The Deal from Hell

Bleakwood Avenue runs through a barrio about eight miles due east of the Los Angeles Times’ Globe Lobby, a marble art deco entry that features a massive globe, Hugo Ballin’s murals of 1930s life in America, and bronze busts of General Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and other members of the family whose name, in Southern California, is synonymous with wealth and power. For Leo Wolinsky, the distance between the newspaper where he would become a keeper of the journalistic flame and the downtrodden east Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up might as well have been halfway to the moon.

A resourceful journalist with a twinkle in his brown eyes and a mischievous laugh that pervaded his speech, Wolinsky was a career newsman who knew the ins and outs of the newsroom better than most. In far-flung newsrooms, we shared a roughly parallel path—he at the Los Angeles Times, me at the Tribune. Products of working-class America, we both rose through the ranks to the pinnacle of journalistic power and decades later would play a role in each others’ career that neither one of us could have imagined.

In the 1950s, S.J. Perelman called the Los Angeles Times “the most wretched fish wrap in America,” second only to the Chicago Tribune. Much as the Colonel polluted the Tribune’s journalistic reputation to make a fortune and further his eccentric political interests, General Otis and his entrepreneurial son-in-law, Harry Chandler, used the Los Angeles Times to build a financial and political empire that put Los Angeles on the map and made the Chandlers a California legend.

A jingoistic, anti-labor firebrand who called his newspaper headquarters “The Fortress,” General Otis bought a quarter interest in the Los Angeles Daily Times in 1882 for $5,000. The paper had a circulation of 400, and Los Angeles’ population totaled 12,500 restless souls surrounded by orange trees, wheat fields, and a handful of wineries. An Ohio native who, at age sixty-one, convinced his friend President William McKinley to pin a star on his epaulet for service in the short-lived Spanish American war, Otis used the pages of the Times to reward friends, punish enemies, and relentlessly promote Southern California. Otis, who weighed 250 pounds, was the walrus in the family. Harry Chandler was the fox, the sly man who married the general’s daughter and started a family that eventually made the Times a powerful and financially successful civic institution that dominated the California Republican party as thoroughly as the Colonel’s operation did in the Midwest. The way the Chandlers used the Times to enhance their financial interests made the Colonel look like a Boy Scout.

The classic film Chinatown was based on the story of Harry Chandler’s secret purchase of huge tracts of land in a parched valley north of Los Angeles. He then ordered coverage and editorials in the Times to support construction of a canal to bring water from the Owens Valley (220 miles northwest of Los Angeles) to the San Fernando Valley. The massive project, financed by a public bond issue, vastly increased the value of Chandler’s nearby real estate holdings and made Harry and a close circle of friends a fortune at the expense of the impoverished farmers who naïvely went along with the deal.

Like the right-wing Tribune of the Colonel’s day, the Times promoted a staunch, conservative political playbook. In The Powers That Be, David Halberstam related how Turner Catledge, then a young reporter for the New York Times, once asked Kyle Palmer, the Los Angeles Times political reporter, for information about the Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair, whom conservatives despised because of his Socialist ties. “Turner, forget it,” quipped Palmer, who doubled as a charming schemer and political operative. “We don’t go in for that kind of crap you have back in New York of being obliged to print both sides. We are going to beat this son-of-a-bitch Sinclair any way we can. We’re going to kill him.” And they did. Sinclair got 37 percent of the vote running on the EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform that advocated universal employment in the state. But Frank Merriam, the Republican candidate favored by the Chandlers, got 49 percent in a campaign that featured fake newsreels showing Russian Communists arriving in California to vote for Sinclair.

By the time Wolinsky joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times in 1977, much had changed, thanks to a gutsy, crafty woman who had married Norman Chandler, Harry Chandler’s grandson. A strong-willed woman, Dorothy “Buff” Chandler knew how to get her way. After her husband became publisher of the Times, he staunchly supported Robert Taft as the Republican nominee for president in 1952. But Buff wanted Dwight Eisenhower to win the nomination. So she presented her husband with a proposition: If he ever wanted to have sex with her again, the Times would endorse Eisenhower. Ike got the paper’s nod and the victory.

Buff had married Norman Chandler just after he’d graduated from Stanford University. Together they had Camilla and, two years later, Otis. Had Chandler family tradition prevailed, Philip Chandler, Norman’s younger brother (who was allied with the more conservative wing of the family), would have assumed the publisher’s chair in 1960 when Norman stepped down to become chairman of the Times Mirror Company, the newspaper’s parent corporation. But Buff knew the paper had to abandon its old ways and adopt the new ethos of Southern California, which was becoming a more enlightened place full of people like her son, Otis, an adventurous, blond, blue-eyed Adonis. After much arm-twisting, Buff persuaded Norman to name their son publisher of the Times.

On April 11, 1960, as flash bulbs popped, before an audience of 725 powerful Southern Californians, Norman stood at a podium at the Biltmore Hotel, a stately structure he had helped build in downtown Los Angeles, to name Otis the fourth publisher of the Los Angeles Times in its seventy-nine-year history. Otis, who maintained that he had no advance knowledge of his father’s decision, stepped to the podium and uttered, “Wow.” He was thirty-two years old.

Otis Chandler transformed the Times as thoroughly as Clayton Kirkpatrick transformed the Tribune in Chicago. Both men successfully reformed widely disparaged, discredited newspapers and made them remarkable journals and newspaper industry leaders. Otis Chandler was lucky. During his remarkable tenure, Los Angeles had equally remarkable explosive population and economic growth, anointing it as the capitol of the new American West and a magnet for immigrants from around the world. The city overtook Chicago to become America’s second-largest city, and the Times under Otis’ leadership, eclipsed the Tribune in stature and influence. Otis opened news bureaus in international capitals including Paris, London, and Jerusalem, putting the Los Angeles Times on a par with the New York Times. He beefed up the paper’s Washington bureau, paid top dollar for writers and editors who would win the paper dozens of Pulitzer Prizes, and exercised the paper’s journalistic muscle on subjects that had once been verboten.

Less than a year after he took over, Otis published a series of stories on Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, a right-wing political organization that portrayed Eisenhower as a Soviet dupe, the United Nations as a Communist front, and Earl Warren as a “red” Supreme Court justice. From a journalistic perspective, the series of five stories that exposed the organization’s hypocrisy and deep roots in California were tame; they started in the opinion section, not on page one, and ran randomly on page two, or mostly in obscure spots inside the newspaper. But Otis’ uncles, Philip and Harrison, and his aunt, Alberta, were Birch Society benefactors and staunch supporters of Welch. Friends and neighbors took notice and started talking. Otis followed up by ordering a tough editorial in the Sunday Times that slammed Welch and the Birchers for their attacks on Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and the Dulles brothers.

“What is happening to us,” the editorial asked, “when all loyal Americans are accused of being Communist dupes unless they subscribe to the radical and dictatorial direction of one self-chosen man? . . . The Times does not believe that the argument for conservatism can be won—and we believe it can be won—by smearing as enemies and traitors those with whom we sometimes disagree.” Otis put the editorial at the top of page one and signed it himself. Readers in conservative enclaves like Pasadena were outraged, and the Times circulation immediately dropped by 15,000, a staggering sum. (Controversial stories of the era typically prompted a dozen or so folks to drop the paper.) Though it resulted in a loss of subscribers, the editorial represented the Times’ declaration of independence from the past and made Otis an idol to generations of journalists like Wolinsky.

A new generation of young men and women was to carry Otis’ torch into the future. In a sense, the journalists who fought to preserve the unique brand of journalism that Otis created and championed were the unsung heroes and villains of the Los Angeles Times. Fiercely loyal to Otis’ standards, journalists like Wolinsky also treated the mere whiff of change as a dire threat to the man’s legacy. Longtime Los Angeles Times editor John Arthur once told a magazine writer: “Otis is Zeus.”

On the surface, Wolinsky was an odd keeper of Otis’ high journalistic standards. Growing up in East Los Angeles, Wolinsky didn’t read the Times. Like me, he was not one of those kids who started a neighborhood newspaper and became the editor of his high school newspaper. “My dad was an electronics developer at McDonnell Douglas. I’m not even sure what he really did. My mom was a housewife. We didn’t take a daily paper. We couldn’t afford it,” he recalled. Wolinsky’s neighborhood wasn’t Times territory, either. A vast swath of barrios and industrial shops between the Los Angeles River and the city’s eastern border, East Los Angeles, is a throwback. The once-dusty streets are now paved, and backyard chicken coops and citrus groves are rare. But the east side is the underbelly of a city better known for glitz and glamour.

By the time Wolinsky graduated from the University of Southern California, Otis had built the Times into one of the best and most prosperous papers on the globe by following the money. The paper’s readers didn’t live on streets like Bleakwood, or in barrios like Boyle Heights. They lived in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Culver City, the South Bay, or Malibu, alongside moguls and movie stars.

Given how large and diverse Los Angeles was, the Times needed people like Wolinsky, locals who understood the challenging nature of the vast metropolis the paper covered. Reporting on a large metropolitan area is no easy task for any newspaper. Under Otis, the Times circulation area grew to encompass some eighty-eight separate municipalities, ranging from Pasadena, the tony, tree-lined town that seems as midwestern as sweet corn, to Little Saigon, a vertical strip mall that rests on a flat sandy plain home to some 135,000 Vietnamese. Parts of Santa Ana in Orange County would be easy to mistake for a town in Mexico, while the neighborhoods around South Central and East Florence in Watts resemble the most hard-boiled ghettos in the Bronx. The northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley stretch to an urban desert, and the posh enclaves along the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica symbolize raw wealth and power. The Los Angeles Times circulates in an area about as large as the state of Ohio, but one that ultimately lacks a center of gravity. Despite years of development, downtown Los Angeles remains a drab urban landscape; its most enduring features are Frank Gehry’s sweeping stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall and a skid row that resembles a Palestinian refugee camp. (In one ten-square-block area, some 114 dialects are spoken.)

Though he grew up in a barrio, Wolinsky understood Los Angeles as well as did Otis, who had created several local editions of the Times to serve its diverse constituencies. One edition of the Los Angeles Times served the San Fernando Valley; one, Orange County. There was a paper for the San Gabriel Valley, and a paper for San Diego. “The way it was supposed to work,” recalls Pete King, a longtime Times writer and editor who would one day recruit Wolinsky to run the a.m. city desk, “is that we would produce six different papers.... These papers had their own editors and in some cases, publishers. The talent level was so high that we could take the best of the stories for these papers and put them into one paper. We made a mega paper out of the six papers for people who wanted it.... The LA Times was important to a certain Los Angeles—the suburban, middle-class, upper-class Angelino. It was never a paper of East LA or the barrios.” Over the years, the paper would be accused of having a bad case of penis envy of the New York Times, but King said the brand of journalism that Otis had created really wasn’t about “knocking the New York Times off its perch.”

“There was an LA Times way of doing journalism,” King explained. “We didn’t get plaudits for it. In fact, we were sometimes ridiculed by East Coast papers. But we were wildly successful. We had some excesses and we had some bad days. But on our good days, you wouldn’t see anything like it in any other newspaper. . . . It was doing it our way. It fit the city. . . . It’s not like we didn’t do daily journalism. Like I’m city editor and Rodney King happened,” said King in a reference to a police assault of the African American man that led to highly publicized riots in the 1990s. “It was not like we didn’t cover the news. But we also did the narrative story. That was our ‘A’ game. I had a goofy theory. A story would jump [from one page to another] so many times, but the coverage was like LA, a city of sprawl. People didn’t leave for work until 9 a.m. because of the traffic. So they had time to read.”

It’s easy to see why King, Wolinsky, and other journalists would go to extraordinary lengths over the years to protect Otis’ legacy. Otis understood that the city he and his ancestors had built needed to be informed and entertained, and he capitalized on the power of his journalists and what they really cared about—their journalism—to provide that information and entertainment, elevating them to an almost mythical status in the newsroom and beyond. Reporters and editors at Otis’ Los Angeles Times didn’t live by the rules that applied to others. They were well paid, flew first-class on every trip over five hundred miles, and spared no expense on stories. And editors worked hard to make sure it stayed that way.

Nowhere was the ability of the Los Angeles Times to entertain on better display than in a celebrated feature that Wolinsky and other Los Angeles Times editors would fight to preserve for years: Column One—deeply reported, well-written stories. Through meticulous reporting and lucid writing, Times reporters and editors simply took their readers to places where other newspapers couldn’t or wouldn’t go. When editors needed an arresting profile on a controversial figure like Washington, D.C., mayor, Marion Barry, they called on a stable of gifted writers like Bella Stumbo who would capitalize on the paper’s fat expense accounts to fill its generous news hole with deep reporting and copy that crackled. Stumbo and other Los Angeles Times writers simply spent more time, more money, and more and better words on a story, overwhelming would-be competitors.

The Times that Otis had inherited from his father was fat—full of ads bought by companies and merchandisers who coveted Otis’ well-heeled readers. At the top of the front page on March 12, 1961, just after Otis became publisher, two numbers—21 and 430—competed for attention with the infamous signed editorial on the John Birch Society. That Sunday’s Times had 21 sections and 430 pages to hold ads for everything from Liquid Snail Killers from the Cha Kent Company to a spread for the Dinah Shore Models Wardrobe at a local department store. Otis built upon that solid foundation to make the paper more lucrative so he could pay his journalists top dollar. He took the Golden Age of Journalism to Platinum. Ads created holes for copy written by those lucky enough to work at the Times.

To Wolinsky, the Los Angeles Times was more than a fat and happy place to work: “For me, it was a symbol. When you saw the people walking down the street with the Los Angeles Times, it was a symbol that they’d made it in society,” he offered. The paper lured many star reporters westward from newspapers in the East and Midwest, but employed just as many Californians—journalists who’d labored at smaller papers to land a coveted job at the Times. Kathy Kristof grew up reading the Los Angeles Times and wanted to work there from the time that she decided to be a journalist. “I really didn’t realize what we had until I started traveling and saw other papers. It was a unique paper. There was nothing like it in the country.”

After graduating from USC, Wolinsky was bound and determined to “land a job at the Los Angeles Times.” After five years of applying unsuccessfully for a roster of Times jobs, he got a break when he was a reporter for The Breeze covering Inglewood, a community in the South Bay, a collection of towns south of the city. The Times had a reporter in Inglewood but her husband was under investigation for a conflict of interest (he had a stake in Inglewood casinos), and Wolinsky applied for her job.

His moxie paid off. He soon became the South Bay reporter for the Los Angeles Times.“At first,” Wolinsky recalled, with his trademark laugh, “I thought I had made a huge mistake. My editor was Hank Osborne. He’d assign these ridiculous stories. He once had someone cover the marathon and write stories about runners who would stop to defecate in the bushes. He’d have you go out and put a nickel, a dime, and a quarter on the sidewalk and when someone would stop and pick one up, you were supposed to interview them and write a story about what they picked up and why. I thought, ‘This can’t be the famous LA Times.’”

Even though most journalists native to Los Angeles coveted jobs at the Times, some balked at taking a job in a bureau such as the South Bay, one of several where reporters were referred to derisively as “zonies” by those lucky enough to hold jobs at the big newsroom on Second and Spring Streets. “The editors downtown were a little snooty about taking stories from the bureaus,” said Kristof, who went to work at the Times as a college intern and would become one if its star financial columnists. “You were just not taken that seriously.” Kristof said the zones were considered somewhat of a backwater at the Times. “They were fully staffed but they used to publish only three times a week. You could get your pants kicked off because you could write a story and it might not appear until three days later.” Wolinsky was transferred from the South Bay to Orange County, which was considered another “zonie” bureau, but opportunity struck when the Times needed someone to help cover the sprawling Los Angeles County beat.

A highly regarded and respected Los Angeles journalist, Bill Boyarsky, who ran the City County Bureau, was everything that Wolinsky wanted to be. He recalled, “I met him at a journalism conference before I got to the LA Times in 1977. He was a smart writer, urbane and sophisticated, someone who had written books and won journalism prizes. He was my hero and my mentor.” The Times had hired Boyarsky off an AP picket line, and his solid journalistic practices soon made him one of Otis’ newsroom confidants, someone who appreciated and understood that the values Otis had embedded in the newsroom were not something to be taken for granted, but a legacy to be embraced and passed on to younger journalists who would listen to him. “Bill said if things worked out at the City County Bureau, I might be able to stay,” remembered Wolinsky. So, in 1983 he started covering the board of supervisors for Los Angeles County.

There were a lot of people on vacation, so [they asked me to help edit] an investigative project by two reporters, one in LA and one in Sacramento. It was a story about . . . a lawyer who had used his connections with the administration of [former California Governor] Pat Brown to get some zoning changes for some property in which he had an interest. We worked on the story for a long time, and finally it ran on page one in the left-hand corner. I was so proud. And then I walked into the newsroom and saw one of the reporters in his editor’s office. He looked ashen. I knew something was wrong.

Parts of the story confused a law professor of the highest standing, who had the same name, with the craven wheeler-dealer. “I figured my career was over,” said Wolinsky. “We did a page one correction the same size of the story. It was incredible. I don’t think anyone ever saw anything like it. I think they paid him a settlement, too. All of the bigwigs went over the story. There were a lot of similarities; they had the same name; they were both lawyers; one worked for Pat Brown, the other for Jerry Brown; one reporter was in Sacramento and the other in LA; they never got together when writing it.” Rather than fire him, the Times kept Wolinsky on, reckoning that his was an honest mistake, one any reporter could have made. This was, after all, Otis’ paper—a deeply paternalistic operation that stood by its staff even when the waters were rough.

To make it to the top of a newspaper, you need more than talent and political skills. Timing is often everything, and Wolinsky had good timing. Soon after he was promoted to city editor in 1991, an amateur videographer filmed Los Angeles policemen beating Rodney King. Once television stations aired the footage, riots broke out throughout the city. At the Los Angeles Times, the newly minted city editor swung into action. He had to. His boss was on a cruise, and everyone else was on vacation. “It was just me there, and I had to react,” Wolinsky recalled. “It was quite a moment for me. We won a Pulitzer for our coverage. But it also marked the start of five years of just incredible stories. There were riots, floods, the Michael Jackson pedophilia case. It ended with O.J. Simpson. It was just incredible.”