24
The Editor
The lobster shift was a lonely one for the guard manning the marble lobby of the Boston Globe. In the dismal hours between midnight and dawn few employees came in or out, the phone on the reception desk stopped ringing, the only sound was the thump and swish of the giant presses. John McAuliffe would fortify himself with Styrofoam cups of muddy coffee while he waited for the freshly printed paper to come up from the loading dock. When the first edition arrived on the morning of October 7, 1974, he turned to the sports section, pleased to see that the Patriots had butchered the Baltimore Colts, 42–3. But the ink on the page was still wet and a black smudge came off on his fingers. He was reaching for a towel when he heard the first shot.
Dropping to his knees behind the desk, he could see the bullet hole, round and dark as a copper penny, drilled through the plate-glass window. Then he heard another volley crash into the pressroom.
At the newspaper’s north entrance, guard Richard Cushing watched a beige sedan park by the median strip of Morrissey Boulevard. A man clambered out, rested a rifle on the hood, and pumped several shots into the building. Then the door slammed and the car fishtailed up the boulevard. When the police arrived at 12:47 a.m., they found three holes in the pressroom window and a fourth slug lodged in the lobby wall a few inches from where John McAuliffe had been reading his newspaper.
The next night, seven more shots slammed into the paper’s rear yard, this time from a car speeding down the Southeast Expressway. A mechanic working on the engine of a Globe delivery truck reported a bullet humming past his shoulder; another bullet went through the windshield of a Volkswagen parked in the lot, a third into the wall of a newsprint warehouse.
The morning after the second attack Globe executives met with Joe Jordan, Boston’s Police Superintendent. The cops had no hard evidence on who had fired the shots, but everyone knew that anti-busing forces, regarding the Globe as part of the liberal conspiracy, were mounting a major campaign against the paper. As busing began that September, bumper stickers had appeared all over town, reading: “We have had enough. Boycott the Boston Globe.” On September 20, demonstrators picketed the paper’s downtown business office. The next evening, a two-hundred-car motorcade blockaded the Globe plant as wailing mothers threw themselves in front of trucks, delaying distribution of the Sunday edition for three hours and setting off a melee in which a policeman and several Globe drivers were injured. A week later, youths slashed the tires on a truck delivering papers in South Boston and seized another truck at gunpoint, forcing the driver to dismount, then pushing his vehicle into ten feet of water in the Fort Point Channel.
With violence against the paper steadily escalating, publisher Davis Taylor, his son, the treasurer and heir apparent, William O. Taylor, business manager John Giuggio, and production director David Stanger, were in a grim mood as they gathered with Superintendent Jordan in the Globe boardroom. The five men quickly agreed on stringent new security measures: expansion of the paper’s hired patrol force; stricter enforcement of the pass system; inspection of all packages and briefcases entering the building; installation of bulletproof glass on doors and windows; steel screens to shield the pressroom.
Then Joe Jordan spoke up again: for the time being, he wanted police snipers on the roof.
The executives were horrified. Absolutely not, they said. The Globe was a community newspaper which depended on rapport with its readers. If word ever got out that the paper had snipers on its roof, that trust would be shattered.
And what did they call eleven bullets in two nights? Joe Jordan wanted to know. If they wanted protection, they would have to let police take the necessary steps.
For the next few days, several sharpshooters with high-powered rifles and sniper scopes manned the newspaper’s roof from dusk to dawn. Globe executives who held the closely guarded secret lived in constant fear of another rifle attack. If the police snipers fired back, they might easily kill one of the assailants. God only knew what might happen then!
But the next sally against the Globe came from a very different quarter.
The October 9 paper carried a story on page one headlined: “5 Black Juveniles Arraigned in Alleged Rape of White Girl,” reporting that the five youths, aged fourteen to sixteen, had been charged with raping a fourteen-year-old Dorchester girl two nights before. According to the girl’s sixteen-year-old boyfriend, they had been sitting on a stoop near their homes when the black kids approached and said, “Is this your old lady? She sure looks nice.” Asked if they were from “Southie,” the couple insisted they weren’t, but the blacks said that was okay, they were white and that was “good enough.” Police said the blacks then beat up the boyfriend and gang-raped the girl, leaving her on the Penn Central tracks bleeding and hysterical.
The story was an unusual one in several respects. Veteran Globe reporters couldn’t recall the last time the newspaper had run a rape story on page one. But special circumstances were involved. The rape—if rape it was—had occurred only seven hours after the Haitian-born maintenance worker André Yvon Jean-Louis was badly beaten by a South Boston mob. The remarks attributed to the black youths suggested that the rape was intended, at least in part, as revenge for such assaults.
Still another factor figured in the prominent play given to the story. The editors made their judgment only hours after the first bullets crashed through the Globe’s windows, demonstrating again the fury some whites felt at the newspaper’s allegedly “pro-black” bias. The Jean-Louis beating had already received extraordinary attention; to give the rape anything less than page one position would be to supply additional ammunition to the Globe’s critics. Robert Phelps, who had recently come from the New York Times to supervise the Globe’s busing coverage, felt that the paper had to put the rape story on page one, if only to demonstrate its impartiality on such matters. Tom Winship, the Globe’s editor, agreed.
But the paper’s black reporters didn’t. To them, the rape story was fresh evidence of the Globe’s effort to have it both ways on busing. Under Phelps’s influence and with Winship’s acquiescence, they believed, the Globe was in fact retreating from its earlier commitment to racial justice. How, they wanted to know, could you balance South Boston’s blatant racism against blacks’ demands for their constitutional rights? That was like equating right and wrong. The prominence given the rape story, they insisted, was a perfect example of the paper’s moral confusion. And this, they held, was symptomatic of another problem: their exclusion from the Globe’s editorial process. Of the dozen blacks on the news staff, none had risen above the rank of reporter. In August, the blacks had met with Tom Winship to ask how a segregated group could make proper judgments on an integration story. Winship handled the protest calmly, reminding them that they were largely young and inexperienced, not yet ready to assume editorial responsibilities. Show me what you can do, he said, then we’ll see about promotions.
Now, the rape story triggered further unrest among the black reporters. On the morning of October 9, eight of them signed a blunt letter to Winship: “Because of the ongoing school crisis and black/white racial turmoil in the city as a result of school desegregation the Globe’s black reporters feel an urgent need for permanent input into the Globe’s policy-making.” Demanding a “black story editor to participate in news conferences and edit stories” and “black input into the editorial page,” they nominated two of their number to fill these jobs. “We want both of these positions filled immediately and the nominees to begin work tomorrow.”
Winship sought to deflect the demands with a coolly noncommittal reaction. In a return letter, he said there was an opening for an assistant metropolitan editor on the Evening Globe. “We invite applications from any of you or from any minority person working at the Globe.” The paper could not hire an additional editorial writer, but it invited “any black person to participate in the daily 11 a.m. editorial page conference and/or submit written ideas and suggestions.”
This only re
inforced the blacks’ determination. The next morning, ten black employees presented another letter to Winship. “We find it unusual and uncomfortable,” they wrote, “to be working, in 1974, for a newspaper that has no black editor or editorial writer…. What we are demanding, therefore, is that the paper’s editorial writing and editorship staffs be desegregated. This demand takes on particular importance against the background of present events in this city outside the Globe building. It is not at all clear that Boston will not be the place where the fabric of desegregation, woven over the past 20 years, begins to unravel. We want to make certain that inside the building this fabric continues to expand.” With that, they resubmitted their demands of the day before.
When Winship failed to revise his position by evening, the black staffers informed him that “we cannot work until this grievance is resolved.” Although their position fell short of a formal strike, they determined to withhold their services until their demands were met. By midday on the eleventh, a dozen blacks had assembled in the boardroom of Affiliated Publications, the Globe’s parent corporation. All through the afternoon, Winship, Phelps, and other editors shuttled in and out, bearing fresh bargaining positions.
Meanwhile, word of the black work stoppage spread through the newsroom, already ruffled by two nights of gunfire. A few white reporters and middle-level editors had long resented their black colleagues (one Halloween a picture of black Communist Angela Davis appeared in the afternoon paper with a headline, “Spooks Out Tonight,” prompting one editor to warn: “Management must crush completely the anti-black cells at the paper”). These newsmen found it hard to believe that at the very moment the paper was being subjected to armed attack from whites, it was also being held hostage by its black employees.
“The disloyal bastards ought to be fired outright,” said a veteran reporter known for his sympathy with ROAR.
“What are you talking about?” shouted a young white liberal. “It’s your friends over in Southie who ought to be arrested for attempted murder!”
By evening, Tom Winship had acceded to the black demands. Carmen Fields, an outspoken young Oklahoman, was named an assistant metropolitan editor. The editorial writer’s job went to John Robinson, a cool, discreet black who had been on vacation in Africa during the protest. The black employees returned to work the next day. But the struggle at the Globe was just beginning. Neither the militant whites nor the militant blacks knew that their countervailing pressures had opened a deep rift in the newspaper’s executive ranks.
Not surprisingly, the business and editorial sides of the paper had different perspectives on the busing issue. To Tom Winship and his chief advisers—editorial page editor Charlie Whipple and executive editor Robert Healy—it was not only the biggest local story since John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency, it was a matter of principle, a test of the newspaper’s long-standing commitment to racial justice and human dignity. To publisher Davis Taylor, his son Bill, and business manager Giuggio, the busing story was also a threat to the Globe’s high standing in the community, a challenge to its reputation for fairness and integrity, a threat to its increasing dominance of the Boston market. These differences had festered quietly for some time, but the attacks on the Globe’s building and trucks brought them to a head in that terrible first week of October.
Left to himself, Davis Taylor might not have intervened in Tom Winship’s domain. In nineteen years as publisher, Taylor had steadfastly respected the division between publishing and editorial operations. But Bill Taylor and John Giuggio were less impressed by such niceties, more determined to curb the “knee-jerk” liberalism they detected across the aisle. Similar misgivings were harbored by the one front-office figure who could legitimately express them to Tom Winship.
Assistant to the publisher Crocker Snow had been brought back from the Tokyo bureau the previous June specifically to serve as liaison between editorial and business operations (“the Globe’s Cardinal Richelieu,” Tom Winship called him). He seemed a perfect choice for that perilous undertaking. An able reporter and fluent writer, Snow had risen rapidly in the editorial ranks, where he was widely regarded as a possible successor to Winship. Well bred, well educated, and well connected, he enjoyed the publisher’s full confidence. Surely if anyone could bridge the widening gap between the paper’s two wings it was Crocker Snow.
As early as September 25—four days after ROAR’s motorcade had delayed distribution of the Sunday paper—Snow outlined his views in a confidential memo to Davis Taylor. Noting that the Mayor’s office might soon seek revisions in the court order, he wrote: “The Globe is in a precarious position on all this, being publicly identified with full implementation of the Garrity plan … Should the plan change drastically, we, with our present stance and reputation, would not only lose face, but also credibility and influence. We would [look] like a lame duck editorial voice on this issue. This is not to say we should simply bend with the prevailing winds, that we should alter our stance if we think it is right. It does mean, however, that we should be aware of the dangers, and not go overboard in supporting a plan that we ourselves know to be a long way from perfect.”
The memo echoed certain of Davis Taylor’s private doubts and he encouraged Snow to pursue his attempt to modify the paper’s editorial position. Then, on October 7, the first shots through the Globe’s windows confirmed the front office’s worst fears: the Globe was no longer a passive observer; it was part of the story, one of the principal targets, out there alone “like Sally Rand.” This was what happened when a newspaper got ahead of its readers. Something had to be done.
Hours after the first bullet smacked the wall above John McAuliffe’s head, Snow issued another, more urgent, warning, this time directed to both Davis Taylor and Tom Winship:
“We are all getting deeper into the trench on this one. Trouble is rising, the boycott may be growing…. Yet Boston’s leaders, the Mayor, the Archbishop, the Chamber [of Commerce], the Pols, are notably silent…. The Globe? We’re firmly identified with the pro-busing, pro-Plan mentality. Few, if anyone, give us credit for being pro-court, first and foremost. Can we change this image?… The trouble with all this, of course, is that any change in Plan looks like a cave to the rock throwers. Similarly, a change in the Globe’s editorial stance could look like mere expediency. Bob Healy worries about this. He thinks we have to stand fast now on the matter of principle, then bend the practicality (the details of the Plan itself) once the principle is firmly established. I don’t know. After all, we are worried about ultimate effects for the City and its people more than our own loss of face for altering our position.”
Tom Winship was as worried about the gunshots as anyone else; he was concerned for the security of his reporters, as well as by prospects of a prolonged feud with the city’s working-class Irish neighborhoods. But he wasn’t about to retreat from the battlefield. On October 8, the morning after the second volley of shots, Winship rapped out a quick note to Crocker Snow.
“Thanks for the memo to me and Dave. It’s a tight spot for all of us. But I’ll be damned if I think we should cave in, as you put it yourself, and call for a change in the plan the court ordered. That is premature…. We would lose respect of friend and foe to twist and turn at this point when a federal law is being flouted. I agree with Bob Healy that we have to stand fast now on the matter of principle, the way the Globe did back in 1880.”
The principle which Winship ascribed to his predecessors—defense of minority rights in a Yankee city—might have looked to others like enlightened self-interest, for the Globe of the 1880s had been a fragile enterprise, in dire need of a new constituency. Established in 1872 with lofty objectives, “the intelligent and dignified discussion of political and social ethics,” it found Boston’s aristocracy well served by the stately Transcript and indifferent to another quality journal. Only the persistence of merchant-prince Eben Jordan kept the foundering Globe afloat, and soon he launched a refitted version, shaped by his young general manager, Cha
rles H. Taylor.
Abandoning the Globe’s carriage trade pretensions, Taylor turned to the city’s burgeoning working class, most of it now Irish, Catholic, and Democratic. Such readers had long received cold comfort from the Republicans who monopolized Boston’s editorial chairs. Taylor himself had been raised a Republican, serving for a time on the party’s state committee, but now he wasted little time in shucking that allegiance, labeling the Globe a “progressive Democratic newspaper” and “advocate [of] all liberal measures which will advance the interests of the masses.”
The Globe’s support for Irish rights—at home and abroad—was the natural corollary of its bid for a working-class audience. It gave lavish coverage to the Irish Land League’s campaign for reform of the landlord system and ran a series on “rack rents.” On a matter of more immediate interest to its Catholic audience, the Globe demanded that priests be permitted to administer last rites in Boston’s hospitals. For years, dying immigrants had been forced to choose between hospital care and that ritual so critical to the repose of the Catholic soul. Ultimately most institutions capitulated, a famous victory long remembered by the paper’s grateful readers.
In refashioning his journal for a broader audience, Taylor broke with other hidebound traditions. Most Boston papers were aimed exclusively at men, but the Globe introduced household hints, recipes, and serialized novels for women. News was whatever interested people, and that included generous helpings of sports. Such frivolities helped the Globe transcend its politics. “If I had my way, I wouldn’t have a Democratic newspaper in the house,” grumbled one Victorian Yankee, “but I can’t keep the Globe out because my boy insists on reading the fool news about baseball.”
Common Ground Page 76