genre paintings of the nineteenth century.

Degas described his work in a letter of February 18, 1873: ”… there are about 15 individuals more or less occupied with a table covered with the precious material, and two men, one half-leaning and the other half-sitting on it—the buyer and the broker—are discussing a pattern.” Degas’s other brother, Achille, leans against the window at far left.

The year 1896 found Oscar Hammerstein in trouble. He was in debt, and the acts he had brought to Broadway weren’t doing well. He was desperate. “I’ve tried the best,” he is reported to have said. “Now I’ll try the worst.” So he sent for the Cherry Sisters. Effie, Addie, Jessie, Lizzie, and Ella Cherry clearly were the worst act of the day. They couldn’t dance, and they couldn’t sing. In fact, they couldn’t do anything at all. Except draw crowds.

Doctors bury their mistakes; lawyers hide them in impenetrable prose; architects plant vines. But newspaper editors, whose only stock is the partial or false information we call news, have to live with the fact that they will be caught out in public daily. The agony stops only when they are retired to the Old Editors’ Home on the hill, and who really knows what goes on there? Good editors, like Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post , who is interviewed in this issue, believe that newspapers are the “first rough draft of history.” Very rough indeed, we’d add, knowing well that the face of history itself only seems to be smooth because the splotches and warts are lost in the receding distance. Like news, history is never fully finished but must be continually reshaped and modified as new documents, new insights, and new errors emerge.

As executive editor of the Washington Post , Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee guides and shapes one of the two or three best newspapers in America. He has been called “a born leader, a quick study … and intuitive. His paper reflects his own interest and hunches. ” He is a brash and outspoken man, and all the world knows when he wins—as with the paper’s daring reporting on Watergate—and when he loses—as in the embarrassing Janet Cooke affair in which Cooke, a Post reporter, had to give up a Pulitzer Prize awarded for a story that turned out to be phony.

Bradlee’s private life is no secret either: it is common knowledge that he is married to one of his star reporters, Sally Quinn, and that at age sixty he became a father again. (He turned sixty-one in August.) Yet few people know what Bradlee really thinks of the press and the Post , of the power and the role of the paper—and the power and the role of the editor.

Of the three great pronouncements uttered by “malefactors of great wealth” in the latter half of the nineteenth century, William H. Vanderbilt’s “The public be damned” is surely the most famous. It lacks the insouciance of Boss Tweed’s “Well, what are you going to do about it?” and the moral grandeur of Jim Fisk’s “Nothing is lost save honor”—but it encapsulated, neatly, what was generally feared to be the attitude of the great capitalists of the day.

Vanderbilt was traveling west in three private railroad cars to inspect his lines, which crossed the country. As the train halted at Michigan City, two newspapermen came aboard; John Sherman of the Chicago Tribune and Clarence Dresser, a free-lancer. Vanderbilt agreed to talk to them. They asked him, among other things, about the new train he had instituted to cut the New York-Chicago run to twenty-four hours. “Does it pay?”

“No, not a bit of it,” came the answer. “We only run the limited because forced to by the action of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”