New Man, Old Touch

When smooth, silver-haired Richard Wilton Clarke went on vacation last month, he had one of the big jobs in U.S. journalism -- managing editor of the New York Daily News. Last week, when he got back, he had a bigger one: executive editor, secretary of the board and a director of the giant News Syndicate Co. Adman Roy Holliss, head man since Captain Joseph M. Patterson's death last spring, had been killed in an auto crash; in the reshuffling of executives that followed, Clarke's stock had gone way up (to about $150,000 a year).

Patterson had left behind him a high-ranking team of admen, business managers and circulation wizards. But he took with him the unique editorial talents that had made his paper the most successful and the most disliked tabloid in the country. Keeping its diverse, perverse personality alive was now squarely up to Clarke.

Tutor & Technique. The late Arthur L. Clarke, first managing editor of the Daily News, wanted his son to be a diplomat. When Dick Clarke finished Hackley School, his father packed him off to Europe for a year, told his tutor to see that he did not read or speak a word of English. Clarke studied at Munich and Grenoble, spent three years at Harvard, got a "war degree" after World War I.

When the Daily News was born in the summer of 1919, he was waiting to take more training for foreign service. City Editor Sumner Blossom, desperate for someone to man the city-desk telephones, argued Boss Clarke into letting his son fill in. Before long, young Clarke became picture editor of Manhattan's first "picture newspaper." He left for an eight-year stretch on the World, skipped back in 1930 before the World's end, stepped into his father's old job in 1939. Patterson turned him into a past master of the devious techniques of tabloid journalism.

Plugs & Slugs. In his new job Clarke is ringmaster for a temperamental menagerie of talent, including Poison Penman John O'Donnell and Broadway Columnist Danton Walker, who has a crystal ball suffering from cataract. One of Clarke's chores is a daily conference with Editorial Writer Reuben Maury and Cartoonist C. D. Batchelor (who used to get their signals from Patterson). Sitting in with them now is a brand-newcomer, quiet, 44-year-old Donald Thompson, an American Weekly graduate. Clarke hired him to backstop Maury. Thompson expects no trouble in adapting himself to Daily News policies--plugs for the metric system, a world calendar and isolationism, slugs for Russia, the U.N. and prohibition.

Last week there was no sign that the Daily News, in losing Patterson, had lost his "common touch." Its headlines still crackled (IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT, u.s. ANSWER TO TITO); its editorials were still full of beans. Its latest comment on those who would share, or ban, the atom bomb: We SAY IT'S SPINACH AND WE SAY THE HELL WITH IT.

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