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by Alan Abrams Walter Trohan, who died Oct. 30 at the age of 100, was the last of those legendary metropolitan newspaper Washington bureau chiefs and correspondents whose bylines made them as well known in their time as television anchorpersons are today. Like Arthur Krock of the New York Times, Trohan was synonymous with his newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, where he worked for 40 years. Trohan began covering Washington in the second year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency and stayed on the job through almost the first term of Richard Nixon. Trohan managed to maintain a cordial friendship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no easy task given that both FDR and his New Deal policies were the targets of almost daily attacks by the Tribune's isolationist publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick. How vehement was the Tribune's FDR-phobia? During the 1936 election, McCormick and the Tribune supported Republican Alf Landon, whose running mate was another Chicago newspaper publisher, Frank Knox of the Chicago Daily News. McCormick ordered the bank of Tribune operators to answer the phones by telling callers they only had so many days left "to save your country" before the election Trohan cut his journalistic teeth as a reporter in Chicago with the City News Bureau in 1929. He was first on the scene of the infamous St. Valentine's Day massacre when Al Capone's gang mowed down seven members of the rival Bugs Moran mob. But his biggest scoop never made it into print - at least as Trohan's exclusive. In 1951 Trohan was the first to learn that President Harry S Truman planned to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the commander of UN forces in Korea. But Trohan lost his scoop when Truman found out what Trohan knew and when he knew it and publicly announced his action Ten years earlier, another sitting president also kept the Tribune from printing a scoop. McCormick's isolationist hatred of FDR may ironically have prompted FDR to declare war on Hitler on Dec. 8, 1941. McCormick was prepared to counter Marshall Field's liberal-leaning Chicago Sun, which began printing Dec. 4, 1941, by publishing leaked War Department documents detailing a plan to invade Nazi-occupied Europe by July 1943. FDR's actions ruined that scoop for the Tribune. Trohan wrote his memoirs in 1975 and titled the book "Political Animals." In the book, he recalled how when he arrived in Washington in 1934 as an assistant correspondent in the Tribune's Washington Bureau, he could freely wander the White House, call cabinet members on the phone and sometimes they would even ask him about what the president had told him. By the time Trohan retired, the Nixon White House was not one that encouraged wandering and Nixon's paranoia would have had him questioning reporters about what cabinet officers were saying about him Alan Abrams is the managing editor of The Rapids Record published in Grand Rapids, Ohio. |
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