Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, the Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism

by Richard J. Tofel

Overview

The story of the man who transformed The Wall Street Journal and modern media

In 1929, Barney Kilgore, fresh from college in small-town Indiana, took a sleepy, near bankrupt New York financial paper—The Wall Street Journal—and turned it into a thriving national newspaper that eventually was worth $5 billion to Rupert Murdoch. Kilgore then invented a national weekly newspaper that was a precursor of many trends we see playing out in journalism now.

Tofel brings this story of a little-known pioneer to life using many previously uncollected newspaper writings by Kilgore and a treasure trove of letters between Kilgore and his father, all of which detail the invention of much of what we like best about modern newspapers. By focusing on the man, his journalism, his foresight, and his business acumen, Restless Genius also sheds new light on the Depression and the New Deal.

At a time when traditional newspapers are under increasing threat, Barney Kilgore's story offers lessons that need constant retelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429967112
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/03/2009
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	385 KB

About the Author

RICHARD J. TOFEL is general manager of ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative reporting venture, and previously was an assistant managing editor and the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Sounding the Trumpet (2005), about JFK's inaugural address; Vanishing Point (2004), about the disappearance of Judge Crater; and A Legend in the Making (2002), about the 1939 Yankees.

Richard J. Tofel is general manager of ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative reporting venture, and previously was an assistant managing editor and the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Sounding the Trumpet (2005), about JFK's inaugural address; Vanishing Point (2004), about the disappearance of Judge Crater; and A Legend in the Making (2002), about the 1939 Yankees.

Read an Excerpt

Restless Genius

Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism

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By Richard J. Tofel

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2009 Richard J. Tofel
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6711-2

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CHAPTER 1

Hoosier Beginnings

Leslie Bernard Kilgore was born on November 9, 1908, in Albany, Indiana. (Neither he nor his parents seem ever to have used his first name, although his mother selected it to honor a family minister.) His father, Tecumseh Kilgore, was the local superintendent of schools. The family of his mother, Lavina Elizabeth Bodenhorn Kilgore, lived nearby, although they traced their origins to the Pennsylvania Dutch region.

Albany (not to be confused with the much larger city of New Albany on Indiana's southern border) was a small part of Delaware Township, in central Indiana's Delaware County. Albany's population actually shrank during the decade of Kilgore's birth, from about 3,200 people at the turn of the twentieth century to about 2,850 people — a decline of more than 10 percent — by 1910. The town is one-fifth smaller yet today.

The prospects of Albany, along with the arrival of his and Lavina's first child, seem to have prompted a career switch on the part of Tecumseh Kilgore. Before becoming superintendent of schools in Albany, he had taught school in nearby Muncie, after starting out as a teacher at age seventeen with his future wife as one of his students. But now he left education, moved his family to South Bend, Indiana, and became, in June 1909, just seven months after the birth of his son, an agent for the Union Central Life Insurance Company. He would remain at this work for the rest of his life. And South Bend was thriving: While the population of Albany had been contracting by a tenth in the first decade of the new century, that of South Bend had been growing by half again. Today it is twice what it was when the Kilgore family arrived.

Tecumseh Kilgore was born in 1875, and named after his father, who, in turn, had been named for the Shawnee Indian chief who had lived in Indiana and lost the battle of Tippecanoe to General William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, and later (ever so briefly) president of the United States. The younger Tecumseh Kilgore attended Indiana University and married Lavina on August 15, 1897, in Madison County, just to the west of Delaware County, where the bride's family lived in the small town of Lapel. Lavina, at twenty, was two years younger than her husband.

Tecumseh's family had deep roots in Indiana. His great-grandfather, Obed Kilgore, was born in Pennsylvania, but lived most of his life in Kentucky, before coming to Franklin County, Indiana, on the southern border with Ohio, in 1819.

Obed's son, David Kilgore, who had been born in Kentucky in 1804, came to Delaware County in 1830, entered a homestead claim, and soon became active in Whig politics. The first of his several terms in the Indiana house of representatives began in 1833. He was a state court circuit judge for seven years and served as a leading delegate to the 1851 state constitutional convention before returning to elective politics. He was elected speaker of the house in 1855 as a member of the new Republican Party, and won two terms in the United States House of Representatives in the years just before the Civil War. He remained active in Republican politics throughout the war and the early years of Reconstruction.

David's son Alfred followed him into politics, also serving in the state legislature, and as United States district attorney for Indiana in the years just after the war, before dying at age thirty-eight. Alfred's brother, the first Tecumseh Kilgore, chose a different path. He was a doctor, practicing in Delaware County all his life, save time as regimental surgeon of the 13th Indiana Cavalry during the Civil War.

While the younger Tecumseh and Lavina decamped to South Bend, the upbringing they afforded Bernard — and, soon, his younger sister, Martha, as well — was traditional and Midwestern. Bernard enjoyed boxing and toy trains as a boy. He dug ditches for the local plumber and learned enough to later be able to pack the joint running to the dishwasher or to repair a faucet. He also painted the family house, learned to play the piano (a favorite lifelong pastime), and delivered newspapers.

But the atmosphere in the Kilgore home was also unusually intellectual, especially for its time and place. The boy, years later, recalled President Woodrow Wilson's campaign train coming through town when he was not yet eight years old and, as he later put it, "I can also remember how everybody thought he had lost the [1916] election, only he didn't."

Tecumseh was, throughout his life, an avid reader and amateur historian, always, as he put it, "mooching around among old papers and books." He worked hard with Bernard, who had a large vocabulary at a young age, using little cards to teach him to read before other children; the boy much later recalled that "that got me a head start in school." During a visit to his mother's family when he was only five and a half, Bernard wrote his first letter to his father. "Dear Papa, Do you want me to bring home a cat? Please answer. FROM BERNARD." Tecumseh kept the letter for the rest of his life.

Bernard eventually skipped a grade, and was a strong student in the public schools of South Bend. The central institutions in the town of Bernard Kilgore's boyhood were the Studebaker automotive factory — Studebaker moved its manufacturing operations to South Bend when Bernard was eleven — and the University of Notre Dame.

These were the early years of Knute Rockne, who arrived to coach Notre Dame football in 1918, when Bernard was not yet nine. In 1920, just weeks after being named Notre Dame's first All-American football player, George Gipp died at age twenty-four in a local hospital, but not before supposedly asking Rockne to someday have the team "win one" for him. Rockne's half-time speech conjuring up the ghost of the Gipper did not come until 1928, but he and Notre Dame won their first national championship, to enormous local acclaim, in 1924.

At home, young Bernard was less an athlete than a tinkerer. He built a model railroad, and hitched a sail to his favorite wagon. He was not much prone to extracurricular activities in high school, but was a member of the debate team. From the start, Barney (as he was soon known to peers and colleagues, although rarely to his family) was quietly competitive and markedly precocious. He won a Boy Scout birdhouse construction contest by creating a new category for entries — owl houses — getting the category officially sanctioned, and submitting the only entry. And, of course, he was simply intellectually ahead of those his age, having skipped that grade. Tecumseh overcame Lavina's objections that Barney was not yet ready for college when he graduated from the public high school in South Bend at the age of sixteen.

In early September 1925, Barney Kilgore, two months shy of his seventeenth birthday, set off to DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana. He traveled by train, by way of Indianapolis.

From this point in his life, we know much more than before, because he began a correspondence with his parents — mostly his father — that Tecumseh preserved. The elder Kilgore retained carbons of his own letters (which all began "Dear Son" and concluded "Love, Dad," and were invariably typed and precisely dated), and the original of his son's ("Dear Dad" or "Dear Mother," occasionally "Dear Folks"), beginning with the second letter home. The younger man's letters were signed "Love, Bernard," even when he had become nationally known as "Barney." There are gaps in the surviving letters, such as nothing from the spring semester of Barney's freshman year at college and little from his junior year, but the letters run from September 1925 through year-end 1954, by which time Tecumseh was seventy-nine. In all, the collection runs well more than a thousand pages. This cache of letters, generously shared with the author of this book by Barney's children, has never before been available to help tell Barney Kilgore's story. Without them, this book would not be the same, and might not have been written.

The university in which Barney Kilgore enrolled was, by the standards of the Midwest, quite venerable. DePauw had been founded in 1837 by the Indiana Methodist Conference as Indiana Asbury University, named for Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in America. Asbury died in 1816.

The university was placed in Greencastle, then a town of 500 people (and only 10,000 today), when the town put up $25,000 for the privilege — the equivalent of about one thousand of today's dollars for each inhabitant. The school, it was clearly hoped, would put the town on the map.

Indiana Asbury enjoyed a relatively uneventful first fifty years, doing a credible job of educating young people, and opening its doors to women in 1867, but certainly not achieving any great distinction. By the mid-1880s it faced a financial crisis, and possible bankruptcy. The president of its board of trustees came personally to the rescue, offering to match, with two dollars of his own, each dollar contributed by others.

The president was a local industrialist named Washington C. DePauw, and the university was soon renamed for him. His gifts, which eventually totaled $300,000 (more than $7 million in today's dollars) went for more land, new dormitories for both men and women, and a new observatory with a state-of-the art telescope. (The telescope, no longer state of the art, was still in use when Kilgore arrived on campus forty years later.) The new college song, "In Praise of Old DePauw" drew both words and music from Princeton's "In Praise of Old Nassau."

Beyond that, DePauw and his colleagues envisioned turning what had been essentially a small college into a true university. In quick succession, they launched schools of law, education, theology, music, and art. But disputes over Mr. DePauw's estate (he died suddenly in 1887) and losses from the Panic of 1893 soon limited their ambitions. A planned school of medicine never materialized. The university quickly ended its Ph.D. program and then its master's program as well; the law school lasted just ten years, the education school five, the theology school fourteen. The school of art limped along for twenty-six years, but was shuttered before the First World War. Only the school of music survived.

The school was not without distinguished students — historians Charles and Mary Beard graduated from DePauw in 1898, Margaret Mead attended for a year before transferring to Columbia University and beginning her studies in anthropology — and it hosted the first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in the state of Indiana, but DePauw remained something of a backwater, led by a succession of mediocre Methodist ministers.

One area in which DePauw did stand out was journalism. The DePauw Daily, which was published from 1907 until 1920, made DePauw the smallest college in the country with a daily newspaper. (After 1920, and during Kilgore's student days, the newspaper appeared less frequently, and was known simply as The DePauw.)

In 1909 Sigma Delta Chi, still the national journalism fraternity (and now called the Society of Professional Journalists), was founded at DePauw. Sigma Delta Chi held its first national convention in Greencastle in 1912. Among the founders of both Sigma Delta Chi and The DePauw Daily was Eugene C. Pulliam, who dropped out after his junior year to go into the newspaper business, and ultimately built the Central Newspapers chain that included The Indianapolis Star and The Arizona Republic. (One of Pulliam's grandchildren is Dan Quayle, former vice president of the United States.) Also on the staff of the Daily was Don Maxwell, later editor of the Chicago Tribune, and a young man named Kenneth C. Hogate, class of '18, who served as president of Sigma Delta Chi in 1921–22 and would later figure prominently in Barney Kilgore's life.

The 1920s were boom times at DePauw as they were in so many places in America. The student body, standing at 1,000 in 1919, had increased to 1,800 by the 1925–26 school year, Kilgore's freshman year. In 1919, Chicago lawyer and philanthropist Edward Rector, who had already contributed a new women's dormitory to the university, underwrote a new merit-based scholarship program offering a completely free education at DePauw to one hundred young men from each year's high school graduating classes across Indiana. DePauw's official history declares that the Rector Scholarships "had a revolutionary impact on the student population" and "sustained DePauw's continued growth while raising academic standards." Barney Kilgore received a Rector Scholarship; it may well have made the difference between his attending DePauw rather than Notre Dame.

And DePauw was beginning to loosen up. The Methodist-inspired ban on cardplaying was lifted after the Great War. The ban on social dancing was starting to fade, although "co-eds" needed written permission to attend school dances as late as 1935.

The transition to life at DePauw seems to have been smooth for Barney. By the second week, he was writing home that "college work does not seem very hard." He was already helping a sophomore in the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house he had joined with the older student's trigonometry homework. Kilgore found the sophomore Spanish class into which he was placed too easy, and moved into junior Spanish. He played duets on the piano with the fraternity's house mother.

His own mother urged him not to work too hard, constantly sent him packages with food and candy, and received Barney's laundry by mail throughout his years at DePauw, washed it, and returned it to him the same way. His father, in contrast, constantly stressed diligence and even more frequently worried about finances. The Rector Scholarship did not cover room and board, which was $378 for the first semester, more than $4,000 today.

The resulting stress for Tecumseh was considerable. When, on November 15 of his freshman year, Barney had spent all of the eighty dollars (about $900 today) with which he had gone to school, his father refused him a further advance for the moment, even if it meant having to miss Thanksgiving at home. Tecumseh wrote, "I know it will be very inconvenient to be broke for I have had a lot of experience but you are still better off than I am because you have a place to sleep and three meals a day assured you while I have not."

A couple of weeks later, father pointed out to son that his spending was averaging seventy-eight and one-third cents per day, compared to an allowance of five dollars per week (or 71.4 cents). The older man was particularly displeased to see that the strict accountings on which he insisted revealed that "practically all your money is going for eats and dates. ... The tall blonde from Iowa [that Barney had mentioned taking out a few times] must be some stepper[,] better get a brunette from Kentucky." Tecumseh did agree to buy and send his son a typewriter, but then quickly enjoined, "Buy ribbons for it instead of her."

But not all of the lessons imparted were financial. Tecumseh Kilgore, whose love for his son shines through his stern lectures — and is always evidenced in how he treasured each word Barney sent home — also had things to say about the life of the mind. During Barney's second month at school, his father reminded him that

th[e] main thing is to train your mind in clear and straight thinking. The habits of thought you are forming now will stay with you as long as you live and will brand you either as a clear and careful thinker or as a careless and slovenly one. ... It may be hard to decide as to the importance of some subjects but ther[e] is no doubt whatever that the most important is English because it is you[r] medium of exchange of ideas. You will get practically all your information through this medium and unless you live in a foreign country three fourths at least of the expression of your life will be through this medium.

Nor were the exchanges between son and parents devoid of humor (at least from the son's side). More than once, when pleading for money, or the endorsement of a purchase, Barney addressed his letter "Dear Omnipotens." Frequently, throughout his life, he referred to his parents in the third person as "Hon. Pa" or "Hon. Ma."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Restless Genius by Richard J. Tofel. Copyright © 2009 Richard J. Tofel. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Introduction,
1. Hoosier Beginnings,
2. A Newspaper's Origins,
3. "Dear George",
4. Covering the Great Depression,
5. "What's News",
6. Washington,
7. Managing Editor,
8. Over the Hump,
9. The Boom Begins,
10. "A Classic in the History of Newspapering",
11. National Success,
12. A Newspaper with "Flair",
13. Interrupted,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Sources,
Notes,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

One of the forgotten titans in American journalism, Barney Kilgore is the subject of a new book by Tofel, a former assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal and author of Sounding the Trumpet. A Midwesterner from Indiana, Kilgore emerged from smalltown America to rise through the ranks at the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the Great Depression. Through the war years of the 1940s into the Cold War era, he reshaped the publication's news focus, visuals, composition, circulation and advertising. He championed a unique style of journalism as its top executive, with keen instincts, intelligence and a progressive view, transforming the broadsheet into a first-class national business newspaper. Innovative and unyielding, Kilgore had one of his finest moments when he faced down General Motors in a controversial 1954 advertising spat, bolstering the newspaper's reputation. Tofel's excellent work on this pivotal figure in journalism is a significant addition to the seminal books on American media. (Feb.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

While Barney Kilgore might not be widely known to many outside of the newspaper industry, the Wall Street Journal, which evolved out of his lifetime of hard work, is certainly known to businesspeople and informed readers around the world. The story of Kilgore and this influential newspaper is captured in a compelling biography by Tofel (Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939), former managing editor and assistant publisher of the Journal. This is not only an account of one man's life during the Depression and the New Deal but also a history of the Journal in particular and business and financial newspapers in general. The cutting-edge ideas and writing style that Kilgore developed transformed the paper from a narrowly focused financial bulletin to the leading business news source it is today. What makes this work especially appealing is the incorporation of the many letters Kilgore wrote to his father, giving the reader a glimpse into this esteemed newsman's way of thinking about his newspaper and the news of the day. Recommended for all libraries, especially those with business and communications collections.
—Donna Marie Smith

Library Journal

Short biography of the man who turned the Wall Street Journal into the most successful paper in America. Having taken only a single economics course at DePauw University, Barney Kilgore arrived in New York City in 1929 to accept a reporting job at the Journal a mere seven weeks before the biggest market meltdown in the nation's history. During the course of his nearly 40-year career he would hold every important position at the paper, revolutionize the notion of business news and turn the enterprise founded by Charles Dow and Edward Jones into a national force. As a field reporter during the Great Depression, Kilgore wrote not for bankers, but for bank depositors, for and from the perspective not of insiders, but of readers, believing business news should be broadly understood as affecting everyone who makes a living. Despite access to a trove of Kilgore's personal letters, former Journal assistant publisher Tofel (Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address, 2005, etc.) recovers little of this buttoned-up Midwesterner's inner life, but the story here is mostly about the Journal's transformation. The author supplies a potted history of the paper, a look at the Bancroft family (especially C.W. Barron), who owned the Journal for 105 years, and mini-portraits of Bill Kerby, Vermont Royster, William Henry Grimes and Casey Hogate, all instrumental to the rise of Kilgore and the Journal. The changes Kilgore wrought, stylistic and substantive, included using anecdotal leads and "nut grafs" to give stories a magazine feel, employing front-page news summaries, establishing nationwide printing plants, adopting the Electric-Typesetter and attending to the new science ofopinion polling. All helped shoot the Journal ahead of competitors, giving the paper sufficient clout and credibility to prevail in a memorable 1955 face-off with the country's largest corporation, General Motors, when the unhappy giant threatened to pull advertising over a dispute with the paper's coverage. Good reading for students of journalism and for general readers interested in the history of an extraordinary institution, acquired last year by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Kirkus Reviews

Barney Kilgore is a legend to those of us who work in journalism. Now Richard Tofel brings him to life for a wide audience in this vivid, insightful, compelling biography. With traditional journalism under siege from the Internet, the story of how Kilgore created and implemented new and higher standards of reporting and writing couldn’t be more timely. More than any single person, Kilgore made The Wall Street Journal the pillar of journalism it is today and hopefully will remain for many generations.—James B. Stewart, author of Den of Thieves and DisneyWar

"[Restless Genius] could not have come at a better time. Here was a man far ahead of his time. And now, by a strange twist of circumstance, he is now ahead of our time, as well." —Columbia Journalism Review“Restless Genius, Richard J. Tofel’s compelling biography of Barney Kilgore, recounts the growth of The Wall Street Journal from narrow trade publication to national business daily. It is a must read for anyone who cares about business journalism and the business of journalism.”—Norman Pearlstine, Chief Content Officer, Bloomberg, and author of Off the Record

“Richard J. Tofel has given us an original, fascinating, and vivid account of the life of an original, fascinating, and vivid man—Barney Kilgore, who, Tofel brilliantly argues, created modern journalism. As the architect of The Wall Street Journal, Kilgore, beginning at an amazingly young age, invented much of what we take for granted in newspapers, magazines, and online today. Too little known, Kilgore is one of those American figures who needed a great writer to bring him out of the mists of history, and Tofel has done it splendidly. Kilgore would be proud.”—Jon Meacham, editor, Newsweek, and author of American Lion

Wall Street Journal

A portrait of the man who did so much to shape the modern Wall Street Journal.

By Myron Kandel

In August 1958, John Hay Whitney, who was days away from buying the New York Herald Tribune, tried to woo Barney Kilgore away from The Wall Street Journal and its corporate parent, Dow Jones & Co. Though Whitney failed in his effort — he wanted Kilgore to leave the leadership of Dow Jones and run the Trib instead — he did elicit from Kilgore a long outline suggesting ways in which the Trib could best position itself to thrive in an increasingly competitive newspaper environment. (For example, Kilgore said, make the news "more accessible to the average reader.") The Herald Tribune did manage to survive for a while — before finally succumbing in 1966, after two devastating New York newspaper strikes.

Richard J. Tofel begins "Restless Genius" with this anecdote and rightly so: It shows Kilgore's high standing in the newspaper world of his time, a useful bit of instruction for readers — especially readers of this newspaper — who benefit from the legacy of Kilgore's ideas and innovations but who may not be aware of his name. Mr. Tofel's book is both an engrossing biography of Kilgore (1908-67) and an appreciation of his work as a newspaperman — his role, as Mr. Tofel's subtitle has it, in "the invention of modern journalism."

Born and raised in Indiana, the son of a school superintendent turned insurance salesman, Leslie Bernard Kilgore (called "Barney" by nearly everyone) was intellectually precocious. At age 16, he entered DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where he eventually edited the campus newspaper and developed friendships with some talented young journalists who would later become his colleagues at The Wall Street Journal. Nearing graduation, he applied for a job at the Journal and started work there in September 1929, seven weeks before the Crash. Three months later he was posted to the paper's West Coast edition, with the title of San Francisco news editor. At 23, he began writing a column, which to his delight was also published in the New York edition. He became Washington bureau chief at 26, managing editor at 32 and general manager of Dow Jones & Co. at 34.

Kilgore believed in humanizing articles on even complicated subjects, insisting that editors and writers try to make room in news stories, whenever possible, for anecdotes, narrative details and portraits of individuals, thus bringing topics alive for that "average reader." But he also had a sophisticated understanding of the Journal's core subject areas, not least economic matters. He was often sharply critical of FDR's New Deal programs, even though the president publicly praised his work on several occasions.

While researching his biography, Mr. Tofel — who worked at the Journal in several capacities, including assistant managing editor and assistant publisher (he left the paper in 2004) — was allowed access to 30 years of correspondence between Kilgore and his father. One letter, written when Barney was just starting at DePauw, epitomizes the elder Kilgore's stern but loving persona. "The main thing is to train your mind in clear and straight thinking," he wrote to his son. "The habits of thought you are forming now will stay with you as long as you live." It is not hard to see how such words themselves helped to form the man who would, for decades, define the Journal's reportorial voice and defend its integrity.

In his early years at the paper's helm, Kilgore introduced front-page summary columns and, more important, spruced up the paper's content and writing, introducing the famous anecdotal "leaders." His changes broadened the Journal's appeal beyond the financial community to the business world at large. He raised the paper's stature in other ways as well. While it may be hard to believe today, in the mid-1950s General Motors was so powerful, and its advertising so important, that few publications dared risk its displeasure. But the Journal engaged in some very aggressive reporting on the auto industry, culminating in a report that included unauthorized illustrations of upcoming GM models. The company was furious and pulled its advertising. Kilgore stood his ground, and GM backed down.

Although Kilgore led The Wall Street Journal to new levels of editorial achievement — and also supervised its huge growth in circulation and revenue — he did suffer one notable journalistic setback, with a paper he created. It was The National Observer, a weekly that began in 1962. Self-described as a "new kind of publication," the Observer strove to provide good writing and astute interpretation on a mix of subjects, including what it called "the business of living." It was the first truly general-interest national newspaper, and it arrived two decades before the birth of USA Today. Despite strong circulation, the Observer never obtained enough advertising to make itself profitable, and it died 15 years after its birth.

Mr. Tofel contends that The Observer, with its emphasis on explanatory journalism, was ahead of its time and even now could provide lessons to newspapers struggling to hold on to readers in a digital age. "More than a few reporters and editors," he writes, "thought that Kilgore, sometime during the sixties, would have found a way" to keep the Observer going.

Kilgore retired as president of Dow Jones in 1966, confident that he was leaving the company and the newspaper in good hands. He died the following year, just after his 59th birthday. The Journal's circulation, which was under 32,000 when he became managing editor in 1941, was then just about one million. It later rose to two million. It is hard not to think that, were Barney Kilgore alive today, he would be saddened by the perilous state into which most of the nation's newspapers have fallen but would also be hard at work trying to revive their fortunes.

Mr. Kandel was the last financial editor of the New York Herald Tribune and the founding financial editor of CNN.

From the Publisher