Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 11Foreign Editor

WHEN I RETURNED to the Journal’s New York office at the end of 1951 as foreign editor, I was invited to join the midmorning “kaffee (coffee) klatsch.” This was the informal daily gathering of Barney Kilgore and the paper’s senior editors. It was held around a large conference table, in the open, at the northeast end of the newsroom at 44 Broad Street, between editorial-page desks near the elevators and the executive editor’s desk by the Broad Street window. Barney would arrive with a copy of the morning’s paper he had marked up on his train commute from Princeton, New Jersey. He would have circled typos and more substantive story failings. Over coffee, Danish, and doughnuts, he and Bill Kerby, long his newsroom lieutenant ...