Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 17Executive Editor

THE YEAR 1965 ushered in a period of watershed changes at the Journal and Dow Jones, changes that were not all apparent at the time. There were changes for our family, too, and certainly for the nation as the Vietnam War heightened in intensity.

Barney Kilgore’s restless mind and restless energy began to find new outlets, and in so doing he left the running of the Journal more and more to his longtime lieutenant, Bill Kerby. Barney had personally purchased the Princeton Packet, his hometown weekly newspaper, in 1955, and became engaged in his off hours in building it up. In 1962, he initiated and orchestrated Dow Jones’s start-up of the weekly National Observer, in which he applied some of The Wall Street Journal’s ...