After the Captain

"It won't last five years after I die." Captain Joseph Medill Patterson may have been only half joking when he predicted the end of the New York Daily News, the big and boisterous tabloid that he ran as a one-man show from the day he helped found it* in 1919 until his death in 1946. But his survivors on the paper knew better than to fiddle with the captain's successful formula. "Those who are left behind," said the News in an obitu ary editorial, "will do their best to keep this page and the paper what he would want them to be."

What the captain wanted the News to be is laid out in lavish detail in Tell It to Sweeney (Doubleday; $4.95), an affectionate excursion through the News's past conducted by its longtime Drama Critic John Chapman. (The title derives from a series of early News advertisements that projected the paper's strong working-class appeal and urged Manhattan merchants to "Tell it to Sweeney; the Stuyvesants will take care of themselves.") How well the captain's survivors have fulfilled their pledge to run things his way can be measured in the continued success of the nation's biggest newspaper.

Frailty & Indiscretion. Fifteen years after the captain's death, the News is almost as big as ever, with 1,980,338 daily circulation (it peaked at 2,400,000 in 1947) and 3,244,667 on Sunday. It still looks and reads like the paper Joe Patterson left: full of crime, sex, human frailty and indiscretion, all jauntily regarded. But the rest of the news is in the News too. And it is still written with a skillfully crisp and colloquial flair, still gaudily bedizened by the flippest headline writers in the business (SINGER CROAKS ON HIGH c, ran above an early story about an opera star, who collapsed onstage and died in the wings). The paper is still so accurately aimed at Patterson's hand-picked target--the Manhattan subway rider--that News circulation plummets 300,000 or so on holidays, when the straphangers stay home.

No publisher ever spent more off hours mingling with the hurrying crowd than Joe Patterson. He not only filled his paper with lively stuff--plenty of comics, features, serialized fiction, puzzle contests and the best picture spreads in town--but he knew just how to sell the "important but dull" story to the gum-chewers. News editorials generally read like street-corner arguments, a tribute in part to Patterson, who once rejected an editorial because "it reads too much as though an editorial writer had written it," and to Chief Editorial Writer Reuben Maury, who knew how to transfer the boss's thoughts into cabdrivers' prose.

Stocks & Surprise. Patterson was an all-out isolationist before World War II, and his paper ran little foreign news until the start of the war. Today, says Executive Editor Richard Clarke, 64, "we find ourselves giving a hell of a lot of space to foreign affairs because that's what the public 'is interested in." Patterson's towering editorial rages have largely disappeared, and his quiddities, which persisted out of habit, now seem to be receding. (Although he supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt for three elections, the captain got so mad at F.D.R. just before Pearl Harbor that his paper's persistent anti-Roosevelt editorials estranged the two old friends.) The paper has become conventionally Republican now--and even peaceable. "Certainly nobody can criticize us for being beastly to John Kennedy," says Clarke. "We're pleasantly surprised by the young man."

The crime stories smell a little purer today, the crusades run a little longer, the bathing beauties show a little less skin; and it is not likely that the News will ever sneak another camera into Sing Sing prison to snap an execution, as it did in 1928 when Murderess Ruth Snyder was electrocuted.

But all in all, says Clarke, "I think Mr. Patterson would like the looks of the News." Its rivals think it has lost a lot of its old zip, but it still holds the loyalty of an awful lot of straphangers, and still boasts twice the circulation of any other paper in the U.S.

* With his cousin, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, then president of the Chicago Tribune. They got their starting stake through their mothers, who controlled the Tribune's treasury and peeled off enough of it to launch the Daily News.

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