Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 32Winding Down

IN THE MID-1980S, in anticipation of retirement in 1991 at age sixty-five, I began to think about whom I would recommend to the Dow Jones board as my successor as company CEO. The years of management transition that followed, mostly years of prosperity at the company, also brought for me bouts of national presidential politics voyeurism, proximity to two aircraft emergencies, and eventually fun-poking retirement parties.

In executive sessions of the Dow Jones board, with other management directors excluded, I had periodically discussed management succession “in case I got hit by a truck.” Now, as we moved toward the late 1980s and my retirement date grew closer, those discussions became more than theoretical. Ray Shaw and ...