by James W. Ure
Gallivan and Welch, the Tribune's chief contacts with AT&T during this period, were perplexed by Hindery's statement. Welch denied that he or his staff made “antiracial or antireligious remarks in public or private.”52 Quoted in the Journal, he said the Tribune tried hard to resolve its business differences with the Deseret News until Hindery came in and threw his weight behind the church.53 Later, under oath in court, Glen Snarr admitted he had never heard Gallivan or Welch make any bigoted or antireligious statements.54
“I regard Glen Snarr, Leo Hindery, and Gary Gomm as the axis of evil,” Welch said.55 (Gomm was a newspaper broker who had inserted himself into the melee.) As court documents would later reveal, while Hindery postured as representing the Tribune interests at AT&T, he was actually working behind the scenes on behalf of the LDS Church.56
John Malone, the former head of TCI who had drafted the 1997 deal with Gallivan, and was now on the board of AT&T, spoke out against a sale to the church. It was poor policy for AT&T to seek ways around the intent of the agreement, he said. The intent being that the Kearns-Tribune interests could buy the newspaper back in 2002.57
By late 1999 AT&T was caught up in a deteriorating situation. Hindery resigned under pressure, leaving behind an eager buyer in the LDS Church and an angry Tribune. A date of submission of a firm offer to purchase the paper was set by AT&T for September 30, 2000.58
James E “Jay” Shelledy, an aggressive journalist from Idaho, had been brought in by Kearns-Tribune as managing editor of the Salt Lake Tribune in 1991. He found what every newcomer to Utah finds: a friendly, industrious, and conforming people.59
Shelledy liked to ride buses and question readers of the Tribune. He moved around town and got to know the politicos and the business leaders. When he visited the thirty-five-acre grounds of the Salt Lake Temple and the LDS Church Office Building in the heart of the city, he noticed a marked difference between the tourists in T-shirts and flip-flops and the dark-suited men and conservatively dressed Mormon women in their calf-length dark skirts.
A tour of the two-block Temple Square complex is a delight to the senses. A team of gardeners make certain fresh seasonal flowers grow in breathtaking abundance. In spring the tulips and petunias abound; in fall vast fields of mums dazzle the eye.
The focus is the LDS Temple, topped by a golden figure blowing a horn. This building is closed except to Mormons in good standing—those who have paid their tithing and have passed their bishops’ questioning about morals, attendance, and tithing in order to receive a “recommend.” Designed in a sort of Greek revival style, the temple was completed in 1893 after forty years of construction.
Inside the temple is a large, bowl-like baptismal font, supported on the backs of twelve metal oxen. Rooms in the temple have symbolic representation. Here the various church rituals are conducted, including marriages. On pleasant days a visitor can see a half dozen temple-married couples being photographed with the temple in the background.
Across Temple Square the visitor views the silver dome of the Tabernacle, where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has broadcast “Music and the Spoken Word” each Sunday since 1929 (some broadcasts today are made from the nearby LDS Conference Center). It is the longest uninterrupted network broadcast in the world. The broadcasts are open to the public, and a tour of the Tabernacle is available every day but Sunday. The Tabernacle's architecture was praised by Frank Lloyd Wright.60
Conversely, Oscar Wilde noted that the building had the appearance of a soup kettle; he added that it was the most purely dreadful building he ever saw.61
A few paces from the Tabernacle the visitor finds what may be the world's only monument to a bird: the bronze California gulls top a pedestal over a reflecting pond in commemoration of the miracle of 1848 when gulls descended on advancing hordes of crickets, eating them before they could destroy the Mormon crops. The church describes this in biblical terms.
Enter the Visitor Center and see the story of the founding of Mormonism in Teutonic-style paintings by Arnold Freiberg. At the top of a ramp is a startling eleven-foot-tall Christus, the universe spiraling behind him, planets and stars twinkling.
You will be asked to write your name and contact information in a registry, and if you do, count on a call—and maybe several—from the Mormon missionaries, no matter where you live. (An acquaintance of the author takes impish delight in placing the names and addresses of people she dislikes in this registry.)
The Mormons are great recorders of genealogy, and two buildings directly east of Temple Square provide an opportunity for visitors to look up their lineage and family tree. The Joseph Smith Office Building, once the church-owned Hotel Utah, welcomes visitors with a bank of computers and knowledgeable genealogists who provide assistance in searching for ancestors. Once again a visitor is asked to sign a register, and if she does, she can count on contact from the church's missionaries.
The tallest building is the Church Office Building, rising twenty-eight stories. Visitors may enter the building to take in the views from an observation platform.
From here they look down on the unobtrusive beating heart of the Mormon Church: the Church Administration Building, a small Greek revival structure in which the general authorities have offices. Frequently referred to by only its address—47 East South Temple—it is where the president and prophet of the Mormon Church holds sway, surrounded by his counselors. From here the major decisions are made.
The Mormon Church is the largest landowner in the city and the state's largest employer.62 It owns most of the real estate on the north end of Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City, including the City Creek Center, a shopping mall with a trout stream. It is across the street from Temple Square.
By default, the gentiles, especially those who made money in Utah's mines where Mormons were forbidden to toil by Brigham Young, took over the south end of Salt Lake City. They established their own hotel, the Newhouse, to compete with the Mormon Hotel Utah, and erected buildings to house gentile businesses.
Shelledy's Tribune Building at 143 South Main Street stood almost dead center between the Mormon and the gentile geography of the city. Its location was symbolic of the paper's institutional balance wheel of the community.
Wearing his ubiquitous bow tie, in 1991 Jay Shelledy arrived at a successful business created by the JOA in 1952, and run profitably ever since.
The JOA had been signed thirty-nine years before, and under this agreement both papers flourished. It would seem that it was simply good business to maintain a degree of harmony. Tribune reporting on the church had generally been soft until Shelledy's arrival.
Shelledy was about to change the tenuous balance that had profitably served both papers. Mormon history and the editor's aggressive style would begin the unraveling of the era of gentlemanly competition.
The tone of vengeance set by Brigham Young is critical to interpreting the underlying resentments of LDS Church leaders—antipathy that was carried into the twenty-first century. The church frequently claimed to be misunderstood by its critics.
Utah Newspaper Project/Citizens for Two Voices described Jay Shelledy as the “Tribune's pugnacious editor from 1990 to 2003. Deseret [News] executives might have many words to describe Shelledy, but ‘discreet’ was probably not one of them.”63
A former Tribune staff writer described an automobile ride he took with Shelledy. “Jay Shelledy controlled the heat by turning it as high as it would go when he got cold, and turning it off when he was too warm.”64
That was how he practiced journalism too. “There was no middle. He was all on or all off,” said the reporter.
Patty Henetz, a reporter and editor who was working for the Deseret News when Shelledy took the helm of the Tribune, said, “Jay Shelledy improved the Tribune. When he arrived the Deseret News had been a better paper.”65
He covered the LDS Church as a major beat; he made the paper edgier. “We were just doing our job,” he said.66 He thought complacency was bad for creativity. Shelledy shif
ted personnel and restructured editorial management. He changed the look of the paper. He brought in new people and aggravated many of the old Tribune people, who had to either learn new ways or find new jobs. He did not endear himself to Publisher Emeritus Gallivan, and they sometimes clashed, since even in retirement Gallivan kept an oar in the water as the Tribune moved on.
“We had a contentious relationship,” said Shelledy. “I thought Gallivan was a great community builder. He was a good guy but not a publisher.”67
An outsider, Shelledy was quick to put his finger on the “Great Divide” as the differentiation between the Tribune and the News. The church was startled by his aggressive attitude. The dissident subscribers to the Tribune were delighted to see the gloves off.
Said Jim Woolf, a retired staff writer and editor at the Tribune for thirty-two years, “Shelledy didn't know or didn't care that many Mormons were our readers. He also believed that the joint operating agreement was bad for the Tribune and stifled competition.”68
Shelledy wanted improved journalism, and he unleashed his reporters and editors.
“In the beginning it was fun and scary,” said Woolf. “We were kicking the monster.”69
Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy…. [I]t's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.
—Edward Abbey
“Us against them” is a feeling that is pervasive among Mormondom's fifteen million members, creating a defensiveness that bonds the faithful and circles the wagons against outsiders and critics.
When Shelledy arrived in 1991, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was Ezra Taft Benson, a former US secretary of agriculture. Gordon B. Hinckley, a public relations–minded leader, was Benson's first counselor, and as Benson grew frail, Hinckley grew more powerful. Hinckley held a grudge against the Tribune, specifically against publisher Jack Gallivan. His grudge went back to 1968 when Gallivan had urged that Utah's tourism could be increased if the state allowed sale of liquor by the drink.1
After Utah ratified the repeal of prohibition in 1933, the Utah Legislature set rules for alcohol consumption: a drinker could purchase beer with a 3.2 percent alcohol content at a tavern or grocery store. At any restaurant, individuals could bring their own bottle of liquor for cocktails and wine to accompany their dinner. The restaurant would provide glasses, ice, and a mixer, called a “setup.” Restaurateurs hated it. They were not allowed to have bars. They couldn't make money on liquor. Travelers hated it. They didn't want to have to go to a state liquor outlet, buy a whole bottle, and take it to a restaurant for one or two drinks. The LDS Church thought the existing system was fine; it didn't want liquor by the drink. The church felt it would reflect poorly on the image of the state and it would encourage more drinking.2
However, many claimed it did just the opposite. You bought a liquor license at a state liquor store and purchased liquor in “fifths,” one-fifth of a gallon. You then brought your bottle to a restaurant in a brown bag, drank as much of it as you wanted in cheap setups, plugged the jug, and wobbled from the restaurant, risking a citation and jail for driving under the influence. It was also illegal to have an open bottle in your automobile, so if the seal had been broken you could be arrested for that. The drinking half of the community said it encouraged overconsumption. Drunks loved it. “Utah is the cheapest place I know to do your drinking,” said a tippling Tribune staffer during that time.3
Jack Gallivan's Tribune spearheaded a little-used initiative petition to change the liquor laws, declaring them obsolete and unenforceable. A campaign was begun to get signatures from 10 percent of the voters in fifteen of Utah's twenty-nine counties. It was successful, and the initiative went on the ballot for the fall election.4
The Mormon hierarchy felt challenged politically and philosophically. It gathered a formidable assembly of church officials and gentile community leaders to create a committee opposed to liquor by the drink.
It is seldom that two newspapers, operating under a joint agreement, enter into the kind of bitter fight that Salt Lake City saw in 1968. The church, through the Deseret News, opposed any changes in the law while the Tribune vigorously supported liquor by the drink.5
For the first time in many years, both papers would use front-page editorials, the Tribune on May 1 supporting the petition initiative, the Deseret News on May 11 with an editorial signed by church president David O. McKay in opposition. As it turned out, during the drive for signatures, the Tribune devoted a significant percentage (a total of 29 percent) of its coverage of liquor-by-the-drink news items and editorials to Sunday readers. The News did not publish Sundays, but the Tribune's circulation on Sunday jumped from about 80,000 circulation to nearly 120,000 circulation. This increase was comprised of Mormon News readers who opted to get the Sunday Tribune as part of their subscription. In the Sunday Tribune during the run-up to the election would be five major pro-liquor advertisements.6
Gordon B. Hinckley, then an LDS apostle writing for the church's Improvement Era magazine in October 1968, called on members of the church to vote down the initiative, regarding it as a moral issue, therefore transcending the arguments of his opponents. He emphasized its effect on the image of the state (and concomitantly, the church that runs it), its effect on youth, traffic, and crime problems, and increased consumption.7
The proposal to ease the liquor laws was defeated resoundingly at the ballot box, and Shelledy maintained Hinckley never forgave Gallivan for running an advertisement the Sunday before Election Day urging a yes vote on liquor by the drink.8 Hinckley had a long memory, and soon he would be in a position of ultimate power within the church.
Ezra Taft Benson became the thirteenth president of the LDS Church in 1985, the last of the church's presidents to be born in the nineteenth century. He'd been in the cabinet of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He succeeded Spencer W. Kimball, who as church leader in 1978 had bowed to the inevitable and decreed that African Americans should no longer be denied the priesthood and the temple rites that other Mormon males were granted.9
Benson's health declined. The Tribune covered Benson carefully, delicately referring to the heart attacks, strokes, and dementia that relegated him to a figurehead. Two other leaders were also in poor health.10
Moving into the power void was Apostle Hinckley. A graduate in English from the University of Utah, he was a scholar. He studied Latin and could read ancient Greek. Hinckley was a missionary for two years in Britain, 1933–35. Upon his return he went to work for the church and would spend his life as an employee or a leader of the church. He was executive secretary of the LDS Church's Radio, Publicity and Literature Committee before being called to be an apostle in 1961. He was trained and duty bound to protect and enhance the church's image.11
In the early 1980s, Hinckley was about to meet a young Mormon counterfeiter named Mark William Hofmann, who would turn from forgeries to murder.
Mark Hofmann's murders were the biggest Salt Lake City news story of the mid-1980s and a national embarrassment to the Mormon Church and Hinckley. Hofmann was born in Salt Lake City and was an active Mormon. As a youth he was a below average student but had an interest in stamp and coin collecting. By Hofmann's own account he forged a rare mint mark on a dime and then presented it to an organization of coin collectors who declared it authentic.12
Like many young Mormons, Hofmann in 1973 was called to a two-year mission to England. He later told investigators that he had lost faith in Mormonism when he was fourteen, but he went to please his parents. Based in Bristol, he wrote to his parents claiming he had baptized several people into the church. He loved the English bookstores, where he explored musty, old historical tomes. He began buying early Mormon material as well as books critiquing Mormonism. It may have been here that he discovered Fawn McKay Brodie's No Man Knows My History. Still, he professed to be a faithful member of the church. Returning from his mission, he enrolled as a premed student at Utah State Univ
ersity in Logan. He married, and the couple would eventually have four children.13
Hofmann began his criminal forgeries in 1979–80. He stole blank pages from nineteenth-century library books, created his own inks that closely matched those commonly used in the 1800s, and studied the handwriting of the early Mormons and the handwriting of those with whom they interacted. He became a consummate forger. His goal was to blackmail the LDS Church with documents that indicated the church was founded on false pretenses.14
In 1980 he created the “Anthon Document,” which he said he had found in a gummed envelope inside a seventeenth-century Bible. This document was purported to be the transcript of Joseph Smith's “reformed Egyptian” characters presented by Martin Harris to the Columbia classics professor Charles Anthon in 1828 (see chapter 4 on Joseph Smith and the papyri). The Historical Department of the LDS Church concluded it was a “holograph” done by Joseph Smith and paid Hofmann $20,000 for the forgery.15
Mormon academic Hugh Nibley predicted that the discovery promised “as good a test as we'll ever get of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.”16
Hofmann dropped out of school and set himself up as a dealer in rare books. He fabricated other documents of historical significance to Mormons. According to Richard and Joan Ostling, in their book Mormon America: The Power and the Promise, Hofmann had become a “closet apostate.”17
By now, Gordon B. Hinckley was running the LDS Church as its de facto leader. During the early 1980s, a significant number of Hofmann's Mormon documents came into the marketplace. Sometimes the church received these as donations, with some of the wealthy faithful directed to purchase them. The Ostlings, in Mormon America, said, “The church publicized some of the acquisitions; it orchestrated public relations for some that were known to be sensitive; others it acquired secretly and suppressed.”18 In other words, Hofmann was creating many documents that made the church look bad, and the church or its surrogates were paying to make sure they were never seen.