'DEAR JOHN'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP73-00475R000401420001-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 19, 2013
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: October 4, 1965
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified in Part- Sanitized Copy Approved for Release S 50-Yr 2013/12/19: CIA-RDP73-00475R000401420001-6
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'Dear John'
The marriage of New York City news-
paper publishers has always been a
rocky one, and last weekend a "Dear
John" letter may have ended it for good.
Addressed to John J. Gaherin, president
of the Publishers Association of New
York, the letter announced that The
New York Herald Tribune was with-
drawing from the 68-year-old association
to resume publishing: this week. "Eco-
nomic and other considerations," wrote
the Tribune's president Walter N.
Thayer, "make it impossible for us to
continue inside the association."
The paper's decision came on the
tenth day of the strike by the News-
paper Guild of New York against The
New York Times, also an association
member. By standing agreement, the
Trib and the three other major dailies in
the organization?the Daily News, Jour-
nal-American and World-Telegram and
Sun?had shut down in sympathy. To-
gether, the strike and shutdown put
some 17,000 newspaper employees out
of work and left the city with only one
major daily, The New York Post, which
itself walked out of the association dur-
ing the 114-day International Typo-
graphical Union strike in 1962-63.
Actually, the printers are at the heart
of the upheaval this time as well. In
heading off a strike by the ITU last
spring, the association, at the Times's
urging and in the face of Tribune argu-
ments, agreed to give the union the
right to veto the introduction of auto-
mated equipment that would affect its
members. "That settlement seemed to us
unrealistic," the austere Thayer wrote in
the Tribunes letter of resignation last
week. "We went along with it only in
the interests of unity. Now, six months
later, the Herald Tribune finds itself in-
volved in a strike and shutdown that
cannot undo what happened last March,
that will not resolve any of the basic
newspaper problems of this city, and -
that only complicates and further embit-
ters newspaper labor relations."
March of the Machine: One ? embit-
tered party is the guild. A computer not
only can help set type in the composing
room but also can take over such guild-
performed tasks as calculating payrolls
or billing advertisers?and the guild fears
that the ITU, with its veto power, will
ultimately be able to place guildsmen
under ITU jurisdiction. Consequently,
the guild has asked for similar veto
power in its dispute with the Times.
Another issue is pensions. The Times
maintains it should be free to run its
pension plan as it pleases because the
paper established it and requires no
Compulsory payments by employees. The
miild armies that because the money
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release @ 50-Yr 2013/12/19: CIA-RDP73-00475R000401420001
Trib' s Whitney: Back in business
otherwise be used as wages and because
many guildsmen participate in the plan
voluntarily, the union should be a co-
partner with the paper in administering
it. Although the debate is a heated one
between the Times and the guild, it has
little application to the other papers.
"Basically," Thayer told an interviewer,
"this is a New York Times strike."
Indeed, there is little love lost be-
tween the Trib, a steady money-loser
that survives on the bankroll of million-
aire owner John Hay Whitney, and the
more prosperous Times, its chief rival in
the morning field. Not too long ago,
insiders say, the Times turned down the
Trib when it proposed the papers merge
mechanical facilities to cut costs.
Many political observers feel that the
New York mayoral race also figured in
the Tribune's decision to resume publi-
cation. Whitney is a heavy financial
backer of John V. Lindsay, the Repub-
lican-Liberal candidate for mayor, and
the paper, a leading national voice of
_ . _
moderate Republicanism,is sure to en-
dorse him in his race against Democratic
candidate Abraham D. Beame. With the
election just five weeks away and regis-
tered Democrats outnumbering Repub-
licans in the city 3 to 1, underdog
Lindsay was expected to suffer most
from the newspaper dim-out.
The Tribune's defection from the asso-
ciation threw New York's already ailing
newspaper industry into almost complete
disarray. "It caught rile completely by
surprise," said Times publisher Arthur
Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger, as he rushed
off to a hastily summoned meeting of
the association. "The New York Tirries4"
he added, "will continue its negotiations
with the guild." -
At the weekend, those talks were still
deadlocked. And after a 43i-hour meet-
ing, the remaining members of the Pub-
lishers Association emerged sullen but
announced they "intend to stand to-
gethe'r." Said city-appointed mediator
Theodore W. Kheel: "The next few days
may be a period of psychoanalysis to see
what the other fellow is thinking."
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