How to Retire

At 6 a.m. the alarm clock went off, rousing the bedroom's two occupants: William Fife Knowland. a retired politician, and Alice, a Saint Bernard who at 165 lbs. weighs just 60 less than her dieting master. After showering, shaving and dressing. Bill Knowland went downstairs for coffee with Paul Manolis, 32, his assistant, who lives a mile away. Then the two men set out on the fourmile. 55-minute walk from the Knowland home in suburban Piedmont to downtown Oakland, Calif., where former U.S. Senate Republican Leader Bill Knowland now makes a living as editor of the Oakland evening Tribune (circ. 214,002).

The title had come to him only a few days before, when relinquished at long last by his father, Joseph R. Knowland, 87, who bought the Tribune in 1915 and bossed it with autocratic instinct for five decades. Bill Knowland had actually been running the paper for almost two years as the Tribune's assistant publisher. In politics Bill was known for his heavy and often inept thumb; at the Tribune the thumb has remained heavy, but it has stamped itself on the paper in a manner that by any reasonable standard can be called expert.

What He Could Do. Bill Knowland's return from politics dates from his decision in 1957 to resign as U.S. Senate minority leader in order to run for Governor of California--a position he patently thought would take him closer to the U.S. presidency. He was thoroughly whopped by Democrat 'Tat" Brown. Knowland nursed his wounds on a slow cruise through the Panama Canal and the Caribbean; then he returned to Oakland and sat down beside his father to see what he might do as a newspaperman.

Not everyone liked the Tribune's assistant publisher. There was a forbidding coldness to him; even today he rarely visits the newsroom. Intolerant of deadwood. Knowland started chopping at it; since 1958 he has fired ten editorial hands, and seven more have quit in anger. Knowland declared war on overtime, trimmed the Trib's virtually unlimited sick leave. He promoted his son Joe, 30, to overseer at large, and Joe antagonized much of the staff. The American Newspaper Guild, which had long failed to organize the Tribune, succeeded last year. To the guild's surprise. Bill Knowland--who based his gubernatorial campaign on an open-shop labor policy--proved a reasonable adversary.

The Doing of It. Along the way. Bill Knowland also proved that he was a newsman. Always long on news, the Trib got longer; today it carries more news linage than any other evening paper in the U.S., has a larger cityside news staff--54 reporters--than any of across-the-bay San Francisco's three papers.

News staffers have come to know better than to tailor their stories to Knowland's political cloth. In the first local election held after he returned from Washington, Oakland Democrats were dumfounded to find that their side got equivalent play with the Republicans. Said Knowland, well aware that the Trib's circulation area is 60% Democratic: "We've got to serve the whole community." In his one try at personal reporting, Knowland filed dispatches of scrupulous objectivity from both 1960 party conventions. Wrote Knowland after the Republicans nominated Nixon: "Both parties have strong and able campaigners who will fight this one out toe to toe."

The Oakland Tribune is proving the better for Knowland's tenure. In the rewards of a busy newspaper and community life, Knowland himself seems to have forgotten his scars. "I work the same hours here that I worked in Washington," he says. "But the difference is that I don't carry home a briefcase full of bills, executive orders and committee hearings."

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