Make It Deadpan, Make It Factual

Before the furor over Frank Morrissey's nomination for a federal judgeship died down last week (see THE NATION), it had ricocheted through headlines and editorials across the country. Yet relatively few people realized that the major factor in bringing the Morrissey case to a head was one newspaper's display of the kind of dogged, investigative journalism that is rare these days in the U.S. press. The paper is the Boston Globe, which zealously carried on a crusade to discover everything possible about the man it thought unfit for high judicial office.

Until recently, such a display has also been rare at the Globe, which languished for years under the flabby aim to be a paper "that would enter the homes as a kindly, helpful friend of the family." Under the prod of its new editor, Tom Winship, 45, the Globe has begun to shuck that please-'em-all philosophy. Ads have been dropped from the front page, almost every big syndicated columnist except Walter Lippmann has been signed on, and the new drama and music critics are both caustic and first-class. News stories have become sharper.

Such changes have moved the rejuvenated paper out of a dead heat with the rival Herald-Traveler only two years ago into a widening 58,000 circulation lead (374,000 v. 316,000). Says Winship: "I'm trying to make the paper damn courageous and really not afraid of sacred cows."

No Personal Attack. With that credo, the Globe set vigorously to work when it learned of President Kennedy's intention to nominate Morrissey, his father's longtime friend, to the federal bench. After the Globe's Washington bureau dug up the details on Morrissey's three applications to the Massachusetts Bar, other papers were quick to pick up the story. Soon after that, Jack Kennedy quietly dropped the whole idea, and the story died for two years.

Then, last year, the rumor surfaced again: this time it was President Johnson who was planning to nominate Morrissey. The Globe carefully tracked the hearsay, finally confirmed it in March through a tip from inside Teddy Kennedy's office. Swinging back to its crusade, the Globe was first to announce that Morrissey was being pushed by Teddy, first to announce that the FBI was running a check on him. Editor Winship ordered a concerted effort to uncover every pertinent piece of information available on Morrissey. "This is not a personal vendetta," he explained. "We just think Morrissey is a very mediocre mind and not up to the job." He wanted no flamboyant personal attacks, he said, just "deadpan, factual stories."

No Question. The best of the Globe staff started to dig. The paper's two Washington men began to test Capitol Hill willingness to resist the nomination. The Atlanta Journal was asked and agreed to track down details at the Georgia end of the trail. All the while, the Globe scrupulously printed every bit of pro-Morrissey news--but there was no question what the paper really wanted.

Reporter Joe Harvey, a lawyer who covers Boston courts for the Globe, went painstakingly to work on every document dealing with Morrissey--from his birth certificate through his Kennedy jobs to his listings in the city directories --to help ascertain when he had and had not been present in Boston.* Statute books of Georgia and Massachusetts were studied to find what regulations applied to Morrissey at the time of his bar exam.

Harvey's lengthy report appeared in early October, with the first hint that Morrissey's membership in the Georgia Bar had been obtained through the endorsement of a questionable, two-man law college. Only twelve days later, Political Editor Bob Healy revealed the seeming conflict between Morrissey's 1934 stay in Georgia and the one-year residency requirement for his 1934 candidacy in a race for state representative in Massachusetts.

Healy kept at it, discovered that despite the story that Morrissey had studied law at Boston College, the school had no record of him, except briefly as a nonlaw night student. Last week, as the walls tumbled in on Frank Morrissey, the Globe was still diligently checking every aspect of his career--from his civil service job as a social worker to his graduation from Suffolk University Law School, and his seven years as municipal court judge.

No Opinions. Winship hotly refutes the contention that the Globe's zeal is due to anti-Kennedy feelings. "We've been damn good to the Kennedys," says he. "This was not an anti-Ted effort. I can't think of a thing we haven't supported him on except Morrissey." It was the Globe, to be sure, that first broke the story about Ted's expulsion from Harvard for cheating. But, as Winship points out, the story had full Kennedy cooperation, was printed only after the editor told one of J.F.K.'s presidential aides: "I'm sick of all these rumors. Let's bring it out in the open."

"We're in this purely as a matter of principle," says Winship. "The community's been starved for a paper that didn't necessarily say popular things all the time. We decided to join the community, and it's been good for us."

* No mean task, since among the Frank Morrisseys in Boston, the Frank in question sometimes used Francis, with an X. or J. thrown in, apparently at random, as a middle initial.

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