The Legacy of Citizen Robert
At 21 Robert Decherd set out to capture the prize that had eluded his father: the throne of Texas’ most powerful media dynasty. At 34 he has won control of the Dallas Morning News and much, much more—but to what end?
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The four grandsons—Joe Dealey, Al Dealey (Walter’s son). Ben Decherd, and Jim Moroney, Jr.—each served an apprenticeship at the News before World War II and returned immediately afterward. When they were all back. Ted announced that they were to assume important roles. “The employees better get used to it,” he told them. “You boys are going to run the business. We’re going to bring you in and make you junior executives.”
From that day forward, the “boys” participated in all major decisions at the News. They sat in on board meetings as well, even though they did not become directors until the annual meeting of 1952, when Joe Dealey, Ben Decherd, and Jim Moroney, Jr., were elevated together. Al Dealey supervised bookkeeping until he left the company in 1951 to join the ministry. Jim Moroney, Jr., worked in circulation and broadcasting, a division run by his father. Joe Dealey, as befitted Ted’s son, had come up through the newspaper. He had served an apprenticeship as a reporter and business editor before moving to the executive offices and becoming secretary of the corporation.
Ben Decherd, the oldest of the three remaining boys, was the intellectual of the group, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UT. With his round-rimmed glasses and receding hairline, he appeared almost professorial. Decherd began at the News as a cub reporter in 1936, then left to serve during the war as a general’s aide. He rose to lieutenant colonel before his discharge, and the military made a deep impression on him. He returned to Dallas with a cool, formal bearing and a penetrating look. In the company he received the title of assistant to The president (Ted Dealey) and assumed an assortment of administrative chores. Many of them were jobs that no one else wanted, responsibilities like production, personnel, and public relations. Decherd helped develop Belo’s first budget and initiated stock options for top management. Progressive employees came to view him as an ally, a man who could get things accomplished in the closed circle of family rule. He had great confidence in his abilities, and equal ambition. Ben Decherd began to think about how much more he might accomplish as president of the company.
The Dealey Deal
The key position at the News, the title signifying day-to-day control, had always been that of president. In January 1960 Olivia Dealey died, leaving the position of board chairman vacant. It was time for Ted Dealey, 67, to do as his father had done twenty years earlier—turn over the presidency and become chairman of the board. Ted would hand his burdens to a younger man. But who? There were three grandchildren, three members of the third generation, still working at the company: Joe Dealey, Ben Decherd, and Jim Moroney, Jr.
The choice seemed obvious, at least to Ben Decherd. He was the oldest grandchild. He had worked at Belo the longest. He was better educated than the others. And he had labored skillfully for years on the company’s most difficult problems. Ben Decherd was certain; the presidency should be his.
Decherd also stood to be the company’s largest single shareholder. That was the problem; he stood to be, but he wasn’t. That honor still belonged to the estate of a man who had been dead for fourteen years, G. B. Dealey.
When he died in 1946, Dealey owned two thirds of all Belo stock. His will divided the stock among the families of his five children, but there was one catch. The children would receive the dividends, but the stock itself would remain in trust until five years after the last of them died. Then the Dealey trust would expire and the shares would be passed on to the grandchildren.
Because he had no siblings, Ben Decherd would be the beneficiary of his family’s entire share. But in 1960 the Dealey trust was still in effect. The shares were voted not by the grandchildren but by the three trustees, Ted Dealey, Jim Moroney, Sr., and a longtime friend of G. B. Dealey’s. Ted controlled the votes, and he intended to deliver the Belo empire to his son, Joe, just as his father had delivered it to him.
So sure was Ted of the outcome that he wasn’t even bothering to attend the board meeting at which the presidency would be filled. He had planned a trip overseas and saw no reason to cancel. But Ben Decherd wasn’t willing to give up. He floated the notion that he had been G. B. Dealey’s favorite grandson, that the dead patriarch of the company had wished him, not Joe, to take over. One day, while driving back from a business meeting shortly before Ted was to leave town, Decherd pleaded with Joe to make his father delay the vote. “I had the feeling Ben wanted me to say, ‘I’m going to remove myself,’ “ says Joe. But Joe didn’t budge.
The meeting went exactly as Ted had planned. There was no discussion, and the vote was unanimous. Ben Decherd came around the table and was the first to shake Joe’s hand, but he was bitterly disappointed. His lifelong ambition had been to become president of Belo. It was not to be. The job, once again, belonged to the Dealeys.
Joe had the title, but his father still dominated the company. For nine years, the formative years of Joe’s stewardship, Ted Dealey wouldn’t let go. As a result Joe became far more influential outside the News than within it. His single-spaced resume in 1970 listed no fewer than 21 community organizations in which he was active: the Dallas County Fund, the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association, the State Fair of Texas, and on and on. By the time his father died, in 1969, Joe Dealey’s notion of his job had been shaped. He believed in the newspaper executive as civic leader, almost to the exclusion of running the paper. But he was a different kind of civic leader from G. B. Dealey. The patriarch had splashed his civic concerns across the front page. Joe served as president of the Citizens Council, the organization that pulled all the strings in Dallas, but his newspaper wrote nothing of what he knew. G.B. had warned against “entangling alliances,” forbidding Ted to accept a seat on the UT board of regents, but Joe sought entanglements. G.B. had decreed that “newspapermen aren’t news” and shied away from self-promotion. In disdain of that dictum, Joe’s paper published countless articles and photos of its president.
Joe Dealey was a pleasant, cordial fellow, with none of the abrasive bluster of his father. He liked things quiet, peaceful, and unchanging. The paper was growing, making money, and staying out of debt. The Herald wasn’t doing anything. Why should anything change?
But if there was no pressure for the newspaper to change, the same was not true for the corporation. Television was coming on strong, and anyone with business acumen could see that there was big money to be made. The men who ran the company’s broadcast operations, Jim Moroney, Jr., and Mike Shapiro, wanted Belo to buy more stations, but Joe wasn’t interested.
Part of the reason was his notion of the company. To Joe, and to Ted before him, Belo was a newspaper company that tolerated a few broadcast companies to help pay the bills. If Ted Dealey realized that television and radio were producing more profit than the News, he didn’t show it. “Ted hated broadcast,” says Shapiro. “Belo’s annual report would devote three pages to the newspaper and a paragraph to broadcasting.”
Moroney and Shapiro combed the country for broadcast acquisitions, and many seemed like sweet deals—stations in Wichita, Sacramento, New Orleans, and Tulsa, properties that would cost far more just a few years later. The two men would scout properties, discuss a purchase price, and return to report back to the board. Time after time, the board said no. “What do you mean, buy something outside of Dallas?” Ted would ask. “What would we want another station for?”
Joe had another objection: he abhorred debt. He thought every station Moroney and Shapiro pitched was overpriced. He wanted to buy with cash, but even cash-rich Belo couldn’t buy TV stations without borrowing, so it didn’t buy at all.
By 1968 the company had accumulated so much cash that it practically had to buy something. It found a small CBS affiliate—KFDM-TV in Beaumont—Port Arthur, a market that ranked number 115 in the nation—that the company could buy without borrowing a penny. It was the first broadcast acquisition the company had made in nineteen years and the only one it would make for eleven more.
Belo’s only other significant acquisition was closer to home. In 1963 the company bought the News-Texan chain of seven suburban newspapers. The papers were miserable rags, and they would never make Belo any money. But they served a purpose. They blocked the creation of any real newspapers in the suburbs ringing Dallas, and because they published in the afternoon, they cut into the Herald’s advertising and circulation.
The News-Texan papers became the responsibility of Ben Decherd. He and Jim Moroney, Jr., had become vice presidents after being passed over for the presidency. In 1968, following the death of Moroney’s father, Decherd was named chairman of the board, but the position carried no power, and Decherd soon decided he had spent enough time at the Belo Corporation. He began spending half days at the News, splitting his remaining time between a large ranch he had purchased near Denton, and St. Mark’s School, where he was chairman of the board. Four years later, at age 57, he was dead.
Decherd was the fifth Belo director to die in four years. There was room on the board for new blood, an opportunity for change, but Joe would delay until 1973 before reluctantly accepting five outside directors. In the style of G. B. Dealey, who used to place a chain and padlock around the company ledger before locking it in his safe, Belo remained a zealously private institution. At annual meetings the financial reports handed out to stockholders were numbered and collected before anyone left the room. The top newsroom editor, Jack Krueger, was due to retire after 29 years; he would be replaced by Thomas Jefferson Simmons III, a man who had worked for Belo since 1931. And already the heir apparent, Joe Dealey, Jr., had begun his apprenticeship. It seemed as though it would go on forever.
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