The Press: TRO for HNG

One day last week a chattering teletype in the Chicago Tribune wire room hammered out a note from its Washington bureau: “The file . . . will be signed TRO.” That made oldtimers feel a little older. For 35 years the Washington file had signed off with “HNG.”

HNG stood for Arthur Sears Henning, the Trib’s softspoken, acid-penned Washington bureau chief. He had been in Washington since 1909 and had seemed as permanent as the Washington Monument. But six years ago, ailing Correspondent Henning had turned over the actual running of the Trib’s eleven-man bureau to pudgy, bouncing Walter Trohan, 46. Last week, at 72, Henning turned over the title of bureau chief as well.

Angles & Stuff. If few Washington correspondents cared much for Arthur Henning’s copy, most of them were fond of him personally. A gentle, friendly little man with iron-grey hair and a big, upturned grin, he is, in the words of a veteran colleague, “the nicest, mildest-mannered guy you’d ever want to meet. Then you read that stuff he writes and it’s startling.”

The most startling story came after the last election. Early Wednesday morning he wrote: “Dewey and Warren won a sweeping victory . . . yesterday.”

Although Henning’s Washington copy usually reflected the crotchets of Tribune Publisher Robert R. McCormick, no one ever accused Henning of deliberately angling a story. Said a fellow correspondent: “You have to give him credit for good faith. He actually believes the stuff he’s writing, just as McCormick does.”

Henning joined the Trib in 1899, a cub from Chicago’s City News Bureau. After a stint at general assignments and politics, he went to Washington and became bureau chief in 1914. Henning was one of the favored reporters William Howard Taft called in for press conferences around the Cabinet table. There, Taft regaled them with droll stories, “shaking,” says Henning, “like a bowl full of jelly.” Henning found Woodrow Wilson irascible and short-tempered, and Calvin Coolidge a man who “would talk your arm off if you gave him a chance.”

Henning had seen more of Washington politics than any other correspondent, and Bertie McCormick had no intention of letting such a man go. Reporter Henning will continue to draw his regular pay, $35,000 a year, and to write and broadcast weekly over the Trib’s WGN on Washington affairs as a “correspondent emeritus.”

Spooks & Sneezes. In witty, talkative Walter Trohan, a member of the Washington bureau since 1934, McCormick had a successor who could ably carry on the Tribune’s own kind of search for truth. In 1941, Trohan “scooped” the country on the “fact” that British agents, in Washington, were wining & wenching on Lend-Lease money (said Franklin D. Roosevelt: a dirty falsehood).

As the ghostwriter of Jim Farley’s memoirs, Trohan had stirred up many a cat & dogfight among old New Dealers. But Trohan, who will get $19,000 a year, is also an able spring-legged reporter when he puts himself to it; he scooped everyone on President Truman’s abortive plan to send Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow. Like Henning, Trohan believes in the infallibility of Colonel McCormick. Says he: “When the Colonel sneezes, the walls reverberate throughout the Tribune Tower, and even here in the bureau. But the Colonel pays for the reverberations.”