The Durable Wilsonian

He was, above all, a keeper of vows and custodian of tradition. As an eighth-grader, David Lawrence would walk four miles to the Buffalo public library to read the Congressional Record. That tide of small print did not intimidate him but carried him close to great men and events. He promised himself that he would go to Washington and convey to others the drama of the great speech, the Government report, the official text. At 21 he made another pledge: "Not to drink any whisky, any coffee or any tea, so as to try to keep in training for the job." He remained fit indeed, and he came to view "the job" as a defense of old values.

Lawrence reported on the Administrations of eleven Presidents, became one of the most widely read conservative columnists of his day and founded and edited U.S. News & World Report. He performed these missions until the end; his last newspaper column appeared two days before a heart attack killed him last week at the age of 84.

Lawrence was not a Washington personality in the manner of the Alsop brothers or the late Drew Pearson. Nor was he an eminence like Walter Lippmann or Arthur Krock. In recent times the readership of his newspaper column declined, and his writing became utterly predictable. But for more than 60 years Lawrence was a formidable journalist who always knew his audience.

He began as a reporter of hard news. An A.P. stringer while at Princeton, he scooped the country by revealing the death of Grover Cleveland in 1908. (A telegram from Mrs. Cleveland, whom he had befriended during an earlier news assignment, alerted him.) Assigned to the White House of Woodrow Wilson, who had taught him at Princeton, Lawrence broke the story of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan's resignation from Wilson's Cabinet. In 1915 he became Washington correspondent for the old New York Evening Post, which soon began sending his daily column to subscribers by telegraph; Lawrence took pride in claiming to be the first Washington columnist syndicated by wire.

By 1919 he was in business for himself, with a series of financial and political reporting services and publications. These evolved after World War II into U.S. News & World Report (current circ. 1,940,000). He kept the magazine conservative in politics, quiet in tone. Fads, fashions, the arts, sports --these were beside Lawrence's point. "No sir," he would say in vetoing a story. "This is a magazine of news significance, and this isn't significant news."

Through it all, Lawrence wrote up to six columns a week, and it was as a columnist that he was best known; in the late '50s, more than 350 papers carried his opinions. These views infuriated many and often puzzled even his admirers. He called himself a Wilsonian liberal. That brand, he said, was "true liberalism." His positions on domestic affairs generally reflected the right wing of the Republican Party. Though an enrolled Democrat, Lawrence supported the re-election of Hoover in 1932 (because it was "dangerous to change parties in mid-Depression") and stayed with every subsequent Republican candidate.

He castigated the "socialist" methods of F.D.R.'s New Deal, condemned most of Eisenhower's "middle-of-the-road" policies, opposed L.B.J. on civil rights. Lawrence argued that the 14th Amendment had been ratified by rigged Reconstruction legislatures. An ardent internationalist, he urged lavish U.S. aid to Europe and supported the U.N. He also defended Senator Joseph McCarthy and was particularly incensed by the Senate's censure of McCarthy.

In private, Lawrence was gentle, retiring and generous. Stock-option plans enabled employees to buy into his publications--at what were termed bargain prices. U.S. News & World Report became employee-owned in 1962, though Lawrence remained editor, chief executive officer and voting trustee of his subordinates' stockholdings. Control now passes to a committee of senior employees. The new editor, Howard Flieger, 63, and chief executive officer, John H. Sweet, 65, are longtime Lawrence men who can be expected to keep the prosperous magazine faithful to the founder's precepts.

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