The Press: The Trib’s Mrs. Reid

In the cavernous ballroom of Manhattan’s plushy Waldorf-Astoria, rich-voiced Paul Robeson recited 1,300 words of poetic prose written for the occasion by Radio Writer Norman Corwin and dedicated to an atomic world: “Set Your Clock at U-235.” Then came General of the Army George C. Marshall, to say less flamboyantly that “there appear to be no short cuts to a better world.” Two nights and 39 speeches later, the 14th annual New York Herald Tribune Forum on Current Problems had done its duty by its solemn theme, “Responsibility of Victory.” Four Cabinet members, statesmen of a half-dozen nations, scientists, generals and spokesmen for plain people—ranging from a German P.O.W. to Cartoonist Bill Mauldin—had had their say.

Up from Appleton. The prestigious Forum is the pet child of the New York Herald Tribune’s tiny, self-assured vice president, Mrs. Ogden Reid. The newspaper business has no comparable public-service venture. It also has no one who quite compares with Mrs. Reid. Eleventh child of an Appleton, Wis. family, she was all set to teach Latin when she left Manhattan’s Barnard College, 42 years ago. Instead she took a job in New York as social secretary to Mrs. Whitelaw Reid and proceeded to memorize the Social Register.

In London, where Whitelaw Reid was the U.S. Ambassador, the Reids’ efficient secretary met the Reids’ carefree son. Ogden and Helen Rogers were married in Appleton. Old Whitelaw Reid had taken over the Tribune after Horace Greeley’s death in 1872; Ogden inherited it. Helen Reid stayed away from the Trib until her husband called for help in 1918, when $15 million of the family fortune had been pumped into it.

With the same energy she had put into suffrage fights, she helped bring the palsied Tribune back to life. She learned to sell advertising the hard way—on the street. She had a lot to say in the Trib’s rise to its present high place, a pinnacle that would seem even higher if the view were not obscured by its great morning rival, the Times. The Trib is sixth in circulation among Manhattan’s nine daily newspapers, but far higher than most of the others in the quality of its writing and its coverage, and its typography. In some departments, notably music and the dance, its critics are superior to the Times’s. Under Mrs. Reid, the hiring & firing has shown spotty judgment. A good man like Columnist Franklin P. Adams was let go; Walter Lippmann was brought in; so was Lucius Beebe, with his ormolu prose. In the days of Alva Johnston and of Stanley Walker, the Trib’s city coverage was the sprightliest in town.

Editorially its policy has wandered up & down, but usually ends up being right wing at home and left wing abroad, in a Republican sort of way. Under Mrs. Reid, the feminists have had their day; the Trib now has 13 women reporters out of 60 on the local staff, and a half-dozen women executives. The Trib’s world, however, proved not big enough to hold both Mrs. Reid and one of her hired feminists, Dorothy Thompson, who declared for Roosevelt in 1940, and dealt herself off the Trib.

“First Mate.” At 62 the Herald Tribune’s First Lady lives on the double She gets to her sixth-floor corner office (right above Ogden’s) by 9 a.m. to start ticking off appointments with Trib admen, women executives, customers, bigwig guests. Some are asked to lunch upstairs. Smoking Parliaments herself but filling a bowl on her desk with Chesterfields for her guests, Mrs. Reid calmly keeps two phones and two secretaries clicking all day. She never raises her voice, but it takes on a brittle edge when impatience brings a glitter to her grey-green eyes.

From the wall behind her, regal Mrs. Whitelaw Reid’s photograph backs her up. Helen Reid calls herself “Ogden Reid s first mate,” and as such she seldom sets her well-shod foot in the composing room, never writes for the Trib—though she talks things over with those who do—almost never bothers City Editor Lessing L. Engelking. His staff seldom sees her expensively suited figure—except when she drops into Jack Bleeck’s bar next door for an occasional democratic drink, she has given up quarterbacking the Monday-morning advertising sales meetings, since I have more capable people.”

In the winter her days end at her East 84th Street town house. Summers she commutes from “the cottage,” a 30-room adjunct of Ophir Hall, the uninhabited Reid castle at suburban White Plains, N.Y.

Her pets include a Welsh Corgi named Bambi, a Labrador retriever named Rheti Butler, a Persian cat named Wahoo Purryanna.

These days there is little time for the North Carolina duck-shooting place, the lodge in the Adirondacks, for tennis and camping and sailing on Long Island Sound, all of which she loves. Nor for Society, which she does not.

Mrs. Reid’s husband and titular boss is currently on a Pacific tour. Both their sons 32-year-old Whitelaw (“Whitie ), a Navy flyer, and 20-year-old Ogden (“Brownie”), a paratrooper, are in the Pacific. Their mother is glad that they both like the newspaper business. One her favorite postwar plans, she says, is to get them into it, and herself out.