ustxtxb_obs_1957_10_11_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

BOW WILLIAMS Automobile and General Insurance it Budget Payment Plan Strong Stock Companies 624 LAMAR, AUSTIN GReenwood 2-0545 Let’s Abolish the Poll Tax! Is DALLAS PRESS SHIFT A HARBINGER? of its steam, McKnight never got the blame in newspaper circles. He was still the most popular Texan at meetings of newspaper brass. Although the Herald got better, no man got credit for the improvement. The News still looks good. Its display of news is outstanding. Most of its writing and editing is fairly sharp. You have to be well enough informed to read and see what news is missing. Some of the stuff which is printed seems to bear the slant dictated by the paper’s editorial policy and business office. Of course, the News, which seems to be published for political power more than anything else, has drifted editorially more and more into the lunatic fringe. Beyond the front page, the Herald looks poor. Its reporters say they are understaffed and underpaid. Editorially, the Herald is a weak sister, For motherhood, Against sin. However, the Herald is even more opposed to integrationand any Negro progress than the News. The Herald could stand a strong hand. THE HERALD has one eal strong point. It is owned by its employees. About ten of its executives hold control, and there is supposedly some sort of agreement that the paper always will be owned by only those in active daily control of the paper. It was probably a large chunk of stock which lured McKnight to the Herald. But he certainly also insisted he be given some sort of free hand with the Herald news policies, maybe even with editorials. For several years Jim Chambers, young vice-president and general manager of the Herald, has been his paper’s guiding light in the ever-more-profitable business offices. He is a close Country Club friend of McKnight’s. smug reasons I am quite sure that Ronnie and I both enjoy the description. Anyway, thanks to the enfant terrible of the Texas newspapermen for making me out a martyr. It’s been so long since I last was one. My best to the organized liberals. If we can’t be brothers can’t we at least be cousins? MAURY MAVERICK, JR., San Antonio To promise a large hunk of stock and editorial freedom, Chambers must have had to talk it over with the other owners for some time. It wasn’t as sudden as it seemed to Dallas newsmen. McKnight is said to have described the offer to him as “fabulous.” If the Herald has committed the kind of money indicated by “fabulous,” it can’t stop there. Surely it wants more than the prestige of a well-known name. It must want McKnight to make it a famous newspaper. There is only one path to newspaper fame: a hard-hitting, crusading news policy with lots of exposes. It costs money, more than the Herald has ever been known to spend, but it makes money, too. Though only a weekly, The VELT, by Rexford G. Tugwell, Doubleday, $8.50. Biographies of men who became Presidents of the United States, written after the fact, invariably attempt to measure the man in terms of that office. The pattern is similarwhat did he do while in. office? what did he do to the office? what did the office do to him? The latest biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt is no exception. Everyone old enough to have lived during the New Deal will remember the name of Rex Tugwell. He was the third member of the famous Brain Trust triumvirate which included Raymond Moley and Adolph Berle. Having been a part of many of the more publicized programs of the early New Deal, Tugwell has numerous sidelights to add to the growing Roosevelt legend. However, this very long biography takes it for granted that the reader is familiar with most of the important Roosevelt commentaries which have preceded Tugwell, such as Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Rosenman’s Working With Roosevelt, Perkins’s The Roosevelt I Knew, Rauch’s History of the New Deal. Stories and details Which have been fully covered in histories and memoirs of the times are referred to, but left to the reader’s knowledge or ignorance as the case may be. The most impressive thing about the book is the portrait of a President of the United States who was The President. There was never a moment when anyone in the administration, among the opposition, or of the people Texas Observer has made some of the state’s dailies, notably in Houston, more expose conscious in the last two to three years. Some of the deeper digging for news has even been reflected in the News and in the Herald. If a big daily, like the Herald, went all out, what would be the effect on the state’s other dailies? Simply revolutionary. Certainly, it would make Dallas a competitive newspaper town. IF McKNIGHT chooses to make the Herald that kind of paper, he could pick from the state’s best newspapermen to help him. Most are tired of having their best stories killed. If he makes it liberal editorially, that would be even more revolutionary. There really isn’t much chance of that. who was administering the affairs of the executive branch of the Government of the United States while FDR was in the White House. Tugwell has provided a measuring rod for men who aspire to or happen to hold the office of president at any time. He has given us a norm which can be used for measuring vice presipresidents, senators, governors, and other politicians and leaders who get “Potomac Fever” and see themselves in the White House. Of course while reading this book one is driven to comparisons of the present occupant of the office with FDR. It is the genius of the American system that we seem able to survive under the most incredible circumstances. Tugwell does perform one task which I feel has been inadequately handled in most of the other boks about FDR and his administration, and that is the proper placing of Mrs. Roosevelt in the scheme of things. One gets a better concept in this book of the tremendous job she did. Time has a way of obscuring details and leaving only the broad outlines in relief. Young people and first voters who never knew what it was like to have FDR in the White House would do well to SOUTH FROM GRANADA, by Gerald Brenan, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York, 1957. $4.00 Gerald Brenan came home from World War I service with the British Expeditionary Forces, found life in the upper middle class from which he had gone to war had become insupportable, and went to live the next seven years in a tiny village, Yegen, in Andalusia. This book is the quiet, lyrically beautiful record of those years. Brenan writes with loving sympathy and compassion of the ancient, non-compliant people of Some old friends say McKnight, who is said to care a lot more about sports than politics, was a liberal when he was young. He was an Ike man in 1952 and 1956. He probably still is today; but the News believes Ike is too socialistic. That may be a reason McKnight quit the News. Even editorials reflecting a Modern Republican philosophy would be a radical change for Dallas newspapers. Way before McKnight ever hired out to the News, the Dallas morning daily set the tone for most Texas newspapers. It still does. It seems likely that McKnight’s job for the next few years will be to make Dallas’ afternoon daily the state-wide tonesetter. He may do it. read this book. It would make them think. So many things which are taken for granted today were only “pie-inthe-sky” until FDR was elected in 1932 and the New Deal began in 1933. Tugwell recalls some details which bring the outlines of current policy into sharper relief and focus. The political divisions of 1957 are better understood when the events and divisions of 1937 are recalled to mind. FDR was a man who was better loved and more hated than any American figure of this century. Tugwell has done a creditable job of presenting him. My own feeling is that his interpretation is too pat. Tugwell feels that Roosevelt was essentially motivated by his belief in divine guidance coupled with his sense of destiny as the leader of American democracy during times of crisis. Frances Perkins’ interpretation of FDR as a very complex character is closer to the mark. The Roosevelt I knew was more like the Frances Perkins version than Tugwell’s. In any event The Democratic Roosevelt is must reading for citizens who are trying to do their own thinking about government. The book is profusely illustrated and adequately covers the period of FDR’s life prior to the presidency. C REE KMO RE FATH Yegen, of everything about them: customs, folklore, love affairs, quarrels, politics, the mountains that bound them, the soil that supports them, schools, churches, lodges, animals, fairs, beliefs, ritualsall about them. There is a chapter on the archaeology of the region, another on visits by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and Lytton Strachey, each a piece to itself. Altogether a lovely book, certainly as good as the two similar ones which come to mind: Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria, and Elliott Paul’s Life and Death of a Spanish Town. Texans aware of the thread of Spain in their own culture’s fabric will enjoy it. L. J. PEYTON PLACE, by Grace Metalious. \(The paperbacked edilishing Co., New York City, 1957. $ .50. Metalious Is carnalious. L. J. TEXAS, OCTOBER 4, 1957 Page 6 Oct. 11, 1957 \(Dallas newsmen have been debating the significance of the move of Felix McKnight from the News to the TimesHerald. One of the better advised members of the Dallas fourth estate writes here what he thinks the move means, DALLAS Texas’ most startling newspaper shakeup in many a year stunned Dallas journalists recently. Felix McKnight, one of the state’s most talented newsmen, quit as managing editor of the Dallas Morning News, the only daily well known outside the state, and moved into the top news and editorial job at the Dallas Times Herald, which has seldom done anything but make lots of money. McKnight may have fired the first shot in a revolution to reform ‘Texas newspapering. Or he may merely have improved his own situation. So far there’s no telling which. Before World War II, the News was a famous provincial paper. It had lost much of the liberal luster of fighting the Ku Klux Klan by opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Herald was one of three afternoon sheets, the most lackluster in its news columns but the most successful ‘in the counting house. Just as the war started the Times Herald absorbed its competition. During the war, neither paper did much because of newsprint shortages and inadequate staffs. Afterwards, for three or four years the News came close to being a real newspaper. McKnight gets credit for this generally among the Fourth Estate. The Herald got fat. Gradually the News declined, and the Herald got better. Both processes were too slow to see. Although the News lost much An Authority To the Editor: Last night at a cocktail, party, and before anybody present had read the Observer, I rolled my eyes and looked my saddest look and advised everybody that Dugger, in his evaluation of the types of politicians, had called me a misfit who doesn’t belong in politics. When a misfit calls a misfit a misfit, he generally knows what a misfit is. For Secretly COMPLETE INSUR CE SERVICE HALL’S WIGINTON-HALL LEAGUE CITY INSURANCE AGENCY INSURANCE AGENCY INSURANCE AGENCY Dickinson, Texas Alvin, Texas League City, Texas THE DEMOCRATIC R O O S Eat large, had any doubt about Tugwell on Roosevelt South from Granada