[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: This is Mary Marshall Clark. I'm interviewing Eileen Shanahan. This is session number twelve of our oral history and the last session. Today is May 22, 1994, and we're actually in the home of Betsy Wade in New York where we did a video yesterday of Betsy and Eileen.*

Hi.

Shanahan: Hi.

Clark: How's that for an introduction?

Shanahan: Wonderful!

Clark: Okay. All right. We're going to pick up where we left off in the last session, which was the death of the Washington Star.

Shanahan: Yes. And when that sad event—I still miss that paper—happened, I knew that I either had to get a job in a Washington bureau of a newspaper, which is very hard to do because they generally promote their own people to that plum job, and people who know about where they came from, which is valuable, or else I was going to have to leave town. That's how it turned out. I wanted to be as close as I could. I found something driveable—Pittsburgh, a five-hour drive, a forty-five minute flight—and was then into a commuter marriage, which I don't recommend to anybody, and that's really why I quit after two and a half years.

But it was a wonderful job. At the age of fifty-seven to go somewhere where you don't know a single soul. There was actually one other former Star person, a sportswriter, on the other paper in Pittsburgh, and we saw each other once in a while but not much. It was hard for me personally and professionally—my husband was always my balance wheel who would let me scream and shout and stomp and cry and then would say, "Okay, enough already now. You know you're not being realistic, you shouldn't have expected what you expected," and so on.

It's also journalistically—it's hard to learn about a city as an editor. If you're out there on the street as a reporter and you get a sense of the community and the mayor and whatever else you need, it would be much easier. For an editor, it's all coming at you at second-hand, through the eyes of a reporter. And I'm vain enough about my reporting ability to think that if I'd been out there, I would have seen something more than what they saw, or something different.

In fact, I think the fact that the big chains who now own a very large percentage of newspapers with a very large percentage of all the circulation and who move their editors around constantly from place to place—I think that's one of the main causes of the deterioration of local reporting in newspapers today. The reason commonly ascribed for that is that they're saving money, they're filling the papers with wire-service copy from across the country and abroad, which makes you think when you first look at them, "Oh, gee, they're doing a good job of covering the serious news."

But then you look and there's hardly any local news. And saving money is a big part of the reason. But I think part of the reason is that those editors mostly didn't grow up where they are now in the chains, or go to school there, or have any real roots there. And if you don't understand the history, you don't understand

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* The videotaped interview session was not transcribed. It is available for viewing at Columbia University Oral History Research Office, the National Press Club Library, and California State University at Sacramento.

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the importance of the story. So from my own experience, I think more than I did before Pittsburgh, that it's a bad idea to put in editors who have no roots in the community. You can't learn it all.

Pittsburgh was a very backward place compared to Washington. Not the paper; the paper was wonderful. The editor John Craig, is someone I came to respect enormously and like enormously. And he taught me a lot, just watching him, how he planned, how he always had in mind who was the next person he'd put in that job if this person left and so on, and when he chewed people out and when he bolstered them. He would answer any question I asked him about, "What did you do that?" And he would tell me. I learned a lot about management from him, how to check references, a lot of very useful stuff.

But the city, I came to see, was fifteen years behind Washington in its attitudes toward women and forty years on blacks. Unbelievable! To give you an example about women—this happened actually after I left but I heard about it—there were two very good young women on the paper who were each having their second babies, not too long after I left there. They were not real close friends but of course they knew each other and they got to talking. And each of them had separately come to the conclusion that they really didn't want to come back to work full-time with two children. It was a six-day paper because it was a joint operating agreement with the Pittsburgh Press which had the Sunday paper. I guess I didn't—did I mention the name of the paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The two of them went in to Craig and said, "Could we split a job, each of us work three days?" And Craig said, "Sure. Okay. Fine. Wonderful." Well, the Newspaper Guild grieved it, said that that shouldn't be done. And at the Guild meeting, I have been told by reliable reporters, the then-president of the Guild unit stood up and said, "The purpose of the Newspaper Guild is to protect the jobs of men who have families to support." Well, I am happy to tell you that he was challenged for reelection and lost the next time around. But the fact that anybody could say that in 1984 or '85 is pretty remarkable.

I got to do a lot of good stuff in Pittsburgh, the metro desk and the state desk were under me, all the hard news, basically, except for sports, and I was also special projects editor, as I had, of course, also been at the Star and we got to do some good stuff. The staff tended to be very old or very young. The older people, for the most part, were not terribly good. They were people who just kind of put in time and had stayed there while the brighter ones had gone on to the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Wall Street Journal or whatever.

And then some young people, many of them Penn State graduates which has a good journalism program—they were green but they were wonderful and they wanted to learn and they loved working with somebody with my experience, and even loved how tough I was on the copy, after it was over. And we did some great stuff.

I guess one of my favorite stories was done by one of the young women. It was about constables, which they still have in Pennsylvania, who have no training for their jobs, there's no requirement, anybody can run for constable, they are armed, and they shoot people. Kill them. And so a complete exposé. The writer came to me and said she wanted to do this. There had been one such shooting right in the Pittsburgh area but she did a statewide story. And it resulted in reform. And she only came in second for the AP managing editors' prize, which I was sorry about.

We did a bunch of other good stuff. And in the process—more than at the Star because the raw material coming to me was weaker than at the Star which had a very sophisticated, highly capable staff. There were hardly any duds whatever, either for youth or age or any other reason on the Washington Star. These kids in Pittsburgh weren't duds, they were wonderful, they were just green. But the copy coming to me was much less sophisticated than the copy as it came to me at the Star and so I had to do a lot more editing, reorganizing.

To this day, I love the longer story and really shaping it up and getting it organized right, which often you can shorten it, if you organize it right. And I had no help there. On the Star there were people to come right in and ask me what sort of pictures I might need and then they took it from there, or graphics and so on.

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In Pittsburgh—well, I obviously had photographers and graphics artists, headline writers and so on to do those things that I didn't do. But I had to think it all up myself. It was great training for my subsequent career running a magazine.

Clark: What was the circulation?

Shanahan: Poor. About 180,000 when I was there. They have since—the other paper fomented a strike with the Teamsters and subsequently went out of business. And the Post-Gazette bought it so that now it's a monopoly and I think the paper is economically healthy. But for a metropolitan area of a million and half, it was a tiny circulation and a tiny paper. There were days at the bottom of the '81-83 recession, which is when I was there, when the whole paper was twenty-eight pages. I say that to people in journalism and they think I mean the "A" section. No! The whole paper.

One other little thing that's kind of worth telling, it's a great, typical—you'll recognize it—feminist story. I was the only woman in the daily front page meeting, which I think I described in the Star part, where the various section editors and the copy editors trooped into the editor's office and talked about what you have for tomorrow's paper and figured out what ought to go on page one, and also any longer term stuff in the pipeline and so on. And that's a very standard thing on all daily papers.

Well, there I was the only woman. And there's always a lot of chatter—usually, there is, unless you've got a giant story that everybody's got to get back to work right away. There's a certain leisurely pace to those meetings frequently and very often they would start with some conversation about sports. Well, I got there in October of '81, which means right into the football season, right? And so there was lots of conversation about football which I don't care for. I don't follow it. I'm sort of a bred-to-the-bone Washington Redskins fan but I don't know the names of anybody but the megastars.

So I just sat there while they talked football. Then came hockey with a new team in Pittsburgh, and I've never followed hockey so I didn't say anything. And then came basketball which I know a little more about but I'm not very interested in. And finally came spring and baseball. And the very first day somebody mentioned something about baseball—I love baseball and I know something about baseball. And at some point, I just spoke right up and said something. They never mentioned baseball again. It was the clearest case—and it's in a lot of feminist books—of using conversation about sports to exclude women. It was absolutely remarkable.

Clark: How did you respond? Or did you?

Shanahan: I didn't. I didn't overtly respond at all, just tucked it away as an incredible experience. And they would even sometimes get to discussing a movie that I hadn't seen, especially violent movies. Somehow they probably found out that I didn't like violent movies—the Mafia movie, I can't think of its name.

Clark: "Godfather."

Shanahan: "Godfather" and "Godfather II" and long discussions about which—"Godfather II" was better than "Godfather I," and so forth, and I had seen neither one, so I would just sit there. I don't know whether Jack Craig was conscious of that or not. I did find no lack of respect for me on his part or any intent to downplay me.

I guess we probably need to move on a little quickly.

Clark: Well, just a quick question.

Shanahan: Oh, you've got questions. All right.

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Clark: You were there how long?

Shanahan: Two and a half years was all.

Clark: Two and a half years. Looking at it overall, what do you think your major accomplishments or major things that you weren't happy about were?

Shanahan: Well, I think the major accomplishment was the longer stories. They had done some but not a lot. The value of those stories, that they were worth the time put into them, they gave the paper a heft, you could really explain stuff in a way that you can't in the breaking daily story, and they have continued to do that since I went, as they now have more resources, after the merger, I expect.

My principal disappointment, I guess, I never did win acceptance in that newsroom. Those people have—Pittsburgh has a terrible inferiority complex. And there I come in from the distinguished Washington Star and the top of the heap New York Times. I purposely never mentioned the New York Times the whole time I was there. I did mention the Star—tell a few anecdotes. But there were a lot of people there, I was an outsider, who really wanted me to go away and I always knew that. And that's very difficult to live with, especially when you haven't got your husband there to come home and tell how terrible it is.

I did make some good women friends in Pittsburgh and people I'd have never met in Washington because there are so many journalists in Washington that we all have—too many of our friends are journalists. In Pittsburgh, everybody on the paper was either—with the exception of the food editor who became a great friend. We went to the theater together. I went to the theater with her and her husband. Everybody there was either my boss or my subordinate, which puts limitations on friendship. I didn't want to be friends with people on the other paper, basically, because we were in fierce competition. But I discovered as the assistant managing editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I could call any woman in town and say who I am and "I'd like to meet you," and we'd have dinner.

My two best friends were women I'd never otherwise have known, the president of a small Catholic girls college, who was just wonderful, and the headmistress of one of the two very hoity-toity private girls' schools. The first time—she came after I was there—the first time I had dinner with her, I said, "Tell me the difference between your school and the other school." And she said, "Oh, in the other school when they talk about diversifying the student body they mean maybe they will let in Jews." Her school already had blacks, and she added to that.

Sister Mary Louise Fennell, of the Catholic college, was very liberal. I never brought up the subject of abortion. I assumed we would disagree. But one night when I was having dinner with her, she kind of sunk into the chair at the restaurant and said, "Boy, did I pull one off today!" I said, "What did you do, Weezy?" And she said, "Well, one of the smartest girls in my school is pregnant and her father has thrown her out of the house. And I thought about—she's a good Catholic girl, abortion is not an option with her. I went to my most pro-choice trustee and I said to him, 'She can make a good life for herself and that child if she can finish college. I can give her free tuition. You have to find her a place to live, now and after the baby is born, including day care.'" She said he swallowed hard and said okay.

Clark: Wow!

Shanahan: I figured I could get along with somebody who was against abortion who was like that.

Clark: Great. [Tape interruption.]

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Shanahan: It was a good job, as I said, but I really didn't like living the way I was living, with my husband in Washington and a great drive to go home every weekend, while at the same time if somebody asked me out to dinner in Pittsburgh, I thought to learn the community I ought to go. So I wound up going home maybe once every three weekends. And it was just a hard way to live. Though the job was wonderful, I decided to leave.

We had rented the house and John had moved into an apartment and the lease was up in June of '84. So actually, I made up my mind I had to come back to Washington over Christmas of '83. I came back and told the editor and told him that I didn't really want to go back to Washington till June but I thought I'd give him all this notice if it was okay with him. He said, "Absolutely. Stay as long as you like." So I did come back the 1st of June, 1984. My older daughter not much later became pregnant with her first child, still her only child, and I probably would have come back for that, if not earlier.

I had found a job in that period, which was teaching in Medill School, Northwestern University, Washington Journalism Program, which I thought I would love and I didn't quite. It was like running a little newsroom. The kids came—the students in the graduate program came to Washington and were the reporters, the Washington correspondents for small papers, clients' papers all over the country who got this service free except for paying transmission charges and so on. So it was like running a little newsroom.

And there was a lot about it that I really liked. I discovered I couldn't stand the kids who just wanted a certificate, who just wanted a degree and didn't care about what they were doing. A lot of people, when you say that to them, think that means I just liked the "A" students. Not so. There were kids that almost flunked who gave a damn and I loved them. And others whom I had to give a good grade to—not usually because the ones who were just trying not very hard just wanted the degree.

But it was interesting. It was all part of some further growth on my part. I didn't mention in Pittsburgh that I came to understand state and local government and how it is to live in a real place. I grew up in Washington, D.C., which is part of no county, no state, the whole governmental structure is different. And for many years we didn't even have home rule. We had an appointed government in Washington.

So I learned about a real place. I learned, after all my years in Washington, that people in a state really feel they know their governor. They don't feel they know their senator. They think the governor's much more important than the senator and they're right because he has real decision-making authority. That was enormously valuable to me, just to kind of think about the city and the county. County government happens to be quite important in Pennsylvania; it isn't everywhere.

So there was a lot of learning there that was good. And then, with the Medill job, in a way I was back to what I'd done with Cronkite, as an editor, filing Washington news of importance to specific regions, which our client papers ranged from Montana to South Carolina to Wisconsin to New Jersey. And I understood—got refreshed on that whole area. Quit actually, after five quarters. I would otherwise have stayed and might be there yet, although I was at that time a little reluctant about leaving journalism, the active practice thereof myself, in a way.

But I quit in a dispute over money. The then dean informed everybody that we would get paid less for the summer session, summer quarter. Well, that was ridiculous. It was the same length of time, it had a large number of students, and I wrote him a letter saying, "Sorry. You'd have to be a fool to teach in Washington in the summertime for less money than I make in the winter and I won't do it." I never heard a word. And so I figured, okay, he knows. Called his secretary, made sure he'd gotten the letter. Yes, he had. And then the first check arrives and it's for the reduced amount. And we got into a hell of a fight about it. And you could say he fired me, for being contentious about this.

We're not talking pennies here. We're talking $6,000. He paid. He paid it. Anyway, so there I am, out of work again. It took me eleven weeks to find the job in Pittsburgh from the Star, which I was told was very fast.

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The headhunters, who never did me a scrap of good though I registered with several, had said, "You've got to figure on a week for every thousand dollars of your salary." Oops, I don't know where that rule came from. Maybe they're exaggerating so people won't think they aren't doing any good.

And then between the time I quit Medill and the time I got to Congressional Quarterly was less than that. It was seven weeks. Congressional Quarterly is a great institution. I had passed the word among my friends and acquaintances that I was looking for a job. And don't think I'm too good for any job, just because I've been assistant managing editor of the Star and assistant managing editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I had tried some freelancing. I hated the loneliness of that life. And I said, "I will take any respectable job in journalism."

Well, someone to whom I had said that called me up one day and said, "Congressional Quarterly's reporter who's covering the tax bill"—the '86 tax act, which was the biggest piece of tax legislation in a very long time—"is very pregnant and leaving." And they were in an absolute panic about it. I had covered tax legislation beginning—I've been covering taxes since 1961, one way and another. So I went around and applied for the job.

I'd never met the editor. We each knew who the other one was. And we talked about it and then he said to me, "Well, Pam"—Pam Fessler whom I was replacing, the woman who was pregnant—he said, "Pam does plan to come back after she has the baby. But I'm not going to offer you a temporary job. What would you like to do after she comes back?" And I said, "Well, I could do this or this or this," editing jobs, reporting jobs, various things. But then I talked to him, and this was something I'd been thinking about for a very long time, the need for more coverage of state and local governments on a national basis. I'd thought about this ever since the near-bankruptcy of New York City in the mid-70's, when the Times assigned me to look at other city governments and see if others were hovering on the same dangerous brink. I found a couple—Cleveland and Providence, Rhode Island.

Newspapers cover their own state and local governments. Very rarely did you ever see a piece that puts it all in a national context. "We're doing this in our state, and maybe they're doing that in the state next door." But hardly ever was that done. The New York Times started to do that in the 1970's. It created a team of four guys—good guys but still all guys—who made a start at that. I wanted to be part of that team, but they saw the story as more social policy than economic—or at least that was the answer I was given. They were just blind to the budget problems that would hamper efforts to fix things. Anyway, the group of four did some very good stuff but then the decline and fall of Richard Nixon came about and the key person on the team, John Herbers, was sent to the White House, so you had two top-drawer people on the White House as Nixon was going down the tubes. And they never reinstated the urban affairs team, really.

But that started me thinking about it. And then all the various experience I had had, thinking about state and local government, in Pittsburgh, with Medill and so on. When I was coming back to Washington, before I found the Medill job, I was hoping to find somebody, at the Post maybe, who would hire me—though I knew I probably couldn't go to the Post because John was there though not in the newsroom—but someplace that might hire me to do that, a news magazine—heaven help us, I'm glad I didn't get the job. They're terrible places to work. But to do that, to create a beat covering state and local government.

Well, when I talked to Peter Harkness about the tax job, and he asked me what I would like to do after the woman I was replacing came back, I then, after offering some lesser and more realistic things, said, "But do you know what I think Congressional Quarterly really ought to do? You ought to add a whole section to the "Weekly Report"—that's their basic publication—covering state and local government, because today with Republicans in the White House who don't believe in government, that's where the interesting stuff is going on nationally, the creative stuff. I had for some time been saving "string"—news clips and press releases on the subject. Well, Harkness almost came up out of his chair and said, "No, no, no, no. Not a special section in the 'Weekly Report,' a whole new magazine."

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Clark: Oh, wonderful.

Shanahan: He had been thinking about it for ten years but had not—because he had some problems, I think, with the guy above him—had not moved on it. And he suddenly saw me as the person who could realize this vision.

Clark: In other words, he wouldn't have been able to articulate it because of his problems with the guy above him?

Shanahan: Well, he may have—no, no, he actually had done a prototype or a little bit of a prototype many years previously, for example, and somehow there just—partly, he may not have had the drive himself. But in any event, it didn't happen, but it was something he'd thought about for a long period of time.

So I got the job covering the rest of the '86 tax bill which was enough to tell me that maybe I didn't really want to do Washington reporting any more. I had a good time doing it but I knew it was finite. It was over in eight months when the Congress ended, and it was a big story and it was fun to do. All the movers and shakers read CQ, not the public at large, so it's a nice audience and you have good access to people because everybody in Congress reads it and knows who else reads it.

I had no promise except that there would be a job after the end of the tax bill and after Pam Fessler came back. But about ten minutes after Congress finished doing the tax bill, Peter relieved me of all my other duties and said, "Start planning this magazine." So I was sitting there in the middle of the CQ newsroom doing that. Meanwhile, he's telling—not his boss in Washington who was kind of a stultifying hand on things, but the big bosses down in St. Pete. [St. Petersburg, Florida]

Clark: Are you talking Eugene Patterson?

Shanahan: Exactly, Eugene Patterson. The St. Petersburg Times owns Congressional Quarterly and then in turn owned Governing magazine. I guess I may not have said the word so far. We are talking about the creation of a magazine called Governing which is all about state and local government, a national monthly, gorgeous four-color magazine. And that is what ensued. I started planning and thinking. I had a file folder that was probably an inch and a half thick into which over the years, as I thought I was going to look for a job, a beat, doing this. I had just kind of thrown a bunch of clippings or articles or whatever, suggesting story ideas to me.

In any event, Peter and I talked about it and I wrote him long memos about—he had originally thought of this publication as a state government report. And I said, "No, it should be state and local because the interrelationships between—what you do with the localities, the tax issues, how you split up the revenue pie, everything you have from federal to state you also have from state to local in terms of problems, areas, taxes, spending, fights, whatever. I quickly saw that that was the case and the publication should be state and local government. He took a little convincing but he saw it my way. [Tape interruption.]

You know, it really is extraordinary to be able to create something. I talked earlier about being one of those who created the beat of national economic policy and one of those—with splendid colleagues—who created the beat of the women's movement, with just dazzling women—they were all women—who were covering that. And now, starting at the age of sixty-two, I created a magazine. It's really remarkable.

It took a lot of nerve. It took a lot of nerve.

Clark: So it was founded when, in 1993?

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Shanahan: No, no.

Clark: Oh, 1990, I mean.

Shanahan: No. No, no. The first issue was October of '87, October of '87. I was released from my other duties, with one exception. I did one more story for CQ, when the Democrats won the Senate. What would the Finance Committee be like with Bentsen as chairman—Lloyd Bentsen who, of course, is secretary of the treasury now. Other than that, from late October '86, I was planning Governing magazine. And our first issue carried the cover date of October '87, though of course, you had to close it about the 25th of August, the way printing magazines goes. That's a lot closer to the date than most magazines, actually, but we knew we were very news oriented.

It's kind of an amazing thing to me, looking back on it, how did I have the nerve? How did I have the nerve to think I could create a magazine? Well, I'm a great magazine reader and I always have been. And part of it was sheer ignorance that emboldens one. I said to myself, "Well, I know what a magazine article is like. I've written a zillion Sunday news and opinion section pieces, haven't I? They're like that."

Well, they really aren't. First of all, a magazine article generally has a point of view, whereas those pieces, even the analytical pieces in the Sunday section or news analyses, you can do some interpreting and assessing and so on, but you can't really say "this works," "this doesn't work," "this was a failure," "this was a success," whatever, which in a magazine piece you not only can do, you probably should do much of the time. And magazine pieces, being generally much longer than newspaper, depend much more on fine writing.

And other things: This was going to be a gorgeous four-color magazine. What did I know from art? I had hung out with some good photographers in my life as a reporter and learned from them and loved to talk to the ones who were really thoughtful instead of those who were just sort of going on raw talent, of whom there are a lot. I've talked to them about their craft but I mean, really, what do you do for illustration? I didn't learn that from having a photographer go with me when I interviewed the secretary of the treasury. It's a whole different thing.

But, like all reporters, I know how to get information when I need it, even in a strange field. I want to say a little something, several somethings, about the magazine business, which is so different in many ways from the news business, even a heavily news oriented magazine like this one. Several hundred magazines a year are started. Most of them don't get past their first—or certainly their second—issue because two guys or two people mortgage their houses and when the $300,000 is gone, they're broke, and they can't continue. I managed to find a multi-billion dollar company to back me, and that's quite a wonderful story.

Clark: Did you have to have any exchanges with Eugene Patterson yourself?

Shanahan: Oh, absolutely.

Clark: Oh, I'm dying to hear that story.

Shanahan: Yes, he's quite a figure, one of the truly great figures of mid-20th century journalism. Let me tell you how it came about. I did a lot of work. I did a dummy table of contents for a first issue. I did long memos about what staff would be needed. I defended the concept of state and local coverage because the people who had to approve this were precisely Eugene Patterson, who was the CEO of the St. Petersburg Times Corporation, which actually technically is owned by the Poynter Institute of which he was the CEO of that, and the guy who now has that job since Patterson retired, Andy Barnes, who was then the editor of the paper. And of course, the bean counter, the treasurer of the company or whatever his title is, whose name will come to me in a minute, [John O'Hearn] who took a dim view of anything that was liable to lose money.

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And then there was a guy who was the supervisor of the affiliates which included statewide business magazines in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. And CQ was considered an affiliate of the paper, the St. Petersburg Times Company.

Patterson and I barely knew each other, through when I was a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors when I was at the Star and at Pittsburgh we had met. But we each knew a lot about the other. And when Harkness hired me, he was quite delighted and wrote me a wonderful little note about it, and then wrote another note when I did a tax story he especially liked. He writes great notes. I've still got them all. They'll find them in my effects when I die.

So Harkness was keeping Patterson informed as to what I was doing. And as I say, I had this stack of memos talking about it. And I had said to Harkness at some point, "Whenever you want to see it, I've got a list—I'll bet you I can give you a list of fifty stories such a magazine ought to do right away," from my folder where I'd been throwing these little notes to myself and clippings for several years. And Harkness always called it the "nifty fifty."

So in due course, and it would have been—I can't tell you the date on this; I could tell you the date of the meeting when they made the decision—all those people, Harkness, Barnes, the bean-counter, Rick Edmonds who was the head of the affiliates came to Washington and with Harkness and me sat around the table. I had meanwhile looked at my nifty fifty in my folder and discovered I had seventy-three ideas that were still viable. So I scampered around and got two more to make it a nice little number of seventy-five and wrote a memo with about, oh, a six-to-eight-line description of each one of these stories.

So in the course of that meeting, I mentioned that I had the memo and handed it to Patterson—I had only the one copy—who sat right there and read the whole thing, and when he had finished said, "You have a magazine."

Clark: Wow!

Shanahan: Well, there was more to it after that. There was real nitty-gritty stuff to do about budgets and really figure out what the cost would be and look into things like art and so on. But then there was a second meeting. It was in December of 1986 when the whole gang trooped up again from St. Pete, talked about budget—well, there were a number of things to be discussed. We had to really discuss to decide was it state or state and local. That decision was made rather easily. We had to decide—the big fight—well, it wasn't exactly a fight—a tug of war I lost and in retrospect I'm very glad I lost it as to whether it was going to be a bi-weekly headed toward becoming weekly and more kind of nuts and bolts like Congressional Quarterly, or a monthly.

Well, this dummy table of contents that I had done had, without my realizing it, really made it look like a monthly: It had news briefs up front and then several long features, and then some other shorter stuff, trimmings in the back and so on. And Patterson was quite adamant about it had to be a monthly, mostly because more frequent publication would run up the cost so much, and Harkness and I originally were broken-hearted about that. I'm very glad. It would have been—I don't know what it would have been as a weekly since, after all, after the decision was made it was going to be a monthly, I stopped thinking about that. But I have a feeling it wouldn't have been as good. And I'll never know and I don't care.

The other decision that had to be made which raised what was to me a shocking concept was whether it would be paid circulation or what they call controlled circulation, which more and more magazines are. You get the magazine free but you have to be a certain kind of a person before you can get it. I mean, American Chef goes only to chefs. There is such a magazine.

There are lots of what the industry calls "niche" magazines, as Governing would be, and it takes millions, I learned, to keep up your circulation. Anybody who takes magazines knows how many times they mail circulation renewal notices to you and you look at it and you say, "For Pete's sake, this is only February

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and it doesn't run out until August. The hell with them!" And so of course, they send reminders to you until you finally subscribe when you meant to subscribe all the time, probably. But that decision was imposed on us, that it was going to be controlled circulation. And at first I thought, "Well, nobody will respect us." Well, that was just further proof that I didn't know anything about the magazine business when I started this.

The time was so ripe. Washington was in such decline after six years of Reagan and the federal budget problems, which got much worse under Bush. They were so terrible that the nation's problems just weren't being dealt with on the federal level. And they were being dealt with, to a substantial degree, on the state and local level.

I have to tell you that finding the big money-bags, just how important it was, in the four plus years that I was the executive editor, we lost millions. Now I think—we believe we would have been profitable in 1990 if the recession hadn't come along and it's going to be profitable this year, 1994. That seems clear as crystal and it makes me extremely happy. I think its survival is now reasonably assured since, earlier this year, we bought out the competition. We, I still say "we," I may say "we" the rest of my days, about Governing. My older daughter, Mary Beth, once said to me—I have two, as you know—"You know, you really have three children, me, Kate, and Governing magazine." And I feel that way. I guess when I stopped being editor and somebody else took over the magazine, it was like your child going off to college and then being married and having a totally separate life of her own. But she's still your child. But I'm happy with all those outcomes.

Well, what they did at that December of 1986 meeting was to say, "Here's a hundred thousand dollars, do a prototype." So we didn't get the absolute final go-ahead at that meeting. And "Do you think you can get it done by the 1st of April?" Well, being a daily newspaper person, I thought that was forever. What? From early December to the 1st of April? Well, of course, with two fingers of my left hand. Well, not quite. I made it but I made it with no time to spare.

And I didn't know that prototypes usually just have the first page of a story as an example, not a full—well, I was ignorant, I did a full-scale magazine of which we printed—I forget, just a few thousand copies to send out to advertisers and a very limited list of public officials. But I did the whole thing, the main features, the shorter stuff, even a book review, and three "op-ed" pieces by officials or professors, everything but a letters page, which you couldn't get with a first issue. We had some good stuff in there, including the personality piece was about Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, because he was head of the Governors Association that year. And it was a very good piece—these were all freelancers I used because I didn't have staff—done by a wonderful writer named Roy Reed who had been on the New York Times and who was now at the journalism school in Arkansas and who had grown up in Arkansas. I put out the prototype with freelancers and a staff of just two, a news assistant and one experienced reporter and editor who did the news briefs, Kathy Sylvester, whom I'd known at the Star. She stayed with the magazine until just last year.

As I look back at it now, the prototype has a million flaws. I've got to tell you that one of the people that deserves a lot of credit for this magazine is a man named Gary Bernloer who was the art director of Georgia Trend magazine, one of the company's business magazines. And they gave him to me for a while, to design the magazine, including that wonderful cover and the nameplate, Governing, which looks the way letters look carved on a building. And I asked him whether he hand-designed the type. He said, "No, that's a standard type; it's called Cathedral." But it was just right for that magazine. It had a sense of officialness about it, I think, kind of a subliminal transmission of the fact that this was all about government.

Clark: What proportion of the decisions did he make about the visuals? I mean, it's striking that there's a lot of variety of visuals in the magazine, from New Yorker type illustrations to wonderful pictures to kind of funny illustrations. It's very visual. Was that your vision or was that his vision? How did that work?

Shanahan: No, not mine. It was his in the prototype and then much expanded and refined by the art director that I hired, which again is a story about maybe how journalists understand how to get information.

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How did I know how to hire an art director? We were just loaned Bernloer for the basic design. Not too much probably survives now though it started off very much based on that and then developed.

Well, at the Washington Star I had worked with one of the great newspaper designers, Eric Seidman, but who had also been in the Time organization and a protegé of a man named Walter Bernard who is one of the giant figures in magazine design, who did the next-to-last redesign of Time, which was wonderful. The current one is ghastly in the opinion of practically everybody. We had become good friends at the Star. Actually, he and I were on the New York Times together, too, and he was in the financial section, the graphics person there, as I mentioned earlier. We happened to start at the Star the very same day and we became great friends and I loved talking to him about design because I'd always been interested, particularly I saw what good charts and graphs could do with an economics story.

So when I'm agonizing over how the hell do I find a good art director, I thought, "Well, Eric may know some," but he mentioned one or two who were all far too expensive for us. And I finally decided, I asked him if he would critique the magazine for me, the prototype, and then as I interviewed people for the job, I would kind of bear in mind what they said about the prototype, compared to what he had said, figuring—I had confidence that he would be right. So I would pick out the one who agreed the most with Eric.

And that's how I found the person I found, basically—Peggy Robertson who had been on the Washington Post on the weekly health tabloid and who had been promised that it would be printed in the Post's razzle-dazzle new plant out in the Virginia suburbs that had all the latest equipment. And instead they printed it in the old downtown plant and she couldn't get any decent color reproduction and she was just fed up with the whole situation that wasn't getting any better. So that's why she was looking for another job. And she'd been on magazines before—mostly magazines, the Post was her first newspaper job. And she heard about us somehow, or I heard about her, I forget. I think she heard about it from somebody. People in magazines kind of know each other, too, and the word was out on their network that there was this new start-up with some money behind it. I had a lot of applicants.

Anyway, I hired her, one of the best decisions I ever made in my entire life. She's temperamental and hard to get along with, and warfare between editors and art people is very traditional. The art people want something that looks nice and different and cutting edge, if they're that kind of person, which she was. And the editors say, "But it has to illustrate the story."

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Shanahan: Some people get so upset about professional arguments. I don't. I figure that's just part of the way it is. And as long as they're professional arguments about what should be done instead of "You're stupid" characterizing, personalizing things, or "You don't know what you're talking about," which people do say to others on the job and shouldn't. Professional arguments about the merits of stories, or art, never bothered me. It bothered her; she cried a lot. She was a very easy crier, I must say. I warned her when I was leaving—because she was ready to leave Governing for some other reasons—that she should watch that. I could stand that, women don't get upset at other women crying because we all know that it's either chemical or training or something that we just don't have the discipline against crying the way men do. So I think it doesn't upset women the way it does men but I told her she really ought to find a way not to do that.

But anyway, she was brilliant and we won design awards right from the start. And the warfare was never over. My all-time favorite picture in that magazine is one she hated—it was in a wonderful story done by, I guess the freelancer we used the most, though we also had staff writers, unlike most magazines, except for the news mags—they have staff writers and most other magazines do not. But it was a wonderful piece done by a guy named Bill Fulton who was a regular freelancer for us, all of it on the subject of economic development; he runs an economic development newsletter in California.

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Clark: This was in March in 1989.

Shanahan: If you've got it there, that must be right.

Clark: And the name of the piece is "In Land-Use Planning, a Second Revolution Shifts Control to the States."

Shanahan: Right. In any event, one of the people he wrote about was a man in Oregon who was the head of some kind of a state commission designed to try and do something about uncontrolled growth that was creating urban sprawl and damaging landscape and all those things uncontrolled growth does. And this particular man was a pig farmer. And he was quoted in Fulton's piece as having said, "Well, any time anybody says they don't want land-use controls, I ask him if they'd like me to move my pig farm right next-door to them."

Anyway, the guy sounded to me like a guy who might be up for doing something a little bit nonstandard. And I called Fulton and I said, "Do you suppose he'd pose with his pigs?" And Bill said, "Oh, sure, I'll bet he will." I mentioned this to Peggy. I don't remember what she said; she positively didn't like the idea. Well, he not only posed with his pigs, pig-pen in the background, he picked up a baby pig—sleeping—and held it in his arms the way you would hold a baby and it was just the most wonderful picture. I'm still in love with that picture. Peggy never did like it—Peggy Robertson, the art director.

But we had had so many pictures of legislators and governors and whatever, standing under a crystal chandelier at the foot of a sweeping oval staircase—they were beautiful pictures but really, they got to be boring. And all those state capitols and other government buildings look a little bit different but they mostly look alike, and enough already! So we started looking for different things. [Tape interruption.]

One of the most glorious things about Governing was that as a startup I was able to hire a whole staff. I didn't inherit any turkeys from anybody, as you normally would going into any management job. And I hired one hell of a staff. I hired people I knew to some degree, Rob Gurwitt from Congressional Quarterly, Kathy Sylvester from the Star, John Martin from Pittsburgh, and some others. John Martin had been state editor in Pittsburgh and had also been state editor on the Atlanta Constitution or Journal, and assistant city editor there, too. So he had certainly good management experience, but all daily-paper, and I'm all daily-paper. So I knew I had to have somebody who knew something about magazines and production schedules as assistant managing editors. John Martin was the managing editor and I started courting him almost the minute I knew we had a go.

But I knew I needed an assistant managing editor who could make the trains run on time and knew about magazine production and knew how to work with the art department and the new world of setting whole pages on computers was just coming into being. It's much more advanced now. We bought a whole new batch of equipment just three years later, that particular technology had changed so much in three years, for paginating.

And with the new technology, you can do all kinds of nifty stuff with your art—you know, have somebody's arm sticking out of a photograph and run the type around it, or those little cartoons you mentioned that illustrated the news briefs and so on. None of them were rectangular. They all had kind of fuzzy, curvy, jagged edges and you run the type around them, and that's all very modern stuff that you can do. We did that from the start but it was much more easily do-able when we got the new equipment in.

And I learned—I didn't learn how to do it but I learned enough about its limitations and capabilities, very important thing for a magazine editor to understand. That was exciting to really learn what I learned about all of that.

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Well, finding an assistant managing editor turned out to be a tough job because we were a startup, nobody had ever heard of us. In doing the stories for the prototype, we had had access partly because of the Congressional Quarterly name. Very respected publication, mostly circulating in Washington with government people and lobbyists and other people that connect with the government. But it had some circulation in state and local government. In any event, it has just a sterling name, a ferociously accurate and thorough publication, so that to call up state or local officials and say, "I'm working for Governing magazine which is going to start publishing, it is being published by Congressional Quarterly," provided some fairly decent access.

But to try and find somebody who knew how to be assistant managing editor and was willing to take a flyer on this was tough, much tougher than the other people I hired. Kathy Sylvester was out of work—that's an interesting story I'll tell. And Rob Gurwitt had taken a year's leave to travel around the world and was just back and didn't have a job. And John Martin—I told Peter Harkness that this was absolutely the one and only guy I wanted to be my managing editor and he was going to have to tell him that he'd have a job at CQ if Governing never made it. And he did so. But the staff was just wonderful.

I kind of skipped around a little bit. I mentioned the prototype.

Clark: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind.

Shanahan: Okay.

Clark: And then we can jump back to yours.

Shanahan: If I don't mind?

Clark: No. I mean, you're doing a nice job of telling straight through. But I guess what struck me, just because I've been listening to the history of newspapering so much, mainly, in this project, is what you can accomplish through a point of view but also multiple angles on various issues that you maybe couldn't accomplish, say, in economic beat. In some of the stories that I read, it's very clear that there is—I'm thinking particularly about the Asian-American story, about the fear of the Japanese or hatred of the Japanese.

There's a coverage that really has to do with the seriousness of statistics and economics. It's a political story but it has cultural and economic angles. It has a primarily cultural angle in some ways, or a social science angle. I wondered how you thought about that, how you laid out the magazine and going back to that first dummy and how that evolved every time in terms of the way that you covered stories and the different angles that you tried to integrate.

Shanahan: Basically, the answer to your question is you hire brilliant people, of whom Rob Gurwitt was one, the man who did the piece on Asian Americans' emergence in U.S. politics. Kathy Sylvester was another. Penny Lemov I hadn't known before but she'd freelanced in Washington for years while her kids were growing up and I knew her work. I was very proud of that Asian-American story. I do not know of another publication who did one at that time. That was the December 1990—November or December 1990 issue—was my last issue as editor.

Clark: November 1990.

Shanahan: Next to last issue as editor. And basically you turn a guy as brilliant as Rob Gurwitt loose on a story and he finds those things. He finds the opening anecdote about the Chinese who got beat up on the streets of Detroit because people thought he was Japanese—a couple of unemployed auto workers or somebody who—

Clark: Oh, that's a very famous case, the Vincent Chin case.

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Shanahan: It is a famous case. I hadn't known about it, to tell you the truth. But he finds it and he distinguished between the first and second generation and later arrivals of Chinese. I'll tell you, as an editor, I didn't shape that story a bit, I don't think. And the same was true of a number of pieces Kathy Sylvester did. And of course, your good reporters will bring you ideas. It's only bad editors who insist on doing only their own ideas.

And I think she was the one who said to me, "Foundations are changing." Foundations used to fund stuff for governments to do, and experiments, which is what foundations like to fund, cutting edge stuff. But now they're requiring going in, after we put in the seed money here, it's going to continue, and the whole relationship has changed. It was a brilliant piece about what you have to do to get foundation money if you're a state or local official who wants to try something new. Nobody had focused on that.

But in the course of her other reporting, she talked to foundation people in the health field when doing health stories and in some other fields. And she came to realize that there was a pattern here. Some of the ideas were mine, and assigning the Asian-American politics story was mine because we'd had a fair amount of stuff about blacks and a fair amount of stuff about Hispanics. And I was aware, as anybody who was breathing should have been at that time, of the huge influx of Asians to the West Coast, including some brands of Asians we hadn't seen a lot of before, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Filipino.

But the answer to your question is: I can't tell you how great things are done. They get done because you have great people doing them.

I really wanted to get back to the funny story about how I hired Kathy Sylvester. I hired her for the prototype. And I had assigned four or five freelance articles. The fact that I've changed jobs so much means I know an awful lot of people in journalism so I was able to pick people like Roy Reed I once worked with at the Times, and a guy who had been in Harrisburg for the Philadelphia Inquirer whom I came to know when I was in Pittsburgh, and various people.

But I decided that up-front we needed news briefs in the prototype, a very standard kind of thing for magazines to do, and I needed somebody to report and write—I think in the prototype it was five pages of news briefs. It stretched to nine and those things are very well read. And Kathy had been on the Star with me and had gotten a job with one of the legal publications after the Star. She was an editor in the financial section at the Star and before that had been a reporter, and the financial section was under me, so I knew her pretty well. Then she'd gotten one of the famous Knight fellowships to spend a year at Stanford studying anything she wanted to do, and came back to Washington and had a terrible time finding a job. And she went from pillar to post, and finally got a job—she had several jobs that didn't last, and finally got a job at NBC working on a new program that Roger Mudd was going to be doing.

Kathy's one of these people who keeps up with everybody she's ever known and we saw each other during this period. I always liked her and knew her talents. One night I'm sitting up in my office—by this time, I have been moved out of the CQ newsroom, at Patterson's insistence, who apparently asked Harkness at some point, "Where's Eileen sitting?" "Well, I've still got her in the CQ newsroom because we don't have any space to put her." And he said, "Give her my office." Patterson had a huge office up on the top floor of the building. That's the biggest office I have ever been in. And so I created Governing magazine in that office, a corner office, a beautiful office, with all of his beautiful furniture.

So I'm sitting up there one night, trying to figure out who I was going to get to do the news briefs for the prototype. I had put an ad in the Press Club bulletin and I had put an ad with an organization called "Washington Independent Writers," carefully stating, you know, "must have at least three years experience as a reporter," blah, blah. Every resume that came in was worse than the next one. Nobody fulfilled the qualifications.

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I was just about deciding to take a very, very green young woman from Fredericksburg, Virginia, as the best of the lot, when the phone rings and it's Kathy. And she says, "Guess who's unemployed again." They had cancelled the Mudd show. And I said, "That's wonderful news!" and quickly said, "Come work for me. All I can promise you is four weeks' pay. We don't know whether it's going to fly. Somebody besides me is going to decide that. But I can promise you four weeks of good professional level pay."

And so she came and did it. She wound up not just doing all the news briefs but actually writing all the headlines—she was a great headline writer—and also in the crunch when we had to get the prototype pasted up and Gary Bernloer came up from Georgia to do it—and we were hard up against the deadline because I was determined to make that April 1 deadline. That's what I had been told and that's what I was going to do. And the two of them worked until two or three in the morning and came back at eight in the morning and got it all pasted up. She had once worked on a non-union newspaper in one of the Maryland counties right outside of Washington and that's where she learned to do paste-up. So it got done and she was certainly one of the mainstays. She has introduced me to a lot of people as the person who said it was wonderful when she lost her job.

Oh, we had a great time! We had a great time. There were so many things we did that I remain proud of to this day. And a lot of them are like the one you mentioned, like Rob Gurwitt's piece about the new importance of Asian-Americans in American politics. One of my last issues, Penny Lemov did a piece about state experiments with improving health insurance coverage.

Clark: I thought that was very interesting, given that the last line of it said, you know, the next president in the White House will have to take up the issue of health coverage for all in this country.

Shanahan: Isn't that interesting!

Clark: A rather prophetic remark.

Shanahan: Yes, it was a real breakthrough story that no other publication had done, up to that time. That one was my idea, I have to say, and Penny just went out and did her usual spectacular job and now you know, because it's been in all the papers, that Hawaii—actually, I think her piece says "universal," it turns out it's like 97 percent in Hawaii, which is a whole lot closer than the 85 percent we have insured in this country now.

But they just went out and did it, all of them. Well, you know, you make a mistake or two in hiring and I had to let one person go. There were other people that were hired that were good. But that original core was Kathy and Rob and Penny and a woman named Elder Witt who came off of CQ and who is now the deputy publisher. She really wanted to be a manager ultimately. She's now making a lot of trains run on time, not so much on the editorial side as the rest of the magazine, and it's a very good fit with her talents.

I was starting to mention, I got off the track, hiring the assistant managing editor—which was a terrible problem because nobody'd ever heard of us—but finally found a woman who somehow heard about it, somebody I told knew her, who had been at Smithsonian magazine, which apparently was one of these truly psychotic organizations and everybody there was miserable and knifing everybody else. There are whole organizations that can get really sick and this was apparently one of them, though it's a great magazine. And she wanted out and she heard about it, and it was clear to me that she was far and away the best that I was going to see. And she was. She was good. She did good stuff.

She subsequently left. She had told me when she came in for the job that she really wasn't all that interested in state and local government, foreign policy was her interest, and that she thought she probably would go back to go to graduate school and take a degree in foreign policy. But she thought she'd like to try this because she wanted the credential of having been the assistant managing editor. And I said, "Okay by me. Come, stay a year, stay a year and a half, whatever."

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In fact, that's what she did. She stayed about two years and then got into the famous Johns Hopkins foreign policy school [School of Advanced International Studies] and is now working with the Canadian-American trade—I forget the right name but anyway, she got the kind of a job she wanted. But she got us organized in terms of the whole process of production, copy and pictures, and so forth. Very valuable. She was another crier. I had so steeled myself never to cry I was amazed that these women cried. I only cried once in my entire career.

Clark: You must tell me what that is.

Shanahan: That was the 1976 Democratic convention. I had not originally been on the list—did I tell this story before?

Clark: Yes.

Shanahan: And I didn't cry much. I mean, I stopped myself or got up and went to the john or something. But I did cry when they sent me back home.

Well, the go-ahead came from Patterson after we got the prototype—maybe you would want these letters for the file. Boy, that man can write a letter.

Clark: Tell us a little bit about him, for people who don't know. He's a legend.

Shanahan: Well, he is a legend. He won a Pulitzer for his editorials in favor of school integration when he was on the Atlanta Constitution—a courageous stand in that place and time. And he was an editor who always saw precisely what was at stake—or in a few cases, what wasn't—in every press freedom controversy, and who stated that case with total clarity, every time. And he was a tough boss. He's short, he's about five-six and burly, and like a lot of short men has to sort of prove he's a tough guy. I suspect that was in his nature all along and he'd have been like that if he'd been six feet tall. He was in the tank corps with Patton in World War II, under Patton, fairly directly under Patton. I think he came out a colonel, if I'm not wrong. His nickname was Treads, meaning he rolled right over people though I'm not sure anybody called him that to his face. But like a lot of people like that, he liked somebody like me who would talk back to him.

I had known him very slightly when I was a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on the Star and in Pittsburgh, but very slightly. I remember the first time he came to town as we were starting to talk about Governing and the whole bunch went to dinner, and he made sure I sat next to him. He also was a UPI graduate and that's a great bond because UPI was always such a struggling place, and we knew tons of people in common. And we're the same age, he's like five or six months older than I am. And so we sat there the whole evening talking, and the rest of the people—since this was the big boss—sort of listened and then finally they broke up into their own conversations.

John O'Hearn is the name of the bean-counter. And I was going to say, I don't remember Patterson ever getting tough with me. Maybe he did. O'Hearn was very skeptical about the whole idea of Governing. My proudest boast, my proudest boast aside from the contents, of course, I brought that magazine, I brought the prototype in, on time, under budget. We were late only twice—I will tell you about those—and editorial expenses never went over budget, not one year, while I was editor. Now, granted, we had a Cadillac budget. It's been cut back since.

The two times we were late, one of them there was a breakdown in the printing equipment at CQ which was setting our type at that time, early on. And the other one was the month when John Martin's father died, and of course he went back to North Carolina. He'd been going down weekends because he knew his father was dying. But his father died when we were right closing an issue and I went to Peggy Robertson, the art director, who dealt with the people who did the color separations for the four-color photos and everything

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except making the plates. I said, "Call him up. We can get this thing in on time tomorrow," which is when it was due, "if we have to. But Vivian and I"—Vivian Noble, the assistant managing editor—"Vivian and I will have to stay here through the night, probably, to get it done, or until two in the morning. Just ask them if they're in any shape to take us a day late." And they said, "Absolutely. We're in terrific shape to take you a day late."

I think in part they would have said that even if they hadn't been because we were so great. I hear stories all the time about how magazines are late. We were never late. I'm very proud of that, particularly since who the hell was I to be a magazine editor?

Clark: Oh, that's wonderful!

Shanahan: But mostly what I'm proud about is the contents—it evolved, it got better, the articles did have more of a point of view as we went on. And you knew it was read. It was the most wonderful thing to go to one of the conventions of state and local government officials. They have a lot of meetings. Many of the city—there are two city organizations, the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The latter is only the larger cities; the former is everything. Many of them have two conventions a year, usually one in Washington about February so they can go lobby Congress for more money for this or that, and for no additional regulations—federal mandates which say you must do this or that, mandates often without money to do them. When the feds say, "You must do this, state government"—usually state—and they often don't provide any funding. It's a real problem, it's a terrible problem for state governments.

But anyway, they usually have one convention in February in Washington where they troop up to Congress and lobby their own members of Congress, and then one somewhere else during school vacation time in the summer. And we began going to those conventions, to meet people and to pick up ideas. Kathy in particular would always come back with nine or ten absolutely first-class story ideas from those conventions. Everybody did but she happened to be a particular star at that.

I went to a few of them. And it was just thrilling. You'd get on the elevator to go down to the morning session with your little badge that said, "Eileen Shanahan, Governing." It didn't usually even say "Executive Editor, Governing," just "Governing." And they'd stop me and say, "Oh, Governing, I love that magazine." You weren't fishing, it just came at you. And they would say, "I couldn't believe your story about X. You had it exactly right. And nobody has ever understood that before." It absolutely kept you going. That first year I worked seventy to ninety hours a week, partly because we were understaffed.

Clark: Just out of curiosity, were you making a salary that was commensurate with your previous salaries?

Shanahan: I think I was making a little less than I had made as assistant managing editor of the Washington Star but we're talking about a couple of thousand. I went to Pittsburgh for less than that but the cost of living is cheap in Pittsburgh. I learned to buy all my clothes in Pittsburgh. I bought a Bill Blass coat for two hundred dollars less than it would have cost in Washington, the identical coat. And CQ, no. I mean, when I went to CQ, I took about a ten thousand pay cut. But I had to get into a regular job. I hated freelancing.

So yes, given that company, which has kind of a low salary history, I think I was not quite back up to what I had made at the Star. And that was sort of okay with me, and whether if I'd been a man I'd have gotten more, I'll never know. I got some—oh, I'd forgotten about that. I planned Governing on the same salary I had been getting at CQ. And after I was shifted over officially to do that planning, I went to Peter Harkness and said, "I don't think I should have to do this on my CQ salary." Well, he went to his boss, this fellow Rick Edmonds, of whom I was not greatly fond, at the beginning or the end—

Clark: What was Rick Edmonds' job?

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Shanahan: He was the guy who was the vice president for the affiliate publications, affiliated with the St. Petersburg Times. He went to Edmonds and Edmonds said no, "Let's see if she can really do the prototype first before we give her a raise." It's a classic story of the way women are treated, and no man is. A woman has to prove she can do the job first. This would have been probably January of '86, after I was already up in Patterson's office. So Peter told me that Edmonds had said no. And with my heart in my mouth, because I wanted to do this as much as anything I have ever wanted to do in my life, I said, "I cannot stay. I just cannot permit myself to be exploited like that." And Peter, who had thought about this magazine for a long time, finally said, "Look, I will make you a promise and I will keep it. Stay at this salary until you get the prototype done and the minute that prototype is done, I will raise you to"—and he named a figure that I thought was reasonable. In fact, he gave me the raise a few weeks early when it was clear that I was going to get it done.

Edmonds put me through the worst two and a half hours of my entire life, professionally, after the prototype was done, he came up to Washington. We didn't print it initially. But what was shipped to him and to Patterson and to Andy Barnes, then the editor of the St. Petersburg Times and Patterson's successor, what was shipped to them were pasted-up "boards," they call them. It's a heavy piece of cardboard on which you paste the type and pictures and illustrations for two facing pages. It's the very standard way magazines are made up and then film is shot from that. The plates are made from the film. And so we shipped the boards off.

And Edmonds came to town to discuss all this. And he and Peter Harkness and I are in Peter's office. And he starts out by saying, "Well, is there anything you particularly want to say?" And I said, "Well, in case you don't know it, I made this at a little less than budget. And no, go ahead." For two and one half hours, that man sat there criticizing, line by line practically, that prototype with never a single word of praise, not one. Sometimes I argued back, sometimes I just listened, sometimes I explained I had had a damn good reason for doing what I did and here's why. It was just awful.

Well, then I was dismissed from the session in Peter's office, while Edmonds stayed behind. And I knew I was going to cry and it was a question of—I decided I'd get out of the office and walk around the block and cry. And we had acquired—again on loan—an advertising guy, a wonderful man, Frank Quigley. I hardly knew him, he'd been there for a couple of weeks and we'd had a few little conversations. And he had a lot of work to do to get some ads that would be free, given away free but to get them into the prototype because we wanted it to look like a full-blown magazine, which it did.

And I was just kind of blindly walking two blocks over toward Connecticut Avenue, the main drag in that part of Washington, when Quigley is coming down the street the other way—he'd been up to New York on a why-don't-you-take-a-free-ad-in-this-magazine trip. And I saw him and we stopped for a minute. I said, "Frank, I don't care where you're headed. You're going to buy me a drink." So we went into a bar that was right there and had a couple of beers and I told him about this session Edmonds had put me through. Not one word of praise, even for being on time and under budget. Not one compliment on anything, large or small.

Anyway, so Edmonds went away and the very next day there arrived a letter from Gene Patterson—and maybe I ought to put it in the file—which I can almost quote verbatim. He was out on the West Coast at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention. And we shipped the boards to him out there. And the letter, handwritten, was addressed to Andy Barnes, Rick Edmonds, Peter Harkness and Eileen Shanahan, right down the hierarchial line. And it said something like, "Being at the convention, I haven't had time to really think this through thoroughly, nor to be kind and gentle in my criticisms. But here's what they are." And he had scribbled criticisms over a lot of pages, quite a lot of things.

But then the second sentence of the letter said—this is a verbatim quote, I believe—that said, "You have done a splendid job on the bulk of this undertaking. The substance of your work is intelligent and spirited and I am confident we will prevail." What a letter! I do still have it.

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Well, that creep Edmonds got his copy of the letter, of course, and suddenly, oh, dear, the big boss thinks this is good, and wrote me a letter saying, "I guess I forgot to tell you what was good." I'd have had more respect for him if he hadn't. He subsequently got passed over for a promotion in the company and quit, or maybe he was fired. I don't know and I don't care.

But anyway, I am so proud of what we did at Governing, the stories that nobody else did. They are legion, I mean, everything from the health care story we've talked about, Kathy's foundation story, Kathy's story about putting social services together to have a unified approach to the dysfunctional family, using the kid in school who may be the only person in the family who has any attachment at all to the mainstream society as the point person to get into that, a story called "Joining Forces for Kids," an absolute breakthrough. In another two years, that's going to be a cliché approach. You begin to hear about it now.

And the nits and grits of management in state and local government, stories about trash, stories about traffic. Penny Lemov, who had worked—had freelanced and she'd also worked for Builder magazine, the magazine of the National Association of Homebuilders. When I came to recognize—I think I probably knew it going in—that state and local governments finance—that is, not taxes and expenditures but borrowing money which they do for capital expenditures, roads and buildings and so forth, dams, whatever—that that was a big story. And I'd known that from my background in economic reporting.

So I set Penny to doing a story about what is known as the municipal bond market. It doesn't just include city bonds—city and state and county and everything else—but for some reason they've traditionally been called munis—municipals. Well, she didn't know beans about it when she started, just an absolute blank and she needed a bit of help from me, but she came through on that very first effort. It was terrific. She now is regarded as the greatest journalistic expert in this country on the subject of state and local government finance. She's one of these people who just does it. Tell Penny to do something and she doesn't bitch and moan, she just does it.

The only time I ever heard her complain, I gave her another one of these hard-core, how-to-do-it stories to do about procurement. Government procurement's got a lot of regulations because you shouldn't steal the taxpayer's money and give it to your friends—too many regulations—and they're making an effort at the federal level under [Vice President Albert] Gore, the "reinventing government" initiative, to reduce those regulations because it had gotten to the point where they're counterproductive and costing more in time and money than you could possibly save from catching the occasional improper let of a contract.

But I remember the only time I ever heard Penny complain—state and local government typically for that era was ahead of the feds in trying to make procurement more flexible, you didn't rigidly have to take the lowest bid, and so forth. So I sent her out to do it. And she came back after a trip to somewhere to interview some people and came in, with this nice little smile on her face, said, "These people! They never give you a good quote. They never tell you an interesting anecdote. I don't know what I'm going to do to make this piece something anybody will read."

Well, the people that were interested read it because it told them what Governing stories told you, which is what people were doing somewhere else, what problems they had encountered, how they solved them, and "you can do it, too" was always the unstated message, because there was stuff out there that was working. There was also stuff that wasn't working, and that's in Governing, too. And that's what that magazine was about: What works and what doesn't. Something else that's sort of become something of a cliché.

Then there were the news briefs. They were very well read. And it was absolutely amazing the reaction some of them got. My all-time favorite was a news brief about a little teeny, tiny town in West Virginia called Vienna, which they pronounced Vie-en-na. And if I remember right, the population was 18,000. And somehow, somebody on the staff—maybe reading out-of-town papers, which we did a lot—somehow found out that the mayor of Vienna, West Virginia, had come up with the bright idea of asking everybody, if they could afford it, to round up to the nearest dollar when they paid their utility bills.

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If you had a bill for $7.86, make it eight dollars. And he had a goal of raising a certain amount of money—I think it was $10,000—the purpose was for park maintenance. They had parks and they were just falling into disrepair because there was no money for park maintenance. And a company there gave them half the target amount. And people gave them the rest. And some people gave them five dollars and some people gave them twenty-five dollars. And a lot of people did just what they asked them to, rounded up to the next highest dollar.

So we had a little news brief about that. The mayor subsequently wrote us two letters, one right away and one much later. The final count: He got inquiries from all over the country. He got inquiries from 144 places in thirty-eight states, saying, "Will you send me everything, your original publicity, blah, blah, blah, we want to do it, too." I assume they did. I got into journalism in the first place for impact. I figured that with honorable mainstream journalism sometimes you could change things and have an impact. And Governing magazine had an impact.

I remember the day they gave us the money for the prototype. There had been an all-day meeting and a lot of hard-core, nitty-gritty stuff about budgets and so on. And as the meeting was breaking up—it was wintertime and we were all putting our coats on—Andy Barnes stood up and stretched. I remember he stretched his arms. And he said, "You know, what we've done here today is not just starting another magazine that may make some money. We could make the American democracy work better."

And in truth I think it has. And it still does. I had to leave—I'll explain that. At first there was some talk of retiring me when I was sixty-five. Harkness just kind of thought you had to do that and told me that at some point shortly before I would be sixty-five—born in 1924, what year was that when I'd be sixty-five?—'89. Sometime before that he had said, "Well, we need to think about what you should be doing after you're no longer executive editor." Gulp! I just hadn't thought about it. I was just barreling full steam ahead.

Well, it's kind of a long story, but basically what it amounts to is I talked Barnes out of it, with Peter's permission, to his credit. I said, "Can I appeal this to Barnes?"

Clark: Who was Barnes again?

Shanahan: Andy Barnes—

Clark: Andy Barnes.

Shanahan: —had by then become—no, he hadn't yet. He was about to become the CEO. And Barnes and Edmonds came up to Washington and talked to me. I had written down exactly what my arguments were as to why I should be allowed to stay as executive editor longer—not to read them but when you write them, they're in your head. You can just say them.

We had dinner and I made my arguments that the magazine needed to be more solidly established before we changed editors and three weeks later—it took Barnes three weeks to decide—Barnes said yes. When he called me back to say that—after three anxious weeks—he said, "Well, for now, let's say you'll stay till the end of 1990 and we'll talk early that year about what happens, what we're going to do." I said, "No. I think that's a good plan. Let's just say I will step down as the executive editor at the end of 1990."

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Shanahan: So I did. And Alan Ehrenhalt, the former political editor of CQ, who had been the heir apparent ever since he'd moved to Governing a year and a half earlier, became the executive editor.

Alan had very different ideas from mine about what the magazine should cover—more different in the beginning than they became. But he came out of a totally political rather than government background,

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and they are two different things. You go through politics to elect your government. One of my enduring criticisms of journalism in general is that we spend all this money covering elections because we say it's important who governs, and then we don't half cover how they govern. And that's true on the national level and on the state level, on the city level, on the county level.

So I was very much focused—as I had always been because I'd always been a policy person rather than a politics person—on how they govern. And Alan wasn't then, at the time I was threatened with what I felt was unwise, too early, retirement. But he learned; by the time he took over, he'd had a good break-in. But meanwhile, during my extended editorship, he was proposing some stories to Peter that I wasn't crazy about and we had some struggles that weren't very fun. And he did—to his credit, I must say—he came to me at some point toward the end of 1990 and said, "Look, you've got some stories you want to get done? Just tell me what they are and I'll support you. I want you to get done every single story you want to get done before you step down," which I thought was quite decent of him. The Asian-American in politics was one, Penny's health story was another, and some others as well. So that was good.

I stayed on. I think people thought I would be more wretched than I was. I wanted to stay. I got the title of senior editor and did some reporting and some editing. And I was not wretched. Alan made a number of changes, most of which I very much approve of and if there are one or two I don't—well, that's inevitable. The magazine is still wonderful and fulfilling a real need. But then the recession came along in 1991 and they were really looking to cut expenses. They had hoped to break even in '90. But we lost IBM and practically all the computer advertising just because of the recession. And you didn't know whether this was forever or just because of the recession. It's now clear it was just because of the recession but it ain't clear when you're going into it.

They were really looking for a way to cut the budget. And it did sort of cross my mind that they might throw me over the side. And one day Andy Barnes called me and said, "I'm going to be in Washington next Tuesday and I want to have lunch with you." And I really thought, "Oh, shit, he's going to break the news that 'you're wonderful but you've had a good run and goodbye.'"

Well, it didn't turn out that way. It turned out that yes, they really wanted me to leave Governing for reasons I well understood: the need to cut back on spending. But he said—we had this wonderful lunch—"How would you like to come back to your old life of covering economics and do it for the St. Petersburg Times?" And it's quite a decent company, you know? And so I did.

Clark: Would you say what that job was?

Shanahan: Covering national economic policy in the Washington bureau of the St. Petersburg Times, a small Washington bureau. I made a fourth reporter when I was there, plus the bureau chief. Then in due course I became the bureau chief because the bureau chief left to become executive editor of the paper.

Let me go back because I forgot to say something terribly important that I wanted to say about the magazine business. Except for the news magazines, which I've never heard this about, most of the magazine business is corrupt in the sense of advertising being tied to what purports to be an independent editorial product. I was so shocked and horrified to discover this. I may have, by good fortune, inherited the only ad director in the world who thought this was terrible and would never sell with a promise of favorable editorial copy. I didn't have to tell him this. Frank Quigley came in there committed to the idea that you shouldn't have to do that, even though he'd never been an editorial person. He could sell, though. Oh, boy, could he sell! And a wonderful colleague who had a short fuse but got over it. We had a couple of fights but they came out perfectly okay when they were over.

I couldn't believe it when I would get called as the executive editor by somebody from big companies saying, "We're sending you an article for your May edition." And I would—I don't know what I said the first time.

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I developed a line of patter, later. I was dumbfounded the first time it happened. But my line of patter after I got used to the calls was, "Well, all of our stories are either staff written or written by a freelancer who has no connection with anything he's writing about."

"Oh, well, you don't understand. It's free." "Yes, I understand it's free. We don't do that. All of our stories are blah, blah, blah, over and over again." Then depending—some of them would just go away quietly. More frequently they would say, "Well, I was thinking of taking an ad," in which case I would say, "Oh, let me connect with Ms. Brown, our ad coordinator." I found out very quickly that it was endemic.

By the way, nobody had told me this, though I did consult a lot of editors when we were starting—even before the prototype. Some I knew and some I didn't. For feminists, you know, just who you are is an introduction. And I called editors of some of the very successful new women's magazines, like American Baby and just told them what I was up to and do you have some time to talk to me and tell me what I should and shouldn't be doing, and they took the time. Some did, some didn't. But the ones who did gave me a lot of time.

There was a woman who was a friend of mine who used to be on the Washington Post and we had done a lot of stuff in the former Women's Press Club together, Mary Lou Beatty, who had started a magazine called Washington Woman which sadly folded. But she kept it alive for several years. Oh, she gave me the best advice I had, just across the board, about things to do and things to be careful about, and so on.

But she didn't warn me about the corruption. And I was horrified, and it never stopped. And what interests me—and I may be being excessively feminist here (hard to imagine!)—but the fact that that kind of corruption was endemic in the magazine business was never really brought to light until Susan Brown Levine became the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review—she had been one of the founders of Ms.—and commissioned an article on it. And then there was a further and much more detailed and specific piece that Gloria Steinem wrote for the first ad-free issue of Ms. about the pressure they were under.

I've also heard stories about the Australian woman who had taken over the old Ms. in its last days and what had happened to them on Savvy magazine, the teenage girls magazine. They had run an article which, as a mother of daughters, I will tell you I wish had existed when my daughters were in their teens, an article entitled "Ten Things to Think About Before You 'Do It' the First Time." And the religious right just attacked the magazine as licentious in promoting promiscuity and threatened boycotts of companies that advertised in Savvy. It was a wonderful article. I may try and find it when my one granddaughter gets to be about thirteen or fourteen.

But we stood firm about keeping the articles insulated from advertiser pressure. Despite the fact that we were losing money, we never got any static from anybody about it because this is—the St. Pete Times company is a company with standards.

So anyway, here I am, as we sit here today, Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times doing, I hate to say, stuff I've done over and over again though it is true that every story's different. Even with Clinton as president, and some good things are happening in Washington, much still has to be done out at the state and local level because Washington has been left absolutely dead broke by Reagan and Bush.

So I'm homesick for state and local news and I also hate the self-importance of the Washington press corps, the self-importance of the way they get sucked up in the White House story and forget—my people don't— that their readers are in Florida, or wherever, and it is their interests Washington reporters should be serving. We do a good job of that and I don't have any trouble with my staff on that. Sometimes they like to do a story I don't quite see the point of and I usually let them if they feel strongly. You can't tell them you can only do—they're young—only things specific to Florida. They want to do the top story sometimes. Two of my staffers are about thirty-six and the other one's forty-eight, forty-nine. That's the foreign policy guy who just goes and does his thing brilliantly.

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And the other two, I remember they came to me shortly before the final week of the presidential campaign and said, "We want to go, one of us with Bush and one of us with Clinton, this final week." And I said, "Why? What are you going to add to the wires?" We get the AP and Reuters and all of the great supplementary or most of the great supplementary wire services—the New York Times, the Washington Post, L.A. Times, and so on. There just isn't a whole lot that we don't get. But sometimes you just have to let people who work for you do what they want to do. And I let them go and by God, they came back with glorious stuff. I've got to say, they had—Karl Vick did a kind of a Reporter's Notebook with lots of little things about Bush and David Dahl did a more analytical thing. In any event, they did wonderful stuff.

But intellectually I'm homesick for state and local, I want to physically be in Washington, and I've done some good stuff for the St. Pete Times—on economic policy and other things. I did a very Governing-like story on welfare reform because that's something, like health care, that's bubbled up from the states, as they have tried to get out of these desperately damaging, ever-increasing expenses, that are keeping state government from doing all sorts of things it wants to do and ought to do, both in health and in welfare. The welfare rolls are still growing very rapidly.

So I went out and I found out who was doing the best stuff out there in the states, like a Governing story, and went out and did it, and had a wonderful time doing it, which just made me more unhappy than ever with the Washington stories. And that welfare story just sank like a stone. Nobody in Washington or elsewhere across the country saw it. Zero impact—and I stay in this business for impact.

So here I sit, seventy years old, as of last February. I may decide yet again to do something else. Before I turn up my toes, as the old saying goes.

Clark: Before we find out what the next chapter's going to be, I wanted to ask you to repeat something on this tape that we had on the videotape yesterday, and that is a word of advice to young journalists.

Shanahan: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And it is more needed to be heard today than it was when I first encountered it, by far. I'll tell you a little story about it. When I was at United Press Radio—mostly just rewriting stories from the daily papers—but I got to go out to do a little coverage, including in Washington's appointed-at-that-time city government, a three-person commission appointed by the president. So I had hung around Washington's poor excuse for a city hall some.

And in due course, the senior reporter on that beat, Robert Buck on the Washington Daily News retired. And they had a retirement party and they invited all the people that had covered the city government with him as well as the people on his own paper, and so I got to go. And the editor of the Daily News—my husband was at the Daily News and he was a good friend of both of ours—had the bright idea of having the newest, youngest reporter on the paper, for the entertainment at the party, interview Bob Buck. And the kid asked wonderful questions about city government and everything. But then at the very end he asked Bob Buck, "What advice do you have for a young reporter?"

And Bob Buck replied, "Be a skeptic but not a cynic. A skeptic demands to be shown but a cynic won't be shown." I think, to this day, that that statement is perfect. And I think cynicism is the most enduring flaw, the most damaging flaw in the American daily press today. It is utterly destructive and getting worse all the time. And I don't know what you do about it. We understand some of the roots in the presidential lies about Vietnam, about Watergate. But the idea—and these young guys that work for me today share this view—the idea that all politicians are liars and only in for themselves, that's not true. That's not true. There are people in Congress who are there because they have a vision of where the country ought to be.

And we've got a man in the White House right now who has such a vision. Ronald Reagan had a vision of where he wanted the country to be. It's a vision with which I almost wholly disagree. But he had a sense of what needed to be done, by his lights, to make America better.

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Clark: Would you call Bush more cynical?

Shanahan: Yes, very much so. There's no evidence that Bush ever believed anything. Look at his flip-flops on abortion, or you name it.

Clark: And yet, what would you say in terms of the impact they had in terms of the cynicism that's called their legacy, which one had the bigger impact?

Shanahan: Well, little as I think of Bush's moral principles or his non-belief in anything amply demonstrated by his performance, I don't think he and Reagan were the primary creators of the cynicism. I think that goes back to the war and Johnson and Nixon primarily, though I am an admirer of Lyndon Johnson for what he did domestically, for the Voting Rights Act alone, he deserves an affirmative place in history. The Voting Rights Act has changed America. Not enough, but it's changed it, and we have these black officials now, we now have a critical mass of blacks in the House of Representatives who, when they vote as a block which they almost do, have a negotiating power inside that institution.

But the cynicism, I think, has its roots in Vietnam. And both Johnson and Nixon, of course, told plenty of lies, and Nixon bombed Cambodia and did all sorts of other things he said he didn't do, which we now know he did.

Clark: He certainly seems to have been forgiven by the American press.

Shanahan: Well, I was rather pleased to see Haldeman's diaries come out, telling the truth about Nixon again. Anyway, I constantly inveigh against cynicism, with little result.

I have a final story I want to tell about cynicism and the way the Washington press corps has changed over the years.

A very distinguished Washington journalist recently asked me what it was really like to be in the New York Times Washington bureau, at the time I was there, under Scotty Reston. And I managed to think of a perfect anecdote to tell him.

It's about the day John Kennedy was killed, actually about 1 a.m. the next day. We'd all just finished patching up our stories for the final edition and Reston suggested that we have a staff meeting, right then, to plan the next several days' coverage, and then we could all sleep a little later in the morning.

So we all piled into his office, and did discuss the where and when and how of what we should be covering through to the end of the funeral and burial.

And after that was pretty well hashed out, Reston rather subtly turned the conversation to the longer-term future: specifically, what kind of president would Lyndon Johnson be? The accuracy of what was foreseen in that room, that night, still dazzles me, in retrospect. That Johnson really cared about minorities and the poor, and would surprise many people by fighting for civil rights legislation and—with all his understanding of Congress, and his standing as a southerner, would win. That if he came a-cropper, it would be over foreign policy, of which he was ignorant—that wasn't a prediction about Vietnam specifically, but just foreign policy in general. That he would court the press and court the press until he was safely past the 1964 election and then he would revert to his bullying, suspicious, secretive and sometimes untruthful habits. That Mrs. Johnson would be popular and a tremendous asset, probably have some projects of her own, but nothing that would become really controversial, and that the East Wing and the West Wing of the White House would always be singing off the same page of the hymnal, unlike the Roosevelts or the Kennedys (Jackie didn't sing much, in that sense). Well, every bit of that came true and it was a sign of the quality of the staff Reston had assembled, nearly all of whom he had hired himself. Whatever his shortcomings were where women and minorities were

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concerned, and they were huge, he was a great journalist himself, and a great judge of journalists. I still feel proud that I was good enough to make it into Reston's Washington bureau.

But there was something else that night—which was what I set out to tell you. Right after Reston had turned our thoughts to the longer term future, he said, somewhat sternly, "I am not encouraging enterprise on the Bobby Baker story."

We all knew what he meant. Bobby Baker had been kind of a high-powered flunky for Johnson when he was Senate majority leader but was currently under a serious cloud concerning some financial dealings, and the press, including the New York Times, was baying after the scent. Reston said nothing else on that subject, beyond that one sentence, but I think we all understood why he was "not encouraging enterprise on the Bobby Baker story." The reason was that he felt it would not be in the national interest, in the wake of the shock and grief caused by the Kennedy assassination, to pursue a corruption story close to the new president. Reston went after many a scoop that enraged officials in the course of his career, but he always had a sense of the national interest, too, a sense that there were some rare occasions when serving the national interest was more important than pursuing a story. If anybody in the bureau disagreed, I never heard about it, then or later.

The Washington Post, among others, had also been in hot pursuit of the Baker story, but they didn't take up the cause again either—or maybe they did, but only much later.

Yet I doubt that any Washington bureau chief today would make such a decision or adhere to such a principle. And I think that is too bad, and too bad for journalism and too bad for the country. The "gotcha" story is now widely, damn near universally, considered the most important task of journalism. I don't agree.

Just for the record, law enforcement officials were already on Baker's trail and later on, he was tried and convicted and served several years in prison.

Clark: Okay. Thank you so much for your contribution to this history project.

Shanahan: It has never been more truly said: My pleasure!

[After reviewing the transcripts of her tape-recorded interviews, Ms. Shanahan had the following to add]:

Shanahan: One thing I discover, as I read this transcript following the formal end of the interviews, is that we focused so much on my jobs that I failed to really talk about my various "extracurricular" activities, other than those involving women.

One of them really does have to be mentioned, because it has meant so much to me. That is my involvement in programs designed to bring more minorities into the nation's newsrooms and to facilitate their rise up the career ladder once they were there.

From 1976 through this year (and on into the future, I expect) I taught, every year but three, in the programs created by the late Robert C. Maynard, the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, located at the University of California at Berkeley, which trained entry level reporters, or the Editing Program for Minority Journalists at the University of Arizona. The editing program was originally designed to train entry-level copy editors, but in recent years more and more of the students are minorities who've already reached such jobs as assistant city editor, assigning stories, and dealing directly with reporters, whose bosses want them to know more about the nuts and bolts of copy editing, to qualify them for broader management jobs.

Teaching in these programs, usually for two weeks each summer, has been a glorious experience for me. Partly because I could feel I was making a contribution to the American Dream of equal opportunity and

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because I knew beyond a doubt that the participation of minorities would make our newspapers better. In Maynard's words, "We cannot tell the story of all America until all Americans are involved in the telling."

But there was something beyond even that. I made real friends in those programs—of the students, in a number of cases, friendships that have lasted over the years—but probably even more with my fellow faculty members, almost all of whom have been minorities. Here, too, it was the cement of mutual undertaking—working our buns off, many hours a day, six and seven days a week in the Berkeley program, especially, trying to assure that every single student was going to succeed. And those friendships have given me more understanding than most white people can get of what it is like to live your life as a minority—especially African American—in this country. Not a full understanding. No. That's impossible. I agree with Senator Bill Bradley, the former New York Knicks star, who said that in his years as a white man in the NBA he learned a lot about what it was to be black in America—and he learned that he would never know what it was to be black in America. But those friendships have enriched my life in a thousand ways, and I have always felt that I got more than I ever gave from teaching in those programs.

And there's more. This summer, I went to the Unity '94 convention, the historic first joint meeting of the four minority journalists associations—black, Hispanic, Asian American and Native American. I must have seen forty or fifty of my former students there and to hear what they are doing now, city and metro editors, editorial page editors, reporters on top-flight newspapers, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and on and on—well, you don't need a better high than that in your whole life.

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