Death of a Reporter

"The fastest mind with which I have ever come in contact," said President Woodrow Wilson. "Probably the most charming extravert in the Western world," marveled a rival editor. Ebullient, egocentric, suave and unflaggingly dynamic, Herbert Bayard Swope stood splendidly apart in an era of splendid individualists. As reporter, foreign correspondent and executive editor on the famed New York World--Joseph Pulitzer's proudest monument--Swope gave a glamorous flair to the incisive, personalized brand of U.S. journalism that flourished before World War I and stretched into the '20s.

Son of a prosperous watchcase manufacturer, Swope grew up in St. Louis, passed up college to get a look at Europe, came back to the U.S. to bounce from Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch to the Chicago Tribune to the New York Herald before settling down in 1909 as a reporter for the World. There he soon became one of the best reporters in a Manhattan galaxy of byliners that included Irvin Cobb. Frank Ward O'Malley and Richard Harding Davis. Herbert Swope's unique asset: overwhelming personal charm. Said an envious New York Telegraph reporter: "He finds out who is the principal source of information, and proceeds to fascinate that person. He will not let the victim go until he has coughed up all he knows."

Confirmed by History. Swope's beats for the World were often as highhanded as they were spectacular. Covering Europe in 1914, he charmed the German high command into letting him break the news that the submarine U-9 had sunk three British battleships ("the greatest setback the British navy has ever suffered"). So dazzled by Swope was James W. Gerard, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, that he disclosed confidential reports that Germany planned to launch submarine attacks against U.S. ships. Swope's story was promptly denied by the State Department, promptly confirmed by history.

Back in Germany in 1916, Swope gathered material for a series of articles analyzing the nation's war effort that won him the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting. When he was barred from the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, Swope grandly donned top hat and cutaway coat, brushed past deferential guards with the explanation that he was a delegate from Liberia, and came out with the hitherto unpublished League of Nations Covenant. Said he: "All I can say for publication is that I found it lying on a table in the meeting room."

Dictum & Dry Rot. In 1920, with the backing of Ralph Pulitzer, who became the World's publisher on his father's death in 1911, Swope knocked out a few partitions to make himself a suitably imposing office, brought in the first rugs ever seen on the twelfth floor of the World building on Park Row, and hung on the door a brand-new title of his own devising: Executive Editor.

From then on, Editor Frank I. Cobb ran the editorial page and Swope ran the World. Though the great Joseph Pulitzer had been dead for nine years, the World was still shaped to his image: cocky, crusading, colorful. Swope and the World were well matched. A solid six-footer with a thatch of red hair, Swope stalked grandly through the city room swinging his massive walking stick, peering at his staffers through a tiny pince-nez, and driving home his dictum: "Pick out the best story of the day and then hammer the living hell out of it."

Swope started the World's famous "op. ed.," a page facing the editorials, and made it a showcase for a distinguished set of columnists: Heywood Broun, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott, Laurence Stallings, Deems Taylor. He directed the investigations of the Ku-Klux Klan and peonage on Southern plantations that won the World Pulitzer Prizes. He took a proprietary interest in the news: "Who's covering my murder trial? Who's covering my snowstorm?" He told reporters: "Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one." He could be coldly disdainful. Sniffed he: "I never fired a man in my life. If I couldn't do anything with a man, I just ignored him until he reformed or died of dry rot."

End of the World. But as the '20s drew on, both the World and Swope got weary. Under Pulitzer's sons Ralph and Herbert, the World gradually lost ground to the Times and the Herald Tribune. In 1929 Swope finally quit. Two years later, Pulitzer's sons broke their father's will, which stipulated that the World should never be sold, turned over the paper to Scripps-Howard for $5,000,000. (The name survives as the New York World-Telegram and Sun.)

After 1929 Herbert Swope's life seemed a kind of wondrously sustained afterglow. He still held court at Manhattan's "21" Club, still darted down to Washington to offer unsolicited but hortatory advice to Presidents--notably Franklin D. Roosevelt. He turned his awesome energy to charities and humanitarianism (Freedom House, National Conference of Christians and Jews), made a pile in the stock market, served as a CBS director, and worked as an unpaid assistant to Bernard Baruch on the U.N.'s Atomic Energy Commission. He was still a conspicuous figure at any major race meeting (disgruntled World staffers had always grumbled that he edited from the track), and when New York State legalized betting in 1934, Swope became chairman of the State Racing Commission.

"Perfect!" In his estate at Sands Point, L,I., Swope fussed over three generations of his family (two children, four grandchildren) and presided grandly at some of the wittiest dinner parties in the nation. No foreign dignitary could say he had been a success in the U.S. until he had been to Sands Point to play a round of big-league croquet against such guests as Averell Harriman, the Marx brothers, William Randolph Hearst Jr. or Swope's late elder brother Gerard, onetime president and board chairman of General Electric. On the croquet court Swope was insufferable: "Now you put your little foot on your ball and drive the other buckety-buckety off into the orchard. Perfect!"

"I'm still a newspaperman at heart." Swope used to say. "I'd rather be remembered as a good reporter than anything else in the world." Last week, when he died in a Manhattan hospital at 76, of pneumonia after surgery, his oldtime rivals, the Times and Herald Tribune, remembered him mainly for being, in the words of former World City Editor James W. Barrett, "the best reporter not only on the World, but in the whole wide world."

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