News Judge

As much perhaps as anyone else, Carr Vattel Van Anda made the New York Times the grey eminence it has become. Adolph Ochs set the goal: "All the News That's Fit to Print"; Van Anda got the news, saw that it was fit, and printed it. He treated the Versailles Treaty with the competitive zest of a tabloid editor covering a beautiful blonde's murder trial, used 24 telegraph and telephone lines to transmit the full text from Washington, and gave it 62 columns of type. No other U.S. newspaper ran it in full.

From such complete coverage stemmed much of the Times's stodginess, but Van Anda had worked on the New York Sun in the days of the great Charles A. Dana, and had watched the Sun go down because it cared more for fluff than fact. A fact man himself, "V.A." was quiet, modest, a hard worker. He spent every afternoon from 1 to 6 in the office, took four hours off for dinner and a nap; then at 10 he returned to bustle over the proofs, spot weaknesses, and stay until 5 a.m. to get all the news in.

V.A. edited the Times not for any "average man," but as if he were its only reader. So right were his news judgments that the wire services for many years telegraphed the Times's front-page news-play to clients for guidance. Some of Van Anda's news decisions are classic: he took a one-paragraph report that the steamship Titanic was in trouble, expanded it into columns of type--while other Manhattan papers played the story down, and at least one pooh-poohed the whole thing because the Titanic was "unsinkable." Van Anda perceived that General Ludendorffs big offensive on March 21, 1918 was the beginning of the end, and angled the Times story that way; other editors treated it at first as just another battle.

Because of his own enthusiasm for science, Van Anda made it front-page news, devoting big space to Marconi's experiments in telegraphy and to Peary's and Amundsen's polar expedition. He led the way in making Einstein and "King Tut" U.S. household words.

Lord Carnarvon's expedition to the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 so fascinated Van Anda that he immersed himself in Egyptology. When the first photographs of King Tut's tomb arrived in Manhattan, Times editors wondered where an expert could be found in a hurry to translate the hieroglyphics on the wall; Van Anda did the translating.

During the last days of the King Tut story he came down with pneumonia. He never fully recovered. Though the Times listed him as managing editor for another seven years, he actually retired in 1925. He spent the succeeding years studying mathematics and astronomy, now & then catching Sir James Jeans or the British Museum in error. Last week, in his Park Avenue apartment, he got a piece of news by telephone: his only daughter had died. Two hours later, Carr Van Anda, 80, one of journalism's greats, died of a heart attack.

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