The Cowles World

Rotating majestically, the oblate-spheroid world in miniature dominates the lobbies of the Cowles family's Des Moines Register and Tribune, and its Minneapolis Tribune and Star. The identical globes (6 ft. in diameter, 19 ft. in circumference) turn once every three minutes, display the time of day anywhere on the earth's surface with accessory sets of clocks. For the four Cowles newspapers, the globes have a heart-of-America symbolism that is apt and obvious: far more than any Midwestern rival, the papers emphasize reporting and editorials that attempt to tell how the world is spinning--and what time it is. Says earnest, globe-trotting John Cowles, publisher of the Minneapolis papers: "I admit it--we have something approaching a sense of mission."

The Cowles family picked tough ground for missionary work. In tradition, at least, the nation's heartland has long been indifferent to foreign news, except in time of war. Buzzing gadflies in this calm atmosphere, the Cowles papers go far beyond filling their front pages with stories on international affairs from their hardworking five-man Washington bureau headed by Dick Wilson, 53. Their editorial pages take positions that are unusual for the Midwest and downright surprising for Republican publishers: they have damned the policies of Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, praised Dean Acheson, bemoaned Chiang Kai-shek (a "lonely, repudiated man"), and called for the recognition of Communist China by both the U.S. and the U.N.

Heritage: Cash & Causes. The Cowles approach to foreign affairs is part of the legacy of Gardner Cowles Sr., onetime school superintendent with a talent for real estate, who founded the family empire in 1903 by paying $300,000 for the faltering Des Moines Register & Leader. After World War I, when the Midwest wanted no truck with foreign alliances, the elder Cowles backed the League of Nations, argued that Iowa's crop surpluses meant that the state would inevitably be entangled with nations abroad. John and Gardner ("Mike") Cowles expanded to new monopoly in Minneapolis during the early '40s, effectively ran the family enterprise for a decade before their father died at 85 in 1946. Today John publishes Minneapolis' morning Tribune and afternoon Star; Mike keeps an eye on the Des Moines morning Register and afternoon Tribune from the Manhattan office of his semimonthly Look, the one magazine in the family empire.

The empire is firmly based on the fact that the four Cowles dailies are good newspapers. They cover the dogfights as well as the international crises, send reporters to club meetings as well as the Kremlin. The Des Moines papers have 214 stringers; the Minneapolis Star once used three editors, five photographers and twelve reporters and rewritemen on a plane crash. Both cities use four-color news pictures (the Star regularly has one on its front page). Both produce Sunday papers that are regional institutions, provide readers with everything from soil-conservation guidance to fine sequence pictures of Big Ten football plays. Crack circulation departments turn loose an army of 19,000 eager carrier boys to home-deliver fully 85% of the Sunday papers. In all, the Cowles brothers have a 275,000-square-mile hegemony: the Des Moines Register (circ. 220,221), Tribune (circ. 128,824) and Sunday Register (circ. 515,599) blanket Iowa like the state's fertile black topsoil; the Minneapolis Tribune (circ. 208,236), Star (circ. 290,960) and Sunday Tribune (circ. 630,035) sell throughout Minnesota and North and South Dakota, cut a swath through western Wisconsin.

One Choral Voice. While their words spread out across their world, John, 59, and Mike Cowles, 55, hold two or three half-hour phone calls a week, brief each other on their sessions with distinguished friends. They seldom need to coordinate editorial viewpoints. John may be closer to the famous--Nehru, Eden, Eisenhower --and Mike may lead a more spectacular private life: his present wife is his fourth; his third was tempestuous Fleur Cowles, editor of the avant-gaudy monthly Flair, which failed after twelve issues in 1951. But with identical backgrounds (Exeter, Harvard, Des Moines city rooms), the two brothers think alike. They even look alike: round spectacles and round eyes seemingly wide with perpetual surprise.

What is more, top Cowlesmen think so much like their bosses that they get little direct supervision. Other than a formal meeting every month or so and occasional spot conferences, John leaves his eleven-man editorial-page staff pretty much alone. Des Moines rarely even bothers to check a stand with Mike. Instead, the staffs in both cities meet to hash out editorials, hear every man's views, try to reach a consensus, nearly always end up speaking in a Cowles tone of voice.

This discursive method of arriving at editorial policy produces editorials that are the height of discursiveness. On many issues, Cowles editorials give sober consideration to a variety of viewpoints--and often end up advocating none. Cracks one rival Iowa editor: "They're like a butterfly in heat." Mike Cowles thinks that other papers are doing the fluttering: on foreign policy, he says, "most papers in this country have become eunuchs."

Pro-Acheson. On foreign affairs, the Cowles papers' basic principles come through clearly enough. Both brothers have long been fascinated by the subject; both have been privy at propitious moments to some of the world's best-known internationalists, including Dean Acheson and George Kennan. The effect of their personal encounters with these world figures is heavily threaded through their views. In 1940 they were early and staunch supporters of Republican Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie. (Chuckles John: "I had to act a little bit more Republican than I really was, to get anyone to listen to me.") After losing to Franklin Roosevelt, Willkie circled the globe with Mike at his side, later wrote his bestselling One World.

Perhaps the most important encounter in these meetings of minds came after the 1952 election. Embittered by political criticism and about to be replaced in office, Secretary of State Dean Acheson took a vacation on the Caribbean island of Antigua. John Cowles happened to be there, happened to have a top-secret security clearance (as a consultant to the National Security Council). The two men talked foreign policy every day for a month. Says Cowles today: "I rather think that history will record that Dean Acheson was one of the greatest Secretaries of State of the 20th century.''

Anti-Dulles. In contrast, the Cowles brothers have often blistered John Foster Dulles (with whom neither has spent a month), on the ground that he ignores the evolving power patterns of the world by "inflexibly" trying to preserve the status quo with treaties and military pacts. Both Mike and John Cowles urged General Eisenhower into public life in 1952, supported him again in 1956. But they have become sharply critical during his present term of office. "Who is responsible for getting the U.S. to the brink of war over two island groups [Quemoy and Matsu]?" asked the Star this fall. "One has to begin with the responsibility of Dwight Eisenhower."

At base, the Cowles brothers are opposed to what they call the Eisenhower Administration's "moralistic" approach to the world. Says John: "I think it's a great mistake to keep denouncing 'atheistic Communism' as a basic tenet of our foreign policy around the world. It shouldn't matter whether a country is Buddhist Moslem, Christian, socialist or whatever so long as they have a live-and-let-live attitude."

Few Dogmas. Looking for alternatives to present U.S. policies, the Cowles papers proclaim few dogmas. One exception: foreign economic aid. The papers have consistently called for larger programs, with few or no restrictions on the recipients. In 1956, when India was being blistered in the U.S. for being too friendly with Russia, John came back from a long visit with Nehru (he was tremendously impressed by the Indian leader) and promptly declared that the U.S. should lend the country $1 billion with no strings attached.

The papers deal pragmatically with each international crisis as it arises, refuse to accept the view that the U.S. is or can be in a dominant position. One major criterion for judging a policy: its anticipated effect on world opinion. This has sometimes led the Cowles brothers to argue that the U.S. may eventually lose more by taking a strong stand than by backing off a little under pressure.

The brothers supported the Berlin airlift and U.S. entry into the Korean war, but when Red China intervened in Korea, they urged that the U.S. pull back, suggested that Korea might be "strategically futile," feared that a major effort there would leave Europe exposed. They stood against U.S. intervention in Indo-China in 1954, and this year opposed U.S. action in Lebanon: "The whole Arab world [will be] inflamed against us." Their present position on Berlin is discursive, but on the side of the West's remaining in West Berlin.

Ultimate Goal. The Cowles view of world opinion rejects the argument that recognition of Communist China would go too far in making Communism respectable in Asia. Said the Des Moines Tribune in January 1951, shortly after the Red Chinese intervened in Korea: "Yes, we know that Communist China is an aggressor, a violator of the United Nations Charter . . . But it is the government of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese land and people. We might as well recognize this fact. And if we want to tell Mao Tse-tung he is a bad boy ... we shall have to recognize his government, ultimately, to do it. Not today, maybe--but eventually."

The ultimate of "eventually" in the Cowles policy is world government. The Des Moines Register put it this way: "The only way to get very far on these dilemmas of the alliance system is to go beyond the alliance toward federal union--in which the national governments would continue to exist for many purposes, but an international federal government representing people, not national governments, would handle the big unsolved problem of keeping the peace. The world is not yet ripe for world government, but that is no excuse to hang back. It is the task of this generation to get it as ready as possible."

As their world spins, John and Mike Cowles are working hard at that task.

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