Family, friends and mostly neighbors will gather at a suburban restaurant Friday to celebrate a new centenarian, Walter Trohan, though the honoree will be something short of ecstatic.
“I am not hot about the idea,” he said. “Most of them didn’t know me in my prime, and I have already given myself a birthday party for 99 years.”
There won’t be any fireworks for Trohan, a legendary retired Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. But then, for decades readers’ eyebrows shot up like rockets as he punched his way through the thickets of the political establishment as a reporter, columnist and WGN commentator.
“Modern journalists talk about ‘The Front Page’ the way aging veterans relive the Ardennes Forest or Guadalcanal,” said prominent historian Richard Norton Smith, author of “The Colonel,” a biography of Robert R . McCormick, longtime editor and publisher of the Tribune.
“Walter Trohan is ‘The Front Page’ — arguably the last living link to an era when the Tribune unashamedly proclaimed itself to be ‘The World’s Greatest Newspaper’ because one rather zany, very dedicated publisher really believed it to be true. He believed it so much that he also believed the head of the Tribune’s Washington bureau to have a better job than whoever temporarily occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
In 1936 when J. Edgar Hoover was grabbing headlines as the nation’s No. 1 crime buster, Trohan called the FBI director “a Keystone cop” and his men “callow drug store cowboys with twitchy trigger fingers and a love of limelight.” In a long Tribune article, he described Hoover as having “a piercing glance . . . the result of practice before a mirror” and “walking with a mincing step, almost feminine.”
The advent of World War II brought Trohan memorable scoops and more prominence: the surrender of France to Nazi Germany in 1940 and the U.S. breaking the Japanese code before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Trohan first learned about the code breakthrough from a White House aide in 1941. It took two years, however, to confirm the report through a high-ranking military source, but the story could not be written until military censorship was lifted in 1945.
In 1951, he was the first journalist to learn that President Harry Truman planned to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the commander of UN forces in Korea, for insubordination and refusing to conduct a limited war. After learning about Trohan’s story through Gen. Omar Bradley, Truman called a memorable news conference at 1 a.m. to announce that he was relieving the war hero of his command and to blunt the Tribune exclusive.
“Walter Trohan is one of the most talented reporters I have ever known,” said Bob Wiedrich, a retired Tribune reporter and columnist.
“I stood in awe of him when I first met him 53 years ago as a cub reporter and continue to stand in awe of his achievements and experience. At age 100, he is a piece of living history.”
By the 1960s Trohan — bureau chief since 1949 — had become an influential voice in the nation’s capital and served as president of the exclusive, establishment Gridiron Club (and first club president to invite women to its annual dinner). In 1964, for instance, when top White House aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for homosexual conduct on Oct. 7 at a YMCA near the White House, President Johnson expressed concern about the prospect of the Tribune reporting such an embarrassing incident during an election year, according to Oval Office recordings released a few years ago.
But Abe Fortas, a powerful attorney and old New Deal crony whom LBJ later rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court, assured the president, ” . . . I just came from the conversation with Walter Trohan. He says he is not going to write it. Nor will he let anyone write it. The man has six children, and he [Trohan] just won’t do it.”
The three Washington papers of the time all initially withheld the story, too, amid pressure from Fortas and power broker Clark Clifford. Lady Bird Johnson wanted to offer Jenkins, “a devout Catholic . . . a happily married husband” who had worked for LBJ since 1939, a top job at one of their family-owned TV stations, but LBJ vetoed any such offer.
In high-profile position
Trohan filled the high-profile Washington post in ways “that only confirmed Col. McCormick’s conceit,” says Smith, who now directs the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.
He annoyed Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose relations with McCormick verged on the poisonous, by singing nonsense songs mocking the New Deal’s alphabet soup of federal agencies. He made stony-faced Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio roar with laughter, Smith noted, by joining a militant union picket line and booming out the protest anthem, “We’re Sticking With the Union.”
“He provided a one-man Greek chorus of Midwestern isolationism in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor,” Smith said. “And he joined his employer in questioning the Republican credentials of Dwight Eisenhower, not to mention the dangerously effete New Yorker, Tom Dewey.”
And, through it all, Smith concluded, “Trohan somehow managed to keep, most of the times, in the colonel’s graces without ever surrendering his journalistic integrity. He is a glorious throwback, [compared to] the made-for-television politics and journalism of today.”
These days Trohan lives alone in a townhouse in suburban Columbia, Md., with a son and daughter living nearby. There is a third daughter in California, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
With his failing eyesight, he seems almost Buddha-like sitting in a living room dominated by a pale Chinese rug of antique vintage. A sign on the front door, however, has already cautioned, “An Old Crab Lives Here,” and the doormats convey such prickly messages as “Get Lost” and “Oh No, Not You Again.”
It is clear to any visitor, however, that the occupant of the house has not sunk into some other-worldly, monastic state. He retains an old-fashioned newsman’s appetite for news and welcomes visitors to sample a new bottle of rye whisky.
During recent visits and conversations, Trohan displayed a seemingly bottomless trove of knowledge about politics in the nation’s capital. He can readily shift back and forth from the long-ago past to the present.
“I’m not too sure about that fellow Bush in the White House.” Trohan said of the current Oval Office occupant, in a voice that sounds half his age. “He works hard, really like Pope John Paul II, who is always traveling someplace. I was against going into Iraq and don’t think Hussein was prepared to go after the U.S.” Mentioning Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s brother, he remarked, “I don’t want an American royal family, like [former vice president] Gore.”
U.S. not world’s savior
The nation’s habit of “trying to save the world” and going to war makes him “sick and tired.” Look at the Korean War, he said, noting that the Asian nation remains “a trouble spot” after nearly 50 years and that Syngman Rhee, the first president of the Republic of Korea [South Korea] had been “a good friend” of his.
Looking back on earlier presidents, Trohan singled out Herbert Hoover as “the best man” for the job yet contends he “flopped as chief executive because he refused to compromise.” He admired Johnson because of the Texan’s skill for “persuading you to do just what you didn’t want to.”
In 1952 he favored Taft as the Republican presidential nominee. “Ike was a soldier and used his Cabinet as if they were military aides,” Trohan said. “But he listened to them. It was like having 10 presidents. I think Ike did a pretty good job.”
Born on July 4, 1903, in Mt. Carmel, Pa., the son of a wholesale grocer, Trohan grew up on the South Side of Chicago at 71st Street and Drexel Boulevard. After graduation from Bowen High School, he worked briefly for the Daily Calumet before enrolling at the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated in 1926.
The Tribune hired Trohan on Feb. 25, 1929, shortly after he had covered the infamous St. Valentine’s Day massacre for what was then the City News Bureau. He recalled being the first newsman on the scene of the carnage in which seven members of the Bugs Moran gang were machine-gunned to death by members of the rival Capone gang.
Earlier that day, he was relieving the switchboard operator when another young reporter, John Paster, phoned in about the shooting. Trohan immediately sent a bulletin and told his boss, “I’m going there, OK, and I’ll take a cab.”
His budget-conscious boss, however, vetoed the cab and ordered him to take the Clark Street streetcar, because “it runs every five minutes.” Trohan always talks proudly of his days as a “City News guy,” and said Paster, later a Tribune police reporter, deserved more credit for the story than he did.
Trohan covered the Cook County Building and courts, including the gangland-style murder of Alfred (Jake) Lingle, a Tribune crime reporter gunned down by a St. Louis mobster at a Loop train station. In 1934 he joined the Tribune’s Washington bureau, which had lost four staffers to Roosevelt’s New Deal administration.
In his 1975 memoir, “Political Animals” (Doubleday), Trohan wryly observed:
“From the lofty beginnings of police reporting, I descended into politics. My progress has been steadily downward ever since. At first I associated with ward heelers, but soon graduated to elected officials. Most of my reportorial life has been spent among politicians at the local, state and international levels. I have eaten their bread and salt and drunk their water and wine. More often than not I have paid for it, because politicians generally are afflicted with an impediment in their reach, no doubt nature’s compensation for their overindulgence in speech.”
An intimate Washington
Washington in the 1930s seemed small and intimate. Television’s prominence was decades away. “I could wander all over the White House,” Trohan remembered, “call Cabinet members on the telephone and they would talk to me –sometimes even ask about what the president had told me.”
By 1937, Trohan was president of the White House Correspondents Association. But it was a far smaller group back then. There were only eight correspondents who regularly traveled with the president: The four press services — the Associated Press, the United Press, the International News Service and the Universal News Service — and four newspapers — the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York News and the Chicago Tribune.
In those days the Secret Service, by Trohan’s count, seemed to number no more than “20-plus” agents, most of whom he described as former policemen and truck drivers.
Although Roosevelt and his New Deal programs became the Tribune’s nemesis, Trohan maintained a cordial relationship with the president while covering the White House. Many years later, he described FDR as having “charisma in spades, a man in love with himself — much like [President] Clinton — who had no mind of his own, no memory and no knowledge of international affairs.” He often said that FDR was “the worst snob I ever ran across.”
According to Trohan, “Roosevelt drove him out of the Democratic Party, more or less mentally” because “I was a Jeffersonian and for me the least government was the best government.” Reporters, Trohan believes, should cover presidents with a critical eye “to protect the people from any administration.”
On one 4th of July at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, N.Y., estate, there was a birthday barbecue in Trohan’s honor. After a few drinks, the honoree tossed firecrackers into the fire and immediately brought Secret Service agents to the scene.
Trohan contends that the New Deal helped transform the federal government in Washington into “everybody’s city hall, where they come for money” especially when states confront financial woes.
A fondness for Harry Truman
On a kinder New Deal note, Trohan confesses to “a soft spot” for Harry Truman because the Missourian “was a man of integrity who, once he made up his mind, stuck with his decision.”
One of his few criticisms of the Tribune is the famous wrongheaded headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman” that appeared on the night of the 1948 presidential election. According to Trohan, veteran Washington bureau chief Arthur Sears Henning and managing editor J. Loy (Pat) Moloney ignored warnings from Republicans that Dewey’s election was far from a certainty.
“The headline should have read, `Dewey Leading,'” Trohan said.
In 1949, McCormick named Trohan Washington bureau chief to replace Henning, who had held the job since 1914 and had been a member of the bureau since 1909.
A connoisseur of history and English literature. Trohan eventually donated his collection of first editions and rare documents — including a 1789 copy of the U.S. Constitution printed in Philadelphia and a newspaper chronicling Lincoln’s assassination — to his alma mater, Notre Dame. For many years, he and his wife Carol who died in 1996 after 67 years of marriage, invited students from Notre Dame and nearby St. Mary’s College to their home to meet prominent politicians.
There were opportunities, of course, for Trohan to leave the Washington bureau. After the “Dewey Defeats Truman” debacle, the colonel’s wife urged her husband to hire Trohan as Tribune editor.
“I said `no’ because I didn’t know enough about the business end of the paper,” Trohan said. “I wasn’t fit to run the paper, and the colonel agreed with me.”
