The Joust

Neither man admits to any desire to become a press lord, but Washington Post Publisher Philip L. Graham and Chicago Sun-Times Publisher Marshall Field are locked in an expanding scrap for the next spot in U.S. journalism's Almanack de Gotha.

In this curious journalistic joust for a prize that both men publicly disavow. Graham has already shown a lordly appetite for possessions. Beginning with the Post, which his father-in-law left him. he has latched onto a newsmagazine and two broadcasting stations. In company with the Los Angeles Times, he pasted together a news syndicate (TIME. July 13) with the second biggest news bureau in Washington (after the New York Times) and an impressive spread of foreign correspondents. On the private preserve of John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, he went poaching for big game and bagged two handsome specimens: Pundits Walter Lippmann. now under contract, and Joseph Alsop, who will sign up later this year. Adding insult to injury. Graham then suggested that Whitney melt the Trib's 14-man Washington bureau into Graham's huge squad of newsmen. That proved to be a serious mistake.

King-Size Kit Bag. Graham not only overestimated Jock Whitney's tolerance but underestimated, or overlooked, that unassuming man in Chicago, Marshall Field. By nature cautious. Field has been moving slowly since his father's retirement in 1950 turned him into a reluctant newspaper publisher. But he has been moving steadily. Under his command, the Sun-Times shifted from red ink to black.

In 1959 he bought another Chicago paper, the Daily News. Field also owns World Book Encyclopedia, which outsells even the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Even as Phil Graham was putting together his new syndicate, Marshall Field organized an even bigger one. Last fall he bought out Chicago's Publishers Syndicate, a kit bag of comic strips, features, medical advice, the Gallup poll and assorted odds and ends, with an extensive clientele of 1,786 daily and weekly newspapers. Combined with Field's own Sun-Times-Daily News syndicate, which peddles to 73 papers such wares as Ann Landers. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, Steve Canyon, and the dispatches of the News's foreign correspondents, the new syndicate made Graham's Post-Times syndication of 35 papers look puny.

Ace up Sleeve. And Field had yet another ace up his sleeve: Jock Whitney. For more than a year. Field had argued that two such ardent Republicans as he and the Herald Trib's boss were a natural pair, one that certainly made more sense than Graham's oil-and-water mixture of Norman and Otis Chandler's conservative Los Angeles Times and the liberal Washington Post. Whitney finally agreed to tie the Herald Trib's small though distinguished syndicate (54 papers) to Marshall Field's big one--a union that, once consummated, will put Field very much ahead.

With this success under his belt, modest Marshall Field, 46, could not resist a modest huzzah. He wished the ChandlerGraham axis all the best, he said. But then he added, with the confidence of a gentle man who has sensed the exhilarating aroma of power: "I would hope that at some future time they would team up with us."

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