The President's Editorialist

Dear Jack:

Your editorial on Thanksgiving hit the mark, even to your point on the Mets and the Jets. In reviewing the [nation's] problems you mentioned it occurred to me that many have said we cannot solve them, just as many said that the Mets and Jets could not win, hut with the kind of support you are giving us I am confident that we, too, will win the big ones.

With warm personal regards,

Sincerely,

R.N.

So reads one of several thank-you notes that President Richard Nixon has written to Francis M. ("Jack") Flynn, publisher of New York's hardhatted morning tabloid, the Daily News. It is not a new correspondence; Nixon also wrote to the News when he was Vice President and later, when he was out of office trying to get back in. (In those days the letters were signed "Dick.") So it was no big surprise when the President dropped by the News offices in Manhattan last week for a friendly chat with Flynn and his top editors. No wonder, either, that one of those around the table was the man who writes almost all the nice Nixon editorials, Reuben Maury.

Now 70, Maury has in fact been writing almost all the News editorials for the past 44 years. His sledgehammer style is better suited to knocking than building, but he and the News have had their heroes. There was, for instance, Joe McCarthy, who (Maury once told an interviewer) "fought Communists the way we thought they should be fought." There was Herbert Hoover, who "came close to sainthood." And J. Edgar Hoover.

Currently there is S.I. Hayakawa, "the nononsense, gutful chief of San Francisco State College." A Maury editorial this month urged Hayakawa's appointment as president of Harvard to "fumigate the campus Commies and anarchists." There is Spiro Agnew, in whom Maury perhaps sees something of himself. "I admire a fella," he told a recent visitor to his office, "who stands up on his feet and says what he thinks in words everybody can understand." But above all there is Richard Nixon, who, Maury feels, was "called to his exalted office by the Lord" as well as by the voters.

In his inimitable manner, Maury has expressed the News' support of Nixon on every major issue. He has cheered him for not "bugging out" of Viet Nam; he lauded the entry of U.S. troops into Cambodia "to root Reds and Red war materiel out of hidy-holes there"; he has sympathized with Nixon over college officials who "bellyache" about campus disorders; he has urged Congress to "quit foozling and fussing around" with proposed anticrime legislation.

Liberal by Moonlight. Though clearly one of U.S. journalism's loudest thunderers on the right, Maury is soft-spoken and amiable away from a typewriter. He never discusses his views outside his office, he says, because "it's so easy to work up ill feelings arguing about politics, religion or the war." In fact, he spends only about 15 minutes a day discussing proposed editorials with his News colleagues, most notably Executive Editor Floyd Barger. Then Maury takes less than two hours to write the three to five editorials settled upon. Generally, the only News editorials he does not write are those that run on Mondays or when he is away. For his virtually one-man show, Maury earns more than $40,000 a year.

Maury's moods in print reflect the influence of the late Joseph Patterson, the News' irascible founder. Patterson hired Maury in 1926 out of Butte, Mont., where Maury had been mixing freelance writing with a law practice. Maury won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials in 1940. At the same time he was moonlighting, writing Collier's editorials that often took an opposite, liberal point of view. Maury's explanation: "An editorial writer is like a lawyer or a public relations man: his job is to make the best possible case for his client."

Maury claims that today he happens to agree with 98% of the News editorials and "doesn't care" about the rest. He also claims not to care about reader reaction. "I don't give much of a damn about what people think of our position," he says easily, "as long as they read us." Millions do; the News' daily circulation of 2,129,689 is the biggest in the U.S.

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